The 2016 Healthy Habits Thread

[EJCC]

I know this sounds pretty stereotypical, but.. I've been working on eating slower. And it is HARD to do. But eating slower has also made me feel more satisfied when I am done eating. I have some pretty awful habits from the military, but eating quickly is one that is pretty firmly rooted in me right now.

I think I have this too, left over from high school(!). We only had a 35-minute lunch break in high school so I would always stuff my face really quickly to allow for maximum unimpeded time to chat with my friends. Then that carried over into college, and into present day.

If it's a calorie-vs-quantity in the tummy game, I think bulking up your dinners to be bigger in general with vegetables is the way to go. If you're cooking stir-fry for example, shred up an entire head of cauliflower to add to that rice. Create a bigger spaghetti plate with spaghetti squash or zoodles or something.

^ Yes! I really need to do this!

... Uh. And of course have some guilt-free snacks hanging out is probably the easiest thing to do.

But really, it sounds like you need something distracting to do. Like, after dinner there's nothing much to do and so you notice you are depriving yourself. Also, you may actually be depriving yourself if you feel like you are. If you're noticing that you have a craving for a food, find a way to work with that craving vs trying to avoid it. If it's a matter of "man, that cookie I just ate is awesome.. ALL THE COOKIES" then, yeah, it might sound like you just need a thrilling hobby after eating. If you're like "Man, I super want a cookie but damn I've eaten a lot already.." there are all kinds of options for fulfilling that cookie-want without tripping yourself out over it. (I used to make a pretty baller cookie-breakfast-shake out of chocolate wafer cookies or cookie crisp cereal, milk, yogurt, carnation instant breakfast, chocolate chips, 2 dates, and vanilla paste all the time. None of those besides the dates are particularly heavy in calorie intake, especially for a personal serving. I think they turned out to be around 250 calories.)

...

Ouch! Been there man.
I've never used quinoa for sweet stuff... I make a pretty bangin' asian salad out of it, but I really dont use it for anything else now that I think about it. Maybe have some super freezer food back ups? sometimes having a $3 freezer dinner that doesn't suck is way better in the long term than spending $6-12 on a fancier convenience meal. I've had prepackage freezer food save me from buying expensive food many-a-times.. and really there are some super yummy things out there now-a-days. They have some awesome burritos and things like that that aren't total garbage for $2-4 and things like that.

Also, maybe think about investing into some snack foods to keep in your car or something? I keep some breakfast biscuits, tuna-lunches, and stuff like that in my car because I seem to always get stuck in a place where I'm feeling hungry but won't have access to food for a while. They're either bulky-and-low-calorie like the biscuits, or they're fairly guilt-free snack-worthy like the tuna packets.

These are really good ideas. Having freezer-food backups is something easy I can do, and you're right, they can be really cheap. Also having snacks at the ready... I'm bad at snacking in general, so this is something I need to work on.

If you or anyone else have any other easy/cheap/filling/healthy snack suggestions? Can be high-maintenance so long as it's high-maintenance just the one time for a whole batch, as opposed to high-maintenance every time. I like fruit, but it's not usually filling. Typically I have either a smoothie or baked oats w/fruit for breakfast, so that gets ruled out. I like peanut butter a lot. I like all types of nuts/nut butters but typically they're expensive. Same with yogurt. Same with jerky (which is another favorite that I only treat myself to when my parents send over local stuff). Same with granola bars. I like sweet and I like sweet/salty, so chocolate and peanut butter together are always a favorite. Haha I'm rambling at this point -- when in doubt, just assume I'll like it, so long as it isn't celery, honeydew, or watermelon.

Maybe one day my body will truly appreciate the sleep it gets, but it seems to hate whatever I do. 7 hours is a sweet spot for me--enough to be rested and function, but not feeling like I lazed around all day/night. I can really function on 4 hours of sleep, just not preferred.. 8, 9, 10, 11 hours.. they all feel the same as 7 hours. So, my habitica thing is just to say "7 hours of sleep. Did it? yup." When I sleep more than that it gives me no really great feelings. I wake up just as sleepy, will myself out of bed, etc.

