Does every cloud have a silver lining? It very much depends on your attitude. When times are difficult it can be quite hard to find anything positive. Every problem seems somehow to be magnified out of proportion. Things you never considered to be a problem suddenly become a major issue.

Things are not helped by television and radio commentators who seem to relish in bad news. The worse it gets, the happier they seem to be.

Of course it doesn’t make any sense to go around thinking there’s nothing wrong, but we do need to find some degree of balance if we are going to take the right decisions.

It’s an alarming fact that we take decisions on 5% of the available information. The message is clear. We need develop our awareness and start to ask more questions. We need to season our diet of bad news with a few facts.

To keep our personal lives on track we need to constantly ask questions. When there’s a crisis we need all the information there is so that we can react the right way and get the right outcome.

Let’s take our health as an example here. Too many of us ignore our health. In particular we ignore our weight and its effect on our health. We keep doing things we know are not good for us. We keep eating far too many calories. Eventually the day comes when the bill has to be paid for our lack of attention. Our health starts to deteriorate and the possibility of contracting a life threatening disease comes closer.

There are some striking similarities with the current financial crisis, aren’t there? Living a lie, allowing problems to stack up, ignoring reality, putting the future in jeopardy…all too familiar!

But let’s not always look on the black side. Maybe every cloud has got a silver lining after all! Let’s start to look for opportunities. Let’s take our health, and our weight in particular. If we are slim and healthy we will be in a far better position to deal with whatever is thrown at us than if we were fat or obese. Isn’t it time we shed all those extra pounds and put our life in order? ‘The crunch’ should be the catalyst that stirred us into action: time to change and learn some new habits – slim habits.