Gretchen Rubin recommends
“Act the way I want to feel:”
…often we feel because of the way we act. So by acting the way we wish we felt, we can change our emotions – a strategy that is uncannily effective.
Second, the world’s reaction to us is quite influenced by the way we act toward the world. For example, in situation evocation, we spark a response from people that reinforces a tendency we already have — for example, if I act irritable all the time, the people around me are going to treat me with less patience and helpfulness, which will, in turn, stoke my irritability. If I can manage to joke around, I’ll evoke a situation in which the people around me were more likely to joke around, too.
This is also the light side of the
obesity network.
If we are influenced by our friends to become obese or not,
we also influence our friends.
Which leads, as always, to the same conclusion: that even though it’s tempting sometimes to think that I’d be much happier if other people would behave differently toward me, the only person whose behavior I can change is myself. If I want people to be friendlier to me, I must be friendlier. If I want my husband to be tender and romantic, I must be tender and romantic. If I want our household atmosphere to be light-hearted, I must be light-hearted.
And if we want our spouses, friends, neighbors, community to be health weight,
we can help them become so by doing it ourselves first.
And invite our friends to exercise, to pass up the donut for an orange,
to go outside instead of watch TV.
Beyond the immediate personal effects, try to persuade the local
supermarket to stock High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS)-free cereals or grass-fed beef or local fresh vegetables.
And if they won’t, start a farmer’s market or a CSA or a you-pick-em.
If enough of us do it, eventually we get successes like
Gatorade, Hunt’s ketchup, Wheat Thins, and many other products
having HFCS removed by their vendors.
Gretchen Rubin was writing about happiness, but it’s the same principle.
If you want people to be happy or healthy, start with yourself,
find like-minded people, and eventually maybe it becomes the way things are.
On the evening of April 8, 1999, a long line of Town Cars and taxis pulled up to the Minneapolis headquarters of Pillsbury and discharged 11 men who controlled America’s largest food companies. Nestlé was in attendance, as were Kraft and Nabisco, General Mills and Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and Mars. Rivals any other day, the C.E.O.’s and company presidents had come together for a rare, private meeting. On the agenda was one item: the emerging obesity epidemic and how to deal with it. While the atmosphere was cordial, the men assembled were hardly friends. Their stature was defined by their skill in fighting one another for what they called “stomach share” — the amount of digestive space that any one company’s brand can grab from the competition.
James Behnke, a 55-year-old executive at Pillsbury, greeted the men as they arrived. He was anxious but also hopeful about the plan that he and a few other food-company executives had devised to engage the C.E.O.’s on America’s growing weight problem. “We were very concerned, and rightfully so, that obesity was becoming a major issue,” Behnke recalled. “People were starting to talk about sugar taxes, and there was a lot of pressure on food companies.” Getting the company chiefs in the same room to Continue reading
