The psychological weight loss strategy | Laurie Coots

so that was me in 2006. i weighed over 300 pounds i had triglycerides of 500 and i had just been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes now type 2 diabetes is when your body doesn't use insulin properly and i like to imagine it as this sugar sludge going through my bloodstream to the soundtrack of jaws like 29 million other americans i was sent home with a diet a prescription and a little booklet about my disease and as i dug into it i learned a dirty little truth two actually the first says in america if you're diagnosed with type 2 diabetes you carry the same health risk as somebody who's already had one heart attack second the object of the game unlike cancer or anything else is to manage your diabetes not cure you so your doctors will work very very hard to try to prevent complications that might ruin the quality of your life or kill you so i knew that this was not going to work for me i was a hard hard-charging taipei global executive and managing my diabetes was not going to be an option so i enlisted the help of the people at canyon ranch in the medical department there who i knew were a little bit more ambitious and here's what we learned on a lesson on a journey that actually took us five years i learned that even though i was 300 pounds and had type 2 diabetes my body was absolutely perfect the way it was for the way i was feeding it the way i was moving it and the way i was resting it quite frankly if i wanted a different body or i wanted different health i had to change the equation somehow the second thing i learned was that if i imagined my future healthy self and started living that life now what kinds of foods i would eat how many calories i would need to maintain a healthy weight for a lifetime that would be the way i would achieve my goal i had to come up with strategies that i could live with for two days two weeks two months two years now when you do this and you live this way and interesting things happens like magic you wake up two years later and you're almost at your goal i learned that i had to keep track of everything so i used iphone apps like lose it and i use my up band to track how much sleep i was getting and how much exercise i was getting along the way and this really helped me to keep the game kind of rational instead of emotional the way it can get this was a big war i had to break this down to the smallest battle i could win every day because i have a short attention span i had to take it down to the cellular level what would make my cells happier and healthier every single day and with every drop of glucose or every drop of blood i fed into my glucose meter i could tell immediately if i was moving in the right direction i became my own science experiment and i learned a lot for example when i didn't sleep or i jumped time zones or took a red eye my blood sugar was 20 points higher the next day and i craved carbohydrates well i didn't need to eat what i needed was a nap portions were always my biggest downfall i come from the land of all you can eat shrimp and endless platters of pasta when somebody showed me what a real single portion of something was it was a huge disconnect for me so i needed to really figure out how to do that i started eating with smaller plates eating with chopsticks to eat more slowly and i promised myself i could have anything i wanted as long as i ate it with a knife and a fork trust me it feels ridiculous to eat a snickers bar like this but it helped me be more conscious of what i was eating i learned to be in perpetual motion all day every day looking for ways to move and to fidget because fidgeting can burn 200 300 calories a day i counted steps i got a standing desk and i learned that my one hour of walking every day was as good for my head as it was for my body and finally life's too short to live without ice cream when i was first diagnosed i made a list of all my favorite foods and i went and did a glycemic a personal glycemic index with my glucose meter of each one then i went back to each food and i tweaked it adding a little fat removing a little sugar until everything fit in my plan and now i plan for a perfect scoop of premium ice cream every day what i learned is that given half a shot your body will recover it's an amazing adaptive machine self-healing mine did i lost over 110 pounds i now have a perfect lipid profile i have had a healthy normal blood sugar without medication for more than five years i am no longer a type 2 diabetic so thank you very much so if any of you have a health issue that you need to deal with or a life change you need to deal with i urge you to imagine your healthy future self and start living that life now break your journey down into little battles you can win become your own science experiment and come up with strategies that will last for two days or two years and most of all you need to start eating like your life depends on it because it does thank you you

Channel: TED Archive

Views: 2,342,464

Keywords: TED, Archive, Laurie, Coots, weight loss

Id: DLYb3IgQ1Qk

Length: 6min 24sec (384 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 14 2016