September 13, 2016

When most people hear the words “eliminate” and “diet” together, they think of deprivation. They think about giving up all the foods they currently eat. They picture a grey wasteland of bland foodstuffs and unfed cravings.

They think of misery.

What an elimination diet actually entails, though, is far less severe.

And the benefits of doing one are nothing short of miraculous.

How it Works

Given your current habits and symptoms of illness, a good nutrition coach is going to be able to look at all the evidence and pinpoint certain things that are causing havoc in your system. Dairy, gluten, soy, peanuts, corn tomatoes and other nightshade vegetables—all of these are common system triggers.

But we’d never go after all of them all at once.

Instead, it’s a systematic, scientific and gradual process.

After determining some of the types of foods that could be causing you problems, we choose one and eliminate it.

If it’s dairy, then obviously we eliminate milk, cheese, etc.

Instead of taking it out altogether and leaving you curled up in the fetal position with fever-dreams about never tasting a milkshake ever again, we supplement all things dairy with nutritious, delicious substitutions.

And even if that still sounds terrible, here’s the thing:

Once we pinpoint the triggering food (or foods) and they’ve been out of your system for a few weeks, it’s amazing how much better you will feel.

It’s a biological truth: Take out the stuff that’s causing the problem and the body automatically starts working at a far more optimized level. By which I mean: You will feel better.

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Knowing How You Feel

And that’s where things start getting fun. After the cravings are gone (which don’t last that long, maybe a week or two at most) and you start to understand how it actually feels to not feel terrible all the time, that triggering food won’t appeal to you anymore.

We have this sense in this culture that cravings are some natural feeling. That they will persist no matter how long you stay away from the particular object of those cravings.

But it just doesn’t work that way. The cravings go away and new, better habits take their place. Cravings are simply another word for “habits.” Your body doesn’t like to change the way it operates and when you force it towards new directions, initially it baulks. But that doesn’t last.

The Other Side

Most of our elimination diets at the Wellness Training Institute last for six weeks or so. At that point, we can start putting some of the potentially problem-causing foods back into the rotation. You try them again, see how your body reacts, and then the decision becomes easy.

If you aren’t sensitive to it and your body is fine eating, say, tomatoes, then awesome! Eat tomatoes.

But if your body rejects that potential trigger again, then you’ll know it. You’ll also know how poorly it makes you feel.

At that point it’s your decision: Eat it and feel terrible, or don’t eat it and feel great.

Because, now that you’ve gone through the elimination diet, you know what it feels like to feel great.

After that, it’s just a choice. And I’ve met very few people who, once they understand how it feels to ACTUALLY FEEL GREAT, ever choose to go back to their old, miserable lives.

The post Feeling it Out: The Power of the Elimination Diet appeared first on Wellness Training Institute.

July 27, 2016

Forgive me for a moment, while I wax philosophic. Stay with me. It’ll get good a second, I promise

In his Nicomachean Ethics, the Greek philosopher Aristotle (d. 322 BC) spends a good chunk of time wondering about ‘the supreme good for man.’ What he’s looking for here is this: What’s the best way to live? As humans, what’s our purpose on this earth?

Aristotle begins this question by looking first to the end. He looks at purpose.

And when you determine the end goal of something, that gives you a path back to understand what makes that thing meaningful.

For example, he looks at a knife. What’s a knife’s main reason for existing? Answer: To cut.

Then he takes a look at medicine: What’s the purpose of medicine? His answer: Good health.

Which makes sense, right?

Except today, that last example doesn’t apply. Our medical system—and healthcare in general—no longer serves its purpose.

Hospitals, for example, exist to keep us healthy, right?

General practitioners are there to make sure we don’t get sick, right?

The answer to both is a resounding NOPE.

Maybe both those things were true at some point, but take a look around you. Take a good hard look at your own health journey. The system, without question, is broken. And broken badly.

There’s a good chance that if you’re reading this, you’re not exactly at optimum health. Maybe you have a chronic disease. Maybe you’re on the doorstep of one. Maybe you’ve just hit the point where your body has begun breaking down, and your main excuse for this is: “Isn’t that just what happens when we age? Isn’t that just the norm?”

I’m here to tell you two things:

One, that along with a broken healthcare system, an overwhelming majority of Americans are broken when it comes to our health.

And two: It’s not your fault.

Let’s go back to Aristotle’s goal for what medicine should be again. He says that medicine’s main reason for existing in the first place is to promote health.

Does that sound like the current healthcare system in America?

No, it doesn’t.

THE DIFFERENCE
And here’s why: When Aristotle talks about medicine, he’s talking about a proactive, preventative style of keeping you healthy. Most doctors and surgeons today see their jobs as REACTIVE. They’re there when a lifetime of poor health choices have finally caught up with you.

They’re there to swap out your ticker when a lifetime of eating terribly has finally rusted every gear solidly in place.

