Success

Daily Weigh-Ins Keep Dieters on Track – MedicineNet

/ SupremeCmdr / Leave a comment

Daily Weigh-Ins Keep Dieters on Track – MedicineNet.

Journal of Obesity — An Open Access Journal.

A two-year Cornell University study found that tracking the results of daily weight checks on a chart helped people lose weight and keep it off.

Sometimes I forget but I try to weigh myself every day.  I keep a log on a Google Sheet.  It is a daily reminder of whether I’ve been good or bad.  Bad behavior is not hard to recognize.  Too many restaurant meals, too much animal protein, ice cream, pizza, beer, etc.  Good behavior is harder but achievable.  Grilled chicken on mixed greens, choosing the smaller burrito rather than the giant version, more plant based meals, less beer.

Periodic weigh-in’s work.  It’s part of the routine ever since losing over 200 pounds.  Boom.

Anne Lamott – Time Lost and Found

/ SupremeCmdr / Leave a comment

Finding time – Sunset.

 

I sometimes teach classes on writing, during which I tell my students every single thing I know about the craft and habit. This takes approximately 45 minutes. I begin with my core belief—and the foundation of almost all wisdom traditions—that there is nothing you can buy, achieve, own, or rent that can fill up that hunger inside for a sense of fulfillment and wonder. But the good news is that creative expression, whether that means writing, dancing, bird-watching, or cooking, can give a person almost everything that he or she has been searching for: enlivenment, peace, meaning, and the incalculable wealth of time spent quietly in beauty.

Then I bring up the bad news: You have to make time to do this.

This means you have to grasp that your manic forms of connectivity—cell phone, email, text, Twitter—steal most chances of lasting connection or amazement. That multitasking can argue a wasted life. That a close friendship is worth more than material success.

It’s Official: The Boomerang Kids Won’t Leave – NYTimes.com

/ SupremeCmdr / Leave a comment

It’s Official: The Boomerang Kids Won’t Leave – NYTimes.com.

One in five people in their 20s and early 30s is currently living with his or her parents. And 60 percent of all young adults receive financial support from them. That’s a significant increase from a generation ago, when only one in 10 young adults moved back home and few received financial support. The common explanation for the shift is that people born in the late 1980s and early 1990s came of age amid several unfortunate and overlapping economic trends. Those who graduated college as the housing market and financial system were imploding faced the highest debt burden of any graduating class in history. Nearly 45 percent of 25-year-olds, for instance, have outstanding loans, with an average debt above $20,000. (Kasinecz still has about $60,000 to go.) And more than half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed, meaning they make substandard wages in jobs that don’t require a college degree. According to Lisa B. Kahn, an economist at Yale University, the negative impact of graduating into a recession never fully disappears. Even 20 years later, the people who graduated into the recession of the early ’80s were making substantially less money than people lucky enough to have graduated a few years afterward, when the economy was booming.

Read the entire article for a lesson in how to put a positive spin on our new Culture of Dependency.  Watch the slideshow of a dose of reality.  Then read the reader comments and decide for yourself if this “new and permanent life stage” is truly a “potentially thrilling economic evolution”.

Or not.

America’s Workers: Stressed Out, Overwhelmed, Totally Exhausted – The Atlantic

/ SupremeCmdr / Leave a comment

I asked Peter Senge about that. How to try to live and work in a sane way when you’re in the middle of insanity: a voracious workplace that will eat you alive, friends and neighbors who raise eyebrows if you pull your kids out of some competitive activity. He gave some important advice: Create your own community, a network of like-minded people. Humans are wired to conform—that’s why these cultural pressures, however silly they may seem, wield such power over us. So find a group that fits your values that would make you happier to conform to.

via America’s Workers: Stressed Out, Overwhelmed, Totally Exhausted – Rebecca J. Rosen – The Atlantic.