Casey Nichols from Valley Fitness Kickboxing joins us again to share his knowledge on nutrition and how to calculate your calories for a successful weight loss or fat loss journey. Learn what a calorie is, how to calculate how many calories you should eat to lose fat, how many grams of protein, fats and carbs to eat in a day; and common mistakes people make when it comes to losing “fat”. You want to make sure you are losing fat and not muscle mass.
If you are interested in trying a free kickboxing class at Valley Fitness Kickboxing visit: https://valleyfitnesskickboxing.com/
Transcript
Welcome to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast empowering you to take a whole person approach to your wellbeing, spirit, soul, and body. Join me your host, Dr. Ana Lara, naturopathic, doctor, entrepreneur, and a servant of Jesus Christ. We are not just a body. We are spirit and soul. It’s time to integrate medicine and spirituality into our healing. Let’s get started. Welcome back to Physician Heal Life Self, the podcast. I’m Dr. Laura. And today we’re going to dive a little bit deeper into nutrition. If you recall back on episode three, I talked about the foundations of nutrition. So today I have Casey Nichols joining me again from Valley Fitness Kickboxing. Thank you for joining us.
Thanks, Ika.
We talk about this a lot and talk about food and what we eat. When do we eat all these details? It becomes a very overwhelming emotional conversation.
For your clients and for my patients as well.
So I know you have a lot of great insight on how to plan your meals and so forth, but there are a couple of things that before we get in-depth on the conversation I want to define for our audience. I think it’s important that people not just see food as something that’s pleasurable to eat but to really understand what is food doing to us when we consume it, right? So we’re going to be talking today a lot about calories, and I want to define what is a calorie. So calorie is a unit of energy that measures the amount of energy that food provides to the body. Bottom line, it’s energy, fuel.
Fuel. It’s the fuel that through the day. The one common mistake I see people make, and I’m sure you get this too, is people who want to lose weight and they’re not losing weight.
I know exactly what you’re going to say.
Right?
Starve themselves.
And they’re not eating. They eat one time a day, maybe two meals, or they’re starting to eat very late starvation mode.
Explain to our lovely audience why that is not going to help.
Okay. So if your body, again, your body, it’s trying to survive, whatever pressure you put your body under, it’s just trying to survive in the environment that it’s in. So if you only feed your body sparingly, if you only feed it once a day, every 14 hours, or something super random, it’s going to think that it’s starving. And because it’s trying to survive, it’s going to go into starvation mode, which means whatever calorie it gets, it’s going to hang onto with all dear life, meaning it’s going to store it as body fat, then it’s going to use your muscles in body tissue is fuel because it’s sinking to itself. I have to have a backup plan. So whatever I eat, I’m going to store it as fat, body fat, and then I’m going to burn my own muscle. So I have a backup plan versus if you flip that and you eat frequent meals throughout the day, your body says, I don’t need to hang on to any of this stuff.
I can just burn whatever I’m ingesting at the time. So if you essentially try and starve yourself, yes, if you do it to an extent, you’re going to lose weight, but you’re going to be a much unhealthier version of yourself, burning muscle mass and tissue for fuel, and then eventually you’re going to get to a sticking point. You’re going to feel horrible. You’re not going to lose the amount of weight that you thought, and it’s going to be a very unhealthy version of yourself. I have a lot of clients, and the very first thing that when they come in for nutrition is we fix is I go out, do you eat breakfast?
No.
What’s your lunch? I may have some crackers. What do you have for dinner? A gigantic dinner. So we try and break that apart and spread those out just to get onto a good cycle of eating again. And then they’ll be like, oh my God, I dropped three pounds. And I’m like, sometimes you have to eat more to lose more.
And that’s hard for people too, especially women. I need to eat more to lose weight. You got your metabolism going.
In our last conversation when we talked about exercise, we talked about how the body really likes a routine.
Very much.
And the nervous system, the brain knows, okay, she’s eating at these times. We’re good, we’re being regulated. So when you’re skipping breakfast and even lunch, your body is holding onto those calories even if you’re only eating 800 calories.
