Hello everyone.
Welcome to 2025.
I hope you had a great and safe holiday season celebrating with family and friends. I am unfortunately seeing many not so lucky patients who got sick after some gathering and are struggling with prolonged symptoms like coughing, post nasal drainage, fatigue and just not feeling well.
It is still not too late to get your vaccines. The cold and flu season lasts until late April but there is no Covid “season”. It is a year round disease.
It is important to test yourself for Covid if you are sick. Remember that with the Flu or other colds, the virus is spread by droplets produced by sneezing or coughing. The Covid virus however, is spread by simply breathing.
Now onto the main topic.
The New Year often brings new ambitions and lofty aspirations of habit change and I wanted to talk briefly about resolutions vs intentions as well as the importance of little steps.
When we make New Year’s resolutions, we are usually looking at making big changes like losing weight, exercising more, stressing less and improving our diet. All very important things, but the resolutions usually have unrealistic goals and often lack a concrete plan. They usually have an “all or nothing” aspect to them as well. Meaning, when we eventually break the resolution, we feel like we have failed and we stop trying altogether.
And the vast majority of us fail in these resolutions.
80% of New Year’s resolutions are over with by the end of January. In fact the second Friday in January is known as “quitters day”. By the end of February, 90% of resolutions have failed, and we are back to our old habits and lifestyle choices.
Intentions however, have a more compassionate approach than resolutions. They do not tie us to an outcome. Intentions emphasize the importance of being more mindful about our actions and continuously trying to improve. Shame and guilt never lead to lasting change.
If you’ve made a resolution to eat better, when you inevitably eat a cupcake and are reaching for another one, you may feel like you’ve failed in your resolution and are much more likely to give up altogether. If you instead make an overall intention to eat better, you may cut yourself some slack and view the dietary indiscretion with less criticism. It’s still not good to eat the cupcake, and even worse to eat the second one, but acknowledging that it is also not the end of the world and you can keep trying, is a better approach. None of us are perfect.
Unfortunately, fear is not a lasting motivator either. I see plenty of head and neck cancer patients who were scared into quitting smoking or drinking too much who slowly return to their bad habits over time. The same goes for heart attack or stroke survivors who eventually start back on their unhealthy diets which got them into trouble in the first place.
When discussing lifestyle changes with patients, they often say how “it’s too late for me” or that “I am too old” or most commonly, “It’s in my genes”. These are all just excuses and justifications we tell ourselves to make us feel better about continuing to do the things which, may make us feel better temporarily, but ultimately, make us feel worse and do not promote health.
Dr. Dean Ornish, has conducted many studies showing that improving the 4 key pillars to lifestyle change: a healthier whole food plant-based diet, increased movement, stress management and increased love and social support, can prevent and reverse many chronic diseases and certain cancers. His most recent study even showed reversal of some early dementia symptoms, something NO multimillion dollar drug has ever shown. In another of his studies, in only a few weeks, positive changes were seen in the expression of over 500 genes, turning on genes which improve health while turning off genes which promote inflammation and cancer.
Most importantly, Dr. Ornish’s work has shown that how much you improve has little to do with your age or the severity of your illness, just the extent to which you are willing to change.
Change is hard and losing weight in particular can be daunting. Most patients are quite shocked when they are told how much weight they need to lose to just get into the overweight BMI classification, let alone the healthy class. A common response is “I’ll never lose that much. I have not weighed that since high school”. It’s important to remember that they did not put this weight on in a week, a month or even a year. And losing it is an equally long and slow process.
But even small changes have big results and profound effects.
For example, losing only 1 pound significantly reduces the total daily load on your knees, equal to 20 tons. This is important since being overweight increases the risks of needing a knee replacement by over 300%. When you lose just 10 lbs., there is a significant impact on cholesterol and blood sugar levels, heart attack and dementia risk, joint pain, sleep apnea, cancer risk and your reliance on medications starts to drop.
Nursing home studies show that, just sitting in a chair, marching with your legs in place, has positive cardiometabolic effects. The largest diet and bladder cancer study found that only a 3% increase in animal protein consumption led to a 15% increased risk of bladder cancer, while only a 2% increase in plant protein intake resulted in a 23% decreased cancer risk.
The point is not to do as little as possible, but that small changes can go a long way.
If you want to go all in with a lifestyle change, that’s great, just don’t be discouraged by imperfection. Just keep moving forward.
See you next time.