I had not planned on this as a blog post, but I just signed up to a meal planning service to let someone else do a lot of the thinking and strategizing behind cooking effectively and healthfully for a week at a  time. Ever since I got into cooking about twenty years ago, it was in fits and starts. I used 2-3 recipes multiple times a month, and while I enjoyed...

Day One, March 11: Arrived home at 7:06 pm.  Light five candles and placed them throughout the home. Several sources of artificial light I did not turn off were a few alarm clocks, the microwave, oven clock, and anytime I opened the refrigerator. I did spend about 30 minutes on my smart phone dealing with work emails, then shut it off. One thing that I hadn’t...

    I’ve always had a problem falling asleep early enough to get a sufficient night’s rest. It’s been like this my whole life, and I wasn’t sure what it was that caused it. Well, this is a problem that certainly can use some experimentation, and reporting on the results. My first attempt to deal with this is to remove an artificial ingredient – In...

“Simplify“, from Joshua Becker is a great read for any aspiring minimalists. His blog, Becoming Minimalist was an important source for ideas and inspiration when I first realized that my excess stuff was affecting my well-being. I spent a lot of time reading Becoming Minimalist for inspiration, getting ideas, and applying them to my own life. In fact,...

My latest foray into Removing Life’s Artificial Ingredients has been quitting drinking alcohol. So far, it’s been fairly easy to eliminate grains, processed foods, excess sugar, and anything non-Paleo. Alcohol? . The hardest, and biggest change so far has been quitting alcohol. Alcohol consumption , while fun in moderate doses,  and social gatherings, has been a...

I haven’t gone into this much,and maybe because I’m lazy, but I’ve always sought the most effective way to get from point A to B, without wasting a lot of time. Long ago I read, from where I don’t remember, but the guy said, if he had a hard problem to solve, he asked the laziest employee for an idea because they will find the easiest way to solve the issue....

So I finally figured it out, and I wasn’t even trying. All this time in the past year or so since I embraced a minimalist approach for my life, I never really had an end goal. It was more about the journey. The journey is plenty rewarding, and challenging, leading to a lot of self reflection, review of priorities,and appreciation for the joy of less, a simpler...