Is Eating on the Go Making You Hungry?

Everyone is in a hurry these days but eating on the go is not the answer. Sorry Go-Gurt and pre-packaged cereal (Just add milk!) but taking a break to eat is well worth it.

A recent study showed how people who sit down to eat are more likely to make healthier choices and cultivate better eating habits. In fact, research suggests that eating on the go may even fuel hunger.

A New York Times article explains:

Eating on the go may not even register in the mind as eating, and may even register as exercise…The trick is to eat in a conscious and focused way.

Participants who ate cereal bars while walking ate five times as much when they were offered a snack later on, compared with those who had eaten while sitting down. Indeed, eating on the go may even be worse than eating in front of the television.

The lead researcher explains the value of pressing pause during a busy day and how taking time out to eat boosts energy and productivity:

It’s important to punctuate your day with breaks so that you can recharge and take stock as a means to relieve stress and work more effectively. It’s also important to turn eating into an occasion so that food is registered and eaten mindfully.

Take time to eat and sit with a friend whenever you can. I guarantee the food will taste even better.

 

I wish you all the best,

Dr. Samantha Boardman

Music as a Performance Enhancing Drug

A large body of scientific research indicates that music positively influences sports and exercise. Dr. Costas Karageorghis, a leader in sports psychology, has conducted dozens of clinical trials with a broad range of professional and amateur athletes including tennis players, long and short distance runners, basketball players, bicyclists and more.

Dr. Karageorghis’ findings show that music “distracts people from exhaustion and pain, increases endurance, boosts mood and even increases metabolic efficiency.” People who exercise while listening to music not only experience an increase in endurance by as much as 15%, but are also left happier and more satisfied by the workout. Music is particularly useful for getting through that last push or extra mile, perhaps because music redirects an exerciser’s attention from the not-so-pleasant sensations of physical exhaustion. Anyone who has ever been to a spinning class at Soul Cycle knows the value of a great song. In fact, spinning teachers are often valued as much for their playlist as they are for their enthusiasm and skill.

So what music is suited for exercise? The researchers used Queen, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Madonna in their experiments. As intuition suggests, music with more beats per minute and louder low-frequency sounds work best.

Bottom line:  Turn it on and pump it up. As an aside, out of consideration for others, may I suggest skipping “Pump Up the Jam.”

 

I wish you all the best,

Dr. Samantha Boardman

8 Strategies to Outsmart the Sunday Blues

If Sundays make you sad, you are not alone. According to a survey, seventy-six percent of Americans dread the end of the weekend.

Sunday evenings can be especially bleak in the winter. It gets dark early, it’s freezing outside, and energy is at an all time low. Even people who like their jobs can get down on Sundays. “Blah” is the word a young patient of mine uses to describe his Sunday blues. It says it all.

Sunday nights have always been a little tough for me (they bring back gloomy memories of sitting on a Greyhound bus heading back to boarding school). With a little experience and a lot of research, I have learned they don’t have to be this way.

Here are 8 strategies to make your Sundays a little less bleak:

1. Bundle Up

No matter what the weather, spend at least thirty minutes outside.

2. Do Something, Anything

You may be tempted to stay in bed and wallow in the Sunday blues but engaging in an activity will be far more rewarding.

3. Shake it Up

If you have a Sunday routine, switch it up. Try a new brunch place, make a plan with a new friend or visit a new part of town.

4. Give Your Time Away

Do something for someone else.

5. Skip the All-You-Can-Eat Buffet

Don’t use Sunday as an excuse to pig out.

6. Plan Ahead

Lay out your clothes for Monday. Pack your gym bag.

7. Get Organized

Instead of avoiding anything work-related, take 20 minutes to plan your workweek. What is the first task you will tackle Monday morning?

8. Have a Work Buddy

Catching up with a friend at work gives you something to look forward to.

 

As the proverb goes:

 A Sunday well spent brings a week of content.

I wish you all the best,

Dr. Samantha Boardman

Bright Spots: How to Fix Any Problem

When Save the Children was invited into Vietnam to fight malnutrition, they asked an employee, Jerry Sternin, to open the office. It was a serious challenge. Malnutrition was widespread and seemingly unsolvable. There were countless reasons why: poverty, poor sanitation, ignorance about nutrition and lack of clean water.

