Being a weight loss coach with a PhD in the Social Sciences, John Oakes has his own view of the obesity epidemic and its origins. By discussing the macro factors contributing to obesity, he hopes to help listeners contextualize their struggles and in so doing. help equip themselves to make changes that last.
Topics discussed:
Don't forget to review the podcast!
Buy my book! 75 EASY: the ultimate challenge for personal growth
Amazon US
UK
CA
AU
Weight loss coaching - Join the Weight Loss Freedom Academy today
To inquire about 1 -1 Coaching with John - email John at john@oakesweightloss.com
Check out the EASY WAY OUT Blog/Newsletter site
Join the free "Lose Weight with John" community
Watch the Easy Way Out on Youtube
Being a weight loss coach with a PhD in the Social Sciences, John Oakes has his own view of the obesity epidemic and its origins. By discussing the macro factors contributing to obesity, he hopes to help listeners contextualize their struggles and in so doing. help equip themselves to make changes that last.
Topics discussed:
Don't forget to review the podcast!
Buy my book! 75 EASY: the ultimate challenge for personal growth
Amazon US
UK
CA
AU
Weight loss coaching - Join the Weight Loss Freedom Academy today
To inquire about 1 -1 Coaching with John - email John at john@oakesweightloss.com
Check out the EASY WAY OUT Blog/Newsletter site
Join the free "Lose Weight with John" community
Watch the Easy Way Out on Youtube
Speaker 1 (00:00:00) - Well, hello. Today's topic is going to be the cause of the obesity epidemic. I think this is an interesting conversation to have about the big picture of why so many people are suffering with their weight, even to great extremes. And I think that the conversation also will allow people to reflect on some of the macro level factors that have influenced their weight, not to like help people make excuses for their choices, but to put some context around it. Because the idea that we are all 100% in control of the outcomes of our lives is a bit silly. I'm all for personal responsibility and not expecting anybody to come save you the calories, not going to come over the hill most likely. But rather than helping people be lazy, do nothings, putting context around their quote unquote failings or the disadvantageous context of their lives or the the undesired outcomes that they've experienced that they don't know how to shift. Getting a proper context around it can help build their awareness of reality. The full suite of what is challenging them, the full array of what factors that caused them to get where they are today.
Speaker 1 (00:01:09) - And this in no way promotes obesity. I think it promotes awareness, which is the precursor to positive change and transformation. Before we get into that, I want to mention a couple. Points. If you are interested in coaching, please reach out to me If you want my help losing a large amount of weight or ending emotional eating or regaining your motivation and sense of self. You can email me at John at Oaks Weight Loss. That's okay Joe at oaks weight loss.com. You can find that in the show notes along with links to some other helpful items, including something I just launched recently, which is a new program that is very affordable so that everybody can do it so that everybody can at least get started on their journey. With my coaching and a lot of the materials I've made for people over the years expressly for the purpose of getting started in a way that is going to set you up for success in the medium and long term, and also for people who are stuck trying to lose weight and for people who have experience losing weight.
Speaker 1 (00:02:14) - There's a lot to gain from the easy weight loss club as well. If you still have a ways to go on your journey, you're going to learn a lot of really good stuff. As far as the techniques and strategies for continuing your weight loss and making sure that you can keep it off. And you're also going to get access to our awesome community and the live coaching opportunities along the way. So this isn't like the Weight Loss Freedom Academy. It really is more like a club, but there are academic resources and coaching resources there because I just enjoy giving those sorts of things away. Super inexpensive sign up at the link in the show notes below. We don't really have that many people yet. Tomorrow, Tuesday, October 3rd, yeah, at 5 p.m. Pacific, we're going to do our first live coaching call. Not sure we're going to have a huge turnout for that. But yeah, something tells me that even though we're off to a slow start, that's normal, considering I haven't really told many people much about it.
