Here are some the reasons eating all raw, or mainly raw, vegan food makes sense:

• Well, we are part of nature and as the nature tends to provide all creations with what they need to survive we should have also been provided by  nature what we need to survive and thrive. Coocked kebabs, steaks, bread, Twix choclate full of  fat condensed suger and artificial colors, do not seem to be what we meant to eat to stay healthy! Rather fruits, vegetables and greens that are readily edible are what we were to eat.
• Only 4 of our teeth (Canine teeth) are suitble for eating meat, all other teeth are suitable for eating vegetables and fruits.
• Although we can eat and digest (well, sort of!) meat, it’s doesn’t seem to be what is natural to us.
• Our closest biological species, the Chimpanzees,  only eat fruit and vegetables.
• In nature calm animals which usually have strong body structure, live long lives, and are usully more useful to their environment are vegetarian. Think of Gerfee, Elephent, Cows, Sheeps etc. On the other hand Carnivores (meat eaters) tend to be aggressive predators, having short lives and not very useful for their environment. e.g. Tigers, Lions, Leopard, Dogs, Wolves etc.
• Cow’s milk is produced for the baby Cow not adult homo sapiens (humen) ! How on earth do we think something that is produced by a Cow for it’s baby could ever be digested by an adult human? Sure, the cow milk is full of useful nutrients but can we actually absorb them? Cows actually have 4 stomachs to digest that milk! So, again, it doesn’t seem to be what we suppose to eat naturally.
• Live (raw)foods have digestive enzymes in them. When foods are cooked they lose almost all of their enzymes so our body needs to produce those digestive enzymes by it self, sucking nutrients and energy from different organs. That’s actually the reason we feel tired and sluggish after eating cooked food.

These are some of reasons eating raw food makes sense. Let me know what you think of this topic and if you would like more info on this. You can also check my friends blog on raw foods.

Everybody knows that they should have a balanced life. A balance in how much you work, spend time with your family, exercise, think by yourself etc. Yet practically it seems to be difficult to keep doing that.

I found B-ALERT system very helpful and practical. It is a method you can implement to plan a day or a week. It is an efficient and very REAL way of planning your days and weeks.

First of all B-ALERT stands for:

• B: Blueprint
• A: Action
• L : Learn
• E : Exercise
• R : Relax
• T: Think

You don’t have to follow it in this order. It is up to you which part you do first, second etc. The order of the letters “B-ALERT” just make it simpler to remember.

ALERT is also to remind you that you are ready, mindful, on guard, conscious and prepared.

B: Blueprint

Time: 10-15 Minutes       Essence: Use a journal to plan your day beforehand.

This is how you prepare for the day. Just the fact that you are preparing for the day can improve your productivity by %20+. It is amazing when we want to print a brochure or send an e-mail to a client we make sure we have everything set before we print or send the e-mail. Why not doing the same for your every single day? Doesn’t your day worth as much as a brochure? If you don’t plan you get what is going to show up. If you do plan you get the most out of what shows up.

Planning for a day can take 10 to 15 minutes max. You can do it in the morning or preferably the night before. If you plan the night before your subconscious has the whole night to figure out the best ways to do things. You wake up with new ideas on how to do things or during the day you get some hunches on how to perform better.

Use a journal, dairy or and electronic organizer to document your plan. So you can refer to it several times a day or later on the week to see what you have accomplished.

A: Action

Time: 8 hours or more   Essence: The actual physical actions you take to accomplish things

There is a BIG difference between being busy and taking planned specific actions that move you towards your goals.

Going to work, finishing a project, taking kids to school, doing the shopping are all in Action part.

WARNING for on LOA (Law Of Attraction)ists!

My personal advice to you is “take action” and don’t wait to the “right time”. Believing, visualizing and affirmations are not enough for a happy successful life. However mixed with magic they can create life mastery.

L: Learning

Time: 15 Minutes or more            Essence:  Learn anything you like, but learn SOMETHING!

If you are serious about your life and your success you should be learning on regular basis. No, Not from newspapers and not from Hollywood movies! Those are OK, but you need to allocate time to study the business you are in, efficient ways to improve your productivity, health, raising children, writing better reports, planning, learning Spanish, national history, and international history and so on.

Every day allocate sometime to learn something new that moves your closer to your goals or wides your imagination. Sometime it is an excellent idea to learn about something you have nothing to do with. It expands your  horizons.

I personally love personal development books. They give me inspiration and I learn from other people’s failures and successes.