They’re there to amputate your leg after decades of processed foods and refined sugar have wrecked shop to the degree that Type II Diabetes has moved in for good and made itself comfy.

They’re there when it’s essentially too late to get the train back on the rails. The cargo’s in the ravine, the passengers are screaming, and everything behind the coal room is up in flames.

This is not what medicine should be.

But again, this isn’t your fault. Not at all. You’ve been told by the medical community for years that if something is wrong, there’s a pill to fix it. You’ve been advertised to at every turn—television, the internet, radio—that consuming the worst possible foods is the best use of your money. You’ve been put in a situation—from kindergarten graduation on—where a toxic degree of stress is the norm.

You honestly didn’t know any better. And I’m not being patronizing here. I mean it: Practically every supposed health expert you’ve ever had a conversation with has guided you in the wrong direction. (And, to be fair, they’ve been led astray as well.)

Big business and the government itself have spent the last century telling us all the wrong things. What to eat, how to live, what our end goal as humans really is. We’ve all been indoctrinated to believe lies.

And one of those lies is that medicine is there to fix what’s wrong.

Which isn’t true. At all.

Here are some facts that, honestly, blow my mind:

American spends more than double of any developed nation in the world on healthcare. We’re currently 37th on the list for healthcare outcomes.

The third leading cause of death in the United States is mistakes in the healthcare system.

The fourth? APPROPRIATE use of prescription medications.

Let that last one sink in for a moment. APPROPRIATE USE.

It’s truly incredible how broken our system is.

Think about it this way:

The current healthcare structure, if it did what its stated purpose is, would destroy itself. It’s the classic definition of an oxymoron.

If the system were really there to CURE its patients, it would be out of business within a year. We’d have a country full of happy, healthy people, sure, but they’d have a lot of angry shareholders.

You don’t have to think very hard about where there system itself comes down on the issue: How much money do medical facilities make if they PREVENT a heart attack?

The healthcare system, as it stands now, is focused on finding things to TREAT, not cure. It should be called “Sickcare,” not “healthcare.” There’s a reason why we are currently living in the ultimate “there’s a pill for that” culture.

And remember, this is coming from inside the system: I’m a practicing cardiologist. I’m not yelling from the mountaintop here. I’m inside the system.

So, I see the problems more acutely than most.

The opposite side of that, however, is that I also see—just as clearly—the solution to all of these problems.

Want more great information about the foundations of a healthy life? Download the first installment of our NEW 7-part eBook series The 7 Habits of Highly Healthful People for FREE right now, right HERE!

THE SOLUTION
The fix for this problem isn’t going to come from the government. It’s not even going to come from the medical industry.

It’s going to come from you, personally.

You’ve been taught from birth that your health is in the hands of your doctor. Or your local hospital.

The truth is that doctors serve a necessary function. Check-ups, for example, are a smart thing to get. Hospitals are the same: If you break a leg, hospitals and their emergency rooms are a great thing to have easy access to.

But they don’t own your health. YOU DO.

The solution to fixing the healthcare system is for each of us to take responsibility for our own health—and start today to change the habits that are killing us (some slowly, some rapidly.)

You are an advocate for your own health. You can choose to begin to change your diet (baby step by baby step). You can choose to begin to cultivate awareness. You can choose to create new habits that will not only stave off illness in the future, but also begin to reverse the illnesses you are needlessly suffering with now.

That’s how we fix the system.

And don’t get me wrong: It’s not going to be easy.

But that doesn’t mean it isn’t attainable.

If I had the chance to take the steering wheel on the future of the healthcare system in this country, my first step would be putting in place a way to educate people about what true health really looks like, and how so many small choices in someone’s twenties can prove either disastrous or life-giving decades later. So much importance lies in those small decisions.

But because we’ve spent our lives being told—wrongly— how to eat, how to live life, what to spend our time doing… many of us have lost the thread.

That’s what education does. It shows you the whole ball of yarn. And once you see how everything is connected, making good health choices becomes levels of magnitude easier.

This is what we do at the Wellness Training Institute. We give you the information, the tools, and the support you need to become an advocate for your own health.

The healthcare system is broken. But that doesn’t mean YOU have be.

It’s time to get proactive.

The post The Health Care System is Broken: Here’s How YOU Can Fix It. appeared first on Wellness Training Institute.

July 6, 2016

Let’s do a little thought experiment:

Let’s say you eat really well—a wide variety of plants, avoiding sugar, dairy, and all the stuff that would otherwise be killing you slowly.

Let’s say you exercise for forty-five minutes a day.

Your body is working fantastically.

But…

You are also essentially the modern equivalent of an early 20th century robber-baron. You are a jerk to people. You cheat your customers. Your main concern is your own bottom line.

Are you healthy?

The answer, of course, is no.

