Tag Archive for: health

The Price You Pay

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On Tuesday, I asked where you’re spending your time. There’s a price for everything that we do and what we don’t do, even if the outcome will ultimately be positive. Here’s a personal example.

It’s no surprise to any reader that I had a knee replacement just before Christmas and have been spending time rehabbing my restructured knee. It will take time to get function back completely, but I’m way ahead on the benchmarks. That’s good.

But I’ve lost seven weeks of higher intensity aerobic exercise and as a result, a lot of my fitness. In addition, I’ve lost a lot of muscle mass and strength. The process of building back muscle will take time (way too long to suit me), but it’s the price I have to pay.

Here’s another price. The day before surgery, my blood pressure was 112/65. About a week ago, my resting BP was 177/102. For me, exercise was one of the ways I maintained my BP; I immediately started to increase my exercise level and—you guessed it—overdid it. I paid the price for that, too. As I can get back to and exceed my pre-surgical fitness level, my BP should go back to where it was. There’s always a price for things you do and what you don’t do.

The difference? Eating less, eating better, and moving more increases the odds of positive health outcomes.

Just a reminder that the Super Bowl Webinar: Reclaiming Your Power!  is tomorrow at 3 p.m. ET; registration is $12.95; Insiders and Members get the usual discounts. You’ll learn why the mitochondria can impact all areas of your health and what you can do to repair this energy producing powerhouse. As long as you sign up by 2 p.m. ET tomorrow, you can be on the live webinar. If you sign up after that time, you’ll be able to watch the replay for a week after the live webinar. Either way, time to get your power back!

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

The Right Choices

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What do you think is more important: the state of your garage or the state of your clothes closet? The state of your basement or the state of your car? The state of your desk or the state of your pantry? Do you want them neat and organized, or are you okay with going through piles of things to find something you didn’t put away?

Let’s look at one more state. Is the state of any one of those areas I already mentioned more important then the state of your health? I think everyone would agree that your health is more important.

Final question: where are you spending your effort, your time, and your money? If you don’t have your health, most of those other areas will never get addressed, so it’s easy to see which should come first.

Your health is also not just one thing; it’s your energy levels, your fitness, your cardiovascular health, your strength, your bones, along with how you manage your diet, your diseases and conditions, and on and on. Are you taking care of your health with the same effort you’re using to take care of your car, garage, desk, or closets? Whether you do or whether you don’t, there’s a price to be paid. More about that Saturday.

Just a reminder that the Super Bowl Webinar: Reclaiming Your Power!  is this Sunday at 3 p.m. Eastern Time; registration is $12.95. You’ll learn why the mitochondria can impact all areas of your health and what you can do to repair this energy-producing powerhouse. Sign up today.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Updates as 2020 Finally Ends!

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2020 was one heck of a year for health news. Someone sent me an email with the hope that when 2020 turns 21, it doesn’t start drinking! I don’t know if we would survive it. All kidding aside, we’ve all been impacted whether we caught the virus or not, and it’s time to plan for the path we want our health to take in 2021. Here are my plans for DrChet.com in 2021.

Memos will still be free. They’re going to be coming twice a week in 2021 on Tuesdays and Saturdays. I’ve been taking one topic and splitting it into three Memos; now I’ll be splitting it into two Memos, which I think will be better for you and for me. I intend to do more teaching via video and audio, and I want to carve out time to prepare for those. I’m also going to cull my email list: if people haven’t opened a Memo for six months or more, I’ll remove them from my master email list. It’s inefficient to keep sending emails to people who may not want them anymore. I’ll continue to promote the emails on Facebook, so if you’re reading them there, no point cluttering up your inbox. If you get cut and you want to resubscribe, it’s easy at DrChet.com.

Memberships will remain the same price for 2021, but I’m adding more features. You’ll get more content that’s applicable to your health and that of your clients. If you’re in the health business, you can deduct the cost of membership at DrChet.com as a business expense—just one more reason to become an Insider or Member today.

Health Goals should be top of mind right now; this is the time to decide how you want your health to change in 2021. Take the time to think what you really want your health to be besides the typical goal of losing weight. Do you need to improve your nutritional health? What do you want to be able to do that you can’t? Do you need more strength, more stamina, or better flexibility? And if you had to prioritize one, which would it be? The choices are endless, but there are two questions you have to ask yourself:

  • What do you really want?
  • What are you prepared to do to get it?

