welcome to new connection where you can tune in and grow i'm your host vicky thompson you may be familiar with new connection magazine for conscious living which has been enjoyed by readers in the pacific northwest for more than twenty years now excited to bring new connection to life in your home on new connection we welcome authors practitioners and visionaries to share new ideas for alternative health spirituality and personal growth today i'd like to welcome to new connection dr james you two hundred ways to lose one pound can you show me one way to lose two hundred pounds what's funny in thinking about this idea and trying best to communicate how to help people make healthier choices in their lives i was talking with my wife one night and i said to her how do you look somebody in the eye and tell them how to lose ten pounds twenty pounds or even one hundred pounds and without skipping a beat she looked at me and said well why not just tell them how to lose one pound in one hundred different ways and so that's how that was the night as for how this kind of approach to the book came about well that sounds like a very practical way to do it because that you know looking at losing fifty pounds or twenty pounds or even ten pounds can be like how can i do this but if i can lose one pound then you can that is creative and have fun that's right and we understand that it's much easier for people to think about making smaller changes in their lives rather than these huge paradigm shifts are extremely lopsided approaches to nutrition or exercise and so if you can help people focus on the little things they actually do add up so i think it's working out for people so you are a heart doctor a cardiologist how did the heart doctor get into the weight loss business well it always comes back to the patients and there was a particular patient who really inspired this whole experience for me he was a gentleman a few years older than me who one day was trying to exercise at home he was getting onto his elliptical machine in a space meant and before he could even press the start button he had a cardiac arrest and so he was brought to our hospital where we found that he was having a heart attack and we were able to open up the little artery that was supplying the heart muscle that was closed in this heart attack and over the over the subsequent weeks he slowly got better and eventually was able to be sent home and the thing that really struck me was when i saw him a few weeks later in the clinic we talked about his medications we talked about the plan for the future and on his way out he sort of looked at me and said what are we going to do about this and it really struck me you know when you when you look in the mirror you don't think about your blood pressure you don't think about your cholesterol your blood sugar you think of how you look in the mirror and it turns out that your weight is the barometer for the rest of your health and we know so well now that if we target people's weight if we can help that society at large lose ten pounds will reduce the risk of heart disease by on the order of fifty percent because it will impact their blood pressure their cholesterol their blood sugar and all these risk factors for heart disease so that's that's how the book was born this patient this experience and very helpful conversation with my wife on how to go about it so you talk about that weight loss starts with just a single pound that's right so how does that philosophy work well for me we have so much data about what works but i feel like one of the challenges has been our message you know when you tell people that they have to fit their lives into your message inevitably people feel as though they're set up to fail you go see your doctor and it's as if you're given a laminated card of advice you know do this and it doesn't matter if you're seventy five year old recovering from a heart attack or a forty five year old or a twenty five year old you sort of get the same information and we all have different challenges we have different lifestyles we have different limitations and i think it's hard to try to get people to all fit that same limited message and so what i tried to do by thinking about this more in terms of small changes that are flexible that's where the title comes from my hope is is that we can actually modify our message in how it's applied to fit people's lifestyles rather than forcing their lifestyles to fit a more rigid message so as a doctor you're obviously seeing people who might be in crisis who might be there because they need a change in their life how how he found this plan to work among your patients it's been very exciting because  one of the joys of my job is that i get to spend time with the twenty five year old the fifty year old the seventy five year old and beyond and as i was writing the book i really found myself almost testing the ideas with people and saying to them you know what works for you how can you walk for ten minutes more every day or what's one thing that you could change about your diet right now that wouldn't be that big of a deal and so taking all those ideas bringing them together and  then supporting it with research was a big part of putting the book together and there's been a really nice response one of the things we've done in my medical center at providence we have something called the providence health adventure in which we try to motivate our employees to exercise more and eat better and we were able to provide over thirty five hundred people with copies of the flex diet to get them involved in the process and people are posting their experiences online their weight loss their the number of steps they're taking the hours of exercise and we're literally into the millions of steps and thousands of hours and pounds lost and that's only over the past six weeks so so the books  y been out for of two months now so i feel like we're