And here’s why: health—wellness—is a holistic thing. No matter how many good, healthy habits you’ve developed, if you’re an asshole to the people around you, it’s going to catch up with you.

This, of course, is just one example. But it’s a powerful one.

Your physical health is just one cog in the system. You thoughts, emotions, and spiritual condition are just as important in the health equation.

In the same way, the process of change is equally all-encompassing.

You can’t just change your diet if you want to be healthy. It just doesn’t work. Going straight to the “diet” category when you’re looking to take back your health is skipping the first—and most important—step.

Which is: Cultivating Awareness.

Here’s why:

SEEING THE WHOLE PICTURE
You are a person. Which means that you live in this universe. Which, in turn, means that you operate according to its laws, whether you want to or not. So, to truly operate on a healthy level, you have to find balance. Within yourself. Within this universe.

As humans, we tend to compartmentalize things. We think about what we eat as being separate from how we breathe. We think about our physical health as something different than our mental health. We think about all these different things as pieces of a puzzle, ignoring the gorgeous, breath-taking landscape they make when all those pieces are put together.

So, the first step in developing healthy habits is to cultivate awareness.

OK, GREAT. HOW DO I CULTIVATE AWARENESS?
Here are two simple—but very effective— way to begins cultivating this awareness.

1. First, watch yourself for a full day. In the morning, first thing, close your eyes and take a deep breath. When you exhale, the exercise starts.

Imagine yourself floating above yourself, observing. When you eat breakfast, observe what you eat and ask, “Why am I eating this?” As you go about your daily routine, question why you are doing a particular thing at a particular time. When you talk to others, listen to what you are saying: Why do you say what you say? How do your words affect the other person? How do their words affect you? What are you really trying to accomplish with what you’re saying?

When you do something—anything—ask yourself, why are you doing this? How does it make you feel?

Do this for one whole day. I promise that you’ll be surprised by what you find out about yourself—and your place within the universe.

The second exercise to begin cultivating awareness goes like this:

2. Find somewhere quiet to sit. Keep your back straight. Close your eyes. Now, take a breath.

As you inhale make a cartoon image of that breath. Give it shape and color. Now, watch as that breath fills your lungs. Let it expand throughout your body, from the top of your head to the tips of your big toes. Let that image fill you.

Savor that breath as if it’s a $10,000 bottle of wine. Appreciate it for everything it is.

This is your life force, the one thing that you can’t live without for more than a few minutes.

It’s essential in a way nothing else is. Your breath is the first thing you take in when you are born. It’s the last thing you let go of when you die.

Then, as you exhale, watch as that cartoon breath leaves your body—up from your toes, down through your neck, back in to your lungs, and then out through your mouth. Imagine that breath escaping, leaving your body and flooding out across the room, through the window, out across the lower edge of the sky, touching hills, fields, lakes and streams, moving out across the world like an echo. Watch as the breath slowly dissipates, losing shape slowly, the edges going first. Then watch as it disappears slowly, but completely, its molecules joining with those of the universe itself.

Then repeat.

HEALTH IS A HABIT
Developing a habit of health is really, when you get right down to it, developing a habit of excellence. And that only happens when we are able to synchronize ourselves with the rhythms of the universe.

In our modern culture we’re conditioned to move quickly. There’s always something to do, some distraction, some obligation. We’re in a car traveling 80 miles per hour.

But what happens when we slow that car down to, say, 3 miles per hour? The world comes into a focus. We see things the way that they are. The blur clarifies. We notice things. Beautiful things. Wonderful things.

Here’s another way to look at what cultivating awareness really means.

Imagine you are in a forest. You are surrounded by trees. As you walk you hear birds, but don’t see them. As you walk you hear birds,

But then you com to a clearing. You sit down. You keep very, very still.

And then it happens:

A few squirrels scamper past, closer than you’d imagine. A few rabbits appear. And then a fawn, reddish-brown and still wobbly in its newness, wanders into view. It looks at you and you look back. And that moment is filled with wonder.

Good things happen when we slow down. It’s literally the first step in cultivating healthy habits. The reason for this is because it forces us to see us how we are—what we are, what we say, why we do what we do without even thinking about it.

Change can only begin when we identify what needs changed. Simply trying to “eat better” won’t get us very far. But understanding what we eat—and how it makes us feel—forces to own up to a lot of things that we normally wouldn’t even notice.

The great thing about awareness is that once a bad habit is identified—and we understand the why behind it—we can change it, slowly, step by step. And after awhile, that good habit become the thing we do without even thinking about it (which is, I guess, the same thing as saying that the good habit becomes your habit).

Awareness, at its core, allows us to figure out what’s good. Knowing what’s good allows you to choose good.

And it is a choice.

If you’re interested in learning more about cultivating awareness and developing good habits, come join us for a free dinner. Here at the Wellness Training Institute we’ve made it our mission to teach people to get out of the cycle of disease and dysfunction and take back their health.

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