Conventional Wisdom

Last time we talked about quality of consciousness. This time let’s talk about the quality of our life, conscious choices, and the Black Box of Conventional Wisdom.

With Halloween in the rearview mirror and Thanksgiving growing larger on the road ahead, I can’t help but reflect on Holidays.

There seems to be an ever-widening gap between a quality life and Holidays.

Over my lifetime, holidays have seemed to devolve from honoring, celebrating, and giving thanks to variations on the theme of bingeing. According to the National Retail Foundation, Americans spent $10.6 billion on Halloween in 2022. That’s a lot of candy.

It seems to me a weird twist on so called American values to teach our most precious, our future generations, our very children to go around the neighborhood and literally filling grocery bags with the cheapest, most gross junk food – pure sugar.

Obesity including childhood obesity and diabetes with children 8 or 10 years old or younger, at epidemic, plague levels.

And yet we have in this great country of ours (the biggest, most powerful economy on the face of the earth) obese / overweight, even diabetic parents taking Rx drugs to try to control their blood sugar leading their very own children down the same horribly destructive path. Is any- one making a conscious adult decision? This is yet another example of the power of the Black Box of Conventional Wisdom – the power of marketing.

And yet the vast majority of America seems onboard with non-stop T.V. ads for Halloween junk / candy and supermarket aisles so jammed with stacks of candy you can hardly squeeze your cart by.

With a diet as toxic as this, is it any wonder that America, the wealthiest country on the planet, has the lowest educational level of the top 20 economies in the world?

Sugar Addiction

Yet with the lowest health-literacy, the highest obesity rate, and the highest diabetes rate, most people seem to be ok with stuffing our precious children with sugar. Is teaching children how to binge on sugar the path to a brighter, healthier, more productive future America? Is sugar addiction the path to a quality life?

Please correct me if I am off base, but bingeing on sugar seems absolutely antithetical to quality of life.

Is trashing our health and our body with sugar binges the only kind of celebration we can think of?

Clearly major corporations raking in $10.6 billion on a single day are only encouraged to produce ever bigger bags of cheap candy.

Halloween is the first salvo, the first major insult to American health to kick off two months of binges called the holiday season.

I realize concepts like “think for yourself” and “Listen to your body” are foreign to most people trapped in the Black Box of Conventional Wisdom, knee-jerk behavior.

Or noticing that the first big sugar binge of the year kicks off cold and flu season. In fact, I just read an article in Financial Times that due to covid compromising so many people’s immune systems, this will be the worst cold, flu, and upper respiratory season in years.

As I have shared so many times before, the vast majority of health problems are self-inflicted.

Nothing compromises the human immune system more than sugar in all its forms.

As I just recently shared, sugar in all its forms (including alcohol) is massively dehydrating.

Prepare for the Holidays

With Thanksgiving rapidly approaching, what can we do to avoid gaining weight and getting sick over the holiday season?

1. Put special emphasis on getting and staying well hydrated. Drink water at room temperature – you will drink a lot more water. Have bottles of water wherever you and your family spend time. In the kitchen. In the T.V. room. In the car. On your desk at the office or home office. At parties or family gatherings, drink sparkling water with lemon or lime. One of my favorite bumper stickers: “It’s OK not to drink”.
2. Stick with your 2 Joe Dillon Shakes a day routine. Start your day with a JDD shake plus Super Omega-3 fish oil (6-12 capsules per day), Vitamin D (2-4 7,000iu capsules per day), and at least 3,000 mg of Vitamin C with Quercetin spread throughout your day as vitamin C is water soluble. Kick-start your recovery from your workout (30-45 minutes of Heavy Hands walking 3-5 times per week) with your second JDD shake with 30 minutes of completing your workout.
3. Stick with high quality animal protein and healthy fat (in addition to your Super Omega-3 fish oil) saturated fat like butter, coconut oil, whole eggs and fatty red meat and mono-unsaturated fat like olive oil on your salads. For lunch and/or dinner: steak and steamed broccoli or asparagus – both smothered in butter. Salt to taste (sea salt). Two of my favorite dinners are steak (ribeye) and salad with olive oil and sea salt. Or bacon and eggs. Notice, we are keeping our carbs (sugar) to a minimum (despite the Black Box of Conventional Wisdom pushing high glycemic load whole grains. You want your fasting insulin under 5.0.
4. Stick to your 3-5 workouts per week routine. As you know, I was born in 1944. I workout at least an hour a day 6 days a week. Use it or lose it.
5. Sleep at least 7 hours a night. More is better. Go to bed early enough that you wake up naturally before your alarm goes off. So you are well rested enough that you don’t need any coffee. What a concept! I don’t drink coffee.
6. When you go to parties or holiday functions, avoid going hungry. Avoid leaving yourself vulnerable. Do a JDD shake before you go. That way you can pick and choose at the buffet or dinner. Immediately get your sparkling water and lime. A plate of animal protein like chicken skewers and/or meat balls. And raw vegetables like bell peppers and/or stuffed mushrooms. Then, move away from the food table. Keep pounding the sparkling water or herb tea, if it is cold.  

Pick your spots. One or two cheat or treat meals per week during the holidays is reasonable. Notice: I said cheat meals NOT cheat days.

We live in the greatest country on earth. We have so much to be thankful for. There are more mature, more meaningful ways to express your gratitude for your blessings that pigging out and/or getting drunk.

Your body and your family will thank you in both the short term and in the long run. Be smart. Play the long game. Want a crystal clear, super quick brain at eighty? Want to still be hiking Yosemite and/or the Grand Canyon at eighty? Start now.

Your body does not lie.

Are you going to be lean and fit to start the new year? Or a train wreck?  

Are you going to make conscious, deliberate quality decisions?  

Are you going to be trapped in the knee-jerk world of the Black Box of Conventional Wisdom?  

A quality mantra: who are you when no one is looking?

Thank you for listening. And thank you for your support.

Let’s work together to make the world a little better place each and every day.

Joe



P.S.: Today (November 6, 2020) I walked 3 miles along the beach which included 1,000 stairs. Notice: I said stairs NOT steps. That’s 1,000 stairs up and 1,000 stairs down. Without panting