Speaker 1 (00:03:06) - I'm more creating this as a container for the next time things really blow up on social media, which I'm planning to be sometime in October. Okay. I know you don't exactly plan on when you're going viral, but something in my gut, in my bones tells me that the flood is coming. I think partially because I'm ready to attack social media with a bit of the gusto of the past mixed with the more refined sense of who I am and what I do and who I serve and how I do it. So the same is true of the Weight Loss Freedom Academy. My my big ticket in depth year long program. There's not a ton of people in there as of yet. So in either case, you're getting in on the ground floor, your pioneering member. And if you're the right kind of person, I guarantee you this stuff can be life changing. Okay. I got to tell you a quick story. Since I'm doing these weekly now, I can give you a look into a little bit about my life and my journey.
Speaker 1 (00:04:01) - Last week I mentioned that I started something called Neurofeedback. I went in for my initial consultation. That was just sort of a vibe check and them telling me the basics of the information. And then today I went in for my actual brain scan consultation where they put the EEG on my noggin and took a baseline reading of the activity of my brain. I got to say, before I went there, I was like, Oh, I'm feeling pretty relaxed today. I hope this doesn't give them a skewed view of how my brain works because I want them to really see how bad I think it is most of the time. And the EEG was just like, lol bro, like smoke coming out of the thing. There's basically four different levels of brain activity and each of those levels comes with a different level of voltage. So frequency and intensity you could say. And of the 20 sensors, only six sensors picked up any of the sort of second rung activity. That means every sensor for the full time I was in the thing picked up non-stop, top level anxiety level activity, and 6 or 7 of them picked up two seconds of level two activity, which we associate with everything being good and calm.
Speaker 1 (00:05:19) - You're good. I'm good. World's good. And yeah, six sensors picked up two seconds out of four minutes of not anxious activity anywhere in my brain. So confirms comically things are cartoonishly difficult. I'd say that I'm more than happy to share that because it gives you an idea of what you can accomplish long before you're totally at peace. I mentioned last week I told the guy I was walking around in the level of anxiety that most people would consider a panic attack, and that's just my baseline setting. And he's like, Well, I got to stop you there. You don't seem like you're having a panic attack. And I'm like, I know because I've had to learn to have a poker face. I have to if I want to go to the grocery store and like not freak people out and like, have friends and like, bees to stay in my body and breathe and not be all twitchy. And yeah, so I think this week he got to look under the hood and I think he believes me now.
Speaker 1 (00:06:16) - So glad we're on the same page as far as what we're dealing with here. But. It was super fun. Usually I don't like going to the doctor getting poked and prodded, but this was noninvasive. It's just like a thing they put on your head. Oh, and weirdly enough, being bald makes it harder for them to get a scan. I thought this was going to be an advantage, but he's like, No, actually having some hair makes it easier for like, the gel that they put on there. Like. Like bonds with the hair follicles. It actually makes the connection better. So as if the bald needed one more kick to the shins. But no, my connections were fine. Really good connections. Hopefully that means my skull isn't too thick, which I had a feeling my skull would be of normal thickness. So he's going to take that data, compare it to the database of what's average out there, what's the reference range for normal brain function, and get an idea of exactly how far off the reservation my brain is and plotting a map for how to maybe get it close to normal, so to speak.
Speaker 1 (00:07:13) - They're not supposed to say normal, but they're trying to get your brain to normal, healthy, which if I'm currently experiencing next to zero, no brain activity outside of the realm of anxiety. Wouldn't that be cool to like get to be not anxious a lot of the time? I got to imagine that if I've managed to be productive with my life and to run a business and help people in this state, my word, what's going to happen if I can get even a little bit of help? So yeah, I'm excited to continue on with that and I'll give you a little updates as we go. It's a topic that I think people are pretty interested in. Neurofeedback is a really exciting avenue of where neurology and mental health meet and I'll stop nerding out about that now. So what are the origins of the obesity epidemic? Well, I would say first let's put some context around the obesity epidemic. Rough data. I'm talking like real rough. I didn't look at it recently. I researched this about a year ago.
