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?

Manopause - A Definition

Manopause - The male counterpart to menopause:

A mental condition typically found in men in their mid to late 50's brought on by the realization that old age is just around the corner. Symptoms include: frequent reminiscing about the “good ol’ days”, cranky judgmental attitude and a closed minded approach to anything new. Usually punctuated by the chronic need to play a lot golf and vote republican. (copied from www.urbandictionary.com)

Fortunately I'm not affected - yet. Feel free to do an intervention if any symptoms start to appear though.

Moving and the Spirit of the 100 Thing Challenge

So we’re moving to Austin Texas. A new job with AMD is taking me there, along with my family. I feel very fortunate to have the job, especially since they are paying for my relocation. We’re now in the middle of going through everything in our home of 27 years, deciding what to take with us on the move, what to give away, and what to throw out. We’re constantly amazed at what we decided to save over the years and view this as an amazing opportunity to significantly declutter and simplify our lives.

I’ve always been fascinated by the “100 Thing Challenge”  promote by Dave Bruno – reducing your personal possessions to 100 items. It occurred to me that this would be a great opportunity to actually give that a try since I'm going through all my possessions and deciding what to keep and take with me anyway. What a great way to make a break with the past and start a new approach to living.

After giving it some thought, I began to question what I would really gain from strictly following this challenge. Instead, I decided it would be better to focus on the spirit of the challenge and significantly reduce my clutter in order to become less focused on, and bound by, a large collection of possessions. I decided to adopt a "filter" that would help me decide what to keep and what to get rid of as I went through things.

The first pass filter I chose is fairly simple: If something doesn't make me a better person or help me achieve my goals, then get rid of it. You can't be too strict about this, so objects headed on the way out from the first filter get a 2nd chance: if they make my life easier, or bring joy into my life on a regular basis (preferably at least weekly), then they could stay.

I've been making some occasional exceptions to these rules, but I find that they do a great job of helping me make decisions to get rid of all sorts of old stuff that would otherwise be difficult to decide on. After you build up some momentum, these acts actually end up becoming rather cathartic and liberating. I'm beginning to think that it's healthy for people to undergo such purges on a regular basis now. I've been way overdue for one.

Quote of the Day

Quote of the day: "Here is the ultimate paradox of the Great Health Care Showdown: Congress will divide along partisan lines to pass a Republican version of health care reform, and Republicans will vote against it." - E.J. Dionne

Sometimes you just have to laugh at American politics.

Life Transformation - Personal Growth

Continuing with the theme of establishing a set of new habits and goals during this new year period, the next topic up is personal growth.

• Seek out people who bring out the best in you, challenge you, and help you grow. Just as children are extremely influenced by the friends they make, so are you.
  
• Do something scary on a daily basis. Among other things, this implies overcoming any shyness and discomfort at talking to people you don’t know.
  
• Simple rules for success from Jane Goodall: “… really work hard, and take advantage of opportunities, and never give up…”
  
• Learn something new every day. Just as you exercise you body, you also need to exercise your brain. This becomes more important the older you get. Studies have shown that the most important brain exercise is to learn something completely new, not just incremental improvements in a topic you are already very familiar with.
  
• The more close relationships you have, the fuller you life and the better your health. Invest in friends, family, and relationships, new and old. Take time to really cherish them.
  

Two Wolves

Your attitude is your choice. Chosing optimism is an empowering political act.
A good friend of mine sent me an email with the following story.


TWO WOLVES

One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, "My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all.

"One is Evil - It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

"The other is Good - It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith."

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: "Which wolf wins?"

The old Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed."

Life Transformation – Spiritual Health

Continuing with the theme of establishing a set of new habits and goals during this new year period, the next topic up is spiritual health. Just as we need to avoid toxic junk food for the body, we should avoid toxic junk influences for our spirit.

• Avoid as much as possible exposure to commercial influences, including exposure to commercial TV and radio.
  
• Avoid exposure to things that promote anger, fear, resentment, envy, disrespect, and pessimism.
  
• Avoid exposure to things that promote objectionable values: violence as entertainment, glorification of conspicuous consumption, treating people as sex objects, etc…
  
• Avoid exposure to people promoting such toxic behaviors, and seek out energizing optimistic people.
  
• Become enthusiastically involved in positive causes that are bigger than yourself.
  

