If you’ve checked the stats lately, you’ll already know how grim the obesity epidemic has gotten—even over the last decade.

And if you haven’t seen the numbers, you’re going to be shocked.

According to data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), 70.2% of Americans are either overweight or obese. 37.7% of us are obese, including a whopping 40.4% of women. Almost 8% of the population is considered extremely obese. Even worse? One in six children ages two through nineteen are considered obese.

That’s bad, guys.

Like, really bad.

Because obesity leads to all sorts of major health problems. Heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, strokes—and hundreds of other maladies are direct consequences of obesity.

And, what’s worse, those stats aren’t trending down. Instead, it’s getting worse.

So, how did we get here?

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Well, while it’s easy to oversimplify the causes of obesity, here are some factors that, in combination, can lead to obesity.

Genetics

While your genes do play a part, they don’t play nearly as large a role as you might think.
Genes, according to a recent Harvard study, only influence who might become obese. Environment and lifestyle choices determine how many people actually become obese.
Yes, genes (by definition) run in the family. But so does diet.
Obese children come from obese parents mostly because they all sit around the same dinner table.

Habits are passed on far more readily than genetic coding.

On top of that, your genes aren’t your destiny. You can change your genetic pathways, which genes are “turned on” and which ones aren’t, by changes in lifestyle and diet.

Diet

Not surprisingly, diet is one of the biggest factors in obesity. Consuming large amounts of simple carbs like sugar, drinking sodas, and ingesting the massive amount of non-food chemicals and preservatives in processed food… All of these contribute to the obesity epidemic in profound ways.

We look back to our grandparents and what they ate for breakfast—thick cut back-strap bacon, eggs, and large amounts of heavy dairy products—and it’s a little confusing. All of those things are supposed to be bad for you, right? But time and time again you hear about grandpa eating that every day and living well into his nineties. Those foods are, of course, bad for you… But at least they are REAL FOOD.

Honestly, though, this isn’t your fault. You’ve been targeted since birth by the big food companies who, especially since the late 1970s have been waging a processed-food arms race against each other. And we’ve gotten caught in the crossfire.

That bag of Doritos in your cupboard? That’s less a bag of flavored corn chips than it is a scientifically engineered attack on your brain chemistry. They’re designed to be consumed, and consumed, and then consumed again.

(Lay’s doesn’t even hide this strategy.. their branding is essentially an overt, cynical shot over the bow signaling that they’ve cracked your taste buds’ code and are preparing to ruin you.)

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. TV commercials, billboards, internet pop-ups, and disgustingly blatant ad campaigns aimed specifically at children under ten… It’s a constant and strategically designed attack on your senses.

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Lifestyle

We work in offices. We spend the evening on the couch in front of multiple screens. We’ll wait for 15 minutes idling in the car for a parking space that won’t require us to take more than ten steps to get to the scooter-cart at the grocery store.

As humans, we evolved to move. To chase down our food. To escape lions.

Now that we no longer have to move, we don’t.

So our hormones slip out of balance. We don’t deal with stress in healthy ways. All our energy just gathers inside us. And with no outlet, all these things have no choice than to make more room for themselves.

In light of this current epidemic, we’re seeing the results of that strategy bare its massive teeth.

Lack of Community

I’ve seen this happen over and over. Without a healthy, supportive community, people can become isolated. Things build up inside them, and in their loneliness, despair sets in. Their health slips. And instead of living their lives, life just starts happening to them. Bad habits develop, and without that supportive community around them, it’s very easy to move down the path to obesity.

You can’t get healthy without a supportive community. But you can definitely get obese in its absence.

Lack of Knowledge

Perhaps the biggest cause of obesity on this list, lack of knowledge is a huge issue.

It’s not that we don’t know we should be eating healthier. We do. And it’s not that we don’t know that we should move every day. We know that too.

But I’m not sure it’s common knowledge how all those different pieces fit together. We have the abstract, thousand-foot view, but the details are blurry. We know we should exercise, but we might not know what kind of exercise we should be doing. We know we should eat healthily, but what makes something healthy? Sugar-packed yogurt is sold as “healthy,” but in reality, it’s one of the worst things you can eat. Diet pop is surely better than regular, right? It has “diet” right there in the name! (Answer: No. No it’s not.)

