A new year is beginning and since it is a new beginning it is a great time to start a new health goal. New Year’s is a traditional time for creating new goals. Everybody likes to start a new diet to take off all that extra weight put on by holiday eating. Unfortunately the reality is that within 2 to 3 weeks most folks have already fallen off their New Year’s Resolution Diet. The same thing happens with resolutions to work out regularly. Life gets in the way, stress happens, and we default to our comfort zone, which means we give up anything new and return to what we already are accustomed to.
This year how about if we try something different. Let’s try some substitution changes. These are changes that don’t require any new or extra effort day to day. They only require making an alternate choice. Let me give you a list:
Substitute:
Avocado or olive oil for your vegetable oils
Dr Dave sugar or Truvia for regular sugar
Stevia sweetened sparkling water for soda
Baked foods for fried foods
Raw nuts for chips & pretzels
Sourdough bread for other breads
Real butter for margarine
Zero carb noodles for regular noodles
Nut butter on toast for breakfast cereals
Coconut milk or Almond milk for regular milk
Vinegar for window, floor, and counter cleaners
Salads for appetizers when eating out
CBDs for opiate painkillers
Curcumin for ibuprofen and Aleve
Slow chewing instead of fast eating
Only a snack instead of a full meal in the evening
Barefoot shoes for regular shoes
Park a little further away than you usually do
The list goes on and on …
The idea is to make healthy change as easy as possible. Changes like the ones above do not require any change in your normal habits. They don’t require any extra time or energy. They all accomplish the same desired end goal. They are just slightly different ways of getting what you want – more healthful ways.
I recommend just trying one substitution to begin. Try it for a couple weeks until it feels “normal.” Once it feels normal then add another one. Again, make the new substitution until it feels like a comfortable habit before adding another small change. With lifestyle changes the biggest problem is that people try to do too much at once. This just promotes failure. Take tiny bites, tiny shifts, and wait until even the slightest unease over the shift has lifted before trying a new shift. These unease feelings can easily pile up and trigger failure. So take on just one little shift at a time until it becomes your new normal.
Life these days is stressful enough for most folks. The stress generated by big lifestyle changes can often cause more negative effects than the positive gained by the change. We want to keep our stress levels low. Challenge is healthy, but only if the challenge does not generate too much stress. Some stress for short terms supports our health when we are able to overcome the stress successfully. This builds confidence and resilience. Chronic stress is simply a killer and does nothing good for us. In fact I read some research last week that estimated that in our current health environment in this country, 95% of ill health begins with unresolved stress.
Even with that all said, I know full well that many of you want and/or need to make bigger changes more quickly. For these situations I find that the best way to decrease
the stress is to follow a well thought out plan that explains what you need to do and how, right down to the little details. Tackling a big change without sufficient information typically results in failure.
One of the best health changes you can make to radically improve your health is to switch to a ketogenic diet. This means you are switching your body over to getting most of its energy from burning fats instead of sugars. Burning fats produces far less inflammation in the body thereby decreasing most degenerative diseases, lowers gene damage thereby decreasing cancers, eliminates diabetes issues, and slows aging in general. It really is the most healthful diet for the greatest number of people living with the lifestyle we have in America today. A ketogenic diet is not perfect for everybody, but probably the best option for about 80% of people right now.
But how do you do a ketogenic diet well? There are a lot of books out there that talk about variations on this theme, but many of them are not well thought out. There are a lot of considerations to deal with in a lifestyle
change like this. If you want to make a bold health move like this, you need a good road map. Fortunately I was given a nice ketogenic diet road map workbook by Amber Elliott of Elliott’s Natural Foods. I checked it out and was quite impressed with how thorough it was and how easy it was to follow. The workbook was put together by one of her vendors, the company that makes Ancient Nutrition, a couple Chiropractors and the founder of Garden of Life products.
The reason I mention this is because they provided a bunch of these to Amber to promote their products. This is excellent marketing because out of 155 pages of educational material, only a few pages are promoting their products. The rest is excellent material that will guide complete beginners through the steps into a workable ketogenic lifestyle. Why should you care? You can care because Amber is giving me 24 copies of the
workbooks, along with an Elliott’s coupon and samples, to give to my patients. This is a true win-win arrangement. You guys get a beautiful free workbook and she gets exposure for her store.
There are a limited number of these workbooks, so when they are gone, they are gone. I believe they should be in the office January 8th, so if you want one just come on by.
2018 has officially started. Do you want it to be a better year than 2017? Do you want to feel better, stronger, and more mobile? I see these as good goals, but to get different results we have to do different things. Our life does not change unless we do. From the age of 25 on our bodies are in a slow decline. We can either slide down the slope of aging quickly or we can fight to stay as healthy and vibrant as possible. Building healthy habits bit by bit is a proven strategy for success in the health field. So here’s to your success in 2018!