So you want to get on a good schedule and you want to make sure, like you said, that your body knows when things are going on. So not only are you eating at the right time or at the same time every day, but you’re sleeping at the same time every day. Your routine. Our body loves a routine, so if you can find a healthy routine, your body will adapt much quicker. Versus you kind of eat good for three or four days and you kind of don’t, then you kind of do, then you kind of don’t. And that is you’re going to get a little bit of results, but you’re going to undo it the three or four days that you don’t eat well. So just lock-in, find a routine that works for you, and just stick.
So I want to be the difficult person here, but Casey, I’m not hungry in the morning. I’m just not a morning person. I’m not hungry.
There are solutions for every problem, and I’m not a morning person either, and I’m not hungry in the morning. So I will blend up some protein pattern and some almond milk and some blueberries, and maybe I’ll throw a little oatmeal in there and I drink that. And that might for me, based on my body weight and everything is a good amount of protein, carbs, a little bit of fat, that’s going to get my body working. So I’m going to eat that or eat that early in the morning. And then three or four hours later, my body is already processed something, so my metabolism is up, I have a little bit of energy burning what I’m putting in, and then three, four hours later, I’m going to be a little bit hungrier. And a lot of the people that don’t eat early in the morning, they’re not really that hungry throughout the day, and then they’re crazy starving because their body’s flipped. So you want to eat. I realize that there are a lot of people that aren’t morning people and they’re not hungry in the morning, but if you can find something that you can get in like a protein bar or a protein shake or a piece of fruit or something, just get something going in the system and then you’ll start to notice that, oh, I’m hungry. Oh, I’m hungry. Oh, I’m hungry.
You want to be hungry. It’ll trigger the response for you to get hungry.
Because if your body adapted to not eating, it’ll adapt to you not eating in the morning and at noon. And it’s very consistent. People who don’t have breakfast, they’re eating late at night.
And that’s the first one – all carbs.
Most people don’t eat breakfast. They have a little weird something for lunch, whatever’s close to them at their desk. And then at night, they have this huge meal and then they go right to sleep.
It’s like the exact opposite. Eat, sleep, and then they can’t sleep, and then they’re irritable throughout the day. And then one of the things that I notice in people when we get them kind of on a good track is the feedback I’ll get pretty meaty is my clothes are fitting differently and I feel better. And it’s so hard to explain to someone that you’re going to feel better all day long. You’re going to have a little bit more energy. You’re going to feel a little clearer, a little smarter. You’re just going to be a better version of you because your system is running correctly.
And on top of losing weight or feeling better, I immediately tell people, that the moment you start eating earlier and having your meal spaced out four hours apart, what you’re going to notice is your cognitive function, your memory, and your concentration is going to improve. You’re going to have more energy on top of obviously the weight management part of it.
This is a really strange analogy, but you have to put gas in the car. If you want it to go you can drive from here to Flagstaff. That’s true. And a lot of us put our body and our mind through so much stress throughout the day, mental stress, emotional stress to that. If we don’t have the building blocks to get ourselves through it, the system’s going to break down.
Absolutely. One of the things I explained to my patients is that when you have more stress, whether it’s a physical demand or mental-emotional demand, you’re burning through your nutrients a lot faster. So you’re burning through minerals and vitamins faster. You’re utilizing these things faster because why? Because it’s feeding the processes in your body, the physiology for it to work faster because of that demand. So this is why people are fatigued. The interesting thing about our physical body compared to a vehicle is that it will find a way to, like you said, adapt and it will eventually show up as a disease in some people, whether
It breaks hormones or thyroid function, and diabetes.
And so forth. Here’s a very interesting thing, and I’m not against one or the other. I just truly believe that individualized nutrition and individualized even therapies are based on that person’s lifestyle. I get a lot of people who want to do intermittent fasting or are intermittent fasting.
I do too.
And I’m like, I won’t tell them anything at the beginning. I’ll be like, okay, that’s what you’re doing. Well, let’s do the blood work. And they look okay. They look fit and healthy most of the time, but they’re either insulin-resistant or they’re diabetic and they can’t believe it because the meals that they do have, they’re not bad.
But they’re going for very long periods of time without eating. And I have to explain the physiology of that. The brain needs glucose. It needs the energy to function. All the body systems need energy to function. And when you wake up in the morning, say six, or seven in the morning, and your last meal was last night at 7:00 PM you keep going through the day functioning without eating anything, and you’re not eating until one or two. You’ve gone through a long time, many hours without eating anything. And in the meantime, in the daytime, while you still feel okay and good, what’s happening is that the brain is communicating to the body. We’re low in glucose, we need you to release it.
