by ken winston caine

Want to lose 20 pounds in the next 30 days?

Make your diet boring. Boring and simple, says Tim Ferris, best-selling author of The Four-Hour Workweek.

That doesn’t mean no variety or tasteless meals, Ferris explains.

He provides four simple rules for losing weight quickly, while building muscle, and — exercise is NOT one of them. (Click the link below to see all four rules — and the exact diet he is using.)

The rules look nutritionally sound. And they are based on results from scientific studies.

Why make your diet boring? Because it’s easier to follow that way, he says.

“The most successful dieters, regardless of whether their goal is muscle gain or fat loss, eat the same few meals over and over again,” he writes in a blog post at (more…)

by ken winston caine

Towns and cities could cut electricity use significantly — simply and painlessly.

Almost overnight.

All they have to do is to commit to quit trying to light up the night as though it is day.

Turn off, or turn down, street lighting, building lighting and after-hours electric signs on businesses. (This was decreed by President Nixon as national policy during the first oil embargo in 1973, alongside more drastic measures such as gas rationing and a national 55 mph speed limit.)

Cutting street lighting has been shown to CUT crime. (More on that in a moment.)

Bring back the night.

Bring back the stars.

If cities would turn off just every other streetlight, on alternating sides of the street, immediately they would cut streetlighting energy use in half. And cut the cost of streetlighting in half.

Why is no one thinking like this at a time when greenhouse gasses produced by coal-and-other-carbon-fuel-fired power plants are destroying the planet’s equilibrium and by extension, our current and future quality of life … and simultaneously, world-wide, we are facing an energy shortage?

Instead, power companies are calling for more power plants and, at the same time, (more…)

by ken winston caine

The questions you ask and choose to explore shape the outcomes you achieve. The trick is to ask powerful questions.

They cut to the chase. They move you forward quickly and smartly.

Asking powerful questions is at the heart of “coaching” as it was developed by Thomas Leonard. And I’ve been collecting lists of powerful questions, or coaching questions, for 11 years — ever since I was first exposed to Leonard’s approach.

But simply being armed with a mile-long list of powerful questions does not make one a good coach. Or guarantee you magnificent, rapid, sustainable personal success. The good coach and the smart achiever know how to ask the right type of question at exactly the right moment.

Better, I think, to understand what a powerful question is, so that you can instinctively pose one when it is needed, than to have a long list of questions to sort through. (Though a list is valuable.)

So what is a powerful question?

The best explanation I have come across comes not from the world of life coaching or business coaching or corporate coaching, but from pioneers of The World Cafe process, Juanita Brown and David Isaacs.

They write, on their website, that a powerful question has eight defining characteristics: (more…)

by ken winston caine

Do projects always take longer to complete than you expect?

I know they often do for me.

Big Idea Coach Jim M. Allen has three cool tips for fixing that. I’ll share one of them here. He says, (more…)

by ken winston caine

Naturopath Leslie Taylor maintains an extraordinary database of known information about medicinal herbs on the rain-tree.com website. A nice feature: It includes the scientific (and other) citations.

Much of the information comes from Taylor’s book, The Healing Power of Rainforest Herbs.

To look up an herb, go to: (more…)

by ken winston caine

See the November 2007 Fast Company piece on Kansan “Johnathan Goodwin [who] can:

• “get 100 mpg out of a Lincoln Continental,

• “cut emissions by 80%, and

• “double the horsepower.

“Does the car business have the guts to follow him?” asks Fast Company in headline type.

His bio-diesel/hydrogen/electric hybrid Hummer gets 60 mpg, has double the horsepower of a stock model, and “does zero to 60 in five seconds.”

Goodwin transforms noxious polluting, gas-hog muscle cars into super-powerful clean green machines using current technology and readily available Detroit parts.

He charges $25,000 per vehicle to manage the metamorphosis. His clientele is mainly celebreties and industry titans — the ultra-rich.

Detroit IS paying attention. But how long ’til this super-low-emission, renewable-energy, power-doubling, fuel-stingy technology is available to the rest of us?

Click this link to read Fast Company’s fascinating article on this fascinating young eco innovator who is delivering the cars of the future, today: (more…)

by ken winston caine

USA Today reports that new parents are leading the fight against our widespread exposure to health-robbing, mutagenic toxins in plastics.

In one of the more comprehensive and serious examinations of the health threats from plastics and plastic food containers, USA Today reporters Elizabeth Weise and Liz Szabo, note in the copyright story, among other things:

• “Parents, activists and many scientists are concerned that if a baby drinks from a bottle made with [plastic chemicals] bisphenol A [BPA] or gums a toy made with phthalates, he or she could suffer serious, even permanent, harm.”

• “In December, the National Toxicology Program, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, concluded that one form of phthalate, called di(2-ethylhexyl), or DEHP, used in intravenous tubing, catheters and other plastic medical equipment, could pose a risk to the proper development of baby boys’ reproductive tracts.”

• “Nearly every American has been exposed. A 2000 study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found (more…)