DIARY OF A RELUCTANT RUNNER

Pandemic fluff is real y’all. This past year I put on some weight. I’m not gonna say how much, but let’s just say that I weigh the most I’ve ever weighed outside of that one time that I was pregnant. And how disappointing is it that after a week of walking every day and two weeks of running that I have GAINED two pounds? Very. I’ll just tell myself muscle weighs more than fat, even though I am not seeing any muscles yet.

Real talk though, my second week of running was very weird, I’ll break it down for you…

DIARY OF A RELUCTANT RUNNER

When I was in junior high I had a gym teacher that would make us run a mile through the woods behind the school. We had a nice trail that wound around the wooded acres surrounding the school, starting and ending at the track. He would sneak through the woods, popping out behind a tree to catch us walking, which I and my friends always were.

I hated running. Hated it. I was in great shape too, I was a dancer and jumping was my favorite part of class. But running always found me out of breath with a painful…

“Dogs aren’t as important as people! Kill the dogs!”

“No — dogs are innocent, and they are just victims of circumstance, they didn’t put themselves in the car!”

The shouting match continued as I showed my students increasingly weirder scenarios: would you choose for the driverless car to self-sacrifice a car full of robbers rather than swerve and kill one older adult? What if it was a car full of cats? What if the older adult was crossing against the light?

These scenarios come from a test called the Moral Machine, created by scientists at MIT to crowdsource answers for…

Have you ever had the experience of having a new routine go fabulously only to have it fizzle out after a week or two? Or had a strict diet protocol feel cleansing and nourishing at first, only to start feeling ravenous and depleted out of nowhere?

I know I have. It’s frustrating and confusing. But the past few days, I’ve been reading and listening to the work of Alisa Vitti, a women’s hormone expert, who has been blowing my mind. She points out that all of the wellness practices that call for grinding out the exact same routine every day…

“Mom, are you going through a Tumblr phase?!” my seventeen-year-old daughter squealed at me over dinner last Sunday.

Maybe I am — maybe at 43 years old, I’m having some sort of return to adolescence. A midlife crisis? But this doesn’t feel like a crisis, it feels like a hack, a trick. I asked my daughter to explain what an aesthetic was to her very clueless and confused father.

“Well, this is a terrible word, but it works… it’s a vibe” she said spreading her hands expressively. “It’s more than a visual, it’s the feeling that comes from the visual.”

…

Changing a habit is simple in concept but difficult in practice. But I found a hack that might help you too, and it’s finding your keystone habit.

A keystone habit is one change that you can focus on, which will start a chain reaction to changing other habits. Like the keystone in an archway, it holds up and supports lots of other little habits. And if you are trying to change all the other little habits but neglecting your keystone, that can also make change more difficult.

If you’re still not sure, here’s my story of finding a keystone this…

She ran the campus clinic and was married to my graduate advisor. Both at the top of their game, both doctors (she an MD, he a Ph.D.). He was a wunderkind obtaining multiple appointments fresh out of grad school, she oversaw the health of the entire university. They were the “perfect” family. Two kids: one boy, one girl. Both children were gifted and polite. A house right out of Dwell magazine. They exercised together as a family, going on bike rides to the farmer’s market and week-long canoe trips for spring break. …

Whether it’s starting a practice or sticking with it, this will help

Meditation takes work, and there are often things that get in the way. These things can interrupt you during your practice, and they can also keep you from starting at all.

Whether you are a Buddhist or not, we all can agree that the Buddha had some excellent advice for meditation, and most of what you hear these days about mindfulness or meditation came from him. One lesser-known lesson was about the things that may negatively impact your practice. He called them the Five Hindrances. …