So our lovely liver will go into muscle and take out the storage form of glucose, which is glycogen. It’ll take the glycogen out metabolize it and release it as glucose so that you can keep going. That’s why you feel okay without eating.
It’s like plan B. Not a healthy way. Yeah, it’s like you’re cheating. It’s robbing from the stored sources, which is your muscle.
This is why you’ll see diabetic people who are, they might be overweight, they might be very lean, but they don’t have enough muscle mass on them.
So I brought some props, I brought some props. I like to have these things as teaching tools.
This is great.
But for our audience to see, it’s even greasy. It’s not real fat, but this is five pounds of fat. So when people say they want to lose weight, I ask them, what kind of weight do you want to lose? Because this is five pounds of muscle, same weight, same weight, different muscle is much more dense than fat.
It even feels different when you carry both of them. One of them is just more dense. This is heavy and it takes up, it looks different on your body. So five pounds is what we’re looking at here. People watching the podcast or listening to the podcast on video, we’ll not see the visual.
One is twice the size of the other, but it’s significantly different. And so when we don’t eat enough food and we’re starving ourselves or doing a lot of fasting, this is what we’re losing right here.
Yeah, we’re losing that and we’re getting a little bit more and we’re gaining the exact opposite of what we want. When people are weighing themselves on the scale, they may see a decrease or not, but we don’t really know which one we’re doing.
Yeah. Well, when a lot of people, this is great. I love this visual. For a lot of people, the scale is the ultimate end all be all off if they’re quote healthy. And I always try and make people aware that there are numerous ways that you can measure if you’re healthy or if you’re getting in good shape or if you’re losing fat. And yes, the scale is one of them, but the measurement is another one. How do you feel is another one? How your clothes fit you. And so sometimes you could be body fat percentage is a big deal, and that’s kind of what this deals with. If there were two people and they were both 200 pounds and one had higher body fat than the other, one is going to look a little bit bigger and one is going to look a little bit smaller. So just because you weigh 200 pounds or 150 pounds doesn’t mean that that’s always quality weight or something like that. Does that make sense? So I think when people step on the scale, and that’s such a huge factor for them, if they’re healthy if they’re getting in shape, that’s only part of the puzzle. And this I think is a good visual example of that. That muscle is way more dense than fat. And so we want to keep this and build this and lose the fat.
So as another example of the visual, another thing that’s very trending, it’s been trending for several years already. It’s these semaglutide shots. And you can look at the studies. You don’t have to be a genius to figure it out. There are tons of negative side effects to these medications. But what the studies are showing is that people are losing muscle, not so much fat. They’re losing more muscle than fat, and it’s really hard to gain muscle because it’s not just working out. You have to have the nutrition. You have to feed yourself.
So we’re probably going to do other conversations around nutrition, whether you want to gain muscle mass or lose fat. And today we want to target more of the conversation on if people want to lose fat, what do you do? What do do to lose that fat?
Right?
So before we do that, I want to talk about it am just going to touch a little bit on episode 3 on the carbs, the fats, and the proteins. Because these foods are not, they all have calories, but the way our body utilizes it and what happens in our body is that’s where the difference is at. And so you really want to have a little bit of all of them a variation that’s going to vary right from person to person, age, hormone, medical conditions, activity.
So it’s going to vary. But a carbohydrate, we know they’re simple and complex carbs. Your complex carbs are going to be the best ones that your body will utilize, the vitamins, the fiber in them, and then your proteins and fats, your proteins are, it could be animal proteins or anything. These are the building blocks to make you muscle.
That’s how your body rebuilds itself.
It rebuilds itself. And the interesting thing about protein and fat is that this is what fills people up. It makes you feel satiated. Satiated. So you’re full. So if you’re eating nothing but carbs, you’re going to be hungry in an hour or two again. But if you have a good amount of protein and a good amount of healthy fats, we want healthy fats. Things with Omega-3 especially Omega-3 are like that’s going to fill you up. It’s going to hold you up and sustain you. You’re going to get enough calories from that to keep you going, and it’s not going to make you gain weight. Because a lot of people will have a misconception about fats. Like if I eat fat, it’s going to make me fat.
