by Larry Senn
The biggest problem with the typical American diet is that it is overprocessed and high in salt, fat, and sugar, which puts on weight and damages the cardiovascular system, leading to heart disease, stroke, erectile dysfunction, and other ailments that slow us down, reduce our quality of life, and lead to early death. And these problems aren’t confined to a small fraction of Americans: nearly one-third of the US population falls into the obese category, and nearly 60 percent of Americans are overweight.
While diets work for a few, most diets don’t work over the long term. My experience suggests that the best way of eating right for health and weight is to find healthful foods you can eat as a permanent lifestyle—not as a short-term diet.
My own journey toward healthy eating habits started around the time I failed Dr. Cooper’s aerobics test. I had a regular checkup with my family doctor, which included a blood test. My physician casually mentioned that my cholesterol was a little high and suggested, “You might want to switch from whole milk to low fat.” This was back in the 1970s, and I hadn’t heard much about the link between cholesterol and heart disease. I looked up all the references I could find and began to educate myself.
I learned that saturated fats in particular contribute to blocked arteries. The case was best stated by Jon N. Leonard, Jack L. Hofer, and Nathan Pritikin in Live Longer Now: The First One Hundred Years of Your Life. Neither a medical doctor nor a nutritionist, Pritikin was an engineer who became interested in health matters when he found out that he suffered from heart disease. He discovered that countries where people consume the most fat had the most arterial disease. Over time he created a program that was a revolutionary departure from current medical thinking and tested it on friends and relatives.
In 1974 he opened the Pritikin Longevity Center in Santa Barbara, California. Its success against illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, and gout proved greater than even Pritikin had dreamed. Eighty-five percent of those who came to the center on medication for high blood pressure left with normal blood pressure and no medication. Half of those with adult-onset diabetes left insulin-free, and more than half of those who were already scheduled for heart bypass surgery left the center no longer needing the operation.
The diet plan Pritikin devised was high in whole grains, vegetables, and dietary fiber, while deriving less than 10 percent of total calories from fats. Today this basic formula has been incorporated into the guidelines on how to reduce the risk of developing cardiovascular disease by such mainstream organizations as the American Heart Association.
My study of Pritikin’s work prompted me to reduce the fats in my diet and increase the vegetables, fruits, and high-fiber whole grains. I later learned that saturated fats (like those found in animal products) are bad for you, while unsaturated fats (like the omega-3 oils found in olive oil and fatty fish like salmon) are good for you. I also learned about the power of antioxidants found in certain berries.
Studies continue to link diet to disease. The strongest link appears to be to animal products—red meats in particular. In a 2010 report by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health, data from more than 400,000 people over a 10-year period showed that just a 2-ounce daily serving of processed meat (like hot dogs, bacon, or lunch meat) increased the risk of diabetes by 50 percent, while just 4 ounces of unprocessed red meat (such as hamburger or steak) increased diabetes risk by 20 percent.16
Similarly, a National Institutes of Health and AARP study found that men who ate the most red meat had a 31 percent higher overall death rate that those who ate the least.17 Other studies have documented the health problems caused by the excessive sugar in soft drinks and the refined flour in most of the baked goods we eat. The rise in diabetes has a direct correlation to the increased use of sweeteners like high-fructose corn syrup and the rise of obesity.
All this information led me to create some simple guidelines that I follow for energy, longevity, and weight control. I try to avoid or limit fats and sugars:
Saturated fats from dairy products, processed or red meat, and the wrong oils (saturated or trans fats) found in most processed food
Simple carbohydrates and non–naturally occurring sugars found in pastries, desserts, soft drinks, white flour, and most fruit juices
On the other hand, these are what I try to get plenty of:
Vegetables, whole fruits, and nuts like almonds and walnuts
Protein mainly from legumes (beans and lentils) and other plant products like soy. If more protein is needed, I use plant-based protein powder supplements. For meat, I choose fish, such as wild-caught salmon or tuna.
The right oils, especially those that have high levels of omega-3s
Fiber from vegetables, as well as grains such as brown rice, oatmeal, and whole wheat
Antioxidants, such as those found in blueberries, acai berries, and pomegranate juice
Water, while limiting juice consumption and cutting out soft drinks
It took me quite a while to develop and implement these guidelines for myself. I have dropped some foods I loved and added healthy ones I can live with as an ongoing lifestyle choice. The key is developing increased consciousness about the right and wrong kinds of foods to eat. That leads to selecting more of the right kinds of foods and avoiding the damaging ones. In time the healthy foods become a preference and a way of life.
I do know that what I eat makes a difference. The cholesterol that my doctor told me was a bit high back in the 1970s—it was 220 then—was more recently measured at 150. I have very low LDL (low-density lipoprotein, or “bad” cholesterol) and triglycerides and very high HDL (high-density lipoprotein, or “good” cholesterol), as well as other favorable blood markers. I entered my first sprint triathlon around 10 years ago at age 70. I now participate in about six triathlons per year, most often as the only competitor in the 80-and-above age category.
