Podcast: Starting Your Journey to a Healthier Life with Dr. Orlena's Four Pillars
Transcription of Podcast
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Good morning. Good morning. Hello, hello, and welcome to Fit and Fabulous with me, Dr. Orlena. I hope that you are feeling amazing and have had a lovely little spring break. Today I want to talk to you about how to start crossing the rickety bridge. So last week I talked to you about the Rickety Bridge. So if you haven't listened to that podcast or Facebook Live, go back and have a listen to that.
The Rickety Bridge to Healthy Living
And what we'd really talked about is. You're standing here, you know that you want to get more healthy. You know that you want to either lose weight or increase your energy, just start living healthily, but you don't really know how. And I talked about this concept of the rickety bridge of where you are now and where you want to get to.
So where you want to get to is it's all just happening automatically. You've got habits, you've got systems, you've got routines, and you just live a healthy life because that's the life that you are used to living. But the reality is, There's what I call the rickety bridge going from A to B, and what that means is you start making changes and you get pinged back.
Crossing the Rickety Bridge to Healthy Living
Life happens. Life is busy lifeing. And when that happens, you take your eye off the ball and you forget about all those amazing changes that you're making and you go back to. Your habits, your what I will call your old habits. But the reality is, is they are your habits. And what what has happened is you haven't really ingrained those new habits.
What I say is you have mistaken an acorn habit for an oak tree habit. So that's the concept of the rickety bridge and how it's very dangerous because what happens to a lot of people is they start going, life happens, they fall off the rickety bridge and then they think, oh my goodness, nothing can work for me.
It doesn't work. I'm gonna give up. And that's the worst possible place that you can be. So today I want to talk to you a little bit about, well, how do I start to walk across the rickety bridge now?
Dr Orlena’s 4 Pillars of Healthy Living
If you've listened to me before, you know that I teach four pillars, so I'll just recap the four pillars.
Healthy Pillar One: Healthy Eating and Loving the Med Style Diet
Pillar number one is healthy eating, and I teach the Mediterranean style diet because it's the most research on how to lose weight, how to lead a long and healthy lifestyle. And what the Mediterranean style diet essentially is, is lots of fruit and vegetables, legumes, lentils, olive oil, less processed food.
So it's not a diet in the sense of, oh, you have to restrict what you are eating. It's a diet in sense of a framework of everything that you eat, and you have to enjoy eating healthily. If you don't enjoy it, you are not going to do it.
Healthy Pillar Two: Exercise that Lights You Up
Pillar number two is, Exercise that lights you up. I'm just about to go swimming in the sea and I'm super excited about it.
Healthy Pillar Three: Delicious Healthy Sleep
Pillar number three is delicious healthy sleep.
Healthy Pillar Four: Emotions and Mindset
And pillar number four is the emotions and mindset piece. And this is a big piece. This is a lot of work, and personally, I've done a lot of work on my own, on myself, on pillar number four. In the last, well, I'm gonna say 10. And it's the really interesting piece as well.
It's where amazing breakthroughs happens where you really begin to get to changes. But you can see that if I'm saying, okay, there's these four pillars and where you really need to get to is healthy habits in all four of those pillars. When you are standing there right at the beginning thinking, oh my goodness, that's a lot of changes to make.
Making Healthy Changes That Stick
So how do you start making changes? And that's the question that I want to address today. Now what I normally do, It. Well, let me backtrack a little bit. If weight loss is your goal, the two pillars that you really, really need to pay attention to, Are how you eat and your emotional wellness. And your emotional wellness really includes your mindset.
So it's looking at your mindset. So thinking, okay, when things go wrong, what's going wrong? And if you miss the workshop that I did recently, I still haven't taken it down actually, it's still in the Facebook group, but it's about positive mindset and negative mindset. And really having a think about, okay, how can I make this.
So that's really the framework that you want to get into. Positive mindset. But if weight loss is your goal, you want to start with pillar number one. You want to start with healthy eating. Now a lot of people say, okay, I want to lose weight. I want to start with exercise. Now, there are some times when this is true.
If Weight Loss Is Your Goal: Start with Nutrition and Mindset
Exercise can be super helpful, the the one to start with, but I would say exercise is the one you really want to start. When you are already eating healthily, and I mean healthily, I don't mean just vaguely eating healthily, and then really knowing that you've got emotional eating. When you've nailed your emotional eating, that's when you want to have a look at exercise.
