Insulin Resistance and Exercise Article

Contents

3. Book Review: Eating, Drinking, Overthinking

Your HRH Program E-book and Bonuses

If you haven’t yet purchased the HRH Program e-book, there’s no time like the present! Go to www.heartratehealth.com to get a copy, plus nearly $100 in bonus material. And remember, if it doesn’t work for you for any reason, you have a full year to return it for a full refund.

Survey Results

Thanks to all of you who wrote back about your opinions on a HRH Program Forum. The opinions broke down into just about half for a forum, half for something else. I think I’ll hold off on the forum for now, but I want to introduce a new feature of the web site based on the something else ideas.

Some said that they would rather go straight to the source (the source being me I assume) for their answers. But they also mentioned that I could post their questions, and the answers to them, on the web site, as long as I stripped out their identifying information.

So I’ll set up an “Ask Craig Anything” page on the site within a few days, and I’ll be taking questions for it between now and the next newsletter. So, fire away, at this special e-mail address: ask-craig@heartratehealth.com, and I’ll try to get your anonymous question up with an answer within a few days of receiving it.

Now, can you really ask anything? Well, yes, but I’ll likely focus on things that have something to do with the HRH Program, just so you know.

All Year's Resolutions

Just as I was sitting down in my favorite coffee shop to write this, I heard someone say “it’s not a resolution, it’s a lifestyle change.” So, are resolutions “out”? Well, it certainly seems that we don’t take them very seriously anymore. I have joked around with them myself.

The reason we don’t take them seriously, of course, is that they usually last about two to three weeks before we’re back to the same old thing. Maybe they could be called “New Half-of-January Resolutions.”

Last week, I suggested that we call them All Year Resolutions, and this does get around the two week phenomenon. Perhaps instead we should call them Every Year Resolutions, or even All Life Resolutions. Now we’re getting somewhere!

Thinking of the rest of your life, how do you want to treat your body? When you think along this time line, one thing almost always comes out. If you’ve started some fad diet with severe calorie restrictions, your first thought might be, “I certainly couldn’t do this for my whole life!” For the most part, diets are a terrible way to handle your health. And your body will tell you this the moment it figures out what’s going on.

So what could you do your whole life? That’s what the HRH Program is all about. Through simple exercise and eating changes, your body slowly adapts to the healthy way of life that it deserves by constantly sticking to what it needs in the present. And once it does so, it starts to reward you with good feelings about continuing or goads you to get back into it when you stray from it. It’s designed to last your entire lifetime.

Like I said in the last newsletter, though, even when our body is balanced and craving the right foods and exercise, our minds can still get in the way. And this inevitably leads us down the path of behaviors we’ve used in the past to “get by” on a day-to-day basis.

So most of this series of All Life Resolutions will be focused on bringing our minds around to support us in our goals, instead of sabotaging us. I’m excited that I found a book that fits well with the first of the Resolutions, and I have included a review of this as the second part of the newsletter below. But let’s get one of these resolutions out in the open to talk about first.

All Life Resolution 1: Bring your past right up to the present. And let it go.

“Those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.” Is there anyone who hasn’t heard that quote? I believe there is a lot to learn from the past, and learning and doing something different the next time is great. But most of us don’t learn from the past so much as obsess over it. So let’s restate the quote:

“Those who obsess about the past are doomed to repeat it.”

Have you ever thought to yourself, “I wish I didn’t do that every time,” and then started to reflect on all the times you’ve ever done it? Almost everyone has. By definition, if we keep making the same mistakes, we certainly haven’t learned or moved on from them. So continuing to punish ourselves for the same past mistakes doesn’t get us anywhere. In fact, it may very well lock it in to our self-conception.

So here’s a quick tip that goes along with the book review below. Once you recognize that you’re “doing it again”, stop doing it. Right then and there. Easy as that. Then, realize that the behavior is in your past and not in your present. In your present is only happiness and flowers and sunshine and love. If you can train yourself to think about anything that makes you consistently feel good, you’ll start to automatically get rid of the bad feelings.

Is this harder than it sounds in the last paragraph? At first, yes, because we’ve trained our minds to keep focusing on the problem. But think about this for a minute: has resorting to obsessing about your past problems ever made them go away, or has it resulted in more of them?

Just stop. And do something different, something better. And when your mind starts in again on the problem, just stop again. And do this over and over until you get the hang of interrupting the pattern. See if it doesn’t perk you up after some practice.

Book Review: Eating, Drinking, Overthinking

Please click here to go the Book Review section of the site.