The Life Ledger

Fitness is a way of life.

So you have taken those first steps: Catching your habits, Drinking water instead of soda, Exercising 30 minutes everyday, Saving 50 dollars every paycheck into your 401k. And you are seeing progress! Slimming of the waist or interest earned, it inspires you to do more. Each time you have a decision you spend more and more time trying to figure out what to do. And you look for more and more aspects of your life to improve.

First let me offer you a whole hearted congratulations. It’s definitely motivating to see progress made. In the second part of this series I’d like to offer a few warnings. It may seem odd to read, but let me explain.

To start with, its easy to have conflicting goals. Wondering how this would happen? A common example is saving of money while eating healthier. Simple economics dictate that fresh fruit and vegetables often costs more as well as being much better for you. So instead of trying to min-max where you search the Best solution, aim for a solid 90% towards your goal. In fact my personal belief is that perfection is an impossible thing to grasp. Also these conflicts can also arise from poorly defined goals and steps.

At the same time, there is also the problem of to many paths and cascading results. Like a grand master chess player or Deep Blue you look ahead to see how your current decision influences what you can decide later. But unlike chess, Life doesn’t have a clear winner. There is no checkmate in which to defeat Mother Nature. The more you try out think, the less actual action you take. Because if you spent 5 more minutes to figure out how to raise the end potential 1 more percent, you can loose it all. Cause see, all those possibilities are just that. Potential, until you finally act.

Lastly, making changes in one’s life can make you tired. At least for me it does. Trying to be aware of every little thing. Watching for those things you can improve. Remembering those new habits you are trying to create. The body, mentally and physically, is used to the old rhythms in life. When you deviate, you add stress until the newness wears off. A great example are all those that flock to the gym with “life changing resolutions”. You know, when parking during January and February is impossible to find. But how many keep at it? By changing too many things at once you can stress your body too much. What happens usually is you get “sick”. Could be a cold, sinus inflection, or more. By keeping those Conscious Acts slow and steady you prevent to much of a shock to your system.

So to wrap this up, I would say I’m a big fan of moderation. It was living in one extreme lifestyle that caused problems in the first place. It would do yourself no good to swing so far the other way that you cause problems yet again.

Or even worse, revert to your old ways.

Continuation from yesterday

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Hey, name’s Dave. I’m a guest columnist here on “The life ledger”. In reading Cris’s article about Point of Awareness and how it’s an important part of fitness, I recalled similar thoughts I had when loosing all my weight.

Becoming aware of what drives you allows someone to be able to change their life for the better. This is especially critical in telling the difference between wants and needs. And strange thing is Cris isn’t limiting this to just health. People can usually tell you what they have in their wallet. Or what they had for breakfast. But if you ask them how much they have had to eat all day or where they are in making progress towards retirement and you get a confused look.

So I’m going to talk about the other side of the equation - Conscious Acts. Can you recognize that moment at which you can resist an impulse. Stop yourself from buying that snack or DVD. Glad to hear you’ve learned that. But now what? Well that depends upon your goals. You have those defined right? Written down somewhere? While having that goal is good, you need to make active progress toward achieving it. It’s not going to happen on its own. So your course of action is…

Well, sometimes there’s an easy answer. That single clear choice that brings you closer to your goals. But sometimes the PoA and resulting Conscious Act can be subtler.

You’re out to lunch with old friends at the nearest Greasy Spoon. After placing your order, Gertrude asks from behind the counter “Whatcha want to drink hon?”. Without breaking your conversation you say “Mr Pibb.”

Habit just bit you in the ass.

Eating is not an activity that Americans typically do by itself. We eat while running errands. We eat going from here to there. Because of this, ordering of lunch is typically regulated to impulse (bad) or habit (worse). It’s that impulse that (future link)Fast Food Frankie(/future link) takes advantage of when they ask : “Wanna supersize that?”. And if a goal is to loose weight you have to fight your habits. Mentally and physically you know what eating that meal entails. How long it takes to eat. How full you feel afterwards. In changing your (future link)diet(/future link) you may feel off balance, craving more food. That’s where the PoA catches the habit/impulse and Conscious Acts, what you do, work in tandem. Given a goal of Losing weight your Conscious Act could be to drink more water or reduce later caloric consumption. A goal of eating better could be to buy some roughage like lettuce, or even filling up on water, when you are still hungry.

These ideas are not just limited to health. Say something appealing shows up on a deal news-feed, say from Hot-deals.org , which happens to be one of my weakness. Or maybe a bad day at work and causes you go to either the mall or one of the Big Box Stores looking for stress relief. Both rely on impulse for that sale. By being Aware you can using that shopping venture to find out what specs exist instead of purchasing on impulse. Or if you have a particular item in mind, set aside money specifically for it.

The purpose of Conscious Acts is to take that awareness and move towards your definitive goals.

special report: shhhh, this is your brain on sleep (@womenshealthmag.com)

I have a lot of difficulty going to sleep.  It doesn’t matter whether I drink caffeine, what I eat during the day, whether I exercise - when my head hits the pillow, I am constantly thinking about things to do, things to research on the Internet, tasks to complete the next day - fortunately, now that I’ve beat my food addiction, the only thing I don’t think about is food.  After reading this article and doing a little research at ScienceDaily, I’m convinced I need to change my sleep habits.

Here’s a short list of the effects sleep deprivation can have on your body:

• Disturbs your metabolism.  Sleep deprivation affects the levels of leptin and ghrelin.  Leptin, a hormone that indirectly signals satiety in the brain, was found to be 15% lower in sleep-deprived people; ghrelin, a hormone that signals hunger, was found to be 15% higher.  Insulin and growth hormones were also affected, which could lead the body to crave calorie-rich foods.
• Increases anxiety.  Both fatigue and the boost in cortizol (a hormone associated with stress) can lead to higher levels of stress and anxiety during the day.  Cortizol also plays a part in weight gain, as it breaks down lipids and protiens in our bodies to release glucose, which in turn increases the body’s insulin production and fat storage.
• Other effects.  Fatigue lowers brain functionality to match that of someone legally intoxicated; sleep deprivation and sleep apnea may have been linked with higher risk of cancer, heart disease, depression and can lower the immune system.

Sleep deprivation is only the beginning of a viscious cycle - depression and hormonal imbalance causes the body to gain weight, which causes sleep apnea, which strips the body of more sleep, which causes depression and weight gain, which…

So break the cycle - exercise before bedtime for a few minutes, take a hot shower at night, unplug from the Internet or TV, read a book - do something that relaxes you and get some rest.  It does your body good.