Certain things happen in this life—in any and every day. They are the bones. Then we apportion our own meanings to them, flesh them out in the way our minds work and they become stories. They are created into gods or goblins (or at least good or bad), depending on our mindset that day, that year, that lifetime.

And yet in reality they are much more scant than that. They are what they are, not what our emotions paint them to be. With our ‘good’ stories, we paint and repaint until our canvas is thick with meaning, with what really happened and why. We do something similar with our ‘bad’ stories; sometimes we even revel in portraying the situation as blacker than it was in actuality.

In the end, does it matter why? We spend so much of our lifetime trying to find the why. If we could just accept the bones as bones and let them stand or lie where they are, giving passing consideration to them but not weaving stories around them, we would live much more in the present, more in reality and less weighed down by untruths and stories we have concocted to try to make sense of these bones.

Now, to do my conjuring trick to change this philosophical moment into a health-oriented thought:  Bone both is good. We should consume that often, perhaps more often than we eat meat.

Have you ever had the experience of feeling upset with someone over something they’ve done only to find they didn’t actualy do it? That whole, “Grrrr, I wish they didn’t do that,” that plays over in your mind like a scratched record from the sixties?

When you found out that person wasn’t guilty of whatever heinous crime you thought they’d committed, how did you feel? Deflated? A bit silly? Or powerful and excited?

Powerful and excited, right? In that moment, you realised the power that your thoughts have on your emotions and your personal reality. You realised that to a large extent, your thoughts create the ‘reality’ that you live. It was a stellar moment in your life because from that instant you took away with you a lesson so deep that you knew life would never be the same for you again.

No, didn’t think so. Me neither. But I think I know why. We’re so wrapped up in our little ‘realities’ and our egos that we don’t see this example for the life-changing powerhouse that it really is. If we really thought about this, we might indeed have a life-changing moment.

It’s actually exciting to find out you were wrong about something and to look back and realise that the emotions you were feeling from the thoughts you generated were all in your own mind. If your mind can erroneously believe something that is not truth, then perhaps you can train it to believe things that are true but which you don’t yet believe.

The potentially powerful moment in your life, which usually passes by without a whimper, is well worth exploring.

For the last little while I haven’t been eating brilliantly. I’ve been doing other things that will eventually move me towards better health, but the eating patterns have totally regressed to encompass all the high sugar hits I once fought and conquered.

And that brings me to today’s topic. You need the right mindset to make a change. As soon as I didn’t really care, all my horrid eating habits came galloping back. So it was a case of two steps forward, two steps back.

What I think I’ve learned from this is that there might be two totally different ways that people succeed in changing the way they eat. One way might be to:

1. Emotionally invest – first and foremost!
2. Make the change.
3. Make it easier to follow the changed habit than the old habit.

The other, diametrically opposed:
1. Take the emotion totally out of the equation.
2. Make the change.
3. Make it easier to follow the changed habit than the old habit.

When you’re the one who buys and prepares all the food, a great deal of your time is spent thinking about food and being in the kitchen. Kitchen means food preparation, which means eating. And eating can be an emotional topic.

I suppose it shouldn’t be. It should be simply a case of fuelling the body. But for me, at least at this time, it’s emotional. I use it as a pick-me-up when I’m tired. I sometimes eat quite sinfully when I’m unhappy. I eat when I have a task to do that I’d like to avoid. I eat while I prepare dinner. It would be fair to say I quite like eating. It would even be fair to say I love eating.

I’ve been pretty tired for the past two months. I’m kind of dragging myself through each day, and of course sugar is your friend as well as your enemy at times like this. It’s probably the main culprit but the problem is, of course, it gives you that bit of energy when you’re desperately looking for it.

I’ve been emotionally invested in something other than improving the way I eat, and it shows. But the only reason this has derailed me is that my habit base wasn’t strong enough to survive without the mental motivation. And habit is a better platform on which to base change than my emotional state. Emotions can be a rollercoaster unless you can learn to understand where they come from and how they are created. I’m doing some study on that at the moment and I must say my mind is blown away by how simple change can be.

Eating well should be a deeply ingrained habit. I do it best when I don’t have to think too much about the topic in general. When it all gets to be pretty automatic, my eating life runs on oiled rails. When I have few queries on what I should eat, because I’ve already made up my mind what kinds of foods are healthy for me, life is on an even keel.

When I’m poring over recipes and thinking about food all the time, that’s when I seem to come unstuck. And that brings me to the other argument. Food should not be an emotional topic. And that means that you need to heal your thinking processes before you’ll ever improve your eating. So, back to the drawing board on this one.

