Book Review

The Power for Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal, by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz(New York:  The Free Press, 2003)

Interval training matters as much in life as it does insports.  This is the straightforward conviction contained in this book about finding fulfillment in life and leadership.  Our ability to expend and import energy in a such a way that we are neither sapped nor over-supplied is critical to maintaining balance in life. 

Starting with physical energy upon which emotional energy supports mental energy by which ultimate spiritual energy is imported and exerted, Loehr and Schwartz build a case for self-care I have not found in many other leadership books.  This is a great read.

As for me, I am putting the physical energy principles to work.  Eating smaller, regularly-interval-ed snacks throughout the day to keep my blood sugar and caloric energy count consistent (no more wild metabolic swings).  Additionally, taking time every 90 minutes or so for a walk outside or some stretching keeps my mind engaged and fresh—more elastic to the pressures of pastoring a congregation the size of Concordia, Kirkwood.

I’ll have more to say in weeks to come, but for now, go out and get the book…it’s quick and easily digestible with lots of stories to match the power of the ideas offered.

Book Review  

Food Rules:  An Eater’s Manual by Michael Pollan, (New York:Penguin Books, 2009)

Metabolism is such a fickle friend.  In my teens and twenties the amount of food—any food!—I could pack into my 150 pound frame was quickly, easily, and efficiently digested with no apparent poundage left behind.  My thirties were all that—everything that a man’s thirties are supposed to be and what I heard.  150 turned quickly to 160, then 170.  Now at the dawn of my forties my metabolism has come full circle, does nothing, as my frame learns to manage 180.

Twenty years ago, food really didn’t matter.  Now food matters more than I ever imagined.  This short, humorous and insightful book helpfully challenges people to live by some simple food consuming rules—about 64 of them.  Written in a “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff” style, the goal is for the reader to adopt the ones which are most “sticky”, as Pollan says, a handful of them at first.  The thesis is that living by even one of these rules will change our eating habits and consequent life for the better.

Take for instance Rule #2:  “Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”  Consider her picking “up a package of Go-GURT Portable Yogurt tubes--(without a) clue what this plastic cylinder of colored and flavored gel could possibly be.”  Humorous, simple and best of all forgiving of our sweet human disposition.

If you want to make a dent in your diet and ever so slightly tilt the method by which you satisfy your hunger, Food Rules is a great tool in your health toolbox.