I usually wake myself up by having a youtube video ready for me to watch.. and I laze in bed, and watch a video I really wanted to watch last night. Then by then I can will myself into my bed stretches for 5 minutes, and by the time I am done with that I generally feel accomplished enough to get up and do things.

That's a good idea -- something to make you feel engaged and involved in the real world. Maybe I can try that with podcasts...

 

[Lark]

I think I really ought to trust people a lot less than I do.

 

[Ivy]

Dat CPAP life! Had mine for close to a year now and would never go back. It's a night and day difference. My dad got so bad before he got his that he was falling asleep in the car. Watch out to make sure you have a good mask fit to your face or that bitch will whistle dixie and keep you awake.

First night down. I did feel like I was taking a ride into the danger zone at first. And I'm going to have to figure out some kind of white noise solution to cover up the weird breathing sounds that come from the machine. But in terms of quality of sleep, I'm pretty happy.

I just had my follow up appointment at the cardiologist after the results from my Zio patch came back. I was a little sad to find that I do still have Afib, in fact I had several instances of it over the 12 days I wore the patch. But it's still under 1% of my total beats, so we're not actually changing anything about my meds or anything like that.

Also, interestingly, most of my a fib episodes happen at around six in the morning, right before I wake up. So it's possible that the CPAP will take care of this too.

 

[EJCC]

A Lifetime of Riches – Is it as Simple as a Few Habits?

Really cool article about changing your habits -- specifically as they relate to spending, but some of this is applicable to healthy living as well.

Excerpt:

Luckily, enough research has been done that we now do know how to make habit change easier. It involves keeping the same cue and a similar reward, but substituting in a different routine. And this is how it is done:

1: Find the trigger point of your habit: You do this by describing your own behavior in detail, searching for clues you might have missed before. My habit of making coffee is triggered by entering the kitchen. Every time I walk in in the morning, I feel like firing up the espresso machine to make some lattes. If I wake up or spend the day in an unfamiliar setting (for example, at a campsite or out at a construction site), the coffee craving abates. But if I spend the day at home and return to the kitchen to make some lunch – hey, there’s that nifty espresso machine again.. maybe I need to fire it up! Similarly, some people smoke in response to a lull in their afternoon’s office work, eat in response to boredom, or buy stuff in response to desires. Find your own trigger.

2: Take the same cue, but trick yourself into triggering a different behavior: If I wanted to quit coffee, I could give away the coffee machine and put a box of herbal tea on the countertop on its place. Then I’d make tea instead of coffee. Or I could put a nice water glass, or even a pair of boxing gloves on that part of the countertop. Each morning could trigger a nice round of boxing practice with a heavy bag in the garage, and I’d be better off for it.

3: Try to make the new reward similar to the old one: With coffee, the reward is a warm, tasty beverage and an excuse to sit still, contemplate, or talk for a while. Caffeine may be a secondary part of it, but the physiological part of habits is only a tiny part of the reason they form (this was big news to me). So the tea would probably work, but boxing would be a bit of a stretch.

That’s the basic Habit Substitution trick, and you’ll go far just by understanding that. But for even more power, add the following two ingredients:

4: Get your foot in the door – with Keystone Habits: Some habits shake things up so much that they automatically trigger other changes. I believe that embracing Bike Transportation is one of these things, as explained in “What Do You Mean, You Don’t Have a Bike!?“. It eliminates spur-of-the-moment shopping, sedentary living, and weather wussiness all in one stroke. To make the change even easier, I once suggested starting by using bikes for just one initial purpose: getting your groceries. This has a keystone effect because you already live close to a grocery store, and you always need groceries at least once a week. By forbidding yourself from taking the car out for this errand, you automatically start to build a biking habit.

