Integrative Medicine

Having a support system is largely individualized and depends on the person. People who need it should make sure they have a coach, friends, family, or internet groups to provide accountability, while those who don't need it can rely solely on themselves.
 
Transcript: "Do you think having a support system is important when trying to make a change for the better? Why or why not? I think this is largely individualized. I think each person needs something different in making changes. For me, having a support system doesn't matter so much. If I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it. But I know a lot of people that do need a support system. They need to make sure that they have a coach in place, that they have friends and family members for accountability. They like Facebook groups or other groups on the internet. They need a lot of checking in and help around their goals and maintaining them and making sure that they're really getting good accountability throughout a day or throughout a week, depending on what the changes are. Other people are really independent and they feel really good with doing it on their own, making their own goals, sticking to them, and their accountability is to themselves. Their competition is with themselves. So they don't feel like they need a lot of people around them to keep them going. And many times those types of people feel like having more people involved actually weighs them down and makes it so they're not able to work out when they want to. They're not able to eat when they want to because they feel like they need to be on a schedule and with their accountability buddies and that kind of thing. So largely, I think it has to do with who you are. Everybody needs something different. And as long as you're honest to yourself about what you actually need, then you're actually going to be able to achieve your goals."

Potential risks of juice cleanses and detox diets include low energy availability, slowed metabolism, and the possibility of dependency. Potential benefits include resetting expectations and desires for intake and potential gut health benefits.
 
Transcript: "What are the potential risks and benefits of following a juice cleanse or detox diet? Oh, advocates and proponents will be able to go on promoting either side of these diets. I will share my top thoughts on both sides. First, my primary concern for both juice cleanses and detox diets are they are generally very low calorie diets and therefore we put the dieter at risk of low energy availability which has major consequences for endocrine system which is your whole hormone system. So maybe even just for three or four days of being in a low energy system we can have negative impact on the endocrine system which impacts all of your other systems in your body but mainly it's counterintuitive to what the dieter wants because low energy availability will start to slow one's metabolism which means when this diet is over we have a slower metabolic rate and the person goes back to eating what they were eating before. The other concern of course for me is dependency so the dieter will eat their normal diet, they will do this cleanse or detox for three to five days and go back to their other diet relying on being healthy because they've done this diet where we're not really looking at a full change of general intake. Flip side of that, one benefit could be a reset where somebody does use this juice cleanse or detox diet to sort of reset their general expectations and desires for intake so I see that as a huge benefit as well as maybe some gut health."

Intermittent fasting is a great intervention to use for health, detoxification, weight loss and reducing insulin resistance. The three most important things to know about intermittent fasting are to limit your eating window to 8-12 hours, don't snack between meals and don’t eat before bedtime.
 
Transcript: "How can I use intermittent fasting properly? Great question. A Shameless plug for a free course, which is on my website. I did a an introduction to intermittent fasting, which is pretty much all you really need to know about it. It's free it's on my website just go to Jonny Bowden.com and download it and listen to it and that will tell you a lot of what you need to know. Now if you don't want to do that or if you want a quicker answer, I'll tell you the two or three things that are most important. Important to know about intermittent fasting or the best lessons from people, who do intermittent fasting. The first is limit your window, during which you eat, if you can get it down to eight hours, that's great. If you have trouble with that at least you 12, that's called a 12 and 12 you fast for 8 hours for 12 hours, most of which you're sleeping anyway, and you eat in a 12-hour window. I'd like to see it down to 8 if you can get it there. But that's a great place to start. And Second. And probably even more important lesson is that you don't snack between meals and you let at least four hours go between meals. So, if you're doing that within a 12-hour window, and you want to eat three meals, it's great, it's breakfast. Lunch and dinner nothing in between. And if you're doing with an eight-hour window, you can still probably get two meals or three meals in but ideally and our programs we like to see two meals in an eight-hour window. And the third important lesson is Is don't eat before bedtime. That's, that's just across the board. Nobody disagrees about that, there's a ton of evidence for it. You don't want to be in digesting mode while you're sleeping. You want that time to be used for fat burning and detoxification, not getting rid of the food that you just binged on while you were watching television. And so, that's, that's the short answer and I urge you to continue to look into this because intermittent fasting is one of the most incredible interventions you can. use both for health for detoxification for weight loss, and for reducing insulin resistance,"

I think intermittent fasting can be a beneficial tool for people suffering from food addiction and obesity, but it should be used in conjunction with psychological support in order to be effective.
 
