1. Drink lots of water. I bet you’ve heard this a thousand times. So why aren’t you doing it? Drink lots of water when eating. It fills you my friend.

2. Shift to a fruit and vegetable centered diet. Plant-based diets just help you consume less fattening and less chemical-based stuff. You can eat too much cabbage and never worry about serious repercussions, I swear!

3. It’s okay to leave food on your plate. I Know mom made you clean up that plate of dinner she cooked and labored so hard for. But guess what? Mom doesn’t cook your dinner anymore. You’re probably near her age when she was telling you to eat all your food. Social conditioning sucks but you don’t have to do it anymore. You’re old enough to be fucking over that shit. Dude.

4. Start looking at food as sustenance, something that gives you energy and allows you to work through the day. Quit viewing it as a recreational activity or a way to bond with friends. Food is supposed to sustain you to do meaningful work, not be meaningful in itself.

5. If you want to enjoy the way a particular food tastes, then eat slower than normal. You can enjoy it as much if you eat slowly the same way you think you can enjoy when you it plenty of it.

6. Chew slowly and pace yourself. Chewing slowly digests your food better and pacing yourself gives you more time to evaluate whether you’re really still hungry or you’re stuffing food in your face for another reason.

7. Stand up. This will take a bit of judgment on your part but stand up when you think you’ve eaten a fair amount of food yet you still want more. It’s nearly impossible to determine how full you are while you’re sitting. The mind seems to equate being comfortable with still being hungry when you’re downing that steak that the only viable way to inform yourself if you’re filled is to get up and reset the environment.

8. Stop justifying your behavior. The reality is, there’s no excuse for eating like a pig. The simple reason being that you’re not a pig. The complex one being that your body doesn’t need so much food. It needs enough to be productive throughout the day but how many of you reading this on the internet actually climb buildings or lift heavy equipment for a living? You only need as much energy as you will expend so consume only what you need. It’s not only healthy for you but it’s less taxing on the environment you live in.

Ever felt like you didn’t have time to do the things you wanted? Like get around to starting that new business, or get that skill cerification, or finally visit your parents? Yet when you take the time to write down all you have accomplished, you come up with a blank.

It’s not very uncommon. You’ve kept busy doing nothing.

Being busy has always been nothing but an excuse for me. Like when someone invites me to a party and I don’t want to go, I tell them I’m busy. When people ask me why I haven’t been going to the gym as much as before, I tell them I’m busy even though I’m really just sick of going to the gym and will probably stop for a few months.

I’m dumbfounded everytime I see people talking about how busy they are. I’m sure many of them really are busy but I can’t help but think how easily avoidable I’ve always found busyness to be.

From what I’ve seen, there are two ways that people are actually busy:

1. Physically busy like they’re driving somewhere or running errands or playing

2. Mentally busy like examining a problem, thinking things through or worrying about something

Both types can be productive, depending on how they are used. In the same breath, they can also both be huge wastes of time and resources. I like outlining busyness as a quadrant divided into four areas where any activity that adds to your busy lifestyle can fall into: Physical-Productive, Physical-Wasteful, Mental-Productive and Mental-Wasteful.

Unfortunately, many people spend much of their busy time engaging in activities that fall into the Wasteful area. And because of this, they accomplish nothing or very little, despite spending an inordinate amount of time on them.

I have a list of my personal activities that fall into each of the above. When I catch myself doing any of the wasteful stuff, I hold back and see how to either: do things differently to make them productive or stop doing it and focus on something new.

Here’s a sample list for each of the above classifications.  Surely, you’ll have your own.  Edit the list and put in yours.

Physical-Productive

• working out
• working on my internet projects with a clear goal in mind
• learning new skills
• going someplace or doing something for the first time (always stimulates the imagination)

Physical-Wasteful

• playing videogames
• talking about making money with people who aren’t making money
• idly tweaking my websites or marketing campaigns
• spending more than 1 hour at the mall

Mental-Productive

• learning new ideas from books and audio programs
• meditation
• planning with a clear goal in mind
• thinking about ways to enjoy my activities more

Mental-Wasteful

• entertainment television, radio, magazines
• entertaining doubts - they never run out
• talking and thinking about negative outcomes
• thinking and gossiping about other people

The wasteful stuff will keep you busy - sometimes for days on end  - but lead you nowhere that you’d care to be two months down the line.  They add no value to your present moment and, in fact, diminishes it.  Most of the stuff that keep people busy simply add no value to their lives.  Why would you spend your precious seconds that way?

Technorati Tags: busy, add value

I just wrote a comedy sales page to push the Final Smoke product that I advertise here on the website. I think it’s pretty funny. Apparently some people take stuff like that seriously and really hated it. Anyway, I advertise it on PPC and don’ t have an obvious link to it from the site. If you’d like to see it, you can check it out here, Top 7 Ways to Kill Yourself With Cigarettes.

[EDIT: I dropped the product after the affiliate network so graciously erased database records of traffic I sent the merchant.  LOL!  What a waste of 109 clicks.]