00:00 You’re listening to the live happier, longer podcast, episode 23.
01:18 Welcome to the live happier, longer podcast. We’re your hosts. Molly Watts and Angela McDade. We are here to help you build the habits of a happier, longer life. Starting now.This episode is brought to you by the five for life planner, or if it makes you feel better, the five for life planner slash Journal. Right. So you can go right now to fiveforlifeplanner.com and download a full PDF version of the five for life planner slash journal. Yeah, and the Five for life planner is a great tool to get you going and check off everyday, these daily actions, one, move, two learn, three, share, four give, and five, let go. Five daily actions, all proven to increase longevity and improve overall quality of life and happiness. Yeah. So you can live happier longer. Yeah. Check it out. Fiveforlifeplanner.Com for your free PDF of the five for life planner.
01:18 Hey Angela. Hey Molly. How is it going? Not too bad at all. Well, here we are end of January. And can I just say that it’s sort of a really typical Yuck January day here in Oregon.
01:34 It’s pretty bad. Cold, wet, windy, rainy, cold, rainy anyway. But that’s okay because we’re warm and cozy here in our podcast studio. We are. We are wrapping up our conversations this month on healthier approach to quote unquote diet, not diet as a way to lose weight, but as a, an approach to eating. Yeah. And um, we’ve had some great guests we’re going to touch on, um, a lot of the information that was shared. Just kind of recap some of those and it’s just you and me and we’re gonna talk about how, you know, a better approach to eating might help you live happier longer. Yeah. Let’s get to it.
02:19 So I would say that the overriding theme of everybody that we talked to, I think I can say that pretty unilaterally without a doubt that they would all agree on, even though they approached diet quite differently. We’ve, we’ve, we’ve gone the whole spectrum of, of diets. Yeah. Different, different ways to approach it. But I think everybody would agree on that. To eat healthier, you need to, one, reduce sugar and two, you need to cut out processed foods and they tend to go hand in hand because the so much hidden sugar and processed food that you don’t, you’re not aware is there. Yeah, I know. I think it’s pretty. I mean once you start looking for sugars in food, you get really like it. It’s amazing. It’s eyeopening. It is eyeopening. And what did we read? We just read this, the, the. There’s actually 56, I believe, a different ways that sugar can be labeled on foods and processed foods like 56 different names for um, refined sugars. Yeah. And you’re going to find that. I mean, it, it doesn’t matter where you’re looking because I guarantee you things that you don’t even think tastes sweet, are a sugar.
03:41 They have sort of processed sugar. Yeah. Yeah. Um, what was the thing? Uh, like potato chips. Sunchips, yeah. Yeah. Sun sunchips here are these kinna nice. Crisps. Whole lot at the time that whole wheat they’re baked. I mean they just sound so good, but they have sugar in them. Oh yeah, yeah. Like all the flavorings on the outside. Yeah, and the sugar recommendation for this is what’s kind of scary. The sugar recommendation for an American diet by the USDA on a daily basis. This even sounds like a lot, but it is 32 grams, which is like how many? 12. No, sorry. It’s eight teaspoons a teaspoons. Yeah. The average American eats approximately 53 teaspoons of sugar a day, which is 212. Like if you did a pile of eight teaspoons of. Well, eight teaspoons. I mean really a lot pile, but 53.
04:48 That is a mountain of sugar. Yeah, and you don’t know that you’re eating it because you’re eating it and you’re getting your. You’re eating his salad dressing salad dressing and it’s in it and you don’t realize it and you’re thinking it doesn’t even taste sweet and it’s in it or you’re eating something healthy like a Granola bar or yogurt. Yogurt is that is, It’s one of those criminal ones. Right? Seriously. So sugar was a huge topic of conversation. In fact, Lisa King, who was our very first guest, that was her. That was her number one thing was just reducing sugar and the reason that she’s so passionate about it and the reason it’s so important is because, and this isn’t just about less trips to the dentist though, I’m sure that probably that is one benefit. Yeah, that probably helps too, but sugar is linked to. Well of course, responsible for the obesity epidemic here in the states and the obesity epidemic is of course responsible for the increase of diabetes and high blood pressure and heart disease, strokes.
