Exercise, Nutrition, and Health: Keeping it Simple | Jason Kilderry | TEDxDrexelU

at one point in our lives we've made an assumption an assumption that we ultimately regret it but we probably learned from that assumption i've made a lot of those bad assumptions in my life i've learned a lot from them but there's one that particularly stands out that absolutely changed my life so about seven years ago i was struggling with the kidney disease an inherited kidney disease called polycystic kidney disease runs rampant in my family so what happened is i was in and out of the hospital constantly and i got to tell you something when you're in the hospital that much it gets boring you can only watch so many prices write reruns you can only sit there and read so many books so what i would do is i'd grab my iv pole and i'd start walking around the hallways my source of entertainment was eavesdropping and all the conversations the nurse were having nurses were having with their patients like oh that's interesting i never knew that about cardiovascular disease next room etc i'll never forget one room that i came on i came upon a gentleman was being discharged from the hospital from what i could gather from this conversation he had been in the hospital for quite some time and he had some sort of heart surgery and the nurse said well aren't you excited you're getting out of here it's like i'm really excited she goes what are you going to do i'm going to take my wife out to dinner she goes that's fantastic where are you going to take your wife oh we're going to go to mcdonald's your wife is going to be pissed you're going to mcdonald's oh my goodness so i'm like i can't believe he just said this how is the nurse going to respond to this and she said to him i don't know if that's the greatest idea and his response is what changed my life he said don't worry i'm gonna get the fish fillet good answer so immediately grab my iv walk towards that room you kidding me i was really angry i kind of thought about what he said and all the time that i had spent in the hospital dialysis units doctor's offices all the people that i came across that were struggling with disease i had a very bad attitude towards these people because i knew a lot of them were there because the choices they made in the foods they ate and in inactivity in their lives but i was that was not a good thing for me to do it's a very bad attitude because my background is in health and exercise science these people don't know better and when i go back and think about his response and he said don't worry i'm gonna get that fish sandwich he actually thought that was a healthy choice he thought that was a good decision and that's when i said you know what if i recover from what i'm going through my goal is to reach as many people as possible to make sure they understand the simple aspects of nutrition and exercise and how they can change our lives listen i want to change a lot of lives with 315 plus million people in the u.s that's a lot what's interesting 117 million of those people have one or more chronic diseases that could have been offset if they chose better foods if they moved around a little bit more 1.5 billion people are either obese or overweight listen i could talk statistics all day numbers all day but i don't want to talk about that there are many variables that we can do to change this i want to talk about one and that's how we get our information and how to keep that information simple listen we hear about nutrition and exercise every single day we see it on social media output friends to dinner we talk about it news magazines whatever it may be we hear about what's right what's wrong etc and then you have all the experts all right i put that lightly experts okay ultimately these experts are pushing supplements they're pushing extreme ways to exercise etc often they're making things more difficult and often what they preach is not evidence-based there's no scientific literature to support it um hopefully they're getting something out of it all right but when we take away it's not simple they're making things way too difficult so i grew up in northeast philly i'm a small guy i have a big mouth so i figured you know what i got to learn how to defend myself at one point in my life so i started taking you know from very early age i started taking some boxing some karate a little bit of wrestling i did this all the way up into my late 20s and i saw a lot of instructors and i'll never forget this one instructor i had he was very very good and the reason was he stuck to the fundamentals we went in there every day and we learned the same punches the same kicks the same footwork i learned a lot from him it carried over into me learning those skills the rest of my life and holding on to them now a lot of the others instructors i came across basically the first day we're going to learn a couple you know punches second day you're going to learn a flying jump kick what flying jumpcake i don't even have a punch and you're having to jump off chairs no thank you they didn't stick to the fundamentals there's a great saying proverb i love it feed a man a fish you feed him a meal teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime that's what i want to do i want to feed people for a lifetime with the fundamentals and listen it's not that hard if you go to shop right all right today i'm going to eat the strawberries i'm going to put down the strawberry pop-tarts congratulations you made a fantastic decision if you decide to get the oatmeal over captain crunch that's a terrible decision captain crunch is the best cereal on the face you see where i'm going we can keep this pretty simple but unfortunately what makes nutrition specifically so hard to understand so hard to grasp is the diet out there everyone at one point in their life has been on a diet and unfortunately diets make things difficult diet is like religion nowadays you see something about diet on social media every single day on the news every single day and i hate to admit this but they work and the reason they work is there's some set principles one it's structured it's more structured than we normally eat two they often eliminate processed foods this is which is a good thing and they often eliminate one major macronutrient whether it's protein fat carbohydrate and what this does we intake less calories we're more structured like i said so we see gains we lose weight our blood work might