Now, I'm not saying that you shouldn't exercise. I think everybody should exercise every single day, but what I'm talking about is really focusing on improving one of these pillars. And if weight loss is your issue, then it needs to be food. Now, there's lots of reasons why this is, but one is it is so easy to eat lots of calories without really noticing about it, and it's actually quite difficult to exercise off calories.
So you can do a lot of exercise, but you can undo that damage. You can undo. You can do a lot of damage and undo all of that work quite quickly by eating not so healthy foods. And this really comes down to the equation of calories in, calories out. Now life is a little bit more complicated than calories in, calories out, but it is a good framework to understand what is going on in the body.
And it is basically very difficult to exercise. From a perspective of looking at calories, so you know, you can do, I can swim for an hour and it will say, oh, you've done, I don't know, 200 calories. That's not very much. It's very easy to eat a chocolate bar, which is 200 calories. So what I recommend people do is focus on healthy eating, number one.
Now, the next question is, okay, so how do you focus on healthy eating? What is it that you're gonna do with healthy eating? And the answer to this question is, there's lots of different ways. There's no one right way of doing it. So you can either just make incremental small changes. So you can just say, okay, do you know what I'm gonna.
My vegetable consumption. What I'm actually gonna do is add in some vegetables at lunch, at dinner. I'm just gonna increase that and I'm gonna do that for a period of time, and then I'm gonna make another change, and then I'm gonna make another change. Actually, the more you increase the amount of vegetables you eat, the less you eat the other stuff because you feel full up.
And so it may not turn off eating processed foods entirely, but it is going to help you reduce the amount of processed foods that. Now the other thing you can do is you can just go all guns blazing and go, do you know what, actually I'm gonna do this for two weeks. And this is the process that I work my walk my clients through.
We do something called a two week reboot, where you just go, that's it. I'm gonna, I'm gonna do it for two weeks and I'm gonna see how I get on with doing it for two weeks. And what I will tell you is you won't do it perfectly, and that's perfectly. It's looking at the positive changes that you are making, and I think two weeks is a really good way of doing this.
Well, for many reasons. Number one, it trains your mind. Your mind goes, oh, actually, it's not too bad. It's not so scary. I'm standing here right at the beginning thinking, life without sugar, life without all my favorite treats is gonna be boring. It's gonna be abysmal. When you've done it for two weeks, you actually realize that life is great, that you can still have enjoyment and fun from other things that aren't food.
So training your mind is a really important thing. Training your taste buds is another really important thing. So our taste buds regrow every two weeks. And if you are eating lots of sugar, your taste buds well and salt as well. Your taste buds are expecting lots of sugar and salt. If you cut out the sugar and salt after two weeks, your taste buds are just, and you begin to really notice the flavors of natural.
I love to talk about what I call the strawberry test. So a few years ago, it was Easter. This was many years ago now. My kids were young, we were eating chocolate and strawberries. Now I had one of the strawberries, delicious, beautiful flavor of strawberries bursting from your mouth. Just so sweet and yummy, yummy straw nurse.
Then I had some chocolate, obviously super high sugar. All you can taste is sugar. And then I went back and ate another strawberry. What happens that strawberry, the same strawberries from the same punt of strawberries is now sour and there's no flavor. Why is that? It's because the taste of the sugar so high from the chocolate has really masked any of the natural flavors, and the strawberry is much less, it's got much less sugar than the chocolate.
So I can't taste the other natural flavors of the strawberry. Now, that's an example of something that. For five minutes. But if you are eating sugar on a daily basis, you are doing that every single time you eat. You're training your body to want that sugar, that taste of sugar. And so when you eat natural sugars, your body is just a bit like, yeah, this isn't so great.
I'm not so impressed by this. So there's what I call the physiological changes, but there's also the mental changes as well in that our body, our mind gets used to sugar. It gets used to this idea of, okay, if I'm hungry, if I want a sugar hit, I need to go and get sugar. And actually our bodies are perfectly capable.
