Sometimes when it has been a long time between posts, I regret calling this website the weekly column. Most of the time, however, it reminds me simply that I’ve always wanted to write a weekly column and this is one way I can do it without getting out there and selling myself or my copy. Without the hustle.

Because I really dislike hustle. I know it’s what people say you need to do to get ahead—and I’m sure if I had tried it even once I would have advanced further up the rungs of some ladder somewhere—but there’s a great difference between hustle and the way of living that involves simple enthusiasm and a desire to reach your potential.

Perhaps this is simply semantics. Am I trying to describe the same thing in different ways? Where I see the difference is in how much the ego comes into the equation. You don’t have to win anything to be enthusiastic. Enthusiasm simply implies a love of  the subject and a desire to pair that love with some kind of action. You don’t have to outshine anyone else to reach your potential. It’s a softer approach; one that doesn’t rely on a competitive attitude and a desire to get past other people on some frantic race to ‘the top’.

Motivation. It’s suggestive of forward movement, of accomplishment, of success. It’s alluring, mysterious and somehow an addictive element  that has crept into the simplest scenario so we believe we need motivation to get anything done. But it might just be the biggest hoax of all time.

Remember when motivation seminars were all the rage? People would attend, get their fill of the feel-good drug (also known as the I’m-so-amazing-that-I-can-do-anything magic serum for suckers) and come home all fired up. A couple of days or months later, the motivation had waned and the exercise, whatever it happened to be, had languished. Another forlorn dream deposited on the scrap heap of motivation.

So motivation is vastly overrated. It’s a siren song that, in the end, might actually keep us from doing the things we want to do. And in that very sentence I believe we have the answer. It’s that ‘doing’ word again. The verb. We don’t need to feel motivated. We don’t need to feel anything. We need to do something.

Now we have found the kernel of truth. Let’s simply acknowledge how we feel (or don’t feel) then find the simplest thing we can do. We can look for the tiniest piece of the jigsaw puzzle and start there. We put that in place then pick up the next piece. The rest, as they say, is child’s play. When enough little pieces have been set in place, the picture will be complete and we will have succeeded at our entire project … without the need for even a skerrick of motivation.

What is the meaning of life, and does life have a different meaning for a plant, an animal, a human?

For flowering plants, you might think the meaning of life is to flower. But that isn’t all their life and what if, for some reason, they can’t flower? Blooming is a part of the general scheme of things for such a plant, but surely it isn’t the sole meaning of their life. The flowering period certainly isn’t all of their life.

A tree which begins life in deep ground could grow to be a hundred feet high. A tree that starts as a seed is caught between two boulders five feet off the ground may grow to be a stunted and less graceful version of a tree, but it is fulfilling the meaning of its life. It is reaching its potential. It is doing the best it can do, using the energy within it to be the best tree it can be. Circumstance may dictate the environment but the tree’s innate energy goes into growing as best it can, not into complaining that another tree has had a better start in life.

I wonder how many of us are being the best human we can be? Part of the problem, I’m sure, is that the tree has its life mapped out in front of it and there’s little choice about the where, when or why … or the how. We have so much more choice in nearly every avenue of our lives and perhaps because of the almost limitless possibilities we find it hard to channel our energy in the same focussed way that plants and animals seem to.

But that, more than any other single thing, may be what we need to do as humans to reach our potential—channel our energy in such a way that we use it for the betterment of us.

A forest makes the world a better place, but the trees don’t set out with that aim in mind. Each tree simply starts as a viable seed which transforms from one thing to another as a means of fulfilling the potential within it. A flower is necessary to bees, to its parent plant’s survival and makes us happy to gaze upon, but it doesn’t set out to do any of those things. It just IS. All good things, it seems to me, come as a result of the fulfillment of potential.

So we can relax and stop worrying if we don’t have a vision for how to change the world. We will make the world a better place if we simply put our energy into reaching our own potential as humans.

We can be rooted in one place. We can be stunted, disadvantaged and imperfect in almost every way but if we are channelling our energy into being the best human we can be, we are reaching our potential and in doing so, living the meaning of life.

One of my earliest childhood memories is of crying myself to sleep. The reason is long lost in the mists of time, but the melancholy of that moment has remained. And while from a perspective far removed from that day it seems sad that it would be my earliest memory, I have come to see it as one of the fine but unbreakable threads that weaves through the lives of all mankind.

We are feeling beings. We all experience joy, sorrow and every conceivable nuance in between. Some of our experiences are gut wrenchingly strong—iprnconsolable grief, desperate fear, boiling anger, hysteria and even the emotion that triggers manic laughter can be incredibly powerful. Some have a softer touch—contentment, melancholy, satisfaction, regret, serenity.

Even bliss, to me has a softness, almost a malleable quality that gives it the ability to mould itself around circumstance. But is bliss an emotion or a state of being? A deep question for another day, I think. Today I am exploring the thought that our emotions are what make us human and form the invisible threads that blend our very disparate lives into commonality. Whatever our lives look like, most of us experience at some level or other the same emotions. Perhaps our first breath gives us a fright and that’s why we cry. Perhaps our last, no matter how laboured it seems to onlookers, gives us the peace we have been seeking all our lives.

