Five Steps to Establishing a Healthier Lifestyle

When meeting with prospective clients there are a few things I like to stress right out of the gate. I’m not here to convince you to change your lifestyle. If there is one thing I’ve learned in talking to family and friends about making the decision to leave the high-carb, low-fat paradigm, it’s that there is no convincing: people are ready when they’re ready. For many, this transition may require not only a significant upheaval of their dietary, fitness, and lifestyle practices, but also a total shift in their perception of what is “healthy” according to conventional wisdom. There are changes that will legitimately challenge your previously held beliefs (“wait -- dietary fat isn’t clogging my arteries?”). Therefore, a serious commitment and a genuine desire to change are absolutely imperative for one to have a real chance at reaping the benefits of these changes -- you cannot half-ass your way to a healthier lifestyle. This doesn’t mean that we can’t transition gradually, in fact, for some this may be the optimal approach. What it does mean is that we’ve got to be all-in: physically, mentally, and emotionally. This brings me to what I’ve established as the five most important factors in determining your success in reshaping your lifestyle: accepting responsibility, setting intention, managing expectations, establishing priorities, and practicing mindfulness. But why change at all? Western medicine and the American healthcare system are broken, and they have been for a long time. Allopathic medicine is designed to treat symptoms and manage diseases once they’ve developed, and it can be very effective in certain circumstances. However, it is not designed to prevent disease or to even treat the root causes, let alone to promote optimal health. In America, our healthcare system functions as not much more than a business. To put it simply: insurance companies, healthcare networks, “Big Pharma,” etc, prioritize profits over the health of the American people. This doesn’t mean that individual healthcare practitioners don’t care about their patients -- I believe they do -- only that we’ve created a paradigm in which many practitioners are drastically limited in their abilities to truly help people lead healthy lives. The current state of (mainstream) nutritional science is not a whole lot better. Facing a heart disease epidemic, the American Heart Association (AHA) initially adopted its low-fat stance in 1961 (1). In 1977, the USDA’s first edition of dietary guidelines was published, recommending an increase in carbohydrate consumption and decrease in dietary fats and cholesterol (2). Since that time, obesity and diabetes rates have skyrocketed, while heart disease remains the number one cause of death in the United States. CDC Data (3). CDC Data (4). In spite of these very clear statistics, the AHA has recently doubled-down on their low-fat stance (5). The USDA, AHA, and many other leading health organizations have quite clearly led us astray. In fact, the New England Journal of Medicine is predicting a potential decline in life expectancy for Americans, due primarily to the growing rates of diabetes and obesity. So what can we [...]