Continuous Improvement

Continuous Improvement mostly doesn’t involve chocolate!

Marginal Gains help us to reach similar actions of an industrial engineering expert writing in Linkedin. He talks about the squeeze on profits from multiple directions in the modern commercial world. Dave Harnett highlights the need for continuous, enterprise-wide improvements to shave spending here and there and protect the company’s bottom line in the process.

Team Sky (the UK cycling team from the 2012 Olympics) refer to the process when aiming to make Marginal Gains wherever possible. Looking at every tiny thing (outfit material and cut, breakfast choices, study of sleeping habits etc) that might shave hundredths of seconds off a competing time for their athletes .

Owners of chronic conditions also need to see the management of their bodies in a similar way to companies or elite sports people wishing to seek continuous improvement and become more competitive.

Continuous Improvement mostly doesn’t involve chocolate!

We may not have the bottom line and shareholders to worry about but we face the hardest manager of all, ourselves. We can choose to focus on aspects of our health… like inflammation or pay no attention to the food we bring into our bodies?

Inflammation is at the heart of many long term conditions. Runaway/unmanaged inflammation contributes to ongoing, long term  damage to cells in the body. It stands to reason if we can minimise its impact on our bodies our bodies might function better for longer?

Bearing in mind that Continuous improvement mostly doesn’t involve chocoloate I’d like to present some lists of anti and pro-inflammatory foods it could be wise for us to do more or less of?
We can experiment on ourselves by take stuff out of our diets for a week or two and observe if it has any beneficial effects on our bodies?

Pro-inflammatory

  • Sugar
  • Wheat
  • Corn
  • Milk
  • Alcohol
  • Soy

These 6 things are the most common foods for provoking an immune response in humans. It’s not an exhaustive list of inflammatory foods (we’re all different for a start).  It may be your body is utterly equipped to deal with these things in which case you’ve spent a week finding out and now you can go back to them without any worries.

Anti-inflammatory substances

  • ‘eat the rainbow’ not a psychedelic instruction from an earlier decade but the suggestion to eat a spectrum of fruit and vegetables in the diet every day.

including herbs, spices and dark green leafy vegetables.

  • Fish and fish oils (flaxseed oil if you’re not keen on fish it’s not as good as fish oil but still better than nothing).
  • Coconut oil for cooking
  • Olive oil for salad dressing
  • Berries as part of the rainbow.

Continuous Improvement mostly doesn’t involve chocolate!

All these things are good for a body. We’ve spent a few hundred thousand years evolving whilst eating versions of these foodstuffs.

delightfully created chocolate rabbits unfortunately are proinflammatory being made with milk chocolate (I’d imagine) which contains one of the taxing foods for our bodies that might not work for us?

Life ultimately is about finding our own middle way and not sticking to hard and fast rules. If we get to talk to people when we eat various foodstuffs we can find a benefit from that. Don’t get silly about it but instead, treat your body with the respect it deserves.

legomen talking about continuous improvement to chocolate rabbits.