05:57 Yeah, I mean it’s just, it all goes hand in hand. And so, um, you know, there’s just a, and I think Lisa actually talked about it too. There’s actually a link between sugar and inflammation and, and yes, Alzheimer’s disease, disease. Actually all of them spoke. Deb spoke both sugar and inflammation aswell, that was a or inflammation in general is just a huge most diseases. Um, when you dial it back, inflammation. Are diseases of inflammation. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. So sugar and that was a huge, you know, a huge just overriding topic and it’s been. And then after we talked to Lisa of course, we got to talk to vinny Tortorich, which was just incredible just because vinny has been on this fitness scene for so long, um, you know, training celebrities and Andy is creating a documentary all about the shift in the Diet Industry over the last 20 to 30 now, maybe 40, 50 years now where there was actually scientific studies done in the fifties and sixties, and they tried to, and it was actually as a result of President Eisenhower having a heart attack in office.
07:18 And they, they basically came out and said that the way to lower your risk of heart disease was to stop eating fats and to start eating grains and low fat food. So what followed was this creation of this low fat diet. But you know what and Lisa King even talked about this too low fat. The way that they did that was they, they processed everything to death. You know, to create these little 100 calorie, low fat snacks. Nutritionless. Yes, absolutely. Nutritionless and highly processed and full of carbohydrates and full of sugars. The only flavor comes from the sugar. Yeah. And it’s amazing. So when we talked to Vinnie of his, his of course diet is no sugar, no grains, which is highly like a ketogenic or Keto Diet. Yeah. And it’s, it’s to remove all those excess sugars, like straight up sugars, only added sugars and then all the sugars that you get from the carbohydrates, right?
08:24 Because unfortunately, uh, in your body, carbohydrates are your body either burns sugars or it burns fats for, for energy. And most of us are burning carbohydrates because that’s where the bulk of our diet comes from. That’s an easy. It goes in, it’s burned up easily and then, you know, so that’s, that’s why your body would choose to do that first, right? And that’s. Yeah, but if you can become more of a fat burner, and Deb talked about this when we talked with her, that process not only is going to help you, you know, uh, reduce some of the reduced body fat, but it also helps. It helps a lot of things that helps in, you know, you’re processing for all your internal organs as well. So it’s kind of a, there’s multiple effect philosophy is if you are the whole fasting that we were speaking to how to be intermittant fasting and what happens is if you only eat within certain hours, one, you have a smaller window of calorific intake.
09:35 So that’s, that’s one reason. So, um, but not only that, itjust gives your body time to process that intake and the benefits that have that are just huge. And one of the things is that because you’re not just constantly topping up with sugar, your body has to figure out where else to get the energy and that where it uses a, yeah, it uses fat. Yes. A lot of people that do, um, that ketogenic type diet or focus on that. No sugar, no grains diet. A lot of them also do intermittent fasting. And one of the things is that if you eat more fats, if you eat more of those healthy fats and we’re talking like avocados, oil and olives and um, you know, but organic or grass fed beef and all the meats and cheeses and even dairy for some. I mean it is included.
10:32 Not everybody can eat it, but it is nuts and things of that nature hit. Yeah. There’s like, there’s healthy fats, right? All those healthy fats. I’m actually keep you satiated longer. So that’s one of the things that a lot of times goes hand in hand in hand with that intermittent fasting is being able because the, just like you said, the carbohydrates, they just go right through. You burn them up, you’d hungry? Yeah, yeah. Eat more. You burn them up, you’re hungry, right? The food manufacturers, they really created also a vicious cycle because you’re your body, you know, you get kind of, and this is in something else and we, you know, we can share it too, but sugar’s addictive and you have sugar stimulates the release of dopamine that feel good chemical, you know, and we’ve talked about that. And so I mean, as, as far as creating good habits, we know dopamine kind of keeps you, but it also, it also can be help you create bad habits because, you know, when sugar is releasing dopamine, your body goes, oh, this is great.
