Question
Merrell virgen
What are biggest hurdles facing people when it comes to taking charge, making a change and eating healthy now?
Answer
Well, let me share some of my own experience, and it's going to be limited to some subset of whatever the challenges might be in the bigger world. But the first one is probably mental. And for those of you that have been on the program with me in the past, you have heard me say that just about every decision in life, certainly any of these food and lifestyle and diet related challenges, are about 90% mental. And the other 10% is just getting down and doing it. And when it comes to making changes, I think we need to just commit in our head to doing it. And it's like flipping a switch. Rather than using a dimmer switch and finding some middle space that changes every other day with the moon, find an on or off position and just decide to go with it and then flip that switch. And it makes it a lot easier. And I have found that with fasting. I have found that with just these other sort of things that I've played around with when it comes to dietary and lifestyle changes. The other part of this is the environment that we create, the environment in which we operate each day. And that can extend from the place where we sleep all the way down to the living and cooking quarters. These spaces are very important to us, and they trigger certain emotions and memories, and therefore they play with that mental switch that I just mentioned. So if you can set up your, let's say, kitchen space and dining space in a way that is supportive of the changes that you want to make. For example, if you want to eat less or stop eating these highly processed snacks and start to eat more whole food snacks, then get rid of the processed food snacks and replace them with whole food items. Whether that's carrots and celery or bananas and avocados. Whatever it is that you want to try out, make that change to your environment. And that becomes a supportive environment and one that'll help keep you on track when you have those discouraging thoughts or disruptive thoughts that might come into play. And otherwise, when it comes to the overarching sort of healthy theme, I say start with the low-hanging fruit. And I just gave one example in terms of switching out the snacks. Another thought on snacking is if you can just cut out snacks, period, that's even better. And this gives you a chance to focus on the The meal proper, regardless of whether you're eating two or three or some other number of meals, hopefully not too many meals, I would say for most people, most of the time, it really isn't conducive to the best metabolic health. But if you can limit your meals, again, for most people, most of the time to three meals, and depending on what your goals are, if it's weight loss, for example, then maybe fewer meals, let's say two, it could be less than that, is a good thing to target as well. And then cut out the snacks and give your body a chance to use up the glycogen supply and to move through that energy that you just consumed in between the meal periods. That's a good thing. And this starts to get us into the space of intermittent fasting or even short-term fasting across multiple days. And there are some great sources out there. One that you might take a look at is Dr. Fung, Dr. Jason Fung, F-U-N-G, who's got a presence online, but also a handful of books that he's published that talk about this sort of activity.
