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Got spidey senses? How clean eating can heighten your sense of taste and hearing

Get ready, because in this post, I’m going to teach you how to develop a heightened sense of taste and hearing.

Heighten your sense of taste

I took my young’uns on a 13 hour road trip to see family. Before the trip I packed a cooler full of good, healthy things to eat. Yogurts, veggies and fruits, meat and cheese for sandwiches, and a yummy trail mix for snacking. It was pretty awesome. We would eat the snacks on the road and stop when people wanted a meal. We’d sit with the back door of the minivan open and eat our food.

After a fun and exhausting week of visiting family, it was time to make the trip home. I didn’t have the energy or time to do the same preparation for the return trip, so we ate fast food at every stop.

I rarely eat fast food, like hardly ever. But on this trip, I ate fast food 3 times that day, and when I got home my tongue was swollen from all the salt in the food I had eaten. I couldn’t taste food for the next 3 days. I couldn’t taste the subtle flavors in my normal fare, and I started to worry that I would never be able to taste food again.

I was relieved that after a few days my spidey sense of taste returned, and I could once again enjoy the delicate flavors in food, like the sweetness of fruit or the earthiness of vegetables.

Heighten your sense of hearing

At work, I hire folks who have to answer the phones, and a lot of them can’t hear on the phone. They don’t take accurate messages and have trouble taking orders because they can’t hear what people say. They turn the volume on the handset up as high as it will go. This surprises me because I have to turn the volume down to the lowest setting or I feel like customers are yelling in my ear. We have a small staff, and I’ve had 3 people with this problem.

I’m not a doctor, and I don’t play one on the Internet, but I would venture to say that some food we eat, my suspicion is dairy products, mess with our hearing.

Your other senses

I haven’t noticed a heightened sense of sight, touch or smell, but if I’ll let you know if I do. And if you want to develop your spidey senses, start by eating clean.

Take action

Eating salt and grease laden food is a downward spiral. It’s like we’re building a tolerance to salt/grease and will need more and more to even be able to taste our food. We’ve all seen the guy who salts his food until he can see the salt. That ain’t healthy.

If you want your kids to enjoy fruits and veggies, don’t feed them fast food, because afterward, they might not even be able to taste the vegetables.

Knowing what foods to eat can be overwhelming, but this is a great place to start. If you haven’t already, stop eating fast food. I promise, you’ll enjoy the other food in your life more.

Success

Dress for Success – like Steve Jobs

Steve jobs’ look is iconic, every day he wore the black turtleneck and blue jeans. I picture his closet like a cartoon closet, with those black turtlenecks hanging neatly next to each other in his closet.

Tim Ferris makes a case for wearing the same clothes everyday. His argument is that we have limited reserves of decision making capacity, and instead of taking up that bandwidth with insignificant choices, like standing in front our closet thinking “I don’t have anything to wear,” we can save those reserves for more impactful decisions.

I think it is a little too much to wear the same thing everyday, especially as a woman, and especially in America where having a varied wardrobe is more important than having a few well-made pieces that you wear more frequently.

I don’t wear the same thing everyday, but I do have about 5 tops in my summer wardrobe and 5 tops in my winter wardrobe that make up my professional attire and a few favorite jackets and scarves that I layer on in the spring and fall.

I try to look my best, and maintain a professional appearance, and I don’t think anyone at the office cares that I rotate through the same 5 outfits for a season. This strategy simplifies shopping, organizing my closet, and yes, I can save my brain power for the bigger decisions I have to make during the day.

Book Review

How to Fail at everything and still win big. Kind of the story of my life: An Excerpt from Scott Adams’ book

Adams’ business book is so good that I have to share his closing statement. He sums up his strategy and I agree whole-heartedly with him. I think if you start with small changes and build solid personal systems, those systems will carry you to great things. Adams writes on the last page of his book:

Focus on your diet first and get that right so you will have enough energy to want to exercise. Exercise will further improve your energy, and that will in turn make you more productive, more creative, more positive, more socially desirable, and more able to handle life’s little bumps.

Once you optimize your personal energy, all you need for success is luck. You can’t directly control luck, but you can move from strategies with bad odds to strategies with good odds. For example, learning multiple skills makes your odds for success dramatically higher than learning one skill. If you learn to control your ego you can pick strategies that scare off the people who feel embarrassment, thus allowing you to compete against a smaller field. And if you stay in the game long enough, luck has a better chance of finding you.

Avoid career traps such as finding jobs that require you to sell your limited supply of time while preparing you for nothing better.