Speaker 1 (00:08:11) - So it's back in the napkin data. But we're talking roughly 9% of people were overweight, were obese in, say, the 1950s and then 1960s. It was a little bit more. In the 70s there was a jump and then 80s and 90s 2000, we see the numbers go into like 50% and possibly more. I don't know. But we know it's bad, we know it's not good and we know that's affecting people younger and younger. So as we see it transferring into younger generations, we can assume that this is partially the result of the habits that parents who grew up in the 80s and 90s when there was a big explosion in the collective weight gain. Obviously the weight gain in children is partially reflective of their lifestyles affecting how they parent. But we can also see from the 80s to say the early 2000 and especially to now, we see people are quick to point out a rise in the use of refined sugars, processed foods, high fructose corn syrup, super sugary foods. These have been pointed to as possible causes for the obesity epidemic.
Speaker 1 (00:09:15) - In fact, many people in the nutrition, health, wellness, life style fitness space are real quick to point out sugar and processed foods as the primary drivers of the obesity epidemic. And then you also have people a little bit further out on the fringe saying it's things like gluten or genetically modified crops. Plastics. Yeah, People have quite a variety of theories, but really the only things that we know for certain cause obesity, regardless of the macronutrient distribution, they've done studies feeding people straight sugar just to prove that, listen, if you eat nothing but sugar, but you stay under your maintenance calories, your body mass reduces. And we know that when we put people into caloric deficits, there's nothing they can really do to stop the body from losing body mass. So calorie intake, on average has gone up since the 1950s. And this corresponds with the rise in obesity. This is partially because, as a sense of portion sizes has changed, the proliferation of easy to acquire very highly palatable food like fast foods and packaged food.
Speaker 1 (00:10:31) - Fast casual dining. Whether you're eating, whether you're buying things from a grocery store, going to a restaurant, the sheer number of options you have for highly palatable and less satiating foods rises and has certainly risen dramatically since the 1950s and 60s. And this is why many people will point to a correlation between the rise in the consumption of processed foods as being the primary driver of weight gain, because the amount of processed foods we eat now is vastly more than what we ate in the 50s because we just didn't have as many options back then. But that's probably correlation and not causation. Highly processed foods tend to be less satiating. That mean they keep you full, not as well, and not as long. Which means if you're getting a lot of your calories from that, you need to eat more of them to feel satiated, which would end up causing greater caloric intake. People tend to have less access to whole foods. We have food deserts, an increased number of people living in large urban centers where these food deserts tend to crop up, no pun intended.
Speaker 1 (00:11:34) - So people have become more reliant on them for their calories, partially because of a lack of access to Whole Foods and partially because of a preference for the ease and the the palatability of these foods, how good they taste. And also, it has to be said, how transportable they are. Processed foods are packaged foods the most often, and that makes them very easy to transport. And that's for many people who value fitness, people who value their health will often still gravitate toward processed foods because they travel so well. Now, many people will point out that, hey, those people and this is actually a helpful clue as to what is the driver of chronic weight gain or widespread weight gain. The fact that there are many fit people, athletes, high performing athletes and millions of very fit, very in-shape people who consume lots of processed foods, The difference, the quantity that they consume and and the proportion of their diet that processed foods make up, which inversely would point to the amount of whole foods that they consume.
Speaker 1 (00:12:39) - And if we're consuming more whole foods, we are getting more nutrients per calorie. And this is one of the biggest reasons why they are more satiating. Another reason is that processed foods tend to remove fiber from whatever it's processing. So fruits, grains, vegetables, legumes, a lot of what's being done to process them, quote unquote, is removing the most nutrient rich content and the most fiber rich content, leaving only the energy that those foods store, usually in the form of carbohydrates. So we could call this a subset of processed foods that we call refined foods, where the calorie content is being refined so that there's more calories per unit weight or volume. Another point in defense of processed foods is that many of the foods that people use to stay healthy are processed foods. A great example is whey, protein or supplements. Whey protein can be an excellent source of animal protein with complete amino acid profiles that is basically pure protein calories mainly from protein and almost nothing else. This helps people get the nutrients their body needs to operate, especially the nutrients that come from protein rich sources.
