September 25, 2017

So much of our health builds upon the patterns we either fall into or mold ourselves, slowly and over time.

I have a theory. I think one of the leading causes of obesity in this country is a lack of mindfulness.

We’re very good at keeping ourselves distracted. Full days can fly by and, by the end of them, a lot of times you can’t even remember what you did.

But a healthy, happy life first starts with being present.

Presence

Being present in your life, in each moment. Being mindful of where you are in the world, your place, and how you relate to both yourself and others.

I say that the obesity epidemic is, on one level at least, a lack of mindfulness because of this one simple question: “How do you end up obese?”

It doesn’t happen overnight. And sure, some of us are a little more environmentally susceptible to it, but never in an absolute, fatalistic way.

From my work with our Healthful Evolutions members, I’ve seen a pattern that happens in a lot of people’s lives. They start out eating the Standard American Diet, mainly because that’s what their parents fed them. And from childhood on, they don’t ever consider eating anything else. Once those dietary patterns settle in, autopilot kicks on.

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This learned response is one of the reasons why you can sit on the couch, turn on the TV, and at the end of an hour find that you’ve eaten an entire family-size back of Lay’s sour cream and onion chips.

In our culture, it’s easy to do. It’s easy to find something that distracts us away from our lives. And a lot of that temptation, I think, has to do with our desire to avoid the negative things inside us. The stuff that causes painful, internal tension.

Avoidance

We’re amazing at not dealing with things. At avoiding the questions that we ought to be asking every day… Why do I do this or that? Why is feeling unhappy, distracted, and physically sick better than sitting down and working through the underlying issues?

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not being judgy about this at all. I struggled with exactly this problem for most of my life. In fact, I still struggle with it. We as humans have a constant desire to escape danger. And when that danger is inside of us, abandoning the moment, getting outside of ourselves, feels like a legitimate choice.

The problems will be there later. We can just deal with them sometime in the future.

But you can see how this ties into our obesity epidemic. By not being mindful of what we eat, what we do with our bodies, and how we’re genuinely feeling… It doesn’t take long for those patterns of distraction and escape to take over the steering wheel and direct us toward disease and depression.

So, What’s the Answer?

The first step is to understand that you tend to run on autopilot. Recognizing that will go a long way toward allowing you to take back your health.

The second step is to do the hard work of asking the questions you’ve been avoiding for so long. How are your feeling? Why do you feel that way? What makes you feel better? Why do you mindlessly move toward one type of distraction instead of another?

And finally, begin building a habit of mindfulness. To start to take just a few minutes each day to just be. Take a walk, or sit in a quiet spot. Do something relaxing.

Then spend that time just paying attention to what’s going on inside you. Breathe deeply and let those internal problems rise to the surface. Look at them from different angles, see what emotions they connect to.

Do this for a few weeks, gradually increasing the time you spend, until you find yourself practicing mindfulness at other points during the day without consciously doing it.

So much of our health builds upon the patterns we either fall into or mold ourselves, slowly and over time.

If we all did this, our nation would be far healthier, happier, and much lighter. It would be a wonderful place to live. But, here’s the thing. It doesn’t have to be just a dream. You can start doing your part today by practicing mindfulness. It won’t be long before you see real changes throughout every area of your life. Changes, I know from experience, that will surprise you!

It’s your life. And you only get one. You deserve to be happy. And you also deserve to live every last minute of it.

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September 22, 2016

Do you feel good?

Right now, at this moment, do you feel good?

As a cardiologist now halfway through my third decade of practice, I’ve noticed two things about the possible answers to that question.

The first: Most people don’t feel good.

The second: Sadly, most people don’t even know what feeling good feels like.

Living in this toxic culture, eating what we eat, racing through our day, and rarely stopping to take inventory of what out bodies are telling us—most people I’ve talked to over the years have been miserable for so long that they have no idea what it means not to be miserable.

It’s sad. Heartbreaking, really.

And although there is no one cure for this problem, there are some systematic steps you can take to at least begin to understand what feeling good is like.

The good news here is that once you understand that feeling, you’ll want to preserve it. You’ll want to keep feeling good.

Here are two of the things we teach our members at the Wellness Training Institute. They are steps in a larger process, but they really all fall under one category: Getting Quiet.

Awareness

I preach awareness constantly. And there’s a reason for it.

Health is built upon the integration of the body, mind, and soul. If all of those things are working together, then you are healthy. It’s as simple as that.

One of the best ways of getting those things working together is through a practice of mindfulness… about everything you do.

It makes a lot of sense: To do something, or make something, or even consider choosing one thing over another, it takes a certain amount of concentration. It takes information. It takes awareness. You have to know that something is there, or that there’s even the potential of a choice.

The way to do that is to become quiet. To sit inside an individual moment. To understand where your body is in relation to the rest of the universe. To watch and listen for what’s actually going on inside your body.

It’s also about documenting what you do. We use a gratitude journaling exercise with our Wellness Training Institute members. It’s a highly effective way to force someone to pause, to look for the positives in their lives, and it sets them up to find more positive things throughout their day.

It’s about getting the mind quiet, calm, and ready to choose life over death, one minute after the next.

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Elimination Diet

An elimination diet is used, first and foremost, to quiet the gut. What I mean by that is this: By taking out potentially reactive foods from your diet (foods that might be causing problems, either by themselves are in a cross-reactive way with other, non-problematic foods), we can get your body to a place where it can just work the way it needs to.

A good example of this is gluten. For a lot of people, gluten doesn’t cause much of a problem. But for those whose bodies react to it, that reaction is usually pretty extreme.

So, by removing gluten from the diet for a little while, the body—the gut—can quiet down and get on with the business of doing its job.

Just like cultivating awareness, an elimination diet allows things to reset, to quiet down. It also allows you to understand what your body needs—as well as what it doesn’t.

It’s probably not an accident that in most cultures (but not ours, for the most part) there’s a time of fasting. For some, it’s a day. Or a week. Or, like Ramadan, a month.

They seem to know something that we don’t here in our culture. There’s power in putting the brakes on constant consumption. There’s power in letting things get still to the point where we can sense things, hear things. There’s power in just shutting things down for a time—for the body, mind, and soul—and just getting quiet.

So, how do you feel? If you feel great, then great!

If not, I would encourage you to come to our FREE Wellness Dinner Seminar. We’ll eat a good meal together, and we will give you a ton of great information about how you can get quiet and take that next step to getting healthy and staying that way!

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