Red Mountain Weight Loss

let me tell you about my mom. my mom was 42 years old when i was born, and she started exercisingfor the first time in her life. she started by running around the block, and then she started doing 5k races,and then she started doing 10k races.

Red Mountain Weight Loss, and after that, she ran a marathon, and after that, my mom did a triathlon. by the time she was 57 years old, my mom was trekking uphillto the base camp of mt. everest.

(laughter) and let me tell you about my dad. when i was a kid,my dad used to take me to science classes. he was also my calculus teacherin high school. i wanted to crawl under the desk. i learned something important from my mom: the value of health. and i learned somethingimportant from my dad: the value of science.

and these two values have guided meon my trek through life, and they've helped me appreciatean epidemic that we are all facing. and it's not ebola. instead, it is the epidemicof unhealthy living. a half billion people worldwide are obese. and you would think that 50 years afterthe first u.s. surgeon general's report on the dangers of tobacco was publishedwe'd be beyond the problem of smoking. today, a billion peopleworldwide use tobacco. tobacco and obesityare two of the most preventable causes

of premature death. solving these problems is liketrying to solve a jigsaw puzzle. we engage in unhealthy behaviorsbecause of our genetics, because of brain neurotransmitters, because of environmental influencessuch as peers and the media. each of those pieces of the puzzle are not things that you and ican solve on our own. but there is one piece of this puzzlethat may hold the key: our choices about what we dowith our cravings to engage

in addictive behaviorslike smoking or overeating. our choices. there is a new science of self-control that may hold the key to reversingthese epidemics. it's called willingness. willingness means allowingyour cravings to come and to go, while not acting on them by smokingor eating unhealthy. but actually, i'm not talking aboutwillpower, and i'm not talking about "power through your cravings."

instead, i'm talking abouta different notion of cravings that looks like this: dropping the struggle with your cravings. opening up to them,letting them be there, and making peace with them. now at this pointyou may be very skeptical. i was when i first heard about ityears ago. a friend of mine came to mewith a book on willingness. he said, "jonathan,

this book will change your life forever!" and i said "oh, ok...yeah... yeah, i'll check it out." so i went through it and thought,"nah, this is a bunch of psycho-babble," and tossed it aside. until some years later when my wife brought me to a workshop on willingnessat the university of washington, and i was blown away. so then i read the book, and then i read a lot of bookson willingness,

and i got trained in it, and what i learned wasthat willingness is part of acceptance in the acceptance and commitment therapyapproach to behavior change. it's a broad approach to behavior change that's being used to help peoplewith anxiety disorders, with addictions even some innovative companies are now using it to help improvetheir employees' performance and reduce their stress. now, to understand why i was blown away,

you have to understandthe world i live in. in my research world, a common way you help peoplequit smoking and lose weight is you teach them to avoid their cravings. avoid thinking about smoking,distract yourself from food cravings. there's a song from a broadway showthat captures this perfectly. it goes like this: (singing) when you start to get confusedbecause of thoughts in your head, don't feel those feelings,

hold them in instead. turn it off like a light switchjust go click. we do it all the time when you're feeling certain feelingsthat just don't seem right. treat those pesky feelingslike a reading light and turn them off. (applause) we all live in this world, where the song we keep hearing is"turn off the bad feelings." now, let's take a look at these cookies.

they just came out of the ovenooh, they are so good! ah, they're so delicious. mm-mm, just feel that cravingto eat those cookies. ooh, they're lovely, they're so good. now, turn it off! turn it off! you want those cookieseven more now, right? you see the futilityof trying to turn it off. you can't turn it off!

and maybe you don't have to. maybe, you can leave the light on. here is how: my research lab at the fred hutchinsoncancer research center, here in seattle, is conducting randomized clinical trials to see if showing peoplehow to be willing to have their cravings is effective for quitting smoking. we are conducting trialsand face-to-face interventions and a telephone quit smoking hotlineand a website called webquit.org

and in an app called smartquit. these technologies have the potentialto reach millions of people with interventionsthat could save their lives. that's pretty amazing. and let me tell you about the data. when you pool together the resultsfrom six clinical trials, all six that have been published to date, including trialsconducted by our colleagues, what we see is that for the peoplewho were assigned

