Category: healthier choices

gratitude/healthier choices/Healthy Habits/Purpose & Meaning/Weight Loss

Sustaining Healthy Habits and Weight Loss

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Dr. Adam Perlman      So many of my patients and friends and family have struggled with being overweight and have tried various fad diets and approaches to losing weight. I get asked about different diets and whether they work or not. I know you shared with me that when you were younger you were overweight and how you were able to lose that weight and keep it off. What was the secret? What was the journey like for you?

Brian Durbin MEd, CSCS of Synchronicity  I was young, I was 19 and I’ll never forget getting on the scale and I got on there and it’s 276 pounds. So I was 6 foot 3 inches and I had been playing football and I remember thinking “Whoa, this has gone too far. . .” I wasn’t playing sports any more and I thought, I have to reel this in. So I started reading data about what happens if you don’t lose the weight and it scared me.  So, it was that point that I started putting in small, little changes that involved exercise and nutrition, trying different things, learning new information, all along the way, it was just experimentation and learning. What works, what doesn’t work.

Adam So many people have this scenario where, you used the words “it scared me!” I often wonder how we create that sort of epiphany for ourselves, that inflection point in our lives, where we decide to do something different.

Brian I get bored incredibly easily. I am not going to be the guy who has the same thing for breakfast, lunch and dinner. That’s not going to be my thing, but if I find some article about some crazy fruit that comes from Africa that has this health benefit, I will definitely add that into my diet for a few weeks. So I try to keep things fresh and that has been a really big help to me.

Adam It reminds me of the Duke Wheel of Health. What I like about the Wheel of Health is that it looks at all these different areas of health and well-being, not just nutrition or exercise, but the concept of rest, professional development, spirituality, which could be interpreted as purpose and meaning in your life, along with connection and relationships. Often we can be a little too tunnel vision with our view of what a healthy lifestyle is or what well-being truly feels like and the Wheel helps me think more broadly about various aspects in my life, some of which maybe healthier than others. The Wheel helps me focus on different areas.

Brian As an example, how are exercise and relationships related? On the surface it might not seem like they are, but when you go “wow, aerobic exercise actually helps with my anxiety levels, lessening my chances of depression, my self-esteem and then you go, how does that actually play out with the way I communicate with people? Or how I make time for things and how I prioritize my life.  Everything is interrelated.

Adam I’ve heard you talk to about just being grateful for things like my heart that continues to beat and grateful for the breath that I can take. This has helped me, as someone who has struggled with trying to be perfect vs excellent which has led to unneeded suffering at times. I also think of someone, as we often do, scan the environment for threats, which at one point worked well for us. Now a days the threats are a text message we didn’t like or an email that had the wrong tone and letting ourselves get trigged by that.  That is something personally that I have worked on, not only for myself but as an example I want to set for my kids.  We have five children as you know and how do we teach gratitude to them? I think it starts by stopping and feeling gratitude ourselves, on a daily basis, right?

Brian  Just feel your heart beat, right, feel your heart beat and feel the appreciation for that. None of us asked to be here.  I mean, I don’t remember asking, but I’m here.  Can you feel appreciation just for that? Just for the heart beat and the chance to be here. Whether it is hard times or good times, can you feel appreciation for that?  Blending that with Rumi, especially his Guesthouse poem, about feeling these things, bad, good, they flow through us, can we let them flow through us without labeling them as good or bad?  That is how we can experience gratitude just for the gift of life.

Adam  The mind body connection is really interesting. I have seen that many times with my patience. It doesn’t mean what they are experiencing isn’t real, somehow other aspects of the way they are thinking or feeling is influencing their physiology.

Brian  I studied biomechanics in school, which is really just physics of the body.  It’s incredible, because you can watch somebody change their body when they start talking about something uncomfortable. You can start to see neck muscles start to contract. You can see recoil, tightness in the arms. The things we maybe are not aware of, right? Depending on what’s going on in our minds is manifesting in our bodies. It’s quite incredible.

Adam  Yeah, it is a struggle.  So many people get hung up on perfection. They think “I should have a purpose, I heard this on a podcast and now I’m going to buy the Dalai Lama’s book.” It really starts with small changes. I use to put three sugars in my coffee. I think the first thing I did, is cut it down to two.

healthier choices/Nutrition

Eating Healthier When Dining Out

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Today my wife Laurice and I are going to talk about healthy eating on the go and specifically one of our favorite smoothie places. Certainly one of the things that we enjoy is going out to eat. We also want to make it a part of the way we live a healthy lifestyle. So, it’s important for us to understand how we make the decisions about what to eat when we go out and how we develop the healthier habits when we are out and on the go.

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The first thing we do is look at the menu. What’s nice about Tropical Smoothie is that they break down everything on the menu, including what’s in all the different dishes and they even give you the calories, but you still need to be a little bit careful because there can be hidden things. For example, there are strawberries but are they fresh or are they preserved with added sugar.  You can really order a lot of calories in a smoothie if you’re not careful.

