Tag: healthy habits

Slow and Steady

Slow and steady wins the race. When you’re slow, it’s hard to even get picked for a team much less win. And yet so much in life requires slow, steady progress. Knowledge builds on knowledge. Strength is gained incrementally. Health builds from good habits over time.

We used to value the lesson of the tortoise and the hare. Then came fast everything – fast food, fast casual dining, speed dating, and immediate news posts. Fast channels currently top activity in the streaming world.

As a result, expectations changed. Tolerance changed. And yet, the effectiveness of slow, steady progress didn’t change. For some reason, anything that’s not immediate is now considered too difficult to attempt so we mold reality to our will by denying it. We demand immediate action and immediate results. Rarely is there a good long-term outcome to this behavior.

It is within our power to make different choices even when they’re hard. We just need to practice a few things.

What do slow and steady require?

Patience. Talk about a commodity in short supply. We are not a patient people. We want complete and immediate results. Unrealistic expectations lead us to view small bits of progress as no progress, lessening pain as inadequate relief, and grief as a process to be avoided. Impatience presents problems in many areas.

When it comes to health, impatience may lead some to abandon healthy habits before results are visible. It can lead to demands for medication when other approaches would be effective but take longer. A lack of patience may lead to impulsive behavior or riskier choices.

Dedication. Commitment to a particular course of action is required to stay on course over time.

Perseverance. Adhering to a course of action over time is inherently required for slow and steady improvement.

Open-mindedness. Not all standards, protocols, or methods are based on solid science or unimpeachable knowledge, yet they persist as “the right way.” As new peer-reviewed, rigorous scientific information becomes available, we must be willing to learn and adapt without being thrown off course.

Desire. None of the above is worth the effort if we don’t have a desire for improvement. And maybe that’s why all of this is hard. Maybe we would rather skate through life than put out the effort required because we just don’t have the desire to do better for ourselves.

It could be we feel like we’ve done our best despite not having put in much effort. Maybe someone has treated us in a way that causes us to doubt our worth. Perhaps we were taught everyone else is more important and using energy on ourselves is selfish. If these, or similar, beliefs hamper our desire to get better, or be better, we’ve identified a starting point for improvement.

Beginning a healthier path doesn’t require a large production. It doesn’t necessarily require an immediate reversal of every habit in your life. Small changes can lead to slow, steady progress and slow and steady can still win the race!

ad

Wishful Eating

You won’t reach optimal health through wishful eating. If you read enough studies and watch enough food documentaries, you’ll find so much conflicting information it may seem as if wishful eating will work as well as following any specific eating regimen. There may be a kernel of truth in that belief, but for most of us, eating for optimal health will require knowledge and discipline.

What is wishful eating?

Wishful eating is like wishful thinking. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines wishful thinking as: the attribution of reality to what one wishes to be true or the tenuous justification of what one wants to believe

Wishful eating is similar in that we decide whatever we want to eat is healthy for us even when we have evidence to the contrary. For example, someone with a diagnosis of celiac disease may decide it’s okay to eat birthday cake as along as they don’t eat bread. But the fact is that birthday cake will damage their small intestine in the same manner as bread. It’s not healthier because we like it better. fried chicken, fried fish, pinto beans, mashed potatoes, and pizza take their place.

I’ve seen wishful eating that meant a person never ate sandwiches or rolls because they “don’t eat” carbs. On the other hand, they consumed potato chips almost every day and pizza two or three times a week. While it’s true eliminating sandwich bread and rolls reduces the total amount of grain carbs consumed, if you’re eating potato chips and pizza, you DO eat carbs.

Wishful eating is sometimes wishful shopping. I have friends whose pantries and refrigerators are continually stocked with lettuce, green beans, turkey, chicken, steak, cheese, apples, oranges, and pineapple, but when mealtime comes, the food remains undisturbed. Fast food or soul food that fresh food in the house, its easier to hold onto the idea that they are eating healthily.

All of us indulge in wishful eating occasionally. The eating itself may not be problematic. The larger risk is when it becomes a habit. By its nature, wishful thinking requires setting aside reality in favor of what we want to believe. That can make it difficult to tell ourselves the truth.

Without the truth, we are likely to deny or ignore anything that needs to change. And until we can clearly identify the obstacles that keep us from optimum health, we cannot begin to change them. Wishful eating is a way for us to remain stuck and not feel conflicted or remorseful.

It’s also a way for us to sway others to support our current path. And with reinforcement, change becomes even more elusive.

Perhaps this is a good time to discard old habits along with our used holiday gift wrap and regroup for a healthier 2023! The magic begins when wishful eating ends!