Happiness is the only useful goal in life, and unless you are a sociopath, your own happiness will depend on being good to others. And happiness tends to happen naturally whenever you have good health, resources, and a flexible schedule.

Get your health right first, acquire resources and new skills through hard work and look for an opportunity that gives you a flexible schedule someday.

Some skills are more important than others and you should acquire as many of those key skills as possible, including public speaking, business writing, a working understanding of the psychology of persuasion, an understanding of basic technology concepts, social skills, proper voice technique, good grammar, and basic accounting.

Develop a habit of simplifying, learn how to make small talk with strangers and how to avoid being an asshole. If you get that stuff right, and almost anyone can, you will be hard to stop.

It might help some of you to think of yourselves as moist robots and not skin bags full of magic mystery. If you control the inputs, you can control the outcomes, give or take some luck.

Eat right, exercise, think positively, learn as much as possible, stay out of jail, and good things can happen.

Look for patterns in every part of life. From diet, to exercise, and any component of success. Try to find scientific backing for your observed patterns and use yourself as a laboratory and see if the patterns hold for you.

Most important, understand that goals are for losers and systems are for winners. People who seem to have good luck are often the people who have a system that allows luck to find them.

And always remember that failure is your friend. It is the raw material of success. Invite it in, learn from it, and don’t let it leave until you pick its pocket. That’s a system.

Challenges

Life is like a video Game

Life is not designed to make things easy for us but to present us with challenges that help us grow. And we should embrace these challenges. Terry Laughlin

It’ssa me, Mario

I watch my kid play Mario, and poor Mario runs into endless challenges. That’s what the game is. He has to overcome his current challenges in order to advance to the next level. And what is on the next level? More challenges, harder challenges.

Life is like a video game. There is no end to our challenges. But does Mario ever look depressed about his challenges, does he move through the game with a grimace on his face? No, he’s smiling, he’s having fun. He agile. He’s bobbing and weaving. Just like us strong people.

Would we ask life to be any other way, for Mario, or for ourselves? What kind of game would it be if Mario didn’t face any challenges? What kind of life would it be if we didn’t have any challenges? Boring.

If life wasn’t hard, would we work as hard as we do to accomplish greatness? Pain changes us into what we are to become, and choosing to live a comfortable rather than a challenging life brings its own challenges.

The more challenges we face head-on, the stronger we get. Which enables us to take on bigger challenges, and the scary bits of life that used to make us run for the covers will trouble us no more. I’d rather have a few battle scars from the challenges I face then be soft and squishy from trying to stay comfortable.

So go forth, face that big, hairy, audacious challenge. You got this.

More thoughts you might enjoy:

Strength only comes from the struggle. Ashley Wagner

It’s through my hardest challenges that I’ve learned my greatest lessons. Sherry Soelberg

Life is a series of problems, if you are to be happy at all, you must be happy, period. Not happy because of. Maxwell maltz, Psycho-cybernetics

Wherever did we get the idea that secure and pleasant living, the absence of difficulty, and the comfort ease of, ever of themselves make people either good or happy? Dale Carnegie

Great faith is the product of great fights. Great testimonies are the outcome of great tests. Great Triumph can only come out of great trials. Smith Wigglesworth

Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something. Wesley, The Princess Bride

Cultivate Creativity

Maker Revolution

There is more capacity, resilience, innovation, and creativity in all of us collectively then in then in any of us alone. Stealing Fire, Steven kotler and Jamie wheal

The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul. Dieter F. Uchtdorf

To my fellow creators, thank you for continuously inspiring me and blazing a new, exciting path for all of us. Lilly Singh

The internet is a crowded, noisy sandbox. The maker revolution is here, and has been so fun to watch. Remember back in the day when we only had TV to watch? Remember when there was only 4 channels and 4 entertainment powerhouses, and it kind of felt like they were always guessing at what we wanted to watch, and weren’t really getting it right? And now we can vote by watching and subscribing and directly supporting the content we like? Hooray, Internet.

I also love that Hollywood is not the only major movie producer any longer. Up your game hollywood! I love that Netflix, Youtube, Amazon, Apple and probably more that aren’t even on my radar are making quality content. Which means that there are more jobs for actors, and all the other creators that it takes to make a movie, and that the content has to be really good in order to capture an audience’s attention.

I love that makers are open and honest about their flaws and shortcomings instead of like traditional Hollywood where publicists wouldn’t allow their clients to have an unshiny moment.

Aren’t you glad that since the barrier to entry has dropped there are so many creators whose work we get to enjoy and learn from?

I love that makers have such a great way to share their work. The more we all contribute and elevate the messages out there, the better off we will be. So go create, participate, even if it doesn’t turn into a career, or even if it does. Take part in the beautiful conversation that is happening right now.

