Chew Your Food for Health and Performance

It's funny how some of life's little tidbits of advice that your mom or grandma used to tell you truly are pearls of wisdom.  Things that we may have forgotten or written off as just old sayings get more and more science to suggest perhaps there was something to those old adages after all.

"Eat chicken soup when you have a cold."  Well it turns out the salt, the broth (that has been leached from bones) contains zinc and other vital nutrients that help support a healthy immune system.  Dehydration is one aspect that makes you feel worse with a cold, so getting that soup in your body is a way of hydrating.  The advice has merit.

"Chew your food."  While the advice was most likely coming from a fear of choking, it most likely has been passed down from generation to generation and the meaning most likely lost in the centuries that pass.

I am a notorious fast eater.  By fast, I mean I am a poor chewer of food.  Perhaps, it was being the youngest of five.  Perhaps, it was something I taught myself.  In college dining hall closed at certain time.  Because sports practice ended about 30 min before it closed.  I had about 20 min to get to the dining hall and get dinner.  I was pretty much in gain weight mode for 4 years at school for football.  I adapted a strategy of filling my tray with food and devouring as much of it as I could in 15 min.  Then going back for 2nds before it closed, to sit down and eat "2nd Dinner."  This probably created a habit I find hard to break today.

A few years ago, I tried to get into the habit of eating one big salad a day.  I was pretty good with this for a bit, but I got sidetracked along the way.  I again started to get into that habit and realized one thing, salads require chewing.  In fact, I noticed it took almost 30 minutes to eat the bowl of salad I had at one point.

This got me thinking.  Most diets, whether it is Keto, Paleo, Raw, whatever....require you to chew more.  (as well as you generally just ingest less calories)  Junk food is mostly processed carbs that don't require much mastication as well as you have eliminated most liquid calories.   So, does the chewing have just as much impact as the calories being less?  Food for thought!

I recently did the Valter Longo Five Day Fast Mimicking Diet protocols.  By day 2, without any conscious thought I was chewing slower.  It was as if I subconsciously decided to chew every last calorie out of the food.  To savor this bight instead of shoving the 2nd bite in.  It was an unexpected benefit to this 5 day protocol.

Practical Tip:  Put your fork down every time between bites.  This forces a slower eating, more chewing.  A good friend told me this.  It's a money move for changing behavior.

A few weekend ago, I took the Cervical Revolution seminar with Ron Hruska.  I've always found value in how they approach a few concepts.  I've had a few patients in the past year whose neck issues just seemed odd.  I've also noted a few interesting therapy practical concepts that I couldn't quite figure out why it worked.  I had some of my own theories but wanted smarter people then me to perhaps drive more insight.  For example, when looking at a right femur that was neurally guarded on adduction, working the right trapezius and some of the right occipitals, the femur moved much more freely.  I think this is the best example of purposeful learning.  Something I've been seeking out.  A few concepts your struggling with, a few ideas you have high interest in, seeking those answers.

One of the big takeaways from the course was addressing the mandible.  The jaw bone.  Occlusion and malocclusion and how they can be influencers of other systems and joints.

Tempromandibular Joint (TMJ) pain has a high correlation with other joints being sore or painful, the most common being the knee.  

Testing of knee strength with balanced and unbalanced bite has shown a decrease in eccentric strength of the knee when maloccluded.

Chewing is a mammalian behavior.  Carnivores generally chew very little.  Chewing stimulates the stomach acid and autonomic nervous system.

There has been influence of same side masseter muscle with the same side SCM muscle.

Chewing stimulates the sesorimotor cortex of the brain.  It activates the brains autonomic area.

Note from course:  People with low back pain don't know how to chew with their molars.

Practical Tip:  Chew your first 10 bites of any food, 10 on the back left molars and 10 on the back right.  

In the book "Jaws" by Kahn and Ehrlich, they outline what they call the hidden epidemic in youth jaw and teeth development.  Lack of chewing creates weak jaw muscles and doesn't allow room for the teeth and jaw to widen.  It's influence on fascial structure is very interesting.  It can lead to mouth breathing, which leads to poor airway development.  Interestingly there anecdotal observations with mouth breathing and things like increased nightmares, bed wetting and lack of good sleep.