5: Reinforce habits with belief and community: This is the reason Alcoholics Anonymous works for so many people, and probably a big part of this blog’s success in changing habits as well. I tell stories of my own life to show that financial changes are not only possible, they are easy and fun to make. That creates belief. Then readers chime in with their own stories, much as JJ did recently, showing that others are achieving the same thing. The inevitable response is “Shit, if Mr. Money Mustache can do it, AND all these readers can do it too, then so can I”. Interestingly enough, both AA and MMM stumbled upon the success formula without much scientific study of habit change. But because we happened get certain parts of it right, we stuck around.

And thus my new understanding of habit has been born.

 

[Unkindloving]

Some of my habit-alteration has hit speedbumps. Mostly pain-related speedbumps, so I've been taking it a bit easy while obtaining a few tools for alleviation of said pain.

New habit includes a myofascial massagey for my feet with a lacrosse ball once a day. So far that's been going well, and providing a solid benefit.
Now I've picked up patella straps for less stressful/less upsetting/more efficient Zumba. Not sure how often or when I should use them otherwise.
And today my yogajellies just came in the mail, which should help alleviate wrist pain/etc during yoga.

I'm not often a fan of additional gadgets and dohickeys etc, but I need to do things while I am doing things in a sense. If I wait for wrists and quads to be strong enough over time, I'll just find I'll feels and demotivation along the way. Now it's a bit of an "all of the things!" mindset.

It's been going well though! I've been enjoying the Zumba classes, packing my things before work so I don't drag my butt back home and become lazy, and am killing my water game lol.

 

[Lark]

I've two seperate sets of habit changes I really want to achieve but I'm having difficulty with, they arent exercise or fitness orientated but are to do with my interaction with others, my own thinking and my own reactions or responses to others.

One is that I want to some how track how much I complain in order to see how often I actual do complain, so that I can consciously note it and arrest it as an actual behaviour, a lot of the time complaining actually doesnt change anything and I've encountered a number of situations lately in which the original complaint begins with someone else, they can be quite consistent in the complaining behaviour themselves, and others are reflecting it or mirroring it but becoming more readily identified with the complaint or complaining behaviour than its true authors.

If I were to change this and change it in others there's a chance it could have some positive knock on effects for business or organisational culture but its more about myself, I dont want to be that guy and I dont want to be as easily influenced by others, especially not unconsciously so in the manner I'm identifying.

The other thing is about self-disclosure and transparency, I would identify this as a societal or cultural trend, reflected in A LOT of social media and online trends which encourage the volunteering and sharing of information in pretty unfiltered ways. I think about how cultures of secrecy effect people and things too, I dont believe its necessarily the best alternative to what I'm talking about either but its a lot like the other goal of developing greater awareness and consciousness and consciously living.

I meet a lot of people on a daily basis who dont seem to possess a lot of awareness or arent exercising it at that given moment in time for whatever reason or something and lately I've been thinking about that aspect of individual psychology which is intersubjective and build up between the self and the other, if the company you keep is of that type of person I've mentioned and you cant avoid that or choose a different type of company for whatever reason it will have implications and want to make some personal changes in response to that insight.

 

[Smilephantomhive]

I'm going to try and think nicer thoughts. I also stopped getting drinks at the gas station.

 

[fetus]

Went for another run today, and I started logging my food.

 

[kyuuei]

I think I have this too, left over from high school(!). We only had a 35-minute lunch break in high school so I would always stuff my face really quickly to allow for maximum unimpeded time to chat with my friends. Then that carried over into college, and into present day.

School lunches were dedicated to eating and eating alone for me. I was always starving as a kid... I tell this story sometimes: Before I really had a grasp on what anorexia was, or eating disorders and body shaming (I never really went through any of that body shaming gig.. It was a non-issue to me.. Pretty thankful for that.) and all that mess, I hung out with all the drugged out emo kids because they were too barbiturated up to pick on me. A lot of the girls because of the drug use + anorexia and general self-harm thing going on meant they'd buy food to give the illusion of them trying to eat, then saying they just cannot and trashing it. I was a savior of food in my own head.. It never occurred to me these women needed help. I just thought, "Oh, you're throwing that away? Scoreboard Houston! Cha-ching!"