They should use a different word.
So I have a really interesting, I guess, point to make here about when we metabolize carbohydrates and fats. So there’s something, the energy production, the scientific term is a TP production. And so at rest fat is a major source of HTP production contributing to 85% of total energy production. And if you compare that to a carbohydrate, you only get 15% of energy production from a carbohydrate. So carbohydrates will give us instant energy for right now, but fat energy will give us the most efficient source of energy that our body will get that will not just get some now, but it’ll sustain us long term. So I just want to make sure that our audience understands what these three things do and why fat is so important in our diet along with proteins. So when it comes to losing weight, what is your approach and how do you explain to people these three things, how do you need to incorporate them?
So the way that I try and approach it, is because it’s such a huge subject, like you said, I look at daily caloric intake and diet. It’s one big math problem. And so there’s a couple of things we have to figure out first, based on your age and gender and your activity level, do you work out a lot? Do you not work out a lot? Do you sit at a desk all day? Are you running around? You’re going to come up with a daily maintenance number and there are tons of calculators online that you can do this and you want to find out essentially your daily maintenance number. So based on me, or if I did a test example, if I took a woman that’s 45 years old and she’s five foot five and she’s 45 years old, I think I already said that her maintenance level might be about 1700 calories a day.
So that’s our first number. So if this one wants to lose weight, we’re going to subtract 500 calories from her daily diet. So that brings us to 1200 calories a day. So now we have 1200 calories a day. So now we know that we want to eat 1200 calories a day to lose weight. And there’s another math problem. I’m going to try not to get too much math. There are 3,500 calories in one pound of fat. So if you want to lose one pound a week, you subtract 500 calories per day over the course of seven days. That’s 3,500 calories. So that’s why we subtract 500 from your daily caloric intake. So this woman, she’s at 1200 calories now, what should she eat? How do we divide these 1200 calories up between these three proteins, carbs, and fats? And what we’ve found is that the research found is that the best way to do a is to eat a high protein diet, a high-ish fat diet, and keep your carbs lower.
So one of the ones that I preach, it’s more of a fitness percentage, but it’s 40% protein. It’s 40% healthy fats and then only 20% carbohydrates. And if you eat that, and if you do all the math and figure that out, I think it’s about 120 grams of protein. It’s about 50 grams of fat and it’s about 60 grams of carbohydrates. So if our test subject eats those calories every day, she’s going to lose weight. And then if she adds exercise on top of it, then she’ll lose additional weight. So it’s finding that first number, what do you need to maintain and then subtract a little bit. Or if you want to gain weight, then you add 500 calories, but you have to find that daily maintenance number and then just do a little math after that.
So it’s very key for our audience to understand that in order for you to lose one pound of fat, you need to burn 3,500 calories. You’re not going to do that in one day.
No, God, no.
You can’t.
No, it’s unrealistic. So if you were to take, then reduce your intake by 500 calories a day, then you would lose just one pound of fat over the course of a week just with diet.
Just with diet.
If you exercise, then that could expedite that process. But usually, one or two pounds of fat loss per week is safe.
Yeah. Anything more than that. Women don’t think that’s great though. They’re like, let me lose 10 pounds in seven days.
That’s not going to be all fat.
No, it’s going to be water. It’s going to be muscle.
I’ve found that if you lose weight a little bit slower, but in a healthy way, you’ll keep it off.
You’ll keep it off.
But if you lose it really quickly, you’ll put it back on really quick because whatever you took away from your diet, most people, they restrict themselves so hard for three weeks and they lose 10 pounds and then they go back to normal and they put it back on, versus if you just change the way you eat, you’ll lose weight slower. But you’ll stay at that. You’re not going to yo-yo up and down. Luckily, most of my clients haven’t spiked back up. They stay. They might gain a pound or two when they go back to normal, but they’re not gaining 20 pounds back.
I mean, there’s always the medical conditions that will affect, and we’re not going to touch on that because that will be like a three-hour conversation when you’re talking about hormones and thyroid and insulin, blood sugars, all of these things are going to impact a person’s ability to lose fat. Sleep. Stress management is something,
Stress is a big one.
