Speaker 1: 0:31

Hi, welcome to episode five of Hacking the Fat man. This is a podcast about my journey from 550 pounds to 175, or actually, more likely, a body fat percentage in the teens is really what I'm going for. I produce this weekly and I gotta stop saying um, but I produce this weekly both for myself, as a marker of where I am and to record my efforts and initiatives and progress, but also I'm hoping to reach out to those that have suffered from depression or weight and or problem and see if I can help you guys out and hopefully provide some insight as I'm struggling. So a little bit of an update. It's been two weeks actually, two weeks from today, two weeks from almost right now that I had my gallbladder removed. It's been an interesting two weeks. I've learned a lot and I'll get into that a little bit.

Speaker 1: 1:26

I saw my GP on Monday this week, went in and had to get weighed and I came in at 255, and before everyone goes yeah, those that have heard the last couple of podcasts where I've said I was in the two thirties I knew from the my hernia surgery six months ago I, before I went in for surgery, I actually weighed myself like literally five minutes before I left to go have the surgery, I weighed myself and then I weighed myself a week afterwards and I had gained 20 pounds from it. It was purely water weight swelling, just the body recovering from it, so I'm not upset with the 250. In fact I weighed myself this morning less six days, it was already down to 245. It took about another two weeks for me to lose that 10 pounds of swelling. I can still feel it right here in my upper abdomen, especially on the left side, which is where that was the incision point where they removed everything and they had to make it quite large. So I still feel the swelling. I can even right now, my hand over my abdomen, I can feel the heat coming.

Speaker 1: 2:28

So there's definitely some stuff there Interesting not interesting, but on Wednesday I leave for a European vacation to Portugal and Spain, and so I'm kind of excited about that One. The Portuguese and the Spanish diet are fantastic for me. I love the food and I think I can actually still be really good there while eating some really good food that I don't normally get. The other thing is from the activity two and a half weeks of travel. My activity level is going to go through the roof. I have five dives planned. Right now I'm diving the Ocean Revival Park in Algarve area of Portugal. We're super excited about that. They purposely sunk four Portuguese warships to create the reef and they took all the environmental precautions and made everything for it. So super excited to do that. Go dive that area. Unfortunately, I'm only open water certified, so I can't do the advanced diving or the wreck diving because I'm not certified in that, which just means I'll have to go back because hopefully, by this time next year I have those certificates. So yeah, I'm excited about about that.

Speaker 1: 3:35

I don't know if I will pass next sunday. You know I'm trying to release these weekly fly out. Wednesday night I'm going to be traveling. I'm going to be no idea about internet access, so that though I so I might. Uh, we will be taking a week off from the podcast and then hopefully coming back the following week with a week and a half summary of the trip so far, um, how I'm doing, maybe even try to find a scale somewhere, maybe not, maybe I'll wait until I get back to weigh myself. So that's what we have coming up.

Speaker 1: 4:03

Another thing that was a surprise this week. So two things. One I've learned about what bile does in the body, because I've seen some improvement in my digestive system, meaning that the constipation Sorry, I'm going to talk about something. Anyway, we have to talk about it. Being on Zepound, one of the side, I found your digestive system and anyway, constipation is a thing I have been from severe, and I talked to my severe constipation. I should have talked to him sooner because it could have been a sign that the gallbladder was going um, I guess itself is laxative and so what I'm what I'm, I'm almost back to step down where things are moving and I am really pleased with that and hope it sticks. Um, I did miss a week after surgery, um, and take it monday and, and I haven't it did slow down a little bit but it not nothing like it had been. Anyway, we'll get off the constipation thing, but that's been a surprise. With the gallbladder is I think I'm actually getting bile into my system. Suspect that I was completely. The gallbladder itself was completely blocked and I was getting very little bile into my system, which is where the gallstones came from. So I'm feeling great on that.

