9 Tips to Lose Weight No Matter However Busy You Are

If you’re looking to lose weight, having a busy schedule can make the process infinitely harder, but it still shouldn’t be used as an excuse not to lose weight. That’s why this guide on how to lose weight even if you’re really busy is so fantastically motivating. We’ve highlighted a few of the tips below, but you’ll benefit immensely by reading the full article.

1. Add strength training to your routine. Even if you focus on just one muscle group a day and do three different exercises, (three sets of 15 for that muscle group) you’ll benefit.

2. Put yourself first.  Stressful situations can take your focus away from properly caring for yourself.

3. Eat whole, fresh foods in a rainbow of colors. Generally, the fewer foods you consume that come in a box or have a label, the healthier you’re eating.

4. Eat mindfully. Don’t watch TV and eat. Pay attention to what you’re eating.

5. Have a purpose for doing all this. Give yourself a fresh start. If it helps, start with the end in mind and think about how you want to feel when this year concludes

6. Set a simple routine and stick to it. One great way to kill your confidence is to constantly start and stop your fitness regimen.

7. Set rules that work for you. Figure out how often you will work out, the bad habits you are willing to give up and the good habits you will start.

8. Be open to surprising yourself. Think about how you feel when you finish an intense workout, run a mile when you never have before, finish a new weight lifting routine, or venture to a new fitness class you haven’t tried before.

9. Don’t chase perfect, chase perfectly healthy. Chasing some idealized vision of perfect doesn’t set people up to have healthy self-images or achievable goals.

9 Tips to Lose Weight No Matter How Busy You Are | Mind Body Green

While it does require a degree of sacrifice and work to lose weight, it doesn’t have to be a slow and onerous process. Four Ways to Lose Weight Fast

Featured photo credit: Women doing stretching in fitness clubvia Shutterstock

Jill Harness is a freelance writer, amateur chef, and a sucker for animals. She writes for a number of websites, including Rue The Day, InventorSpot, Oddee and Mental Floss. While not typing on her computer, Jill spends her time playing video games, cuddling with her dog and visiting Disneyland and the San Diego Zoo.

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4 Shortcuts for Becoming a Business Pro (No Matter How Amateur You Feel Right Now).

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30sec Tip: Hit the Target No Matter What.

When you start doing a task, identify the goal you must reach before you can stop. Hit you target no matter what.

Many people think that setting a goal destination is having a dream that is there in the far distant future, but will never be attained. This proves to be a self-fulfilling prophesy because of two things. Firstly, that the goal isn’t specifically defined enough in the first place, and secondly, it remains a remote dream waiting for action which is never taken.

Defining your goal destination is something that you need to take some time to think carefully about. The following steps should get you started on a journey to those goals.

9 Steps to Define your Goal Destination and Devise a Plan to Get There

Featured photo credit:  avenue in modern city via Shutterstock

Brian is a Lifehacker who covers all sorts of tips for life. He is also fascinated with new technology.

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Shea Hembrey sculpts dark matter in a new gallery show

Shea Hembrey is 100 artists in one. At TED2011, he shared how he staged an international biennial containing works from 100 artists … all of whom he invented himself.

The talk has spun into his first New York gallery exhibit, featuring work he made—this time as himself. The exhibit is called “Dark Matters,” and it’s on view at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery through October 20.

“When I spoke at TED in Long Beach in 2011, Gary and Sarah Wolkowitz were in the audience and their son, Bryce, now represents my work,” Hembrey tells the TED Blog.

The exhibit focuses on his fascination for the past 20 years: dark matter.

“For nearly two decades, I have continually pondered dark matter and dark energy—which together account for over 95% of the cosmos,” Hembrey says in the gallery materials. “The question of these mysteries has repeatedly surfaced in my imagery over the years.”

After the jump, watch Shea’s wonderful TEDTalk and see some of the pieces from his new show.

And here, some of the works from Hembrey’s new exhibit:

When Eyes Are Closed—Dark Rain, 2012, acrylic on board, 36 x 48 inches.

