Written by Christopher Kelly
Jan. 13, 2015
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Christopher: Hello and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive Podcast. My name is Christopher Kelly and I'm joined today by my registered nurse, Amelia. Hi, Amelia.
Amelia: Hi, Chris. How are you?
Christopher: Very well. Thanks. How are you?
Amelia: Good.
Christopher: So today we're going to talk about New Year's Resolutions and how to achieve them and the pitfalls that you're likely to run into. Let's talk about: What are your New Year's Resolutions, Amelia?
Amelia: Well, I have to tell you that I haven't actually made a New Year's Resolution this year. Last year, my resolution was to complain less and I think I have achieved that one pretty well. But this year, I've been focused on more of the long term successes that I want rather than something short term that's going to be wasted later.
Christopher: Yeah. I must admit I don't have one either. I don't think it's ever really worked particularly well for me. If I make a decision I'm going to make a change, I just do it there and then. I don't need to wait for some special event like the yearend in order to do it. I don't see why you really need to do that. But, yeah, for some people obviously it's a kind of useful device.
Actually, to be fair, I gave up smoking on New Year's Day about 17 years ago. I just went completely cold turkey and didn't touch another cigarette ever again. So I know it can work so I wouldn't want to completely rule it out.
Amelia: Yeah, I can say my complaints have diminished especially at work at the hospital so…
Christopher: You've got a lot more to complain about than me, I think. I work at home, I'm with my daughter all day and I live in the Redwood trees and I get to ride my bike. Yeah, so I'm –
Amelia: So when can I move in?
Christopher: Yeah. One thing I think is really important to say is that when you're trying to achieve any goal you have to really want it. What I mean by that is not hating it slightly more the consequences of not doing it. Does that make sense? If I illustrate this with an example of exercise, like if your goal, your resolution is to exercise more, then you need to want that in itself and not just hate the consequences which might be worse health or weight gain or something else I don't know about. You really have to have like intrinsic desire for whatever it is that you're trying to make a resolution for.
Amelia: And what I found on that point, I think that's very well stated, that sometimes when you're making a resolution, it's to lose weight or to exercise more like you said but sometimes the resolution can be the habits that are put in place to achieve that goal.
For example, if your goal is to lose weight, which a lot of people's is, focusing on having nutrient dense meals, making sure your macronutrients are in line and in order, making sure that you're not eating any refined sugar, kind of working with someone like Julie to kind of troubleshoot your diet and especially if your goal is weight loss or even if your goal is health, putting the habits in line that are going to get you those results.
One of the things that I heard about habit formation is that you've got to put it in front of yourself every day. For example, I have heard someone who wanted to start flossing their teeth. Rather than having the tooth floss in the drawer in the bathroom, bring it out and put it on the countertop so every time you go into the bathroom you're going to see it.
That applies to the kitchen as well so making sure that your pantry is stocked for nutrient dense meals, making sure you've got your batch cook done, making a resolution to batch cook once a week so that you can maintain your goals and get that end desired resolution and establishing the lifelong habits that are going to get you that.
Christopher: Yeah. Funny you should say that. That's great advice. I've received it in person actually from a PhD clinical psychologist I interviewed earlier on the podcast, Ashley Mason, and that's exactly what she said. And then also important is the reverse, right?
I have a problem with cacao nibs. I love blending them in a high powered blender into a high fat – I add butter and MCT oil in that. Really, the only way that I'm going to stop drinking that if I don't want to is not having it in the house, right? So this is the opposite. If you want to do something, then you need to lower the barrier to entry. And if you not want to do it, then you need to raise the barrier to entry.
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Another great one actually with working out is lower the barrier to entry so am I going to get into a car and drive to a gym? Probably not. Am I going to use the TRX that's hooked up to my bathroom door here? Almost certainly. It's right there next to my desk. Why not? So, yeah, that lowering and raising the barrier to entry thing I think is really important.
Amelia: Yeah. I've got my kettlebells sitting right next to my TV so if I watch TV I have to do kettlebells.
Christopher: That's a good idea. Yeah. I've got some kettlebells here as well. They are so versatile. They are great.
Amelia: Oh, I think that's a very good way to get those habits established.
Christopher: Yeah. Maybe you need to then break this down into like a planning phase and then an actual execution phase. I think a lot of people fail because they don't plan it out. They just go, "Okay. I'm going to start working out" or "Kettlebell swing starting tomorrow" and of course you haven't got any kettlebells. The same is true like say you're planning on doing a Whole30 program and you basically just eliminated every single food in your fridge, in your pantry that you could possibly be eating. Well, it's not going to work, is it? On Monday, you're going to have nothing to eat.