Speaker 1: 5:17

Not only did I could not take my Zep-Bound shot last week, but I haven't been able to take my supplements. They want you not to take supplements. For weeks I could have started them up again, and I did one day, but then I traveled to Vegas to drop my dogs off for the trip and I've just been off my supplements. So one of the side effects I've noticed interest is, over the last week I've started having some negative thoughts, one around this what am I doing? Why am I doing this? I shouldn't be doing this. You know that the imposter syndrome was kicking in General. I started noticing that my attitude was not as pleasant as it's been over the last couple of months, and so I'm now suspecting that, outside of the inflammation and everything else that my supplements were given there, there are probably some um, mental health benefits, that and anything that you know. There have been studies that say that for me. So I started taking a lot of these supplements to go.

Speaker 1: 6:14

After inflammation. I knew I was inflamed, I knew I had swelling, I had pain and joints and that. So there is a link between that. Um, but something I'm going to resort, but I do want to take some to talk. There were a couple levels on facebook that I found that they were pretty interesting, and the first one is, if I can bring it up here on my screen. First one I want to talk. There were a couple of little things on Facebook that I found that were pretty interesting, and the first one is if I can bring it up here on my screen. First one I wanna talk about it.

Speaker 1: 6:34

You know my love of lemon juice. Early still have it here in my water. I couldn't find my squeeze so I just did old school spoon in there and so I've got a bunch of pulse. So if you see me pulling something, forgive, of course, three seeds all will harvest those and my love of citrus it. I found this. The early 2000s a friend introduced me to the juice cleanse and basically it was like three days or five days basically drink water and juice. That was it. And I chose lemon to put in there and I noticed that I felt better than I'd ever felt in almost my entire life. I felt doing this and it was such an impact on me that it stuck with me. So even though I'm not just drinking this as a diet, I've just added it to it. So it's my water, and even before I read this article, you could hear the joy in my voice when I talk about my lemon water. It just brings me joy.

Speaker 1: 7:31

So this is an article out of the Harvard Gazette, harvard EDU. You might have heard of them, and it was a study performed by Raj Mehta and if I'm name right, raj I'm sorry he is an instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a physician at the Massachusetts General Hospital. What they did is they discovered that eating an orange a day just eating a medium orange a day may increase a person's depression risk by 20%, and they think this might be because the citrus stimulates the growth of a particular bacteria. I'm not going to even pretend to pronounce it. I will put these links into the podcast and I will republish them both on Facebook and Instagram of the articles that I'm going to cover here so that you can see it, but it's an area that's been around for a while.

Speaker 1: 8:18

This is known to help influence the production of neurotransmitters, of serotonin and dopamine, and we know that those are two things that we know help elevate mood, and we know that those are two things that we know help elevate mood. When asked what inspired the study, he and another fellow read a paper. It was just about the paper they read, from 2016, was just about women, but it was finding coming out of that study. So they piqued their interest because it had a lot of data. But they wanted to also see if it wasn't just women or was it also men, and so they produced this study and it was conducted over what? A couple years, two years that they did it. So the first study was nurses who ate a lot of citrus had lower rates of future depression than those who did not. That was what came out of that initial study. So they started creating, recreating it and testing it themselves. And let's see what else did I want to? There was one of the things you know, one of the things that they realize, or what he's calling about, is there are. Well, this is his quote.

Speaker 1: 9:24

I think people know intuitively that food we eat impact our mood. We even have a term for this in comfort food and it's these dishes that you eat. That and I love citrus. It's just a comfort food to me. Enjoying your food. This was the second thing I wanted to take out of it. So it wasn't just the citrus coming out of this study, but it was in our diet. Again, back to one of my points. Is enjoy what we eat, that it cannot feel like a punishment. If you're eating as a punishment because you're fat or you think you're fat, sorry, don't, you can lose weight.

Speaker 1: 10:01

On one of my daily videos I shared one of my favorite comfort foods that I make and that is my came from my mom's tuna casserole. For foods that I make, and that is my came from my mom's tuna casserole and it was just, it's just two cans of tuna, some frozen broccoli, mushroom soup and pepper, and I absolutely love well, broccoli and spinach or spinach. I absolutely love that. Put some pepper on there. A gourmet meal and that it was just a quick meal. I would do.

