How to be a happy Londoner

So apparently the lovely Blog of Sunshine has become quite popular. I’m happy to share with you another guest-post from one of my close friends, Alex. She the odd one out happy ‘Hammersmithian’ and she’s sharing some tips&tricks of living a happy Londoner (and not only) life. I absolutely loved reading it, the English humour just cracks me up. Enjoy!

PS: Alex has her own blog about languages, translation and other cool stuff if you want to check it out: http://robinandthemachine.wordpress.com.

According to this latest piece of research, happiness and life satisfaction levels vary quite a bit across London. Whilst I wasn’t too surprised to see that people living in the super-wealthy borough of Kensington and Chelsea seem pretty happy with their lives, I was a bit surprised that people in my area, Hammersmith and Fulham, seem like a pretty dissatisfied bunch. Obviously there could be 100s of different reasons why people are unhappy with their life, but I thought I’d share a few of my ‘secrets’ to being one of the happy people in Hammersmith!

Cheesecakes and exercise

My friend Gianfranco, a man who has lost over 50 kg and completely changed his lifestyle, was kind enough to be my guest and tell us more about weightloss, excercise and how anyone can become the person they wish to be. He is that person that is always either cycling, swimmig, running, climbing and ocasionally playing tennis – annoyingly healthy, I know! *takes a bite of cheesecake*

Now, his advice might seem a bit extreme, he used to weight 135 kg so you can imagine what kind of effort that kind of weightloss requieres – most people don’t need to follow a strict diet or excercise that much but it’s great motivation and I’d consider myself accomplished even if I’d do half of what he does. Right, I’m off to the gym now, I’ll let you read his great post.

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A few years ago, I was a completely different person.

The way you look influences deeply the way you feel, and the way you feel interferes with the way you connect with other people. This is a vicious circle, because acceptance seems to be the base of many other aspects of our everyday relationships. The way you look impacts on your work, the trust other people have in you, and other people’s expectations. Some books say “oh, don’t bother about what other people think, just live your life” – this is a misleading message. Being social animals we cannot just detach ourselves from the community and – sorry to say – being healthy, fit and possibly good looking is a facilitating factor in every single aspect of life.