Living Skillfully: Your Mind and Health

This is the first in a series of posts about maximising your health with lifestyle changes. Over and over in study after study, these seven health behaviors are associated with improved health and longer life. First, I’ll summarize the seven, in no particular order, and then in future posts discuss each health behavior in more [...]

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Your body is built and maintained out of the food you eat. So it’s not exactly a surprise that nutrition and physical health are closely tied together.
And since your brain is part of your body, your mental performance is also related to what you eat. Likewise, your emotional state and mood are affected by what [...]

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Before I leave the topic of nutrition (for now) and move on to exercise, I’d like to expand on something I said in Nutrition and Health: Why knowledge is not enough. I talked there about how we sometimes manage our moods with food. Why does this even work?
Well, it seems we are wired to experience [...]

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When I was at school, I was a skinny nerd. (I’m still a skinny nerd, actually, though I’m working on the “skinny” bit, and at my age “nerd” mostly means “gets paid more”.)
I did play a sport – field hockey – mainly for the sake of not disappointing my dad, who loved sport and [...]

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One thing, I think, that often puts people off starting exercise is the idea that they need to exercise like a professional athlete in order to get any benefit: Join a gym, go jogging every morning at 5am, fill the garage with exercise machines, or do a Marine-style “boot camp” programme.
If your state of [...]

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