Speaker 1: 10:28

I love cheesy broccoli. Green Johnson, you buy the steamed packages. It's not really cheese, it's more of the Kraft macaroni and cheese powder kind of stuff. But it's still nothing against that. I love Kraft mac and cheese. So can't eat it. But please, it reminds me of that.

Speaker 1: 10:44

Very calorie Cheese can be very high in calories. I tend to say I want the full fat version of things. Cheese is the area where, especially with the patient, that's sorry. Cheese can lead to constipation. So I'm, and it's high in calories. So while I do love cheese, I tend to try to reduce as much as I can, but the cheese doesn't count. I mean it counts but it doesn't count. So just tuna and the cheesy broccoli is a comfort meal to me. It just makes me feel good. So make sure to eat an orange a day, or have your lemon water that's a full lemon that I have in there juiced. Be sure to make sure that you enjoy the foods you eat. Take the time to understand what do you enjoy. Every diet I've ever tried, there were always my favorite meals, and most of my diet now is those meals. Just what mood am I in for which one? And I'm going to list those out at some point for you guys. I've already started a couple, but I need to work on that a little bit more.

Speaker 1: 11:42

The next thing, and this I just loved, I absolutely loved, in fact, every year forward, I love this study so much, but it was a study out of the University of Colorado, boulder, and this was why it was a study conducted of bacteria in dirt and does it affect our mood and depression. And so what they did was they grabbed some volunteers and they had plant seeds in soil that they knew that they had placed this particular again, I'm not a bacteria study. I guess it's one of the oldest bacteria on the planet. What they're studying, or what they're thinking about, is that this was a simple evolution, that this bacteria and us have evolved together. It provides a benefit to us. It improves our mood. They had wired electrodes, I guess, to people's brains and they noticed that. So one group planted in dirt that they knew they had that bacteria in, and another group planted and just and just from the electro man, the readings that they were getting from, they could tell within 10 minutes which, which group it was. So, looking at the results, not knowing whether someone was in dirt with the back that had been sanitized, they could tell which one were the dirt.

Speaker 1: 13:00

Fascinating to me, and there's there's still a lot of research that needs to go along with this. There's obviously, you know, no supplement. I'm not going to go along with this. There's obviously, you know, no supplement. I'm not going to tell you to eat dirt, but I will tell you to go plant things, get out in the dirt and have fun. I garden, watch some of my daily activities and I'm using exercise. Look for exercise. It's actually just working in the back, because I do know it improves my mood. I can feel it just being out there. It makes me feel better. So now it's good to know that there's actually a reason why it's the smells that you're the fresh air there's could be something in there. So their recommendation is eat. Eat fruit and vegetables, because even if it's been cleaned and washed, there's probably some of they call these old friends, this bacteria, old friends. There's some old friends on on there. So eat fresh fruit and vegetables. That's going to help us. Might be one of the reasons why fresh fruit and vegetables are good for us. And then go play in the dirt, have a good time, enjoy your.

Speaker 1: 13:53

The last article I wanted to cover and again this is a you know on the topic of just mental health and what it means to our diet a new study that came out this, this is from Neuroscience News. Been able to find the actual article. I tend to like the source UCSF. Oh, so sources the University of sorry, uc San Francisco tested the effectiveness of a week-long web-based well-being intervention known as the Big Joy Project. Okay, so this is an article on Neuroscience News talking about the UC San Francisco study on the big joy product project and they they enlisted over about 1700 17,000 individuals from around the US, canada, great Britain to participate in this project and what they wanted was a few minutes a day, five to seven minutes of kindness, whether it's's to adults or to yourself, and what they discovered was after the seventh day. They call it an intervention. After the seventh day intervention, participants reported higher levels of well-being and positive emotion and a stronger belief that one's own behavior can promote happiness. They also reported decreased stress and improved health and sleep quality. Why this matters you know we've kind of covered it in the last couple articles is we know that improvements in well-being are associated with lower risk of future mental illness. That leads then to better physical health. People with higher well-being are less likely to develop chronic conditions like cardiovascular disease, reduce mortality in both unhealthy and unhealthy population. Web-based well-being interventions over the last several weeks take three to four hours a week to complete have shown favorable results. But this is the first time that a short intervention has shown such strong benefits. So what that means is they had done studies that if you were doing three hours a week and that it had improved. Now they realize it can be as simple as five to seven minutes, simple acts of kindness, and this was particularly interesting to me.