So emotions are a big part of the human experience. A burning desire can turn us into a zealot, while the same desire clothed in softer hues can accomplish great things without irrationality or destruction.

At some level we can control our emotions. What we say can have a big effect on them. Our patterns of thinking can deepen the possibility that we will follow one emotion downward or upward. Being hopeful and hopeless are the same emotion, but pointing different ways. We need to explore where our emotions take us and how powerful they are. We can find out if there is a way to head them off at the pass if they are taking us down a dangerous path.

I’ve heard that it’s proven that if you smile and look happy, whether you feel like it or not, you will be happier. This surely means that actions can be a powerful precursor of emotional change. So when we can feel our emotions slipping into negative territory we should take great care to create actions that will steer us a different way. It seems unlikely that a physical action could influence an emotion, but it’s such a powerful concept that we could all gain by exploring its possibilities.

Now when I am thinking negatively, I don’t try to change that thought any more. I look for an action that I can take which will make me feel the way I want to feel.

You’ve made it to your goal weight. Yahoo! But in the past it has always crept up again and you have regained all the weight you lost and even added extra ballast. So now is not the time to relax but to enter a slightly different phase of mindfulness. But how do you control your eating when you have always had a yoyo relationship with your weight?

For many of us, the whole weight loss journey starts with wresting control back from the sugar fiend, because while he has us in his grip we are  his puppets—little fat ragdolls dancing sluggishly to his siren tune.

But say by some miracle we have managed to drop the weight and look fantastic. How do we keep it up? Or  I should say, down? Most of us have experienced that sweet spot where we are at the right weight and eating the right food, then it all goes haywire … perhaps, gradually, perhaps in a tsunami of bad decisions or from simply taking our eyes off the ball. Or having our eyes on the donuts, perhaps.

Some of us just have to accept that we need to be vigilant, pretty much forever. We must do everything we possibly can to stay in that sweet spot where we have the control we need. Sometimes I’m sure we have some internal fear of succeeding and sabotage ourselves just when we’ve made it.

It’s not easy. But it is fairly simple. We decide in advance what we will be eating. That helps with control. When we are preparing the food we have decided on while we were being rational and careful, we weigh and measure, using our previous diet as a guide and factoring in, exactly, the extra calories we are adding. That helps with portion control.

Some people think that having to weigh or measure food after the reducing diet is finished is ridiculous … a waste of time … an indication that you have failed after all. It is none of those things. It’s a tiny little aid that keeps us on the right track. If a little weighing is all that’s required to keep our newly slim figures forever, it’s a very small investment in time and effort for a priceless measure of peace.

People who weigh their food every day are freaks. Right or wrong?

Right. They’re control freaks. And being a control freak is a good thing when in the past you have allowed yourself to be totally, uninhibitedly out of control. I have been a control freak for the past eight months, and I like it. I like the pleasure of knowing how much I need to eat to keep my delightful svelte figure. I like knowing how much is enough and how much is too much. I even quite like the ritual of it, most of the time.

We are creatures for whom data is important. We measure other things and don’t think anything of it. We know that putting too much oil in our car’s reservoir is not good for it and that too little can be catastrophic. We know with a racehorse we need to give it some exact dietary requirements for it to do its best on the course. But our bodies, the one thing that each of us takes with us from birth to death, are somehow different? I don’t think so.

If the difference between weighing a healthy amount and being too heavy is simply a case of keeping track of the amount I eat and the kind of foods I eat on a day-to-day basis, then I’m going to weigh in on the side of weights and measures. It’s not that hard, and it keeps my eyes on the prize.

When you’re on a diet,  you’re living life in a somewhat stressed state. It’s not just that your body is having to adapt to a lower calorie intake and compensate by using up fat stores. Your whole self is affected. Preparing special meals or measuring your food or choosing not to eat certain things you usually eat without thinking puts you under some degree of pressure. It’s like being a piece of elastic that is always in a somewhat stretched state.

While ever it is a pressure applied evenly, you feel you could go on forever in that mode. But should the pressure increase or decrease too quickly and too greatly, that’s when things are liable to snap. It’s like building up a head of steam. You can operate that way for a certain amount of time and then something has to give.

Unless we want to be on a diet forever, we need to be able to control this step between being on a diet and getting on with ordinary life. And the way to do it is to gently ease the elastic back instead of letting it snap back to its original shape. It’s not only the elastic that reverts to its original shape, unfortunately!

The thing is, we all need a little stress, a little discipline in our lives. So perhaps ‘letting go’ is not the most successful way to end the diet. Perhaps the secret is knowing how far to relax the elastic … so far and no further, otherwise you have to start way back at the beginning again.

Diets that teach you maintenance mode and which really concentrate on it are doing us all a great service. Let the elastic go a little, but keep control of it.

