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Session 06- Commitment

Session 07- PROGRESS Commitment System

Does it seem that no matter what diet you try, you can’t seem to lose weight? Or, when you finally do lose weight, you somehow manage to gain it back? Are you a literal encyclopedia of weight loss knowledge yet, you still can’t make it work for you? If this is you, I know how you feel. What if I were to tell you that the secret to your success, in fact your destiny, lies not in what you know but what you do. Would that surprise you? Probably not. Well, then what if I told you that what you do is determined by your beliefs, thoughts and words? I think Gandhi said it best when he proclaimed “Your beliefs become your thoughts. Your thoughts become your words. Your words become your actions. Your actions become your habits. Your habits become your values. Your values become your destiny."  What I have come to understand is, like so many sages before him, Gandhi was a careful observer of humanity. His wisdom came from being able to step back and see how and why some people became great while others floundered. 


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Session 01- Update Your Operating Systems

Literally one of the biggest problems facing people that have been heavy all or most of their lives is size of their stomach. Years of overeating will tend to stretch out the stomach of people with weight issues. Imagine stomach is like a bucket with a little switch at the top that tells you it’s full. The problem is that the switch is at the top so if the bucket is large, it takes a lot of food to fill it up. Since most of us only stop eating when we feel full, eating “not too much” is a real problem for people with unusually large buckets. 

Thankfully, Dr. Barbara Rolls, PhD, a Cambridge educated food researcher and chair of the Department of Nutritional Sciences at Penn State University has pioneered a radical new concept that helps people eat more food and still lose weight. Her research on calorie density is just what the doctor ordered for those of us that have big stomachs to fill. In her book The Volumetrics Eating Plan, she provides some outstanding examples on how to reduce the calories in many ordinary meals while being able to actually increase the amount of food. She includes recipes and photographs to show you how much more food you can eat with this plan. This book (and many others I discuss) is a must own. The secret is in understanding the calorie density of the food on your plate. 	 	
According to Dr. Rolls, to calculate the calorie density of a food, simply take the weight (in grams) of the food and divide it by the Calories. Carrots, for instance, have a Calorie density of .41 Cal/g.  (41 Calories/ 100 grams). The lower the Calorie density, the more food you will get per Calorie and, ultimately be able to fill up your bucket on less calories. This is another reason salads (light on dressing) work so well. They are high in nutrients, high in volume (amount of food) and low in calories.

Let me ask you this, What weighs more, a pound of bricks or a pound of feathers? It was a trick question. If you did say bricks, you had the right answer to the wrong question. You might have been thinking about the density of the bricks. Density is a measure of weight as it relates to volume. Bricks always seem “heavier” than feathers because bricks pack so much weight into a small package. They’re not heavier, they’re just denser.

Bricks Make You Fat
How about this question, Which takes up more space, a pound of feathers or a pound of bricks? If you answered feathers, you are right. Now, imagine your stomach is an empty bucket. With this bucket in your mind, imagine it filled with feathers. This is your pound of feathers and you stomach is full. Now, think about how full a pound a bricks would make the bucket. Would it be the same? No, at just a pound, you may not even get to have one whole brick in the bucket. If this was your stomach, wouldn’t feel full until you filled the bucket. If those pounds were calories, filling the bucket with bricks would make you pretty fat.

This concept becomes really powerful when you combine low density foods (feathers) with higher density foods (bricks). If you decide to have cheese and crackers, for instance, think instead cheese and carrots. The low density carrots will help to satisfy your hunger, letting you enjoy less cheese and ultimately consume fewer calories. If you don’t like carrots, try celery or peppers or anything with a lower Calorie density than crackers.t a calorie density of just .41, you could fill your bucket on carrots and it would not add up to an insane amount of calories. Carrots are feathers. By contrast, cheddar cheese does not do so well on the calorie density test. It has a Calorie density of 4.03 Cal/g (403 calories / 100 grams)!! Ouch, that is 10x the calorie density of carrots. Cheddar cheese is a brick.