Speaker 1: 16:33

I remember at the height of my depression, when I was thinking the bad things that simple tasks used to me off and make me frustrated. Like, actually take my water. I've got a Samsung refrigerator no offense, samsung, but literally it's the worst ice dispenser I've ever seen on the planet. I get one ice cube about every 20 seconds. It's slow. It's even just filling up the water is slow and pain, and I used to get so frustrated at it. Or even just getting up, you know, you hear people that can't get up out of bed. Well, it's worse than that. They don't even want to take a shower. I didn't want to take a shower, even though I knew I smelled, I was dirty, I was disgusting, I'm miserable, um it just I did not have the energy to get up and do something.

Speaker 1: 17:22

And reframing those tasks in my head when, you know, when I, when in episode one I talked about just doing something a little bit of kindness makes do make my life a little bit better each day, it was actually those tasks I started to focus on. So, getting up and when I'm taking a shower, I remind myself it feels good to be back to myself, it feels good. This is a good thing that I'm doing for myself. I am benefiting from it. Versus oh my God, I can't believe I got to get up and take another shower, whatever was going on in that stupid true brain. I'm pushing that aside now. It's just, it's gone.

Speaker 1: 17:58

So, doing the simple things, not getting frustrated being in the moment on. So doing the simple things, not getting frustrated being in the moment. And so if I find myself getting anxious, waiting for the Samsung to drop the next ice cube, I start thinking about other things. I start just being calm, deep breathing, think about something good that my dogs did or something. And next thing, I know I've overfilled the ice, got too much ice in it. Well, okay, that never really happens. But close and or the, or it fills up and I'm done, and it feel like an hour is that feels like the two minutes that I'm doing, and that's again just the well-being, the, the act of kindness to yourself, and just reframing what you're staring at or what you're doing to help give you this, this feeling of, of, of, of wellbeing.

Speaker 1: 18:44

So it's, it's, it's, it's interesting to me, um, and and, and I think it's important, and these two things, three things, that that, and the reason I bring them up is I've realized I I have a a not a story problem but a articulation problem, that that I know things are working and work for me, but I'm not really sure why they're working for me and I'm articulating them well, right? So when I talk about well-being, people will you know I've talked with families and friends about this, and acquaintances or anyone that wants to sit down next to me on an airplane. I will talk to them, you know, about my adventure, if they're interested in it, and they immediately start focusing on these other things. I, I, you know, I keep trying to tell them hey, you know, there's no guarantee they start talking about well, I'm frustrated because I don't have the house I want or the those, but those are tomorrow, right, what are you doing today to get you to those results? I ask, I'm frustrated, I'm not 170 pounds and, yes, I, I want, I want to be it, but I don't start there. What am I doing today, at this second, because it's the only thing I can control is this second. What am I doing this second that will lead me down the path to where I want to be in the future? And as long as I'm doing something now that gets me there, it starts to, it starts to get easier and it starts to get better.

Speaker 1: 20:04

One of my favorite quotes and I did post this recently on Instagram was from Van Gogh, and I'm paraphrasing and I'm going to paraphrase it horribly, I keep trying to remember the exact quote, but it's, it's greatness, just greatness doesn't happen overnight. It is a bunch of smalls brought together and that's exactly it. It's how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Don't worry about the house and where you want to be in the future those things will come. Just make sure that you're moving yourself. Don't worry about your weight. Make sure you're doing. Did you do everything that you did today, that you could do today, that set you up for success tomorrow? And if you keep doing that, you will arrive at your destination at some point. Yeah, so that's it on the articles.