The book contains on a chapter on GOPex (good oral posture exercise)

Some of the the takeaways of practical use were again.  Chew your food with mouth closed.  Even encouraging gum chewing with the mouth closed.

Practical Tip:  Read out loud with good punctuations.  This encourages nasal breathing.  Pause at full stop and take in a breath through the nose.  5-20 min of this per day.

You can play around with surgical tape on the mouth and do some fun games/activities which forces nasal breathing.

Practical Tip:  Always begin your swallow with the teeth of upper and lower jaws touching.  Consciously pause for at least a once second before the swallow.  This will allow the tongue to go the roof of the mouth.

Chewing is an autonomic activity.  We don't need to think about it to do it.  (unless it's painful).  Much like breathing.  But, like breathing, when we bring conscious thought to it, we can make some significant health and performance improvements.

Learning is Asking an Emotional Question

Growing up, if you asked me what learning meant, I would have answered that learning was the memorization of "stuff."  Ask me a question and I will repeat what I had "learned."  Ask me in a week, and I might not remember it anymore.  I got the A and moved on to the next piece of information to be memorized aka learned.

Is that really learning?

In college, I had the fortunate opportunity to have several, several teachers that didn't allow memorization to be tested.  Concepts were expected to be understood.  They couldn't be memorized.  It took several failed attempts to memorize super large quantities of data to change the pattern of my study process.  Concepts were understood, learned.

Is that really learning?

I had several opportunities to play sports in different settings.  From baseball and soccer,  to football, rugby and bobsled.  Skills were taught.  Techniques were practiced.  Practice until you can do them well.  Looking back, I realized I practiced till I could do a skill, without really an understanding of the why.

Is that really learning?

Taking a poll of my younger self.  I would have stated, I don't like school, I don't like reading, I don't enjoy "Learning."  I just want the end result.  Give me the answers.

Present day, one of my favorite things in life is reading, I'm not really in a Joy state if I'm not learning things, if I'm not pursuing something.

Pursuit.  Pursuing is an emotional thing.  Your whole being is involved.  It implies passion and thought and commitment.  My present self would go back and tell my younger self, you do love learning.  You just don't get what that means.  Learning is finding the secrets to the subject your interested in.  The answers to an emotional question.

What are the emotional questions?

My first emotional question was how do I play football in college.  As a 119lb freshman in High School, the answer was get bigger and faster.  So I learned about training.  I showed up and trained.  I asked questions.  I observed other athletes training.  I wrote every coach I could think of and asked how to train.  I experimented with training.  I devoured a lifestyle of training.  This bled into not only lifting weights and running, but I learned about other methods of training.  I remember writing Istvan Jvorak and learning and using his Complexes and not understanding how all of a sudden by lifting lighter and faster I put 4 more reps on my 225lb bench and 3 inches on my vertical in 12 weeks.  I read up on nutrition and supplements.  I read about hormones.  I learned about wave cycling.  But, I didn't know I was learning.  I was just pursuing an answer to a question.  I never said to myself.  I'm going to study new rep schemes tonight.  I'm going to study some biochemistry tomorrow.  It just happened.

My view point at this point in time is that a thing can't be learned if it doesn't come from an emotional question.  The answer will be superficial at best without.  You may know the answer, but only when the question is exactly what you studied.  Life very rarely gives the story book question.

I knew how to rehab a tendon a year and half ago.  After my own achllies tendon tore a year ago,  I pursued the answer to how to sprint again.  Now I KNOW how to rehab a tendon.  The intricacies of reps/timing/nutrition.  Tendon research.  Tendon researchers.

In 2013, my daughter was one.  I realized I couldn't squat deep anymore.  My mobility had deteriorated.    My emotional question was how do I regain my mobility.  Again, deep dived into mobility training and theories.  Functional Range Conditioning kept popping up.  Dr Andreo Spina, created a system.  An amazing process of principles.  I regained my hip mobility.  More importantly I learned about mobility training.

I don't think you necessarily have to have your own tendon failure to learn about tendons.  But, I do think there must be an emotional connection to your question.  Perhaps it's a friend, family member or patient that drives you into the pursuit.

