At Risk and Overweight

Feeling stressed? Know you’re not alone. We all inevitably have stress in our lives, and we need to manage stress in healthy ways while also staying productive. On today’s podcast, Daria Tsvenger joins us. Daria is a mindset coach and has also studied cognitive neuroscience at Stanford University. Daria has a unique program called The Dream Sprint, a personal growth challenge that people gain clarity and pursue their dreams.   Next Steps Wherever you are today, I want to challenge you to take the next small step that will lead you to where you want to go. Daria’s Dream Sprint program could be a great way to get some support and accountability as you move forward. We all need support and encouragement. Once you have those, you also have hope. And hope is a very powerful thing. That’s why I make this podcast. So I want to encourage you to keep taking intentional small steps as you are on your journey. 

Step into your greatness by taking action with intention and purpose. Ryan Stanley, a Certified Personal Coach, dives into the driving force behind living life without fear and on your terms. He talks about the impact of stress and anxiety on the mind, the body, and life. Taking steps toward change will make you the creator of your dreams. Ryan delves into the importance of shifting your mindset, pushing through negative self-talk, and utilizing your time intentionally. He talks about building patience and pushing through the stress to increase your level of success.   What you’ll learn: Living on purpose doesn’t happen by accident.  The Doc Brown Theory  The first step to overcoming negative self-talk.  Dealing with the mindset and taking the first step.  Be Patient, Be Present, Be Joyful: A First Aid Kit for the Emotional Bumps, Scrapes, and Bruises of Life More about Ryan M Stanley: Website: https://www.ryanstanley.com/be-patient-be-present-be-joyful Website: https://www.ryanstanley.com/free-ebook  Website: http://teachmetocoach.com  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rms_ryanstanley/  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rmslifecoach/  Twitter: https://twitter.com/RMS_RyanStanley  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RMS.Life.Coach/    Recommended Reads: “Be Patient, Be Present, Be Joyful: A First Aid Kit for the Emotional Bumps, Scrapes, and Bruises of Life” By Ryan Stanley “Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself” By Dr. Joe Dispenza. 

I've been absent here for a while, and part of that is because I "fell off the wagon." It started as a planned cheat day that turned into a cheat 3-week period. I had gained 8-9 pounds of the 18 I lost, and it felt defeating. But I have since lost 4, so I have 5 pounds to get back to my weight a month or so ago.

We've all heard the mantra for weight loss: "Eat less, move more." While this does play some role, what really affects weight loss is insulin. When I started my current weight loss journey, my doctor recommended the book "Delay, Don't Deny" to help me better understand intermittent fasting. In that book, the author, Gin Stephens, refers and recommends many other books and studies. One of these is "The Obesity Code" by Dr. Jason Fung. Dr. Fung proves (over and over) that insulin is what causes weight gain, more than limiting calories or burning more calories than you take in. I recommend that you check out these books for yourself, too.   Delay, Don't Deny by Gin Stephens The Obesity Code by Dr. Jason Fung   * These links are affiliate links, so I do get a small commission if you use them.

It can get easy to struggle, get frustrated, or give up if you don't have accountability with your goals. This is true for health goals as much as with anything. Today I want to share a conversation I had with my mastermind group last week. All three of us are podcast editors and we started our mastermind group back in March to help each other primarily with our businesses. We talk through our goals and tentative plans, looking for feedback from the others. There’s also a level of accountability as we followup on each others goals. Business related goals are the primary thing we talk about, but we do also share personal goals as well. For me, that includes my journey in health. So last week, I brought up some of the struggles I have had with my intermittent fasting and keto plans. They shared some ideas and advice. Then they said I should share that part of the conversation with you on this podcast. So, now I’m going to share this part of the conversation.

Travel (and many other things) can disrupt our schedules and routines. If we don't have good habits around our health, these changes can cause us to derail our health goals. "The One Thing" (great book!) shares the study that it takes an average of 66 days to establish a habit. As a result, they created a free 66-day challenge calendar to help you (and me) track our progress. Download the 66-day calendar here.   How you can join me While this podcast is about my journey (or at least it’s starting this way), I’d like to invite you to join me. If you’ve listened to this so far, my guess is that you’re on a similar journey. Let’s see if we can help keep each other accountable and help each other achieve lasting results. I just set up a Facebook group. If you’d like to join, go to OverweightPodcast.com/fb. It can be a group to encourage each other, keep each other accountable, and pass on different insights as each of us progress through our own journeys.

