Amusing Rules for a Better Diet

Eating a perfectly balanced and exceptionally healthy diet can be hard, but some friends and I came up with this list of simple but amusing rules that, if followed, will dramatically improve your diet.

1. Don't eat anything you've seen advertised on TV
2. Forge the outside isles of supermarkets, don't venture into the middle of the store.
3. If it has an ingredients list, put it back
4. If it has a cartoon or a prize it is not food, it's entertainment. Put it back.
5. Avoid eating anything that leaves an orange stain on your fingers, it's not food.
6. Eat lotsa different colorful plants.
7. When choosing food colors, minimize the amount of brown food (exceptions to this include nuts and extra dark organic chocolate).

Other rules?

Life Transformations - Health

Continuing with the theme of establishing a set of new habits and goals during this new year period, the next topic up is general health. I’ve done well this past year on hitting some of the big themes: regular doctor checkups, not smoking, wearing my seat belt in a car, etc. My diet was covered in another post, so here’s what I have left to work on this coming year:

• Average at least 7 hours of sleep per day
  
• Take a daily vitamin supplement and fish oil capsule
  
• Exercise at least 4 times a week
  
• Jog a total of at least 500 miles during the year
  
• Minimize caffeine intake. Drink no more than one small cup of coffee per day.
  
• Maintain a positive and grateful attitude (to be covered more in another post)
  

I once took a test on improving my life expectancy, and to my surprise the single biggest factor I could improve on is driving less. In principle that should be one of my health goals too, but I just don’t know how to set a specific actionable goal on that given my current uncertainty over future unemployment plans. It's something to keep in mind though.

Life Transformations - Diet

The beginning of a new year is a good time to reflect on your life and to think about establishing new habits or goals. Many experts will tell you that the best success at establishing new habits comes from focusing on one new habit at a time. However, there is a certain thrill that produces a greater sense of motivation for starting a larger life transformation all at once, which implies changing many habits at the same time. I find myself having trouble resisting the temptation to do this, or at least to contemplate it in some detail. So I’m going to write a sequence of appends about initiating a larger set of transforming habits. The idea is to start these on Jan 1st, 2010. We’ll see how successful such an approach really is.

To start the list, I’ll pick a topic that’s rather straight forward though not necessarily easy – eating. The strategy for eating food should be based primarily on maintaining the best possible health. That’s actually a somewhat radical notion for most people. Granted that there are exceptions where sharing food becomes part of special celebrations or social activities, but this should not in any way be a driving force in your diet habits. Food choices can also be an important part of an effort to live in a responsible and sustainable way, which interestingly often results in making the same choices that would be made if health issues drove your selections.

So here are some new choices that will help transform my diet:

- Eat three healthy meals per day – no between meal snacking.
- Fast one evening per week (i.e. No eating after 3pm).

I will eliminate the following from my diet:

- Cookies, donuts, muffins
- Soda (including diet)
- Candy
- Fried Foods, including French fries
- Bread (except as part of meals)
- All junk food (you know it when you see it)
- Eat lower in the food chain, and eliminate beef
- Anything I’ve seen advertised (with exceptions for obviously healthy food, but such food is rarely advertised)

That’s a good start. If I can pull off most of this, it will be a major improvement in the quality of my diet.

Do five simple things a day to stay sane

We all know many of the basic daily routines needed to maintain physical health as we grow older: proper diet, exercise, sleep... As you might expect, there are a number of basic daily routines for maintaining mental health too during our lives. A recent article in TimesOnline outlined five recommended steps for maintaining proper mental health and balance. The article discussed them in more detail, but I'll post a quick summary of them below.

Connect
Developing relationships with family, friends, colleagues and neighbours will enrich your life and bring you support

Be active
Sports, hobbies such as gardening or dancing, or just a daily stroll will make you feel good and maintain mobility and fitness

Be curious Noting the beauty of everyday moments as well as the unusual and reflecting on them helps you to appreciate what matters to you

Learn
Fixing a bike, learning an instrument, cooking – the challenge and satisfaction brings fun and confidence

Give
Helping friends and strangers links your happiness to a wider community and is very rewarding

I found that I actually did fairly well following most of these in may daily life. How about you?

The Surprising benefits of standing and puttering around more

There's an interesting study out that claims there is a significant health benefit from simply standing up a puttering around more. Apparently when we remain sitting for long periods of time, important parts of our metabolism system pretty much shut down. Getting up and walking around exercises the big muscles in our legs and backs enough to produce a significant change. It seems that this should apply even if you exercise regularly at a gym but work in an office environment during the day.

So I'll give this try for a while. That means I'll try to establish a habit of standing up and talking a walking break every 30 minutes or so. At my office I can even use the stairs to get a little more intense activity for my legs. And although the article doesn't say this, I suspect that the time right after meals is particularly important. So a nice walk after lunch is also something I'll try to work into my routine too.

Another Benefit for Goal Oriented People

Goal Oriented People May Avoid Alzheimer's Disease — A new report claims that individuals who are goal oriented --in other words, those who are more conscientious and have a tendency to be self-disciplined, careful and purposeful--appear less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease, or at least suffer less from the effects of it. That's a nice side benefit :-)

Life Expectancy Test

I just took a great little Life Expectancy test at http://www.poodwaddle.com/realage.swf It asks you various questions about your health, life style, family history, and then computes your life expectancy. In my case it turned out to be 82 years, which isn't bad. I actually expect it to be longer, potentially 100, because of medical science progress over the next 30 years.

I was curious to know which factors effected the results the most, either positively or negatively. Compared to the average person, I expected the moderately intense exercise I do (jogging) would be a real benefit. It only added 1.4 years to my life expectancy. My diet was slightly more important, adding 1.8 years. The biggest single benefit was that I am happily married, which added 2.0 years to my life expectancy.

The biggest reductions? Sleeping only 6 hours per night (or less) on the average knocked down my life expectancy by 2 years. Hmmm... getting 8 hours of sleep per night would actually improve my life expectancy more than all the exercise I do. That's unexpected, and good to know.

By far, the single biggest detractor was the amount of driving I do - over 20,000 miles per year. This dropped by life expectancy by a whopping 4 years. Ouch! That was at least double any other single factor in the entire test. Now I know where my greatest health risks lies.