14 Foods that Lower Cholesterol

14 Foods that Lower Cholesterol is an interesting overview of controlling cholesterol with diet. The typical way to treat high cholesterol is with drugs, right? But what if you could just change your diet a little? The suggestions aren't just to eat less fatty foods, but there have been a range of studies showing foods which act positively to decrease cholesterol levels.

Reviewing the list of recommendations I see some which have their own unwanted effects. For example Whole grains and oats, which is a great idea because high fiber foods help clean the colon (probably reducing colon cancer) and according to the above blog posting, they act to decrease artery wall thickness. However if you have a gluten intolerance or celiac condition, whole grains and oats are a bad idea as they contain gluten and will trigger the gluten allergy.

Remembering to do something when there's no way you can do it

Ever remember to do something when it's the last thing you could possibly be doing? Like, you're at the barber shop having your hair cut, and your to-do list starts coming out of the woodwork. Like how you've been meaning to clean out the closets, or shine up the chrome on your car, etc. Why is your subconscious reminding you to do something when it's the last thing you could possibly do? Why don't you remember to do this when it's convenient?

This, and more, is covered in Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. In this and his other books David Allen has been exploring the subconscious processes that interfere with getting things done, and he offers practices to help one better manage the tasks we have in life.

The way he puts it, the source of this is the operation of human consciousness. How many items can you hold in short term memory? Psychologists have studied this in every way, and shown it's possible to hold 5-7 items in short term memory. This means the vast majority of things we are remembering are stored in long term memory, and long term memories surface when the triggered, not necessarily when they're convenient.

For example, sitting in a barber chair is a very relaxing place, and when the mind relaxes the pending items in your mind will tend to surface. Meditators through the millennia have known this, they call this the monkey mind. When meditating it's widely recognized a flood of ideas will surface, and it is part of meditation to learn how to focus on something even with the distracting thoughts surfacing from the subconscious. The same process occurs in the rest of our lives, with the subconscious surfacing ideas and thoughts at a time and place of its choosing.

In Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity the focus is on practical issues of more efficiently recording ones to-do list. The idea is to help your subconscious relax by purposely recording all the to-do items you've entrusted to the subconscious. By recording all your to-do items your subconscious doesn't have to work to keep reminding you of these things, and instead you can trust the system you build that holds the reminders.

It sounds great, but in the back of my mind I'm wondering, what happens if the reminder system is lost or stolen? For example if you have a "smart phone" which you've used to hold all your to-do items, what happens if the phone is left in your pants and goes into the laundry? Or if it's stolen or lost? Hopefully you kept the phone backed up onto a computer, but since when does anybody make backups? And what if the backup of your phone contents cannot be copied into the replacement phone (because the phones are incompatible)?

Ways to make new habits stick

I think in many ways habits drive us in ways that create pain in our lives. For example I am somewhat shy, and the shyness is really a habitual not-speaking. I have been outgoing at times, especially when I spent lots of time in friendly talkative situations, but being quiet and retiring has been a lifelong habit. There are of course deeper issues which are what led me to be shy in the first place, but that just means there are multiple ways to understand the phenomena of why we do what we do. At one level it's our habitual behavior, at another level it's the life history of woundology which led us to decide one behavior is better or safer than another.

At some point in ones self healing process it is necessary to begin to change. Once you understand why you chose to act the way you do, why not work to change how you act? Probably you can think of other behaviors that are more agreeable with your understanding and preference of life.

Here are a few good recommendations, some of which I've done for myself.

18 Tricks to Make New Habits Stick

Changing lifelong habits cannot be done overnight. You've been doing this for years and years, so it will take some practice and awareness to make the change to newer habits. The writer suggests a 30 day period, but I would say it's actually not a fixed time period but whatever time period you find necessary. Another suggestion is experimentation, and having a period of time where you focus on a specific behavior gives you time to experiment and learn about the new and old behaviors. It is important to have a way to remember the habit changing experiment you are undergoing. It's so easy to, throughout your day, just fall into the habits and having a trigger to remind you of the experiment will help.

Good luck

Two views to health

I came across these two articles one right after another and find them interesting together. The Secret to a Healthy Body is a set of recommendations to health that essentially boil down to being active. Their specific suggestions include aerobic exercise, and stretching and balance exercises. Then Why New Yorkers Last Longer goes over research showing that New Yorker's live longer, and it attributes this to the fact that they walk more. New York, as a city, is organized such that it's easy to walk around the city rather than drive. This moderate exercise, walking, apparently is enough to give them an average longer life, and is enough to overcome all the pollution in that city.

"Love in its essence is spiritual fire"

Had an interesting fortune cookie today: "Love in its essence is spiritual fire"

Gosh, this just makes me think of the experimentation which led to my writings on Inner Homeopathy. This is a practice of Love, to love ones self, to love every single part of you, to love the self destructive parts of ones self, to love, and to love more. This is a very self transforming practice, so very simple yet so comprehensive.

