Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Amazon Music | Email | RSS

Podcast 118: Obesity and Preventing Illness

Obesity is a leading cause of preventable illness and death in North America. In recent years, the number of overweight people in industrialized countries has increased significantly – so much so that the World Health Organization (WHO) has called obesity an “epidemic”. In the United States, over 50% of the population – about 150 million people – are overweight. In Canada, about 40% to 60% of adults have a weight problem. Whatever your situation is, a healthy ideal weight is paramount to living a vibrant life.

Scott: Hey everybody you are listening to the Life Enthusiast online radio network restoring vitality to you and the planet I am your co-host Scott Paton and our other co-host is Martin Pytela. Hey Martin how are you doing today?

Martin: Good Scott thanks for asking it has been a very busy day I don’t know where all these people are coming from but they are calling.

Scott: They are coming from our podcast Martin, you keep telling them to call and they call but just before you and I went on the air you and I had a very interesting discussion because you are at what I call ground zero. When people are calling you they’re asking you questions and you and I were talking about some of the things you were discussing with people today and I thought we should share some of those with our listeners because if someone took the time and energy to call you and ask you something there is probably hundreds or thousands of people that have similar type questions and it would be great to get that answered so let’s just do a day in the life of the Life Enthusiast co-op and let’s just talk about some of the issues that came up during the course of the day and that would be kind of towards the end of the day as we are talking now so you have had a full sixteen hours of being on the phone.

Martin: I tell you I am just all talked out I would just love to sit here with you just running your hands through my hair saying oh well I don’t care who it is I am just going to close my eyes.

Scott: That is your wife’s job not my job.

Martin: I know but listen when you close your eyes when they turn out the lights you can’t tell the difference.

Scott: Well I think some people might tell by my five o’clock shadow.

Martin: Yes that part but I asked you to touch me on my hair just to tell me everything was okay.

Scott: Everything is okay you did good today a nice little shoulder rub would feel good too wouldn’t it.

Martin: There you go what a friend would do. I am not asking for anything beyond what a friend wouldn’t do.

Scott: Okay so what were some of the things that came up through the course of the day?

Martin: Well one of the people called as a referral from another person so this person the source is a lady who had an astounding problem and was told that she had parathyroid problems and that she was going to have to have it irradiated and operated and destroyed and taken away and she says before I do that can we talk I am thinking I want a second opinion someone in the natural healing business so we went through the motions explaining what I thought and made some recommendations and three weeks after she stared taking the stuff that we sent her which is the simple stuff. We sent her magnesium, iodine and the ZoeTein a super food blend anyway the simplest stuff and she is doing fantastic her doctors cannot believe and how is it possible that we had you misdiagnosed all your life. She had high calcium all her life high calcium and they were saying that is parathyroid, over production of parathyroid hormone causing you to have high calcium and I said to her don’t you think that they should look at the opposite of high calcium you know there is the sea salt and the other one is the low magnesium so how about we fix that? So anyway we did so the referral is she has a friend so the friend called up and said let me tell you about my symptoms I am fifty two I am two hundred and something pounds and all of the excess weight that I have is carried right in front I look like I am eight months pregnant and I have diabetes and I have high blood pressure and I said you know lady there is a name for what you’ve got it is called the metabolic syndrome X and she said my doctor doesn’t know that.

Scott: That is a very official sounding name too.

Martin: Well when doctors have something with the name syndrome on it what they mean is really we have no clue and it must be something that we don’t understand that’s a syndrome. That is why we have fibromyalgia syndrome or the metabolic syndrome or something with the gut, I don’t know I forget all the names oh yeah AIDS acquired immune deficiency syndrome another one that we don’t have a clue what is killing your immune system but something is.

Scott: And we will give you some drugs to help you out.

Martin: Well logically you know a man with a hammer.

Scott: Everything is a nail.

Martin: That’s right so anyway here is this conversation with this fine lady from Chicago so i said you have this issue sort of late in the day you just cannot help yourself you just have to open a bag of chips or open a box of donuts or eat some pizza or something like that right and she says yes how do you know?

Scott: You are a mind reader Martin.

Martin: And I said there is another woman just like that in Chicago who is quite famous and she has the same problem she has had to fight with her weight all her life and she has had a fight with her thyroid for many years and her million dollar doctors can’t seem to find the answer for her but you know how do I get to her show. Somebody out there tell her there is this guy on the west coast he has the answers, no he is not a doctor, no he doesn’t have degrees, no he doesn’t practice medicine he just tells people what they can do differently and when they do it differently they improve their life.

Scott: Their life changes.

Martin: That’s right.