However, the military destroyed my love of methodically eating. When you have from the time the first person who sat down to finish your meal and you're third from the last, AND you have to finish the water cup first before you can eat, you scarf down as much as you can without vomiting. Sometimes even then you risk it. I went from 132 to 119 lbs in basic training. It was pretty gross.

^ Yes! I really need to do this!

Some dishes are easier than others.. Rice dishes, noodle dishes, side dishes.. Sometimes you gotta get creative. Like, for hamburgers, we're going to make turkey burgers and then make some black-bean burgers to make a double decker of hamburger-y veggie goodness. Spaghetti is the easiest, but also it gets boring if you do it more than a couple nights in a row.

If you or anyone else have any other easy/cheap/filling/healthy snack suggestions? Can be high-maintenance so long as it's high-maintenance just the one time for a whole batch, as opposed to high-maintenance every time. I like fruit, but it's not usually filling.

Snacks I like that are light weight:
- Popcorn with hot sauce and dill pickle seasoning
- Dried apples (from Trader Joe's) or chili covered dried mangoes
- Pudding or apple sauce
- A lot of the things from the cook yourself thin cookbooks are pretty good suggestions
- Pinwheels .. I really like these things a lot, they're pretty stupid easy and make a bunch in little effort.
- Small ploughman dishes.. You can find some separated Tupperware for cheap and put together some cheese, meat, pickles, crackers, and carrots or cucumbers.
- Can't go wrong with a quesadilla either.. A single tortilla folded in half with some pre-made filling (shredded cheese, frozen spinach thawed and squeezed of moisture, and some tomato and green chiles) ready to go in a bucket is pretty easy eating.

Some heavier things for me might be a piece of bacon and a hard boiled egg, or some noodles with Korean BBQ sauce and scallions or soba-style with cold ponzu sauce, greek yogurt + vanilla bean curd = the best tasting vanilla yogurt Ever, sweet potato baked with some TJ Sriracha ranch dressing + some chopped steamed veggies, or some black bean brownies.

Heavier things you can make and freeze in advance to just pop into a microwave or oven: Burritos, sweet potato fries, etc.

An easy side dish is something that can make a good snack as well, and can translate into a dinner later. Asian Quinoa Salad | Quinoa Salad Recipe | Two Peas & Their Pod This is the one I'm making lately, adapting it to the ingredients I have at home. Its pretty damn good, and it goes well with anything.

- chocolate chip cookie dough made with white beans (it's from Chocolate covered Katie's website) + pretzel sticks

I like all types of nuts/nut butters but typically they're expensive. Same with yogurt. Same with jerky (which is another favorite that I only treat myself to when my parents send over local stuff). Same with granola bars.

Nuts are expensive. The ones I like from TJ's are like $7 a bag. @_@ I get away with them via flea market grocers. Yogurt I think you can catch the plain ones on sale sometimes and flavor them yourself--or the bigger tubs of plain yogurt + flavoring. Banana curd, Vanilla bean curd, lime curd, etc. All make really easy 1-ingredient yogurt fixes. And the jars are from a brand called Dickenson's or something like that.. $2-3 a jar that lasts several tubs of yogurt. Jerky is expensive no matter what you do. @_@ I don't buy it often. My favorite current granola bar:

That's a good idea -- something to make you feel engaged and involved in the real world. Maybe I can try that with podcasts...

If you can do that awesome! Pod casts make me go right back to sleep because I'm not physically looking at something.

 

[DiscoBiscuit]

Another 13 miles on the bike today.

 

[kyuuei]

Cooked some bad ass turkey burgers for dinner! Omg they turned out to be the best ones I've ever made. Putting the turkey into the food processor REALLY made a difference in the texture and feel of the burger. <3 <3 Froze the rest for later.