You need to go through a planning phase and so maybe that should be the first and most important goal like when you finish listening to this podcast or even right now if you can, if you're on the computer, go to onnit.com or somewhere else. You can get kettlebells delivered to you for cheap. They're not expensive. And then the same like if your goal, if your resolution is to eat more organ meat then go to U.S. Wellness Meats and order some of their breakfast sausages. Do it right now. Don't think that you're going to turn this around and it's all going to happen tomorrow because it isn't. It takes some planning.
Amelia: Yeah, and in that planning, make sure to understand that it takes just as long to cook five pounds of ground beef as it does one pound so doing the batch cooking. If you do your carbohydrates, especially in the evening, make sure you, instead of throwing one sweet potato in the oven, throw six of them.
Christopher: That particular example is really relevant I think. I mean, I just couldn't believe it. When I suddenly thought of this, I thought, "I can't believe I've been doing that for the last three months." I used to be a big sweet potato fiend and, yeah, I would do exactly that. I would just cook one and obviously ten minutes later I need another one.
Amelia: Uh-hmm.
Christopher: It's so ridiculous. They are great in that they last such a long time. You can batch cook ten sweet potatoes and just leave them in the oven even. I mean, maybe Julie's going to slap my wrist for saying this but she's the food scientist that understands how well or how quickly food spoils but certainly in my experience they never went bad at all not even refrigerated. In fact, they went kind of yucky when you refrigerate. Probably some of the carbohydrates turns into something else like resistant starch or something. Yeah, they keep really well.
Amelia: Yeah, I have a dozen boiled eggs in my fridge at all times so…
Christopher: That's a really great idea.
Amelia: Yeah, that really helps me. So another – oh, go ahead.
Christopher: I was going to say something that's kind of like I'm realizing as well is that the education piece is often not enough so that's what I'm doing here with this podcast. I'm giving you information and, really, all I'm doing is hoping that you are going to do something about it and the chances are you won't.
For this reason, I think programs like Dan's Plan and maybe Chris Kresser's 14four.me where you have some accountability and structure is probably going to be better than just a straightforward education piece. At some point, you need to have somebody actually doing something. I am not sure that these podcasts do that.
Amelia: Yeah, and having a good coach in your corner. I know that working with someone like Julie, working with someone like yourself or like me really helps keep the accountability piece especially when you're doing the lab testing for your health in the long run. You want to make sure that you get the education but then you get the accountability as well so having a good coach on your side is always very beneficial.
Christopher: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And now we've got the new clinical rounds as well that I'm trying to move everybody onto so that we can be more efficient in asking questions. Certainly, there's some accountability too there, right? So you can turn up on to that webinar live, ask your questions. It could be about anything. It could be about your sleep; it could be about supplements; it could be about your lab work. It could be about anything actually.
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Just having that as a subscription that you are paying for I think is going to add some accountability like we're going to care whether or not my recommendation works. If you do something I say and it doesn't work, then I want to know about it. There's definitely an element of accountability there.
Amelia: Yeah, I think that's a great tool that you've put together. I am really excited for that. That's going to be great.
Christopher: I hope so.
Amelia: So another thing that I wanted to talk about is a lot of people have health goals, have exercise goals and one of the things to keep in mind is that health and exercise goals, those are great resolutions but you need to make sure, especially for the long term, that that's not disrupting your health. We talked about establishing habits before. Doing something like strapping on an HRV monitor in the morning, just getting that habit in to see if your physiology is ready for the stress that you're about to put it through and then understanding that, "Okay, well, my reading is red today. Maybe I should just do some mobility work." And, yeah, especially if you've got that exercise itch like we all do, being able to understand that for your goals in the long term, it's going to be really important for your fat loss, for your fitness goals that you take care of yourself in the short term so that you can experience the results in the long term.
Christopher: Yeah, absolutely. It's something that I was missing initially with our protocols but I'm now insisting that everybody checks their heart rate variability just because it's so easy. I should probably explain what it is real quick for people who don't know.
Heart rate variability is just the interbeat intervals of your heart rate. Imagine your heart does not beat like a metronome; it is not steady; the gaps in between the heart beats vary from beat to beat. The greater the amount of variability between the beats, the more healthy your autonomic nervous system is.