11:40 Let’s do this some more. So, you know, it’s uh, definitely something that was just, you know, overwhelmingly I would say a part of what we were talking about all, all month long. Yeah. And what Lisa was saying about it, once start to reduce the sugars and your diet, you do lose that craving. So when you eat things, if there’s a lot of things that before you, she, she has started to reduce the sugar in her diet and things that she would eat before. Now, when she eats them they taste too sweet and she doesn’t, you know, and she’ll just have a bite of something and that satisfies the sweetness. Whereas before she would have eaten. It’s like a whole candy bar or a whole, slice a key or something like that. No, a bait is enough to get that. Oh, that tastes good. But that’s enough.
12:32 Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting too because I know like I said, so Lisa really focused on reducing added sugar. So those refined sugars, those sugars that are, you know, reducing those. And I think she actually, the recommendation she shared was for women I think was 25 grams per day. It was a little lower, yeah, no more than 25 grams per day of added sugars. Now I know on no sugars, no grains Vinny’s approach, they actually have you avoid, um, most of the fruits that have, that are higher sugar fruits as well. And of course they’re no grains too. So that was interesting because we’ve talked a lot about, um, a blue zones and the blue zones diet is highly. I mean, they’re, there, they very much talk about a diet as base. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they talk about diet as a tool for longevity.
13:30 They are absolutely, you know, that that’s one of the features of, of blue zones. We have purposefully stayed away from a diet per se. Yeah. Diet recommendations. We wanted to explore kind of a different options all month long, which is what we’ve done. But what’s interesting is that there are a lot of people that talk about how grains in the body wheat especially causes inflammation. And so the plant based Diet that, uh, these blue zones recommends. And actually our last guest, Tina, I’m follows basically a 90 percent plant based diet. Um, and again, no- low processed foods doesn’t, tries to keep everything fresh food made from scratch. Yeah, yeah. She’s quite the cook. But that whole notion really. I mean like that’s where that, that real divide comes, you know, between those vegetarian plant based diets and the. No sugar no grain. Right. Which is full of meat.
14:38 Yes. Yes. Full of meat and full of, I mean, but basically anything that looks that is starch like. So that would include potatoes, rice, baked potatoes, I mean some sweet potatoes, legumes. Now pretty much legumes are out I think in lentils, all of that stuff which in the blue zones diet I mean that are a huge are basically the bottom line part of that, the highest concentration of centenarians in the seventh day adventists community and they are vegetarians and the famous doctor just died and he was a surgeon. He actually is seventh day adventist surgeon who kept doing surgeries into his nineties even open heart surgery. He was looking inside the bodies and touching people, vascular surgeon touching the actual arteries. And He, I mean several, you know, many, many years ago. And realized that the, that the plant, the vegetarians had more flexible, pliable arteries then then those who ate meat. Hence why, hence where we used to try to not take a hard stand on.
15:47 We shared lots of information and our deal is that you take all of that information and make that choice that works for you. Over the course of the month. We did get a lot of differing opinions and a lot of great information. Yeah, I think that’s the bottomLane. We got really, really good information. Some of it was very different, but all really, really good. All compelling. I mean, you know what I mean? There’s, there’s, there is a science to back up all of it. It’s not just, you know. And that’s what I love. I always love the science. I’d love to know the facts behind it. And I, I like to understand things [inaudible]. I think that maybe the reason that the vegetarians and the blue zones thrive so well is because of the no processing. Yeah. No matter what you’re eating. Yeah, right. Yeah. They’re just not eating a bunch of packaged foods off the shelf because you wouldn’t make a casserole and put four spoonfuls or table spoonfuls of sugar in it.