Speaker 1 (00:13:53) - So yeah, whey protein has been processed within an inch of its life. Does that mean it's unhealthy in the sense of weight gain? No, it's actually something that people use mainly for weight loss and for muscle gain. And it is the most tested and one of the only proven health supplements that actually help people lose fat and gain muscle. There are also processed foods that higher volume, more voluminous. One example is rice cakes. Anybody who's ever tried to be on very low calories. Many people have used rice cakes as a way of feeling like they're eating more than they're actually eating. And so this is where through the production process, the food is actually given more volume, which can help people feel fuller even though they're actually eating less. Now, obviously, these types of processed foods are in the minority. Most of the time companies are trying to make their foods tastier, which involves putting more sugar and fat and salt onto things in the smallest packet possible so that there's the most punch of flavor. And anybody who's ever eaten a rice cake can tell you that when you dilute the volume of a food through processing, you also dilute the flavor.
Speaker 1 (00:15:03) - So the profit incentive most of the time is to pack more and more calories into processed foods rather than reduce the volume per calorie. Okay, so it comes down to calorie intake. The rise in processed foods has aided calorie intake, but there's a lot of other factors as well. Obviously, the nature of work has changed. We've entered a post-industrial age where in the developed world many people have had to move away from. Manufacturing and production jobs into the service economy, and many jobs in the service economy are more sedentary. You're working at a desk rather than on a factory floor. Now, most people who have a service based job probably don't want to trade it for a job at a factory, but it does come with some downsides and obvious drawbacks for health with more sedentary working. There's a reduction in cardiovascular fitness. Reductions in bone density because people aren't on their feet as much and just a far lower average daily caloric output. The energy we're expending in a day, we also have far more public transportation options than we did in the 1950s.
Speaker 1 (00:16:13) - And we're working and shopping and going to school at places much further away than the distance. We would be traveling to those places in the 1950s. Cities have gotten bigger. They've sprawled. So the chances that you need to move up 6 to 12 miles to get to school or work is not at all remarkable. So it means that walking to those places is absolutely not an option because you're going to be walking for 2 to 4 hours to and from. That's almost a full time job in and of itself. So we have to drive. We have to drive to get to the places we're going, which means we're not spending calories walking to the store. We're not spending calories walking to school or walking home from school. We're not spending calories walking down to the cinema. We're not even spending calories walking to the bar or to the restaurant where we're going to shove food in our faces. We're driving to all these places, which just means that we're burning fewer calories in the act of going out, even for consuming calories.
Speaker 1 (00:17:13) - So that deserves mention as well. Food acquisition has never required fewer calories. You can acquire food solely through money. Now you don't have to grow it or hunt it down yourself. And obviously that was true in the 1950s as well. People weren't exactly hunter gatherers in in the 1950s, but the amount of calories you had to burn to put food on the table was far higher than what you need to burn today. So the difference between the calories we burn now in order to meet our maintenance caloric intake is far lower. So that ratio in and of itself is skewed toward weight gain. And one thing we haven't mentioned is the rise of the gig economy, including DoorDash, what used to be Postmates. I don't know if they still have Postmates, Uber Eats. These are now household things. You know, when I've started doing it, you know, it's pretty much ubiquitous because I'm usually the last person to get on any trend. And I only started ordering from DoorDash like this year and was like, Oh, wow, you can just have people bring food to your house.
Speaker 1 (00:18:18) - What is this invention? And obviously I'm a latecomer to that. A lot of people have been hitting the DoorDash real hard and they hit it real hard through the pandemic. And that was one of the ways that people were able to patronize restaurants through quarantines and things like that and restrictions, which is a good thing. But on the flip side, it has made it so much easier to acquire large quantities of food brought straight to your door. And there's probably an app by now where you can just it's public health. Spooner where you have the guy come to your house and literally spoon the food into your mouth for you. If it's not here yet, it's on the way. And it's if it's not here yet, then it's my idea and that's my IP. So whoever invents that, you need to cut me a percentage because that's going to be that's going to be big. Another factor in the increase of average caloric intake has to do with stimulant usage. In the 1950s, how many people smoked? A lot.
