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Wes: Welcome everyone to episode ten of Healthy Mind Fit Body podcast. This is Wes and Kevin’s on the other line. Hey Kevin.
Kevin: Hey Wes, hey everybody.
Wes: How’s it going?
Kevin: It’s going pretty good, I am a little under the weather I think the last couple of days, I don’t think I actually was sick officially but some kind of bug was definitely attacking me.
Wes: No flying pig flu right?
Kevin: Oh no, no that’s not going to happen. I don’t want to even think about that.
Wes: When pigs will fly, that’s when you’ll get that.
Kevin: Exactly. Yeah I kind of sat around and rested up yesterday and today a little bit more and then I did some yoga at noon and that seemed to do the trick, so I felt like pretty crappy beforehand and I almost didn’t go but then I got in there and about halfway through I started feeling like a human being again so…
Wes: A little yoga-cizing will bring you back in order.
Kevin: Yeah, there’s something about it, something about those kinds of movements and the sweating. Works pretty well for me.
Wes: It gets you in that kind of mindfulness state and meditative and gets all that good stretching in too.
Kevin: Yeah get the kinks out.
Wes: So you can practice your Chinese splits.
Kevin: Yeah, maybe in a couple of years I’ll be doing those Chinese splits.
Wes: There you go. We were just kicking around this article before the show from ToplessRobot.com, a kind of interesting site but this is titled, “The 10 Most Beloved and Unhealthy Gaming Snacks,” and we were kind of reminiscing on some of the things we used to eat back in the day. I remember these pizza rolls, when I was a little kid I used to eat those, pretty quick and easy for parents to dish those out to kids.
Kevin: Yeah, I was eating those when I was training heavily in college for swimming.
Wes: Oh when you were a big boy.
Kevin: Yeah, I thought the carbs were just so good, it was loaded with carbs and it’s got a lot of salt so what could be wrong about that?
Wes: Although you can burn your mouth on those things. You’ve got to be careful.
Kevin: Yeah many times.
Wes: And of course Oreos is another one that we’ve got here, and Slim Jims. We’ve got a picture of the white pasty substance which is also one of the few things that you know can’t be healthy for you without even looking at ingredients on the package. But if you did look you would see “mechanically separated chicken” as an ingredient. Yes it sounds like it might be chicken torn apart by a robot with claws for hands, but in reality it’s just chicken meat turned into a paste like substance, which looks like this.
Kevin: Yeah, it’s pink and it’s fluffy.
Wes: It almost looks like vanilla yogurt or something.
Kevin: Yeah or pig flavored yogurt.
Wes: Yeah you never know what you’re getting in all those minced up meat products, and sausages, and stuff.
Kevin: Yeah the prepackaged foods and they’re full of surprises. I like the combos, they have a package of crackers and they’re bacon, egg, and cheese crackers.
Wes: Yeah I’ve never seen those before.
Kevin: They called them snausages for humans.
Wes: Yeah, which is nothing like a snausage, which is a snack for dogs which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. So yeah, Twinkies and then Mountain Dew and then of course huge piles of candy at the end, but donuts are in there too and it kind of goes in line with what we talked about, donuts in a previous episode. The little write up here is, “Who does not like a donut? It’s about the worst thing you could eat. You may think that because it has dough in it that perhaps you’re getting some nutrition, but you are thinking.
A donut, whether it be cakey or crispy has about no nutritional value whatsoever, it’s got nothing but fat, sugar, and carbohydrates in portions so large it may as well be the Sam’s Club of unhealthy. However, like cigarettes, it may be the unhealthiness that draws us to it. Also, it is one of those few foods you can buy a box of, bring it to your friend’s house, and only your most picky of bitch friends will not find something they like.”
Kevin: Yeah, going to be popular with the big box right?
Wes: And this is the sort of eating habits that we find not just in the gaming community, but in America in general. And we both watched the latest episode of Nightline, you can actually see that online titled “New Diet Pills Show Promise For Weight Loss: the drug industry hunts for a holy grail pill to help people lose weight and keep it off.” It’s like a ten-minute segment and it talks about the nature of the obesity and overweight epidemic in America.
It interviews a couple people that are trying to lose weight and I thought the comments by the one lady are pretty fascinating where she said that she didn’t eat wisely and they asked her why were you not able to lose the weight or keep the weight off and she says you just get used to eating the same amount of food and then your body yells at you and she says, “I obeyed my body.”
Obeying your body, this is a conflict that we’ve talked about in the past, about the two different sides of self – one is wanting to eat the right things and be healthy, and the other side is doing it because it wants to or because it hasn’t reconciled those conflicts.
Kevin: It’s kind of like putting your body on auto pilot, right? I mean you’re not using your mind at all. You’re just going to take the mind part out of it. A fit body becomes really tough to achieve and it sounds like people like that woman are not going into introspecting, they’re not really thinking about their decisions too much.