Self Improvement

How to be a Ninja: Improving career skills improves life skills

I was my strongest when I was teaching yoga. People would ask me how I got so strong, was it because I did so much yoga? And how did I get so good at yoga, did I do it every day? I told them that I did not do yoga everyday, I cross trained through running and weightlifting, and would usually attend a dance class every week just because I loved it. Everything I did made me better at the other activities. Yoga made me a better runner. Strength training improved my yoga practice.

It is the same in our life outside of fitness. Take business for example. I’ve found that any improvement I make at work carries over into my personal life. Here are some of my hard earned business lessons:

If you have information that is useful to someone else, the sooner you say it – the better:

I fight an innate passive nature. I naturally tend not to say anything until the last moment. I think I do this subconsciously to protect myself because I feel people around me will get upset by anything disruptive. But withholding useful information usually causes awkward moments at the least, and emergencies and chaos at the worst.

For example, I’ve told someone at the beginning of the day that I need to ship the job they are working on that day. They say OK, but as the day progressed they weren’t working on it, and I knew it has to ship at 3:00. My inner battle is “Am I being too compulsive, because, I can be that way, or do I really need to say something. I still have to muster my courage and tell them at 1:00 that I need the job by 2 or 2:30 so I can get it ready to ship. The sooner I give my coworker all the details, the better it is going to be for all of us.

Leadership means I have to let people know my expectations, I can’t leave them guessing. I would see something that would trigger a red flag in my brain, but subconsciously, I would dismiss it in order to keep myself safe and not rock the boat with anyone. Then later the issue would come up, and I would say, “I saw that, I just didn’t say anything about it.”

I’ve really had to train myself, and my team to question everything. I tell them, “If you have a question on something, ask. If you see something, say something”. And in communicating, I’ve found it is always better to let people know any information I have as soon as I can. This is more about scheduling things and noticing potential pitfalls than giving people feedback, which needs to be done carefully and thoughtfully.

This has helped me in my personal relationships as well. I tend to live in my head, but if I have information that my family needs, the sooner I let them know, the better for everyone.

Think about what your customers want

This one changed my business, and me. I have sometimes felt a pull of customer demands weighing heavily one me. My ideal life would be me nestled into a couch reading a book. It would look like this: Hmm, what is on my schedule today? Oh, all I have to do is stay here and read all the books that are waiting for me. No one is going to ask anything of me?

But in reality, I have to interact with people and people have needs. It was taxing for me when people made requests from me. What changed for me is when I really took time to consider how I could serve my customers. Their wants are pretty simple: they want their jobs done on-time, correctly, and within budget.

I also ask myself regularly if I have taken the time to care for myself and others in my personal life, and how I can better serve my family.

Organization

Order sends a meta-signal of peace. Kelly Brogan

I was raised amid clutter, and I took to it like a fish to water. And, I love paper, so an empty surface is in danger in my house. I was a graphic artist at my first job after college, and I got really good. I was super fast, I was a pilot, and my keyboard was the control center. But I had a tendency to work right up to quitting time, and not take any time at the end of my day to clean my area, and then in the morning, I would just start right in again where I left off. One day my manager said that he was going to start giving awards to the people who had clean desks at the end of the day. I’m pretty sure that contest was aimed at me.

I still had this bad habit when I returned to the workforce after my 10 year stay-at-home mommyhood. I couldn’t figure out how other people kept their desks clean. I’m sure they had just as much paper floating through their lives as I had, but somehow they kept their desks neat and tidy.

I can walk by a shelf at work and tell when one of my coworkers has been in that area because everything is lined up. It is very calming.

But now I’m the boss, and have to set an example. I ask my team to keep their areas neat, and “don’t work on top of work.” When I have time, and I don’t always have the time, I get to the shop early and tidy every morning for 15 minutes. And then at the end of the day, I take just a minute to gather what I have been working on into a neat pile to go through in the morning. It makes a huge difference.

Patrice Washington says, “Clutter is the physical manifestation of chaos in your mind.” I have to believe that’s a little bit true. As I meditate regularly and work hard to eat right and workout, I feel the chaos in my mind quieting, I feel the clutter and cobwebs clearing. I’m able to slow down and get an aerial view of my life, which is pretty awesome.

I’m now at the point where I straighten shelves at work as I pass them by.

This new tidiness bend is showing up at home too. I don’t have cleanliness in every space yet, but I’m getting there, and really enjoying the tidy spaces I have created.

I’m a tidiness ninja.