Tomorrow grocery shopping after voting.

 

[Lark]

There's a yogurt that its actually good for you to eat, reduces bad colestorol and all!

 

[Ivy]

The Blendtec was getting lonely so I'm letting it make me breakfast. This was delicious:

 

[Aquarelle]

Next week I am getting back into my healthy eating and exercise habits. Help keep me accountable!!

 

[Bush]

Some of my habit-alteration has hit speedbumps. Mostly pain-related speedbumps, so I've been taking it a bit easy while obtaining a few tools for alleviation of said pain.

Same. God, I hate that. I don't know how to establish a daily routine with that sort of stuff going on.. and honestly, in some sense, I don't know how much slack I ought to cut myself. (I default to close to nil.)

"Your foot's asleep? Oh, don't worry about your daily habits then."

 

[EJCC]

The Blendtec was getting lonely so I'm letting it make me breakfast. This was delicious:

Ahhh peanut butter and banana smoothies are my favorite <3

This is the recipe I usually use: Peanut Butter Banana Oat Smoothie - Let Why Lead

I love the consistency that the frozen bananas give it

Next week I am getting back into my healthy eating and exercise habits. Help keep me accountable!!

GIT ER DONE.

"Your foot's asleep? Oh, don't worry about your daily habits then."

I had serious issues with this kind of logic last week. "Oh you have really bad seasonal allergies? No need to take allergy pills -- just treat it like it's a really bad cold, ignore all of your obligations, and go to bed at like 9pm every night."

 

[Ivy]

Oh yeah, the banana was frozen. The kids go between eating tons of bananas and eating no bananas, so I never know how many to buy. When I buy too many and they start getting brown I toss 'em in the freezer for smoothies. Never put oats in before...

 

[EJCC]

Cooking/food plans for the week:
- Snacks: apples and cheddar cheese slices; white bean "cookie dough" that [MENTION=4939]kyuuei[/MENTION] suggested
- Breakfasts: apple walnut baked oats; banana smoothies (per the above recipe)
- Dinners: Udon noodle soup w/spinach, mushrooms, and a ramen egg; zucchini noodles with tomato/olive/anchovy sauce; something with whatever ingredients I have left lying around (e.g. baked sweet potatoes with sauteed spinach and a fried egg)
- Also, I'll be binge-cooking like 10 different breakfast burritos (bacon, chicken breakfast sausage, eggs, cheese, green onions, red bell peppers, baby red potatoes) and putting them in the freezer as a backup meal plan per kyuuei's suggestion

Exercise update:
- Now that I've resolved the snack problem, I'll hopefully be more motivated to exercise next week. Also the weather will be warmer!
- My roommate took me to a rock gym yesterday to go bouldering, and damn, that's difficult. I wouldn't mind going again, but I'm barely in shape enough to do the easiest wall -- I'm sore and I only went up the wall like 5-7 times -- and I only got over my heights-related nervousness like 60% while I was there.

Oh yeah, the banana was frozen. The kids go between eating tons of bananas and eating no bananas, so I never know how many to buy. When I buy too many and they start getting brown I toss 'em in the freezer for smoothies. Never put oats in before...

Oats in banana smoothies are really good! Surprisingly also good in blueberry smoothies. One of the strangest but also most addictive smoothie combos I ever made was oats + blueberries + almond butter.

 

[Lark]

I havent bought any books from the beginning of Lent and I've managed to dispose of a lot of ones which were sitting around gathering dust but I'm so, so, so strongly tempted to buy more, all the time, the struggle is so real to me right now.

I'll watch movies, sometimes particularly shite ones from the seventies, horror or thrillers, and when the movie disappoints but I discover its an adaptation I'm intrigued to find out if the books are as bad or if it was the fault of the studios.

 

[DiscoBiscuit]

Ugh, I have a shitty cold. Just had some Pho and some medicine to try and feel better. Still feel crappy but pho is delicious.