The way we think dictates the way we live. The things we think about, what we give importance to in our mind—they become who we are. So when we’re being negative or hard on ourselves all the time, we’re not really helping ourselves.

This is something I struggle with, and it behooves me—and you too, if you want to live a life in charge of yourself—to learn about this part of ourselves that we habitually allow to sabotage us … without a second thought. Learn about, and let go.

I’m not even sure what I need to learn—I just know that I don’t know enough to be doing enough right!  Maybe it’s the self talk that needs to disappear, or perhaps I need the skills for being able to really look clearly at a problem, or a myriad other issues.

I certainly understand the need to break out of bad cycles, but in my heart of hearts I think it should be easy—and I haven’t found that yet. I think it should be something as simple as thinking, “The way I’ve been doing this isn’t good for me. I’ll change to a better option.” Full stop. End of story. Done and dusted.

It should be that easy. It could be. It’s just a case of finding the golden thought, or the piece of magic, that will make it happen.

Yeah, I know. I’m too old to believe in the tooth fairy. But some people have discovered a higher consciousness. Some people don’t have mad urges that that they give in to and which ruin their health. Some people have worked it out perfectly. And if someone else has, I can too. It’s getting to that part of the world’s evolution where the hundredth monkey is going to know this stuff, and then suddenly we all will.

Keep on plugging away at this. Read books, learn the skills, keep your mind open. Anything can happen when you believe.

I know it seems that I’m a proponent of doing things the small way rather than a jump-in-and-make-a-big-splash kind of way. I don’t get scared off so easily if I divide a big project into tiny increments and then follow my incremental plan to see an improvement, albeit small and perhaps painfully slow.

Sadly, I have come to the conclusion that sometimes this simply does not work. It’s playing around in the shallows and all it does is muddy the waters. Sometimes you just need to face the big project or the hard decision with an all-of-you-against-all-of-it type of determination.

For people who drink and are either alcoholics (or believe they are, or are hovering on the edge of what they believe is being an alcoholic), it can be pretty hard to incrementally improve. I’ll just have one sip less every day until I’m only drinking one glass of wine, or one beer or a scotch right before bed.

Yeah, right. Most people who have a drinking problem know that although they’d like to be able to have ‘just one drink’, the before-one-drink decision and the after-one-drink resolution are generally diametrically opposed. Perhaps once you haven’t had alcohol in your system for a while you can make that call, but a lot of people simply find it impossible.

If you are a habitually heavy drinker, perhaps you can do this for one night with pure willpower. The next night, however, might be of almost binge proportions so your body can ‘make up’ the alcohol it lost the night before. This looks very unlikely in print but that is the way many of us respond to a night without our normal serving of alcohol.  So, back to the  point. Some things are actually easier to cut out completely than to limit, and many of us find that alcohol is one of them.

I remember that years and years ago I gave up smoking by using non-nicatine cigarettes for a couple of weeks. They tasted pretty foul but they allowed me to keep the habit while breaking the addiction. I was just 20 and thought it was a pretty smart idea back then—just do one hard thing at a time. Decades later, I still think it was a pretty good idea, because it worked for me. Of course, I wanted to give up smoking and that’s the number one consideration in anything like this. For drinking, a similar method can be used. Firstly, you must really want to stop being a slave to alcohol. Commit to that. Commit to the feeling of freedom you will have when you no longer have to even think about alcohol, let alone have it rule your every day. Go back in time in your mind and remember when you were young and alcohol wasn’t even a consideration in your daily life. You lived fine without it. You had fun. You coped with any bad times and didn’t need it. So you know it is possible to live a good life without it, because you’ve done it before.

Wine is my alcohol of choice. Weirdly, alcohol-removed wine, which we can buy in the supermarket (alcohol is not sold in supermarkets where we live), is actually dearer than many bottles of ordinary wine. My response to that is, hang the expense. It will work out cheaper (and of course better for overall health) in the long run.

So you don’t really like the taste of the drink? Not quite as good as your favourite tipple? Not nearly as good, then? Many’s the time I’ve seen the bottom of a wine bottle when I started out saying I didn’t really like the taste of that particular wine. So what you don’t love the taste? It will either grow on you or you will move to phase two quicker. Suck it up.

Stock enough in the pantry so there’s no way you’ll run out. If it makes you feel safer to have a back-up, keep your normal bottles of wine as well but put them in a different place. The non-alcoholic stuff needs to be in the place you habitually go for your first drink.