Don’t like reading?

• Watch documentaries, on people, history, culture and personalities who shaped the world
• Watch Biography on A & E, The Learning Channel, Discovery Channel, the History Channel, PBS Television.
• Ask a friend to teach you how they do things they are good at. Cooking, exercising, communicating, handling their e-mails, etc.

E: Exercise

Time: 15 Minutes or more            Essence: Get busy exercising. Move your body by program or spntaniously

Did you know that even 15 minutes of exercise a day can drastically improve your health and vitality? If you just exercise for 15 minutes continuously, your metabolism increase, you burn more fat, your blod circulates better, it uplifts you mood and makes you a happier person!

Don’t know how to exercise?

Walk, jug or run around the block. Do some push-ups. Ride a bicycle. Move your body in any way you can. Be spontaneous, just decide to exercise and get busy. You will learn or invent a couple of exercise you like!

Of course, you can also get a book on exercising but DO NOT use that as an excuse for not exercising.

R: Relax

Time: 15 to 30 minutes                  Essence: Take regular breaks to Re-Energize

Most of us get physically tired or exhausted during the day. If you are an early raiser (5:30 to 6:30) around 13:30 to 15:00, probably you have a “sag” time. Some of us try to fortify it by drinking 3 or 4 cups of coffee.

Get 20 minutes off in the middle of the day. May be you can lock the door, put your head on the desk and relax. Go for a walk. Take some fresh air. Breathe deep for 2 minutes. This will improve your productivity dramatically for the rest of the day.

When you go home consider that you might need a transition time. Ask your family to give you 20 minutes to put yourself in homey mood! Before the kids are unleashed on you!

T: think

Time: 15 to 20 minutes                  Essence: Think. Ponder. Mediate. Reflect on you day and on your life.

Regard each day as a mini-movie and you as the star. How did you do? What did you do that made you happy? Is there any adjustments to make to improve the way you did something?

Use your journal if you want to. Write a couple of lines or even paragraphs.  Just start writing. You will have realizations while you write.

Make reflective thinking a daily habit. It only takes a few minutes but if will make a lot wiser, stronger and happier person.

B-ALERT Checkpoint System

You can Plan your week like the below table. Put a tick next to each letter if you have done it well for that day and a circle if you need to do some more work on it later on.

A final thought:

Do not be too hard on yourself. Implement the System. Just Remember B-ALERT and plan. Reward yourself for planning, regardless of the result. Remember success can be built upon success. Reward the fact that you have planed.

1. Study from variaty of resources (i.e. different books, different professors, CD, DVDs, websites etc.) Often times when you cannot grasp something throughly it is because of the approach of that author or instructor. Try learning from another source such as another book on the same topic or another professor in your faculty.
2. Use Leitner flashcard learning system for memorizing. Ever had trouble memorising defenitions, meanings of the words, or physics formulas? Then Leitner flashcard system can make your life much easier by automizing your studying and reviewing. You need a box with five sections and a number of flashcards. Basically you write on a flashcard, a question or one half of an equation and on the other side you write the answere. You put them in the first section of the box and review that a couple of times a day. On day two you check to see if you remember the cards, whichever you remembered is promoted to the second section otherwise it stays in section one. in 1 day,again you  check all your cards, and keep promoting them. You revise section 2 less times than section 1, and sections 3 less times than section 4 and so on. By the time  the cards gets into section 5 you have almost certainly memorized it by your longterm memory. Read more on this on here. Surprisingly there is not so much information on this in the web in English. I am going to write a post on this soon.
3. Memorize the things you do not understand. In my experience when you memorize things although you do not understand them at first, you start the process of understanding them. Memorize concenpts you do not understand and after sometime you will have gained insights on that topic. It gives you the chance to start and keep wresteling with the idea until you understand it. If you memorize something you can discuss it with others throughout the day.

There are many more items to come in the next posts. Please let me know if there are  thing you wish you would know when you were a student.

See, we tend to think of good things that we want and then, because they are so big and nice, do nothing about them. After all they are BIG dreams, how could they be realized at this very trivial, casual, ordinary moment, right? Well, apparently not. Most great innovations and achievements have been achieved or at least started to be realized at most ordinary, casual and seemingly un-important moment.

Ask any great engineer or architect and they will tell you most of their great achievements started in such ordinary moment. They will tell you they were talking to a friend in a restaurant and they started to write and draw things on a napkin and that napkin is now a 20 story building or such and such electronic device or even an entirely new city, think Dubai, UAE.