Thrive

3 heros who turned poor health into flourishing careers

Dr. Kelly Brogan – “I put down my prescription pad.”

I don’t know how Dr. Brogan finds the time to do everything she does. According to her bio, “she studied cognitive science at MIT, received her MD from Weill Cornell Medical College, is board certified in psychiatry, psychosomatic medicine, and integrative holistic medicine. And she’s a mom of two young girls. It makes me tired just typing all that. Her practice mainly focuses on getting women who deal with depression off medication, and thriving through natural foods, and a detoxed lifestyle.

Her medical practice changed when she got Hashimoto’s disease after she had her first baby. She couldn’t get better, and the doctor she was seeing wasn’t able to help her, in fact, she thinks that the medicine the doctor put her on made her more sick, and she didn’t like the indefinite sentence of being on a medication for the rest of her life. She started doing research and found a natural way to heal herself with food. Then she started thinking about her patients. She specialized in treating pregnant women who suffered from depression, how to prescribe drugs to pregnant women.

Brogan is now vocally skeptical about medical school and the pharmaceutical industry, saying that although she learned how to treat people with drugs, she didn’t learn how food and nutrition affect the human body. She says through her personal learning journery she, “put down her prescription pad.” She created a diet for herself and her patients that protects against depression.

Dr. Terry Wahls – “I became a modern day hunter gatherer.”

Dr. Wahls was practicing medicine when her body started to break down. She “developed a chronic disease for which there is no cure.” She got Multiple Sclerosis, a disease which shrinks the brain, damages the myelin sheath on the billions of neurons in the brain, and harms the mitochondria (the powerhouse of the cell). Her body digressed until she was wheelchair bound and having nightmares that her chief of staff had pulled her clinical privileges. She says, “for seven years, I got the best care, and the newest, latest drugs, but continued to get more disabled”. She couldn’t sit in a normal chair, she had to sit in a zero-gravity reclining chair. She could walk only short distances using 2 canes.

Since she wasn’t finding the help she needed from the medical professionals around her, she started researching the nutrients she believed her body needed. She started supplementing, and then ended up crafting a food plan to get her nutrients.

3 months after starting her dietary protocol, she could walk between exam rooms, using one cane. A month after that she could walk through the hospital without a cane. At 5 months, she got on her bike for the first time in 10 years. 9 months into her new way of eating, she pedaled 18 miles. The following year, she did a trail ride in the rockies.

She healed herself! She got her life back.

Mary Shenouda of the Paleo Chef – “Eat, Play, Crush”

Mary Shenouda is the daughter of Egyptian immigrants, and was very healthy as a child. When she went to school here in America and started eating school lunch, she got sick. She was still very high functioning, and as an adult, had a spectacular corporate career going, but discovered she had celiac’s disease and started healing herself by preparing paleo meals. Her discovery of self-healing led to her career as a personal chef to the stars and the creator of my favorite bone broth, and a wildly successful paleo running goo.

Canaries in the coal mine

These women are healers. One thing I want to highlight with these women’s stories is that they fought through major hardship and worked to find a way to turn their circumstances into major successes. And now they share their knowledge with the rest of us.

These women were sick and tired of being sick and tired. And they took their health into their own hands and healed themselves. Dr. Wahls calls herself a canary in the coalmine. I think each of these stories are a warning to the rest of us. Our beloved American diet is poisoning us, it is imploding the empire. But we can change this, for ourselves, for our families, and for our communities.

What about us?

Do you have a story of how food has changed the way you feel? I sure do. I didn’t grow up eating fast food, but I did grow up eating a lot of bread. I don’t know if I believe everything I’ve read about modern wheat, all I know is that going low carbs changed my baseline, it gave me a new normal, and I felt better than I knew was possible. I’m always looking for ways to improve my health and cognitive function. Alzheimer’s is pretty prevalent in my family. And having energy is important to me. I will do whatever I can, I will even eat liver and follow Dr. Brogan’s strange detox recommendations, if I can continue to improve the way my brain and body perform.

Parent Like a BadAss, Uncategorized

Excuse me — Sorry to Interrupt

Gone are the days when “children should be seen and not heard.” I’m not saying that was right, but I realized a long time ago that letting my kids interrupt adult conversations is a disservice to them.

Moms especially will turn from whatever adult they are talking to and answer a child’s inquiry, or “mom, look what I made” exclamation. I have been guilty of this myself, but I have seen the light and changed my ways.

Growing up in the real world

I had to learn not to demand instant help, and not to interrupt others on my own. There were two owners at the first job I had after college, and I used to interrupt them and almost demand that they helped me with my immediate problems when they were busy doing their own jobs. They weren’t having any of it. They never lectured me, they just didn’t respond immediately to my requests.