Life Transformation - Attitudes

Continuing with the theme of establishing a set of new habits and goals during this new year period, the next topic up is attitudes. Keeping in mind the old phrase “my habits define my life”, these are the habits of attitude that I want to help define my life.

• They key positive attitudes I will keep and promote at all times are gratitude and compassion. Before getting out of bed each morning I will establish a mindset based on these to attitudes.
  
• Negative attitudes I will eliminate from my life: anger, fear, envy. Decisions made when under the influence of these emotions tend to be very poor decisions.
  
• I will not complain about anything this year. I will either accept things as they are, or do something to change them. Sitting around complaining is an unacceptable reaction.
  
• I will not be impatient (a big personal problem for me). Being impatient is essentially complaining that the world is not moving fast enough to satisfy you, which is a silly and useless waste of your mental energy.
  
• I will always treat everyone with respect. This can prevent all sorts of problems.
  
• Being optimistic is a decision you make. It is one that empowers and energizes you and makes all sorts of positive change possible. I have decided to be optimistic.
  

Life Transformation - Progress Report

I did manage to get my email inbox down to zero on Jan 1st, and have kept it that way every evening since. I filed some items for future reference, and put those emails that still needed action in a “to do” folder, then archived the rest in a special folder in case I need to reference them in the future. So far, so good.

I also got rid of the vast majority of my pile of magazines. I cut out and saved some articles for future reference, then threw the rest out. It turns out that I had many more magazines squirreled away than I realized at first, and my goal of getting down to just three magazines being saved at any one time will be more difficult than I thought.

One problem that occurred to me comes from the old phase "my habits define my life". While the previous postings on developing better habits for organizing, diet, and staying healthy are good, I don't want them to define my life. Next up to post about is the set of habits that address attitudes, purpose, and spiritual related issues.

Life Transformation - Organizing Habits

Continuing with the theme of establishing a set of new habits and goals during this new year period, the next topic up is organizing habits. One thing I really have trouble with is setting priorities when it comes to consuming information. I suppose many people with a healthy curiosity about a wide variety of topics have this problem. However, when there is essentially an unlimited amount of free information available on the World Wide Web, the tendency to attempt to consume everything of interest has to be resisted. Otherwise, as in my case, your email inbox will continue to grow without bounds with all the things “you plan to get to as soon as you have more time”. Same with the ever growing stack of magazines on the desk.

The overall habit must be to become more selective in what you try to drink from the fire hose of information coming at us each day. We can’t possibly take it all in, or even any reasonable fraction of it, so there needs to be prioritization about what is important to further your top one or two goals, what is really worth the time spent on it, and be willing to ignore the rest.

So my goals in this area for the coming year are (this is where things get more radical):

• On Jan 1st, I will zero out my email inbox (actually archive the roughly 1900 emails currently in there, ugh!) and start out fresh. I will completely clear out my inbox again each night before going to bed.
  
• The first time I open an email, I will remove it from my inbox. If I can deal with in 2 minutes or less I will handle it right then. Otherwise I will put it in a “To Do” folder, file it in a folder where I save useful information on that topic, or delete it. I will not leave it in the inbox with the intention of coming back to it later.
  
• Many web browsers let you open multiple windows, with multiple tabs per window. This is great for opening articles that you intend to read “later when you have more time”, but it also invites a great deal of abuse. On Jan 1st I will close all the windows and tabs on my web browsers, and do so again each night before going to bed.
  
• I will have at most 3 magazines on my pile of “magazines to read as soon as I have time”. If a new magazine comes in the mail, I will get the pile of magazines back down to 3 before going to bed.
  
• Decluttering: Vertical places (desk tops, table tops, floors…) are not meant to be places to store things. To discourage clutter and accumulation of useless stuff, and encourage focusing on those things I prioritize, I will clear off key vertical spaces each night before going to bed.
  
• To encourage more productive days, I will get up at 5am on a regular basis. The exception is when doing so would result in a severe lack of sleep because I had to stay up late the previous night.
  

That sounds just radical enough to be exciting.

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.

"Live as if this may be your last day

Thought for the day:

"Live as if this may be your last day, and people will judge you based on it."

