Sustainable Health Changes | A Doctor Explains | The Cooking Doc®

Hey everybody, it's Dr. Blake the Cooking Doc. I am a nephrologist. I love to cook. I love to talk about the way food and healthy eating can impact your health. So let me set the stage for you today as we get into what I'm going to talk about. So suppose you just got back from the doctor and the doctor says you got to make some serious changes to your diet in order to make yourself healthy. Maybe the pandemic has really set you back because you really haven't had time to focus on your health and wellness over the course of the last 18 months. Or maybe this is 10 to 20 years in the making where all of a sudden you've just woken up one day and you said well now's the time to make changes to make things better. How do we go about and develop a strategy for making those things happen and what do I think is the best strategy for you? Stay tuned for my thoughts. Thanks so much for watching. Make sure you subscribe to my channel so you never miss a new recipe or a new health tip. It's important to remember that everybody is different. So for a lot of people it doesn't work to just kind of cut things off cold turkey or to just all of a sudden start exercising every day when you haven't had good health habits for the last year or five years or ten years. There are a few people that can just all of a sudden turn the light switch on and go and some of them can keep those changes forever but I am a big believer in slow and steady changes. Changes that you can make that will set you up for success. The way I think about it is first of all for a lot of us unhealthy habits are not something that have just developed. These are things that have been going on since we were a child or maybe since we got in our 20s and life changed and we're unable to continue the healthy habits that we had developed up until then. So these are things that are baked into our daily life. You wake up in the morning, you go to work and you stop by the fast food for a bacon egg and cheese on the way. You've been doing that forever. That's your routine. That gets you through the day. You love that or maybe you go out to lunch and just by default what do you want to drink? Sweet tea. Coke. You go by Starbucks and it's not a black coffee that you order but it's a double whipped frappuccino with extra chocolate. I don't know if that's even a thing but you know what I'm saying. You get in these habits where you do things for a long time a specific way and they're not healthy habits and these are things that have built up over the course of many many years many times. So I believe in a strategy where you can take a lot of time to cut these unhealthy habits out and work healthy habits into your daily life and I think that's a way to make sustainable changes. So maybe that is not stopping by fast food for breakfast, bacon egg and cheese on your way to work. Maybe you start with cutting out on Mondays. On Mondays you make oatmeal for breakfast okay and you do that for a little bit then you realize that you feel pretty good with that oatmeal so maybe you incorporate it on Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Maybe instead of that crazy drink at Starbucks you know you ask them to use non-fat milk or maybe you ask them to do one pump of sweetener instead of four pumps of sweetener. Little changes and over time you'll realize that you not only feel better when you make healthier choices but that it becomes second nature to you and becomes part of your daily routine. You know when I when I started running in my mid-30s my wife taught me to run. I'd always been a terrible runner. I always hated running and she told me that I was running too fast. So the reason that I hated it was because I would go from no running to trying to run too fast because I thought that's what I needed to do to keep myself healthy. So I started off slowly, short runs, slow runs. Runs that I could handle and that I could do and that made me feel good. You know I didn't feel exhausted or have all my muscles hurt the next day from these slow short runs and over the course of one year, three years, five years I kept getting better. My running stamina improved. I could run longer and longer and longer and I could do it in an enjoyable manner, in a sustainable manner and here I am now 10 years later and I still love to run and you can apply that same thing to your own lifestyle specifically to your healthy eating habits. So making slow sustainable changes in your diet, understanding how you feel when you make those changes, setting yourself up for success is key. One of the things that we realize for sustainable dietary changes is that you have to find out what works for you and if the fad diets or the cold turkey diets don't work for you, this is a way to find a slow and steady pace to make those changes and you can do it. We are building a lifetime of healthy habits and healthy changes and you are going to do that in a manner that works for you. It is never too late to incorporate slow steady changes into your life. Before you know it, you'll be two years down the road and you will be in a much better and healthier place. So thanks so much for watching. I'm Dr. Blake, The Cooking Doc. Make sure you subscribe to my channel so you never miss a recipe or new health tip and we will see you next time.