One of the key factors to a peaceful, purposeful and happy life is diet. For me personally, I feel much more balance, control, and powerful when I’m eating right. For me it’s not only the health, but it’s also about setting goals (I want to eat right) and achieving them. It goes hand in hand with exercise and overall mental health. In fact, eating healthy has been shown to provide: longer life, happiness, vitality, great skin, weight loss, life satisfaction, and better relationships. It helps our attitude, our outlook, and our energy.

Since a healthy diet is such an important factor in our lives, it just makes sense to find ways of making it easier. If there are short cuts I want to know about them – they are usually worth their weight in gold. So, for the last month or so I’ve been tracking various ideas for eating healthy. Some are easy little hacks, and some are more general, but the idea is to make eating healthier easier. With marketers, commercials and media all telling us what to eat (and seldom do they have our health in mind) we need all the help we can get.

So here they are in no particular order:

1. Wait 10-15 minutes: After eating a small to medium-ly portioned meal, wait. Wait 15 minutes before deciding if your still hungry or not. Often our brain doesn’t feel full until 15 minutes after eating has passed. With this short stall, we can trick ourselves, and feel full with out actually eating more.

2. Eat smaller meals: Going hand in hand with waiting 15 minutes, is to eat smaller portions. In the US especially, we are used to Costco, Walmart, Chevy Trucks, and Super Sized. What’s funny is that 90% of the world doesn’t operate this way. It’s amazing how many calories (and dollars) can be saved by just reducing what we consume.

3. Count your calories: For at least for 60-90 days, or until it’s a habit, track how many calories you eat in a day. You may be surprised to find out you are normally eating 3,000 calories a day, when you should really only be eating 2,100. Plus when you count your calories you become much more aware of everything your eating.

4. Track/log what you eat: Along with tracking your calories (at least for 60-90 days until it’s a habit), track what you eat. You’ll want to know how many carbohydrates, proteins and fats your eating each day. Too much of one, and not enough of the other leads to unbalance, and isn’t healthy.

5. Replace carbohydrates with protein. So much of what we get at the store, and at restaurants is filled to the brim with carbohydrates. We need to actively look at ingredients and get more protein and less carbohydrates.

6. No eating before bedtime: Something I’ve noticed really helps my weight, and overall metabolism is not eating before I go to sleep. 1) I wake up hungry, this kicks my metabolism off to a good start and 2) eating right before bed turns the energy your body gets from the food directly into fat instead of burning it off.

7. No carbs 5-6 hours before bedtime. Your body doesn’t really need carbohydrates in the late afternoon and before bed time. Since you’ll be sleeping you don’t need the energy that comes from eating carbohydrates. Your body turns carbohydrates into fat instead of energy when all you do is sleep on them.

8. Drink water. 1) it’s good for you. 2) it curbs your appetite – many times instead of being hungry, I was actually thirsty. Drinking some water satisfied that appetite, and I no longer craved food.

9. Eat natural. When in doubt eat something natural. Not frozen, packaged, processed, or produced. Look for as little ingredients as possible.

10. Don’t use self-control: That’s right, I said “don’t”. The idea here is that if you don’t want to eat it, don’t buy it, or have it in the house at all. If it’s not even there, it’s not a temptation and you don’t have to use self control. Try to use will power as little as possible.

11. Brush your teeth early. I noticed that when I brush my teeth, I’m much less likely to eat something afterwards. I have this idea that I have already brushed my teeth, and I don’t want to brush them again. So, whenever I can, I’ll brush my teeth as early as possible, this takes care of any before bed temptations.

There it is. Have any more?

Note: I am by no means a professional nutritionist or anything like that. These are merely things that have helped me. Please consult a professional when making any changes to your diet.

This song randomly popped up on my itunes playlist this morning and reminded me just how much I love it. The melody, harmony and lyrics work together perfectly to make a great piece of music. They also communicate a very potent message.

“If I could save time in a bottle, the first thing that I’d like to do, is to save every day… just to spend them with you”

What would you do if you could save time in a bottle? What person or thing is so important to you that you would put time with them in a bottle in hopes that it could last forever?

“But there never seems to be enough time, to do the things you want to do,
once you find them”

How many of us could relate to this line? You find something you really enjoy, a person or activity, but find there is never enough time to spend with that person or thing. You really enjoy writing, but find that you don’t have enough time for it. You really enjoy spending time with your kids, but there is just never enough.

What’s the lesson here? Well, I think it’s two fold:

1) Savor and enjoy every moment. Time is truly the most valuable and scarce resource we have. Use it to the best of your ability, and never, never, never waist it.