So you can strap on a Bluetooth heart rate monitor and hook it up to your phone that's running an app like Elite HRV is my favorite one at the moment, and it will spit back a number at you after two- or five minutes that is a number that represents your readiness to train or the health of your autonomic nervous system.
So if something's going wrong and you don't really know, it's non-specific so you don't really know what it is that's causing the problem but if all other things are equal so if you slept as well and you just had an argument and you're eating in the same way and you've got the same amount of sleep and all the rest of that, then you might be tempted to assume then that it's your training that is varied.
Maybe you did a hard workout yesterday and you would see the number go down. When it drops suddenly, the app will help you decide that that day might not be the best day to then go ahead and do that again. Maybe it will be a better day to take off or go for an easy walk or something less stressful. That can help you avoid digging yourself into an overtraining situation. It takes some time. For me, it took like hundreds of days to actually establish a baseline that I could really interpret and find useful but now I know exactly what's going on from looking at my heart rate variability.
So that's kind of one reason why I get everybody to check it but the other reason is it's more data that I have and the more data I have, the better decisions I can make both now and in the future. That's really important. I know my programs are working because people's heart rate variability increases over time.
It's a really common scenario for me to meet someone and one of their complaints – maybe they are savvy enough to already be measuring the heart rate variability – is, "Oh, my heart rate variability is in the 60s and yet I'm a really active person. I don't understand why." They get rid of an infection or they get rid of a micronutrient deficiency and suddenly their heart rate variability pops up into the 90s which is what I would expect of a relatively young, fit person that's doing the right things, making the right lifestyle choices.
So it's great for me. I can show to that person the symptoms are not always the best way of measuring progress but this is something really quite quantifiable, that's well-established in the literature that shows that you really are making progress.
Amelia: And that's interesting that you bring that up because you hear about all of these "bio hacks" that are coming on the market and on the scene so to speak but HRV monitoring has actually been around for a long time. It's been used in the medical field to detect stress within the fetus of a laboring mother. By monitoring that metric, you can see how the baby is doing. I'm really happy to see that that tool is being used for the general population.
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Yeah. It's just one of those things that's come of age. I heard Phil Maffetone talking to Robb Wolf on his podcast the other day. It's just a fantastic interview. You should go check that out. He was talking about when heart rate monitors first came out. It was a box that was strapped to your chest and you had to look down your shirt to see what your heart rate was which I thought was hilarious.
Of course, now we laugh at that because the technology has got so good. I'm sure there're lots of things that we are doing right now that are going to look laughable in ten or 20 years but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't jump on these technologies right now. That's what we've got for now and they're still extremely useful. I think they're great.
What are your thoughts on some of the other Quantified Self gadgets? I saw someone post an article the other day that said that it wasn't healthy to be constantly monitoring all your vital signs and sort of maybe – I don't know how you describe that kind of neurology almost of people just constantly monitoring everything but for me I've had such great results. I think it was Peter Drucker who said: that which gets measured gets managed and that's certainly been the case for me. What are your thoughts on all the Quantified Self stuff?
Amelia: I think it's beneficial. I think just like anything, if it's taken overboard, if it starts breaking into your lifestyle, if it starts breaking into your relationships, then maybe it's time to discuss with yourself whether this is something that's benefiting you or not benefiting you. But doing something like taking your vital signs in the morning, monitoring your HRV before you get dressed in the morning, that's pretty unintrusive but when it starts to take over your life, in some cases, like Dave Asprey wearing the electrodes on his head to different events, I personally wouldn't go there but maybe it works for him.
Christopher: Yeah, it's true. To give you an example of what's helpful is the first thing I do when I get out of bed is check my heart rate variability. So I spend two and a half minutes lying on my back on the floor in the living room and I check my heart rate variability. I see that as quiet a good practice. It gives me some data but it's also quite a healthy practice, like spending the day – because I'm quite focused on getting the best possible number I can get rather than the 150 unopened emails I've got in my inbox. I don't see, you know, just diving straight into that stuff.
Again, I have talked with Hal Elrod about this. He has a book called "The Miracle Morning" where he talks about this stuff. It could be extremely useful to have some practice that's not just diving straight into it. So that I think is helpful but you can see that if I was to be constantly wearing a heart rate monitor, constantly looking at my heart rate variability, constantly looking at some web app to see what my heart rate variability is and then getting stressed over the fact that my heart rate variability is not as good as I would like it to be, that's kind of more than the kind of the neurology side of it. Neurotic. That's the word I'm looking for. Not neurology – neurotic.
