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What Gives You Joy?

Joy and Purpose. If there is one secret to having a great life well into your old age, that is it.

The findings are consistent. Those who get to be really old and enjoy life to the fullest have a sense of purpose that, frankly, most of us don’t share. They know without a doubt why they are getting up in the morning, why they need to be around, what their gifts and contributions are.

Those people who live to be very old drinking red wine? I know everybody is now talking about the secret ingredient in red wine, resveratol. And there may be something to it (although we don’t know for sure yet). The real reason they live to be old, is that they live well, are social, enjoy life, and have a reason to live.

It is not the red wine that is the reason to live. You are trying to trick me. The red wine is a symptom. I bet you that these people who drink red wine until a ripe old age …

… never drink alone.

And that is the key. It is not the wine. It is the social company, the pleasure in spending time with other people, people who are happy to see you.

Their reason to live is the pleasure to share life with others.

Do you know your purpose in life?

It is not that hard to find out. There is one condition though.

Be totally honest with yourself.

And ask yourself this question:

What gives me joy?

Not satisfaction.

Not distraction.

Not pleasure (though I am all in favor of pleasure).

Joy!

Joy is are built in signal to show us what we are on earth for. It is the one sure fire pointer towards a fulfilling life.

And that is why you need to be brutally honest with yourself. Not everybody wants you to feel joy. Or rather, they don’t want you to make the kind of choices you would make if joy becomes the main purpose for living. You may stop doing things you are doing now, and that will make some people uncomfortable.

And you will anticipate their discomfort. You will think to yourself “if I really live my life with joy, I would have to stop doing xxx, and people won’t like that.” Maybe.

You have only one life, and nobody has the right to take it away from you. So decide now to find out what gives you joy. What gives you goose bumps? What thrills you? What makes you forget yourself and everything around you?

I think you already know.

What’s the answer?

Be honest.

You have a chance to love your life and live well for a long time.

Howard Thurman said it best:

Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

What Seniors Can Learn from Schoolchildren

Have you ever looked at the food they serve our children in schools these days? It is an ugly site. I was shocked just by looking at a group of pictures online. This is high fat, low nutrition food. Seriously. Do an image search for “school lunch” and you will be horrified.

A recent study at the University of Michigan discovered that children who eat school lunches are more obese that children who bring their own food. Of those who ate at school, 38.8% were overweight or obese, whereas 24.4% of children who ate food that was prepared at home had this problem.

School lunches give more bad cholesterol, fewer fruits and vegetable to our children.

[click to read more…]

An Average Life Will Kill You

Yeah.

Average Americans have not eaten more fruits and vegetables in the last ten years. Even though we have learned so much more about healthy eating and all the benefits you get from it, Americans still don’t eat enough healthy foods.

That is what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tells us in a recent report. Let me give you the highlights in, well, English. [click to read more…]

Senior Moment or Brain Genius

Why You Don’t Have to Be Afraid of Senior Moments.

If you are afraid of senior moments, you may mistake the genius of your brain for failure. You may sit there and wonder why you can’t think of something, but in reality, the beautiful design of your brain is helping you remember what is most important.

What do I mean?

I had dinner with a friend recently, and she told the story of a senior moment she had had a week or so ago. Now, my friend is mid-sixties, highly successful, sharp as anybody I know, working like a mad woman and she shows no signs that she even wants to stop working. She is having too much fun.

[click to read more…]

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One Secret Tip to Improve Your Health – Standing Meditation

If you do nothing else to improve your health, stand. I love to watch those PBS specials that go on for two or three hours. They feature a doctor who will inform us how to improve our health. Why do we need to keep hearing the same advice though? To improve your health, you need to install healthy habits, and forming new habits takes time. Here is one suggestion where to start.

The absolute simplest and possibly the most important habit to adopt is standing. Yes, standing. Standing meditation has very old roots, and some suggest that it was practiced in pre-historic times. Standing meditation has most efficiently been formalized in Chinese Qi Gong. [click to read more…]

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How To Change Your Habits for a Fulfilling Life

How To Change Your Habits.

I want to offer a simple four steps solution to habit changing.

First, change one habit at a time. This is important and critical for your success in changing habits. If you try to do too many, you will fail because you will be overwhelmed by the shear number of things to keep track of all the time. You changing habits requires awareness, but to have to walk around all day as if everything is a new habit will exhaust you quickly. [click to read more…]

Bill Clinton is a Vegan

This is a wonderfully moving side of President Clinton. He saw the evidence, collected for over 25 years, and decided that he needed to eat a plant based diet to live long enough to see and enjoy his grandchildren.

Watch him: [click to read more…]

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What Is the Best Brain Food?

What you eat makes a spectacular difference in the way your brain functions. It is critical that you always remember this:

Your brain is part of your body.

What you put in your body you put in your brain.

[click to read more…]

Can You Prevent Alzheimer’s By Walking

Alzheimer’s Disease and Type II Diabetes are related. But How?

A recent study in Japan discovered that people who have Type II Diabetes have an extremely high chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease. The study showed that of 135 people with insulin resistance, 72% showed the kind of plaque and tangles that cause Alzheimer’s.

What they didn’t know is whether insulin resistance causes plaques to form.

In other words, the precise relationship between Alzheimer’s disease and Type II Diabetes is unclear. [click to read more…]

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Food for the Aging Brain

I share this at the request of the great people of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine.

This talk by Dr. James Joseph was recorded at their conference in Baltimore, in 2008. Dr. Joseph passed recently, and we are fortunate to have this lecture as a small piece of his legacy.

It is a timeless lecture and I highly recommend you listen to it. You wil also be very entertained.

I promise. [click to read more…]

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