Leaning into your life: Kathy Freston at TEDxFremont

well I just want to tell you a little bit about myself so that you don't think I popped out of the womb and health not certainly not I grew up in Doraville Georgia which is a seriously down home part of Georgia outside of Atlanta and I grew up eating chicken-fried steak and barbecued ribs and burgers and pizza and all the stuff that everyone around me ate and I loved every second of it I didn't think twice about it I wasn't stupid I wasn't a bad person I just ate what my mom put in front of me and what she told me what was what was good for me so I I loved my life but my life my childhood my upbringing did not serve me well they created it created some bad habits right my habits were born from community and tradition it's what was important to me community and tradition so I was not served well by that and as I moved into my 20s it started becoming apparent why I put on about 15 to 20 pounds but I rationalized and I thought you know everybody puts on 15 20 pounds and they get out of school and they go into their lives and that's kind of the American Way so I'm not gonna be hard on myself and you know it was more and more as the years went on and I also had really bad acne that never went away when I wasn't a teenager anymore and so I had these welts on my face and I felt like I was kind of a leper got really sensitive and really self-conscious and everything and my energy never picked up I grew up not a sporty kid I was a couch potato and I was not you know really out there playing with friends as a kid and that kind of transferred up into my adulthood and I realized that I'm just really not out there enjoying my life pursuing a career being passionate I just didn't have that vitality so that was all well and good but the kicker was I started to see people in my family and the people that I grew up with start to get sick I started seeing some diabetes heart disease use cancer a little bit of stroke and we were getting sick so I thought ooh something's got to change here so I said about my path and I thought I am going to get healthy I'm gonna just change my habits I'm gonna get healthy so I started trying all these diets I started that crazy grapefruit diet I don't know if you remember that didn't work and then I went for the high-protein low-carb thing that everyone was talking about there were a million different kinds of you know Atkins or whatever and that was you know good at first but didn't didn't hold and I started trying the juice fast that everyone was talking about and all of these things were for me just a miserable experience I was feeling deprived I was angry I was just miserable I hated it you know and I was so mad at myself that I got I couldn't just change my ways what was wrong with me I was ashamed I was really deeply ashamed of myself and so one day I was playing with my little chihuahua lote see and she was on her back and I was just making myself feel better saying oh I just love this animal so much she's so cute and I swear she was smiling from ear to ear and she made me so happy and I was thinking to myself I love this dog so much animals are just the most magical creatures and then this little voice inside of me said well if you love animals so much why the hell are you eating them and what well uh because I always have because it's a habit because I like the taste of meat and so the word meat popped into my mind and as I'm petting low see my little chihuahua I was like me animal okay so I started picturing her in a factory farm where you know most of our meat and dairy comes from and I started picturing her in these tiny little cages that chickens and pigs were in for their whole life and I saw how freaked out she would be I mean just like she's the social creature she's part of our family you know I knew her emotions I knew when she was sad or I knew when she was anxious or worried or fearful or when she wanted to go for a walk and so visualizing her in a tiny cage was just sort of eye-opening and then I saw her in my mind being marched off to the slaughterhouse kill floor and I could just see that she'd just be shaking and her eyes were blazing and and everything about her was just horrified and so in that moment a light bulb went off in my head and I thought to myself wait a second if you don't want your dog to experience that why would you want another animal to experience that because I I realized that the only difference between my dog and that little pig or chicken or kaffir or whatever was that I knew her you know I had spent time with her so she was a somebody not as some thing and so I thought okay well you got to challenge yourself then if you don't want her to experience that you're gonna be a hypocrite if you don't want other experience other animals to experience that so that was step one actually that was born into my process of getting healthy losing weight and it was to have an emotionally-charged intention that's just bigger than my interest my personal interest for me that was I didn't want to see animals suffer it was a killer to me I couldn't bear to think about it I couldn't bear to watch it so that became like the door opening for me it was the craziest thing so every time I wanted to eat a burger or a pizza or steak or something like that I'd go on my computer and I would Google factory farm slaughter video like if I wanted a hamburger I would go to you no beef slaughter video and I was like whoa so suddenly there was no it wasn't like just white knuckling I've got to just not eat it it was like that was horrible of course I don't want to eat it so that was step one right but now step two was born quickly follows that was like oh my god but if I don't eat meat and this is the stuff that I grew up on and everybody knows that you need lots of you know animal protein to be slim and healthy so step two was that I have to educate myself I've got to feel good about what I'm doing I've got to feel okay about this so I started looking into the science the peer-reviewed science not the industry back science but the peer-reviewed science and what I saw was that all this information was pouring out in support of the plant-based diet the American Dietetic Association which requires rigorous and exhaustive science actually says that vegans and vegetarians are not only as healthy but they're healthier in terms of far less heart disease stroke type 2 diabetes and even certain kinds of cancer well so I'm like okay wait a second I can actually stick with my my newfound ethical idea and I'm gonna get healthier and then I looked a little farther and I saw that the one dietary component that's been most most consistently associated with lasting weight loss not instant weight loss but the stuff that comes off and stays off was fiber now fiber is only found in plant food so whole grains like brown rice quinoa barley rye beans like legumes like lentils and chickpeas things like that vegetables fruits fiber is in plant-based food and that's the thing that helps you lose weight and what I learned was that fiber basically fills you up and it makes you feel satiated right it cleans you out so you feel light and slim and by the