Old habits die hard. The SAD (standard American diet) is entrenched in our minds like concrete. Some people find it easy to change, others find it excruciating. It helps to remember it’s just habit. What’s normal to us is only normal because of habit, not because it’s written in stone.

Here are a few ideas that may make it easier for those struggling to change.

1. No change needs to be permanent. As you think about trying a new approach to nutrition, no one is saying that you must eat this way and only this way for the rest of your life. It’s more relaxing to think of a change as an experiment. I recommend giving any new approach a trial run of about 2 to 3 weeks. Then see how you feel, and re-evaluate. It’s easier if you think of it as being similar to trying on some new clothes in a store. So a foray into, say a low-carb diet, should be considered experimental. This can relieve a lot of pressure on those who worry that they’ll be stuck eating a bland health diet. For starters, I recommend a wheat-free diet for at least two weeks

2. Imperfection in your diet is OK. For most people, the thought of never having ice cream or a pastry again is terrifying. But eating healthily doesn’t mean your diet should be perfect. For one reason, it’s virtually impossible – we’re just human, after all. Second, it isn’t necessary (except in the most serious cases.) If you eat healthily about 90% of the time, that’s more than enough to improve your health. When people take an all-or-nothing approach, they throw their hands up in frustration and surrender after the first bite into an Oreo. Forcing ourselves to eat perfectly healthy creates too much pressure. And a great way to reduce that pressure is to plan on one or a few sinful treats throughout the week. If I run into you at Dunkin’ Donuts, neither of us need feel guilty.

3. Eating healthily can come easily and naturally. With time, eating healthily will become your norm. You can get to the point where you don’t long for unhealthy foods. In fact, they can begin to look ridiculously unappetizing. It may help to think that your body wants to eat well, and will start to look at healthy foods with desire. If it doesn’t, it’s just stuck in habit, and habits can be always be changed – with time and patience.

4. Eating healthily can be delicious.The myth that many people struggle with is that healthy food equals bland and boring. On the contrary, when done right, healthy food is delicious; and processed foods, like bread, can start to taste strange. One patient of mine has four children under 12 who are now refusing pizza and instead asking for healthy snacks (and meals) from a cookbook called Everyday Paleo by Sarah Fragoso. The recipes include only protein, vegetables, fruit, and some oil, and the kids love it. Their allergies are going away, they’re not getting colds all the time as they did before, their energy has improved. All from eating delicious AND healthy meals.

What have you found to helpful in eating healthily?

The loving No is, ultimately, a gift.

The resentful Yes is, ultimately, an insult.

The loving No strengthens both you and the other.

The resentful Yes weakens both.

The loving No generates energy between you and the other.

The resentful Yes drains energy.

The loving No brings healing and growth.

The resentful Yes impedes healing and growth.

The loving No takes courage.

The resentful Yes comes from fear.

The loving No is….loving.

Please note that this is available only in Kindle, not in Nook or other devices. However, if you don’t have a Kindle, some mobile devices like iPads and iPhones (maybe most of them for all I know) have a Kindle app that can be installed on the device. With that in place, the Kindle version of the book can be downloaded.

Enjoy!

But in a culture with endless possibilities and multiple daily stresses, many people have fallen into an overstimulated way of life. The constant surge of adrenaline stimulated by pressure, deadlines, worry, anxiety, fear, and a hyperactive life gives us a false sense of energy.

One night last summer I woke up to see an orange glow on the wall downstairs. Because I thought the house was on fire, I popped out of bed like a lightning bolt. I quickly realized that the lights had come back on after a power failure earlier that evening, but I remained hyper-alert. I was wide awake, filled with a sense of power, and I had an extraordinary sense of wellbeing. It seemed that I could have torn doors off their hinges and scrambled up to the roof with the power of a wild animal. And it all came about in less than one second. For the rest of the night, I barely slept even though I wasn’t feeling any stress—I was just over-stimulated. I also saw how addictive that wonderful feeling could be.

So when we rush around meeting deadlines, entertaining, volunteering, working, parenting, taking on too many tasks, chores, we can experience that adrenaline surge. And it is literally like taking a drug that temporarily boosts our sense of wellbeing, or at the least, gives us more energy.

In the long run, this wears the body down. Continually high levels of stress hormones weaken the immune system, disturbs sleep, predisposes (some of) us to overeat and gain weight, increases inflammation which in turn increases pain, and reduces our ability to think clearly. Eventually, the adrenals can go into a state of exhaustion characterized by fatigue, irritability, moodiness, depression, loss of libido, lack of concentration, and so on.

And beyond the sheer volume of an overbooked schedule, the adrenals can be overstimulated by ongoing and significant emotional stresses. Worrying excessively about a spouse or child, feeling resentful, isolated, hopeless—all these stresses can affect the adrenals.

Since the body is amazingly resilient, it can withstand virtually any sort of stress for a short time. But stress that is significant and persistent can take its toll on the adrenals and therefore the body as a whole. The body and mind are designed to move through cycles of rest and activity. But the human desire to keep going endlessly is at odds with this rule of Mother Nature.