Speaker 1: 20:47

I do want to kind of touch on a just just a couple other things from last week's podcast, right? So in last week's podcast, I started talking about how we start to how would you start to implement this diet, or how would I start to implement this diet and I'm bringing back this, the mental healthness thought, because that's actually where I started, right. Last week I talked about setting a caloric limit, setting very small changes to your lifestyle. See if they stick. And if you can stick with those, then you add on the next thing, right? So, yes, you can go out and buy a gym membership and hit, great If you can lose the 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 pounds on a gym membership. Thing that you like to do good on you.

Speaker 1: 21:33

From my standpoint is I've done the diets and exercise, I've done the hardcore workouts and then I got injured and my diet went, or I had to travel for work or for some other reasons I lost access to something. Oh yeah, talking about buying a treadmill or gym membership and you know, it's kind of like our New Year's resolutions and I've been guilty of this, everyone's been guilty of it. Okay, I'm going to make a change and for some reason it's the easiest change we make is buying something expensive. I'm going to buy a bike, I'm going to buy a and I'm not knocking those things. If you can do it and stick with it, great, do it For me. I found that those aren't make this stick.

Speaker 1: 22:16

Going back to this, so making small changes to it, to my diet, my life seem to have greater lasting effect and become easier. You know, if you want to walk for exercise, great. Why don't you just get up and walk for 30 minutes? In our case? It's hot, it's summer, I get it, but you don't need to necessarily buy a gym membership or a treadmill first. I suggest making some smaller changes. The 5 to 10 minutes of just doing acts of kindness to yourself and for others, that's a great change. That's something you can immediately do today. Tomorrow it will start to change the way you approach things. Adding a medium orange or a lemon to your water, a citrus is going to start helping you.

Speaker 1: 23:02

Last week I talked about moving to earlier in the day. That's a simple shift, right? Instead of eating all your calories at six o'clock, eight o'clock at night, move your calories to noon to 2 pm. I already 90% of my calories in by 2. Most of the time I'm actually getting 100% of my calories in by 2 pm, but I've also set the limit of if I've missed something or if I'm feeling a little hungry, making sure I don't eat past 5. That's also something I've added, and those were simple changes to my life that I can do anywhere in the world, it doesn't matter where I am, and they had great effect in enabling me to start. So, yeah, that's this week's podcast.

Speaker 1: 23:43

So, if you're looking to start, if you're looking to make minor changes, I posted one of my favorite quotes from Van Gogh butcher this mercilessly, but it basically was greatness doesn't happen in one act, it's a bunch of small acts coming together, it's the how to eat one bite at a time. So doing simple acts combined lead to greatness, and I just love that quote because that's kind of what, not kind of. That's exactly what I'm trying to say here. Start small, make small changes, because by doing this, it's exactly what I'm trying to say here. Start small, make small changes, because by doing this it's more likely to stick and become a habit in your life. Working out an hour a day is a major change to your life. Again, not knocking if you can do it, awesome if you can't. But shifts tend to not stick and we know that. I mean the number of gym memberships that don't really use them, though they have them money. The companies want you to do that because they know a certain population is going to be like that.

Speaker 1: 24:42

Small changes, acts of kindness to yourself and to others. After your diet, what am I supposed to do? Oh and go play. Go get outside and have some fun. So that's this week's advice. I hope you enjoyed this podcast with Hackin' the Fat man Again, no podcast next Sunday. I'm going to take a week off and try to get one out, depending on what my internet connectivity looks like in Barcelona, because I'll be in Barcelona at that time and hopefully I'll have some stories about my dives and dive in Porto Mayo and the ocean park, because I'm really, really excited about it. I hope you guys time and hopefully I'll have some stories about my dives and dive in Portimao and the ocean park, because I'm really, really excited about it. I hope you guys are great, have a good week and I'll see you in two weeks. Alright, cheers.