Just watched a very interesting talk by Dave Asprey, who became a millionaire at a very young age and actually sold the first item ever on the world wide web. He made millions as a very young man, and he lost millions too. He was also obese at a very young age and didn’t even realise you could walk without pain until he was in his mid-twenties, he’d had arthritis so long and so early in life.

He went through a lot of changes in his life, in the search for improvement. He learned yoga, he travelled to the far East, he meditated in a cave, in isolation, for four days, to see what was going on in his head, and he questioned everything … everything.

Here’s a link to the video, but I’m not sure it’ll be up for long so if you’re interested you should probably take a look soon.

There’s an untrained dog in your head!

Some of his findings, which he talked about, are very simple yet very profound. He spoke about the fact that the brain is very much like an untrained dog, jumping up and down all the time, hyperactive, and easily frightened. It also wants you to eat everything! Which, in his case, led to early obesity. And it never gives you a moment’s peace.

His way of training his ‘dog’ included allowing it to eat plenty of ‘good’ fats in his diet. These fats are not just good fats, they’re good in the sense that they provide lots of energy. And energy’s what we crave, right? So eat plenty of good fats and those cravings (the dog jumping up and down, desperate for more food at every opportunity), sesttle down. The dog relaxes and becomes much more like a trained dog than an excitable puppy.

And it’s this understanding of dietary facts that allowed him to drop an enormous amount of weight, but not only that, to keep it off for good. He’d lost weight many times, but like almost everybody in that situation, he gained it all back, and then some. This time, having learned the importance of eating more naturally, the weight disappeared, never to be seen again. Worth keeping in mind, next time you feel you’re getting suckered into believing all the hype about keeping well away from fat, and cutting back on it at every opportunity. You crave it for a very good reason – it’s good for you. Don’t fight it! As I’ve said before on this blog, fat is an essential part of a healthy diet, and perhaps the key to long-lasting weight control.

Gratitude – surprising remedy for insomnia

Another very important point he made was the importance of gratitude. He teaches his kids to be grateful by getting them to try to come up with three things to be grateful for every night, at bedtime. And he made the very good point that it might just be that “I’m grateful this lousy day is over, hopefully tomorrow won’t be so bad”. Not high on the traditional list of items to be grateful for, but if you’re grateful for it, it counts!

And he even teaches them the importance of failure. Too often we shy away from failure like it’s actually going to kill us. Wrong attitude! Failure is a stepping stone to success. He asks them to tell him about one of their failures every night, and if they can’t come up with one he acts really miserable till they think of something. When they do, he’s ecstatic! Because every ‘failure’ holds the seed of another success! And only by failing can we learn. And of course it’s true. We only progress by making mistakes, and learning from them. So encouraging kids to have a healthy regard for failure is a very positive move indeed.

So basically, he was talking about gaining a new perspective on things. We all have to deal with food cravings. For some of us it’s harder to bear, and for some it leads to lifelong obesity if it’s not properly dealt with, but for nearly everyone it’s at least uncomfortable. Changing our attitude to diet, and changing our actual diet, can bring the ‘dog’ in our brain under control. And without a huge expenditure of will power either. You only really need lots of will power when what you’re doing goes against logic, or against your natural urges.

And learning to foster a healthy attitude of gratitude can be enormously beneficial to our mental health. If we go to sleep feeling grateful for something (for anything, actually), the dog becomes calm and restful and we sleep better. What might have been an unsatisfying and fitful sleep becomes a truly restful, healthful slumber. Definitely something to think about next time you’re tossing and turning and unable to drop off to sleep.

A talk that was fairly short, but was a real page-turner

I’ve watched and listened to many talks on the internet over the years, but this was one that was relatively short (about a half hour) and really, really interesting. In fact, I was going to watch the first few minutes and come back to it in a day or two, but it was like a real page-turner of a book … once you started it you could barely put it down. Thanks, Dave, I loved listening to your talk, and I learned from it too. That’s two things that very often don’t go together.