Speaker 1 (00:19:14) - It's a scientific term, way more than smoke today. Right now, if you smoke, you're in a small minority, especially if you're a heavy smoker. Back in the 50s, it was pretty common to have a smoking habit and people use this to manage their appetite. People would use this in combination, especially with caffeine, which was ubiquitous at the time, but it was in the form of a cup of Joe, Right? We didn't have caramel Frappuccino. Macchiatos Those types of coffees were really hard to find. They were in specialty cafes, usually only in large cities. And even then the you might have had the opportunity to have a latte or a cappuccino or an Americano. But the array of things that you would see on the menu at a cafe are far fewer than what you can get your hands on today. So we're smoking way less, which is great for health, but it does mean that people tend to eat more because they aren't enjoying the appetite, suppressing benefits of smoking and nicotine. But John, do people drink more coffee now than they used to? Yeah, they do.
Speaker 1 (00:20:22) - Now our caffeine consumption has gone way up. So you think that would balance things out, right? The problem is that our caffeine consumption in the same way we love to pair. Sugar with fat. We love to pair sugar and fat with caffeine. So your caramel frappuccino macchiato, whatever. Right. You're going to have a lot of heavy cream. Whipped cream. Caramel chocolate syrups. Right. And so there could be 50 calories worth of coffee in a 450 calorie drink. It almost be like if people replaced two of their three coffees in a day with milkshakes, you get roughly the same effect. So we have anything from energy drinks, right? Fancy coffees, sweetened teas. And unlike nicotine, caffeine has a much longer half life, which is fancy talk, for it stays in your system for longer, which means you can build up more of an effect. Which means that the total stimulus you can get from caffeine is far higher than with nicotine, which means that when you come down off of it, you're going to crash much harder.
Speaker 1 (00:21:29) - So as stimulants go, nicotine has some advantages over caffeine. Actually. This is why some of your like productivity gurus, your biohackers will do things like chew Nicorette gum because it gives them an effect similar to caffeine, but it's going to wear off much faster and have less effect on their sleep. The vast majority of and this is a supposition on my end, I don't have hard data on this, but I would bet everything I own, let's put it that way, I would put everything I own on the idea that if we split the waking day up into three general times morning, afternoon, evening, that evening massively outweighs breakfast and lunch times, as in the amount of calories the average, let's say, American consumes. And I'd bet you half of everything I own that 50% or more of calorie consumption happens after people clock out of their 9 to 5 job or a job that has roughly the same schedule and go home. People who are on split shifts and things like that, obviously that's a whole different can of worms.
Speaker 1 (00:22:34) - And even then, it'd be really interesting to analyze shift workers and the proportion of calories that they consume before, during and after their shift, seeing when they took in the most amount of calories. I still think that you would probably find the majority of their calories being consumed in that post-work time span. Another reason for the obesity epidemic is the fact that our sleep collectively is garbage. We are not sleeping as much as we used to. This has to do with the amount of light pollution that is entering many people's bedrooms at night. In the 1950s 60s, you just had far less light in the nighttime hours, far less ambient light bouncing around, coming through your windows. For the average person, this is compounded with the fact that the proportion of people in rural areas versus urban areas has shifted more toward urban areas, which means more people are being exposed to this higher light pollution. Obviously a big impact of sleep is the caffeine usage stress eating habits also can inhibit sleep. And then, of course, a big one is screens.
Speaker 1 (00:23:40) - The amount of time we spend zapping our retinas with blue light from tablets, laptops, TVs, phones that say computer screens, monitors, what have you. For most people, it could easily be ten hours a day, which is so much. How much time are you spending on a screen in 1960? None. And if it was, does a black and white TV even emit blue light? Highly doubtful. I could be wrong. This is a bit out of my depth, so I'm not sure. I'm not sure when the blue light really became an issue, but I can definitely see that it was in the mid aughts that screen usage skyrocketed from its place where it had previously skyrocketed due to the advent of computers. So we have the advent of computers. We have an improvement in TV screen technology in the aughts as well, where we start seeing a lot of high definition TVs. TVs are getting bigger and bigger. And then as you get into the teens and the and the pandemic years, screen usage has just gone up and up.