If you’re confused about what to eat, that’s by design. After all, it’s hard to make money shilling kale.

That knowledge gap also comes into play in when people aren’t in touch with what’s going on with their bodies. They don’t know what’s happening inside themselves because, to be honest, most of the time they don’t want to know.

It’s easier to stay distracted, to leave the issues that they sense might be worsening for their future-selves to deal with.

It’s a natural response, of course. We all do it.

But in this case, it can have deadly consequences.

The Skinny on Obesity

And maybe that’s the moral of the story here. The obesity epidemic isn’t going to go away on its own. Honestly, even trying to tackle the problem at a macro level is probably a fool’s errand.

But if you educate yourself, and then take action on that information, that’s how we’re going to reverse obesity.

Your health is yours. It all begins with you.

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The post The Obesity Odds: What You Can Do Today to Avoid the Epidemic appeared first on Wellness Training Institute.

October 3, 2017

If you view a change in diet as something you “get to” do, as opposed to something you “have to” do, you’ll be much more likely to one, stick with it and truly feel the benefits, and two, enjoy yourself as you go through the process. Here’s what I mean…

I once had a patient who had an eating problem. He had some serious health issues, and he was in and out of the hospital pretty regularly. But what triggered these episodes was his habit of going out and eating so much he’d end up on a ventilator by the end of the night. He would eat so much that he could no longer breathe on his own.

I remember one instance where he was in the hospital for a few weeks. We were attempting to get his symptoms alleviated enough for him to go back out and live his life. He was making progress, and finally, he was discharged.

Not two nights later, I saw him again. At a local steakhouse. When I made my rounds the next morning, I was not surprised to see he was back.

It’s All About Perspective

It’s a sad case, but it’s not an isolated one. Many Americans are stuck in a pattern of this kind of self-destruction. It’s not only limited to diet, of course, but the whole idea of eating ourselves into an early grave is alarming to me.

Why?

Because, for one, we know which foods are bad for us. It’s not a mystery. A 20-ounce steak served with butter, a deep-fried onion dipped in fatty batter, and a loaded baked potato? That’s not good for you and you know it.

Secondly, part of what makes those foods so bad for you is that they cause inflammation inside the body. And these staples of the Standard American Diet— aptly shortened to SAD— aren’t just bad for your heart, or your arteries, or your liver. They’re also terrible for your mental health. A recent study showed that out of a group of 120 women, the ones who ate more meat and refined grains and drank more soda were far more likely to be depressed a decade later.

This vicious cycle is one reason why the the SAD diet persists. You eat it, it makes you physically and mentally sick, and to alleviate that feeling, you eat more.

And the crazy part? This state of affairs is what “normal” looks like. It’s how most people eat. And it’s impossible to be happy when what you’re eating is making you actively depressed.

So How Do You Break the Cycle?

This might sound a little overly simplistic, but what I’m about to say is true.

Happiness, at its core, is about perspective. It’s a choice.

You can be eating a huge steak and get a lot of pleasure out of it. But you could also eat a stick of celery and, depending on how you view your life and health, be equally happy. Or, more likely, even happier.

If you view a change in diet as something you “get to” do, as opposed to something you “have to” do, you’ll be much more likely to one, stick with it and truly feel the benefits, and two, enjoy yourself as you go through the process.

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Now, the patient I referenced up top was probably in a spot where it was going to take a lot more work than the average person on his end to shift his view of life. He didn’t get that way overnight, after all. But you’re probably in a much better place. And just changing the angle at which you look at things can have a massive impact on both your health and your happiness.

Learn more about breaking the cycle in your life in this video!

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The post Is Your Diet SAD? appeared first on Wellness Training Institute.

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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April 17, 2017

Does your doctor really understand how type 2 diabetes ACTUALLY works? Read on… you might be unpleasantly surprised…

According to the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) most recent data, 29 million people in the US have type 2 diabetes.