A person picks up a bow and arrow and shoots it at a target.  They miss. They keep practicing.  They get better.  They start to love archery.  They ask the emotional question, How do I get better.  They learn about wind.  They learn some physics and geometry.  They start making their own arrows.  They study the history of the bow.  They practice breath control.  They test equipment.  They learn the bow and arrow.

Ask an Emotional Question.

Practically speaking we live an an amazing time for available information.  One of my favorite ways to spearhead an emotional question is search out a a concept or person with books/podcasts and articles and listen and read everything that person has done for several days/weeks.  Then if my pursuit is still calling me, you dive into the research papers and textbooks and see how to apply it.  

But again, those deep dives are coming from an emotional question.  Right now,  I have two questions that I'm asking.  One.  How do we create Biological Durability.

"Avoid inactivity of your organism as you would avoid severe illness and cultivate the endurance function as a pathway to biological durability."  Ernst van Aaken.

Two.  What do we know post cancer?  Valter Longo keeps coming up.

These are all my theories and thoughts, and maybe I'm the only one that learns this way.  It would be great if I could just pick up a topic and own it thoroughly, but I'm not wired that way.  I don't think I'm alone.  I do think that we can cheat the system though.  By simply asking better questions, finding that emotional connection, we can learn better.

Keep Learning.

Circadian Rhythm of Life and How to Enhance It

The weekend marks another spring forward time change.  Setting the clocks forward often means a loss of an hour of sleep for many people.  The reason many people have a hard time with time changes is because our bodies naturally adopt a certain ebb and flow to the sleep/wake cycle.  We can essentially train our self to fit our lifestyle.  This can be good and bad.

The good.  Humans greatest physical attribute is perhaps its ability to adapt to its environment.  Cold, hot, sea level, mountain living, city, country, much like a coyote, humans will figure it out and thrive. 

The bad.  We are so good at manipulating our environment to survive, we have altered our natural rhythms of life that we have built into our cell biology.  We are finding this to have some serious health consequences.  

First, some science.  Chronobiology is the study of circadian rhythms.  Humans have built in biological clocks (an innate timing device) in every tissue and every organ.   Biological clocks produce and control circadian rhythms.  There is a master switch in the brain that is composed of 20,000 neurons called the suprachiasmatic nucleus that controls the biological clocks.  This resides in the hypothalamus and receives input through the eyes.  This is an important distinction as this will show the significance and power of light.  

Light has the ability to turn on and off genes that control biological clocks.  Because of this powerful impact light has,  it becomes very important how much we get and when we get it.  To jump start a day, let sunlight hit your eyes.  Sunlight has blue light.  It creates a power trigger for alertness.  Equally important as the sun sets, eliminate or diminish all blue light to allow the body to start producing melatonin (sleepiness hormone).  This also coincides with a slight reduction in body temperature.   Staring at a computer or cell phone is just triggering the biological clocks that it still daytime.  In the absence of light, humans are still wired for around a 24 hours of sleep/wake.  Light just influences how we go about regulating other circadian rhythms in the body.  

Our natural circadian rhythm is built around a 24 hour cycle(day).  There are also other parts of our biology that have circadian rhythms in it.  One of the most important is cell metabolism or energy.  Every cell has an organelle called mitochondria in it.  Mitochondria are the power houses of energy production.  They have a fusion/fission pattern.  If this is disrupted, energy production is compromised.  This pattern is linked with circadian rhythm of the body.  How and when energy is produced is in direct relationship to the health of your rhythm.  Disrupt your circadian rhythms and disrupt your mitochondrial ability to produce energy. 

Performance can even be potentially thought of as having a rhythm.  It has been speculated that peak alertness is around 10am.  Coordination around 2pm and peak cardiovascular and strength around 5pm.  I have heard these numbers thrown around before but couldn't find much on the origins.  Peak body low temperature is around 4am and peak body high temperature is around 7pm.  Perhaps they were able to coordinate it with this.  I for one have never felt strong in the morning when lifting weights.