The way that translates into the real world is that when you compare the calorie cost of cheese to carrots, eating the carrots allows you to eat TEN times more food. That doesn’t mean you can never have cheese again. What it does mean is that you can never think about cheese the same way again. The idea is to treat the cheese as a condiment or complement to the meal. Not as a meal.

Quick Estimate
One quick way to estimate the calorie density of food is to simply compare the calories to the serving size in grams. If the calories are MORE than the serving size, BE CAREFUL!! In the case of the cheese; the Calories are 4x the serving size. If the serving size is MORE than the Calories, you can eat more and worry a little less. Notice the Calories for the carrots are about ½ of the serving size. If the numbers are about equal, think twice before going for seconds!!

You may be wondering why cheese is so dense with calories.  The answer is actually quite simple. It's because cheese high in fat and fat has 9 Calories per gram. The other macronutrients found in food have lower Calorie densities. Carbohydrates have 4 Calories per Gram, fiber 2 Calories per gram, protein 4 Calories per Gram and water 0 Calories per gram. This is why foods high in water are low in Calorie density and foods high in fat have high calorie density.

 wine	
Watch What You Drink
By the way, at 7 Calories per gram, alcohol has almost the same calorie density as pure fat. What that means is, ounce for ounce, drinking alcohol is almost as detrimental to your waistline as drinking pure vegetable oil. 

So next time you’re sipping a glass of wine, or worse yet, one of those frozen drinks, remember, that innocent looking liquid in that attractive glass could be your weight loss downfall. 

Another good rule of thumb that will help you determine calorie density is that vegetables have the lowest calorie density. Why? Generally, it's because most vegetables are high in fiber (2 Cal/g.) and water (0Cal/g.) which offsets the carbohydrates (4Cal/g.) and fat (9Cal/g.) that may also be there. This one reason I recommend a plant based diet. Does that mean I want you to give up meat? Not necessarily. While I believe that meatless is healthiest, I did lose all my weight as a meat eater.

Let Us Do the Math
Perhaps the easiest way to get the Calorie density of foods is to have someone else do the math. That's why we include the calorie density data for all our recipes. We not only calculate the calorie density for the whole recipe, we also include the calorie density for each ingredient.

In addition, we include a CD% measure. The CD% is a relative measure of how calorie dense an item is compared to the MOST calorie dense food on the planet, which is pure oil. So, if a food has a CD% of 50%, it has HALF the calorie density of pure oil. The LOWER this number, the LESS dense it is and the MORE you can eat, making it a feather. The HIGHER this percent, the HIGHER the calorie density. This makes it a BRICK. 

This is really great information for two reasons: 
1. If a recipe has a high calorie density, you know you need to be really careful about portion size. 
2. If a recipe has a high calorie density, you can LOWER it's calorie density by decreasing any high calorie density ingredient and adding more low calorie density items. A great example of this is when you take some or all of the cheese out of a quiche and add more vegetables. 

Eat Your Feathers First
One of the most effective ways to use this knowledge is to eat your feathers first. What I mean by that is to begin your meals with the lowest Calorie density foods possible. Research shows that when people simply begin their meals with salad or soup, they lose weight. This works equally as well for snacking. Try making a rule that you will only snack on foods with Calorie densities of .5 or less. If you snacked like that, snacking would actually help you to lose weight.

