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Tag: skills

  • Don’t Panic — It’s Just the Holidays Darya Rose at Summer Tomato has a nice list of recommendations for sticking with your healthy eating habits throughout the holidays. Here are the basic ideas — go read the post for terrific tips on how to implement them: 1. Don’t panic. 2. Pick your battles. 3. Plan…

  • Is ANYTHING Good for You? In an article cheekily linked as “10 types of diet books that prove you can’t eat anything,” io9 notes: “What should you cut out of your diet to be more healthy? Everything. According to the most popular diet books on the market, there’s barely a food on Earth that’s safe…

  • Use What You Have Available I’m not 100% sure what this raccoon’s plan is, but sometimes we have to improvise when we want to stay active. It’s not always obvious how to get started, though, so take a look at Mark Lauren’s bodyweight training. The sales pitch is a little aggressive, but Lauren’s You Are…

  • Nudge Yourself into a Sound Grocery Strategy Feeding America worked with Cornell University to develop a nudge-based way of presenting food in food banks and pantries — putting produce and recipe ideas right up front so that it was easy for people to make the right choices. Your local grocery store has its own priorities…

  • Safety Around Dogs Exercising outdoors — or even just walking somewhere — can have risks, and almost every runner has at least one story (usually many more) about being chased by a dog. I have noticed that people whose off-leash dogs chase and jump up onto strangers are often very quick to say “Oh he’s…

  • Getting Ready for Thanksgiving If you are making a new commitment to healthful eating, Thanksgiving might be the biggest challenge of the year. Halloween candy can be tough to resist, but the prospect of tables groaning with comfort food — and cooking plans that seem to be designed to guarantee a week of leftovers —…

  • A More Active Environment If you played sports in school or had regular physical training in the military, you got a good start building a fitness base, but sometimes after leaving those settings it’s hard to stick with it. As valuable as coached and other structured activities are, once you’re out, it’s hard to form…

  • Visualization, Negative Self-talk, and Self-efficacy

    I am critical of negative self-talk — I encourage people to forgive themselves for failures and focus on getting back on track — but I also don’t care for “visualization,” at least of the “power of positive thinking” stripe. I’ve seen first hand that daydreaming and detailed discussions of a hoped-for future can become a…

  • Consider the Possibilities Only a tiny minority of people are actually harmed by eating gluten, but many people find that if they eat less gluten-containing foods they feel better. That could be for many reasons, including undiscovered sensitivity traits, something about gluten processing that we don’t understand yet, other food components that tend to travel…