motd Saturday Aug 17, 2011

[Guest guest]

HABIT FORMING

Saturday, 27 August 2011

From the earliest days of your

life, you begin forming habits. Some of the habits

you picked up, you learned from your parents,

grandparents or even from your peers. You picked up

those habits and now...they belong to you.

Habits come in two forms. There

are good habits and, of course, there are

the bad habits. And once those bad habits

become part of your life, well, I don't even have to

tell you, they're hard to break.

Earlier this week in my Clubhouse Chat, I asked my

members to share two bad habits in their lives they've

been able to kick. I want to share with you some of

the bad habits they've beaten. And I wonder, how many

of these bad habits are ones you need to

break. For instance....

Do you skip breakfast? Oh, that's a bad, bad, bad

one. Your name might as well be Brown, as in Leroy

Brown, baddest man in the whole damned town!

Now listen up, you need to eat breakfast, every

morning. That means you may have to rearrange your

daily schedule and, if you have to, get up a little

earlier to prepare that healthy morning meal for

yourself. You should make time to actually sit down

at the table and have your breakfast every morning

before starting your day.

Do you frequent fast food

drive-thrus? Do you eat a lot of fast food, claiming

"you have to" because your life is just so busy? Is

it like your car can find those drive-thrus...on

their own? Oh, it's one of the baddest

habits we Americans have, our addiction to fast-food

and those drive-thru windows.

Are you a big soda or diet-soda drinker? Are you?

Now you know, they're basically cans of chemicals,

don't you? And oh, those diet-sodas. They get their

"sweetness" from artificial sweeteners which

have been shown to increase your appetite and even

raise your blood's insulin levels.

Do you eat a lot of red meat? Let

me fess up here. I've eaten steaks and prime rib ever

since I was a kid. Back home in New Orleans, just two

blocks from our house on St. Louis Street, was the Rib

Room Restaurant at the fabulous Royal Orleans Hotel.

My family used to love going there. But today, you

and I know that we need to limit our intake of red

meats. They may be tasty and tender but they're hard

on our stomachs. They take so long to digest, too.

And red meats are loaded with fat.

What about alcohol? Are you a big drinker? Do you

have a beer or cocktail every evening when you get in

from work? And do you drink a little more on the

weekends to, uh, "celebrate"? Yeah? So, what are you

celebrating? That you're slowly choking the life out

of your liver? And oh yeah, liquor contains calories,

too. Lots of them. And people have a tendency to not

count the calories when they have a drink...or

two. Remember, everything in moderation.

Are you one of those people who

likes to open the refrigerator door every time you

walk by it? What are you looking for anyway? How

many times a day do you open your fridge? 5 times?

10? 263 times a day? Cut out this bad

little habit because every time you look into that

fridge, chances are you're gonna find something to

snack on.

Are you a late night eater, a midnight feeder? Do you

sit on the couch in your family room with a bowl of

snacks on the end table right next to you? Without

even thinking, you're reaching over picking up another

handful of Goldfish mini-crackers or cashews and

plopping them into your mouth. How much calorie

damage can you cause doing that, huh? Talk about a

weight-gain. Well, it'll be yours if you keep

consuming all of those mindless calories late into the

night.

And I want to leave you with just

one more bad habit you need to kick. Do you not

make time to exercise? Yep, that's a

really bad habit and maybe the worst of all! You've

got to get your workouts in so you can burn those

calories and fat as you get your body into better

shape. Hey, I've got an idea. How's about making

daily exercise one of your good habits!

Good habits can be as hard to break as the bad ones.

And that's a good thing!

My

Clubhouse members have worked hard turning their

bad habits around and kicking them out of their

lives. And I hope you'll join them by saying adios to

the bad habits in your life, too. How about it?

Love,