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Today’s Health Upgrade
Improve your relationship with your children
Financial philosophies for a rich life
Beef up your diabetes protection
Arnold’s Podcast
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How To Improve Your Relationship With Your Children
Looking for a way to improve your family dynamic? Research suggests that practicing more gratitude could be the foundation of feeling closer to your kids and having a higher sense of satisfaction.
In the study, parents who wrote a letter of gratitude about themselves and their family saw almost immediate benefits. One week after writing the letter, they reported more positive emotions, empathy, happiness, connectedness, and competence. More importantly, by focusing on what they’re thankful for, the parents felt closer to their kids, expressed improved communication with them, and — as a result — reported fewer challenging behaviors from their kids.
Is it that the kids actually started behaving better, or perception changed? Because the parents weren’t in a lab, we don’t know — and it doesn’t really matter. The researchers found that when parents “filled their cup” by expressing gratitude, it gave them more mental bandwidth, allowing them to parent more effectively and be less stressed by their children's behaviors.
Oftentimes, parents feel the never-ending stress of trying to do a good job raising their children. Instead of adding to your already busy life, the research suggests that a weekly gratitude practice — such as writing a gratitude letter or journaling about what you’re thankful for — can strengthen family bonds, improve cooperation and support between family members, and enhance overall family functioning.
3 Financial Philosophies for a Rich Life
Part of creating the life you want is your willingness to be unapologetically different. This applies to your goals, visions, and even your finances.
A lot of advice — whether in fitness or finance — takes your latent fears and heightens them. If you listen to these fears, you become frightened and anxious, worrying about everything that can go wrong.
Just like we help you build a different vision for your health, we believe you can do the same with your finances. That’s why we asked New York Times bestselling author Ramit Sethi to share his philosophy for building a rich life. After all, 72 percent of Americans recently reported being stressed about money.
Here are Ramit’s top 3 money philosophies for living a Rich Life:
Don’t ask the $3 questions; ask the $30,000 questions. Focus on what Ramit calls “Big Wins” — automating your finances, investing early, landing your dream job, finding a stable place to live, having positive relationships, etc. Get your Big Wins right, and you rarely have to worry about the small things.
There’s a limit to how much you can cut, but there’s no limit to how much you can earn. You can only cut back so much before you have nothing left to cut. One of the best things you can do is earn more by starting a side hustle, negotiating a raise, or finding a better-paying job.
Spend extravagantly on the things you love and cut costs mercilessly on everything else. Get specific. What do you love? What if you doubled your spending? Quadrupled? Even 10x’d your time and spending on what you love? What does your life look and feel like then?
Start here, and you’ll have a vision of what’s possible. Do it the usual way, and you’ll be stuck worrying about $3 expenses for the rest of your life.
Beef Up Your Diabetes Protection
Can eating lean red meat help put diabetes in remission? A recent 12-month study on type 2 diabetics suggests that it might be more possible than you’ve been told.
Red meat is oftentimes in the news for all the wrong reasons. Still, many of the downsides of red meat either appear to be linked to eating too much and too often, consuming far too many calories (and gaining weight), or taking in more saturated fat than your body can handle (which increases LDL and Apo B, both of which are associated with cardiovascular issues).
But if calories are controlled, and saturated fat doesn’t negatively impact your blood work — is red meat still off limits?
This study randomly assigned participants to either a high-protein diet with lean red meat (low in saturated fat) or a moderately high-protein diet without red meat. Both groups improved cardiometabolic health, saw reductions in HbA1c and fasting glucose levels, and better glycemic control. The moderate-protein group lost 28 pounds, while the high-protein group lost 22.5 pounds.
Fat loss, especially losing fat from the liver and pancreas, plays a key role in improving insulin sensitivity, which is probably why about 38 percent of the participants in both groups no longer met the criteria for type 2 diabetes, suggesting they were in remission from the disease.
This supports prior research suggesting that losing weight — and, more specifically, body fat — is more important to managing, preventing, and putting type 2 diabetes into remission than stressing over a particular food or amount of protein in your diet.
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Publisher: Arnold Schwarzenegger
Editors-in-chief: Adam Bornstein and Daniel Ketchell