Of getting sugar from stores. We've all got stores of energy. If you are a thin person, you have three months of energy stored in your body, three months. So you don't need to go and get sugar. You just think you need to go and get sugar now. Don't worry, you are not alone. Everybody thinks like this and I've had to train myself to realize that actually, oh my goodness, I can go and swim.
I can go and cycle without needing that. That external sugar sauce. And I remember the first time I thought I used to get up in the morning and I used to have some breakfast or banana or something like that and then go swimming. And I decided that I was going to stop doing that. And the first time I did it, I was thinking, oh my goodness, what's gonna happen to me?
Am I gonna run out of energy? And the answer is absolutely not, because I know my body is perfectly capable of going and. That energy and that I don't need to fill myself up with sugars before I go and exercise. Now, a caveat is if you are exercising for a long period of time, yes, you do need to have sugar.
You do need to have external sugar. But from a point of view of weight loss, you don't need to have the external sugar. Your body is perfectly capable of finding it. So, so many good reasons to think about why you should change your, your food, your healthy eating, and why you should really focus on healthy eating and stick to it, because if you don't stick to it, It doesn't work now.
It's such an easy plan. It is so easy. Eat healthy food. Keep eating healthy food. People tell me, oh my goodness, it doesn't work for me. Yes, it does work for you. You just need to keep doing it. And it stops working When you stop doing it. People always say to me, but it's so easy, and I say, yes, it is easy.
I can make it complicated if you want, but really and truly eat healthily and you will lose weight. Now, a lot of people say to me, okay, I do eat healthily and I'm still not losing weight now. Well, number one, I need to have a look at what you are eating to see if you are eating. And number two, the question really to ask yourself isn't, Hey, I'm doing this thing.
I have got this expectation that my body is going to start losing weight. It's really more about, okay, what do, what do your body need to lose weight? So you may be eating healthily. If your body is not losing weight, you are eating more than your body needs. Now that is partly because you are eating what your brain thinks you need as opposed to what your body needs, and your body will tell you what it needs.
So you can tell. If you are eating exactly what your body needs, you are not going to be losing weight. And so in order to lose weight, you do need to eat a little bit less because you need to allow your body to use that internal energy, and your body is perfectly capable of doing that. So as you're losing weight, you do need to lose, eat a little bit less.
Now, it does not need to be unpleasant. You do not need to be ravenously hungry all the time. You don't have to be fighting desires and and cravings all the time. So talking about cravings, there are two threads to the craving. There is your mind thread and there is what your eating thread. And so another really good reason to do your two week reboot is because it's really gonna help you with your cravings.
You're gonna understand what's going on in your mind, but also you're gonna be training your body to not have that link with food, not have that desire for. And you need to do the two things together. You need to do the mindset work, the understanding what's going on, but you also need to train yourself away from what I call white refined sugar, which is sugar and flour, all those white refined sugars.
So if you are not sure how to start going across the rickety bridge, my answer to you is, Well, you're one. Number one. You're welcome to come and book a call and I'm happy to chat with you about where you think you should start. But for the vast majority of people it is, start with pillar number one, healthy eating, whilst also paying attention to pillar number four, because you need to pay attention to emotionals emotional wellness.
You need to pay attention to your mindset as well. Now, exciting news, really super exciting news for those of you who are interested in making changes to pillar number one and two, I am doing. A, a four, a four week event. Event basically, and it's called Positively Healthy. And we are going to be focusing on, hey, guess what?
Healthy eating and mindset. Now, if you want to know more, let me know and I will show you the page that I have put together. It is four weeks where you're gonna start off really focusing on building up your positive mindset, and then you are going to plan, not a reboot so much, but just two weeks of healthy eating.
And you are gonna do two weeks of healthy eating and I'm gonna give you recipes. I'm gonna give you meal plans, all of the stuff that you possibly need. I'm gonna hold your hand to do this, and we're gonna do this with group coaching. So I am super excited about this. We're gonna be kicking off on April the 27th, and we're gonna be doing it for month, just in time for people in the Northern Hemisphere to start thinking about going to the beach and start getting it into their summer swimming wear.
Positively Healthy
Find out more and sign up here: https://www.drorlena.com/positively-healthy
So get yourself feeling fit and healthy for the summer. So if you're interested in finding out more about Positively Healthy, then let me know and I will give you the. Okay. Have a fabulous day, and I look forward to seeing you next week. Bye-bye.