Scott: So what do you do if you have metabolic syndrome?

Martin: Well the first thing you need to do is you need to increase magnesium because you are calcifying you are calcifying everywhere you have too much inflammation everywhere and you need to soothe it. Second thing you need to do is you need to fire up the thyroid so you need to increase the intake of kelp so we recommend sea weed. It is the iodine the low levels of iodine that causes the thyroid to be running at a low rate. So those are the first two things I said and it is very strange that your situation is very different from your friends, who has parathyroid problems and you need to take the same stuff. Then I said you know maybe there is something wrong with the water in Chicago there is just not enough magnesium in it and not enough iodine and then it dawned on me there is no ocean next to Chicago so people just don’t eat enough sea weed and don’t go swimming in the ocean and they are just deficient. So I expect that she is going to be getting better soon we are mailing it to her and all that she is hopeful and I know it from experience that she is not the first one that we are going to help. I have had people call up and say I have heard that magnesium helps with arthritis and I say in general it helps with inflammation you know i cannot help you with any condition that has a medical name on it but if you are talking about sore swelling joints then yeah we can probably do something about that.

Scott: Right we can’t fix arthritis because nobody knows actually what it is but if you have sore joints we might be able to do something there.

Martin: So this women I recall quite vividly calls up about that, no other questions just that so I said okay soak your feet in magnesium crystals that is what you need like three times a week about a quarter cup in a bucket of water and keep doing it. She called six weeks after and she says you know I love it the symptoms are gone my joints aren’t hurting and she says you know what my blood pressure has dropped and I lost twenty five pounds.

Scott: Wow that is amazing.

Martin: And I said you didn’t tell me about the blood pressure and the overweight and she said I didn’t call about that it wasn’t high on my priorities list but she was suffering from this.

Scott: That is a fascinating story I mean who would have thought that being out of magnesium would have caused or having the right amount of magnesium would cause such a dramatic change.

Martin: Exactly I mean we keep saying it over and over I mean it has been two years Scott and we keep coming back to the basics.

Scott: This is our hundred and eighteenth podcast episode.

Martin: And we are still on the basics because this country is not getting it. Well the reason they are not getting it is because the companies that advertise on TV have no interest in pushing magnesium because there is no money in it you know fools like you and me are trying to make a living promoting stuff that we cannot mark up.

Scott: Which we sell for pennies and not dollars.

Martin: You know this woman is getting out of her metabolic syndrome and I just shipped it to her and a two and a half months supply was a hundred and six dollars with everything included you know you go to your doctor and you don’t open the door before you drop a hundred dollars but if you go to a naturopath the first thing they say is that we need to do a few tests so that will be about three hundred and fifty dollars for the panel oh yeah we are seventy five to eighty dollars an hour and the initial appointment is one and a half hours and so on right. So anyway that is the famous metabolic syndrome in fact we spent a good amount of time on this weight loss program that maybe we should tell people about it. What do you think?

Scott: Sure we called it weight loss for good. Well did you hear about the banana diet?

Martin: Okay I am not on it.

Scott: It had this really weird name it was something like the Japanese banana diet and it was this really weird thing you take three bananas in the morning and drink a glass of water a half an hour later you will lose weight or something. I don’t know can you eat three bananas all at once?

Martin: Well I tell you by the third day you are so sick of bananas that you would rather be on a fast.

Scott: That’s what ends up happening.

Martin: I tell you Scott that would have to be the most insane diet going.

Scott: Well it was famous and it was in the news and everything I don’t know if someone died from it or not but it wouldn’t surprise me so the weight loss for good program is not about eat this or eat that as much as it is about why because there is two or three different reasons about why someone could be overweight and it is not always your fault. I guess that a lot of people who are overweight feel really guilty about it and I must be weak, it is my fault and I am weak. You know it’s my fault and I want to take responsibility maybe it’s part of what you put in your mouth but maybe it’s what you should be putting into your mouth but what you are not and you did a really good job of explaining the metabolic syndrome like someone who has that going on has a whole different problem than somebody who is eating ice cream all day right and sometimes you can do all the exercise you want and eat all the proper foods as opposed to junk food and there is still a problem.

Martin: Just like I remember the famous lady from Chicago she admits on the air that she has potato chips they just call me you know I just open a bag and I don’t stop until I finish it so she has a strong addiction to the carbohydrates and then later she says I am on corn chips now, I have gone organic blue corn chips now.

Scott: Now does that make any difference at all?

Martin: Well there are a little less on the glycemic index where the potato chips would be 100 the corn chips would probably be 94 and well they are organic so there is probably pesticides on it but nutritionally they are both carbohydrates, they both are starch, they both will convert straight into sugar and they both will go straight to the hips.