The big one.
But because we’re focusing today on the diet part, so in your example, a 45-year-old female, not really active.
Doesn’t work out. 1700 calories is her maintenance.
Is her maintenance based on her weight, she’s 175 pounds, I believe 75. Okay, so about 1,700 calories a day intake. But if she wants to lose fat, then cut back 500 calories. You want to put your body in a caloric deficit. So you want to be 500, you could do 300, just wait a little bit slower or 200. You want to be a little bit under what your maintenance is, and then that way you should be trending down over time.
You don’t want to go down too much. So what if you have this overachieving female? It’s like, well, let me cut 800.
No, it doesn’t work. No, if you go too low, your body’s going to go into shock. It’s going to go starvation mode. It’s not going to work. It’s a bell curve in a way. If you do it to a certain extent, it’s going to be really successful. If you overdo it, you’re going to break the system. Yeah. Again, starving yourself does not work.
So then going off of these calories, now that you’ve decided, okay, she should be consuming now, was it 1,200?
Yeah, 1,200.
So with these calories, how does this person now break that down into realistic foods? How do I prepare? Yeah. Now we’re just looking at a number. Okay, so if we take 1200 and then we do our 40, 40, 20, that equals 120 grams of protein. So we write that number down to 120, and then we have 50 grams of fat, and then we have 60 grams of protein. So we want to make sure that whatever meal we plan, we kind of stick to that 40, 40, 20%. So if we look at our plate, 40% of it should be healthy fats, 40% should be protein, and 20% should be carbohydrates. And carbohydrates. You want to stick to complex carbohydrates. You want to stay away from simple carbohydrates. Complex things are things that take a little bit longer to break down your system. Sweet potatoes are a great example. And simple carbohydrates are very, are sugary carbs. They give you a spike in insulin levels. It’s going to you a short burst of energy, but we want to stay away from that.
So now we know that we want to stick to these numbers. And then so try and break down if I need to get 120 grams of protein a day, and if I’m going to, it’s one big math from it. If I’m going to eat four meals a day, then how many grams of protein per meal should I get? And then you take that further and figure out, what I like to do with my clients is we break this down and we actually go through and I have a list of healthy sources of protein, healthy sources of carbs, and then healthy sources of fat. And then we’ll fill in, okay, for breakfast, let’s pick eggs. So let’s pick a protein shake and then let’s pick our carbohydrate, and then let’s pick. So you want to just kind of plan out your meal, your daily meals so that, and then you can do all the math on the side and say, okay, I’m close to 1200, I’m close to 120 grams of protein.
But if you list out whatever you eat all day long and it’s 200 grams of carbohydrates and 20 grams of protein, then we’re off. We need to redo it. And a lot of people when they come in, I’ll have ’em track their calories on a calorie tracking app like MyFitnessPal, and I’ll have ’em just track their normal, what they’re currently eating for two or three days, and they bring it in and I show them you’re not only eating more carbohydrates than you are protein, you’re eating more sugar than you are, and sometimes two or three times more. So people sometimes aren’t eating a lot, but what they’re eating is just in the wrong direction. Yeah, I think most people, when I evaluate their diet, their carbohydrate count is out the root.
I don’t know if it’s this country or this culture or this time of year, but we are so carb-heavy. It’s carb-crazed, and then if you look at us, we look carved up. And so we really need to, when you’re planning your meals, when you think about eating, the carbs should be the lowest one on the totem pole. The protein and the healthy fat should be higher.
Yeah, absolutely. It’s one big math problem.
It is a lot of math. You have to sit down. The easiest way really is to use MyFitnessPal.
MyFitnessPal is a great app to use. You just use a free App
And figure out all that information on there. I mean, it makes it so easy that you can even scan products.
Oh yeah, it’s great. The information will come up and tell you how many proteins and fats and so forth are in that food so you can track it. I really encourage people, and I know you do too, for people to track what they’re eating, just do one week, just track what you’re eating for the week. No judgment. Don’t change it up. Track it, and you will be surprised.
Yeah, I have a lot of how many calories. A lot of people will say, well, I’m not losing weight and I’m doing everything right.
