Robert Paterson's Weblog

April 13, 2013

Are you a boomer? What is your retirement looking like?

How are we boomers going to live out our long lives? I worry about this myself a lot. My concern is why I have sold our big house on PEI and moved to a small one here in Quebec near my kids. It is why we have set this house up to run on very low energy costs. It is why we bought in town so that we can walk everywhere if we have to.

I have a tiny pension and the government one too. I do have some savings but I wonder about their safety and again how long they will last.

The situation for most Americans - where I have the data - is dire.

75% of American nearing retirement age in 2010 had less than $30,000 in savings. Most have no pensions.

One of the biggest exposures that all older people have as they age in becoming chronically ill. What price illness? What price disability?

More than any factor - even energy costs - being chronically ill is the greatest threat that any boomer will have to how we live out these last decades.

This is why I took charge of my health. It is why I urge you to think about taking charge of yours too. For at our age, the forces of Natural Selection - that protect the young so that they can have kids - have abandoned us. We have no protection except what we do for ourselves. Here is more on this vital topic by the expert in aging, Professor Michael Rose.

You can do a lot to reduce your risks of becoming disabled by chronic illness. It is all about living your life as close as possible to our evolutionary fit. Eating what we are evolved to digest. Using our body as it needs to be used - that is being active, sleeping well and getting enough sun. And having a purpose and so a proper social place and connections.

These are all easier to find as we get older and have more time.

My guide for how to do this and why is here You Don't Need Medicine to get Healthy.

Posted at 06:33 AM in 55 Theses, Activity, Aging, Books, diet, Evolutionary Fit, Food, Food and Drink, Food Systems, Health, Michael Rose | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 12, 2013

It took us less than 30 years to get fat as a society - It can take a year for you to lose it all

If we got this fat this fast - we can get healthy again. The issue is what changed in this time?

The answer is we gave up real food and took up processed food.

If "we" cannot do this "You" can "I" did. It took me a year to go from fat and prediabetic to thin and healthy.

This is what I did and this is what you can do - You Don't Need Medicine to get Healthy.

Posted at 02:47 PM in diet, Evolutionary Fit, Food, Food and Drink, Food Systems, Health | Permalink | Comments (1)

I am a cheater #paleo But my gut pulls me back

At my age, this is my kind of porn and it is also where I am weak and can and do cheat sometimes on my paleo diet.

Last weekend I was away for a party. I fell off the wagon completely. Had half a loaf of French Bread at dinner. A Burger King Burger on the road WITH bun. Ate what was put in front of me all weekend - all totally non paleo and had more Burger King on the way back.

I put on 5 lbs immediately. But worse, I felt like shit. Cramps and generally crummy.

A week later I am nearly back to normal having been very strict. My point is this - apart from acknowleding how hard it is to give up bread etc, it is to wonder at how sensitive my system has become since I have not made wheat and sugar part of my diet.

It takes only a few hours to start to feel "off". When we eat like this all the time, does our feedback mechanism stop? I know that in theory when we feel or see something new, after much repitition the novelty fades. Is this what happened to us when bread etc was the staple of life?

I think that the good news here is that once we have made eating the old way a new thing, then when we fail, we get reminded so hard and fast that this is not good that it is easy to get back on the better path.

If you are thinking about taking charge of your health, consider being a strict paleo dieter for the first 3 months. This will first of all show you a new looking and feeling you. Then it will set you up to react when inevitably, you cheat later.

Good luck and if you want to know more - my book You Don't Need Medicine to get Healthy is here.

Posted at 12:12 PM in Activity, Aging, Books, diet, Evolutionary Fit, Food, Food and Drink, Food Systems, Health | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 10, 2013

Your health is in your own hands - Look at smoking!

We all know that smoking is not good for us. It is a lifestyle choice. And it is hard to give up once you are addicted. But more and more have given up. Look at how deaths have fallen in the UK as a result of more and more people giving up smoking and then think about what you eat or how active you are. (Link here)

It is hard to change your diet and life. But once people knew what smoking would do to them, many did make these changes.

Over the past 20 years Britain has seen the biggest decreases in the world in national rates of death before age 70 from lung cancer and breast cancer (which are both down by half) and cancer in general (which is down by almost one third). Still, however, two-thirds of the risk remains, and Oxford scientists are well placed to help the current revolution in the multi-disciplinary effort that is cancer research to yield new causes and new cures.

Peto graph one

My book You Don't Need Medicine to get Healthy is a practical guide to what you can do in terms of Diet, your body and your social world to improve your health. It has the information that you need and a guide for how to take each step to live differently.

If we live like this, we can expect to be active and healthy for most of our lives. If not.....

Now we ALL KNOW this about smoking. Soon we will all know this about diet, activity and our social world. Armed with this, you will be in charge of your health. You will be well and FREE.