This close-up is from a piece in the series What You See When Your Eyes Are Closed. Hembrey explains in the gallery materials, “When I first heard about dark matter, the first visual I immediately connected to this mystery was what I see when my eyes are closed: that mercurial, unfixed, shifting darkness.”

Raft, 2012, guinea feathers, redbud sticks, lead, amethyst, chrysocolla, vanadinite, azurite, malachite, fluorite, quartz, selenite, nickel, calcite, garnet, citrine, turquoise, mica, tourmaline, topaz, and silk thread, 13 x 21.5 x 21.5 inches.

This work is also one of Hembrey’s Universal Portraits, which he calls “simple sculptures that are lyrical models of the cosmos.”

Radius, 2012, wheat straw, wood, foam, plastic, paper, screws, and acrylic paint, 83.75 x 83.75 x 27 inches.

Hembrey says of his series Strewn, “Made of straw, [it] contemplates the ever-present well of dark energy.

Brick (celestial), 2012, burnt cork, pins, nails, moonstones, one piece of thread, ink, and acrylic paint, 5 x 12 x 8.5 inches.

Another of Hembrey’s Universal Portraits.

To read much more about Shea Hembrey, visit his website. And to find out information on his exhibit, head to the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery site.

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Early Riser or Night Owl: Why It Doesn’t Really Matter

I bet you’ve heard this quote before:

“The early bird gets the worm…” – William Camden

Perhaps you’ve heard it in reference to your own sleeping habits. There are numerous articles on the web where writers tell you that one of the best ways to become more productive is to get up early. By doing so, you get a jumpstart on the rest of the world and reap the benefits of a quiet work environment — among other things.

Yet for the amount of articles that all about getting up early, there are many people who struggle to do just that. I’m one of them. I’ve tried time and time again to get up early, to “reset my internal clock” to make that happen…and I can’t seem to make it stick. While failure isn’t the worst thing in the world when it comes to this (and other efforts, for that matter), after trying to become an early riser more times than I can remember, this quote came to mind:

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” – Albert Einstein

Now I wasn’t doing the exact same thing each time I made an effort to change my sleeping and waking habits, but I realized that the act of trying to change my habits was the problem. That’s where the insanity was coming into play. I was frustrated that I simply couldn’t do what I thought I should be able to do — and I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working.

And then it came to me: I’m not meant to be an early riser. I am a night owl and I needed to embrace that rather than fight it.

Further to that, I examined how somebody who’s a night owl could essentially “hack their day” in the same way as an early riser does. Perhaps not surprisingly, the same benefits that apply to early risers can belong to night owls too.

If you’re up past the bedtimes of those in your home, then you’re going to get the same sense of quiet that the early riser gets. Plus, if you woke up later in the morning, you won’t be as tired when you get down to whatever you plan to do with that quiet time because you’ve been awake for far longer than the early bird will be. As someone who does a lot of writing, I have found that I’m at my best in a creative sense later in the day, once all of my essential actions and errands have been taken care of. I call it my “Finally Time” — I finally have the clarity of thought, quiet I need and time I want to get my great work done.

While many are up at the crack of dawn and getting an early start to their day, I’m sleeping. And I’m no further behind because of it.

You see, I’ve already done the things that I needed to get a jump on the previous night. I’m no less productive than the early riser because I did what they do in the morning hours during the late hours the day beforehand; I am being proactive in my own way.

The notion that early risers are more productive than night owls is a myth. They just do “more productive” differently. How they allocate their time is the key.

I started off by offering a very famous quote…but there’s more to it than what I initially delivered. My favourite addition to that quote is:

“The early bird gets the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese.” – Jeremy Paxman

To some that may mean that you should proceed with caution rather than be first into the fray, but I tend to look at it differently.

There is no advantage to being an early riser over being a night owl when it comes to increasing your productivity. It’s all in how you handle what comes at you – day and night – and making sure that you handle in it in a way that suits you and your lifestyle. If you find that you like getting up early, go for it. If you don’t, then don’t change that. Instead, put your efforts into making sure that your are being productive rather than when you are being more productive.

Listen to your mind and body and drive yourself to do more when it works for you. Don’t drive yourself insane trying to do anything that doesn’t.