Sternin described the analysis of the situation as TBU “true but useless.” Instead of being paralyzed by this overwhelming information, he employed a different strategy. Rather than focusing on all the malnourished children, he searched for examples of children living in poor villages who were not malnourished. He looked for exceptions to the rule.

Sternin’s strategy was to search for bright spots—successful efforts worth emulating. If some kids were healthy despite their advantages, that meant malnourishment was not inevitable.  Furthermore, the mere existence of healthy kids provided hope for a practical, short-term solution. Sternin knew he couldn’t fix the “root causes.” But if a handful of kids were staying healthy against the odds, why couldn’t every kid be healthy?

By observing the way that mothers of these healthy kids fed their children differently (they added cheap sweet potato greens, shrimp and crab into the food, they fed their children the same amount of food but spread it out into four meals a day instead of two larger ones and they hand fed their children rather than allowing them to feed themselves) they learned a simple way to fix a seemingly unfixable problem.

What can we learn from this? Don’t be deterred by TBU (true but useless information). Instead of troubleshooting, look for bright spots.

I wish you all the best,

Dr. Samantha Boardman

Instead of Asking “What do I want?” Ask This Instead

What do you want out of life? Every once in a while it is important to reflect upon what you are doing with your life. But are you asking the wrong questions?

This recent article upends what most of us think we should be thinking about when it comes to “big life questions.” Instead of focusing on what will make you happy, Mark Manson suggests something a little more challenging:

Everybody wants what feels good. Everyone wants to live a carefree, happy and easy life, to fall in love and have amazing sex and relationships, to look perfect and make money and be popular and well-respected and admired and a total baller to the point that people part like the Red Sea when you walk into the room.

Everyone would like that — it’s easy to like that.

If I ask you, “What do you want out of life?” and you say something like, “I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like,” it’s so ubiquitous that it doesn’t even mean anything.

A more interesting question, a question that perhaps you’ve never considered before, is what pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for? Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.

He continues…

Who you are is defined by the values you are willing to struggle for. People who enjoy the struggles of a gym are the ones who get in good shape. People who enjoy long workweeks and the politics of the corporate ladder are the ones who move up it. People who enjoy the stresses and uncertainty of the starving artist lifestyle are ultimately the ones who live it and make it.

This is not a call for willpower or “grit.” This is not another admonishment of “no pain, no gain.”

This is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our successes. So choose your struggles wisely, my friend.

I wish you all the best,

Dr. Samantha Boardman

It is What It is? Or is It?

“It is what it is.” This hackneyed phrase is on repeat in your head and odds are, you don’t even know it. We rarely question or bother to challenge things as they are. Why bother?

As Adam Grant points out in the un-put-downable book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, we accept the default setting for a lot of stuff in life. Examples abound in all aspects of our daily lives –even for basic stuff like which search engine you use. If you’re a Mac user, your computer came with Safari pre-installed so most likely you use Safari, not Chrome or Firefox. Few bother to explore whether a better option exists.

Relying on a mediocre search engine is but one example of the power of defaults. It occurs everywhere—at the voting booth, in the supermarket and in the office. The astonishing thing it is how it happens without most of us even noticing.

Grant uses the wildly successful online, affordable and fashionable eyeglass company Warby Parker to underscore the necessity of questioning things as they are. Up until Warby Parker came along, few questioned the “fact” that eyeglasses needed to be so expensive. The founders rejected this default position and the rest is history.

Accepting the status quo has consequences. It numbs us into believing that things are supposed to be as they are and it robs us of the initiative to take action to change them.

One way to defy defaults is to practice what Grant calls “Vuja De.”

We’re driven to question defaults when we experience vuja de, the opposite of déjà vu. Déjà vu occurs when we encounter something new but it feels as if we’ve seen it before. Vuja de is the reverse—we face something familiar, but we see it with a fresh perspective that enables us to gain new insights into old problems.

It takes a little extra effort to practice vuja de but it may just open your eyes to what is in front of you and, even better, help you envision and create a better future.

I wish you all the best,

Dr. Samantha Boardman

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