Welcome back to the Good Living Doc show. My name is Dr. Mark Smith. I am the Good Living Doc. Goodlivingdoc.com. Thanks for showing up.
You can find all of my podcasts on my website, as well as pretty much every major podcast platform. This is episode 9.
As always, keep in mind while you’re listening, that I’m not your medical doctor, and so you should not take anything I say as personal medical advice. Never try to diagnose, treat, or cure any illness or symptom in yourself or anyone else based solely on the things that I say here. And if you decide to change your life based on information you get from this show, please do so with the guidance of a trained and licensed health professional.
This is step 2 of my 5 step nutrition program. I designed this program after decades, and hundreds…if not thousands…of patients who want to eat better for whatever reason. And what I’ve found over the years is most people, at least in my experience, do better with making changes to their lives in very subtle, slow ways.
Some people…yes, I know you probably know some personally…some people can discipline themselves and just power through whatever changes they’re trying to make and overhaul their lives overnight.
But that route usually involves a tremendous amount of self-control, a tremendous amount of discipline, and a lot of pain. Because making changes that are drastic to the life that you’ve lived for the past however many years…decades…is not easy. And also, many times, those people who make those changes and power through and muster up the discipline to change their lives…because it happened so fast…they revert back to their old lives eventually.
My goal here is to take you on a very slow journey, making tiny, tiny changes to your lifestyle over time that you barely notice. And in doing that, if you change your life one percent a day, in 100 days your life has been completely transformed.
But I find that people stick with small changes a lot easier than huge, drastic changes and I think people want to do the drastic thing because they want their results right now. They don’t want to wait six months for their changes…or a year. They want it now. Because sometimes there’s an event coming up and they want to lose weight for it, or maybe they’ve got a health scare and they want to change things right now because they’re afraid of the road that they’re going down or they’re afraid of their body falling apart.
Whatever Your Goal, Get Healthy
But this is a marathon. It’s not a sprint. The first step in this program is called The Purge, and it was episode 6. And it is an imperative step that you have to do before you do this step. So if you haven’t done The Purge, please go back and listen to The Purge and then complete The Purge. Don’t move on to step two until you complete step one. This is step two. And the steps have to be done in order.
Here’s the mindset that I want you to have when you’re trying to eat better, no matter what it is that you’re trying to eat better for. Maybe you’re trying to lose weight. Maybe you’re trying to have more energy. Maybe you want nicer skin. Maybe you are trying to reverse disease. Maybe you have a nagging symptom you’re trying to get rid of or maybe you just want to be healthier.
But the goal that you have to keep in mind is the same no matter what you’re trying to do, no matter what you’re making these changes for. The goal in your mind has to be to get healthy.
If you want to lose weight, get healthy. If you want to reverse disease, get healthy. If you want more energy, get healthy. Because If your goal is to lose weight, what a lot of people do is they just start counting their calories or they start counting their carbs. They don’t make any efforts to change the food that they’re eating and so they eat a bunch of crap food, they just eat less of it. And that might get you to that goal of losing weight, but it doesn’t make you any healthier.
Eating less junk to change the circumference of your waist is not ultimately going to get you to wellness. Now, losing weight will help your body work better, that is true. But if your goal is to get healthy, and your focus is on getting healthy, then the changes that you make will probably be different. The choices that you make will probably be different. I’m hoping that they will be.
Your body runs on hormones. Hormones control everything. And the biggest influence on your hormones is your food. Bad food creates bad hormonal balance. Good food creates good hormone balance.
So, if you want to eat better, if you want to make a change to your health as far as your diet’s concerned, my number one tip to you is to eat real food. Eat more real food.
Eat More Real Food
Now, what is real food? Real food is food that the Earth made. It is unchanged and unprocessed and you eat it the way it was made. An apple is real food. You can pick it from a tree and you can eat it. A box of chocolate chip cookies is not real food. Chocolate chip cookies don’t grow on trees. You can’t plant them in the ground and grow more cookies. Cookies are made in a factory somewhere. They are manufactured. That is not real food. You can put it in your mouth and chew it up and swallow it, but that does not make it food to the human body.
I want you to eat more food and that’s what this step is going to be about. It’s going to require you to make a few changes with the way you shop at the grocery store. Real food is in the fresh food section…those areas on the outside of the grocery store is where the real food is.
We’re talking about fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, all the fresh stuff is on the outer rim of the grocery store. The processed junk is in the aisles because that stuff doesn’t need to be refrigerated. It doesn’t need to be maintained in any way. It’s just because it’s already got preservatives and chemicals, and all that kind of stuff in it.
The fake food that we want to eventually eat less of is the stuff in wrappers, bags, and boxes. If it’s in a wrapper, bag, or box, 99% of the time it’s not real food. That’s the manufactured franken-foods that are full of chemicals and processing, and it is far, far removed from the way that the Earth made it.
Why do we have to eat real food? Well, that apple that we pulled from the tree…that apple contains the same stuff that’s in our bodies. That apple that you picked from the tree is made of the same stuff that you are…the same vitamins and minerals…that are in that apple are inside your body. And so your body recognizes it. It knows what it is.
So when you eat that apple and you chew it up and you swallow it, and your body starts to work with it, it’s the same stuff. So it’s easy for the body to break those things down and absorb it and use it for its purposes…to help us function better and to keep us healthy.
That box of chocolate chip cookies is not made of the same stuff as in nature. It’s been changed. It’s been processed. It’s been stripped of things. It’s been loaded up with chemicals, colorings, flavorings, preservatives. Those are things that the body does not recognize because those things were made in a factory somewhere, or in a lab.
