Dear Dad,
Set yourself up for success.
People don’t like to talk about it but many successful habits and outcomes are born from intentional guardrails—self imposed obstacles to curb one’s actions in a preordained direction. This is just as true for an athlete imposing a rule against staying out after 10 PM, a business professional refusing to check email after dinner, or an anybody hoping to make healthy food decisions.
Longevity journalist, Dan Buettner, firmly states that we make over 250 “food related choices” each day! What to eat, when to eat, where to eat, how much to eat, hot, cold, salt, pepper, this snack, that snack, etc. With the amount of “food” available to us you could say the choices are infinite.
So what’s the problem?
A book I’m reading made the following observation:
“Very little of our conscious being lies under the direction of our conscious minds, and very little of our actions runs from our thoughts and consciously chosen intentions. Our mind on its own is an extremely feeble instrument, whose power over life we constantly tend to exaggerate.”1
The only way to combat this inevitable slide into the whims of our unconscious minds, i.e. to prevent our hands from reactively reaching for that bag of Doritos, box of cookies, or greasy sandwich, is to set clear guardrails as it relates to how, what, and where you chose to eat.
The easiest first step is to keep tight control of what food you bring into the house. If soda is your vice—don’t buy it at the grocery store to bring home. If you give in to your cravings make it at a special occasion like a restaurant or party—but if you buy a 12-pack of cola at the grocery store knowing it’s an unhealthy choice and store it in the kitchen fridge—then what do you expect?
Play with fire and you tend to get burned.
With Love,
JSR
Willard, Dallas, “The Divine Conspiracy, p 322”