[COMPETITION: This list features a competition. See item seven on this list for details] It is the weekend. If you in the northern hemisphere, winter is slowly heading to you and you may be starting to feel a little down. Politics sucks, everyone is mean to everyone else online, and the media does nothing but tell you why you should be miserable. Rubbish! Forget it all. Life is awesome and with a few little tips you can make that true more often that not. So here I present you with the weekend ramblings of a man who wants to make the world a little happier today. Good luck with the competition! Leave a comment. Smile—

—and read this too: 10 Tips for Success in Everything

10 Laugh

Watch this video. I’ll wait . . .  Did it make you laugh? Or maybe the better question is: at what point did you begin to? Tell us in the comments! I posted that clip to get you into a better frame of mind for the reading of the rest of this list—let’s hope it worked. Science tells us it does. Adding laughter to your life truly is the best medicine and hopefully this item has proven that to you more than my words can. Nevertheless, in brief, watch or do funny stuff regularly. It gets easier with time.

9 Become A Loser

While our readers tend to be extremely good at maintaining their composure during commenting wars, occasionally the pearl clutching gets a little intense and nerves are frayed (I am being so diplomatic right now!) A really good way to be a little happier—particularly if you frequent online discussions—is to let everyone else be right. That is not to say you need to state a belief in something you don’t agree with, but you also don’t need to try to convert everyone around you to your ideas. How much does your life improve when you convince someone to change a belief they hold? Probably not at all. Most of the time these people are not even in the same room as us. So why get so het up about things? Think about it this way: in 12 months, will the outcome of your argument matter? Will anyone’s lives have changed because of it? If the answer is no, it is probably not worth pursuing.

8 Wear Blinders

Obviously I mean metaphorical blinders (or blinkers as the Brits say) and I am talking specifically with reference to the past and future. Do not look behind, do not look in front. Be. The somewhat wise man Lao Tzu said:

“If you are depressed you are living in the past.
If you are anxious you are living in the future.
If you are at peace you are living in the present.”

What is done is done. You can’t undo the past. So why suffer at its hand? And as for the future: you can’t do anything about that until you get there so why spend so much time thinking about it? No matter how bad things may seem, you are here right now and you are not in the midst of the greatest crisis in your life. Live for now.

7 Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff

Buy this book. “Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff” is probably the single best book you can own in terms of happiness. It has brief points to help out in your daily life and boy do they make you think. The book is broken up into 100 short one page (or thereabouts) entries, but even a cursory glance of the table of contents is enough to give you some life-changing advice that will improve your happiness level hugely. Here are a few of my favorites:

1. Make Peace With Imperfection
2. Seek to Understand
3. Let Yourself Be Bored
4. Think of Someone Everyday to Thank
5. Remember: Life Isn’t An Emergency

Buy this book. It will make you happy. It is the only self-help book I return to time and time again. Actually, don’t just buy this book: buy ten copies and give it away to your friends.

Competition: I love this book so much that I am taking my own advice. 24 hours after the publication of this list, I will note the comments with the ten highest upvotes and I will send their authors a copy of this book (signed by me with a little anecdote added). In other words, there are ten copies to be given away to the best commenters. There are no restrictions on which country you are in.

6 Ditch the Drugs

What goes up . . . must come down. For the sake of propriety I will presume people here aren’t using illicit drugs but this item goes doubly for people who do. With a great deal deal of caution, a person who is a long-term user of prescribed drugs should meet with their doctor and evaluate the ongoing benefits. It is quite easy to get used to taking longer-term medication without bothering to make sure it is still appropriate for you. The human body is pretty amazing, and unless you have a very obvious need for medication (in the case of schizophrenia or acute nerve damage for example), it may well be able to cope on its own. Antidepressants fall into this category and are often needed only to get through particularly dark times. I am sure I don’t need to say it but: do not make any medication changes without the full knowledge and recommendation of your doctor.

