Speaker 1: Transcriber's Name Reviewer's Name At one point in our lives, we've made an assumption. An assumption that we ultimately regretted. But we probably learned from that assumption. I've made a lot of those bad assumptions in my life. I've learned a lot from them. But there's one that particularly stands out that absolutely changed my life. So about seven years ago, I was struggling with a kidney disease. An inherited kidney disease called polycystic kidney disease. Runs rampant in my family. So what happened is I was in and out of the hospital constantly. And I've got to tell you something. When you're in the hospital that much, it gets boring. You can only watch so many Price is Right reruns. You can only sit there and read so many books. So what I would do is I'd grab my IV pole, and I'd start walking around the hallways. My source of entertainment was eavesdropping on all the conversations the nurses were having with their patients. I'm like, oh, that's interesting. I never knew that about cardiovascular disease. Next room, et cetera. I'll never forget one room that I came upon. A gentleman was being discharged from the hospital. From what I could gather from this conversation, he had been in the hospital for quite some time. And he had some sort of heart surgery. And the nurse said, well, aren't you excited? You're getting out of here. He's like, I'm really excited. She goes, what are you going to do? I'm going to take my wife out to dinner. She goes, that's fantastic. Where are you going to take your wife? Oh, we're going to go to McDonald's. I'm like, your wife is going to be pissed. You're going to McDonald's? Oh, my goodness. So I'm like, I can't believe he just said this. How is the nurse going to respond to this? She said to him, I don't know if that's the greatest idea. And his response is what changed my life. He said, don't worry. I'm going to get the fish fillet. Good answer? So immediately, I grabbed my IV pole. I walked towards that room. You couldn't eat fish fillet? And I was really angry. And I kind of thought about what he said. And all the time that I spent in the hospital, dialysis units, doctor's offices, all the people that I came across that were struggling with disease, I had a very bad attitude towards these people. Because I knew a lot of them were there because of the choices they made and the foods they ate and the inactivity in their lives. But that was not a good thing for me to do. It was a very bad attitude. Because my background is in health and exercise science. These people don't know better. And when I go back and think about his response, and he said, don't worry. I'm going to get that fish sandwich, he actually thought that was a healthy choice. He thought that was a good decision. And that's when I said, you know what? If I recover from what I'm going through, my goal is to reach as many people as possible to make sure they understand the simple aspects of nutrition and exercise and how they can change our lives. Listen, I want to change a lot of lives. The 315 plus million people in the US, that's a lot. What's interesting, 117 million of those people have one or more chronic diseases that could have been offset if they chose better foods, if they moved around a little bit more. 1.5 billion people are either obese or overweight. Listen, I could talk statistics all day, numbers all day, but I don't want to talk about that. There are many variables that we can do to change this. I want to talk about one, and that's how we get our information and how to keep that information simple. Listen, we hear about nutrition and exercise every single day. We see it on social media, out with friends to dinner, we talk about it. News, magazines, whatever it may be, we hear about what's right, what's wrong, etc. And then you have all the experts. I put that lightly, experts. Ultimately, these experts are pushing supplements, they're pushing extreme ways to exercise, etc. Often, they're making things more difficult, and often what they preach is not evidence-based. There's no scientific literature to support it. Ultimately, they're getting something out of it. But when we take away, it's not simple. They're making things way too difficult. I grew up in northeast Philly. I'm a small guy. I have a big mouth. So I figured, you know what? I've got to learn how to defend myself at one point in my life. So I started taking, from a very early age, I started taking some boxing, some karate, a little bit of wrestling. I did this all the way up until my late 20s. And I saw a lot of instructors. And I'll never forget this one instructor I had. He was very, very good. And the reason was, he stuck to the fundamentals. We practiced every day, and we learned the same punches, the same kicks, the same footwork. I learned a lot from him. It carried over into me learning those skills the rest of my life, and holding on to them. Now, a lot of the other instructors I came across, basically the first day, we're going to learn a couple punches. Second day, you're going to learn a flying jump kick. What? A flying jump kick? I don't even know how to punch, and you're having me jump off chairs. No thank you. They didn't stick to the fundamentals. There's a great saying, a proverb, I love it. Feed a man a fish, you feed him a meal. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. That's what I want to do. I want to feed people for a lifetime with the fundamentals. And listen, it's not that hard. If you go to ShopRite, alright, today I'm going to get the strawberries. I'm going to put down the strawberry Pop Tarts. Congratulations. You made a fantastic decision. If you decide to get the oatmeal over Captain Crunch, that's a terrible decision. Captain Crunch is the best cereal on the face of the planet.

Speaker 2: You see where I'm going.