I was shadowing a trainer at another job and she had to ask a coworker for something. She was so nice when she asked him, and not demanding. It was beautiful to watch, and I learned a lot from that.

What’s to become of them?

What is going to happen to our kids we when they get into the workforce? They are going to have a rude awakening if they interrupt their coworkers mid-sentence, or God forbid they interrupt their boss.

Do your kids a favor, and don’t allow them to interrupt adult conversations. Teach them to say “excuse me,” or as my beloved son’s kindergarten teacher taught her classes: to gently lay their little hand on her shoulder if they had a question for her. Beautiful.

Tips and tricks:

Say to the adult you are speaking with, excuse me, and then address the wee one vying for your attention.

Set your child up with something while you and another adult talk.

Hold up your hand to signal to your child that you are waiting until the person you are speaking with has finished their sentence, and then you will address them.

Explain during a quiet moment with your child how to rest their hand on your shoulder or leg if they would like to tell you something.

Make it a game. This same kindergarten teacher taught her classrooms some simple sign language, yes and no, and may I go to the bathroom. That way the children could communicate with her without yelling.

Teach them in quiet moments, that interrupting is rude, and that you aren’t going to allow it.

Systems, Time Management

Systems — A story of weight lost and fortunes gained

Goals are for losers. Systems are for winners. Scott Adams

I’ve got food and exercise figured out. I don’t measure anything when it comes to food and health. I don’t count calories, I don’t count steps, I don’t measure body fat, and the only time I get on a scale is at the doctor’s office. Why? Because these measurements don’t give me accurate feedback on whether I am healthy. My systems do.

I was listening to a podcast recently, and Sharran Srivatsaa was describing systems for achieving your goals. He used weight loss as an example: He said, you can set a goal to lose 20 lbs, but you shouldn’t focus on the goal, you should focus on the steps you are going to take to achieve that goal. What are you going to eat? How much sleep are you going to get? How often, how intense, and how long are you going to work out? If you follow your system, you will reach your goal automatically.

Diet, exercise, and financial literacy are lifelong pursuits. I’m always gunning to learn and implement new knowledge to the food and exercise systems I already have in place, but how to set up a marketing system kept eluding me. Until now. After listening to Srivatsaa, I sat down and wrote out my marketing plan. I wrote what I will be doing quarterly, monthly, bi-weekly, weekly, and daily.

If you’d like to read more about creating systems, you might enjoy Scott Adam’s book, How to fail at almost everything and still win big. Ray Dalio’s book, Principles, and Peter F. Drucker’s book, The Effective Executive.

Cheers!

What systems will you create?

Hard Work

War on Work

Always do more than you get paid for as an investment in your future. Jim Rohn

I have a confession: I’ve been a mediocre employee at some of my jobs. Here are a few of my sins: I became the production supervisor at my first job after college and initiated a daily production meeting so we could cover everyone’s work load and schedule for the day. That production meeting would usually last an hour. We would sit and bullshit for an hour. My manager was part of the meeting, and I know he didn’t like that we sat there that long, but he never said anything.

I had another job where the room I worked in was on camera, but there was a part of the room that was hidden from view. I would bring books to work, go to that hidden corner, and read until the first customer came, which was sometimes an hour or two into my shift.

What a waste of time! I made $9.00 an hour at this job, and obviously deserved it. I didn’t fight that pay or ask my manager for a raise because I knew I deserved what I was getting for the job I was doing. But I had coworkers who were upset about their pay. They bad-mouthed management about how stingy they were because they wouldn’t pay more. I’m telling you right now that what you make has everything to do with you and nothing to do with your boss. You are in charge of the money you make in this life. Don’t put that on someone else. That’s called blame.

I get that not everyone can or even wants to be an entrepreneur, there is a lot of risk and hard work down that path. But if you’re sitting at your job sneaking onto facebook, or sending texts all day when you are supposed to be working, you are not only wasting your employer’s time, you’re wasting your time. Find another job that will challenge and excite you. One where you can learn something instead of wasting everyone’s time. If you find yourself trying not to work so that, hahaha, your milking your boss, and they are “paying you not to work, I’ll show them,” you are doing it wrong. This is so opposite of personal growth. It’s stagnation. The person you are really holding back is yourself.

You should run your life like it is your business, because it is. You should work like you are building a business, because you are. You are building you. You are building skills, and a personal ethos. Work, despite what mainsteam media sells, is good for our souls. Work is a gift, just ask anyone who can’t get a job during hard times.