just getting started but i'm really excited about the response well once you tell us a bit about the flex diet and how it's work and how it works and how it's set up sure where there's two hundred solutions as i call them but when you're trying to present things in a book form it's helpful to organize it into a program because i think it is useful for people to think and about things in terms of timeframe and so that they're not overwhelmed by all the things that i need to do so what i did is i separated the book into three different parts the first part i called today the second part i call every day and the third part is your way and so the idea during the first two weeks which i call today there are some solutions there that i think that most people should be able to adopt right as they're reading them really easy things that don't require much planning you don't really have to go to the grocery store and buy anything fancy it's just a question of doing some things are going to keep you more mindful and then in the next section which is the three week period called every day i started presenting a lot of nutritional ideas some recipes some great strategies for making your breakfast lunch and dinner healthier and adding in a lot of exercise and activity and then in the your way selection which is about one hundred of the solutions that's a another three week period but it really extends beyond that and the idea here is to do things that are a little bit outside of the box to choose things that you might not of heard about before thought about before and be flexible because the solutions that might work for you won't work for me and vice versa and i think that instead of thinking of that as a limitation it's time to actually celebrate the fact that we're individuals and it's ok that we're going to do things a little bit differently but we're going to get to ultimately a similar place well it sounds like a very creative book but it also sounds  practical rather than you know only this protein right with this other you know mineral that you will achieve this is just sounds like someone could pick it up and if they were also you know dealing with high blood pressure they could pick it up and just find simple ways to change that that's the goal you know there are a lot of interesting ideas out there with respect to focusing on a certain super food as that it's called or doing exercise in a particular way or staggering your meals and in a  particular fashion and i find that those ideas are interesting but hard to stick with in the longer term and it's exciting you know you're reading your book and you're involved in this program but then you go to a wedding or you want to go out to dinner on saturday night or you want to do something special with your family and you realize that that doesn't fit into the diet program that you're on and it's very confusing you don't know how to deal with that situation and ultimately you start to stray from this program and for a lot of us once you've strayed from the program all of a sudden you fail and that i think ends up that yo yo experience that a lot of people have where they feel that they somehow have failed at this program and then they're stuck at square one but the goal of the flex diet and i think other similar type approaches just to mindfulness and rational thinking is basically you never fail you just keep learning and so when this solution doesn't work out for you that's ok just choose something else that does because there's one hundred ninety nine more like that you can choose i'm sad to see you have over two hundred different weight loss ideas people can try let's go through a couple that people could try today one flex solution number sixty seven is that you could substitute for white rice yeah you know a lot of us use rice or pasta as kind of that starch content of the meal and while the low carb approach might just say get rid of it entirely you can't have it and you can't have a bun on your burger or a tortilla with your burrito or whatever it might be i'm trying to think about different substitutions that might work and it turns out that keen y is something that people don't know a lot about it's actually more a vegetable in the category like beets or chard and when you cook it up it has a sense a fairly similar consistency to rice in that it kind of soaks up the flavors of other things that it's served with and it has fewer calories and more fiber there's about forty fewer calories in a serving of king once compared to white rice and it doesn't sound like a huge change but that's exactly the point it's not going to be a big deal when you're sitting there dinner having this you're not going to be losing melting pounds away as you enjoy your meal but if you do that over a period of weeks or months forty calories adds up and i think all the ideas are all about that finding the little things  not that stressful you're not going to freak out you know that i can't have my whatever that i enjoy so much it's just thinking about a little bit more flexibly creatively and using the evidence in the nutritional information of back it up but also sounds like it because in your lifestyle that you can make these simple lifestyle changes that make a big difference and it is sometimes we change our life one step at a time so it's nice yeah i think we should i think when people decide to make drastic changes they're easy to get your mind around for the first day or two if you decide for example i'm not going to be bread anymore that's very concrete and you can figure out how you're going to do it but on day three you start going crazy and then at least most of us do and i think that we have to have opportunities for kind of the rest of us who can't do those kinds of super ultra disciplined and even a little lopsided approach is to do something that's more generalizable to just the real lives that we're all trying to live well