Pursuit Happyness

The ‘French paradox’ rears its ugly head again. The reasoning goes something like this: French people eat more saturated animal fat than any other affluent nation, and have the second-lowest rate of coronary heart disease (only after Japan, which has a much higher stroke rate than France). French people drink red wine. Therefore, red wine must be protecting them against the artery-clogging yogurt, beef and butter. The latest study to fall into this myth was published in the AJCN recently (1). Read more [...]

When faced with a big decision, it is natural for you to seek advice from friends, colleagues, and experts. Sadly, it can also be natural to ignore that advice when you don’t hear what you want to… I was chatting with my friend Fred and he was lamenting the very high mortgage payments he had to make. Not only were the payments high, but after the real estate bubble burst the property was worth less than the mortgage (not an unfamiliar situation for many these days, I am sure). Fred Read more [...]

Image courtesy of Amelia PS/Flickr So you’ve got something you’re really passionate about. Perhaps it’s a hobby which you think you could turn into a business. Or a community project, or a novel you’re writing, or a diet or exercise routine which you’re really taking seriously this time. The problem is, you’ve got a day job. It takes up most of your time and energy each day. So how can you find the energy to get anything else done? I’ll be the first to admit that it’s Read more [...]

Last week I logged into Google Webmaster Tools and noticed something different; the keyword report now showed how many impressions, clicks, and your average position in Google search results worldwide. Cross section this information with data in Google Analytics, and it’s a goldmine. I’ll show you! First you need to choose something on your site you’d like to improve. A key source of revenue for WhyDoWork.com are our work at home job listings. Improving traffic to this area of the site Read more [...]

Interested in beginning meditation but don’t know where to start? The good news is that all you need is 5-10 minutes a day to get started. Are you thinking to yourself, ‘Ten minutes, I don’t have an extra ten minutes a day! My life is already jam packed with work, family, social obligations, and I’m not even mentioning my growing to-do list”? Well, what if I told you that the benefits of meditation include a reduction in stress, sharpened concentration, improved circulation – Read more [...]

We can measure the nutrient and toxin content of a food, and debate the health effects of each of its constituents until we’re out of breath. But in the end, we still won’t have a very accurate prediction of the health effects of that food. The question we need to answer is this one: has this food sustained healthy traditional cultures? I’m currently reading a great book edited by Drs. Hugh Trowell and Denis Burkitt, titled Western Diseases: Their Emergence and Prevention. It’s a compilation Read more [...]

Image courtesy of Marie Claire/Bill Diodato In a divorce, a woman’s life is turned upside down — nearly everything about her existence changes, but for the man, the most he has to change is his phone number and address. Most women who left the workforce to raise a family are at a significant disadvantage and find it difficult as they try to re-enter the workforce they left years earlier. I don’t have marriage advice, but if you do a few simple things in the other 8 hours, you can survive Read more [...]

If you’ve been reading personal development blogs for any length of time, you’ll have come across plenty of posts about goals. We’re all expected to have them. We’re told that having goals means we’ll be happy high-achievers, storming through life as we check off yet another item on our to-do list. And yes, setting goals for yourself can help you to stay focused on what you want from life. It can help to counter our bias towards short-term thinking and short-term results. But even Read more [...]

Not all dairy is created equal. Dairy from grain-fed and pasture-fed cows differs in a number of ways. Pastured dairy contains more fat-soluble nutrients such as vitamin K2, vitamin A, vitamin E, carotenes and omega-3 fatty acids. It also contains more conjugated linoleic acid, a fat-soluble molecule that has been under intense study due to its ability to inhibit obesity and cancer in animals. The findings in human supplementation trials have been mixed, some confirming the animal studies and Read more [...]

Canadian telecom giant TELUS recently commissioned a survey targeted at over 1000+ employees to study their opinions and attitudes on flexible work. The results were promising: 47% of respondents work remotely at least a few times a month 46% of workplaces currently offer a flexible working program 89% of employees agreed that allowing for flexible work makes a company more attractive to work for The majority of respondents say they are just as productive (48%) or more productive (39%) Read more [...]