2) When you find something you really enjoy, give it time. Since time is the most valuable asset we can control, use it wisely. Use it to invest in the things most valuable and enjoyable to you.

Every so often I like to think about things that give me great ROI (Return On Investment) – not in terms of money, but in terms of peace and purpose. What little thing could I do that gives me a lot of peace and serenity? Well, one of the things that I’ve found is eating healthy.

There is something really special, and peaceful that comes over me, just by eating healthy foods, and in good proportions. It’s almost amazing how much this effects my mood, and to a larger extent my life. I feel more at peace with myself, my family, my friends – more productive, alert, happier, the list of positive effects goes on and on. And this doesn’t even touch the physical and tangible effects: longer life, better blood flow, less fat, stronger organs, etc.

It’s truly one of those things that gives great return on investment. Put in a little work to prepare good food, planning your meals, and times that you eat, and you’ll get a great return – immense amounts of peace.

Contractors and water damage specialists came to asses the damage, and after all was said and done, we are now living in a hotel for at least 2 weeks while the condo is cleaned and rebuilt. Needless to say this has been a very tramatic time for our family. Being displaced, coming close to losing valuables and household items, and the sudden loss of all that we are used to has been difficult. We packed a couple small bags, headed to the hotel, and now we wait. If you want to keep peace in your life, there’s much to learn from a situation like this:

Live simple: When life displaces you, you have to be prepared to move on an instant. That means that if you rely on everything from specialized toothpicks to your special shower message system….you may have a problem. Frankly, this will cause you a lot of stress and steal the peace that you could have.

Focus on the good. When you face a situation like this, it’s really easy to focus on the negative things. I don’t have this, I don’t have that. But with a little work, you can keep a positive outlook and attitude, and that will change everything. You can suddenly change the whole mood of your entire family just by keeping a positive attitude.

Think about the concrete and the future. It’s really easy to get mad at the past, to get mad at the fact that your house is in 3″ of water, that you no longer have a place to hang your hat, etc. But it doesn’t help. And, as a matter of fact, it makes things worse. You cause yourself grief, and most likely cause friction with your family.

Notice what you now have time for. It’s amazing since this happened how I have cut out little things that are meaningless. Checking up on pointless emails, over use of social sites like facebook and twitter. It’s amazing when you are forced to trim down the fat, and really focus on just what’s important, what time saving mechanisms you come up with. Can I keep these when I’m not living crunch time?

Look for lessons not problems. The more you look for what you can learn from the situation the better. When you focus on problems and set backs, it’s like going in reverse on a freeway. You’re not likely to get anywhere you want to go, and you are very likely to damage and hit other people who are going the right direction.

While there’s no silver bullet for having fun, and each person is different, I am always looking for what produces the best chances of success in something, be that peace, purpose, working hard or having fun. Today, I wanted to simply think about the key factors that produce the highest chances of having fun. What are those things that we can do, that when done, will give us the best chances of producing a good, memorable time. Here we go…

1. Be Outside. There is something about fresh air hitting your face and warm sun light hitting your skin. It has been proven that UVB rays from the sun positively effect the mood of people suffering from depression. Also, some of the predominant colors outside – blue and green – have been shown to invoke feelings of calmness, coolness, tranquility, and sedation.

2. Be Active. There are countless studies showing the positive effects of physical activity on the brain and mood. It’s been shown to alleviate pain, make you smarter, cure depression, build self confidence, and much, much more. Here’s just one example of the laundry list of benefits that come from physical activity.

3. Be With Others. One other critical item I have found is to be with other people. While I can enjoy, and even thrive on my own, meditating on my own thoughts, there is something special about sharing time with others. One thing I have found is that I laugh and smile more when I’m with someone else, even if it’s just one other person. Sharing jokes, laughing, and smiling go hand in hand when you’re with other people, not so much when you’re by yourself. You’re also some what giving your time to someone else, and that’s usually a great investment.

There you have it. My guide for having fun. There’s a lot of openness here, nothing concrete, and that’s purposeful. These are only some basic guidelines that I’ve found to maximize the potential of having fun. The rest is up to you. Which leads me to my last and final point:

You Must Begin. This is where the rubber hits the road and is by far the most difficult part. It’s very difficult to actually get up off the couch, or in my case comfortable office chair and laptop and actually do this stuff. But nothing worth-wild is easy, and if we can just get over that initial hump of difficulty the rest is simple…and fun!