Role Model and Mentor!
“There is a need, in my view, for someone as a standard against which our characters can measure themselves. Without a ruler to do it against, you won’t make the crooked straight.” Seneca
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Archive for September, 2016
Real Food, NOT Supplements!
To reduce a naturally grown vegetable or fruit to a reductionist scientific way of thinking, where we tease out one particular vitamin, mineral or antioxidant and attempt to bottle it as a healthy alternative to eating produce, is superficial thinking and wrong-headed – a “stuck in stupid” approach. Life requires, in many instances, a sense of mystery and acceptance of what we don’t know and sometimes can’t know. Believe me when I tell you, current food technology has no idea what makes a fruit or vegetable so healthy for our physiology; so don’t succumb to oversimplifications and fancy bottles, pamphlets and marketing campaigns – simply eat the real thing!
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The Meaning of Life?
It boils down to having a “WHY”! Why do we live? What’s the Point? What’s important to us? A meaningful career? A close family or family member? A friend? A pet? A religion? A Philosophy? More time to experience life? Further personal development? A book to be written?
Whatever the “Why” may be… we must have one! It is our motivation!
As Nietzsche stated: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
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Prepare Your Own Food!
A sure-fire way to gain weight, and lose control of your health, is to consume food prepared by others (i.e. restaurants, catering services, potluck dinners, etc.). You can’t take responsibility for your weightloss goals, or your health, without knowing what’s in the food that you consume and that starts by preparing your own food. Eating out frequently abdicates your personal control to someone who has no interest in your health and weightloss goals.
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Finished Reading: Seneca; Letters From A Stoic
“It is philosophy that has the duty of protecting us…without it no one can lead a life free of fear or worry.”
For several years of his turbulent life, Seneca was the guiding hand of the Roman Empire. His inspired reasoning derived mainly from the Stoic principles, which had originally been developed some centuries earlier in Athens. This selection of Seneca’s letters shows him upholding the austere ethical ideals of Stoicism—the wisdom of the self-possessed person immune to overmastering emotions and life’s setbacks—while valuing friendship and the courage of ordinary men, and criticizing the harsh treatment of slaves and the cruelties in the gladiatorial arena. The humanity and wit revealed in Seneca’s interpretation of Stoicism is a moving and inspiring declaration of the dignity of the individual mind.
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Finished Rereading: Man’s Search For Meaning
Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the experiences of others he treated later in his practice, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. Frankl’s theory-known as logotherapy, from the Greek word logos (“meaning”)-holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful.
At the time of Frankl’s death in 1997, Man’s Search for Meaning had sold more than 10 million copies in twenty-four languages. A 1991 reader survey for the Library of Congress that asked readers to name a “book that made a difference in your life” found Man’s Search for Meaning among the ten most influential books in America.
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Isolated Nutrients are Misguided!
Isolated nutrients (such a vitamins, minerals and antioxidants) taken as supplements to our existing diet or artificially added to a product found on a store shelf where it’s then called fortified, is simply a misunderstood concept and grossly inadequate for good health. For instance, vitamin C, is only one single compound of hundreds of compounds found within a single fruit or vegetable. Consuming more of it, when there’s no dietary deficiency (which is normally the case for all of us) without the other compounds, is misguided and unsafe. Vitamins, minerals and antioxidants consumed singularly, in large doses typically found in many store bought supplements, have proven to actually increase disease in carefully performed research on humans; so much so, the studies were halted early because cancer rates were increasing significantly in the participants – not decreasing as desired!
Case in Point:
The majority of our bodies are made of water (65-70% of our bodies); drink normally and things function as they should. But, supplement your normal drinking habits with excess water and you end up in the hospital with Hyponatremia (a metabolic condition in which there is not enough sodium in the body fluids outside the cells because of over-hydration).
If something is good for you, then more must be better? This is simply poor thinking and marketing Bull Shit!
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Finished Reading: How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
Winner of the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
How to get along with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love—such questions arise in most people’s lives. They are all versions of a bigger question: How do you live? This question obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, considered by many to be the first truly modern individual. He wrote free-roaming explorations of his thoughts and experience, unlike anything written before. More than four hundred years later, Montaigne’s honesty and charm still draw people to him. Readers come to him in search of companionship, wisdom, and entertainment —and in search of themselves. Just as they will to this spirited and singular biography.
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