way it lowers your blood pressure and cholesterol to boot so was pretty incredible now when I looked at the stuff that I grew up loving which was all the meat dairy and eggs and all that stuff guess what no fiber there's no fiber in animal foods what you do have in animal foods though is a lot of fat and calories so fat and calories are great when we were cavemen back in the day when we were scrounging for food we'd recognize something that had all that fat and calories and we'd grab a hold of it because we needed that to sustain us we didn't know when food was coming along again but now that's not our issue food scarcity is not the issue in this country the issue in this country obviously is obesity heart disease stroke type 2 diabetes cancer so it made sense that we have to sort of modify our way of approaching food to address those things because we want to live to a ripe old age rather than dying at 40 like they did back in those paleo days right so I was learning all this stuff and I realized that the things that I had been taught were super healthy we're actually not so healthy at all for instance chicken I mean I've been oh my doctor even said you know you want to you want to move away from the ground beef and have more lean chicken well one breast of chicken has 20 grams of fat in it that's a lot and 27 percent of that is saturated fat so so that's a lot of fat that's gonna make me fat right it's gonna clog my arteries and that's something that I needed to move away from what I also learned was that only animal foods have cholesterol did you know that plant foods don't have cholesterol so I realize you know I'm looking at my family who's got a lot of heart disease popping up and I'm thinking wait a second so if I eat animal stuff I'm eating their cholesterol whereas if I eat the plant stuff with all that fiber I'm getting no cholesterol that's incredible so all of this stuff is coming together in my mind and I'm realizing okay I'm going down this path I'm you know feeling really great but what is a girl from Doraville Georgia to do I like my food I don't want to live like a month so not interested in being one of these granola-eating vegans who is annoying to everybody I believe me and I I want to I want to love my life I want to stick with my community and enjoy my traditions so what I decided to do was I decided to lean into it and that became step three in my weight loss and getting healthy program is I decided I'm just gonna set my intention and I'm gonna nudge myself forward in the slightest little ways and I'm gonna lean into it and I'm gonna just take one little step at a time till I get used to it and then I'm going to create a little bit of a momentum and I'm gonna keep leaning so let me tell you three things that I did that help this process of leaning into it first thing easy-peasy I added an apple a day somewhere in the day I would have an apple maybe two apples if I felt like it apples have a very special kind of fiber called pectin and pectin stays in your belly twice as long so you stay fuller twice as long right so you consume less calories because you're just not as hungry plus the fiber slows down the release of glucose into your bloodstream from the food so that crazy craving hunger thing doesn't kick into gear so I started adding in an apple second thing I did and this is really interesting is I decided to move away from cow's milk to non-dairy milk now the reason for this is a lactating cow remember a cow has to be lactating in order to produce milk nature intended for that milk to make a little calf put on a thousand pounds really quickly and that little calf is gonna be a fat slow animal that's nature intended it well I didn't want to be a fat slow animal so I decided I'm gonna opt for soy milk almond milk hemp milk rice milk there's a million different non-dairy milks easy peasy again not giving up anything just making a switcheroo adding something good in the third thing I decided to do and this is what made the really sort of big push is I started switching out my favorite traditional foods that I grew up loving - plant-based versions so for instance I loved pizza right so I got a pizza crust from the grocery store and I put some tomato sauce on and I put some non-dairy cheese and veggie sausage popped it in the oven and voila perfect I loved it I'd still got the same food that I loved but it was a better version I didn't have all that cholesterol that saturated fat far less calories but I got to enjoy what I loved so I didn't feel deprived remember I don't want to feel deprived so I started eating burgers with a veggie patty rather than a beef patty not a big deal what I realized was that I liked all the fixin's I liked the tradition now that the pickles and the lettuce and the you know the bun and all of that stuff so I didn't really miss the beef patty I just switched it out very easy I started making chili with soy protein and black beans stuff like that Mexican night at my house is really popular night so instead of having a chicken burrito we would have a black bean burrito I still had the guacamole and the salsa and the shredded lettuce and all of that stuff so all of these things that I loved I just switched them out in the easiest of ways and what happened was I kind of got my groove I started feeling really better and I realized that I didn't have to lose anything it was just a matter of crowding out the old stuff that made me heavy and unhealthy and tired with stuff that made me feel powered up and cleaned out and light on my feet and you know what happened I'm sure you might have guessed it by now I woke up one morning and I realized wow I haven't had a pimple in a long time my skin's cleared up funniest thing and I had so much energy these days that I actually had to start exercising because I was jumping out of my skin I just you know I was like ah I wasn't used to this this was new for me and you guessed it I lost the weight the weight came off and it came off gradually easily without much thought without much attention it just kind of came off and it never came back so here's my message to you is that everything great that we do in our lives every profound truly great thing we do in our lives is a work in progress so it requires an emotional intention that really means something to you like it moves you to your core and it requires some good motivational information and then lastly all you have to do is lean into it and when you start leaning into it and you take a step and then another step and another step and you make these little tweaks before you know it you're in this jet stream of change and you are moving happily along your way to healthy lasting weight loss or whatever it is that you need to see change in yourself and I know that your body will thank you I thank you and Bon Apetit [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 61,688

Rating: 4.8633375 out of 5

Keywords: \United States (Country)\, Lifestyle, Psychology, tedx, Food, ted, ted talk, TEDx, Health, English, tedx talk, ted x, Education, ted talks, tedx talks, TEDxFremont

Id: nRr1Dvt5ITI

Length: 17min 2sec (1022 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 05 2012