Some people say to keep busy, to do different things, to keep your hands occupied. I say just do the same things you always do but drink the non-alcoholic wine instead of alcoholic stuff. Keep drinking out of a wine glass. Keep chilling your bottle to perfection. If you’re a bottle-a-day type drinker, keep drinking that amount. And go to bed when you’re finished your bottle. Tomorrow’s another day.

Just remember that your own thoughts are more likely to sabotage you than your friends. During the day, find a bit of time to read about why alcohol is bad for you. Read stuff from real doctors. Dr Amen, for example. When you go to a party, take your bottle of non-al wine. Tell your friends that the doctor told you not to drink alcohol and you’d appreciate their help. If you’re on medication where you can’t take alcohol, use that explanation. And when your bottle’s finished, go home.

Some people like to quit (drinking, cigarettes, sugar, whatever) by putting it out there for all the world to see, but that doesn’t work for everyone. All that public accountability can actually scare off certain kinds of personalities. Just the thought of failing is enough to decide never to have a go in the first place. Some of us—even extroverts—prefer to undertake this process quietly, for ourselves. We gain strength by keeping the energy, the thoughts, the decision, inside. And that’s a fine way to do it. It’s not anyone else’s business, anyway. It’s ours, and ours alone.

I was thinking the other day about my hearts and kisses game and musing that a lot of people would think it was a pretty stupid idea. Visualisation. Make believe. Fairytales. And I started thinking that it probably was pretty childish.

Yet if the game works, isn’t it worth the silliness? For, in truth, is not our whole life a fairytale? Everyone’s version of reality is different, so you could convincingly argue that there is no true reality because each human makes his or her own concoction. We all see the world through our own glasses, tinted by our particular personalities and contorted by our personal experiences. If there is such a thing as reality, it is ‘out there’ and not truly able to be defined by mere mortals. That means that visualisation has just as much worth as our more established ideas about what is real.

So, on with the game. Anything that helps someone cope with a bad situation and doesn’t hurt anyone else is okay in my book.

I’ve worked out why my fridge works and my freezer doesn’t.

My fridge is often pretty full but that never stops me getting in there and starting a meal because my salad makings and the general vegetables for cooking dinner are both in big, separate containers. I just grab a container, put it on the kitchen bench, and start. The containers are tall plastic bins that fit side by side on one of my shelves. They’re so tall that I rearranged the shelves to fit them and have a shallow shelf above as a result, but it works perfectly. I have vegetables in other places in my fridge as well. In a crisper drawer on the shallow shelf most of my smoothie-making fruits and greens live. Mushrooms, eggplant (aubergine) and not yet opened 1kg blocks of cheese live on the bottom shelf in a rectangular container. Extra fruit and vegetables go into my fridge’s crisper, while milk, drinks and pre-made dishes and leftovers live on the top shelf.

I save my vegetable water to use for making soup, so I have a tall lidded bottle in the fridge door for that. The bottle lives in the fridge whether it is empty or full.

But it’s the two containers for salad vegetables and cooking vegetables that I think my fridge revolves around. They’re always in the same place (they don’t fit anywhere else, so have to be) and always have the correct food in them for the kind of meal I’m planning to prepare. I’ll get extras from other spots in the fridge, but I always have the nucleus on my meal in one of those containers.

So that’s the secret. Find something that works for the long term. For me, it’s containerising items I’ll use together. My salad container also carries cheese, relish/mayo and whatever cooked meat I’m going to use. To make sandwiches, I need to grab bread and butter as well. Easy. Perhaps my freezer  needs a similar kind of fit out? I’ll see what containers I have that might do the job, and make a start.

I don’t know why, but when my freezer is packed untidily full, I never want to go there. I might have enough meat for two weeks but I don’t want to stray into that amorphous mess so I feel quite uninspired. I don’t have room for precooking meat-centric dishes, which is my favourite way of getting ahead of the game. And I cringe a bit when I gaze at all the little butter boxes of whoknowswhat packed haphazardly on the lower shelves. When I look at that, all I can think is, “I wonder what’s in them,” and  “How hard would it have been to ID the lids with a Texta?” Doesn’t help any, but that’s what I think every time I get myself into this pickle.

So when I’m suffering from lazeeitis I know it’s possibly because a few of my organisational necessities have gone awry. I either don’t have the right ingredients in the fridge, which means my shopping plan has failed or—more likely—I have become lazy about packing my freezer and it’s time for an arctic upheaval.