5 Take the Air

If you do no exercise at all, I don’t advocate joining the gym. Start walking, or swimming, or even doing sit ups in your living room. Any movement is better than no movement. As I recently explained on Top 10 Things Your Ancestors Did Better Than You,Exercise releases endorphins and has been found to be more effective than anti-depressants in many cases. Beyond the physiological effects of exercise you also get to take time away from electricity’s vice-like grip on your life (don’t wear headphones!) and see nature as God intended it. This is effectively a form of mindfulness as you have no choice but to simply let life exist around you.

4 Fail, Fail, Fail

When we try hard to do something, we sometimes stumble. Oddly, the harder we try, the more we stumble. If you are anything like me you are your own harshest critic and that certainly doesn’t help matters either. To truly begin the process of being happy, you need to accept failure. You will never be perfect—nothing you ever do will be perfect, but the more you are willing to accept being a step away from that, the happier you will be and the more you will take pride in what you do. Thank God I don’t except it to be perfect every day, otherwise I would have stopped seven days after I started! So be prepared to fail, and when you do: get right back up and go at it again.

3 Become Ignorant

I am being a little playful here with the title of this item. Remove the news media from your life. If you don’t read the news you don’t need to worry about whether it is fake or not (hint: it probably is). Politics and human misery can be put out of your mind. Let other people deal with that: why do you think we pay politicians so much money? Even if they do a terrible job what you can do? Okay so there might be a coup: but if that happens, you won’t be finding out about from the pages of the New York Times.

2 Be Nice To Others

Don’t just be respectful of others. Don’t just treat others as you would want them to treat you. Go a step further. Be as nice to other people as you can be. You are doing them a service, you are doing society as a whole a service, but most importantly, you are doing yourself a service: because most people will respond to you in like Manner. It is very difficult to be rude or unpleasant when someone is being extremely nice. And remember: if the other person doesn’t respond in kind, you should first consider that they are in the midst of some awful life situation rather than presuming they are simply a rude person. We all have bad days.

1 Get Friends

When a person is unhappy the company of friends and family can go a long way to fixing things. At the very worst you will be distracted for a short time and your brain will have a chance to re-organize some of its thoughts, and at the best, it will start you on a path to complete happiness. This can be a particularly difficult thing to do when you are not feeling very good but it is one of the most important things to achieving contentedness in life. If physical visits are impossible or just too difficult, a phone call is better than nothing at all.

[COMPETITION: This list features a competition. See the bonus item at the end of the list for details.] I’m as guilty as the next man when it comes to canonizing our ancestors—in fact, probably more guilty than most if this list, this list, and this list are any indication. And perhaps it is no small wonder when it comes to diet, that so many of us look to the past to find answers: after all, our own governments failed us when they began promoting the modern diet (you know . . . the one that made us all fat!)^[1]

See Also: Top 10 Craziest Diets Ever

But as tempting as it is to find these answers in the past, we are not living in the past. Just as we don’t seek to find the best way to build our houses from the ancient homes of the Greeks, we shouldn’t be looking at cavemen to find the perfect diet. In fact, I would posit that the perfect diet is not even a diet at all!

10 Ditch The Diets

This is probably the single most important item on this list. From this moment, delete all diets from your life. No more keto, no more paleo, no more veganism, no more vegetarianism, no more weight watchers, no more Jenny Craig, and on and on and on. Every time you go on a diet, you statistically gain 11 pounds for the effort (after the diet fails: and it always does.)^[2]

Why does this happen? The physiologically reason is that diets tend to restrict nutrients you need (weight watchers: no fat; keto: no carbs), and your body does a nutrient catch up when your diet fails (though new research now indicates that stomach bacteria may have a big part to play in this). And psychologically we fail because the diet is ordering you not to have something you really want. When the diet ends, your entire mind and body begin to work against you. This can cause a snowball effect of bad habits which makes things even worse. This, obviously, is the binge / purge form of modern dieting.^[3]