Transcript: "This question is, what is my opinion of intermittent fasting? Well, I think in general humans have used fasting as long as we have recorded history, mostly for religious purposes but certainly for health to, we know that fasting is a good thing. It actually helps to reset our bodies and helps to clear out a lot of waste that's that builds up as part of metabolic byproducts. So I think intermittent fasting is just sort of a new, a new And to involve a very old concept, but in general, I think intermittent fasting. One of the benefits would be to help people who have food addiction, which is obviously a very significant problem in the United States. Today, just if, for no other reason, by the number of people who are overweight or obese, to be able to help people get a grip on and a control on how much food they eat per day. And so, if you can narrow that window down to maybe four to six hours per day as opposed to just Raising which at one point used to be considered a reasonable and effective strategy for maintaining weight. But I think this notion of narrowing that window down to just a few hours per day where you're consuming all of your calories in a limited window of time, I think can actually be a good strategy, but I think for somebody who has a really serious food addiction problem, they need mental support. So you can provide someone with a tool, like, intermittent fasting. But without good Small psychological support, the person may not succeed. It may really take that level of help to get someone looking at food in a much better and healthier way. But in general, I believe, intermittent fasting can be part of your toolbox for approaching things like obesity, diabetes, cancer heart disease, even depression, even mental and mood disorder as well. So I'm a fan of it. I think it's a good thing to do but I think like anything else. You ought to baby step your way into it and not try to just completely flip one switch to another and expect results. I think you have to work your way into it and there is a lot of good information out there to help you do that."

To stop overthinking before performance, use mindfulness, breathing exercises, mental rehearsal/visualization, questions, and brain spotting.
 
Transcript: "The question is, how to stop overthinking before performance? This is a great question because we do tend to get into our heads before our performance. We think that somehow thinking hard about it is going to help us do better but it doesn't we know that Peak athletic performance comes from the hindbrain unconscious brain rather than the analytical brain up here. So we do want to turn off that overthinking. One of the things you can do is get out of your head by getting into your body. And that means basically using mindfulness something like the Senses meditation where you take a moment to appreciate everything, you can see, then everything you can hear everything you could feel and everything you can smell and taste and that will bring you right into the present moment in your body and out of the analytical brain. You can also use breathing exercises noticing, how the breath feels going in and out of the body. Another thing you can do is use Mental rehearsal or visualization to imagine the performance. You want. The key here is not to get caught up in the details. Details and worrying about how it's going to go. But rather just to feel and imagine that perfect performance that will also get you out of the analytical brain. Another thing you can do, if that analytical brain won't shut up is ask some questions of yourself, for example, what evidence do I have for my beliefs and then what evidence contradicts my beliefs? What would I ask or tell to my best friend to help them if they were doing this? Is there an alternate way of thinking about this? If you need help you can always ask a trusted teammate or coach or someone else who can help you see the other side because our fears are often exaggerated in our own mind and we have a hard time seeing the other side. Lastly, you can also use something called brain spotting brain. Spotting goes into the fears and processes them deep in the neural networks of the unconscious brain. Once those fears are down to neutral, then the brain no longer brings them up and so they don't occur to us right before our performance. I hope that's helpful."

Diet and physical activity are both equally important when it comes to weight loss and management. People should focus on doing a variety of exercises including cardio, weight training, balance training, and yoga as well as eating a diet high in plant based foods and low in animal source proteins. Additionally, time restricted eating can also help with weight loss and management.
 
Transcript: "When it comes to weight loss, I'm often asked which is more important diet or physical activity and the truth is they're both equally important, in fact think of it like the scales of Justice you need to have a good dietary intake to balance out physical activity and nobody ever gets out of my office without talking about both. So it's always key and critical that I speak to people about what they're putting into their body when it comes to Weight Management. Especially when they're looking for weight loss and especially when we're aging and in terms of physical activity, that's important too. If I could just touch on physical activity for a moment because I think that that's something, I I think gets overlooked all exercise is valuable any kind of physical activity that you do is great. But a lot of times people believe that they should only be doing cardiovascular exercise or cardio instead of doing weight training. You know, people say, I want to do a lot of cardio loose. And wait and then I'll do weight training. No wrong answer. You need to do resistance exercise so that you can build up your muscle mass. So that you have more muscle mass, which means you're going to burn more fat for fuel at rest, which is when you burn the most fat for fuel, don't look at what it says. On the equipment, you burn more fat for fuel when you are at rest and when you are sleeping. So sleep is also an important part of that equation. So it's important to balance everything out. You want to do cardio, you want to do weight training, you want to do balance training as you're aging, which is why I think yoga is really important and you want to make sure that you get some good stretching in as well. And then, as far as food goes, I'm high, I'm a big fan of recommending plant-based diets where you're eating large amounts of plant based foods and smaller amounts of animal Source protein. So, being cognizant of that, being aware of getting more fiber in your diet. And I like to add in a little bit of time, restricted eating in there. R as well."