Other organs also operate with a circadian rhythm.  The liver is a prime example.  Liver enzymes that help to convert calories to energy are stopped being produced at night.  It is producing enzymes to store energy. To take in a large meal before sleeping then disrupts this natural rhythm.  Like light, food then becomes a powerful environmental trigger for supporting the natural circadian rhythm.  This is becoming known as time restricted feeding.  There have been many health benefits shown for creating a smaller window for eating.  Instead of 16 hours of eating, trying to get to 10-12 and even 8 hours.  For myself, I've been trying to do 10-12 as this allows me to still support biking/lifting and a social life.  

Skeletal muscle makes up 40% of all tissues in our bodies.  It also contains biological clocks that influence circadian rhythm.  The last decade has brought lots of research on studying how exercise influences this rhythm and whether there truly is an optimal time of day for exercise.  There have been many studies of mice that show that exercise influences and enhance the health of the biological clocks, but to date no consensus has been shown at what time or what is "best."  Most studies have been done with endurance activities, but resistance exercises have also shown to have an impact on the genes and gene expression of the biological clocks.  

As humans we have built in rhythms.  These rhythms drive almost all aspects of our physiology.  Because we are so amazingly adaptable, we can fight against these natural rhythms for years, perhaps decades, before any "wear and tear" or signs of distress show.  There is a difference between adequate and optimal though.  Science is in agreement, for optimal health, the circadian rhythm must be respected and nourished.  

The 3 most powerful tools we control are LIGHT, FOOD and EXERCISE.  Establish routines for all three.  There will be arguing over the minutia, don't let this paralyze you.  Get 7-9 hours.  Eat in a certain window of time consistently.  Try to exercise everyday around the same time when possible.  Following these three principles will give perhaps the best foundation for a healthier lifestyle.    

7 Ways To Train Your Grip

Since the earliest strongman days, feats of grip strength have often been demonstrated.  Lifting weird or unstable objects have been synonymous with strength.  Many sports, from rock climbing to wrestling, rowing to Jiu-Jitsu,  require extraordinary grip strength to be successful.   Not only is grip a requirement for sports, it has a very high correlation with health and lifespan.  Grip strength continues to show a high correlation with low cardiovascular risk and longer lifespan.  Improvements in grip strength have been shown to decrease Blood Pressure by up to 10-15 units of measurement.  This was studied after early fighter pilots were passing out at higher speeds.  Pilots that gripped the joystick with an intense squeeze stayed conscious.  This act kept the blood flow to the brain adequate.

 Quite often in certain lifts, it is the grip that gives out first.  A secure grips gives the brain/body positive feedback that allows more power to be generated.  The grip is neurologically tied to the rotator cuff muscles.  Often the first thing I will do with a patient or athlete with a rotator cuff injury is to find safe ways to train the grip.

JL Holdsworth owner of Spot Athletics in Columbus OH did a great presentation at the 2018 SWIS in Toronto on training grip.  He outlined 7 ways to train it.  JL is wold champion power lifter and also competed at the highest level in grip competitions.  I was fortunate enough to meet him at a RPR seminar a few years ago and he did an excellent job presenting then as well.

7 Grip Training Methods

1.  Support.  This is your classic hold in hands for time.  Your classic deadlift or farmers carry is a good example.

2.  Crush.  The handshake.  Captains of Crush is a common tool.  The fingers are the movers and the thumb is support.

3.  Pinch.  Holding two 10lb weight plates together and not letting them fall apart.

4.  Friction.  This is something that can slide through your hands.  Climbing a rope.  Doing pull ups with a towel.

5.  Clamping/Crimping.  This is done almost exclusively with the fingers applying pressure into the palms.  Think rock climbing on small crimps and jersey tackling in football.

6. Forearms.  Flexion and Extension as well as pronation and supination.  The old school wrist roller held at arms length.  Holding a dumbbell and doing pronation and supination around the elbow joint.

7.  Wrist.  Ulnar and Radial deviation.  The wrist is the only thing moving.  A common way is to use a hammer and control the uneven weighted object into radial and ulnar movements.

Grip Training is not often scene in many strength programs.  As you can see there are several styles of grip training and each style has to numerous of examples to list.  But, what can't be overstated is the health impacts developing a strong grip can have and also its importance in sports.  For these reasons, grip should be given a higher level of importance then it usually is given.

Growing Focus by Eliminating Multitasking

To improve anything in life requires first and foremost focus.  Focus is the ability to block out all distractions and keep a singular target for the goal at hand.