Speaker 1 (00:24:40) - And the number of screens the average person owns has gone up and up. I can say in 2007, I had one screen, I had a laptop in. Today I, I have if you're watching the video, you can see a TV behind me. I'm looking at a laptop. I've got a phone on my desk that's not counting the other laptop sitting on my desk or the other TVs in my house or my kids tablets that I often borrow. And I'm by no means some like super obsessive when it comes to phone usage. I'm probably on the lower end, given that I don't spend a lot of time on social media. I know you probably met me through TikTok, but I don't spend time on TikTok, meaning if I'm getting on TikTok, it's to upload things and comment back to people who make comments to me. Not so much to scroll. I watch some YouTube. I like YouTube. So why is there an obesity epidemic? I think a better question is. Wouldn't there be an obesity epidemic? Why wouldn't half of us or more be pretty severely overweight to the point where even the average person, a person who has statistically in the mean or median of body fat percentage would be considered overweight if not obese.
Speaker 1 (00:25:53) - Why wouldn't there be an obesity epidemic? And I think that this is for most people who struggle with their weight, there's obviously a big part of taking responsibility for your decisions and all that stuff. You've probably been exposed to content telling you to do that, which is great. But we also have to recognize that before we were in our mid-twenties, our brains were still developing. So if you're, say, 50 years old, the first half of your life, your brain was still forming itself, its behaviors, its patterns. Laying down the track for how basically you're going to run, how you're going to be as an adult. If in that time children are exposed to unhealthy patterns, unhealthy behaviors, high calorie food sources, low calorie expenditure, careers and jobs. Urban sprawl. Increased commute time. Increased access to cheap, highly palatable foods. We cannot honestly expect children to suddenly act differently than the way in which they were brought up. Okay. If you take a bunch of Chinese kids, you take 100 Chinese kids and you raise them in America and then you send them back to China at 24.
Speaker 1 (00:27:01) - Oh, my gosh. These kids, they don't even speak Chinese very well and they need to really take responsibility for their lives. No, they've been brought up.
Speaker 2 (00:27:07) - An entirely different culture.
Speaker 1 (00:27:09) - Okay. If you want them to become Chinese, it's going to take a little while and they're not ever going to fully forget what it was to be brought up in America. In that sense, everybody who grew up in the obesity epidemic, they can't unlearn that. That's not how humans work. That's not how the brain works. What we're going to have to do is learn a new culture. We need a different set of values than you're either a moral, upstanding citizen or you really like food. You're either a good person or you're overweight. We need to get rid of those dichotomies. Yes, but also for moving the other direction as we try to help people take their health back and find better balance with everything from sugar to caffeine to screen time. Total activity. Right. We want to bring all these things more into balance so that we're burning roughly the same amount of calories we're eating in a day.
Speaker 1 (00:28:01) - If our goal is to maintain our weight and showing people that these things can be done easily and not necessarily through the rigamarole that many people in society prescribe. Right. We have this idea that this needs to be hard and this is partly the result of lionizing people who don't have this outward marker of moral failing and then ascribing that to discipline rather than cultural upbringing or any number of other factors, including preference. We haven't just seen a lot of changes in the last century. We have gone through more change than any other culture in human history. The way culture worked for all through our evolution was that the things you were taught from your parents and grandparents were going to be hugely useful to you for the rest of your life, and you were going to teach those same things with few alterations to your children and grandchildren because the world they were going to inherit was going to be very similar to the world you inherited. My grandfather was born in 1899. My grandfather was born in a time where people barely had radio.
Speaker 1 (00:29:09) - There was no TV, there were no screens. I don't think there were cinemas at the time. There were no widely produced vehicles. It was a horse and buggy world. And that person is one of the biggest influences in my upbringing. Now, my case is an extreme example. I'm an elder millennial with a grandpa born in 1899. That's not usually the age distribution, but we're easily talking about grandparents who were born or grew up during the Great Depression. Many people, even if you're a Gen Z or your grandparents, are maybe the boomers, right? People who grew up in the 40s, 50s and 60s before things really took a turn around the time that the Gen Xers were growing up. If you don't know, have a PhD in human geography specializing in social and economic geography. So that's my academic background and that definitely informs the way I look at weight loss and weight gain and weight management through a lens of public health. If something is affecting millions upon millions of people, it just doesn't make sense to say, Well, that's just a character issue.