Yeah, so I don't think that is helpful. But, yeah, it's very difficult and you might need someone on the outside to define what's being helpful for you and what's not.
Amelia: Yeah. Absolutely.
Christopher: The same is true I think of the Food Diary. A really useful tool that Julie has people do is just enter all the food into a Google Doc spreadsheet and so you can then have someone, an expert, look over your shoulder at what you are eating and give you some helpful feedback.
For a three- or four-day period, I think this is a really useful activity. In fact, I think it's useful for anyone, myself included, to occasionally go back and do this and just look to see how much repetition there is and look to see how often you are eating something that you know you shouldn't really be but somehow it's creeping in there. It really pops out when you write it all down but at the same time, life is too short for recording everything you eat in a Food Diary.
I think a lot of people do this. I see on Facebook groups and stuff people that record every last morsel of food that they eat for three years or something in MyFitnessPal. Life is too short. You're not going to get that time back. What did you achieve by that? It's kind of crazy to me.
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Amelia: Yeah, I was very guilty of that. When I was doing kind of the standard American thing, I would monitor all my food; I would monitor all my exercise; make sure my calories in match my calories out. It just drove me nuts. I'm really glad I'm in a place health- and emotion-wise where that's behind me.
Christopher: Yeah, for sure. That's the reason why we have never standardized on one of those tools; we just use the Google Doc spreadsheet is because we don't really want people counting calories. Calories are useful as kind of a unit of how much you've eaten at some point but I think kind of the pitfalls of counting them are like massive. For that reason, it just makes sense to just not do it at all I think. We've gotten the best result by getting people to not count it.
The thing that really scares me about things like MyFitnessPal – it's been a little while since I've seen it, maybe six months, but the last time I saw it, it said things like: Oh, if you eat just 300 fewer calories today, then in six months' time you would have lost 30 pounds of fat. The science just does not support that at all. I think that's kind of really dangerous and so we just didn't want people seeing MyFitnessPal at all. I can't recommend it.
Amelia: Yeah, and calories in, calories out, it's such an old system. The body is such a dynamic universe. By getting your hormones in line, by getting any infections taken care of, by getting your micronutrient deficiencies filled, your body just works so much cleaner, so much better so that you are able to utilize these "calories" as nutrition in a way that's benefitting you and not necessary putting weight on the scale.
Christopher: Yeah, I think that's great advice. So I think that's about it. Was there anything else you wanted to cover?
Amelia: I think that really covered it all. I wish everybody the best of luck in their New Year and just really wherever we can be of help, I really just want to offer my assistance.
Christopher: Yup. The best way to get ahold of Amelia, you can book a free consultation on the website but, like I had mentioned previously, we are now doing this thing that we're calling "Clinical Rounds" and what that is is the chance for you to submit your questions on a weekly basis and then each week I will conduct a webinar. Webinar is like a kind of videoconference if you like. You sign up; you get reminders; you get invited to join into this thing. It runs in the app on your computer, just beside your web browser. It's video and so it's interactive. I will answer your questions live in the video. The video is also recorded so you'll be able to get access to the recording later.
So you could submit a question, not actually make it on live and then just watch the recording afterwards. Each week, it depends what sort of questions I get. If I get a ton of questions about food, then I'll get Julie on and she can talk about food science and her recommendations. If it's other things, if it's lab work or more of the kind of the lifestyle things, then I'll have Amelia on.
I'm sure from time to time my partner, the medical doctor, will join us. That won't be quite so often but, yeah, it's a kind of a great platform I think that can scale better than me or Amelia or Julie trying to answer each question one by one with email. That quickly becomes overwhelming and I'm not really sure how efficient it is.
I'll link to this in the show notes but you can also just head over to the website and you'll see it like "Order" and then "Packages" and then there's a product in there. It's $27 a month. It's not that much money, less than a dollar a day. Certainly, you could buy Starbucks every day for this amount of money. And then you've got almost like a concierge medical service where you can ask your questions and get them answered. Yeah, I'm excited about it.
Amelia: Yeah, it's going to be great. I'm really excited as well.
Christopher: Excellent. Okay. Well, I think that about wraps it up. Yeah. We'll see you in the next episode.
Amelia: All right. Thanks, Chris.
Christopher: Bye-bye.
Amelia: Bye-bye.
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