9 Ditch The Exercise

Don’t have a melt-down! I don’t meant to ditch all exercise. But intense and prolonged exercise? Dump it. At least for now. Remember that old phrase “work up an appetite”? In other words: exercise to get hungry. This is the natural consequence of intensely working out and it is also the reason that when we join the gym to lose weight, we are recommended diets involving 6 or even more meals per day to compensate: but those are usually meals comprised of meagre nutrients and lots of fillers (vegetables mainly).^[4]

So why go through the pain? Don’t. Ditch the gym and bring exercise into your daily life as a part of living: walk to the store for milk, park further away from the office door, dance around your kitchen when no one is looking. As you get older, being more nimble and flexible is really important. Focus there, not on sweat pouring down your brow before you chow down on a salad that does nothing for your hunger at all. If you look at it objectively, this “gym->salad” cycle is a form of voluntary torture.^[5]

8 Eat Three Meals

This is conventional wisdom and follows logically from rejecting the 6+ meals a day thing. Eat three meals a day. I know cavemen only ate when they could (which was not daily) and that breakfast is a modern invention, but that doesn’t mean three square meals should be anathema. In addition to this weird idea that you need to basically graze throughout the day like a cow, there is even a bizarre myth floating around that eating so many hours before bed will make you fat. How ridiculous! Calories don’t change because of the position of the hands on the clock. Eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and eat well at each meal.^[6]

Basically common sense says to have one hearty meal and two smaller meals a day. For most of us that looks like a small breakfast, a moderate lunch, and a big dinner. Some European countries (though they are becoming fewer in number) have their main meal at lunch time. Oh, and if you are a Catholic in most of the world (except America), don’t forget: no meat on Fridays!^[7]

7 Don’t Snack

This is pretty obvious right? And much of this list is, but that goes to show how bad things have become that we need to even write a list that tells you not to eat more food than you need. Snacking is, in almost all cases, about passing the time or alleviating boredom. A busy person doesn’t eat snacks unless he is trying to adhere to a gym routine that demands six meals a day or is obeying the government’s advice on eating up to 10 pieces of fruit and vegetables a day.^[8]

What bizarre advice: with no caveats whatsoever, a government committee decreed that we should eat 10 fruits or vegetables a day. Ludicrous. Have some vegetables with your meal and a bit of fruit in your dessert and that’s it. Until refrigeration was invented for mass transportation of food around the world, there were entire nations who had no notion of most of the fruit and vegetables we have today. Children in England had their minds blown when they saw bananas for the first time after wartime rationing.^[9]

6 Keep It Real

Try to keep the food natural. Here’s a good way to put it: if God made it, it’s good to go. Food from nature is your best choice. One gimmicky way to look at this (which is surprisingly accurate actually) is to outlaw anything in the center aisles of the supermarket. On the outskirts you usually have the fresh food, and in the middle are the shelves of chips, cookies, cakes, and other delectable poisons. Supermarkets are actually designed that way on purpose to give the illusion when you enter that they are selling fresh, healthy goods. The real coup of the supermarket villains was combining the farmers market with the dry goods store.^[10]

I dare you to do an experiment and see if you can go an entire week without venturing into the dark recesses of the middle aisles. Eat entirely from the edges. And here’s food for thought: if we all did this (hint: before the 1930s we did,) how much plastic waste would there be in our homes? Governments are busy banning straws and plastic shopping bags when it is the entire supermarket concept they should be banning! I guess supermarket chains have too much money to offer governments for them to do the genuinely right thing rather than the “visibly right” thing. Ah . . . government virtuousness.^[11]

5 Cook At Home

Try to be part of the cooking process. If you contribute to the process of preparing your meals, you are (provably) less hungry, and more likely to eat better. And it goes without saying, you will find the whole “keep it real” rule far easier to follow. If you cook the food you know what’s in the food.^[12]

Additionally, you will obviously need to eat out from time to time. No problem: just choose meals that match the advice here as closely as possible and you will be fine. You can even have dessert if you feel like it; but if you are not home cooking, I’d suggest you keep the non-nutritive foods to every other meal out.^[13]