When those things get in the body, not only does your body have to deal with the fact that a chocolate chip cookie doesn’t have any nutrition, it also has to deal with the fact that it doesn’t understand what this thing is…and so it causes a problem. It causes a change in the body that the body has to go through in order to deal with this toxic thing.
That’s why in fruits and vegetables, and things that the Earth made, they feed us. They nourish us. They contribute the things that our bodies need. Foods in wrappers, bags, and boxes do not.
And so a life spent eating food from wrappers, bags, and boxes eventually cause a breakdown in the body, and cause disease because the body can’t build itself…and rebuild itself…with the things that are in those so-called foods.
Step two is going to involve you eating more real food. And in doing this you might have to go to the store a little bit more often because what you want to do is you want to get fresh food.
Make a List of Your Fave 5
I want you to make a list of your five favorite fruits and your five favorite vegetables. Now, you may be hard pressed to find five vegetables that are your favorite. And so I’m going to give you a little loophole here. They don’t have to be fruits or vegetables that excite you or that you’re like “Oh my gosh, I just can’t wait to have this asparagus.” Because chances are that’s not going to happen.
So they need to be vegetables that you don’t mind eating…that you’re not going to quit this step over because you hate them so much. They need to be the vegetables that you can eat and it’s really no big deal to you…not the ones that you absolutely hate. Leave those alone.
You get a plus…actually you get a double plus if these vegetables that you’re choosing are green, or they are leafy, or they are bright and colorful. So, five vegetables and five fruits, and they have to be fresh…they have to be unchanged and unprocessed.
We’re not talking about going to the store and getting applesauce. The apple is what you want, and you’re going to eat three servings of these things every day. Not all of them. You’re going to pick three. So if you eat three meals, then you have one with each meal. You have one serving of one of these 10 things.
If you don’t eat breakfast, it might be a really easy thing to just have a banana in the morning. If you normally get fast food for lunch, it’s not going to be much of a thing to have a handful of grapes along with your meal.
If you are in a job where you’re not able to take these things along with you, then you’ve got to do it all at night and it’s really easy if you have a little salad at night before you eat.
But you have to have three servings every day and you can’t repeat any one until you’ve gone through the list. So you can’t just have a banana every day. You have to have the banana, but then you have to work through your list and have everything that you’ve listed once before you eat that banana again.
There’s a big difference to your body between 100 calories of an apple and 100 calories of a chocolate chip cookie. And so we’re going to increase our intake of real food. That’s the whole point of this. Nothing from a can or a bag. They have to be foods that the Earth made and they cannot be changed or processed.
So, not only are you going to be getting some better nutrition, but you’re also going to resensitize your taste buds to whole, natural foods and start reintroducing them to your body on a regular basis.
Raw fruits and vegetables are delicious, but if you don’t think so, it might be just that you’ve destroyed your palate over years of not eating them. And so you’re used to more artificially flavored, sugary foods because that’s what foods from wrappers, bags, and boxes are.
You may not believe me yet, but as you get healthier, as you do The Purge, and as you do step two, your body is going to start craving nutrient-dense food more often.
You’re not giving up any foods that you love or crave yet. We haven’t deprived you of anything. You’re not stopping yourself from eating any of the other foods that you have kept in your house from The Purge or the ones that you really, really like. You’re just adding more real food to your day.
It’s a great accomplishment to get some nutrition. And you know if you’re trying to lose weight, this is going to help you when you replace that processed breakfast bar that they’ve tried to tell you that was healthy…which is just really a candy bar under different marketing, and you have a banana instead…or you have an apple, or make a small salad with your dinner.
An apple is a serving. A handful of grapes is a serving. Maybe a cup of chopped bell peppers in your salad. I mean, you know, get creative with it.
List your fave five fruits and vegetables, and get to work. It’s a simple step. I believe in you. I know you can do it.
Episode 9 Tip-of-the-Day
And now we will do the Good Living Doc Show tip of the day. My tip of the day for episode 9 is to get your vitamin d3 levels checked. If I could get every person to take one supplement, it would be vitamin d3. Most Americans, or most people around the world that don’t live in sunny climates, are vitamin d deficient.
More than 10 percent of our genes need vitamin d to express health, so on a genetic level, we need adequate amounts of vitamin d.
I’ve done a ton of research on vitamin d, and there’s a pile of research that shows that having adequate vitamin d levels benefit people with depression, Alzheimer’s, PMS, asthma, fibromyalgia, diabetes, respiratory infections, osteoporosis, 17 forms of cancer, chronic pain, and the list goes on.
From a health standpoint, vitamin d is imperative for the immune system and to control inflammation. So if you’re deficient, you have to supplement, and the best way to determine if you need that vitamin d3 and how much you need is to get checked…get tested.
You can ask your doctor to do it for you. Maybe they do it as a regular test for your checkups, but there are also independent labs that will take your levels for you. You probably have one in your town. The one in my town is called AnyLabTestNow and you can go in there and you can give them some blood and they will test pretty much anything you want to test.
So that makes it easy, especially if it’s hard to get into your doctor. So get your vitamin d3 levels checked, and if they’re low, you need to supplement.
All right, that was kind of quick. We’re done with episode 9. Thank you all for showing up. I appreciate you being here. My name is Dr. Mark Smith. I am the Good Living Doc. Goodlivingdoc.com. I’m doing these episodes as I can. Sometimes I’m real busy and I can’t do one for a while, but there will be more coming. So, stay tuned.
Subscribe to my show on your podcast platform, or you can go to goodlivingdoc.com and you can fill out the information to get on the email list and I’ll email you when I come out with a new episode.
All right. Get your fave five going. Start making your list and get your vitamin d checked. Until next time, I appreciate you. Thanks for being here. Take care.