Getting to Zero

Environment Affects Healthy Habits

new year
It is clear that environment affects healthy habits. I’m in my hometown for a holiday visit with family. Funny thing is, there’s not much family left here so I’m not running from party to party with no time to spare. I’ve had time to notice how quiet it is in this little town. It reminds me of a snow day when there’s no traffic and a blanket of white absorbs the noise.

There’s a wonderful new restaurant in town. I eat there every time I’m here. Last night when I finished eating, the manager walked me to my car. It was about 7pm, but really dark outside. There were more bright stars visible in the sky than you can imagine. The whole scene struck me as ironic. In a town so small that I can see every star in the sky, the restaurant manager is courteous enough to make sure I get safely to my car…at 7pm.

This stands in sharp contrast to a recent experience in the neighborhood where I live. After a concert at a highly touted restaurant, in order to reach my car I had to walk past two men who had rolled out a mattress in the parking lot where they were openly smoking crack and talking to the car next to them. The car was empty, but the alarm had gone off causing the men to loudly admonish it. There was no security guard and certainly no restaurant volunteer to walk with me.

This is not the first time I’ve encountered a crack-encumbered man outside of an upscale restaurant in my city. One night on the way to my car, another man who was flying high hugged me after I told him I wasn’t going to give him money. He could just as easily have shot me.

I felt pretty sure a gold-toothed man I encountered at a gas station was going to hurt me whether I gave him money or not. I don’t go to that gas station any more, but I don’t think my instincts were wrong. Four people have been shot and killed near that intersection in the past year. And so it goes where I live. In the past month, a two-year-old and a 3-year-old were shot and killed while riding in cars.

You might dismiss this as a large inner city problem, but I don’t live in a large city. The population is under 200,000. You might dismiss this as my choice of neighborhoods, but I live 5 blocks from the governor’s mansion. In an even more affluent nearby neighborhood, two women were recently robbed at gunpoint in a grocery store parking lot. My daughter-in-law had just left that store moments before.

Today I’m left pondering the contrasts – a small town that is often called ultraconservative, redneck, closed-minded, uneducated, bigoted, and the most racist small town in America where a total stranger wants to make sure I’m safe on a short walk to my car vs a small city that is considered more sophisticated, diverse, educated, inclusive, and enlightened where it is commonplace to encounter danger and uncommon to encounter concern for my welfare.

If I had grown up in the community where I now live, would I believe that I would live long enough for healthy habits to matter? Would organic produce seem important when I’m rolling off the couch into the floor to crawl away from external walls because I hear the rapid-fire shots of an AR-15 and the screeching tires of the car out of which it’s being fired? Would I be more likely to seek comfort in a high carbohydrate, endorphin releasing meal?

I can answer one of those questions. The most recent drive-by shooting at my house was within the past year. Nothing seems more important than hitting the deck when you hear gunfire outside. Period. You’re not going to make sure to grab your phone so you can call the police. You’re sure as hell not going to make sure you grab a salad while you wait for your heart to stop pounding.

If there’s a way to import the attitude of community concern I experience in my insular hometown, sans bigotry, to the city where I currently live, it’s sorely needed. Self-care begins by giving our bodies good nutrition, adequate sleep, plenty of movement, and enough stillness, but the feeling that we are worthy of self-care begins when we feel valued. That feeling comes when our environment provides safety and responsiveness to our need for food, warmth, comfort, and touch.

It is ideal when that responsiveness comes from our parents and extended family in our first moments, but it can be healing even when it comes later. The violence and divisiveness in my community exposes a huge need for healing. Extending a hand may require courage. It could make us vulnerable. But if we don’t begin to summon some courage to reach out, we all become more vulnerable anyway.

As I move into the new year, it is with an acute awareness of the unhealthy environment in which I live. No matter what I do within my household, I am still affected by my neighborhood and the community at large. I must decide how I can best take care of myself while best contributing to the larger community. It is the ideal time for reassessment and reevaluation.

The extent to which I am willing to face my failures, own my weaknesses, understand my limitations, enforce my boundaries, and feel my shame will determine the extent to which I am effective in contributing to healing, health, peacefulness, and joy.

In 2017, I hope you will join me on a journey to create an environment for ourselves, our partners, our children, and our communities in which we can all become healthier as well as more whole, peaceful, and joyous. We may not solve the world’s problems, but when we show concern and kindness one walk to the car at a time, we will make a difference.

Happy New Year!

Additional Reading:
http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/42878/1/924159134X.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12034132