Once upon a time. I remember my dad coming home from work, very proud of himself. He announced that he had discovered a new way to lose weight. (He readily admitted that credit for this discovery should not be his, rather it belonged to a client of his).
The technique? To eat a carrot before every meal.
I groaned. The pedestal that my father had been firmly placed on, had already started to shrink.
The problem was, at the time, I simply didn’t realise how ingenious this idea was. Not only was it easy to implement, this strategy allowed the filling the tummy of the dieter, it worked out their jaw (proven stress relief), produced saliva to help avert tooth decay, provided soluble fibre (carries away cholesterol and helps regular bowel movements), supplies bountiful levels beta-carotene (the vegetarian form of vitamin A) and delivered a sense of achievement (it’s no small feat to rabbit through three carrots a day).
Thinking about it now, as I eat carrots with my meal, it makes me realise that all solutions are that simple. All of them. There is no wheel that needs to be reinvented.
It could be eight glasses of water a day (the cheapest way to glowing skin, better concentration and perfect blood pressure) or walking briskly a few times a week (hello healthy spine and improved cardiovascular function). Or even sleeping by 10am (Chinese medicine, in particular, speaks volumes about which organs function optimally when we sleep at a specific time)
It’s not about getting rid of a bad habit (too much cheesecake), rather about super-imposing a good one (carrots, anyone?)
It is so deceptively simple that I don’t understand why more people aren’t doing it. Maybe because we think it’s too hard – like the struggle against what just hasn’t been working.
When you toil endlessly against what doesn’t serve, you invertedly put attention there. Where attention goes, energy flows. It’s the reason why cancer tumours grow exponentially in the first few weeks after diagnosis.
So energise the good stuff, the stuff the works, the stuff that is really, really, really easy to do, and let go of the rest.
It’s about ease and effortlessness. It’s about alignment. It’s about being receptive to the magic that is Universal flow.
And which good habit am I going to be superimposing on a bad one? To call as much as is introvertedly possible, instead of Whatsapping.
After just two days, I’m amazed how the voices in my head are already getting quieter.
Maybe they are eating carrots too.