to the avoidance approach -avoiding your cravings —- some of them quit smoking, and it varied depending on the study. however, for the people who were randomlyassigned to the willingness condition, twice as many quit smoking. very, very encouraging. now, of course, the data only tell usone small part of the story. so, to help you see willingness in action, i'm going to weave togetherexperiences i've had

in counseling people for quitting smoking. and i'll together refer to themas one person that we'll just call jane. so, as is typical of people who come into want help for quitting smoking, jane was a 45-year-old person who started smokingwhen she was a teenager. she tried to quit smoking several timesand was not successful. so, she was very skepticalthat anything "new" was going to be helpfulto her for quitting,

and yet she was really hopefulthat this time would be different. so, the first thing that i showed janewas to be willing, that is to be aware,of her cravings in her body. so to notice where she felt cravingsin her body. and what i did was i asked her to journal that, and just to trackthe intensity over time, and to see if she'd smoke afterwards. so in the middle of explaining this,she stops me and says, "what are you talking about?i don't have cravings, i just smoke!"

so i said, "well, why don't you try it,and we'll see what happens, and if it doesn't work,we'll try something else." so she came back a week laterand she said, "you know, i've been tracking my cravings, i've been tracking them all the time. and now i can't stopthinking about smoking! what am i supposed to do?" well, before i tell you my answer,let'’s look behind the scenes. now, what was probably going on here

was that janewas having cravings all along, and like a lot of us,she was living on autopilot. you wake up in the morning,you smoke a cigarette, you have a cup of coffee,you smoke a cigarette, you get in the car, you smoke a cigarette. we're often just not aware ofwhat we think, what we feel before we act. so, my answer to jane was to be willing, and one of the waysi showed her to do that was with an exercise called"i am having the thought".

so, one of jane's thoughtsbefore she had a cigarette was, "i'm feeling a lot of stress right now,i really need a cigarette." so i asked her to add the phrase "i'm having the thought" like this. "i'm having the thought that i'm feeling a lot of stress right nowi really need a cigarette." then i asked her to add the phrase"i'm noticing i'm having the thought," so "i'm noticingthat i'm having the thought that i'm feelinga lot of stress right now,

i really need a cigarette." now, we can all do an exercise like thiswhen we have any kind of negative thought. like for my thoughtthat "i'm boring all of you with my talk" and i'm having the thoughtthat i'm boring all of you with my talk. so, what this exercise didis it gave me a little bit of space between me and my thoughts. and it's in that space that i can choose not to run offthe stage in front of 1,500 people. and the fact is we don't acton every thought we have,

because if we did, we'd all bein a whole lot of trouble. so, this was helpful to jane,but there was something else that was really difficult for jane. i felt a lot of compassionfor her about it. that was the judgment that she felt from people when she would beoutside smoking a cigarette. the criticism from her husbandfor being a smoker, and the self-loathingthat she developed about smoking. and she dealt with this shameby having a cigarette,

which gave her relief temporarilyuntil the shame came back. so, i said to jane, "what would it be likeif we tried to honor this feeling of shame as part of the human experience? if you had a close friendwho is feeling shame about smoking,” i said to jane, “what would you offer this friendas words of caring and kindness, and could you then offer those wordsto yourself, jane?" and she looked up,

and she had this look of this temporaryrespite from the shame, which made it justa little bit easier next time not to act on the craving. so, here is the secret to self-control: the secret to self-controlis to give up control. because otherwise, we get into a tug-of-war with a monster,a craving monster. and the craving monster says, "come on, smoke a cigarette.come on, have that cookie. come on!"

and you're on the other side saying, "no craving monster,i'm going to distract myself from you, i'm going to ignore you,no, no, no, no." and the craving monster says,"no, no, come on, you know you want it!" and you're just back here and you're going back and forthand back and forth and pretty soon the craving monsteroverpowers you — you have that cookie,you have that cigarette, until the craving monster comes back.

and then you're in the tug-of-war againdoing what we've learned how to do. unless - unless you drop the rope. and what you discover is that if you just allowthe monster to be, to occupy a space in your body, you discover in a few minutes that the craving monster is notas threatening as he appears. and sometimes, he even goes away.

as we break for lunch, we're going to havechoices of what to eat. when you see them, try to be awareof the cravings in your body, try to be willing to have those cravings. see if they pass on their own. whatever choice you make,try to bring a spirit of caring and kindness to yourself, for that is the mountainthat we are all climbing. thank you very much.

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