wonderful that kind of leads into a habit that a lot of people have so your flex solution number seventeen or seventy two is to skip the diet soda yeah you know the phrase diet soda is one of the most impressive marketing schemes of all time because if you think about it if you switch from our regular product to a diet product the implication is that you lose weight or that it will somehow benefit you in some grand way but there's never really been a research study that has shown that if you switch from regular to diet soda that you lose a single pound and i looked for those studies and they've done a lot of studies to try to find that change but it never works out that way people always maintain the same way or sometimes even gain weight when they start drinking diet soda and the reason for that is not entirely clear one thought is that if you are drinking diet soda you say to yourself well i can have some non diet chocolate cake and it won't really matter but another thought is that the sugar substitutes in these diet drinks actually result in having us crave sugar at other times of day you sort of fool your body and get your insulin moving in a way that it normally would if you were consuming sugar so when you don't you want it later on and you might not it might not be so obvious to you you might just grab an extra handful of pretzels or another piece of candy from the candy dish and not think anything of it because those are small little things that you wouldn't really tabulated your in your mental food diary but the truth is they add up and there's also some interesting data about diet soda for example you might be familiar with a recent study that was presented that suggested that there's an increased risk of stroke in people who drink diet soda and there may be some problems with that study and more data needs to come out but the fact that we're even having that kind of conversation means that we need to think carefully about what we're putting into our bodies sticking with things that are real foods that are as famously said by market bittman that come from plants rather than made in plants reducing our processed foods and whatever form those things are going to get us healthier so what a lot of people i think are addicted to diet soda yeah so as a doctor and as someone who has studied nutrition what are some good substitutes when you just have that diet soda craving it can be challenging and that the truth is that some people switch from a diet soda to another beverage that has a sugar substitute and so the careful thing there is to try to avoid a sugar substitute of any type the best thing you can drink is water we know that  and it's true that it can be a little bit boring but there are other there are some flavored waters that are out there if you want to spend money on it that don't have sugar substitutes and there are some actually that are infused with herbs i've found a few out there  things that are infused with lemon grass or rose or cinnamon and some kind of funky ingredients which are incredibly healthy don't have any additives or preservatives or anything like that but you have to be looking for it so that you can find it sounds like maybe you could get some herbal tea bags and maybe brew up some lovely concoction absolutely yeah just got to be a little creative and realize that it should be a priority and you know while mentioning that liquid calories of any any kind there is things you have to watch out for even from fruit juices or from alcohol and just realizing that having those things in moderation is very important but talking about another drink that people could do the flex solution number seventy four is to drink green tea and we've heard such good things about green tea and for good reason green tea is a great beverage not only because absence of significant calories but it contains some substances that are not only helpful for weight loss but also have additional benefit so there are these substances called catechumens and they function a little bit similarly to caffeine in that they boost metabolism a bit and so people find that drinking green tea does help with weight loss it's not just one cup of day though the research studies show that you'd have to consume more like three or four cups a day if you want to achieve a significant impact on your way but with regards to the anti oxidants and other substances within green tea that are just felt to be beneficial for the body anti inflammatory  you get those with any amount and so it's a great idea i think that for people who are looking for a substitute to coffee or who are looking for example to make green tea as a cold or beverage it's a great idea just make sure that if you're buying it that it doesn't have additives that it doesn't have added sugar or any other chemicals that you really don't mean keep it natural you know that yasser all that's right wonderful well you have some great tips on when you're going to the bookstore and say you talk about flex solution one of three is that when you buy in bulk to store it in serving sizes that's right i think we do a poor job sometimes of figuring out our portions this is no surprise yes and so if you're going to make things easier on yourself the idea here is to basically think about the portions when you're putting the food away so if you go and you buy a big bag of pretzels for example if you were to take a little bit of time  either use as a blog bags or if you have reusable tupperware containers things like that that you can basically store the stuff so that when you want to use it later to have a snack or use as part of your kid's lunch or whatever it might be you just it right there and you don't want to be in a situation where you're sitting there watching television with an enormous bag or container of food mindlessly now taking it because the research shows that we don't know how much we take but if you ha yourself a little baggie