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At another location we visit from time-to-time, they have a smoothie called a “Hulk Strawberry”.  That smoothie has more calories than a Burger King double cheeseburger with fries.  Now, if I look at the menu here at Tropical Smoothie and check out something like the Detox Island Green smoothie with spinach, kale, mango, pineapple and bananas, and ginger, at 180 calories, I’d be hungry before I walked out the door.

I like the Health Nut, the blueberries (a lot of antioxidants), I’ll probably add some peanut butter just to give me even a few more calories which are okay for me, I had a good workout this morning.

When I go out to eat I recommend you limit sugar, refined grains, like white bread and processed foods in general. I also recommend adding more fiber, as I have done with adding kale to the Health Nut smoothie that I ordered.  You should also eliminate juices that are meant to sweeten for taste (like apple juice) but add too much sugar.

Substitutions really don’t make much of a price difference either. Just makes your meal a little healthier, not more expensive.

People are often challenged with how to eat healthy on the go. Science suggests limiting sugar, refined grains, processed foods while adding more vegetables and fruits and more whole foods.

It’s also a good idea to get something in a bowl, as opposed to having it in a wrap if you are trying to lose weight.

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Some will tell you to order smaller portions when dining out (if you are on a weight loss program). There is some recent research that explains why the quality of food you order maybe more important. This study, published in JAMA, found that people who cut back on added sugar, refined grains, and highly processed foods while concentrating on eating plenty of vegetables and whole foods — without worrying about counting calories or limiting portion sizes — lost significant amounts of weight over the course of a year.

This is even when scientists are looking at genetic testing to understand if we are more sensitive to a low-carb diet vs a low-fat diet.

What matters is the quality of food choices you make.  You can read more about the study here @nytimes The Key to Weight Loss Is Diet Quality, Not Quantity, a New Study Finds.

Blue zones/Health/healthier choices/longevity/Self Expert Tips/small changes

Small Choices That Lead to Healthier Habits for Life

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You know there is a saying now that 100 is the new 80, that people are expecting to live to 100 years of age. Of course, we want to live a long life, but we want to live a life of health. We want to be healthy physically, mentally and emotionally. We also want to be healthy spiritually and have a strong sense of meaning and purpose in life. We want to wake up each morning and know why the day matters.

Believing You Can Change

A couple of things are important to remember. One is, to have that life, the first step is to believe that your life can be that way. You need to believe. If you can believe that, then you can begin to plan for that healthy life, one day at a time.  There are no guarantees for how long we are going to live. For some people they have already developed certain conditions, others are concerned about preventing the development of conditions in the future. Whether you have diabetes or heart disease or you are overweight or you are concerned about developing those conditions it’s never too late to begin to try to reverse the conditions that you may be suffering from and its certainly never too late to begin to put into place the habits, the lifestyle needed to both prevent or treat the chronic diseases that have become epidemics in our society and that sometimes keep people from living longer. On the flip side, living longer with these chronic diseases will zap our quality of life, including our energy, ability to connect with people and have the meaning and fulfillment in our lives that we want.

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It starts with making choices, small choices, one day at a time.

This includes choices around the foods you may eat. Choices around how or when you might exercise or be physically active. Choices around how you might choose to connect with others in your life.  When you look at some of the research on longevity, like the research around the Blue Zones, these areas in the world where people tend to live longest, there are some commonalities there. They don’t necessarily go to gyms or take a lot of medications or supplements, but what they do –  is eat a healthy diet (sometimes there is a little more meat than others) but their diet typically consists of fresh vegetables and fruit, they remain physically active throughout their entire lives,  they connect with their community and loved ones on a regular basis and finally, they have a sense of purpose in their lives. Purpose around their work and family.

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Finding the Time

Social connections and relationships are so critical to having a life that we want but it need not feel overwhelming. Sometimes the things that hold us back from the life that we want are subtle things that we over miss.

For example, I was talking to someone the other day and overall they were feeling pretty good. They were exercising, eating well and they felt well mentally. The one issue he was having was a lot of stomach upset. He just couldn’t figure out where it was coming from and had spoken to his physician and after talking it through it turns out that one of the habits he had was chewing a lot of gum. Well, guess what? Gum can have Sorbitol in it and that Sorbitol can affect the stomach. Just look at the label.   That Sorbitol can cause stomach upset. So this seemingly innocent habit that he had was the issue. He since switched to a gum that has Xylitol in it which is just a different type of additive. If you weren’t aware, Xylitol and sorbitol are sugar substitutes commonly found in foods labeled “sugar-free” or “no sugar added. Once he started chewing this sugar-free gum with Xylitol his GI issues got better. It was such a “small” thing with such a profound impact on him.

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We don’t need to think in terms of what overwhelming life shift that we have to take, but what are some small, new or revolved habits you can make to make sure the trajectory of your life is headed in the direction you want along with the quality of your life. Ask yourself, Is the quality of your life where you want it to be today? Are you doing what you need to in order to assure that the quality of your life will be what you want it to be tomorrow?