To Do List

Here are a few short steps to have a happy/healthy/successful/long/fulfilling life:

1. Sleep 7-8 hours a night
2. Take Naps – *NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN PEOPLE*
3. Eat your vegetables
4. Cut out sugar and alcohol, and saturated fat, oh and carbs. Pretty much don’t eat anything that tastes good.
5. Eat real butter instead of margarine (now we’re talking!)
6. Don’t drink cow’s milk, but also don’t drink soy milk if you are a woman
7. Get plenty of vitamin D, but I guess not from milk. Get it from sunshine, yay, unless you live in the Pacific Northwest, in which case get used to having crappy vitamin D levels.
8. On the 5 minutes the sun comes out, wear plenty of sunscreen so none of the vitamin D gets in. Also because skin cancer = sucks
9. Ladies take your calcium with vitamin D, but calcium citrate – not calcium carbonate if you are prone to kidney stones otherwise you will end up in the ER with, well, kidney stones. Note: 99% of all calcium supplements will be calcium carbonate, except expensive name brand ones.
10. Don’t go to urgent care or you might get misdiagnosed with diverticulitis and end up in the ER with kidney stones even though you told the urgent care doctor that this feels just like when you had a kidney infection in college. Also get a C. Diff infection from antibiotics prescribed for misdiagnosis. Learn the hard way about the importance of probiotics and a good primary care provider.
11. Eat yogurt, because probiotics *ALSO NOT HAPPENING*
12. Keep a food journal
13. Keep a journal-journal (can I write about how much I hate keeping a food journal?)
14. Socialize with friends (without sugar or alcohol..??)
15. Spend time with family, but in real life not on social media, which is fun when they live all over the entire country and airfare to go visit your parents is more than airfare to go to Hawaii. Of course, fish and relatives get old in 3 days, so don’t stay in that place you just spent more money than Hawaii to go to for too long.
16. Exercise regularly. And exercise includes the following:
    1. Aerobic activity
    2. Strength training
    3. Core fitness
    4. Yoga
    5. Stretching
    6. Getting 10,000 steps a day, even though days you work out with your trainer and you can barely sit on the toilet the next day you are so sore don’t count because that kind of torture does not equal steps
17. Do something creative like look at pinterest to see exactly how much of a loser you are because you can’t make handmade pasta in the shape of chinese lanterns
18. Turn off the TV (Is a life without binge-watching Stranger Things on Netflix even worth living?)
19. Drink red wine and eat dark chocolate (take that, #4! And, uh, does white wine count if you don’t like red wine?)
20. Follow your passion
21. Eliminate debt (if only my passion for giving unsolicited advice paid better, or at all).
22. Meditate. Sit in a quiet place and calm your mind. Being a FOMO media loving American makes this very easy.
23. Get an annual physical, and your eyes checked, get an annual mammogram, go to your dentist twice a year, and visit your various specialists that you have accumulated since you turned 45. Make sure all the various medical professionals mention that losing weight will solve all your problems but then don’t give you any guidance on how to do that. Get a colonoscopy before you are 50. Tell your husband terrifying stories about how he will never be able to handle the prep for your own amusement.
24. Lose weight by calculating a mystery point system, journaling what you eat, and going to regular meetings. You will lose weight if you do these things. You will not lose weight if you do none of these things and just keep paying for your membership.
25. Go to bed at the same time as your spouse. Unless your spouse routinely goes to bed before 8pm, in which case sit in the other room with the TV on ruining your brain with blue light and mock him from the sofa for his sleep weakness. Definitely wake him back up when you go to bed and tell him you are doing it for your marriage because you read an article on the internet once that couples should go to bed at the same time.
26. Get off social media. (Well, then how am I supposed to know which friend of mine has some vague problem they are willing to post about but not say what it is.)
27. Don’t smoke. Done. Never started. Super glad. If you have friends who smoke don’t ask them all the time if they are going to quit or tell them all about lung cancer. They will band together and plot your murder in which case your non-smoking life will be much shorter than theirs.
28. Be married. I don’t necessarily recommend it to someone training for a long distance triathlon unless you like hearing about swimming, running, biking, bike parts, bikes in magazine, lifting up a bike with one hand to prove that yes it really is super lightweight. The only defense is to do your own endurance event and then you both talk about your events non-stop and effectively ignore each other together.
29. Have a pet, especially one that eats too fast and promptly barfs their dinner on the carpet and then is hungry again. They will especially like to do this the morning you are having company over that night and just finished vacuuming.
30. I have heard having children both makes you immortal and want to run in front of traffic, but I haven’t done that one so I can’t really comment. I can have fun getting “that” look from people when you told them you chose not to have kids, like, on purpose. It seems to be a mixture of pity and longing.
31. Stop reading and making lists. They definitely make you depressed and feel bad about yourself.  Hang out with your friends and family, drink a little wine, eat a little chocolate, run around the lake with your friend regularly enough to get some exercise and also not need to pay for actual therapy, and maybe eat some vegetables with those carbs. Hug your cat and your husband on a regular basis. Definitely watch Stranger Things on Netflix, but maybe not all at one time, just like 2-3 episodes a day.