Calrie Density

The best way to activate positive-emotion circuits in the brain is through generosity. This is really a kind of exciting neuroscientific finding because there are pearls of wisdom in the contemplative tradition—the Dalai Lama frequently talks about this—that the best way for us to be happy is to be generous to others. And in fact the scientific evidence is in many ways bearing this out, and showing that there are systematic changes in the brain that are associated with acts of generosity. The full download and CE credits are available at BetterListen.com https://www.betterlisten.com/collections/continuing-education-credits/products/richard-davidson-neuroscience-of-compassion

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Neuroscience Of Compassion with Richard Davidson - Preview

May you be free from suffering and its causes 
May you experience happiness and its causes 
May you know joy
May you experience love and acceptance 
May you experience kindness and compassion 
May you feel safe and protected 
May you be at peace

May I be free from suffering and its causes 
May I experience happiness and its causes 
May I know joy
May I experience love and acceptance 
May I experience kindness and compassion 
May I feel safe and protected 
May I be at peace

May ALL BEINGS be free from suffering and its causes 
May ALL BEINGS experience happiness and its causes 
May ALL BEINGS know joy
May ALL BEINGS experience love and acceptance 
May ALL BEINGS  experience kindness and compassion 
May ALL BEINGS feel safe and protected 
May ALL BEINGS  be at peace

Love And Kindness Meditation

I just had an awesome interview with Dr. John McDougall 
You have got to see his website! 
http://www.drmcdougall.com/

Dr. McDougall of the McDougall Program

What if I were to tell you, that even with a rock solid financial plan, your retirement could be in serious trouble? What if financial capital were only part of the retirement equation? In fact, money is not the only currency of value in your golden years. What about your health?  

Have you ever thought about how your physical condition and the physical condition of your spouse will impact your ability to enjoy retirement? How is it impacting your ability to enjoy the here and now? How do you spend your time together? It seems so obvious that without health, nothing else matters. Yet we allow our daily distractions and constant demands to take priority over our health. As a result, we neglect ourselves. We make disastrous but convenient lifestyle choices that invariably lead to our own destruction. Like it or not, your healthy (or not so healthy) habits have a profound effect on your future. 

While living to a ripe old age is good, aging gracefully is much better. What good is it to live eighty or a hundred years if the last thirty (or more) are miserable?

Think of the time and effort you put in now as investments in your wellness retirement portfolio. Just as small amounts of money saved over a lifetime allow you the financial security to enjoy old age, small changes in the way you think about your health and weight will compound and grow, allowing you truly to enjoy the fruits of your life’s labors. It might seem impossible, but that the Twinkie you are about to wolf down could seriously influence your ability to hop on a plane when you are 80. If you are holding a Twinkie right now, think about how much more fun it would be to spend your eightieth birthday lying on a beach Costa Rica instead lying in a bed at a nursing home. 

One simple change is to know when you are and are not really hungry. If you are no longer hungry, don’t keep eating. Food that you don’t really need is actually worth more to your future when it is in the trash. Even if you are in the middle of chewing food that you know is not right for you, it’s not too late. It is not actually a crime to throw out food and you can even spit it out.          

According to You: On a Diet, by Michael F. Roizen, M.D., and Mehmet C. Oz, M.D. (Free Press, 2006), diabetes causes your body to age one and a half years for every year that actually passes.[v]  Therefore, if you are diagnosed with diabetes when you are 40, by the time you are 45, your body will actually be 48. That means by the time you retire at 65, your body will already be ready for that nursing home. Add that to the likelihood that you will be blind and missing a limb or two by that time and you can begin to understand why my diagnosis of diabetes was such a strong motivator for me to lose weight and why I am now doing this paddle for the diabetes association. 

As you gain weight, your risk for health problems grows by leaps and bounds. Those extra pounds have been linked to, and, in many cases, are directly responsible for, a whole host of nasty problems. Diseases like osteoarthritis, hypertension, acid reflux, urinary incontinence, gallbladder disease, depression, diabetes, hyper-insulinemia, asthma, sleep apnea, congestive heart failure, anemia, coronary-artery disease, menstrual irregularity, infertility, cancer, psychological dysfunction, sexual dysfunction, and social discrimination have been attributed to an excess accumulation of body fat. The good news is that changing how you think about your weight and health can eliminate them.


Love And Kindness Meditation

Doc Russ

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