The Fox and Cat Principle: Follow It For Better Bones

For my 10th birthday, my parents gave me a hardcover edition of Aesop's Fables, and I fell in love with the entertaining tales. All the while my young, impressionable mind absorbed the morals that came with every story.

One of my favorites was the story of the fox and the cat. The wiley old fox was bragging to the cat about how clever he was, “I have a whole bag of tricks, and it contains at least a hundred ways of escaping my enemies.” The cat came back with, “I have only one, but I can generally manage with that.”

Just then, a pack of hounds descended on the pair. The cat quickly jumped onto a tree and hid herself in the branches, saying, “This is my plan.” Meanwhile, the fox was thinking. Pondering his hundred different methods for evading the hounds, confused and scattered and discarding one plan after another. While the fox was sorting through all the plans, the hounds caught up with him and he was soon killed by the huntsmen.

The moral, as voiced by Miss Puss:

“Better one safe way than a hundred on which you cannot reckon.”

That stuck with me, and in my journey for natural bone health, I've applied The Fox and Cat Principle.

Are You Like the Cat or Like the Fox?

Do you find a course that works and stick with it, or are you constantly leaping from one solution to the next, never confident how to proceed?

It's certainly easy to be swayed. There will always be an article proclaiming that what you believe to be true is in fact not true, and there will always be a new “expert” who will come along and give you all the reasons why.

Indeed, there are alternative ways to approach most situations, and your bone health is no exception. In that sense, the fox had a point. The danger is that while you're pondering all the different approaches, life is moving on, and you're not taking action.

Ever heard of “analysis paralysis”? Here's one of the best descriptions I've seen: “Analysis paralysis is where you can’t make any forward progress because you bog yourself down in details, tweaking, brainstorming, research and … anything but just getting on with it.” If ever there was a classic case of analysis paralysis, Aesop's fox had it.

Create Your “Bone Health Philosophy”

But… even at that point, there are traps for the perfectionist.

If you've chosen to go with the Osteoporosis Reversal Program, you could still get bogged down. A true perfectionist is likely to think, “If I can't do everything in the program perfectly, I may as well not try at all. I'd better get everything in place, make sure I have all the foods and understand their composition… I injured my ankle and can't work with weights the way Vivian recommends, so I'll have to wait to get started until my ankle heals… Oh, and Vivian writes about the benefits of grapefruit, but I'm on a medication that interacts with grapefruit, so I can't eat it. Hmmm, better wait until I’ll know what to do about grapefruit before I start the program.”

Here's the thing. You don’t have to follow everything all the time in the Osteoporosis Reversal Program to succeed in your natural bone health quest. You don’t have to be perfect! The Actions outlined in the Osteoporosis Reversal Program are so powerful and effective that even if you follow only a handful you’ll be doing marvelous things for your bones. And those few Actions can have amazing bone health benefits that will change your life for the better.

Let’s take a look at a few examples.

• If you eat a few meals that are not perfectly balanced… just get back to the plan without kicking yourself.
• If you're worried about getting the exact proportions of each meal right… stop worrying! You don't have to weigh and measure. Just eyeball your plate and shoot for an approximate balance by volume. And don't worry about getting each meal perfectly balanced every day of the week. On occasion, you can think in terms of balancing your intake on a daily basis, rather than meal by meal.
• If you absolutely can't do without your 3-latte-a-day habit (for now, anyway)… that doesn't mean that you can't improve your bone health. Follow as much of the program as you can. And gradually work on making changes to that latte habit. Perhaps substitute almond or soy milk for the regular milk, cut back from two shots of espresso per drink to one, then cut back to two lattes instead of three, and so on.
• If you can't do an exercise I show you due to injury or because you're out of shape or for any other reason… don't stress about it. You can either modify the exercise or find other ways to achieve the same result.
• When I talk about the benefits of a particular food, that doesn't mean you need to eat it every day… In almost every case, it's just one of many bone healthy foods that you can include in your diet. It's more important to eat a varied diet rather than to focus on one particular food. And if you're allergic or simply don't like one of the foods on my lists, just don't eat it! There are plenty of others to choose from.
• And here's the best part…

Worrying Less about the Details is Good for Your Bones

As I explain in the Osteoporosis Reversal Program, stress can hurt your bones because it activates cortisol secretion, and cortisol negatively affects bone density. So if you happen to be a perfectionist, now you have a great reason to let go!

The bottom line is that you don't have to do everything that's in the Program to improve your bone health.

So relax, do the best you can, and you'll reduce your stress and improve your bone health at the same time. And remember, you don't have to be “purr-fect” but be more like the cat.

To your bone health success!