Keto is short for Ketogenic diet. It is a low-carb, high-fat diet that allows ketones to be produced. So, you are basically drastically reducing the amount of carbs that to take in, neglecting your body the direct sugar it’s looking for. When you do this, your body doesn’t create insulin to process the food, so the body creates ketones from your fat cells to produce the energy it needs. Hence, the ability to burn fat and lose weight. Just so we’re on the same page, carbs come from things like sugar, flour, fruits, beans, and starchy foods like potatoes and corn. Things you can eat are like meats, cheese, and many vegetables. There’s actually a good variety of food you can have, it can just be hard to say no to the other foods.   How low is low carb? There are a couple “levels” of the Keto diet: Strict Keto - 20 carbs or less (and almost all carbs come from veggies) Dirty Keto - 50ish carbs or less and it doesn’t matter where the carbs come from If you’ve never looked into it, the numbers may not mean anything to you. As a point of reference, if you were to get a Quarter Pounder, large fry, and large drink from McDonalds, that would be 48 carbs. For one meal. Other examples: 1 cup of cooked pasta or rice - 45g Whole english muffin - 30g Medium potato - 30g 1 cup of corn - 30g A small fruit - 15g 1 cup of milk - 12g 1 corn tortilla - 13g 1 flour tortilla - 98g This puts a lot into perspective. It can actually be pretty easy to get 400-500 carbs in a day. The Mayo Clinic recommends between 225 and 325 grams a day for the “normal” diet. This is one reason why I and many others have gained weight - eating too much food in general, and especially eating too many carbs. Since everyone is different, your body will go into Ketosis when you eat between 20 and 50 carbs for 2-3 days. That’s when you start to see the difference in your weight.   Benefits of Keto The obvious benefit of Keto is being able to lose weight pretty quickly. Generally speaking, the lower your carb count, the more you can lose; but that’s obviously not a guarantee. There are too many variables. I can’t speak for everyone, but my wife and I can attest to having no heartburn while following a keto diet. While we eat normally, we’ll get heartburn and have to take antacids 4-5 days a week. On Keto, it was close to 0 times that we had heartburn in a 3-month period. Overall, you start to feel better because you’re not having the sugar coursing through your body.   A couple warnings One negative with starting with keto is what’s known as “Keto flu.” The symptoms and severity are different for everyone, but usually include things like headache, foggy brain, fatigue, irritability, nausea, difficulty sleeping, and constipation. It usually happens about 2-3 days after starting and lasts for a few days. So basically, when you start to get the benefits from keto, your body is also basically going through withdrawal.  One way to minimize the effects of keto flu is to gradually bring your carbs down so it’s not quite a shock to your body. So start by dropping to 150 carbs the first day, then 100 the second day, and so on. Once you get past the first week, the symptoms usually go away, and your body starts to get used to the new normal. Another thing to keep in mind is your blood sugar is you have diabetes. This would definitely be a case where you want to work with a doctor on what you should do.   What do I plan on doing with Keto So, as I mentioned previously, I plan to slowly work into lowering my carbs after I get used to the intermittent fasting. I’ve been mostly consistent with the fasting, so I just started to lower my carbs. I don’t plan on following a full keto plan most of the time, because that can sometimes be a little harder when no one else in the family is doing keto. I plan to keep my carbs under 100 and then have times where I do 3-5 days of 20-30 carbs. So this might look like being full keto for 3-4 days and then allow upto 100 carbs for 3-4 days. The whole time, though, I plan to keep doing the intermittent fasting. The big thing for me is that I want to have a plan that I can follow consistently because I’ve tried to start the keto diet full-fledge several times, and I struggle because of the food that’s available in my house.