That’s why our tagline remains the same: What are you prepared to do today?

Have a safe New Year’s Eve, and I’ll see you back here on January 1!

        Dr. Chet

Practice Makes Perfect

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Have you ever looked at new health habits as a series of tasks you need to perfect? There are many different habits that are part of a healthy lifestyle such as eating more vegetables, exercising five days a week, taking your supplements regularly, and dozens more. Losing weight is not just eating fewer calories; it’s a process that involves many different tasks in order for you to be able to do that.

  • What are you going to eat?
  • Who is going to buy the food?
  • Who is going to prepare the food?
  • How are you going to measure the food?
  • When are you going to eat it?

Think about all the decisions that have to be made in order for you to simply eat breakfast—not just any breakfast, but one that fits with your overall meal plan and caloric goal for that particular day.

Let’s say you want to start with a protein smoothie in the morning. Do you have the right kind of blender or juicer to be able to do that? Have you purchased all the fruit, vegetables, and protein powder that you’re going to need? How much time will you need to add to your morning routine in order to do it?

There are probably dozens more nitty-gritty things you need to perfect. The point of this memo is to have you recognize the types of changes that you’re going to have to think about, and remind you that you probably won’t get it right the first time that you try. You’re going to have to practice these new tasks. Hence the title of this memo: Practice Makes Perfect.

Fitness: An Example

If you take any tasks related to the overall goal of getting fit, there are elements of it that you’re going to have to complete. It’s not just the exercise itself. That’s something you can do. Where this idea comes into play is in preparing to exercise.

Are you going to exercise in the morning? Set your alarm at least 15 minutes before you want to begin. For some of you it may have to be an hour earlier because you have certain rituals you perform in the morning before you start your day.

When your alarm rings, get up and get out of bed. You can go back to bed if you want to, but you have to get out of the bed. Do that for one week, weekdays, or weekend. Get good at it. Get used to it. You’re practicing to get up on time in order to be able to exercise. You may find out right then that getting up early is not going to work—maybe mornings just aren’t your time and you’re going to have to figure out some other time to exercise.

Then the following week, the night before you start, lay out your exercise gear. When the alarm goes off, get up get out of bed and put on your workout gear. Do that for a week. Laying out your clothes the night before. Getting up on time. And getting dressed on time. Again, you can go back to bed if you want. When you’ve got that mastered, again weekday or weekend, then you can start your workout routine.

Seems a little silly, I know. But you have to practice being successful at the things that precede exercise before you can be successful at exercising itself. You’re going to run into obstacles, and you don’t yet know what they are. It may be that your wife will want to get up at the same time. It may be that your kids, if you have them, will hear you and want to get up as well. You have to be able to deal with all of those issues and anticipate that they may happen at varying times before your workout. Think of it as getting prepared for a game-time situation. Once you’ve experienced it, you’ll know how to react better than you would if you leave it to chance.

We could do this approach for every task related to any health or fitness goal. The degree to which you have to cut up that elephant to consume the parts depends on you. Some tasks may be easy to manage while others will not. But unless you perfect the component tasks, it will be too easy to quit when an obstacle appears.

The Bottom Line

In this summer of coronavirus, improving everyone’s health has never been more important; if the virus tracks you down six months from now, you can be better prepared to fight it off. This week I’ve written about ways to help you prepare to change your health from where it is to where you want it to be.

  • Setting realistic goals allows you to break up any big goal into manageable parts.
  • Changing directions is critical, or you’ll end up where you don’t want to be.
  • Finally, you have to practice to get the tasks that contribute to your goal just right. You can do it with enough practice. One bite at a time.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Eating the Elephant

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I’m sure you’ve heard the question, “How do you eat an elephant?” The answer: “One bite at a time!”

Paula and I took off last week to try to organize a couple areas of our house. I thought we could get two or three different tasks done. I was wrong; we’re still finishing the very first task. Granted, it’s been at least 10 years, probably more, since we tried to clean out our clothes closet completely, but I felt that it was doable. Turns out it was one enormous elephant, and we didn’t finish. Yet.