"Keep the goal, the goal."  Dan John

In todays day and age, it almost has become a bragging right to talk about all the things you got done at once.  I listened to this podcast, returned emails, played with my kid and ate my breakfast.  It's similar to having pride in how little sleep you get.  

We carry around these tiny super computers that bring dings and vibrations when anyone in the world makes a comment or a like to a post or a photo.  We get included into group chats.  We get texts that are expected to be answered within a few minutes.  From this, it is very easy for a quick check to become a lost 5 minutes...15 minutes.  

But times they are a changin'. 

Multitasking has been shown to be pretty much a sugar coated way of saying I'm ok with doing sub par work in a few areas of my life.  There has been shown to be a noticeable loss of seconds when we switch tasks.  Perhaps talking on the phone and doing dishes may not be that big of deal (or is it, I'll come back to this) but driving and talking is. 

They have now shown that driving while texting is the equivalent of driving with 3x the legal alcohol limit.  Doing two cognitive tasks at once is impossible for the human brain.  In fact, there have been some research that even suggests that it is decreasing the brain volume size when we multitask a lot. 

Outside of the dangers of obviously driving or doing anything with machinery, I think the true cost of  multi tasking is that we are training ourselves to get distracted.   Habits are being formed.  A life is being adjusted and created.  We are what we allow ourselves to become, good or bad.  

People understand training.  If you want to get stronger, run longer, move faster, you have to train your body and it will happen.   The whole body will respond to different stimuli.  No gravity and your bones will become brittle.  Don't move your hips, you get immobile.  Ride your bike everyday, your aerobic system will improve.  Practice sitting at a desk for 8 hours a day every day for years and it will get good at sitting.  The body is magical this way.  It becomes what you do.  It gets good at what we repeatedly do.

Multitasking is training the brain to get slower, to perform less, to accept a different level of "good."  It's training your brain to be easily distracted to the next fleeing thought, emotion, feeling, ding and pretty bauble.  We are getting better at being busy with an outcome of less accomplished and what is  less quality.  Multitasking is allowing lack of quality into our life and I think it is creating  stress in our lives.

Back to our example of laundry and the phone.  Surely if anything applied to successful multitasking, something as benign as this, would fit the bill.  I'll politely disagree.  Again, you are teaching yourself to be distracted.  You are teaching yourself to lack focus.  Your Focus muscle is getting smaller and weaker.  

"The way we do small things is the way we do everything."  Robin Sharma

You may think your giving your family or friends your full attention, but again, research has shown you are not.  You are in two places in your mind.  Give me your attention is one of the most powerful acts and also one of the most prized possessions.  So when someone give you theirs, be respectful.  

My favorite story I ever heard about Kobe Bryant was from Kobe himself.  He talks about how he started to the process of training focus.  2:20 on the video.

When we give our focus to a task, good things will happen.  I personally think meditation is becoming so popular, not just because it works (it does) but because it's teaching focus.  What we train we get better at, remember.  There is carryover.  Focus allows us to be a better parent, partner, spouse, worker, craftsman, or friend.  It feels good to apply our focus on things.  We call it flow.  Whole seminars and books are written about finding flow.  Being in the present.  Flow is just the ability to focus and block out all distractions.  

"Concentrate all your thoughts on the work at hand.  The suns rays do not burn until brought to a focus."  Alexander Graham Bell

Every time you block out the task, stay distraction free, say no to multitasking and focus with singular intent, you will do a better job, have a better outcome.  Have a quicker outcome.  But, more importantly your focus muscle will strengthen.  

At first shoot for a few minutes.  If your reading, read and immerse yourself in the words.  What is it trying to say.  When thoughts show up, which they will.  Acknowledge them, flick it way and go back to reading.  After the few minutes, then address your thought.  Sometimes just writing down the thought, allows us to go back for another few minutes of solid focusing.  

Some practice tips are working in 15-20 min blocks.  Are bodies are almost programmed to move every 20 minutes through a process called creep or deformation.  After 20 min of not moving the soft tissue starts to mold to that position at the cellular level.  But if you get up and move before then, it restarts.  90 min to 2 hours are another chunks of time to be used, with a brake that can be anything from 5-30 minutes.