4 Fats And Oils

Fat was the biggest victim of the new governmental dietary plans of the 1960s and 1970s. Because of bad studies, it was determined that animal fat in particular was absolutely terrible. So much so that even synthetic fats were recommended over natural fats and companies like McDonalds switched from cooking their fries in beef tallow to cooking in trans-fats! We now know, of course, that they couldn’t have done a worse thing!^[14]

Even though we now understand how wrong this advice was, animal fats are still off the menu (probably due to vegan or vegetarian lobbying and the mainstream media promoting anything that is abnormal for clicks). But if you can, buy meat cuts that are high in their natural fats, and favor fish like salmon with naturally high fish oil. It is not only better for your brain (particularly if you are a child) but it is more delicious and more satiating; and that, in turn, keeps you full for longer. The anti-animal-fat crusade has led to what could well be the single worst piece of dietary advice ever inflicted upon man.^[15]

3 Proteins and Carbohydrates

Humans are meat-eating creatures. Our stomachs match those of the other meat eaters, and our brains allowed us to develop the requisite tools for the important task of chopping up animals for yums. However, some people prefer a non-meat diet due to religious or philosophical reasons. Regardless of whether you eat the normal human diet or a vegetable-based diet, protein is essential and should comprise a significant portion of your calories. And, as mentioned above, even better if the protein is laced in fat.^[16]

Your main meal of the day should typically comprise a large cut of meat or fish (or a protein substitute) with a generous amount of vegetables and accompaniments to enhance the taste and pleasure of the meal. Forget measuring or weighing food, forget counts of 6 or 8 or 10 portions a day. If you love lettuce, fill the plate with lettuce. If you love carrots: ditto.^[17]

And this is also true of potatoes and starches though some caution is needed while you transition back to real eating. Starches, like these, should preferably not dominate the meal—though on occasion they will such as with pasta. But generally, if you are eating whole food, you don’t need to worry yourself about carbohydrate vs protein ratios or weights, and as a rough guide, one small potato is the correct quantity for one person.^[18]

2 Portions

A correct portion size doesn’t need measuring. Just take a standard dinner plate and leave a good inch around the rim and don’t fill the plate like a mountain. If you do that, and if you don’t go back for seconds, you will maintain a healthy weight for your body. If you are overweight, this advice will allow your body to slowly restore itself to normal but it is important not to fret through the process. Natural weight loss is slow weight loss. Just focus on enjoying the food you are eating.^[19]

This is probably also a good time to point out that you should portion such things as sugar in the same way you would portion alcohol. Consider it to be an addictive substance that needs moderation (or total abstinence if you are unable to moderate). So while all the advice here is generally unrestrictive, sugar should be counted not as food but as a stimulant. It is no less addictive than alcohol and should be treated with the same caution.^[20]

1 Cheat

If you really want to: cheat. It’s not really cheating if you’re not in a competition. When you lie on your deathbed, no one is going to tally up the times you ate a chocolate bar and condemn you to the fiery pits of hell for it. Truthfully, a large part of the reason we fail on diets is because we can’t stand the severity of dietary restriction. It is certainly better to buy one candy bar and eat it today, than starve yourself of candy, spend every waking moment thinking about it, and then gorge yourself on five of them in one go. What is the point of a healthy diet if you can never enjoy the benefits that come from good health due to a constant gnawing sense of desire for that which is forbidden.^[21]

My aim in writing this list is to help you take the guilt out of the food you eat, and to get you on the path to enjoying one of the great pleasures that life has to give us. So, to that end, I’ll leave you with this Biblical exhortation: “Eat, and drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die.”^[22]

+ Competition

Because this list is all about food it makes sense to give away my favorite cook book: Gordon Ramsay’s Home Cooking. It is a cook book I go back to time and again for various staple recipes. Everyone needs Gordon Ramsay in their kitchen! The commenter, by the end of the day, with the highest upvotes for their witty and relevant comment, will have a free copy sent to them. All commenters are included, regardless of where they live.