Every great, or even not so great for that matter, achievement starts from an idea and a set of first couple of things the owner of the idea can do to realize it. So why not write them down?(right NOW!), Why not do the first (or easiest) one now ? and then Why not think of just couple of other small chuck sized actions you can take? and only then why not doing some of those? and why not keep doing that, here is a big word, UNTIL you realize your dream? Well, of course there are NO guarantees, but what’s the alternative? UNTIL you do all of that  you won’t know.

When you are on the right direction, baby steps count ~Chris Gardner

So start where you are with what you have. Favorable circumstances, supportive people, a better mood, rarely all exist when a great idea ideas and dreams are realized and achieved. So by all means start now and tomorrow shall have its own adventures.

P.S.: Why not procrastinate procrastination? There is all the time we want to procrastinate tomorrow. For today, let’s do some small steps towards a better life.

Questions, The Gate Way to Heaven

Questions are probably the strongest tools we have in order to use our mind.

• New questions can take you places you never even imagined.
• Questions powerfully change your focus.
• Questions can change your emotions.
• How you ask questions form yourself determines your responses to your environment.
• Thinking can break apart our habitual ways of thinking relieve us from the past.

As Anthony Robbins says Question Are the Answers. I cannot agree more with him.

What is Thinking Anyways?

Have you ever thought what is thinking? What do you really mean when you say I am thinking or I need to think about this or that?

Thinking is the process of asking and answering questions from yourself and to yourself. Therefore if you change you ask yourself you change the way you think, eventually you affect your behaviour and your environment.

How To Put It In To Work?

Perhaps you can start asking yourself question you haven’t ask yourself yet. Here are some of them I have found very useful.

• What are some easy things to do that improve my life-style/health/relationships/finances that I do not do?
• What Am I Grateful For? (If no good answer comes ask: What Could I be Grateful for If I wanted To?”
• How do I make my life simpler?
• What are some of the thing that enlighten me the most?
• What could I learn to make myself happier?
• What are some of good things in my partner/family that I haven’t been appreciative about enough?

The way I use these is that I write them down in my journal and  answer them. You might as well write them on small piece of paper and read them throughout the day. Try it for few days. Make your own questions and let me know what happens.

I recently bought the Audio version of this book and I am thrilled. It was quite refreshing to see some new, good and useful material in personal development.

Rich Content

The book is rich in material and content. I am sure you know some or many of the lessons he talks about, yet he has put things in such a language that you get the lesson.

So far I have listened to only about first 20 minutes of it and I have gained so much new insights. It is a very very well written book. Every word is meaningful, no sentence is a waste. In fact I listened to the introducion 3 times already!

Focus on fundamentals

What I like so fat about this book is that it not a fairytale. It is a collection of real, down to earth, meaningful and useful lessons and tips. No promises, no magic formula and no quick fix. Long lived principles that we all know are true, yet most of us tend to avoid them because of the pain we do not want to face.

In next few posts I am going to write about what I have learned from this book. They are all going to be titles as: Start Where you are (x).

I started this blog because I come across so much of new and exciting information and insight that I would like to share with my friends and family. I actually came to the point where I couldn’t explain and discuss everything I want in one seating with a friend, so using this blog I would have all the space I need to express myself.

For those of you who do not know me personally I would like to introduce myself. Apart from my career as a lecturer at a local university here in Cyprus, I am very active in learning new things. To tell you the truth I myself do not know why I like to learn, I am just jazzed by learning. It gives me a feeling of ecstasy and high!

Above all I believe life can be different than was is average.  Here are some of my other core believes that I do not think they will change:

• I believe you can learn life while living it.
• You can improve yourself and your life by learning from others’ experience.
• Everything you do affects all of your life, whether you realize it or not. Everything counts.
• The world is not as static as we tend to think it is. The world at the fundamental level is a dynamic sea of possibilities. It is us that is static and choose the same things all the time.
• You are master of your destiny.
• The average diet is rubbish! We human meant to eat vegetarian and perhaps only raw vegan food. Science is not being honest with us about this. How can you learn about health by studying disease anyway?!
• You can change. You and I can change any moment we choose to.
• Our brain is the most powerful tool we have in our disposal, we better learn to use it! Have you every had a class on how to use your mind?! Why not?

Actually I think I better write a post on each of these items! Anyways, these are some of the things I would be talk about. I would also provide product review of personal development material I go through.

So stay tuned

p.s.: By the way my real name is Ali :+)