Focus isn't just about doing stuff though.  Lots of people need to focus on shutting off.  Truly just letting the mind relax.  Sitting and thinking about all the stuff you need to do is not taking a time out. Recover.  As the famous saying goes, time wasted wasn't wasted time.  

Practice no phones with people you are talking too.  Practice just allowing one task to be done at once.  See it to the end and move on.  Get better.  One of my big fears in life is to wake up in a 10 years and be no better at manual therapy. To be the same.  To literally have the old cliche of 10 years of work, but it was one year, repeated 10 times.  How easy it for the same days to become weeks, the weeks a year.

In our clinic, I try to make a conscious decision each appointment to take literally 3 seconds and remind myself, have a new experience.  Accumulate new experiences.  Give this patient my focus.  

I thought a lot about what I wanted 2019 to be more like then the previous year.  It was focus.  In a weird twist ala M. Night Shyamalan style, I realized 2018 had taught me it.  A torn achillies basically forced me into a hyper focus rehab mode.  2-3x a day dedicated rehab with lots of my free reading being directed towards tendon and tendon health.  The result was I feel more fit and faster then even before the tear.  My understanding of tendons has improve leaps and bounds.  The first 6 months just flew by.  Flow.  As the focus slowed down, regular life become more normal again, but for one change, the first time I've started to really notice when I'm distracted.  I think it had been a gradual hardly noticeable slide, until it wasn't.  I could make lots of excuses, owning a business, wife, kids, hobbies, friends, fitness, continueing education, etc...but thats what they are, excuses.  Focus on the task at hand.  Then move to the next.  Build that Focus muscle.  Feed it and it will grow, multitask and it will starve.  

I'll leave you with this quote from the great Philosopher Yoda...

Understanding that Context is King

Context:  The preceding or ending event, word or speech that gives clarity to the meaning.

Perspective:  An individual thought or attitude towards something, point of view.

We live in a world where perspectives have become the foundation for many peoples truths.  It's becoming paramount that your perspective is equal to my perspective.  Instead of trying to decide what your perspective is coming from, we just say you have your right to view it that way and I have the right to view it my way.  Go on about our days.

Perspective isn't the same as opinion.  My favorite vehicle is a 4Runner.  That is an opinion.  If I start telling people to never by a Chevy because they always break down and you are dumb if you buy one, my opinion is slowly evolving into a perspective.  That perspective can get dangerous if I start associating my perspective onto others.  Context is needed to change both.  I may have bought a Chevy it broke down and maybe I felt dumb for buying one.  Now I feel that this is universal.  I search for more people that have had similar circumstances and low and behold, my perspective was confirmed.  This is called confirmation bias.  Context would be looking for how many percentage of vehicles were broken down.  There is work that has to be done.  Context takes work.

You have to be careful with statistics when understanding context.  There were only 10 4Runners brought in to Toyota dealers for problems.  Wow, there were 100 Chevy's brought in.  I told you 4Runners were way better!  Dig Deeper.  There were only 20 4Runners on the road.  There were a  1000 Chevys.  This changes the complete picture.

Last year, did you hear Yanni or Laurel?  I heard Laurel clear as day.



My whole family heard Yanni.  I just assumed we have different way of interpreting the acoustic vibrations, maybe the anatomy of the ear had something to do with it.

Now this was a simple and silly difference, but with a little research the answer was found.  What if it had been a bigger thing?

This has been common meme in social media.

In reality, it should really be more like this.

I often play a game with my oldest kid about comparing things.  Are apples and oranges similar or different.  I want her thinking about context.  To ask better questions.  Are you asking if their both fruits or similar color?  Things we can eat or things that grow in Michigan?

Context requires work and thinking and research.  It also will eliminate misunderstandings, misconceptions and perhaps allow for better conversations and relationships.

Season of Discontentment and Confusion: Evaluating Life Choices

Discontentment can be defined as dissatisfaction with ones circumstances.  There can be an unhappiness and even some resentment that can be subtly put up with.

The discontentment is enough perhaps to drive change, but instead of change, we get confusion.   In confusion we get genuine ignorance, paralysis by analysis and most deadly a life of a hypocrite.  This then eventually leads us back to discontentment.

How does this cycle be broken?  How do we get clarity?

