A Little Inspiration for the Day

Six Tips for Eating Healthy

Playing with my food.

After a yet another month of mindful eating, I’ve come up with six tips for eating healthy.

Distraction

Being busy definitely helped me stay on track. It is much harder to eat right on the weekend when there is no set schedule, but lots of fun activities. In some ways that’s a sad statement. It is almost like saying I eat when I’m bored. But there is one tool I’ve always used that sometimes works and sometimes does not. If I want to eat and I think it’s just for the sake of eating, I take a walk or start doing some exercise. If afterward I still want the food I can have it. If nothing else, at least I’ve added more movement before eating something I perhaps should have skipped.

Planning & Prep

Having healthy snacks ready and on hand makes all the difference in the world. Junk food is very easy to grab. The good news is if pressed for time, there are locations that we can buy premade healthy options. For me, nuts was an easy snack to have around. But if you are a cheese lover maybe […]

Six Tips for Eating HealthyMaggie Downie2018-02-09T14:25:38-05:00

Live Longer

My Grandma inside the igloo for her 89th birthday!

My Grandma will be 92 tomorrow. She lives on her own, cooks for herself, loves the movies, and is interesting to talk to. She has moments of forgetfulness and relays a lot of stories from the past and her youth. Now and then my mom will call me to tell me she is worried my Grandma might be losing it a little. Sometimes my mom seems right and other times I say, “I do the same thing. If Grandma has dementia then I must too.”

A week after Christmas my Grandma called me to thank me for the beautiful amaryllis I’d given her for Christmas. She left a message and as I listened, I grew a little sad. I had not given her an amaryllis. Perhaps my mom was more right than I realized. Someone else deserved this thank you. Not me. It signaled that my Grandma seemed to be losing it.

Later that night when Matt arrived home, I told him about my Grandma’s message and how my mom might be onto something. “I didn’t get her an amaryllis,” I told him. “Yes, […]

Live LongerMaggie Downie2018-02-14T15:54:22-05:00

Kill them with kindness

Christmas brings extra cooking, cleaning, decoration, wrapping and visits with friends. All good stuff, but all fit into a short period.

December is always a stressful month. As much as I love Christmas, it adds a lot of extras that all have to fit into one month of the year. Much of this past December I felt like I was constantly fumbling a football. I couldn’t get anything right. Overall, I laughed it off and saw it as comical, but I have no doubt some people I work with may have been frustrated when I was making mistakes or not responding to emails.

The Monday before Christmas I decided to get my act together. I was going to make a master grocery list and go to the grocery store one time for the following two weeks. With calendar and recipe book in hand, I recorded everything I could possibly need for baking, house guests, and cold winter days. It was a fail. I ended up going to the grocery store every day that week for something I’d forgotten.

In addition to groceries, I was trying to get a copy of the Wall Street […]

Kill them with kindnessMaggie Downie2018-02-14T15:55:44-05:00

Finding happiness

Being in motion on a long hike makes me happy. Here I am at a camp on Mt. Kili.

Figuring out and finding happiness has consumed me lately. I’ve been reading a lot about it. What makes us happy? As far as I can tell, what makes us happy is a series of contradictions. You need a stable government, unless you live in Mexico and then apparently you are happy without one. Earning more than $70,000 per year supposedly doesn’t lead to greater happiness according to statistics, except that in the very specific places where people are the most happy individual income is higher overall. You need freedom, but one of the happiest towns in the United States has a lot of restrictions.

In all my reading and research I can pinpoint four things that seem to truly make people happy—good relationships, volunteering or doing good for others, a sense of purpose, and your perspective.

Here are just a couple tips, using the four points above as a reference, to try and increase your happiness quota:

Get together with good friends at regular intervals. Have a monthly dinner club, or book club, or […]

Finding happinessMaggie Downie2018-02-14T15:58:45-05:00

Ornament history

The tree on the corner of Church and Main in Old Wethersfield.

I love Christmas time. My family is fun to spend time with. Tradition is comforting. Getting gifts for family, though a bit overwhelming, is mostly fun. My favorite part of the season is taking moments to just stop and observe. I love to sit in my living room with a hot cup of tea or hot chocolate or hot tea with chocolate and stare at the tree. I love to turn off all the lights and stare at anyone’s tree. Which sounds a little creepy, but normally only people who know me let me in their house to stare. Seeing all the houses aglow and the lights in yards and along streets makes the cold days better. I wish people left their lights on until mid-March. This from a girl who doesn’t put any Christmas lights up, but once someone has, they really should let them linger longer.

The Ornament:

This year as we decorated our tree, a tradition I love, I thought about how ornaments began. The Christmas tree came from Germany, and not surprisingly so did the ornament. If […]

Ornament historyMaggie Downie2018-02-14T16:03:51-05:00