Healthy Eating Tip: Keep It Fresh!

One of the hardest things to do in life is changing how we live or modify our lifestyle. In terms of weight loss, we tend to concentrate on details like consuming fewer carbs or less fat, the latest exercise gimmick, or the nutrient du jour to help us lose weight. I am here to tell you that the magic pill doesn’t exist; lifestyle modification is hard work, and the first step is to make a serious and lasting commitment. Without the first step of deciding to change your lifestyle, the weight you lose this week will just return next week, or next month, or next year.

Taking off weight is one thing; keeping it off for an extended time is quite another! You can use a diet to take off weight, but to maintain that weight loss for an extended period, you need to change the way that you live. A diet is a short-term project to lose weight for a particular goal, like fitting into a dress or suit for a wedding. It’s a temporary change in how you eat that may not even involve other aspects of your life. Changing the way that you live is called “lifestyle modification.” Lifestyle modification is a life-long process of changing the way that you live in pursuit of greater health. Weight loss is just one side effect of lifestyle modification. Comprehensive lifestyle modification will reduce cholesterol and triglycerides, eliminate hypertension, stabilize blood sugar, reduce the chance of cancer, improve your day-to-day functioning in every aspect, and increase longevity; the good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.

Weight loss from dieting is almost always temporary, but if your lifestyle modification plan is comprehensive, realistic, and actionable, you can maintain all of the beneficial side effects for an entire lifetime, and that is the goal! 

Creating a lifestyle modification plan that is comprehensive, realistic, and actionable is much easier said than done! Each aspect of your lifestyle modification is essential and needs to be well thought out. 

Your lifestyle modification plan needs to be comprehensive. 

Consider all aspects of your life, including how you feel, think, and act over a day, week, month, and year. 

Your lifestyle modification plan needs to be realistic.  

Your commitment to lifestyle modification should be steadfast and unchanging but your plan needs to be dynamic and has to be based on your willingness and ability to change given what is going on in your life at a particular moment in time. You need to be able to bob and weave like a boxer taking evasive action moment by moment in order to stay in the ring with a formidable opponent! 

“Be like water…if you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot; it becomes the teapot.” 

-Bruce Lee

If your plan is static and unchanging, you will fail.

Your lifestyle modification plan needs to be actionable.  

What you feel and think is important, but what you do is where the results are! 

“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do!”

-Bruce Lee

If you read these healthy eating tips, you have seen me write about this before, and you will see it again! That’s because we all need to develop our own plan and work through it over and over again. Lifestyle modification is a journey, not a single event. In any journey, we follow a path that is not always straight.  It may bend to the right or bend to the left, or even double back and go in the opposite direction for a while. Part of walking a path is realizing that it will turn, bend, and sometimes go the other way. You will need to stop along the way and periodically reaffirm your commitment to lifestyle modification. People in 12-step recovery programs, which is a very similar process to lifestyle modification, call this “keeping it fresh.”

One tool that I use to keep my lifestyle modification fresh is to stay aware of the latest research. I use this information as motivation and to remind myself of what I am doing and why I am doing it. Here’s something I found a few months ago that helped get me back on track after my recent heart event in December.

On January 11, 2021, the peer-reviewed medical journal BioMed Central Medicine published an article detailing a cohort study that found links between increased risk of dying from 24 different cancers and six markers of obesity.  Researchers from the University of Glasgow identified 437,393 adults who were cancer-free to investigate the risk of developing and dying from 24 cancers according to six markers of obesity: BMI, body fat percentage, waist-to-hip ratio, waist-to-height ratio, and waist and hip circumferences.  The results were adjusted for age, sex, ethnicity, deprivation (depriving oneself of food), education, smoking, alcohol consumption, intake of fruit and vegetables, red and processed meat, oily fish, physical activity, and sedentary behaviors.  What that means is that all of these factors or variables that can confound or distort outcomes of a study have been “accounted for” so that the result more accurately reflects the relationship between the variables we want to isolate or “study” – in this case, six markers of obesity – and the results of the study. The researchers wanted to see how just those six markers of obesity and nothing else related to dying from cancer. All of the items listed above – some of which have already been identified as carcinogens or strongly associated with cancer – were ignored, so that study results reflect the relationship between obesity and cancer. Generally, the more thought out and more extensive the list of confounding variables adjusted for yield higher-quality and more significant study results. Some studies may account for just one or two confounding variables. The list of confounding variables accounted for in this study is extensive and well thought out. 

After an average of 9 years of follow-up, there were 47,882 cases of cancer and 11,265 cancer deaths.  The researchers found that all six obesity measures were positively and similarly associated with a higher risk for 10 cancers. Each 4.2 kg/m^2 for men and 5.1 kg/m^2 for women increase in body mass index (BMI) was linked with a higher risk of cancer. The CDC defines body mass index as a person’s weight in kilograms divided by the square of height in meters; weight (kg) / [height (m)]^2. A high BMI can indicate high body fatness. A BMI of 18.5 indicates underweight, 18.5 – 24.9 is a “normal” or healthy weight, 25.0 – 29.9 is overweight, and 30.0 and above indicates obesity. 

Each 4.2 kg/m^2 for men and 5.1 kg/m^2 for women increase in BMI above 25 kg/m^2 (overweight) was associated with 35% higher risk of cancers of the stomach, 33% higher risk of gallbladder cancer, 27% higher risk of liver cancer, 26% higher risk of cancers of kidney cancer, 12% higher risk of pancreatic cancer, 9% higher risk of bladder cancer, 10% higher risk of colorectal cancer, 73% higher risk of endometrial cancer, 68% higher risk of uterine cancer, 8% higher risk of postmenopausal breast cancer, and 3% higher risk of “overall” or any cancer. Dr. Carlos Celis-Morales, the study lead, University of Glasgow, UK, said that “We observed a linear association – the more severe obesity is, the higher the risk of developing and dying from these cancers.”

The researchers were careful to note that as an observational study, results could not establish causation.  Given the list of confounding variables adjusted for, although the results fall short of causation, they are certainly “meaningful,” and for the man on the street and an average joes like me, that is what I call fresh motivation!

Until next week, think comprehensive, think realistic, think actionable, and keep it fresh!

Here are the references for today’s healthy eating tip:

Parra-Soto, S., Cowley, E.S., Rezende, L.F.M. et al. Associations of six adiposity-related markers with incidence and mortality from 24 cancers—findings from the UK Biobank prospective cohort study. BioMed Central Medicine (BMC Med). 19:7. January 11, 2021.

News-Medical.Net. News. https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210510/Obesity-measures-are-associated-with-higher-risk-for-10-cancers.aspx. (Accessed 5/14/2021)

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Healthy Weight. Assessing Your Weight. Body Mass Index (BMI). https://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/assessing/bmi/index.html. (Accessed 6/25/2021.)