I believe this is possible because of my healthy diet and my commitment to regular exercise. The combination also contributes to a lot more time up the Mood Elevator. I hope you’ll try embarking on your own journey of well-being. You’ll be glad you did.
10
Quieting Your Mind
Quiet the mind and the soul will speak.
—MA JAYA SATI BHAGAVATI
In chapter 9 we looked at the importance of the stretch-and-recover cycle as a basic principle of physical fitness that also applies to mental, emotional, and spiritual fitness. Developing the ability to move from a very busy mind to a quiet mind is central to living up the Mood Elevator. The nature of thought on the lower levels, like worry or anger, is frenetic and circular. In the highest state on the elevator−grateful−there is almost no thought, just a good calm feeling. This quieter state allows both mind and body to rest and recover from the strain of everyday life.
That has become increasingly difficult in our digital, broadband-driven world. We are constantly bombarded with information, demanding our attention and scattering our focus. I met a CEO recently who said that when he sends a text message or email to someone on his senior team, he expects a response within 30 minutes—a rule that applies 24 hours a day, seven days a week. While this is an extreme case, more and more people do feel the need to respond to work-related messages no matter when they arrive. As a result, evenings, weekends, holidays, and vacations are no longer times for mental refreshment, recreation, and relaxation. They are often periods of stress and anxiety that simply extend the workweek rather than enable you to recover from it.
Making Time to “Be Here Now”
Higher-quality thinking feels different from lower-quality thinking. In the higher mood states, our thoughts are quieter, more flowing, clearer, and relaxed. Feelings like gratitude, love, serenity, and peace come with almost no effort. Spending time with those feelings, in what you might call being states, provides precious recovery time that greatly enhances our emotional and psychological well-being.
Think about the last time you were in such a being state. Maybe it was a
moment when you were overwhelmed by a beautiful scene in nature, delighted by the pure love of a child, transported by the grandeur of a piece of music, or moved by an act of generosity or forgiveness directed toward you. During such moments, your mind is quiet and your thoughts are still. Life feels like an undisturbed, flowing river. When we are completely focused on “being here now,” the surface of our emotions is calm and transparent, even though lots of water may be flowing underneath.
By contrast, when you are down the Mood Elevator, your thinking is busy, cloudy, and unclear. You tend to get caught up in eddies of worry, anger, insecurity, judgment, and other emotions that swirl around and spiral downward. Learning to recognize and calm those mental eddies can help destress your life.
Two techniques help me achieve that quieter state of mind. One is to compartmentalize my work time and my off time.
Make no mistake, I live a busy, high-pressure life, just like most people today. That means I often take some work home at night, on weekends, and on vacation. There are times when I need to respond to urgent messages from the office or a client, even when I am officially “not at work.”
I minimize the impact of these pressures on my psychological and spiritual state, however, by ensuring that I am not mentally at work all the time. I block off time for me to be here now with the people and activities I care about. I consciously cultivate my ability to be fully present in the moment with a quiet mind.
Of course, this is a challenge for me—as it probably is for you. Most of us get so caught up in our thinking that special moments in life pass us by. Have you ever had a day off when your working mind never shut down? Have you taken a vacation when only your body was present? Have you ever spent time with a loved one only to realize that your thoughts and concerns were far away? These are all examples of not being here now. They are also lost opportunities to refresh, renew, recover, and connect with people on a deeper level.
This is not a brand-new problem. Many philosophical and religious traditions teach that happiness is to be found by living in the present moment. And modern science has confirmed this ancient truth. In an article titled “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind,” psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert describe their investigations into the relationship between a wandering mind and happiness in the real world. They developed a web application for the iPhone that allowed them to randomly sample the emotional status, activities, and mind states of about 5,000 people from 83 different countries. They found that most of their subjects spent at least half their time thinking about something other than their immediate surroundings—and that most of this thinking did not make them happy.18
Knowing that I am just as susceptible to this tendency as anyone else, I make a conscious effort to combat it. Practical steps to compartmentalize my attention are very helpful. I turn my smartphone off during my son’s volleyball games, on most evenings, and during large blocks of my weekend and vacation time. When I am away from the office, I allocate brief blocks of time to catch up on emails, but then I shut down my electronic connections, as well as my thinking about work. This provides not only recovery time for me but also more quality time with my loved ones.
The Role of Breathing in Quieting Your Mind
The second technique I employ to find those peaceful, centering moments we all need is a quick, simple way to quiet my mind in the midst of a hectic day. I merely stop, take a deep breath, and as I exhale I say to myself, Be here now. This exercise somehow has a centering effect and clears my thoughts, at least for the moment. It works remarkably well when I’m walking from one meeting to another or before opening the door when I get home at night.
I am not the only person who has discovered the amazing impact of breathing on one’s state of mind, of course. Research has shown that slow, deep breathing somehow triggers the parasympathetic nervous system, which induces calm.