Yeah. I have a lot of people say, I eat pretty good now. I go track and then they’ll bring it in and then I’m like, you’re eating 75 grams of pure sugar a day. And they’re like, oh, wow, I had no idea. So sometimes we think this is a famous one, people will say, well, I eat oatmeal every morning. And I go, what kind do you eat? And they go, well, the brown sugar one. I’m like, oh my God, that’s like eating a Snickers bar. You can’t do that.
Not all oatmeal is the same. I even take it a step further with oatmeal. I tell people if you’re going to eat oatmeal, get organic. Because the non-organic ones, they’re so heavily sprayed with pesticides. And I often find that people have a lot of digestive issues from consuming it. So it is the food in this country that’s part of the problem, the culture,
That’s a whole nother conversation. Yeah, it’s everything’s so fast-paced. I see sometimes when you’re eating at the gym and you’re very prepared with your meals, what’s a day for you? Like breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So I’m not a morning person and I am not hungry when I wake up. So I’ll eat or drink a protein shake, and then I like breakfast for lunch, so I have my eggs for lunch. So a very typical lunch for me is a bunch of scrambled eggs or scrambled egg whites, and then some piece of fruit or some pieces of fruit. And then dinner, which I’m sure you’ve seen me eat a million times, is I eat a lot of grilled chicken and then I take broccoli and I kind of shred it up, so it’s like lettuce, and then I throw some sunflower seeds on there and some dressing. So it’s kind of like a chicken salad. And then snacks are a big one. I know that a lot of people, their meals are pretty good, but then they fall apart when they eat snacks.
And so I try and stick to high protein things like a handful of almonds or I found these Quest protein chips or Greek yogurt is really good. Or if you’re just snacking for snacking sakes, bored, try and stick to baby carrots or something that’s not super calorically heavy, but you want to stay away from processed foods. You need to stay away from things that come in a bag or a box. I always tell my clients, to try and think of whatever they’re eating, it should either have walked or swam or grown at some point. You don’t want your food that has 17 different chemicals and was made by a guy in a lab coat. You want your food to have the least amount of ingredients as possible.
So, people who snack, that’s a problem. Huge. And typically what I find the problem to be is that they’re not getting enough protein and healthy fat in their meals because if you eat the macros, the way you explained it, where you’re having 30 to 40 grams of protein in a meal for breakfast, I’m not going to be snacking in between.
Yeah, very true.
I’m just not going to be hungry.
True.
And that’s okay. I’ve had people tell me I feel like I have to eat every hour, every two hours, and they think that’s a good thing. And I’m like, no, that means you’re not getting enough protein in.
In. Yeah, something’s wrong in the system or something hormonally is off that you’re having the need to do that, but that’s not normal.
Yeah, that’s actually a really good point. If you’re eating every three to four hours and you’re eating what you’ve planned to eat, I mean, you might be a little hungry if you’re putting your body in a deficit, but you’re not going to be starving to the point that you’re eating a whole bag of Doritos or something. I know a lot of people stress eat. I know that’s a very real thing. I’ve done it. I know that people eat when they’re bored and they reach for things that are either going to scratch some emotional itch or they’re going to reach for things that are just simple.
And so trying to stay away from snacking or just at least limiting it, which would be planning your meals, making sure that you’re eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner so you’re not super hungry, and then just don’t have that food in the house. Do yourself a favor. Get the bad stuff out of the house. And if you have a sweet tooth, find a sweet alternative. If you have a salty tooth, find a salty alternative find. I mean, if you’re really craving something, have something. Give your body what it wants, but don’t have the bad version of it. There’s a good version of almost every taste that you could go after to get the bad fruit out of your house.
That’s key right there. That’s what I did many years ago when I went on my journey of changing my diet that same day I just cleaned out my pantry, my fridge. This is either going to get tossed away or be given away, but it’s not going to stay in the house. And then don’t buy it. Don’t bring it back to the house.
Discipline is a huge part of it too. That’s a huge thing. Are there any tips? I mean, that’s really what I tell people. Just clean it out and don’t bring it in. I don’t know if there’s any way to really teach that discipline to people but just do it.