It’s very important to be well organised and I think the easiest way to get, and stay, organised (at least for a while) is to have room. If you’re always expecting an avalanche when you open a door, that’s a door you’re probably not going to be keen to open anytime soon.

So today’s job is to reorganise the freezer. It will probably take about quarter of an hour, which makes me feel terribly ashamed that I’ve been too lazy, or uncaring, to do it until now. But when I’m finished it will be back into order. Cooked dishes on one shelf, raw protein on one, bread-type items all together, frozen vegies corralled somewhere convenient and items like butter, flour and ice-cream (yes, I know, not very healthy) in their designated spots. And today I will also pull out that 2kg packet of mince I froze instead of dividing into small packages because I was short on time. It will be tomorrow’s job to make that into various freezer meals. I’ll be able to do that because I’ll have made some room in the freezer shelf that’s supposed to be only for cooked meals (but has become a landing space for all sorts of other tubs of whoknknowswhat).

I’m really busy with work at the moment. That could be an excuse for not doing this task, but actually it’s more of a reason to get it done. When you’re busy, the shopping, fridge and freezer plan needs to work. I do the shopping and fridge part much better, but my freezer seems to be a bit like John Ralston Saul once described democracy—you get in and tidy up the problem areas, it’s all good for a while, then it gently devolves into a mess. So you get in and clean it up again. Okay, he didn’t describe it exactly like that, but I think that was the gist of the message. That’s what happens with my freezer, anyway.

Let’s play a visualisation game today. This is about someone’s bad attitude and how it affects you. Hubby is fuming about something. Not just fuming—articulating strongly. The youngest child is drumming his heels into the carpet having a spack attack. Someone cuts in on you in traffic and nearly causes an accident, then has the temerity to give you the finger. Whatever.

So, the scene is set. Our natural tendency in these situations might be to get upset ourselves, to hit back in some way or to withdraw as fast as possible. I have been known to do all three, but perhaps not all at once!

However, if it is not up to you to fix the whole world—and it is not—then to drill down into specifics, it’s also not up to you to fix the problem the other person is having. Of course it’s nice if you can be sympathic and helpful, but in the end it is that other person’s decision to react in anger to their situation.

Say that you want to simply stand there and observe instead of jumping in and (1) getting irate yourself (2) trying to fix the problem or (3) attempting to jolly the other person out of their funk. And say that you normally find quiet observation almost impossible (as it is in my case).

Here’s the game. Your inner self, which has an invisible body that takes up the same space and dimensions as your outer self, has only one available response. That is, to throw heart-shaped foam-type objects at this person.

As this is visualisation, anything goes. So as the invisible you (you might imagine an outline of yourelf making this movement while your physical body remains still, if that helps) draws back an arm, the heart appears in your hand just as your arm reaches the furthest part of its backswing. You concentrate on making sure the heart is thrown with enough energy to reach the other person. If you’re throwing it like a frisbee, it appears as your arm bends across the front of your body.

At first you use the heart like a missile, putting a fair bit of arm strength behind your aim. The pointy bit of the heart ricochets off the other person, causing a small but not painful jab. When it hits, it makes a noise. A short kissing sound. You watch the foam heart drift to the ground around their feet. It is red, but not fire-engine red. More a softer hue with apricot overtones.

As this all happens, you are growing in stature, making the other person’s anger appear smaller, A heart appears in your hand every time you swing your arm, so you keep lobbing them. Over the noise of the yelling or screaming (if there is any) you distinctly hear the sweet sound of little kisses. In fact, the angry vocalisation becomes strangely muted and the heart kisses sound louder as you  continue to send the hearts spinning that other person’s way. Your action of throwing becomes more gentle, more loving as the hearts start to build up around the other person. They look gorgeous all clustered around the howling one and you realise that you created them from your mind and in difficult circumstances. Sweet.

This doesn’t have to be when someone is throwing a temper tantrum. You can practise this when another person is being surly, unreasonable or showing any kind of emotion that would normally unbalance you and cause you to take on their angst. Their angst is theirs. Let them own it. You owe it to yourself to learn a way to be calm and loving in difficult circumstances and not to be infected by another person’s negative emotions.

Because you didn’t take the other person’s anger to heart and therefore were not hurt by it, perhaps you can now say something helpful or reassuring. You can certainly take yourself off happily to the kitchen to prepare a nutritious dinner. You’ll be in a gentle frame of mind and will prepare the food with love. (No doubt the pots and pans will thank you for your new serenity). While you’re at it, throw a couple of tomato-sauce flavoured hearts into the pan.