Stacey 2.0

About 5 years ago, I started counting calories as an answer to all of the diets I hated trying.   I love eating and I love food, so it's hard for me to try a diet that excludes something.   A nutritionist I used to work with said, "It's just calories in, calories out."   I created this fancy little Excel spreadsheet and became anal about weighing out all of my portions.   But I lost about 20 pounds that year and kept it off so I must have been doing something right. It was during this period that I took up drinking diet soda on a pretty frequent basis.   It was oh-so easy to track the calories in those things (zero!) and I could still have sodas with lunch or dinner instead of boring old water.   My doctor and my dad hated that I drank the stuff.   "Even drinking coffee is better than drinking diet soda," my doctor would say.   "Coffee at least has some health benefits."   My dad's comments were a little more colorful than that, but ...

“ The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised. ”  - George Will , author I spent the better part of the past 32 years living by this philosophy.  I have always felt there’s that little black cloud hanging over my head, no matter where I go.  I have some pretty bad luck – thankfully nothing particularly tragic or sad – but things would happen to me that don’t normally happen to other people.  I just don’t remember it being any other way.  And so, as long as I didn’t get my hopes up too high, I couldn’t get crushed.  Family, school, jobs, money; everything applied. I became particularly sad after turning 30, because nothing on my life plan seemed to be getting accomplished.  That’s not entirely accurate, because I was far from rock bottom: I have a husband that I think loves me the majority of the time; I bought a house; my cats and dogs are healthy and provide a wealth of e...

I’m always looking for apps that help me do something better/faster/smarter.  So in my quest to be happier, I had to find out if there was an app for that.  It probably won’t surprise you, but there  are  apps designed for this purpose.  I have tried two of them so far and I wanted to share my thoughts.  Juice – FREE in the Apple App Store I first heard of Juice when I was poking around tinybuddha.com looking for tips on teaching myself how to meditate.  Meditation, or just the simple act of learning how to relax, I thought could help me navigate through some of the stress in my life.  Anyhow, I think I first saw it mentioned in a tiny banner ad on the website, but a more in-depth article about the app can be found  here  from tinybuddha.com’s founder, Lori Deschene.  (Just as a side note,  tinybuddha.com  is pretty awesome and has a lot of good ideas and articles about change in your life.)  This is the ver...