1.9 – Recap

This blog is structured by weekly topics. Every Thursday, the week’s topic is summarized with clear and actionable implementation steps. You can find all these summary posts in this category.

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Recap: Fitness Toolkit

This week, we looked at four key tools that can help build lifelong healthy fitness levels. Let’s jump straight into the summary.

The checklist

The four key fitness tools read as follows:

  1. Ideally located home. Not practical for many, but very powerful if you can make it work. 
    • Next time you move, try to find a location where you can easily and safely walk or cycle and easily get into some green-spaces. 
  2. Equipment. Spend wisely to not end up with a basement full of fitness gizmos gathering dust. 
    • The quality of the equipment you buy should be proportional to how much you will use it. 
  3. Technology. Keep it very clean and simple.
    • Start with Google Fit, add a fitness band if you can genuinely use the features, and join Strava for great motivation if you regularly cover longer distances. 
  4. Friends and family. Because movement and socializing play well together. 
    • Actively look to bring more motion to your socializing. There are tons of possibilities! 

So, there you have it. If you keep your toolkit nicely stocked, it will actually become quite hard not to achieve permanent healthy fitness levels 🙂

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Recap: Automatic Exercise

This week explored a simple principle for achieving permanent fitness: never exercise just for the sake of exercise. Instead, set up your life in such a way that exercise happens as a natural byproduct of other useful activities. 

Let’s take a look at how this can be done.

The checklist

We covered four key areas offering healthy doses of automatic exercise:

  • Personal transportation. Think carefully through your daily life and identify any short trips to work, the shops or your friend’s house that can be made by muscle power instead of fossil power. 
  • Sport and nature. Getting yourself a sport you genuinely enjoy and regularly getting out in nature bring great fun and revitalization. 
  • Work. Even though most of us spend our working lives at a desk, there are still plenty of ways to incorporate some healthy movement into your daily life. 
  • Morning and evening routines. Movement is great for switching on the body in the morning and relaxing the mind at night. 

If you manage to incorporate most of these elements into your life, you’ll never need to worry about exercise again! It will happen all by itself for the rest of your life 🙂

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Recap: Making the Classic “Healthy Living” New Year’s Resolution Work

It’s hard to believe there’s only five days left of this decade! Such a major milestone often brings with it some very useful motivation for driving positive change. This week’s posts were all about channeling this motivation into creating permanent healthy eating habits. 

So, let’s wrap this up with the traditional checklist…

The checklist

Here’s the 1-2-3 to a nutritional New Year’s resolution that might actually work 🙂

  1. Understand why diets have such a high failure rate.
  2. Intelligently shape your environment.
  3. Intelligently shape your habits.

So, if the classic health and weight loss resolutions are running through your head as we approach the new decade, why not give this a try?

As a reward, you’ll get to enjoy the next decade (and many more after that) in optimal health at your ideal weight 🙂

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Recap: Building Permanent Healthy Eating Habits

We all have a pretty good idea of what we should and shouldn’t eat. The real challenge is actually implementing this common sense, consistently. 

That’s why the last two weeks were dedicated to strategies for building permanent healthy eating habits, allowing optimal nutrition to happen naturally. Let’s summarize how this can be done.

The checklist

There are five categories of foods that should be an integral part of healthy living. To automate our consumption of these foods, we need to maximize taste, practicality and affordability. Here’s how this can be done:

  • Nuts, seeds and berries: Here we focused on maximizing the practicality and affordability of this surprisingly tasty superfood combo, particularly through bulk purchases of seeds. 
  • Raw green veggies: These green nutrient bombs taste rather bland, but things like a green drink and smart combinations with other tasty foods can make them regulars in your diet.
  • Cooked veggies, mushrooms and beans: This strategy revolves around the use of meat and other flavors to include surprisingly large quantities of these colorful bits of health into cooked meals. 
  • Fish and eggs: The convenience of smoked and canned omega-3 fish and scrambled eggs or omelettes make these high quality protein sources easy to include. 
  • Avocado (and other fruit): Here we discussed the fine art of avocado ripeness management together with several ways to make fruit consumption even easier. 

Next, we need to keep self-destruct foods out of our lives. A strong defense against the world’s worst foods that lurk around every corner in your local supermarket looks like this: 

  • Refuse to pay for self-destruction: Trading time, effort, vitality and life expectancy for fleeting endorphin highs is a truly terrible deal. Realizing this on a deep level is a great first layer of defense.  
  • Healthier snacking: Sometimes really tasty treats can actually have some longer-term benefits. For these rare occasions, choosing healthier alternatives makes all the sense in the world. 
  • Home-made meals: Taking care of your health becomes a lot easier when you take direct control of what goes into your body. Home-made food also makes overeating much less likely. 
  • Whole foods: Buying more whole produce is a great way to keep self-destruct foods out of your life. Getting into the habit of reading food labels can also add many good years to your life. 

So there you have it. These strategies combine very nicely to build healthy nutritional habits that last a (considerably longer) lifetime 🙂

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Recap: The World’s Best and Worst Foods

Over the past two weeks, we’ve been discussing foods that heal and foods that kill. Today’s post presents the short and sweet (but still healthy) summary.

The checklist

Last week, we discussed five groups of superfoods that should be regulars in any healthy eating regime:

Following our discussion of these champion foods, we ventured into the four darkest corners of the food spectrum:

You can add many great years to your life by turning the best foods into a habit and building strong defenses against the worst foods. This will be our focus over the next two weeks.  

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Recap: Health Foundation

We’ll be spending the next couple of months covering several proven strategies for achieving optimal physical and mental health.  