Wes: No there’s no real deeper self reflection or solemn introspection if you will to try to comes to terms with one’s feelings because obviously what one is feeling, the hunger pains, the cravings, are just a manifestation of the habits that one has built up over time in the past – whether it’s how you related to food with your parents. Did they force you to eat everything on your plate or eat all your vegetables before you could have a giant dessert, all these different habits that we’ve developed and then the things we just covered with the donuts and the pizza rolls and all those processed foods.
This is part of like our culture and people just develop these habits and then they get ingrained and then they think that somehow their bodies are acting contrary to their own wishes. It’s almost like they’re possessed by a demon or they become zombies instead of eating brains, they eat all kinds of nasty junk food.
Kevin: Yeah, I mean imagine if you and I never gave much thought to what we were eating, we’d still be doing the pizza rolls, and the donuts, and we’d probably look about twenty years older than we do, and we’d be falling apart at this point of our lives. We’d be sitting here going yeah, I don’t know what to do, I’m just following what my body says.
Wes: And of course because of this, we can’t overlook an entire industry that’s trying to come to the rescue here, the pharmaceutical industry which is what this Nightline show was about basically, a big pharma stepping in to try to solve this problem in America, right? So they had, I guess he was like the CEO of one of these drug companies, he says, “We want you to lose your weight in a safe fashion and keep the weight off.”
And of course they noted that this means taking these drugs in perpetuity basically for the rest of your life if you’re going to rely on the drugs to suppress your appetite, to make you feel full, to regulate your metabolism. I mean these are like the main aspects of what these drugs do. If you have to rely on a pharmaceutical, then you’ve got to keep on taking it right?
Kevin: Yeah, yeah. Do you think there’s ever a time when it is appropriate to prescribe drugs to somebody who’s obese?
Wes: You know, the obesity is the result again of all these different habits that people built up in their minds, in their subconscious minds and how they relate to their own emotions, right? Or they don’t relate to their own emotions, and I think the most important thing is to connect with your true self in these matters, your more authentic part of your self.
And in our book, Healthy Mind Fit Body, we actually have a whole week program to deal with this. It’s using the sentence completion technique that was really perfected by Nathaniel Brandon. He has whole workbooks on it, but I designed it so that you could actually explore the different facets of this weight struggle that people have and get to the root of it basically.
Because I think the drugs…and in the realm of psychotherapy, people prescribe psychotropic drugs for all kinds of reasons – severe depression, major anxiety, panic attacks, things like that. But they’re kind of a bandaid you know? And there’s no substitute for actually getting in touch with your own emotions and discovering new habits of relating to your self, and I think that’s the most important part psychologically because if we just rely on pharmaceuticals, we’re not getting at the root of what actually caused the problem.
Kevin: Yeah exactly, and you’re saving a lot of money by introspecting and working through these things. I mean I imagine especially at first those drugs are not going to be cheap, and then to say that people need to be on them their whole lives, I mean yeah…
Wes: Oh, but insurance will cover it Kevin!
Kevin: Oh yeah…
Wes: Other people will cover the expenses there.
Kevin: Of course, of course yeah, just rely on insurance companies and maybe government will cover it too.
Wes: Oh yes, that’s going to be courtesy of the government which actually…where do they get their money? From productive people in the populous or they just print it out, that’s a whole other issue.
Kevin: But it goes back to responsibility, it’s just this idea that someone else is going to take care of you and it’s all going to be figured out for you. That just doesn’t work obviously.
Wes: It’s inherently disempowering isn’t it?
Kevin: Yeah, exactly.
Wes: This whole business about health care, the health care industry, and how people are going to be taken care of by other people. I mean this is what ingenious people do in the marketplace if they’re free to actually operate their businesses in a way that they want to rather than how regulators and busybodies and political do-gooders think that they should be providing those things.
So again, it’s multi-faceted but in relation to your own health and well being, there’s no substitute to actually focusing on what really matters in your own life, taking responsibility for these things.
Kevin: Taking responsibility, yeah.
Wes: So do you think these drugs are at all efficacious because then this piece that Nightline did, they basically showed that at least the two people that they interviewed had lost substantial amounts of weight.
Kevin: Yeah, I mean that’s impressive but then how long are they going to be able to keep it off after they stop taking the drugs, or is it just that they’re supposed to keep taking the drugs forever?
Wes: You’ve got to keep people in a crisis chronic disease state so that you can keep on feeding them drugs you see. This is how the health care industry works, right?
Kevin: Yeah exactly, and we still don’t know what the side effects of these drugs are. I mean are we going to rely on the FDA to keep us safe? I mean that hasn’t worked out too well in the past so there’s that issue too.
Wes: Yeah, every drug has a side effect, it doesn’t matter what the drug is, it’s always going to have a trade off there.
Kevin: Exactly.
Wes: And again, this problem is caused essentially by eating habits and by misinformation out there because as we’ve noted in previous podcasts and in the book, most people don’t have the correct nutritional information to understand the nature of how fat gets deposited in the fat cells and how it’s kept there by what you eat basically, by having higher insulin levels.