Scott: So that was the first part and the second part is once you have identified what your main issue is, what you can do about it because too often people are telling people to do the wrong thing. It just blows my mind like this week you have to eat more fats well now it’s the protein diet and the low carbohydrate diet.

Martin: Or the no fat diet. I remember Dan Cornish with the no fat diet and the zero fat fad where we have low fat salad dressings I mean it is so asinine you know.

Scott: So there are good fats and bad fats and you need to understand that not no fat because our body requires fats to function properly.

Martin: That’s right if you eliminate omega 3 fats out of your diet which is what our society has just about succeeded at doing you will increase the levels of inflammation phenomenally. There was this famous doctor Nicholas Perricone who was running a skin care clinic in New York and he found that omega 3 fats when you put them on the skin or into the skin dramatically decreased the inflammation which means wrinkles go away and it reverts back to useful plump rich appearance so he was treating his rich clients with high omega 3 oil supplements and low and behold the side benefit was that they were getting skinny.

Scott: So you are talking about putting the omega 3 oil on the skin?

Martin: Well remember we have been talking about for a hundred and seventeen episodes that it makes very little difference what you swallow something or put on the skin or into your body because it will absorb.

Scott: Okay so if you had a good cold pressed hemp oil, flax oil, fish oil or whatever. You have trained me to have a bath once or twice a week where I put magnesium salts in it and it is very soothing and very relaxing and I can tell, actually it was interesting because I was getting off the floor because we were kind of just sitting around on the floor and it was kind of achy getting up and down and then I realized I hadn’t had a bath in two weeks and I thought that was interesting.

Martin: So the inflammation started to return back into your body.

Scott: And I noticed it so you kind of trained me. I don’t have a bath anymore I have soup so I am just thinking would it be helpful to put a teaspoon or two or more of hemp oil or a high omega three and six cold pressed and soak in it for twenty minutes?

Martin: I don’t think so I think you need to put it onto your skin and allow it to absorb because if you just put it into your bath it will just float all over your bath tub and make a mess and accomplish nothing. No you need to put it onto your skin and let it absorb.

Scott: I will do that, I have actually been taking a teaspoon of hemp oil a day.

Martin: Okay you are on the right track now go to two table spoons or you go to six and not one teaspoons. That is the level you need to hit to go therapeutic.

Scott: So part of my concern of course was that this is a high calorie intake.

Martin: But those are the good calories like you need calories like 2400 calories just to sit still.

Scott: So there is another thing and it is just the sort of thing we talk about in weight loss for good you know you can be watching your calories and gaining weight because you have the wrong calories going in.

Martin: That is a phenomenal question you’re asking too many calories right. Well the joke is this it does represent 250 calories which is ten percent of the daily recommended intake but these are the most calorie dense foods.

Scott: Yeah I mean two table spoons is not a lot.

Martin: Well it’s enough right.

Scott: I mean compared to a pasta dinner if you look at the two table spoons and you look at the pasta dinner there is a lot of pasta and sauce and meat ball right and garlic bread.

Martin: Have you ever tried bread dipped in olive oil and vinegar?

Scott: Oh yeah.

Martin: Well you could do this you could take an ounce of the oil and add some balsamic vinegar. I mean the bread is not going to help you I mean bread is carbohydrates but if you are going to do it then do it with good omega 3 rich oil.

Scott: Well the hemp oil I am taking you right now is a cold pressed and it has a nutty taste to it and it doesn’t taste nearly as bad as the cod liver oil my mom gave me when I was growing up.

Martin: Yeah fish stuff tastes fishy.

Scott: So that’s good if you get calorie dense, nutrient dense foods like the hemp oils that has the omega 3s because I have heard that part of the reason why our body holds onto fat is that it is looking for the good fat and it is not getting it so there is that problem so when it gets the good fat it lets go of the old fat. I had this image of my body grabbing onto my fat and saying you’re not leaving right.

Martin: And you know you have been conditioned terribly, remember you just said you took one teaspoon and I said no no you have to take six because you were really timid thinking oh I shouldn’t eat all this fat because it is going to be high calorie.

Scott: Exactly what I was thinking I didn’t want to overdo it because I don’t want to take this stuff and I also have this thing that if you eat fat you get fat.

Martin: Well I remember this conversation with your body builder friend before he had his conversion to raw foods and we presented to him the super food ZoeTein which is precisely great at turning fat into muscle, he looked it over and said there is too much fat in this formula and I remember just fuming saying yeah but it’s the good fat you miseducated person.