When it comes to improving your health, it’s just like eating that elephant: most of us are too optimistic about what we can do within specific periods of time.

  • “Three months until the wedding? I could lose 40 pounds.”
  • “My HbA1c is 6.8? I can get it down to normal in a month or two.”
  • “My blood pressure has sky-rocketed to 195/110? I could handle that in probably a few weeks by getting some exercise and eating better.”

Is it possible to achieve those goals? Maybe. Most likely not, at least not in that time frame, because you’d have to consume too much of the elephant too often. The likelihood is that you’re going to get tired of the taste of elephant and quit before you get there.

Setting realistic goals is difficult when it comes to your health. What’s even more difficult is to understand that you have to make a commitment to take long-term control of your health; short-term plans rarely get the results you want. That means you’re going to have to commit to eating a little better. Eating a little less. And moving a little more.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Digital Media and Relationships

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In observing the people at Paula’s high school reunion, the one thing that stood out was that the relationships the classmates had formed during their time together had endured. True, they had a small graduating class with fewer than 75 students, but even in bigger schools with hundreds of graduates, there are groups of students who still know each other well because of activities they participated in together.

What impact would digital media have had back then? Paula was asked to speak as a representative of her class and in looking back, she said this:

We didn’t have an amazing computer in our pockets that we use for vital things such as taking pictures of our food and watching cat videos and texting each other: “What do you want for dinner?” “I don’t know, what do you want?” But we had down time, free time to spend just being a teenager. No one stared at the phone—that would have been silly. We looked at the scenery and at each other.

How would social media have affected the class of 1967? They were a social network. They were involved in each other’s lives during school, sports, and other activities, live and in person. I’m sure it would have had an impact; I just don’t know if it would have been in a positive way. There would most likely have been less live social contact and instead a lack of human contact. There would have been less time to talk face to face because there would be so much more access to more people, even in a very impersonal way.

The irony of digital media today is that social media is how many members of the class reunion found each other; it certainly helped spread the word of the reunion itself. They had gotten reacquainted before they got together in person and had seen pictures of each other’s spouses and kids and grandkids on Facebook and Instagram. Digital media are just tools of communication, and that’s how the reunion class uses them.

Digital Media and the Class of 2018

Don’t for a minute think I’m a Luddite. After all, I’m communicating with you three times a week via email and many of you read this on your cell phones.

Whether the use of digital media contributes to ADHD is not certain, but it does contribute to one thing for sure: isolation. A 2016 article in Psychology Today said:

Humans are hardwired to interact with others, especially during times of stress. When we go through a trying ordeal alone, a lack of emotional support and friendship can increase our anxiety and hinder our coping ability … Other studies confirm that loneliness isn’t good for anyone’s health. It increases levels of stress hormones in the body while leading to poor sleep, a compromised immune system and, in the elderly, cognitive decline.

Texting and commenting on social media platforms cannot convey true emotion, no matter how many emojis you use. The only way that works is live social interaction where you can look someone in the eye when you talk to them or at the very least hear their tone when speaking on the phone.

When you think about health and what can impact it, the bonds we make with other humans is important. It can help our mental health in many ways and that can impact our physical health. To me, that’s what the class of 2018 might be missing: the social interaction and personal bonds that transcend decades. When they meet in 50 years, will they talk about the great text or Tweet someone sent or the excellent Instagram story someone put together? I doubt it. And that’s their loss.

What are you prepared to do today?

Dr. Chet

 

References:
1. JAMA. 2018;320(3):255-263. doi:10.1001/jama.2018.8931.
2. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-the-ooze/201611/the-perils-social-isolation

 

Healthy Lifestyle? A Tiny 2.7 Percent

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“Only 2.7% of all Americans achieve all four of the basic behavioral characteristics that experts say add up to a healthy lifestyle.”

Sensational? Yes. True? That’s what we’re going to look at this week. The health news reported about a recent study that examined the health behaviors of a group of people who participated in the Nutrition and Health Examination Survey (NHANES) in 2002–2006. The researchers picked four behaviors and assessed them with the best techniques available.

This is not the typical BMI and Food Frequency Questionnaire survey; these are numbers based on excellent assessment equipment . . .

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