Intention

Intention is paying attention to your thoughts and your actions, but most important, defining your beliefs.  What do you hold valuable and true?  Then we choose our actions with intent to live out those beliefs.

I would suggest that all your new years resolutions take a back seat to sitting down and writing out not goals, but things you believe in.  It is a time to define your values.  They can be big or small, but it should be written down and evaluated.

How do we evaluate?  We use the simple filter of a question.

WHY?

First, define why you think it's important.  Then,  the much harder question, why you have not been doing it.  Judge your reasons.

1.  Make a list of things you believe in and find important.
2.  Why is that important to you.  Give it a story.  Story is what we tell ourselves deep down behind your reasons.
3.  Did you do this?  Yes.  Great job, move on.  No.  Why?  Figure out a few reasons.
4.  Make a plan to make a No a Yes.
5.  Look at your list 2x a Month

For Example from my own list.  
1.  Drink 100oz of water per day.
2.  Water is important for healthy body and muscle tissue.  My story.  I think better when I drink water.  I hate that feeling of a slight headache I get when I haven't drank enough.  I feel like I'm more prone to slight muscle strains when I don't drink as much and I have a way better emotional balance when I get to train unimpeded.  I'm just happier.
3.  Yes.

1.  Eat 2-3 serving of vegetables per day.
2.  Veggies supply a ton of micro nutrients that will be missing from your diet if you forgo.  My story.  I have less belly fat when I eat veggies.  It's pretty much filling up on good stuff more then bad stuff.  But deep down, it's probably more for vanity.
3.  No.  I pretty much sucked at this for the last few months.  I think I got derailed when I tried to do the vertical diet over late summer.  Except, I didn't give up any of my vices, beer with friends, donuts with kids, or the best burger in Grand Rapids (Louis Earl Butchery) by myself.  I had given up salads and cooking veggies in the oven.  Deeper, it's easy to be lazy.
4.  They say Americans eat the same 5 Veggies in their diet and they should be in the 20-30.  Going to make it an exploration game to get 2 new veggies per week till I get to 20.
5.  Keep track that at the end of the month I've attained new veggie exploration badge.

There are two examples to show how this process is done.  The more the beliefs we state are important match up to our actions and life, the more we can live in harmony with ourself and our world.  But, the opposite is also true.  The more we state something is important and the more we don't do what we think is true, the more discontentment arises.  Discontentment can be a good thing if it drives change. When we don't have intention, when we just keep going forward to tomorrow,  we will start to be a person that we probably won't like in the mirror.  If the discontentment does drive change, but we haven't taken the time to figure out why we aren't living our beliefs, we will invariably be in confusion and just go back to the status quo, thus driving the discontentment deeper.

Take a week if need be.  Look at your typical day and all the things you do now.  Evaluate all of them.

1.  Get 8 hours of sleep
2.  Drink water and pinch of salt on waking
3.  Drink 3 shots of espresso
4.  Be positive with the kids, no yelling at them.
5.  Eat only protein for breakfast
6.  Offer up something healthy to the kids, but be content with eating anything.
6.  Shower
7.  Go to the bathroom
8.  Brush teeth
9.  Don't listen to music in the car if I take the kids to school, so we have a conversation.
10.  Walk the dog if I'm not taking kids to school
11.  Enjoy the work day.  Become better at my craft.
12.  Be present with every single patient.  Learn something each encounter.  Why did last visit work or not work.
13.  Return 2 emails
14.  Drink lots of water at work
15.  Healthy snack somewhere in there at work.
16.  Cook dinner
17.  Hang with kids
18.  Read/write/recovery
19.  Hang with Friends 1-2x a week
20.  Night vitamins

These are what popped in my head quickly.  Each day for some people will be unique.  Mine is pretty much routine every single day.  Then evaluate what you wrote down.  Some will be beliefs like for me, drinking water upon waking.  Some will be responsibilities, like take the kids to school.  But from that task comes a belief.  That the time with them is important and great conversations can come from that time.  So I don't turn the radio on.

The more we can line up all our choices with our beliefs, the more congruency we will have and the more peace our days will enjoy.  Hopefully in 2019 you will be living a life of intention and clarity.

Blessing for 2019