To replenish our reserves, it helps to take time out for meditating, reading, taking a bath, getting more sleep, and avoiding or reducing caffeine. It helps to stick with our priorities instead of trying to do it all (and to do it all perfectly). One of the greatest ways of reducing the stress of being overscheduled is to develop the skill of saying “no.”

Because we want to do a lot and have a lot (not just material things but art, beauty, soul, love, social justice, a healthier environment, etc.), we keep driving ourselves with our inner drill sergeants. But the adrenal glands are amoral. They don’t know if we’re working toward social justice or a thousand pairs of shoes. All they know is that when there’s too much pressure and activity, no matter what the nature of our pursuit, they have to report for duty and pump out stress hormones.

As for the emotional stresses, resolution is often easier thought of than done. Nevertheless, we can think of the feelings of stress and the ensuing symptoms such as insomnia or pain as messages: they’re symptoms teaching us to keep moving toward wholeness and healing.

In the end, the answer lies not in techniques like relaxation and yoga, meditation or deep breathing, massage or acupuncture—though all that’s very helpful. Instead, it’s about our core values and the gut-level choices we need to make in order to live a life that works. It boils down to our willingness to take responsibility for our health and our lives in general, and to decide—firmly, clearly, courageously—on what really matters to us.

What are your thoughts?

I welcome any questions or comments about what you heard. Have a great day!

In The Courage to Create, Rollo May wrote, “If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. Also you will have betrayed our community in failing to make your contribution to the whole.”

He went on to write, “People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day to day. These decisions require courage. This is why Paul Tillich speaks of courage as ontological-it is essential to our being.”

I too have written about the role of courage in our lives, and in particular, its impact on our health. Our reluctance to make tough but necessary decisions leads to suppression and spiritual enervation that easily lead to bodily distress. This could take the form of fatigue, lethargy, specific aches and pains, or aggravations of medical disorders.

Most simply, the courage we need might be to experience the discomfort of giving up the unhealthy habits of excessive alcohol or desserts or time in front of the TV.

But it can also point to deeper, more complex issues such as leaving a job that clearly drains our vitality, or revealing the full scale of our emotional vulnerability in our attempts to clean up clutter in our intimate relationships. The resistance to feeling the initial discomfort – whether of telling someone that we’re hurt and want to heal the relationship or of driving to the gym on a dreary day – leads to far greater discomfort in the long run. Conversely, we are healed and made whole by our willingness to show up fully authentic, to take the risk of being our true selves, of acting in accordance with our most cherished values. A vital energy is released to run through the mysterious channels of energy in the body when we are being true to ourselves.

Another type of courage is just letting go of the need to have it all. We want to read this, and contribute there, and travel here, and be with these people, and with those people, and go to that concert, and give the best lives possible for our kids or grandkids, or to endlessly have company on the weekends, to buy this, to stimulate all five senses, and even to stimulate the mind, the heart, the soul. Whether our desire is for the merely sensory, or for the deepest existential pursuits (including the pursuit of enlightenment), that sense of being driven to have it all and to have the most and the best can, to put it bluntly, drive us nuts and twist our blood chemistry into knots.

I believe that this drive to have it all and do it all is rooted in the creative evolutionary impulse, pushing us forward on the track of progress for civilization. But it can be employed either creatively or destructively.

The willingness to experience the emptiness of “not-doing” can be scary, as we might come face to face with something there we don’t want to see. But filling that emptiness with breathless “doing” can keep us in the dark.

Rollo May also wrote, “In human beings, courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible. An assertion of the self, a commitment, is essential if the self is to have any reality.”

“If the self is to have any reality” – that’s a powerful, sweeping statement about the impact of courage. Our symptoms may simply be telling us we need more potassium or less chocolate, but they may also run deeper, insisting on our evoking the courage to fully be ourselves, to be fully authentic – expressing our truth effectively in order to produce greater harmony and vitality in our lives. In short, the courage to be ourselves is a healing, integrating quality. To be real, to be our fully human selves, is a mandate that conveys its message through the discomfort we feel. The courage to face those discomforts is a fundamental ingredient of health.

href=’http://bit.ly/KfHfCy’>Sonia Rachel, bathing newborns

But that’s looking at the issue from a purely psychological point of view.

There’s another side to the issue of perfectionism, reflected in a broader and deeper view that takes into account the philosophical and spiritual view of things. It doesn’t contradict the psychological view.

It’s reflected in various spiritual traditions, and highlighted by thinkers such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo. They write of this endless striving in the human experience as the thrust of creative evolution itself. It’s the universe trying to improve itself by creating this dissatisfaction in us.

This dissatisfaction lies at the root of all great achievements in society. As a race, as a society, we keep wanting more, better, bigger. And while that can lead to the discontents of perfectionism, and while that leads to destructive ways of satisfying our needs, and while that gets confused as the need to pursue pleasure, it’s nevertheless the thrust of a creative, spiritual evolution that leads us to greater heights of human potential.

Philosopher Martin Buber wrote that unity is the task of the world. He said that there is a relentless movement embedded in the design of the universe, and therefore in human nature, toward wholeness, oneness, and actualization.

Being aware of this impulse then leads us to see our perfectionism as catalysts for growth, energy, and possibility.