Yeah, that’s a tough one because at some point all of this breaks down to you have to follow through. We can give you as much advice, and I could write you the most custom diet to meet every minute and every calorie, but if you don’t actually do it. And so what I tell people is if you’re having a hard time adapting, this is a lifestyle change. I mean, you’re going to do this every day. This is a huge deal.
That’s the key right there.
It’s a lifestyle change. I hate the word diet because that sounds restrictive. It sounds negative, and it sounds like it’s temporary. You should change your relationship with food, as cheesy as that sounds, no pun intended.
No.
But I tell people, if you’re having a tough time adapting to this new way of eating, and I had this conversation yesterday, try and just solve one meal this week. So this week, just worry about breakfast. Just eat a good breakfast all seven days this week. Don’t worry about lunch. Don’t worry about dinner. Just solve breakfast for this week. Then next week solve lunch, and then next week solve dinner or some version of that. You don’t need to solve every single problem right now.
Yeah, that’s a good point. Just solve this next one and then you can build upon that. Just take baby steps. And the next one is you have to plan. If you don’t have a plan, you’re going to fail. If I’m going to drive to California for where I’m sitting right now, I’m going to come up with, I’m going to take this road to this road. I’ll probably stop for gas here, and then I’ll arrive at such and such time. If I don’t have any of that information figured out, I’m never going to get there. So you have to plan, what am I eating for breakfast? Where am I getting that food? What food do I need to prepare? Boom, boom, boom.
You got really great points. I hope that our audience takes those keys away.
I hope too.
Mindset on that mindset is really important. I would say that’s primarily where you need to start Why do I want to change my diet? Why healthy you’re why? And once you realize your why, then you do have to come down to deciding this has to be a lifestyle change. It’s not going to be just for a week or a month or six months to get to fit into that dress, or it can’t be a short-term thing. It has to be long-term.
You have to want it – perspective. You have to want it.
Yeah. We tell people the what’s your why is a really big deal in health and fitness and nutrition. If you’re able to identify and really let it sink in why you want to do this, you can always weigh your why against that cheat meal or whatever it is. If you want a Snickers bar more than you want this, then you’re going to do it. But if you want this more than you’re going to want that, you’re always going to go in the right direction. And once you’re on track, it’s so much easier to keep going once you have some momentum going, it’s very hard to get on track, but it’s absolutely doable.
Hearing this conversation. I recall this situation when I used to work with a doctor who was an ophthalmologist and saw a lot of patients who were losing their vision. Most of the time it was because of diabetes. And so there was this man, he was in his late thirties, still very young, had a young family, and he was about to lose his eyesight, so he had to do surgeries and his thirties invasive injections to his eye monthly and so forth. And my job with him was to go take some information from him. And I asked him, what are you eating? And he’s like, I just love this Mexican, the Mexican bread, UR. He says, I just love the bread and I drink this and I eat that. I just have a hard time. And I told him, I just looked at him straight in the eyes, no pun intended, but I said, well, you’re going to have to decide. And his wife and his children were there. You’re going to have to decide if you want to eat that bread or if you want to be able to see your children with your own eyes.
Because when you lose your eyesight, you’re going to lose a lot of freedom.
You’re not going to be able to drive, you’re not going to be able to see your family grow up when you become a grandparent. You’re not going to see these things. You’re taking your vision for granted for food.
And it was like I was slapped in the face. You’re doing it for bread. So you want this cheap thrill of the bread and the soda and these foods where you’re going to get that now. So if you can just find it within you, find the willpower within you to find the determination and the discipline to stop eating these foods that are harming you, that are going to rob you of a future. And sometimes you have to have those conversations.
Did he change?
Oh, he did.
Good.
Yeah, he did. And when he would come back every time we would see the ocular, the back of the eye, and we could see that there was a lot of change, a lot of decrease in inflammation and less destruction because he was changing what he was eating. And so when we look at food that way, either the food that you’re living, you’re eating, it’s either giving you life or it’s taking life from you, bottom line, it’s giving you life or it’s taking life from you. So you either buckle down, make the decision today that you want this, and then just make it a lifestyle change. And like you said, you gradually make small changes, small attainable changes that you get there.
But you got to start somewhere. And if you really feel like I can’t do it on my own, then that’s when you reach out to people who know what to do, how to do it, and they’re going to push you to do it and keep you on track.
That is going to hold you accountable.
Big part.