Speaker 1: We can keep this pretty simple. But unfortunately, what makes nutrition specifically so hard to understand, so hard to grasp, is the diet out there. Everyone at one point in their life has been on a diet. And unfortunately, diets make things difficult. Diet is like religion nowadays. You see something about diet on social media every single day. On the news every single day. And I hate to admit this, but they work. And the reason they work is there's some set principles. One, it's structured. It's more structured than we normally eat. Two, they often eliminate processed foods, which is a good thing. And they often eliminate one major macronutrient, whether it's protein, fat, carbohydrate. And what this does, we intake less calories. We're more structured, like I said. So we see gains. We lose weight. Our blood work might be a little bit better. But ultimately, the bad thing about this, it's quick fix. It happens overnight. And this is why we go yogurt diet. Because they create boundaries. You can't eat certain foods. So when you have ice cream, you have failed your diet. You've stepped outside that boundary. And that beats you up. And what happens is you do it again and you do it again to the point where you're not fine on that diet. And maybe some of the good nutritional principles that diet has instill. So that's why we yo-yo so much. But let's look at just some essential nutritional habits that we can instill into our lives when we go shopping every time. We've heard this time and time again. Let's seek out fruits and vegetables. Let's seek out foods with lots of fiber. Your oats, your grains, your fruits, your vegetables, your dark leafy greens. Let's seek out healthy fats that we find in healthy oils, nuts, seeds, fish, avocados. If you want to eat meat, that's fine. Just make sure you have a wide variety of it. And we want to have a wide variety of all the other foods we choose as well. Meat gets a bad rap. And it's ultimately because the average American takes in probably 72 times the amount that we can actually absorb and use. That is not a statistic, so please don't quote me on that. You get what I'm saying. So those four basic principles, we have seen in the scientific literature that evidence for the past 50 years that when you follow these, it leads to offsetting chronic disease, increased quality of life, more vitality. We do have to be aware of the sugars. This is my son. First time he had a cag cake, it was like... I don't even know what it was like. He was pretty excited. Let's just put it that way. With that said, these refined sugars, we have to limit them. Processed foods that you see at the end of the aisle at the supermarket, we have to limit them. There's no nutritional value to this stuff. I'm not saying completely get rid of it. Because listen, my family is from Northeast Philly. If you told me that I had to stop eating cheesesteaks, you're nuts. Cheesesteaks and hoagies are a food group in my family. With that said, let's just use that old principle of moderation. Let's limit these foods. Then maybe one day, yeah, you might want to omit them from your nutritional habits. But again, we're all human. Unfortunately, with these salty, sugary-based foods that we like, we watch a lot of TV while we eat them. We watch a lot of terrible TV, let me tell you. With that said, the average American is spending nine and a half hours a day, plus looking at their phone, on the computer, or watching TV. The average American spends 160 minutes in front of the TV a day, but they spend less than 20 minutes in a kitchen preparing food. Martha Stewart is pissed if she found out you were only spending 20 minutes in the kitchen a day. She's not happy. And what else does this cause? Inactivity. We're not moving. We're not moving at all. We need to get out and move more. Because we have a lot of things that ultimately just set us up to sit down, and sit down a long time. Dr. Stephen Blair did a study looking at the predictors of death. The number one predictor of death was low cardiorespiratory fitness, aka sitting disease. We sit too much. Yeah, we have to get out and move more. I'm not telling you you have to run a marathon. I'm saying you need to get out 30 to 45 minutes a day and move. Walk your dog. Ride a bike. American Council of Sports Medicine says 30 to 45 minutes a day is what we need to get. Now listen, that's a reach for many of us. I coach athletes to do 5Ks, 10Ks, marathons, sprint triathlons, etc. Some of them don't do 45 minutes a day of activity. That is a goal. That is something you want to reach for. Maybe start off with 10 minutes a day. Maybe 10 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes at night. The key thing is with movement, we want to do it frequently. We don't want to just walk our 30 minutes and then go sit down for 9 hours. What we're seeing in the literature is that 30 minutes is not as beneficial for you when you follow it up by sitting hour after hour after hour. Get up and move. Now there are even treadmills at work. Listen, I love this idea. We're thinking outside the box. We're walking at work. But if you ever watch these treadmills, I kid you not, this is how fast the people are walking. That's not doing much for you. If you can't fit in 10 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes at night, without doing it while you're working, you're booking yourself too tight. It's time to work on some time management, let alone basic nutrition and exercise. Get out, move often. Now look, that's it. I told you the basic principles of nutrition and exercise. Very simple. How do we implement them? How do we make them last a lifetime? When I first started my health and sewing company 12 years ago, I was very excited for my first client. I had 30 pages of paperwork I had him fill out because I wanted to know everything about this person. As I'm going through, I'm seeing a lot of red flags. Over 40 years old, 50 pounds overweight, lots of medication, high blood pressure, risk of cardiovascular disease because it's in his family. Then I saw it. I'm like, oh, well, here's your problem. You eat six Snickers bars a day. That's a lot. Stop eating Snickers bars. Pay me. All right.

Speaker 2: Well done.

Speaker 1: If I would have done that, though, two weeks later, I'd be with him right back on the horse. He would have ultimately been eating six, seven, eight Snickers bars. What I did over the next 15 months is I gradually brought that out of his nutritional choice. Fifteen months later, he was eating two Snickers bars a day cut up into six pieces. He was implementing every single thing I just told you about in small doses. We took the baby step approach. We didn't take the fast food, quick mentality approach. I want to do everything overnight. When you instill this stuff in small steps, they don't become chores. They become habits, and that's what we want to instill. We want to instill the basic principles that I just gave you. You'll remember that. You've heard a lot of it before, and then you just want to do it the baby step fashion. So do me a favor. Tell everyone. Thank you. Applause