Sustaining Healthy Habits and Weight Loss

Hey, Brian, how you doing? Dr. Perlman, good to see you. Please call me Adam. All right.

So many of my patients, many friends and family have struggled with being overweight and have tried various fad diets, various approaches to lose weight. And inevitably, I get asked about different approaches and whether I think they work or not. And I know you've shared with me that when you were younger, you were overweight and how you were able to lose that weight and then keep it off. Like, what was the secret? What was this journey like for you?

When I was young, actually, when I was 19, I remember getting on the scale and I got there, it's 276 pounds. So I'm six foot three, and I had been playing football, and I remember thinking, whoa, you know, this has gone too far. I'm not playing sports anymore. I got to do something to kind of reel this in. And so I started then reading data about what happens if you don't lose the weight and so forth, and it scared me. And so it was at that point when I just started putting in small, little changes to both exercise and nutrition, little habit changes and trying different things. Learning new information all along the way was just experimentation, learning what works, what doesn't work.

So many people have this scenario where you use the word, it scared me. Yeah, right. And I often wonder, like, how do we create that sort of epiphany for ourselves or that inflection point in our lives where we decide to do something different.

One thing is, I get bored incredibly easily. I am not going to be the guy that has the same thing for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That's not going to be my thing. But if I find some interesting article about some crazy fruit that comes from Africa that has this health benefit, I'll definitely have that into my diet for a few weeks. Right? So I try to keep things fresh. And that has really been a big help to me.

I mean, it kind of makes me think of though, this. I was at Duke, as you know, and there's this Duke Wheel of Health, which I know you're very familiar with. And what I liked about the Wheel of Health, because it looked at all these different areas of health and well being, not just nutrition or exercise, but even concepts of rest in there and professional development, spirituality, which could be purpose and meaning and connection and relationships. Often we can be a little too tunnel vision with our view of what a healthy lifestyle is or what well being truly is. And that will, at least for me, help me to think more broadly about the various aspects in My life, some of which may be sort of healthier than others and help me to focus on different areas.

As an example, you know, how are exercise and relationships and communication related? And on the surface it might not seem like they are, but when you go, wow, aerobic exercise actually helps with my anxiety levels. It helps with my chances of depression. Right. It helps with my self esteem. And then you go, how does that actually play out with how I communicate with people? Right. Or how I make time, how I prioritize. It's incredible the relationships between things you see.

Yeah. And I know I've heard you talk too, about just even being grateful that my heart continues to beat, you know, every moment and grateful for the breath that I can take. And as someone who maybe has struggled with trying to be perfect versus excellence, and that has led to unneeded suffering at times. And I also think as someone, as we often do, who tends to scan the environment for threat, which I think evolutionary, many of us do, and that worked well. Except nowadays the threats are a text message we didn't like or an email that maybe had the wrong tone and getting triggered by that, you know, that's something personally I've really worked on, thought about that only from my own context, because it's also about the example I want to set for my kids. We have five children, as you know. And how do we teach gratitude to our kids? Well, I think it probably starts by stopping and feeling and experience gratitude ourselves on a daily basis. Right.

Just. Just feel your heartbeat. Right? Feel your heartbeat and feel the appreciation for that. None of us asked to be here. I mean, I don't remember asking, but I'm here. Right. And can you feel appreciation just for that? Right, Just for that heartbeat, the chance to be here, whether it's hard times or good times, can you feel appreciation for that? And then blending that with Rumi, especially his guest house poem. Right, right. About feeling these things. Bad, good, they flow through us. Can we let them flow through us without labeling them as good or bad? Right. And that's how we can really experience gratitude. Just for the gift of life.

The mind, body connection is funny. I mean, I've obviously seen that many times with my patients. And it doesn't mean what they're experiencing isn't real. It just means that somehow stress or other aspects of the way they're thinking or feeling are influencing their physiology and contributing to the pain or other things.

I studied biomechanics in graduate school and so really it's just physics of the body and it's Incredible that what you can. You can watch somebody when they start talking about something that's maybe uncomfortable or something, and you can start to see neck muscles start to contract. Right? You can see recoil, you can see tightness in the arms. But the things that maybe we're not aware of, right. Depending on what's going on in our minds and what's actually manifesting in our bodies, are incredible.

So many people think, okay, I want a purpose. I heard this, or someone mentioned it, or I listened to a podcast, Now I'm going to go buy the Dalai Lama's book. Or, you know, it often starts with such little things. I used to put three sugars in my coffee, and I think the first thing I did was cut it down to two, literally. I mean, I can almost remember that by going to Dunkin Donuts and being like, nope, I'll take two sugars with my coffee, please, today. You know, and then kind of work, right. Kind of worked my way back down, you know, and kept going from there. But it's those small changes, maybe those small habits, right, that we begin. We evolve over time, you know, and then we begin to sort of string together this. These series of behaviors that, you know, hopefully leads to this life that we want for ourselves. It's consistent with, again, purpose or goals or whatever we, you know, it feels meaningful to us.

Yeah.

You need to start by believing it could be different, whatever different is. But you have to believe it could be different than it is today.

I mean, fundamentally, do you believe it could be different? That's a great question to start with. Because. Because if you don't, it's gonna be really hard to put in place any of the things that we've been talking about today. If I, at 19, had watched us talking now, 20 some years later, I would have thought, who is that psychopath? Right. I mean, I really would have because it's been so gradual over the time. But the one thing that was consistent and pointed. You just nailed that. The one thing that was consistent from that day forward is I do believe that things can be different. And believe me, economically, I was in the worst possible shape. But it wasn't going to do me any good to focus 20 years on the future. It wasn't. But I focused on what I had control of each day. Right. And then one thing that became infinitely important to me was celebrating that just with myself, the little steps that I took.

Not easy for many people.

No, it's not. Right.

Because we tend to be so judgmental of ourselves, and in some ways, starts with a belief that it could be different, definitely, you know, and then saying, let me take the first step in.

My journey and why can't it be? You know, why can't it be?