(Photo credit: Time to Wake Up via Shutterstock)

Mike Vardy is a writer, speaker, and "productivityist". You can follow him on Twitter, listen to him regularly on his podcast, ProductiVardy, and read more from him at MikeVardy.com and at Vardy.me.

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Making matter come alive: Lee Cronin on TED.com

Before life existed on Earth, there was just matter, inorganic dead “stuff.” How improbable is it that life arose? And — could it use a different type of chemistry? Using an elegant definition of life (anything that can evolve), chemist Lee Cronin is exploring this question by attempting to create a fully inorganic cell using a “Lego kit” of inorganic molecules — no carbon — that can assemble, replicate and compete. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2011, July 2011, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Duration: 15:11.)

Watch Lee Cronin’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.

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It’s Not a Matter Of Priority, It’s a Matter of Attention

Priority

I work in a large company where we “prioritize” everything. In fact, we are so good at priortizing that we have multiple priorities at any given time. And even after that we have long meetings to discuss what priorities are the most important. It feels like we are trying to meet the demands of everyone else and not our projects.

Coming from the “cult-like” GTD background I have been shaped to believe that there is no such things as priorities, that something is important or it isn’t and that we can intuitively figure it out without a 1, 2, 3 – A, B, C type of prioritization code. Yet, the masses of people in the corporate world hang onto prioritization for dear life and with it do work that may not be important to them at all.

I’m somewhat simple when it comes to figuring things out. That’s why I like definitions. It’s hard to talk about something without knowing what that thing means. So, priorities are:

“Precedence, especially established by order of importance or urgency.”

So, a priority is a list of stuff in order of what is most important. But important to who? And how do we know what is more important than something else.

My wife and I discuss (argue) about what is more important to me during the week. Is it programming? Writing? How about washing the dishes? What is my highest priority? Also, during work meetings we talk about how we will “balance and manage our priorities” and how we need to “prioritize” our work.

Like I said before, I have ingrained and strong opinions about prioritization and the lack of it. I truly believe that something should either have your attention or it shouldn’t. I don’t think that we really need to put stars and colors next to our tasks to show how important they are. We need to find our attention and stick to it.

I really do like what Mr. Merlin Mann speaks about in his time and attention talks. He believes (and pontificates) that all we have is time and attention and that priorities may not really work. What it comes down to is understanding what is important in your life and then devoting attention and focus to it; not to worry about what has a bigger star next to it and what order it falls into.

Your A, B, C – 1, 2, 3 system may help you sort the important things in your list of tasks, but I know that just taking a quick read through what is on your plate will easily show you where your time and attention needs to be drawn to. And that is the key. We need to concentrate on what is important to us: not what some external force deems as important.

Applying attention to what you and outside entities have agreed on as a priority (this can be work, family, or even friends), and not to what you feel is more important is a sure fire way to not pay attention to what your calling is. In fact, this difference between what is important to you and what is important to other entities is grounds to grow some awesome resentments, produce little, and grow bring about procrastination.

So, instead of listing out what you think is important try to step back and identify the top 5 to 7 things that are important to you. Then throw out the rest. Seriously, if you have more than 7 “Areas of Responsibility” on your plate you are probably spreading yourself too thin. I know that I would be.

So to be a good sport, here are my top areas of attention:

HusbandFriendPersonal and spiritual HealthEmployee of Erie InsuranceEditor at LifehackSoftware development and writing

Anything outside of that is just cruft or fun. I know it’s hard to swallow, especially if you were or are a “yes man” like I once was, but the fact is that you can only devote your attention to so much, and that has to be devoted to what you deem important. If you can cut out all the excess stuff that is in your life, you know, the stuff that you are failing at “prioritizing”, then you can get some real work done and even become a better person while doing it.

Instead of prioritizing all of your work try identifying was is totally important to you apply your attention to that.

Chris is a developer, writer, tech enthusiast, and husband. He holds a degree in MIS and CMPSC from Penn State Behrend. Chris is also interested in personal productivity and creativity and how to utilize technology to get more things done. Check out his tech writing at androinica.com where he writes about Android.

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