I was first introduced to the power of breathing when I read The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School. Benson studied Eastern meditation techniques and found that merely repeating a particular word or phrase each time you exhale while in a relaxed position has the effect of quieting the mind. While a Buddhist practitioner or someone who follows Deepak Chopra would use a mantra like so hum, Benson found that repeating the neutral word “one” on the exhale produced a similar result. He documented through research that the same exercise reduces pulse rate and blood pressure.
I’ve proven this myself by being able to drop my resting pulse rate from its normal 60 beats per minute to as low as 46; and I can lower my blood pressure to 90/50, when it is usually 20 to 30 points higher. I have used my own form of Benson’s relaxation response technique and variants of it for years to start most days from a quieter, more grateful place.
More recently, I was introduced to author and psychologist John Selby, who also points to the power of breathing—but with a twist. In Quiet Your Mind, Selby’s theory is that if you give the mind two or more tasks to perform, it can’t wander. The result is a quieter mind. In practice, he recommends breathing through the nose while noticing the air as it moves in and out. If that is not enough to quiet your mind, the second simultaneous task is to notice the rise and fall of your chest or stomach. The concentration required to do both of these things at once makes other, more complex thinking difficult, resulting in a quieter mind.
When I am in the midst of a busy day, I simply take a few deep breaths whenever I feel I am ramping up, becoming too intense, or getting caught up in distracting anxieties and worries. It’s a useful shortcut that helps me achieve a quieter mind in just a few seconds. Try one or more of the techniques I’ve described and see whether they make a difference for you.
11
Cultivating Gratitude
To speak gratitude is courteous and pleasant, to enact gratitude is generous and noble, but to live gratitude is to touch Heaven.
—JOHANNES A. GAERTNER
I recently watched a YouTube video called “The Power of Words”—one that more than 25 million other people had also watched.19 It shows a man sitting on a city sidewalk with a tin can for donations and a sign reading, I’M BLIND PLEASE HELP. Passersby come and go, but very few make a donation.
Then a woman comes along. She looks at the man’s sign, thinks for a minute, then flips it over and writes a new message on it.
Almost immediately, the donations dramatically increase. The blind man is both confused and amazed to hear the shower of coins landing at his feet and in his can. When the woman returns later in the day, the man asks her, “What did you do to my sign?”
She replies, “I wrote the same—but in different words.”
Then the sign is revealed: IT’S A BEAUTIFUL DAY AND I CAN’T SEE IT.
That little video evoked powerful emotions in me. What was it about the new message that induced so many passersby to give generously to the blind man? It was the power of gratitude—a feeling that is always available to all of us but that we too often neglect in the rush of everyday life. Being reminded of the miracle of sight made the people who saw the sign newly aware of how lucky they were—and in their gratitude they opened their hearts and shared some of their bounty with a man less fortunate than themselves.
Counting your blessings is more than a platitude; it is a pretty good way to maintain perspective on the realities of your life.
Choosing the Gratitude Perspective
I have often been asked why the word grateful appears at the very top of the Mood Elevator map. There are several reasons.
Gratitude is what we might call an overriding emotion. It is almost impossible to be grateful and at the same time be angry, depressed, irritated, or self-righteous. There is a sense of calm, warmth, and happiness that comes with gratitude that overrides impatience, frustration, and anger. Because gratitude is an emotion that connects us to a higher spirit, it helps us feel more purposeful, present, and supportive of those around us. And because gratitude is focused more on others than
on ourselves, it lifts us above lower mood states like envy and enables us to escape from feelings of powerlessness or of being victimized.
Above all, gratitude is about perspective—about appreciating the realities of life and all it has to offer.
Consider this: The fact that you are reading this book means you are devoting time to thinking about self-actualization—to maximizing your potential and abilities and to making your life as rich, rewarding, and meaningful as possible. By definition, that means you are not focused on where your next meal is coming from or on how you can put a roof over your head. In other words, you already have a lot going for you. You are among the privileged of humankind who are not living at a subsistence level but rather can take the bare necessities of life—food, clothing, and a place to live—more or less for granted. Millions of your fellow human beings aren’t so lucky—and not just in developing countries but closer to home, as well.
If you’ve ever seen a homeless person pushing a shopping cart containing all of their possessions down the street; or a child in a developing nation trailing after a tourist, begging for a penny or two; or a refugee family from a war zone desperately pleading for permission to cross the border into a land at peace, you know how blessed you and I are, no matter what problems and challenges we may face on an average day.
Does that mean we automatically feel a sense of gratitude every morning when we wake up? Unfortunately, no. That’s where perspective comes in.
If we choose to focus our thoughts on what we don’t have or don’t like, we won’t feel good about life. We will quickly head down the Mood Elevator—and stay there. Most of the lower-level mood states represent times when we have lost perspective. And when we ignore the many good things in our lives, the things we don’t like can become overwhelming and consume us.