Sun Tzu says Know Your Enemy
(DrRic says the modern food industry can be your enemy)
A basic premise in success. It is also a concept with making a lifestyle change that is imperative before starting any exercise program or fad diet. Science is awesome with the information being revealed on how macro nutrients effect emotion and metabolism. I think some people are still in the dark ages when it comes to initiating a change. I hear of people just cutting out lunch or breakfast hoping to sustain this form of "fasting" for 2-3 months. (It takes about 2-3 months to see effective lasting change) I don't know about you but for me to refrain from a ritual is hard over the course of just 1 day. How to expect keeping it up for weeks? No matter who you are, human nature loves ritual. We develop daily rituals and even if bad, they make the day go by faster. Breaking ritual and changing goes against our DNA and the brain will send all kinds of chemical signals into the blood stream when it wants to get back to the old way. Craving, irritability, poor sleep, anger, depression.....all can be felt during times of lifestyle change.
Some of these signals can be "modified" with the right choice and timing of nutrition. Science has helped figure how food can cause damage but also how food can be used to control damage. This information is out there for you to find and self educate but one has to be well versed in research and sifting through all the internet crap out in cyberspace. At the time of this blog, I searched on google for diet and 486,000,000 hits came up. By the time you find the correct study out of this search, your time on earth would be up. Short cut your efforts and increase the chance for success in making a lifestyle change by enlisting the experience of someone that reads through information like this for a living. Registered dietitian's, research fellows, scientists all have to keep up to date so why not pick their brain. Not to boast but I spent 2 extra years of post graduate training with Andrew Weil just to be "comfortable" with talking about nutrition since your average doctor only gets about 2 weeks in medical school. How are we supposed to teach about a topic we no nothing of? Hint: we're not, it is just bypassed and substituted with prescriptions or surgeries. Hippocrates said let food be thy medicine and although archaic, still a basic concept in making sustainable lifestyle change.
At First Health Associates I have the luck of bouncing questions off of Tom Jordan, a registered dietitian. He has a passion for changing lives and runs our wellness department. He has alot of success stories with weight loss patients in addition to his love of marathon running. It pains me when I have to write multiple prescriptions to young people in order to control disease. On the other hand, I feel great when Tom tells me they were able to stop meds with lifestyle change in only a few months!
Don't do it alone, weigh the odds in your favor. Going cold turkey is soooo 1960's....it does not work for the majority of Americans who try it. Making a change in life is not supposed to be a annual thing. The Saguil Approach is to initiate a change, exercise then overload, prepare for hitting the wall then re-establish new goals and power through. I see a repetitive failure in people that Push Crash (as Aimee Weber our exercise physiologist put it)....driving the body/mind too hard and suffering severe consequences that force abandonment of the entire effort. I feel that having someone to be accountable to will act as a 3rd eye to make sure goals are not too extravagant, methods are trustworthy and most of all you don't waste money!