Scott: Well there is just so much and yeah he has seen the light we have a convert but there is so much information out there and so much misinformation like you and I like discussing blind men and elephants and there is six blind men and they are all at a different part of the elephant and one is like he is long and thin like a snake and he is on the tail and another is like it’s like a tree trunk and he is on the legs and of course they all think they are right but none of them have the big picture. One of the advantages that I have and everyone that is listening has is your many years of experience and the whole big picture on all of this.

Martin: You know Scott it was my realization that I had to apply my training as a systems analyst, as a management systems consultant. and I had to apply that to my own health, when I finally realized that made the difference and that is the difference between strategic and tactical thinking and in medicine that is the symptoms oriented medicine versus holistic medicine. These days’ lots of people talk about holistic but half of them don’t really know what that means.

Scott: Okay so what does holistic mean?

Martin: Holistic as in Holos is Greek word meaning the whole thing means that you consider all aspects in your solution, and you need to see the big picture and strategy of it before you go to tactical measures. That means managing the cellular terrain for the whole body. You know just as an example let’s just say that you have gluten intolerance which means you are going to be unable to digest wheat, barely or rye, you could have inflammation in the gut, incessant diarrhea, you could have eczema, you could have high blood pressure, you could have hair falling out, hormonal disturbances. I mean you could be going to your endocrinologist and he is going to be fiddling with your hormonal imbalances not looking to the gut or you can be going to the skin doctor saying doctor I have this horrible psoriasis or eczema and you need to do something for me and he is going to be lathering you in creams and cortical steroids and never asking if you eat wheat? and that’s the holistic medicine and we just start from the basics. How do you eat, how do you exercise, and what do you do for your mental health?

Scott: How stressed are you because that again can lead to weight gain right.

Martin: Absolutely stress is an inflammatory stimulant and food is the tools we readily go to in order to soothe it.

Scott: Right so if someone wanted to go check out this course that we put together called weight loss for good where could they go?

Martin: Well Scott you were involved in putting it together, there is this whole website that we have dedicated to it. It is called obesity-diet-weight-loss.com.

Scott: This is called setting you up.

Martin: Yeah you set me up good and I fell.

Scott: I pitched a soft ball for you to hit out of the park. It is some great information on the site and some great information in our conversations,

Martin: We have actually put together a series of messages of emails that you can enjoy reading dealing with each one of the weight management issues and not only that we also are normally giving it to readers for twenty dollars but maybe we should make it attractive to our listeners right?

Scott: Right yes we should give a little something special for our listeners.

Martin: Okay ten dollars off and the coupon is going to be called WL4G which is weight loss and this coupon will WL4G on this item this weekly report you are going to get ten dollars of instead of 19.95 you will pay 9.95.

Scott: Wonderful half off doesn’t get any better than that.

Martin: After all this is a downloadable informational product. We could have easily charged $199.00 for this product because after all we have one or two hours of listening content.

Scott: I think it was about an hour and a half.

Martin: Okay so you have an hour and a half of listening to us talk and more intelligently than this with more focus and no rambling and also we have a transcript of that too.

Scott: It’s a great reference, rather than go to the point that you want to refer to you can just whip through the transcript and say yeah there it is, there is the information that I am looking for.

Martin: So there. You are going to put a link to this text for obesity-diet-weight-loss.com. Note: replaced with updated content.

Scott: So if you go to LifeEnthusiast.podomatic.com that’s where all the archives are for our 180 episodes that we have done to date and I will have a link there for you to go and see more about the weight loss program and there is also an email course that comes along with it that you can sign up for free and each one has lots of great information about how you can lose your weight for good.

Martin: And those of you who may have remembered that we had tried this once before, we did and this is the reincarnation of the program after we got a lot of feedback. Some of which was not good and saying this was not like you so we decided to go back to the drawing board. Instead of having a marketing perspective we took a serious high value good for you perspective.

Scott: So we look forward to hearing about what you think about our second kick at the can.

Martin: Right it better be good or else.

Scott: Right so Martin if someone wanted to know more about the life enthusiast co-op where could they go?

Martin: Well they can go online to www.life-enthusiast.com or call us at 1-866-543-3388 and we will walk them through it. We are answering the phone from 8 am to 8 pm pacific time. So there we are this is our talk about what’s new at life enthusiast and how my day has been.

Scott: I think maybe next time because we only have one but maybe next time we will do another one I just find it fascinating to hear what people are asking about and what’s going on.

Martin: Absolutely, I agree. So folks thanks so much for listening and time out of your life to listen to us this is Martin from Life Enthusiast co-op restoring vitality to and to the planet. Thank you folks.

Scott: Bye-bye.