And then it’s an open and honest relationship too. I always tell my patients, that I want them to be honest with you. I don’t care if you drop the ball and you have a bunch of sugar-processed food. I want you to be honest with me. Then what I’m going to ask you, is what was going on that day? Because usually, it’s mental stress. Emotional stress. So then, okay, then there are some things that we can do to offset that stress. What are any, as we wrap up the conversation, we’re going to continue this.
Yeah, it’s a big subject.
Big subject. There are just so many dimensions we can go from just talking about food, right? What are some, you kind of shared already a lot of really key pointers, but what’s the takeaway that you would want people to know when it comes to this part of nutrition?
I was having a conversation with a girl yesterday kind of along these lines, and she was kind of arguing her point and saying, well, I don’t want to bring food for work to lunch. I don’t want to wake up earlier. And she was kind of making excuses for why she couldn’t eat healthy, and I kind of made an off-color joke, and I think it stuck. I said, don’t worry. It’s not that big a deal. It’s only your health. And she kind of shot, and I was like, maybe I shouldn’t have said that, but this is a really big deal. Think about it like this. If you have children, would you let your kids eat crap all day long? Would you let your kids go to school with no breakfast? Would you let your kids ingest all of these crappy foods? No, I hope not. So why would you do that to yourself?
A lot of us know that we should eat better, but not of a lot of us take those steps to do it. And if you can do it on your own, there are so many resources online to figure out what to eat to plan a good meal and to stick to it. Maybe your spouse is your accountability partner. Maybe it’s your best friend or your sister or your brother. Maybe you bring in professional help, but there are resources out there for you to do it, but you have to do it. You have to want it. You have to start doing something now that’s going to make every step in the process a little bit easier. But if you keep putting it off till Monday, you keep putting it off till after that event or after this or after that, I’ll do it after the holidays. No, start now because you’re going to going to feel better now. And there are things you can do today. There are things you can do tomorrow. Some people can help you. It’s absolutely a road that you can get on right now. And when you are feeling better because you’re healthier and you’re eating better, you feel lighter, you feel cleaner, you feel smarter, you feel more rested. It’s so hard to get someone to grasp the concept of what it’s like to feel better all day, every day. And so it’s worth it.
It is worth it. It’s worth it. So I encourage our audience to do a 21-day challenge, just 21 days, decide today, start planning today, and then set a date, a start date. I
Used to do this every year. It’s just kind of silly, but I would always pick a Halloween costume that I had to be shirtless in and the fear. So what motivates you? Money is a big motivator for people. Fear was a big motivator for me. And so I knew if I was going to go to a party with my shirt off, I had to look really good. So for some reason, and I knew that date wasn’t going to move, so if it was a Halloween party on the 31st or the 25th or whatever it was, I knew that date was coming, so I had to start doing stuff to get me to that date. I know that’s really silly, but if you’re able to find what motivates you and then put a timeframe against it, I’m going to be X, Y, and Z by this date or whatever it is, make your goals measurable and put a timetable against them. I’m going to lose 10 pounds by Christmas or don’t say I want to lose weight. How much do you want to lose? When do you want to lose it? So we can figure out if you’re on track or not?
Yeah, I say if you set a date, even a short term like 21 days at 21 days, I want you to reassess how you feel you really stuck to the plan, to this meal plan. How do you feel after those 21 days? If you feel better, you will be encouraged to continue that plan for another 21 days. So short-term attainable goals
Will help you to get there. I hope that you guys enjoyed this. I want you to share this video with someone who you know is struggling with what to eat, how much to eat, and where to go from. And if you have specific questions, I want you guys to share your questions. What do you want to hear more about this topic? Because I know that there’s a lot of people who have really great questions about nutrition. As I said, this conversation can go in many different directions in-depth, and so until our audience really lets us know what you’re interested in learning more about, then we can go in that direction and really dissect it and be very pinpoint on that. I hope you’ve enjoyed this conversation. Stay tuned for future conversations as we dissect the world of nutrition. Have an awesome day and stay blessed. Thank you for listening to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please like, share, and subscribe, help this message, and reach more people who may need to hear it. Leave your comments. I want to know what you think. If you’re interested in learning more about Raices, visit our website. Until next time, be blessed.