In February, I went to the doctor, and, for the first time ever, I talked with him about getting my weight under control.  One diet I had tried before, and had good success while I was on the diet, was the Keto diet. I’m planning on talking about this in a future episode, but it’s basically a low carb diet. My doctor said that it was a good idea to follow that diet, but also for me to try intermittent fasting. He recommended a book for me to read as I get started: Delay, Don’t Deny: Living an Intermittent Fasting Lifestyle. I ordered it right away and began reading it over the next 2-3 weeks. It has a lot of really great information about intermittent fasting. I’ve been doing intermittent fasting for the past month, and have been mostly consistent with it, so I want to share some of the things I’ve learned.   It’s a Lifestyle, not a Diet One of the main points of the book is that intermittent fasting needs to be a lifestyle change, not just a diet, which is just a temporary situation. A diet lasts for a month, six months, a year - whatever. And then you revert back to your normal eating habits. The problem is that your normal habits - and my normal habits - are what led to being really overweight and at risk for a lot of issues. Committing to a forever lifestyle is the key to lasting change. Now before you start worrying about starving yourself and the long-term effects of starvation…   What is Intermittent Fasting? So intermittent fasting is fasting...intermittently. In other words, it’s having a shorter, specific period where you eat and then not eating (or fasting) for more than 12 hours. And this fasting time does include sleeping. Many people, myself included, tend to eat late into the evening and then wake up and have breakfast. This leaves maybe a fasting time of 9-10 hours. During this time, your body is working on processing the food that you ate. After about 12 hours, your body is done processing the food, and then starts to work on healing itself. Also, after 12 hours, your body starts to burn fat for energy, since you don’t have the sugar from your food to draw from. With intermittent fasting, the point is to take advantage of these self-healing and fat-burning aspects of fasting.   Intermittent Fasting Plans So, there is more than just one way to do intermittent fasting: 5:2 - where you eat regularly for 5 days and fast for 2 days (not consecutive: i.e Wednesday and Sunday) 16:8 - fast for 16 hours and eat during the 8-hour window 18:6 - fast for 18 hours and eat during the 6-hour window OMAD - One Meal a Day, you give yourself a 1-hour window to eat Other variations I am starting with the 16:8 plan, allowing 16 hours of fasting each day. You can adapt your eating window to your schedule/preference. I chose to have my window be 1pm-9pm. I’ve been doing this for about a month, and it has been a little difficult, but not as much as I thought it would have been. I’ve always been one to eat breakfast within the first hour or two of waking up, so I started by changing when I first eat during the first week: 8am the first day 9am the second day 10am the third day 11am the fourth day 12pm the fifth day It hasn’t always been smooth and I’ve allowed myself to adapt my window, like I would start at 12:00 some days and stop early. And many times, I would stop before 9:00 anyway. I’m mainly trying to keep the fasting time at least 16 hours regardless of the specific time, which I think is the most important part of this.   What to Eat? This principle of only eating during your window only restricts when you eat, not what you eat. Theoretically, you can eat whatever you want to inside your window and still be doing an intermittent fast. But you do need to remember why you’re doing the fast - in my case, I’m trying to be healthier and lose weight. So, while I can load up on cookies and brownies, it’s not necessarily the best choice. (my daughter has been on a baking kick lately, which has made this harder)   It’s not a Religion Remember, intermittent fasting is not a diet - it’s a lifestyle. But that doesn’t mean that it controls your life - it’s supposed to compliment your life. So, if you have a birthday party - eat the cake and icecream, and get back to eating better tomorrow. If you have family or friends from out of town for the week, go ahead and eat brunch, even if it’s outside your eating window; and then get back to it when they’re gone. If intermittent fasting becomes such a burden, you’re going to hate it and give up on it.   Pairing Intermittent Fasting with Other Habits One way you can maximize the effectiveness of intermittent fasting is by pairing it with other habits. For me, I plan to add a Keto diet on top of intermittent fasting. I’m waiting a bit until I get used to the intermittent fasting part before adding this. I’ll be talking about this more in a couple episodes, but the two work really well together when it comes to losing weight. Another thing that I’m adding is exercise. My doctor wants me to do 30 minutes of exercise 4 days a week. I haven’t had a history of exercising, so I’m slowly working on adding this. I’m currently doing 20-30 minutes 2-3 times a week, but hope to get up to my doctor’s goal within a month.

What this podcast is As I just mentioned in the introduction, my name is Joshua Rivers, and this podcast is basically an audio journal of my journey back to better health. To be truthful, though, I’ve never really been healthy - I just had a high metabolism until my mid-twenties that caught up to me. I went from 190 pounds in early 2008 to 294 pounds in early 2020. As we go through the podcast, I’ll probably be sharing more about my history. But, I’m basically on a journey to lose almost 100 pounds and get my overall health away from being “at risk” as much as possible. What this podcast is not This is not a “how-to” podcast from an expert. I don’t plan on trying to explain the complexities and intricacies of how your body works, or different nutrition facts, or how different exercises will help you. Of course, I’ll touch on each of these as we go, but, again, I’m not an expert in this field. Maybe I’ll have and share some conversations with people that are experts, but no guarantee.   What to expect I plan to share at least one episode a week, maybe more. I’m expecting that the episodes will generally be short (10-15 minutes or less), unless I do have a conversation with a guest expert, then those will be longer. As I stated, this is mostly an audio journal of my personal journey, and it’s also a form of accountability. So, yes, I will be focusing more on what I’m doing in relation to diet and exercise.   How you can join me While this podcast is about my journey (or at least it’s starting this way), I’d like to invite you to join me. If you’ve listened to this so far, my guess is that you’re on a similar journey. Let’s see if we can help keep each other accountable and help each other achieve lasting results. I just set up a Facebook group. If you’d like to join, go to OverweightPodcast.com/fb. It can be a group to encourage each other, keep each other accountable, and pass on different insights as each of us progress through our own journeys.