- Author unknown

Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence

A personal rule that I think we should ALL follow is that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", no matter how much comfort or righteous indignation you can feel by believing in something. Those of you with a background in science should be especially aware of this. It really helps keep you from believing in some rather dumb things.

For example, I recently came across a claim about a pandemic in Ukraine being caused by a bio-weapon being produced by Baxter Intl's Ukraine's Lab. This clearly counts as an "extraordinary claim", though I was surprised at the number of people willing to accept the rumor as most likely true without any investigation. An unusual "pandemic of pneumonic plague hitting the Ukraine" should be something easy to prove, so I'm going to remain skeptical until I hear some other evidence confirming that such a thing exists.

By the way, it would be really nice if anyone reporting on wild rumors would do the rest of us a favor and at least include a comment on what www.snopes.com has to say about it so that we don't all have to look it up ourselves. Unfortunately, www.snopes.com doesn't have anything to say on this one way or another yet. However, according to Wikipedia the "WHO (World Health Organization) issued a statement that there were no significant differences between the pandemic H1N1 strain, and the Ukrainian strains tested", and stated reports that the "mass refusal by Ukrainians to be vaccinated (after several persons allegedly died after vaccinations in 2008 and 2009) was partly the cause for the epidemic." In other words, what apparently happened is that Ukraine got hit by a bad outbreak of H1N1 because people refused vaccinations. At least that's the most viable explanation pending further evidence.

Empathizing With Charlie Brown this Thanksgiving

It was an unusual Thanksgiving this year, a quiet small gathering with my family. Thanksgiving happened to be nine months to the day since I was laid off from my job of 26 years at IBM, which made it a little more solemn than past holidays. During those nine months I’ve had a total of seven face-to-face interviews, but still no job. I never expected to be out of work this long – with so much experience I was sure I’d have no trouble finding suitable work. I’ve come to realize that the work I did at IBM was somewhat specialized and there’s a limited market for it outside of the company. This means I’ve had to put some effort into reinventing myself to some extent. The number of opportunities that I’ve missed has also been on my mind. When the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving special came on in the evening, I found myself really empathizing and identifying with his character and all the frustrations he experiences in his life - more than at any time in my past.

It recently occurred to me that I've spent most of my time these past months trying to get a full time job and rejoin “corporate America”. It often seems as if fate has been conspiring to keep me out of “corporate America” though, as if I was destined to enter a different line of work. What that could be is something I’m spending more time thinking about now.

Back to Charlie Brown. Besides the regular Thanksgiving show, there was also a great little TV show staring the Peanuts characters about the history of the Pilgrims and their voyage on the Mayflower to North America. Although meant for younger kids, the show describes in some detail the hardships faced by those early settlers, culminating in the first Thanksgiving celebration with the local Indians. It was a useful reminder of how lucky I’ve been in comparison. During their first winter in North America, about half the Pilgrims died. By comparison, I have plenty of food on the table, a warm house, a healthy wife and kids, good health care, a promising future, and a great support community. Compared to many of the unemployed people in the world today, I have much to be grateful for.

Implications of Completely Eliminating Complaining

There is a new movement that urges people to completely eliminate complaining from their lives. The idea is that if you see something that you consider wrong, then either (1) work to fix it, or (2) accept it as the way things are. Sitting around complaining produces a disempowered attitude and is toxic to your spirit. In a group situation, it can produce toxic effects on the attitude of the entire group.

I thought this would be easy for me, until I started to consider the implications. The goal is to change your attitude, not just your outward behavior. So that means ending all internal complaining about how people, or the world in general, has treated you unjustly. That is harder. Then it occurred to me that it also means eliminating impatience, because impatience is really internal complaining that the world is just not moving fast enough to suite you. It also means eliminating anger, since anger is just complaining taken to an emotional extreme. This is really challenging, but it gets even worse.

Did you ever beat up on yourself for missing an important meeting or event? Did you ever feel that if you were just a better and more dedicated person you wouldn’t have missed that appointment? In reality, missing an event should not be viewed as a moral failure; it should be viewed as a failure in your scheduling process – something that you can work to correct. This is just an example of a wider issue. For me, one of the hardest parts about eliminating any complaining from my life is to stop complaining and beating myself up for all those times when I did not live up to my expectations. This is a challenging task for anyone, but one with large potential rewards in terms of enhancing your spirit and attitude towards life.