16:53 You wouldn’t do that. Whereas you buy a little packaged frozen meal and I’m quite sure you would find your. Yes, I’m sure that you would find a lot of stuff in it. So we, we talked a lot. Like I said, all of this was great information all month long and I know both you and I kind of took bits and pieces of it and started to try to apply it to our own lives. I, I’ve, I’ve used intermittent fasting before and I actually, it’s one of those things that, that is pretty easy for me and I like it and I liked the way that I generally feel doing it and talking to Deb just kind of reminded me like, Oh yeah, that’s, you know, there’s a good, there’s a good reason to do that. So that’s something I’ve been trying. Definitely has made me highly aware of eating processed, packaged foods for sure.
17:46 I mean I know that we like in our house. We don’t eat a whole lot of process, like we just, we like to cook so we, we do. You do like to cook? Your husband likes to cook, he likes to cook. Yeah, I mean we pretty much, we almost, not entirely exclusively but almost exclusively by our food from Costco because you buy big bags of vegetables and you know, so like all of that stuff we buy in bulk and then we cook it all from scratch. So. So which was a, a phrase that I had never.
18:24 I had never heard of “did you cook that from scratch” because I was like, what? Who else would you cook it? My. That’s funny. Yeah it was. That was something you clearly did not grow up in the seventies here in the United States because that was like, you know, I can only hope that I can undo some of the stuff that was done in my body. Yeah. Like, I don’t know. How old were you when you had a microwave at home? Well, don’t ask me. I, we’ve shared. I shared that story with, with when we talked about Deb, do we share it on the website? Do we share it on the podcast or was that before when we were talking about. I don’t know. I can’t remember, but. So you would my dad want a microwave in 1970, 1973 or 74, so I haven’t then when I was two years old. Right. So I don’t think my parents had a microwave when I lived at home, so I would, it maybe would have been the nineties. Nice. So I was soaking it all up for you. All those microwaves, like I said, I just have to check with my parents, but I really don’t think maybe we had it before then, but like a microwave, people are getting really scared for me right now. They’re listening. Oh my God. They’re like, where does she live? We didn’t have dishwashers either, just saying! We washed our dishes by hand.
19:55 Not so much. Nope. Oh goodness. Yeah. That they’re scared for me. They’re thanking their stars that they didn’t have. They didn’t have to. But anyway, back to what we were saying. We just. Fortunately that’s, that’s been a thing at our house. We have all was just, we enjoy cooking and will like, you know, trying different ways of cooking food and stuff. So. So that definitely is, now knowing more about the science behind all the, all the Yuck that you get and processed food that you really don’t want to be taking in. It’s just reaffirmed my, yeah, my belief in continuing to. I think the hardest one that I have like, like I struggle with is not even like the, the, the process like making processed pasta out of a box, like say macaroni and cheese, but like actually like giving up noodles, you know?
20:55 Yeah. Those are high and they’re high in carbs and sugars. I mean that would probably be the one thing that we would deep moral is the noodles, the dried pasta. Yeah. Like I said, that whole carbohydrate thing and low, low fat, high carb diets that kind of came into trend, you know, as I was growing up, I definitely believe that they’re, that they are responsible for a. yeah. For people being overweight. Statistics have shown that when, when the low fat diet was introduced or obesity rate cases the cabs and increase and the obesity increased. So yeah. And it’s also, it’s a shame because it’s, you know, it’s, it’s cheap, right? It’s cheap food and that’s the, it’s a filler and that’s why. And that’s a big part of that diet. Yeah. And that’s it. That is the most unfortunate part about it is like when you do go buy fresh fruit and vegetables that know that they’re not cheap.
22:05 I mean sometimes you can get them in when they’re seasonal. Obviously there is not as expensive but you know, in between times it’s, you know, you can be slightly more expensive and when you have a smaller budget you just want a fill yourself up and feel not hungry all day long. Back to the tuna pasta days. Exactly. Yeah. One of the other elements that I was listening to, I was listening to it on a podcast and then we talked a little bit about a book and a Ted talk that I thought kind of applied here when people are thinking about. Because, you know, honestly, a lot of us are really, you know, we, we don’t think about it all the time. We’re pretty good with what we do and we think we’re making good choices along the way or enough good choices I guess is really the way to say it.