I mean insulin is that storage hormone for fat, it converts the carbs to fat and the fat actually doesn’t make you fat. We covered that too so this nutritional misinformation and oftentimes disinformation actually keeps people unhealthy and then of course leave it to the pharmaceutical companies to come to the rescue with a bigger bandaid.
Kevin: Yeah, we were talking a little bit before the show, drug addiction – maybe we need more drugs to keep away from drug addiction. I mean where do you stop, I mean it gets pretty crazy.
Wes: Yeah, there are drugs that are substitutes for the actual black market drugs but that’s obviously not taking responsibility either because again, when we look at the nature of health and wellness and fitness, it’s more a psychological process than it is some sort of disease state that can be fixed with drugs. I mean I think that if people were to actually focus on the psychological component, this would be a fairly easy problem to solve.
But it’s that most people in these helping professions aren’t focusing on what really matters and the nature of the nutritional information and then the psychological side, which entails the motivation aspects. So when someone says that they’re not eating wisely and that their body is forcing them to eat things, that’s an indication that there’s self-conflict happening. There are certain value judgments that are being unaddressed in that process.
Kevin: Yeah, that actually reminds me…and I’ve talked about this before but I have a friend that a long time ago, when I first bought the Zone Book, he bought it at the same time and we were reading it and we were going wow, this is really cool information and I started kind of implementing it and so did he and I don’t know, a couple of years later I was over at his place and he’s drinking a Mountain Dew and pounding the Pringles.
And I looked and I said, “What happened to the Zone? I thought you were kind of big on that,” and he’s like, “Oh no, I can’t do without my carbs!” And he’s overweight, and it’s just like, where’s that disconnection there? What’s going on, I mean he knows exactly what the right thing is but he’s choosing to do the unhealthy thing that’s keeping him overweight.
Wes: Yes, and if you look at our culture, it’s almost as if being overweight and obese even is normal and this pathology of normalcy is just a slippery slope where people basically don’t take the initiative in order to actually remedy the situation and become more healthy because as this guy at Scripts Institute (this piece was actually done in San Diego where we are), he said that most of these diseases that people come to doctors with are the result of this obesity issue and eating problems.
So you need to address the problem from a psychological point of view and the behavioral point of view, and if you addressed the healthy eating side of things then all these other disease states kind of fall by the way side and people are able to manage their own health in a preventative fashion rather than always going to the doctor to try to do damage control, right?
Kevin: So in summary let me ask you, is there or is there not a magic pill for weight loss?
Wes: A magic bullet or a pill?
Kevin: Yeah, does it exist? Is it out there somewhere? Are there some scientists that we can rely on or some doctors, or somebody that can just whip up something so we don’t have to worry about this whole eating thing anymore?
Wes: Yeah, so we don’t have to state phrases like this gal from San Diego sports medicine and family health center that obesity is a chronic disease and we need to think about the chronic medication for it. I don’t think, I mean that’s not really a magic bullet is it? It’s not a magic pill, it’s not a holy grail because if we look at this rationally and realistically, if you need chronic medication, you’re going to be addicted to the medication now.
You’re going to be relying on that now instead of relying on your own resources, your own psychological resources and this can be achieved. I mean the last podcast we asked people to comment on what their issues are and so forth and we’re recording this show actually before anyone made any comments so we encourage you to make comments to this show or the previous one so that we can address the particular issues that you have in your life – the psychological struggles with eating the right foods and discovering what actually is good food for you and how you maintain a healthy mind fit body in this process.
Kevin: Yeah, and also just people who are already doing this and kind of taking charge and kind of eating the foods that we’re talking about to stay thin and stay healthy, how’s it going? Like what are you finding that are the challenges there? I did actually have a comment on my Facebook page from one of our listeners and she said she’s started to eat more fat and she said, “I’m working my way out to Wes’ 50% fat,” and so yeah, we’re changing the world one person at a time.
Wes: As long as she’s cutting down on the carbohydrates and replacing them with the fat energy. That will serve her well and it will make it easier to actually lose the weight and to keep it off because that’s the goal here and it’s just surprising that all these researchers and doctors, and all these experts are not focusing on what really matters but instead these bandaid prescriptions, literal prescriptions for people to pop pills and waste money on that process.
Kevin: Well that’s where Healthy Mind Fit Body comes in so we’re basically the anti-pharmaceutical industry and the anti-FDA, and we’re what works.
Wes: Indeed, because your own body has so many complex processes going on that it can take care of itself if you do the right things for it, that’s the key.
Kevin: Exactly.
Wes: So if you like the show you can rate us or review us on iTunes, we have a link there on the website and just visit HealthyMindFitBody.com for all the good information.
Kevin: Yeah, and we have a newsletter and a free audio that we’re offering if you go to HealthyMindFitBody.com and just put in your first name and email address up in the upper right, and we’ll start sending you that wonderful information immediately.
Wes: Alright, well that wraps it up, thanks for listening this week and we’ll talk to you next week!
Kevin: Thanks for listening and we’ll talk to you soon!