Love is acceptance, as it accepts the loved one without regard for anything the loved one is doing. This is God's love this is, it is a sort of love which humans often have a time accomplishing.

Humans so often have conditions on their love. I'll love you only if you treat me a certain way and so on. Is that God's love?

The Inner Homeopathy practice I've written about can be very challenging. Inside us are so many conflicting ideas about ourselves, not all of which are consciously known. In the subconscious is held all the beliefs we've made about ourselves and the world, many of which paradoxically contradict each other. We may have a belief of our competence and love-ability, but find another part that's self doubting and certain nobody loves us. These subconscious beliefs swirl around based on the events around us, the memories inside us, etc, each belief being triggered at various times depending and affecting how we act from moment to moment.

Not all of our inner beliefs appreciate being held in love, just as we don't always recognize love when it is offered to us, and we don't always trust those who claim to love us. So is it also true when we practice loving ourself.

Yet I know from the experience of my experimentation, loving ones self can transform such inner beliefs. It is as if unconditional acceptance and unconditional love, Gods love in other words, is the ultimate in remedies, the cure for all ills.

Love to you all.

First day on the job

A new priest at his first mass was so nervous he could hardly speak. After mass he asked the monsignor how he had done. The monsignor replied, "When I am worried about getting nervous on the pulpit, I put a glass of vodka next to the water glass. If I start to get nervous, I take a sip."

So next Sunday he took the monsignor's advice. At the beginning of the sermon, he got nervous and took a drink. He proceeded to talk up a storm.

Upon his return to his office after mass, he found the following note on the door:

1. Sip the vodka, don't gulp.
2. There are ten commandments, not twelve.
3. There were twelve disciples, not ten.
4. The communion wafer is consecrated, not constipated.
5. Jacob wagered his donkey, he did not bet his ass.
6. We do not refer to Jesus Christ as the late J.C.
7. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are not generally referred to as Daddy, Junior and the Spook.
8. David slew Goliath, he did not kick the shit out-o-him.
9. When David was hit by a rock and knocked off his donkey, don't say he was stoned off his ass.
10. We do not refer to the cross as the "Big T."
11. When Jesus broke the bread at the Last Supper He said, "Take this and eat it for it is my body." He did not say "Eat me."
12. The Virgin Mary is not called "Mary with the Cherry."
13. The recommended grace before a meal is not: Rub-A-Dub-Dub thanks for the grub, yeah God.
14. Next Sunday there will be a taffy pulling contest at St. Peter's, not a peter pulling contest at St. Taffy's.

A tip for keeping track of your life

I've recently been studying the material in the book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity and it's a very enlightening book shining a light on habits which create mental clutter, and showing ways to rid yourself of that clutter. The idea is the more "stuff" you carry in your head, the more appointments or to-do list items you carry in your head, the more your mental and emotional energy is tied up with the act of carrying those factoids in your head.

It's a mental juggle trying to remember all that stuff... and if you think about it, the reminders don't always come out at the most convenient time. Say you need to buy a pound of hamburger for dinner, but you think about it during a meeting in the afternoon, but it's completely gone from your mind until you get home. Emotional costs arise because of fears of what might happen due to forgetting these factoids.

The more of these little factoids you try to carry in your mind, the heavier is the burden. Looking at it from another angle, the less you carry in your mind the greater will be your peace.

One idea I'm using pretty successfully is to use a computerized calendar to track appointments. However it is not perfect, yet. In the past I've used a paper calendar and that is pretty successful, but for two issues. One is I found it easy to forget to look at the paper calendar, leaving it as a continued mental weight to remember to look there. Second is the paper calendar isn't always on my person, and again you have to rely on memory during those times you aren't carrying the paper calendar.

With the goal being to reduce the mental burden to zero, any solution which involves remembering factoids is something to resolve.

My current method is to use the iCal application on my Mac, and to use the iSync application to exchange appointments between iCal and my cell phone. The advantage is that I'm always carrying my cell phone (well, almost always). Because iSync does a good job of synchronizing appointments, they can be entered either into the cell phone or the iCal application and kept synchronized.

What happens is my cell phone kicks off an alarm shortly before every appointment. I find it very comforting to have this widget remembering my calendar for me.

I said it isn't perfect, so here are the issues I know of.

First, entering appointments through my phone is clumsy. It means entering text through a numeric keypad. While "the kids" seem very comfortable doing SMS messaging through their cell phones, I find it tedious.

Second, I don't remember to enter all appointments and end up keeping some of them in my head. Oops. That may be partly to do with the clumsiness of using the phone to enter appointments.

Third, synchronizing my phone with the iCal calendar does not help my colleagues know what my schedule is. My iCal calendar is in my home computer and there isn't a way to synchronize appointments from my home computer to the calendaring service my employer uses. This means my colleagues have no idea what my schedule is. While that could be a problem, many of my colleagues also do not synchronize their appointments to the corporate calendar service.