Best wishes

Rob

Posted at 07:42 AM in Books, Evolutionary Fit, Food, Health | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 09, 2013

Our children's health is in our hands - Can I help you?

Our children's health is in our hands as parents. It's tough to hear this. But it's the truth.

"We are raising our children in a world that is vastly different than it was 40 or 50 years ago," says Yoni Freedhoff, an obesity doctor and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Ottawa. "Childhood obesity is a disease of the environment. It's a natural consequence of normal kids with normal genes being raised in unhealthy, abnormal environments."

Here is the summary of a great article on this in Scientific American. The full article is here.

"This is a lot more complicated than ‘eat less, exercise more,'" Freedhoff says. "If weight management or childhood obesity prevention and treatment were intuitive, we'd have a lot of skinny kids running around." Freedhoff himself is developing a program for families that focuses on "redrafting" kids' and families' environments, starting with more home cooking.

"Every parent would die for their child, but most won't cook for their children on a consistent basis with whole ingredients," he says.

"What I'm amazed by is the constant use of fast food to pacify children and reward children—there is no event too small for candy or fast food."

There are many places communities could start: making school lunches healthier, ditching vending machines and access to fast food inside schools, not celebrating sports wins at fast food joints, and ending the use of candy or fast food as rewards, such as "pizza days" and other unhealthy food-themed school events, to name a few.

"People don't appreciate that parents are around children a minority of their days," he says, so it really will take a village to turn back the clock in terms of kids' environments. "If we had a time machine, it would be the world's best weight-loss program," Freedhoff says. "It's the world that has changed, not people."

I may be able to help you a bit. My new book "You Don't Need Medicine to get Healthy" is a comprehensive manual for what what is really going on and what each of can do to take charge of our heralth - AND of our children's.

Posted at 11:54 AM in Books, Children, Diabetes Type 2, diet, Early Years Research, Environment, Family, Food, Food and Drink, Food Systems, Health | Permalink | Comments (0)

How to change your work culture - a lesson from nearly 100 years ago - Vimy Ridge

On this day, April 9th, 1917 the Canadian Corps captured Vimy Ridge and changed how war was fought in WWI. Their story is not only important in purely historic terms (this was Canada's Waterloo - Gettysburg - Gallipoli) but how they did this has lessons for all today who wish to make their organization more like a network and less like a machine.

How do organizations make sense of the new networked world? The same problems faced generals in WWI. How were they to make sense of industrial warfare? The Canadian Corps solved this problem in 1917 at Vimy. The lessons learned of how they did this apply today. Here we discover the essence of what they did and how to apply this to our own time.

In honour of the men of 1917 and to help us understand how to create the culture to create a truly human organization, I have written a very short book that offers you a step by step acccount of how this was done back then. The times are different but the problem of how to get away from Command and Control remains. The lessons from Vimy are here to be learned all over gain.

Here is the link to the book

Posted at 06:56 AM in Natural Organization, Organizations and Culture, Paradigms, Vimy Ridge 90th Anniversary, War | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 08, 2013

Are you part of the 45%? Here is why and what you can do

About 45 percent of the nation’s unemployed are between the ages of 18 and 34, according to a recent report from Demos, a public policy organization. In addition to the more than 5.6 million young people who don’t have a job, there are about 4.7 million young employees who are underemployed or working in jobs for which they’re overqualified, the report found.

Unfortunately, it seems we have a long way to go before youth employment reaches levels anyone would dare describe as normal. Demos found that U.S. employers need to add some 4.1 million more jobs before young adults will be employed at levels similar to those before the recession. (link)

And if you have a job, what kind of job? (Link)

Some 28% of workers are expected to hold low-wage jobs in 2020, roughly the same percentage as in 2010, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute.

The study defines low-paying jobs as those with wages at or below what full-time workers must earn to live above the poverty level for a family of four. In 2011, this was $23,005, or $11.06 an hour.

Why is this going on? I think I know the answer but it's not all bad

What can we do? I think I can help you here too. Here are 4 short books that tell you more.

I start with the “Job”. “You Don’t Need a Job” – Link to Store – If we can see the Job for what it is, a construct of a paradigm, then we are no longer trapped. For how we make our living is the starting place for the journey.

The second book in the series is called “You Don’t Need a Banker” - Link to Store - More than any institution today, Banks seem supreme and essential. But I will show you that to get the credit you need to make a living and to have a good life does not mean that you have to depend on banks as we know them today.

You Don’t Need Medicine to Get Healthy - What if our health did not depend on doctors and drugs? This is not a fantasy. This book will explore the new science of Ancestral Health and show you how to take charge of your own health. the link is here.