But all the best health advice in the world is useless if we cannot get ourselves to make consistent healthy choices. This challenge lies at the foundation of healthy living and must be addressed first.

Constructing a solid foundation on which to build a truly healthy lifestyle was the focus of this week’s posts. The key messages from these posts are summarized in the checklist below.   

The checklist

Here is the 1-2-3 to a solid health foundation:

  1. Measure your health.
    • Smart BMI, biological age, stress and sick days combine to give a surprisingly complete assessment of general health. 
    • This invaluable knowledge will cost you a mere 10 minutes per quarter. 
  2. Find you why.
    • Carving out a healthy lifestyle among all of life’s unhealthy temptations requires a strong driving force, a strong why. 
    • Start by fully understanding the implications of health for yourself, your loved ones and your planet. 
  3. Learn to win during the crux moments.
    • Choices during crux moments set you on a longer-term path to either wellness or illness. 
    • Mastering these moments is the key to unlocking optimal health. 

Please make sure your foundation is strong. If so, the next couple of months can add many awesome years to your life 🙂

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Recap: Accelerating Evolution

Over the past two months, we’ve talked a lot about our outdated emotional responses and how to handle them. 

Taming our primitive emotions is not easy. If it was, everyone would be genuinely happy, healthy, wealthy and productive in this truly amazing modern world of material affluence. 

That’s why it’s so important to set ourselves on a journey of accelerated evolution towards full compatibility with our modern world. 

The checklist

Here’s the 1-2-3 of staying on course during a journey of accelerated evolution:

  1. Make it part of your identity.
  2. Focus on tiny saves during day-to-day living.
    • Use a counter app on your phone to track your small victories over the Big Five.
    • Use some fun visualizations to dispatch the Big Five when needed. 
  3. When bad stuff happens, it really is time to step up.
    • Recognize the danger of a Big Five stampede and learn how to stop it.
    • Use such events as a valuable experiment to learn more about yourself. 

So, that’s it for the second chapter of the Supermorning series! Next week, we’ll shift our attention to the pursuit of perfect health. 

If you have any feedback or suggestions that can help me improve these accelerated evolution guidelines, please use the form below.

Your message will not be publicly visible, so please don’t hold back. Having gone through the scientific peer-review publication process about 100 times, I’m used to critical feedback 🙂

The Supermorning blog will run on an annually repeating basis, so this time next year I will present an improved version of these guidelines on accelerated evolution. Your feedback is important to make sure that next year’s version really offers a clear improvement.

Thanks in advance!

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Recap: Acceptance

Most of us waste a huge amount of time and energy obsessing about things that are not going to change. Here, the simple act of acceptance can make your life a whole lot easier. 

Freeing yourself from this unnecessary burden will allow you to get to many more useful priorities. Give it a go. I think you’ll like it 🙂

The checklist

Here is the 1-2-3 to successful acceptance:

  1. Accept your caveman.
    • Our primitive emotions of Craving, Ego, Sloth, Frustration and Worry present many challenges.
    • But once you accept and understand them, they become manageable and, sometimes, genuinely entertaining 🙂
  2.  Accept yourself.
    • Accepting your caveman makes it much easier to accept yourself. 
    • You will never be perfect, but you can always improve your emotional balance to reduce wasteful inner conflict. 
  3. Accept the caveman in others.
    • Another important source of wasteful inner conflict is festering negative feelings about others.
    • In most cases, a little bit of Tolerance of the caveman in others is all that is needed to win back this wasted energy.

I really hope you give acceptance a go! It can free up a lot of time and energy for more useful things 🙂

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Recap: Building intelligent environments

The last two weeks have been about the gradual construction of intelligent environments where healthy and productive actions happen naturally and self-destructive actions become much harder. 

Without such intelligent environments, your primitive emotions will always get the better of you. You can try as you might with willpower, but it will be a losing battle. 

However, when you tilt the scales so that healthy and productive actions become automatic, life becomes much more interesting. 

Let’s take a look at the summarized guidelines to getting this done. 

The checklist

Here is the 1-2-3 for intelligent environment design:

Building intelligent environments takes time and patience. But you should start seeing some benefits already early on in the process. 

The process itself can also be very interesting. So just get started and watch what happens 🙂

See you tomorrow for this month’s edition of Practice What You Preach.

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Recap: Emotional Balance

Humans will never be robots. It can be a blessing or a curse, but we’re stuck with a complex system of instinctive emotional responses that drives us to act in certain ways, often against our conscious wishes. 

The bad news is that many of these instincts and emotions are totally outdated in today’s world, causing great heartache and misery. But the good news is that, with the right awareness and technique, we can restore balance to the system. 

The past month covered this idea in quite some detail. In fact, it could really be useful to quickly revisit the recap posts from the three previous weeks on primitive emotions, the emotion safari, and positive emotions. 

The checklist

If you do that, this week’s checklist will have the best chance to restore emotional balance in your life:

  1. Recognize the value of the Big Five primitive emotions.
    • Craving, Ego, Sloth, Frustration and Worry all have good intentions.
    • But it’s up to us to keep them under control in our modern world. 
  2. Be aware that we can have too much positive emotion.
    • This issue will only become relevant when you have trimmed the Big Five herds.
  3. Develop the habit of taking emotion safaris as a ranger.
    • Accept responsibility for early identification of imbalances in you mental ecosystem.  
    • Take strong proactive action to restore balance like a good wildlife ranger.

Next week, we’ll be designing environments that automatically weaken the Big Five and strengthen the Great Five. This will give you another effective tool to maintain balance in your mental ecosystem. 

But before that, I’ll see you tomorrow for another edition of Getting 1% Better. 

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