Speaker 1 (00:30:14) - Can we explain why character would have massively shifted since 1960? What's different? Is it character or is it all the factors that I mentioned today? Most likely it's the numerous factors that I mentioned today. Is character different? I don't know. That's for somebody else to say. But what we can say for certain is that there are tons of practical factors that have impacted the way we consume calories and the way we expend calories that have nothing to do with character. So when it comes to transformation and proving your life, so many people come at it from a very shamed point of view where, yes, they're trying to lose weight, they're trying to take their lives back. They're trying to live their lives at all, have the life that they deserve, see some of their potential expressed in their lifetimes. But so often, we're also trying to just unburden ourselves from the massive shame that was carrying around, which is the cultural residue of the attitudes toward weight gain in earlier times in the 50s, 60s and in the decades before, where obesity was seen through the lens of goodness and badness, through sin and holiness, sin and righteousness.
Speaker 1 (00:31:21) - And it's still seen in the lens of sin and poor character. So it's not enough for culture to change its view of obesity from a character issue to a lifestyle issue. It's certainly not enough to just remove every shamed perspective on obesity so that no one has any bad opinions about obese people, because then people are still going to be massively unhealthy and overweight and unable to live their lives. And it does no good to them that cultural attitudes have changed. If they can't fit in a plane seat or buy clothes or sit in a chair without fear of snapping it. So even though a lot of the people who are listening to this podcast came to me because of my perspectives on weight loss, really to me, the weight loss aspect is part of a bigger cultural shift that we're going to need to experience, which is going to come in the form of mindset and perspective shifts for the individual. I personally do not believe that if you are struggling or someone you know is struggling with severe weight issues or compulsive eating, I don't believe that's fundamentally an issue of that person's innate goodness or character or their potential.
Speaker 1 (00:32:25) - I've seen in my clients time and time again people who come to me eating a whole lot, weighing a whole lot, and by doing an inventory of their mindsets and their thought patterns and their attitude toward themselves and a lot of the cultural programming that they've never even been aware of. As we unpack that and bring new awareness to what's going on the inside. We see people getting free mental constructs that were acting as prisons, and when given full choice in the matter, people will choose healthy, balanced lives. Sure, maybe not everyone will choose that. That will always be the case. Okay, well, kids are getting home and crying. This is not cool. I need one of those on air signs downstairs so that people know to be quiet. Anyways, hope that this was an interesting discussion. I hope that you got something out of it. Perhaps you'll think about 1 or 2 of these factors and go, That's maybe an aspect of my life that I haven't looked hard enough at. I'm focusing so much on Whole Foods versus processed foods that haven't really been looking at, well, how many calories am I expending in a day? And maybe I should focus there instead of just trying to browbeat myself for eating Doritos, Or maybe I should really look at my sleep and think, well, if I'm not getting 7 to 9 hours of sleep a night regularly, I'm not really setting myself up hormonally, mentally, physically to have a healthy weight.
Speaker 1 (00:33:46) - If you're jacking your system up with caffeine and then crashing and eating, that's something to look at. So these factors are explanatory for the public health explanation of how our culture shifted in terms of eating expending energy. But it's also helpful for the individual to take the big picture, look at their life away from the lens of shame and just looking at the wheels and gears that have been turning in their lives since they were born and long before they were fully cooked psychologically and say, okay, I accept that probably got dealt, but a very difficult hand. Without very good guidance on how to balance our eating and are working with technology and the changes in the post-industrial economy and to have a little bit of compassion for yourself and others who are suffering and to realize that if you feel like you're having to relearn how to be human, that it's okay. And there are lots of explanations as to why that might be the case. We are living in a time like absolutely no other in human history. It's wild for your cultural programming to be so irrelevant compared to the circumstances of your life simply because of the change in technology from grandparents, from parents to children.
Speaker 1 (00:35:04) - If you're enjoying this podcast, please leave me a review that would really help get more people into it. Please share it with a friend. Share it on social media. I appreciate it. Check out the show notes for links to coaching opportunities and my email address. If you'd like to inquire about coaching or just talk to me about it. Yeah, I think this is my fourth week in a row of being consistent and this feels good. We'll keep on doing it. So have a great week and we'll talk to you soon.