Alarmingly, roughly a quarter of those people don’t even know it.

A QUARTER.

Another 86 million Americans are classified as prediabetic, where their blood sugar is really high… but just not high enough to be classified as actually “diabetic.” The CDC estimates that 15 to 30 percent of these people will develop full blown type 2 diabetes within the next five years.

This is distressing… for a number of reasons.

For one, type 2 diabetes is a lifestyle disease.

Which means that it’s born out of poor life choices. Eat bad food, don’t exercise, float through life without actually experiencing any of its moments, and you’re going to get diabetes. It’s very possible.

The numbers are scary because type 2 diabetes is TOTALLY preventable.

The second alarming thing about these stats comes from my own personal experience as a practicing cardiologist.

Namely, that there are a lot of doctors out there that simply don’t believe type 2 diabetes is preventable or reversible.

But there’s good news here too. Many people think diabetes is a life sentence.

We know for a fact that it’s not.

General Confusion

Every doctor has an opinion. I might have three different people come in for labs in a given week. Their numbers will come back identical. And yet, the first person’s doctor has told them that yeah, for certain, you have diabetes. The second will have been told they are prediabetic. And the third will have gotten a “let’s just keep an eye on it” from their practitioner.

General advice from a lot of doctors: “Everything in moderation. And take this pill.”

But what does “moderation” even mean? And what’s the pill actually treating?

The truth is, most doctor’s don’t understand nutrition. And it’s really not their fault, we don’t learn it in medical school.

Not to mention, there’s a ton of really terrible information out there floating around.

For example, is yogurt good for you?

Answer? No… Aside from the problems with dairy itself, the sugar content in most brands is ridiculously high. And even the ones that are billed as “sugar free” use artificial sweeteners, which aren’t good for you on a number of levels, and increase substantially your chances of getting diabetes.

Or, is a low carb diet healthy?

Answer: Again, nope. Low carb foods are processed to the point that it’s a stretch of the imagination to even call them “foods” at all.

Or, how about this one: To get protein you have to eat meat.

Again, this isn’t even remotely true. Nuts, seeds, grains, legumes… all of these contain enough protein to sustain (and power) your body.

I’m bringing up these three examples just to show that there is a ton of confusion out there. And doctor’s aren’t exempt. Very few medical schools and residency programs talk about the role diet plays in disease. They just don’t… even though diet is one of the most foundational elements of health.

[Want more great information about the foundations of a healthy life? Download our new eBook The 7 Habits of Highly healthful People for FREE right now, right HERE!]

Bad Advice

The advice generally given to people along the diabetic continuum—”Eat less bad stuff and take this pill”—tends to come from an attitude that I think is very dangerous. There aren’t any studies to support this, but in my experience, doctors tend to treat diabetes as if it’s a long game.

As in: “You have a high chance of diabetes, but we still have time. You don’t have it yet. Or, you do, but it’s not that bad yet.”

The truth, though, is that diabetes isn’t a long game. It’s a very dangerous, very aggressive disease. Once you have it, you’re headed down a very steep, very slippery hill.

Meaning: You need to take action NOW.

To treat it as either fate (you’re “genetically predisposed,” so you’re gonna get it eventually) or as something that doesn’t need taken care of NOW through diet and lifestyle changes are both extremely irresponsible approaches.

So, how should we approach diabetes?

How to Beat Type 2 Diabetes

First, if you either have diabetes or are prediabetic, stop feeling like a victim. Your genes are not your destiny. And your health is your own responsibility.

Second, change your diet. Give up sugar. Give up meat. Give up dairy. Eat vegetables. But make all these changes slowly. Habits are formed baby step by baby step.

(We have a ton of resources on how to do this. To get started, click here, here, or here.)

Thirdly, get moving. That’s going to mean different things for different people, given their health. But even sitting in a chair and lifting your arms above your head a few times each day is going to make a huge difference down the line. Start where you are, and then slowly work up to doing more and more.