I think we need to get out of the mindset that we ‘go on a diet’ and then when it’s finished we can stop thinking about our intake of food. If we want our big reward of a slimmer body and a healthier attitude to food to stick around, we need to keep up the work that got us there.

I was reading something the other day that asked, “What is your greatest fear?” And the thought which immediately occurred to me was, “Dying unloved.” I immediately discounted it as a weird and ridiculous thought but as more questions came thick and fast, the thought stayed with me.
What do you do because you’re fearful, what does your fear create, what proves your fear is misguided, what can you do to overcome it?
It came to me—as I was reading these questions and as answers kept popping unbidden into my head—was that most of us do when we’re fearful of such a thing is an act known as self-fulfilling prophesy. We step back from life, from friends, from family. We create the exact situation of which we’re fearful by pulling away from the ones we love and becoming introspective and overprotective of our emotions. What proves the fear is misguided? The love of family and friends. And what can you do to overcome the fear? Keep the communication channels open. Keep loving the people you love. Stay accessible. Love even more people than you do now. Help other folk. Be there for the ones you care about.
Now I suppose you could say this fear is grounded in possibility. There’s every possibility that I could die unloved. I could live to be 120 and have no friends or family left. A natural disaster could wipe out the world and just leave me in it alone. But the scenarios have to be pretty scary for my inner fear to transpose itself into real life.
So I suppose the fear behind the two-word thought is the uncomfortable feeling that you might not be loved by enough people. Or perhaps that you might not be loved enough by certain people. And that’s not something you can fix by making other people change. All you can do about it is to show more love yourself. That means being more present, more demonstrative, more thoughtful and just … more of everything good and kind and lovely.
Nothing wrong with aiming for that.

On the whole, I’m pretty happy with what I’m eating these days. I suppose you’d call it assisted eating because I am following a plan, but it’s a plan that makes sense and is malleable enough to fit into most occasions and most days.

Over Christmas I decided to have a break from my eating programme and I’m glad I did. It showed me that even a six-month stint of new habits is not enough to truly change deep-seated eating patterns. At first this may seem a bad thing, but actually it’s good, because it points out the weaknesses in the chain. It shows me where I need to take care not to put too much pressure on myself.

After a couple of days (okay, nearly a week) of eating junk, I was pretty much ready to go back to my planned way of eating, but it was scary how hard I found the first two days back on good food. I suppose part of it was the extraordinary amount of sugar I had  allowed into my body over the course of the festive week. The sugar fiend is only a sleeping monster when you don’t feed him!

The thing is, when the fiend is asleep, I can have a little treat now and again without waking the giant. It seems to work best for me when it is something that I plan for, look forward to and allow myself to enjoy wholeheartedly. In the lead-up to the holidays, I managed to do this and safely navigate a wedding, Christmas dinners, parties and afternoon teas. I didn’t go into free fall from having the occasional dessert or sweet biscuit. (Note the singular. One dessert. One sweet biscuit.)  But I had a very firm idea in my mind of what I was going to eat and I stuck to it.

There is a quiet enjoyment in this kind of eating which is not present in the open-slather, I-know-I’ll-regret-this tomorrow kind of consumption. Guilt is not present when I have planned to eat one treat. Clearly, it also doesn’t rouse the monster from his slumber.

It’s kind of like drawing a line in the sand. On this side, I’m safe. The other side has all kinds of sinkholes and if I venture there I’d better be really careful of I’ll end up in quicksand. If I stay on this side of the line and occasionally put a toe on the other side I’ll be okay because all my weight is still over here on safe ground. But if I stomp past the safety line in my hobnailed boots, there’s a great probability that I’m gonna fall into a hole. A big fat, unhealthy hole frequented by sugar fiends and other monsters. A good lesson to take into the new year, I think.

As 2015 was named the International Year of Light, I decided early that I would have my own Year of Light. Mine would have less to do with illumination and more to do with weight—household weight. If possible, I wanted to lighten the load of domestic stuff—and stuffedness—around the house. At the very least, I wanted it to be a zero-addition year.

I look around and don’t really see a grandly discernible difference. I know I didn’t spend the whole year with my resolution in mind and I certainly didn’t factor it into my calendar or list of tasks to do. I also know I succeeded at the base level because I didn’t keep adding and adding. And there are spots where I have quietly succeeded, which is pleasing.

But I see the biggest change when I look in the mirror and see my personal Year of Light outcome as a living, breathing person … a lighter, healthier person physically and, at last, one who is seeing the light mentally as well, looking at thoughts and refusing to carry them for too long when they are the kind of thoughts that can have a detrimental effect.

I have discovered that if a thought occurs to me and I allow it to pass without grabbing it and inviting it in to stay, that thought will simply float away. It will be as light as air and continue on its journey without me. On the other hand, a thought that I take hold of and then harbour within me can anchor me to an unending hamster wheel of unease and even unhappiness. Described that way, it becomes pretty obvious that thoughts deserve freedom. If I don’t shackle a certain thought, keep it prisoner and feed it, that thought will simply not have a home with me … not become part of me … and therefore will have no power over me. That’s a lightbulb moment if ever there was one.