be a little bit better but ultimately the bad thing about this is quick fix it happens overnight and this is why we go yoga diet because they create boundaries you can't eat certain foods so when you have ice cream you have failed your diet you've stepped outside that boundary and that beats you up see and what happens is you do it again and you do it again to the point where you're not following that diet and maybe some of the good nutritional principles that diet has and still so that's why we yo-yos so much but let's look at just some essential nutritional habits that we can instill into our lives when we go shopping every time we've heard this time and time again let's seek out fruits and vegetables let's seek out foods with lots of fiber all right your oats your grains your fruits your vegetables your dark leafy greens but seek out healthy fats that we find in healthy oils nuts seeds fish avocados if you want to eat meat that's fine just make sure you have a wide variety of it and we want to have a wide variety of all the other foods we choose as well meat gets a bad rap and it's ultimately because an average american takes in probably 72 times the amount that we can actually absorb and use that is not a statistic so please don't quote me on that you get what i'm saying so those four basic principles we have seen in the scientific literature of the evidence for the past 50 years that when you follow these it leads to offsetting chronic disease increased quality of life more vitality all right we do have to be aware of the sugars this is my son first time he had cake it was like i don't even know what it was like it was he was pretty excited let's just put it that way with that said we are these sugars these refined sugars we have to limit them processed foods that you see at the end of the aisle at supermarket we have to limit them there's no nutritional value to this stuff all right i'm not saying completely get rid of it because listen my family's from northeast philly if you told me that i had to stop eating cheesesteaks you're nuts cheesesteaks and hoagies are a food group in my family all right with that said let's just use that old principle of moderation let's limit these foods and then maybe one day yeah you might want to emit them from your nutritional habits but again we're all human and unfortunately with these salty you know sugary based foods that we like we watch a lot of tv and we watch a lot of terrible tv let me tell you so with that the average american is spending nine and a half hours a day plus looking at their phone on the computer or watching tv the average american spends 160 minutes in front of the tv a day but they spend less than 20 minutes in a kitchen preparing food martha stewart is pissed if she found out you are only spending 20 minutes in the kitchen a day she's not happy all right and what else does this cost inactivity we're not moving we're not moving at all we need to get out and move more all right because we have a lot of things that ultimately just set us up to sit down and sit down a long time dr steven blair did a study looking at the predictors of death the number one predictor of death was low cardio respiratory fitness aka sitting disease we sit too much yeah we have to get out and move more i'm not telling you you have to run a marathon all right i'm saying you need to get out 30 to 45 minutes a day and move all right walk your dog ride a bike the american council sports medicine says 30 to 45 minutes a day is what we need to get now listen that's a reach for many of us i coach athletes to do 5ks 10k marathons sprint triathlons etc some of them don't do 45 minutes a day of activity that is a goal that is something you want to reach for you maybe start off at 10 minutes a day all right maybe 10 minutes in the morning 10 minutes at night but we the key thing is with movement we want to do it frequently frequently we don't want to just walk our 30 minutes and then go sit down for nine hours because what we're seeing in the literature is that 30 minutes is not as beneficial for you when you followed it up by sitting hour after hour after hour get up and move now there are even treadmills at work all right i listen i gotta i love this idea we're thinking outside the box you're walking at work but if you ever watch these treadmills i kid you not this is how fast the people are walking all right that's not doing much for you if you can't fit in 10 minutes in the morning 10 minutes a night without doing it while you're working you're booking yourself too tight it's time to work on some time management let alone basic nutrition and exercise all right get out move often now look that's it i told you the basic principles of nutrition and exercise very simple how do we implement them how do we make them last a lifetime when i first started my health and sewing company 12 years ago i was very excited for my first client i had 30 pages of paperwork i had him fill out because i wanted to know everything about this person and as i'm going through i'm seeing a lot of red flags okay over 40 years old 50 pounds overweight lots of medication high blood pressure risk of cardiovascular disease because it's in his family and then i saw it i'm like oh well here's your problem you eat six snickers bars a day that's a lot all right stop eating snickers bars pay me all right if i would have done that though two weeks later i leave him right back on the horse and he would have ultimately been maybe even six seven eight centers so what i did over the next 15 months is i gradually brought that out of his nutritional choice 15 months later he was eating two snickers bars a day cut up into six pieces he was implementing every single thing i just told you about in small doses we took the baby step approach all right we didn't take the fast food quick mentality approach i want to do everything overnight now when you would fill this stuff in small steps they don't become chores they become habits and that's what we want to instill we want to instill the basic principles that i just gave you you'll remember that you've heard a lot of it before and then you just want to do it the baby step faster so do me a favor tell everyone thank you [Applause] you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 750,179

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Health

Id: qUfWOT3ZujY

Length: 13min 55sec (835 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 09 2015