How To Plan For The Unplannable

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Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• It’s easy to plan great new health drives, and it’s even easier to fall off the wagon along the way

  • Today’s main feature gives three rules for always being able to follow through (unless in truly, incredibly extreme circumstances)

  • Key ideas include systemic redundancies, advanced troubleshooting, and more useful self-correction

• Getting kids (and/or grandkids!) to enjoy healthy snacks can be a challenge, but it’s a rewarding one.

  • Today’s sponsor, Skout Organic, has tasty whole-food snack bars (always 7 ingredients or fewer, all simple) with a wide range of flavors sure to please all the family. Give them a try!

Read on to learn more about these things, or click here to visit our archive

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🛣️ MAIN FEATURE

How To Always Follow Through

The thing is, much like a different Robert wrote, "The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley", and when we have a plan and the unexpected occurs, we often find ourselves in a position of “well then, now what?”

This goes for New Year’s Resolutions that lasted until around January the 4th, and it goes for “xyz in a month” plans of diet, exercise, or so forth.

We’ve written before on bolstering flagging motivation when all is as expected but we just need an extra boost:

How To Keep On Keeping On… Long Term!

…but what about when the unexpected happens?

First rule: wear a belt and suspenders

Not literally, unless that’s your thing. But you might have heard this phrase from the business world, and it applies to healthful practices too:

If your primary plan fails, you need a second one already in place.

In business, we see this as “business continuity management”. For example, your writer here, I have backups for every important piece of tech I own, Internet connections from two different companies in case one goes down, and if there’s a power cut, I have everything accessible and sync’d on a fully-charged tablet so I can complete my work there if necessary. And yes, I have low-tech coffee-brewing equipment too.

In health, we should be as serious. We all learned back in 2020 that grocery stores and supply chains can fail; how do we eat healthily when all that is on sale is an assortment of random odds and ends? The answer, as we now know because hindsight really is 2020 in this case, is to keep a well-stocked pantry of healthy things with a long shelf life. Also a good stock of whatever supplements we take, and medicines, and water. And maintain them and rotate the stock!

And what of exercise? We must not rely on gyms, we can use and enjoy them sure, but we should have at least one good go-to routine for which we need nothing more than a bit of floorspace at home.

If you’re unsure where to start with that one, we strongly recommend this book that we reviewed recently:

Science of Pilates: Understand the Anatomy and Physiology to Perfect Your Practice – by Tracy Ward

Second rule: troubleshoot up front

With any given intended diet or exercise regime or other endeavor, we must ask ourselves: what could prevent me from doing this? Set a timer for at least 10 minutes, and write down as many things as possible. Then plan for those.

You can read a bit more about some of this here, the below article was written about facing depression and anxiety, but if you can enact your plans when unmotivated and fearful, then you will surely be able to enact them when not, so this information is good anyway:

When You Know What You “Should” Do (But Knowing Isn’t The Problem)

Third rule: don’t err the same way twice

We all screw up sometimes. To err is, indeed, human. So to errantly eat the wrong food, or do so at the wrong time, or miss a day’s exercise session etc, these things happen.

Just, don’t let it happen twice.

Once is an outlier; twice is starting to look like a pattern.

How To Break Out Of Cycles Of Self-Sabotage, And Stop Making The Same Mistakes

Take care!

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❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE

Healthy Snack Bars Your Kids (And You) Will Actually Enjoy

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Give Skout a try today and get 20% off your first purchase with the code 10ALMONDS.

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📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

Eat to Beat Disease: The Body’s Five Defence Systems and the Foods that Could Save Your Life – by Dr. William Li

Dr. William Li asks the important question: is your diet feeding disease, or defeating it?

Because everything we put in our bodies makes our health just a little better—or just a little worse. Ok, sometimes a lot worse.

But for most people, when it comes to diet, it's a death of a thousand cuts of unhealthy food. And that's what he looks to fix with this book.

The good news: Dr. Li (while not advocating for unhealthy eating, of course), focuses less on what to restrict, and more on what to include. This book covers hundreds of such healthy foods, and ideas (practical, useful ones!) on incorporating them daily, including dozens of recipes.

He mainly looks at five ways our food can help us with...

1. Angiogenesis (blood vessel replacement)

2. Regeneration (of various bodily organs and systems)

3. Microbiome health (and all of its knock-on effects)

4. DNA protection (and thus slower cellular aging)

5. Immunity (defending the body while also reducing autoimmune problems)

The style is simple and explanatory; Dr. Li is a great educator. Reading this isn't a difficult read, but you'll come out of it feeling like you just did a short course in health science.

Bottom line: if you'd like an easy way to improve your health in an ongoing and sustainable way, then this book can help you do just that.

Click here to check out Eat To Beat Disease, and eat to beat disease!

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The 10almonds Team