Lessons from Vimy Today nearly all organizational leaders have grown up in world where social networks did not exist. They and their organizations are designed around command and control. They are told that they must use social media and networks. But all they know is how to control. They do not know what to do to change their culture and organization so that they can take advantage of the power of the new.

Changing the culture is key - this book is all about how to do this. The link to the store is here

Posted at 08:51 PM in Books, jobs | Permalink | Comments (0)

The jobs are still going away - what to do? I offer you a survival manual

Source Zero Hedge

90 Million Americans are no longer looking for a job

This chart shows labour participation. There is no sign of any change. The job is not coming back.

We are starting to understand why this is not just a "normal" recession. It is structural. A global workforce pushes labour costs down. The shoe maker in Maine competes with the labour pool in China. The lawyer in New York competes with the lawyer in Mumbai. It is also about technology. The lawyer in Mumbai competes with software that offers you and I the simple contract. IBM are developing software that will give you a better diagnosis than your doctor. No one in the job world is safe.

So what to do? My advice is to stop making getting a job or keeping yours the only focus. Don't over invest in getting the credential for the job.

There is another mindset and another world of work out there that is not at risk the way that the job is. It is a world that offers you great freedom and health too.

It is the world of the network and skilled person doing something personal in this network.

You Don't Need a Job is a survival manual for our time.

It is the first of a series that explores the real new economy that is based on the network. You Don't Need a Banker to Get Credit explores crowd sourcing and the new credit system that relies on your social world too. My latest book, You Don't Need Medicine to get Healthy - shows how to take charge of your health. One of the most powerful forces of illness is the loss of control that we get from having a job!

I am just starting on You Don't Need a School to get and Education - I hope you can see the pattern. The network will replace the institution. The job is at the centre of the institution.

I hope that I can help you.

Posted at 07:52 AM in 3D Printing, Banking, Books, Organizations and Culture, Personal Health, Resilient Communities, You Don't Need a Job | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 04, 2013

Practical steps to get and to stay healthy - You can live like your ancestors

My new book - You Don't Need Medicine to get Healthy is now available on Amazon for Kindle. - You can get it here.

70% of chronic illness is driven by how we live: by what we eat, by how we use our bodies and by our social world. In writing this book I have gone to all the experts in all of these fields and I have synthesised their knowledge into one practical manual for living.

We are designed to live out a healthy, active and participatory life. Provided we live close to our own design. In the book I show you why this statement is true.

The book is a personal manual for taking practical charge. You can go as far as you wish but there are simple steps that any of us can start with. I, an old fart, have managed to go a long way and I am sure you can too.

I wanted to show you more though than a diet or an activity plan. I have done my best to bring all the factors for our health into view so that you can see how they all help each other. I have also gone deeply into the science here, so that you can see why this book is not just another self help book.

I wanted to help you take control at a time when medicine has not been successful at preventing you from becoming ill and at a time when the safety net is being reduced as we all age.

I wanted to help us all reduce the immense direct and indirect costs of being ill. In Canada, the average man is disabled by chronic illness by 65 and lives another 10 years. Think of what this means to you as his family? In America health care costs are beyond the reach of any family and a bad diagnosis is often a step to bankruptcy.

Our health is truly in our own hands. When we can accept this, then we change the world that we live in today. This is the greatest step for true freedom that any of us can take today. This is how each of us become the core of any resilient community.

I hope you enjoy the book and I hope that it will help you.

Best wishes

Rob

Posted at 08:00 AM in 55 Theses, Activity, Books, Community, Diabetes Type 2, diet, Early Years Research, Environment, Evolutionary Fit, Food, Food and Drink, Food Systems, Freelancing, Health, Hope, Making a Living, Michael Rose, Missing Human Manual, Natural Organization, Organizations and Culture, Paleo, Paradigms, Personal Health, Prince Edward Island, Resilient Communities | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 31, 2013

I want him back! The lessons of death

Two years ago today, an hour after this picture was taken, I had my dear boy Jay put down. He was the dog of my life.

On this Easter morning, I want him back. I miss him terribly. But I can't. So I go back to his life and ask myself, if he was the dog of my life, was I worthy of his devotion?

And so the lesson that he still teaches me resonates this Easter morning. All that I know will die. As will I. In my life, knowing that this is all that there is, do I pay attention to to what really matters? Do I pay enought attention to the people that are close to me? Do I pay enough attention to what matters to them? Do I pay enough attention to myself? Do I live the life that I have the privelege of having?

Maybe there is a Rainbow Bridge? Maybe there is an after life? But I can never know this in my life. This life and those I love are all that I can know now.

But I still long for him. If I was to spend eternity with another being it would be with him.

Jay April 2000 - March 2011

Posted at 08:09 AM in Dogs | Permalink | Comments (3)