that has the right quantity for that particular portion you won't make any mistakes you don't need to think about it because you've done the work a little bit earlier and it takes a couple minutes but this is an investment use even just when you enjoy a snack if you don't want to calculate servings beforehand from that big bag when you go to have your potato chips or pretzels because people will you please even after watching this show grab a ball and put the chips in the ball and then take the ball to where you're going to be enjoying it rather than taking that bag with you because that way you'll just keep track of what you're doing and then you'll know what you've had and yet you've stopped when it's time to stop exactly what you have flexible is the number one hundred fourteen you talk about eating slowly which i think is important in society today because sometimes who are on the run we're going to the fast food or eating in the car or we're eating very  quickly so can you share some mindful techniques around us slowly or the whole idea behind this is that when you eat quickly first of all you don't have time for your stomach to tell you that you're fall and second of all when you're in a rush you're just not thinking about where you're eating and so some great strategies are to actually make sure that you choose your food before you eat it some people recommend putting your fork down or utensil down between each bite chopsticks you know for when you're eating foods but even when you're eating other types of foods because the truth is most westerners aren't greatly using it and slows you down a little bit and just making a point of enjoying your food and enjoying the experience of eating it because we food for fuel and for calories but most of us think of fuel food excuse me as something that makes us happy and so really enjoy it and sit there and enjoy the taste and the flavors and you'll find that you eat more slowly and probably eat a little bit less and as you eat more slowly does your body then feel more satisfied because i'm wondering when you're wolfing it down right does your body not have enough time to register that oh you did have lunch people estimate that it takes at least twenty minutes for your body to really recognize that you have eaten enough food and so when you're eating in a shorter period of time you don't have the opportunity to figure that out within your body and so that's why for example if you're having a salad with your meal eating the salad first and then bringing out the meal makes so much more sense than putting the salad on the same table as the meal itself because you eat that higher fiber healthier salad first and then by the time you get the lasagna or whatever it is you're less hungry and you might even eat less of it so it sounds even positive that you could be at a restaurant getting your salad and your meal and you're practicing your diet plan is well that's  to recommend to people when they eat at home to eat at the table and to think of your food as served restaurant style rather than family style serve yourself portions on plates rather than sitting at the table with a big bowl of mashed potatoes and giving yourself more every time you think about it and the idea of serving food in courses have a salad first have the soup first and then have the rest of the meal which tends to be higher in starch and higher and other things that might not be as good for you and that's wonderful you have another solution about eating at least twenty five grams of fiber for day and that's flex alicia number one sixteen and i love that you know you go up to two hundred there really are two hundred you know that the reason why fiber so important is because we don't need enough of it the average american consumes about half of the recommended twenty five to thirty grams that we recommend every day fiber is good for you because it reduces your risk of heart disease and reduces your risk of some cancers and it can be very hard to get in your diet if you eat a diet that's very high and processed foods and a diet that's low and fruit and vegetables so when you're thinking about how can i augment the fiber in my diet those two things will help you if you really think about real foods foods that come in a container in a package that are frozen or canned it's more difficult to get to a good fiber level and i include in the book a great website i found where you can basically plug in foods that you eat frequently and find out how much fiber they have and that way you can think to yourself well what if i substituted this fruit that i always eat for that fruit that maybe i don't eat as much and you can get more fiber that way and the bonus is that fiber keeps you fall fiber reduces your appetite and therefore it does help people lose weight but you had even list some  foods with fiber and you know it's interesting a banana has three grams of fiber and that's wonderful because there's a tasty that's right i just saw an article a few days ago that telling bananas is the next super food and fact there's a new super food every day but the idea that bananas are actually pretty healthy and part of that is that high level of fiber so that's a great option they're easy to get you don't have to refrigerate them and they're i hope so and it's sort of a joke unto itself to be honest but you know i think it's important people have a light hearted approach to all of this stuff because when you get too obsessive in your counting gran's and points and weighing things it seems like eating healthy and becoming healthier is a very serious business but the truth is is you have to view it in proper perspective and while you're at it laughing burns calories too so if you are so much for joining us it's my pleasure you can learn more about healthy eating at our website at w w w new connection journal dot com join us next time a new connection where you can tune in and grow