22:59 And um, so I heard this talk, I heard this conversation about the compounding effect and it’s actually the book is called the compound effect and it’s by Darren Hardy, who’s the publisher of success magazine. And the talk I listened to was, it was really great and there was a, we can probably share the link to that youtube video that was kind of an overview of this book. But one of the things that really struck me with it is how much one choice, either the choice to eat something with sugar in it or not eat something with sugar at it every single day. Right? It has a compound effect. So when you’re in the moment you don’t think about it, you don’t, you know, you think, oh, it’s just one cookie and you eat it, right? Or you say, oh, I don’t need to eat that cookie and it’s just one, you know, one small choice or, or an extra pump of vanilla in your latte.
23:54 Right? All of these things, the compound effect is basically saying that, you know, you don’t realize when you’re in the moment, the small choices, they layer on top of each other and they compound and you may not get the result you want in the first 30 days. You may not get the results you want in the first year. And he has a great. This, this a youtube compilation that I watched. It had this great video where it’s actually like, you know, like interest, like we can understand compound interest when, yeah, it applies. But you could be making these changes every single day for six months and really not see an effect that you have to stick with it. You have to keep making these small changes. And I know Lisa King, you know, her book, tiny life changes. I’m sure she would agree with this, those little, but they don’t necessarily talk about the compound effect and how strong it is.
24:51 Um, both negatively and positively. Yeah. So the back to the cookie. So if you consider a cookie, I don’t know how many calories in a cookie. One hundred? I don’t know, just the depends on the cookie. Yeah. Yeah. So if you eat one cookie every day and it has 100 calories, they in for a whole year, you have 365 days, right? 36,500 calories. 100 calories. If you cut out those 100 calories over, that whole year, its 10 pounds basically. Yeah. So it’s like you don’t think one cookie right? A day or seven cookies in a week or 31, whatever, cookies in a month, you don’t really think so much about that. And it might be like a half pound pound, you know, it doesn’t add up, but at the end of the year all of a sudden you’ve got 10 pounds. Yeah, right. It’s, it’s the truth. And that’s simply for a weight that that’s an easy one to look at as far as a weight gain.
26:02 The, the, the effect of improving your diet is just, you know, all theeffects on your physical health is just such a big impact by making these little changed everybody and improving your, your dietary intake and it does it just, you know, it’s the accumulation of all these good choices that you make. Yeah, and Darren Hardy says the first step towards change is awareness. If you want to get from where you are to where you want to be, you have to start by becoming aware of the choices that lead you away from your desired destination. Become very conscious of every choice you make today as you so you can begin to make smarter choices moving forward. And I think really that’s kind of, I think, a great place for us. I mean in, in just a great overall synopsis of the information that we wanted to share.
27:00 Yeah, I mean for Five forvlife overall. Yeah, exactly. I mean we’re all about creating good habits every day, but to absolutely dial into a month of healthy eating, it’s just such a, such a good lesson and to take. Look at every choice you’re making. I know it’s not fun all the time, but think about what you’re putting in your mouth. Think about what you’re putting in your mouth and whether or not it really is going to help you reach your goals and whether those goals are to prevent disease, to lose weight, to live longer, to feel better to goes on and on, right? Whatever your goals are, make good choices and find the right dietary choices for you and start making those changes. Yeah, so next month we are going to be onto talking to some examples of living happier longer. Yeah. Some people that are all in their seventies, eighties, and maybe even some 90 year olds all about living that happier, longer life, which that’s what we strive to do. Well, everybody here at five for life that that’s the goal. That’s the goal. So we thought maybe we should get some advice from people that are doing it, people that we want to be when we grew up. Yeah, exactly. See you next week.
28:25 Thanks for listening to the live happier, longer podcast. Now it’s time to move, learn, share, give and let go. Five daily actions to make the rest of your life the best of your life. See you next week.