Fourthly, if you don’t think you can do it yourself, sign up for one of our free Wellness Dinner Seminars (if you’re in the Detroit-metro area), or find someone local to you that takes a holistic approach to health.

Nationally, type 2 diabetes is a problem. And it’s only getting worse. But at the individual level, if you’re at risk—or already have it—it’s time to take action. The one thing you can’t do is ignore it.

The post Does Your Doctor Understand Type 2 Diabetes? appeared first on Wellness Training Institute.

April 10, 2017

Obesity is at epidemic levels. It’s scary. But, read this to the end, because there’s hope… and you play a big part in it!

If you take a look at obesity trends over the last two decades, it’s remarkably sad. In the 1990s, there were a lot of states in the U.S. where the obese segment of the population was below 10%. Fast forward to today, and there’s not one state that’s under 20%. Some states are close to 35%.

And, keep in mind, we’re talking obese.

Not just overweight.

Obese.

Minorities in our country are at even more risk. African American women have an obesity rate of 57.2%, and Latina women are at 46.9%.

I don’t have to tell you that this is causing a ton of problems for a lot of people. The health effects of obesity are clear: Drastically increased chances of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and even certain cancers.

So how did we get here?

There’s no one answer, of course, but over the last half century we’ve seen a perfect storm of contributors.

These include:

Half of what people eat is fast food.

And even with dinners cooked at home, at least half of the food is processed.

In 1975, the average American consumed 11 pounds of added sugar per year. That number is now at 44.

Part of the reason for this particular trend has a lot to do with the publication of the Low Glycemic Index in 1976. Fat was vilified and food producers began bending to public demand by coming out with “low-fat” alternatives. The problem? It tasted terrible. So they added tons of sugar to everything to compensate. (We now know that sugar is far more destructive than fat, but we’re seeing the consequences of this first hand now.)

Food is cheap. As I’ve mentioned before, in 1900 half of household income went to buying food for the family. That number is now down around 12%. Which means you can buy more… and eat more.

The cheapest food is the worst food, in most cases. Think McDonald’s Dollar Menu. It’s also very calorie dense and nutrient light.

But why we’ve gotten to this point isn’t nearly as important as answering this questions… namely, how are we going to end this epidemic?

Because it’s not going to get better on its own.

The stats again show a grim trend.

Since 1980, the childhood obesity rates (ages 2 to 19) have tripled — with the rates of obese 6- to 11-year-olds more than doubling (from 7 percent to 17.5 percent) and rates of obese teens (ages 12 to 19) quadrupling from 5 percent to 20.5 percent. (National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey [NHANES])

[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!]

Reversing the Epidemic

So, what can we as individuals do to reverse (or, even better, prevent) obesity in ourselves and our loved ones?

There’s no silver bullet, of course, but the starting point is this:

Get educated.
It’s amazing to see how much terrible health information there is out there. Plus, you’re being outright lied to by food companies that spend billions per year trying to get you to buy—and eat—more.

The food itself is designed to be craved and to not fill you up as you’re eating it. (Michael Moss, in his brilliant book Salt Sugar Fat calls this the “bliss point.”)

So, you’re up against a lot.

And it’s not your fault. You’ve been targeted for the last three decades with commercials, billboards, radio ads, website pop-ups… the marketing is everywhere. And it’s coming at you in very sophisticated, very deliberate ways.

The key here is to find the correct information, and understand what the food you eat is really doing to you. Our blog page is a great place to start, but there are a ton of great sites out there that give you honest, peer-reviewed research. (Nutritionfacts.org is certainly one of the best at digging through the literature and then translating the results in a clear, easy-to-understand way.)

And then the next step is starting to incorporate that information into your daily routine. Start eating more vegetables, begin drinking more water, learn to cultivate awareness so that you’ll better understand what signals your body is sending you. It’s all about habits. And habits are formed step by baby step.

You can’t reverse the epidemic all by yourself. But starting today, you can take ownership of your own health and begin to make the small changes that, over time, create an overall habit of health.

The post Can We Reverse the Obesity Epidemic? appeared first on Wellness Training Institute.