How a Fellow Computer Geek Ends up on TV

I was watching the Discovery Channel yesterday when I came across a commercial for their mini-series called “The Colony”. It’s an imaginary reality-type show with a group of participants trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world using their skills and wits. Normally I have no interest in such series, but I recognized one of the participants as an old friend of mine, John Cohn. I knew John from IBM, where he was well known as a technical expert and a somewhat eccentric proponent of science education for young people. He became an IBM Fellow, which was the highest technical rank within IBM, is now a cast member of a national TV mini-series, and is 2 years younger than I. Meanwhile, here I sit unemployed and uncertain about my future.

I had two choices of how to react: I could become envious of his success, which is a rather self destructive approach in the end. Or I could be happy that such a well deserved advocate for science education and all around genuinely nice person is achieving some notoriety, and see what I could learn from his success. That is the option I chose.

So what can I learn from John Cohn’s success?

1. Do what you do with passion and really put your heart into things, whether it’s your career or outside interests.
   
2. Building a reputation as an enthusiastic, friendly, and helpful person can serve you very well in the long run.
   
3. You don’t want to be defined by a single corporate job forever. To avoid this, you need to develop a reputation and a passion for other interests too. In John’s case, it was his active engagement in science education for youth. This in fact may launch him into a second career outside of his IBM technical work.
   

John suffered a tragedy in his life a while ago when his 14 year old son was killed in an accident. My own son recently graduated from college, is trying to start his own business, and is starting to plan a longer term future with his steady girl friend. All things considered, I guess I really wouldn’t want to trade my life with John’s. Sometimes you just have to practice gratitude for what you have. I do wish John Cohn the best, and hope this is the start of a more public career advocating the enjoyment of science for our world’s youth. It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

A New Personal Record to Be Happy About

I'm in a good mood today. When I woke up this morning I established a new personal record for the most number of consecutive days..... being alive. 52 years worth of consecutive days in fact.

Use Jobless Time to Build Better World

A friend recently pointed me to an interesting article written by Barbara Ehrenreich titled Use Jobless Time to Build Better World
(thanks Joanne). The title says it all. It doesn't really give instructions on how to do it though, but I guess that's not a realistic expectation. To my disappointment I find myself spending a great deal of time searching for that next job as the article says, which is what all the job counselors state you should do. It's sad to contemplate all the hours spent by very highly skilled people engaged in "job search" efforts producing essentially no social benefits for all their hours of labor.

By comparison I spend only a relatively small portion of my time trying to build a better world. I have more freedom than I've had in over 25 years, and more than I probably will have until I retire. In principle I could be spending 12-14 hours a day trying to build a better world as the article suggests. I'm not sitting around doing nothing for this, mind you, but I'm also not doing significantly more than I was doing while working 40 hours a week. (Let's ignore for now the discussion about how much that 40-hour per week job was really contributing to building a better world.) I think I need to reconsider my priorities (and my schedule) during this privileged period of my "paid sabbatical".

As the article concludes:

...the first step, as in any 12-step program, is to overcome denial. Job searching is not a job; retraining is not a panacea. You may be poorer than you've ever been, but you are also freer -- to express anger and urgency, to dream and create, to get together with others and conspire to build a better world.

Observations After 2 Months of Unemployment

I recently passed the 2 month mark of being unemployed. Some observations:

The job market doesn't look bad. Every week I come across multiple new job postings that are very appealing and for which I consider myself very highly qualified. The unsettling part is that I continue to get no responses after applying for them. In some cases I know that's because I'm one of several hundred people that apply, and I'm not one of the few chosen to be interviewed. In other cases the company with the job opening will collect resumes for several weeks before contacting anyone, so I just need to be patient. I'm still in a position where the wait is not causing financial problems, but I really feel for those who are in a more desperate situation with few skills to rely on.

I continue with about the same work around the house, volunteer work, and other outside interests that I used to have. I have no idea how I actually did all of this when I was working though. I feel just as busy as ever, even without taking on any major new efforts. Being busy is good, but it doesn't leave the time for deep reflection.

My wife and I really pulled together in our relationship to get through this, and she's been very supportive. It does start taking a toll on your relationship after a while though. I'm sure the number of broken families will rise noticeably due to this financial transition we're going through. That's a cost that doesn't get figured into the normal accounting procedures.