New Year’s resolutions FAIL!! There, we said it. While the intent is great, the execution never pans out. Drs Bagley & Schurger discuss better ways to ACTUALLY make a difference in how to approach your health goals for the new year by changing one habit today (like right now as you read this) that will make a positive impact on your health. We’re here to help guide you on your health journey, and this episode is a step in the right direction to getting started.
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The Anti-Resolution Episode
We were talking before this. I know we don’t always go right into it and jibber-jabber at you. We tried to plan and then we decided we were wasting time talking about good stuff. We’re right into it. This episode is coming out right after Christmas 2023 and right before New Year 2024. We got done with Thanksgiving 2023. I ate everything that I could. I ate all the snacks.
Do you remember how we talked about this? We said, “Don’t overdo it.” I overdid it. I enjoyed myself. I had all the turkey and all the brisket, and then some more brisket. We didn’t use it for dinner so I got to eat most of it myself. I also ate some of the desserts that I didn’t get to enjoy. Guess what? Come Monday morning, I’m still down almost three pounds from where I weighed in Thursday night. How are you doing on things?
I did well. I’ve been doing the keto diet. I’ve done this before. I fell off the bandwagon many times but I’ve been good. I did decide, “Thanksgiving is Thanksgiving. I’m going to eat Thanksgiving.” I didn’t go crazy, which I would’ve in the past. What I did was it was just that meal. I didn’t let it go past the next day or the day before.
I didn’t say, “I’ve already screwed up so I’m going to keep screwing up.” I had my thought process of, “That’s that one moment.” Honestly, I took a tiny piece of pie. I don’t like pie that much so I tried that. We talked about how we were going to fry a turkey and how you guys always fry a turkey, too. We did that. I had to make sure that the oil worked. We did some French fries and that was good.
It is fantastic. I’m hemming and hawing about doing a full turkey in beef tallow.
That’d be awesome.
It’s a matter of getting enough tallow to do that. Dad insisted upon peanut oil so I’m like, “Fine. I’m not going to argue with Dad.” In 2024, I might say, “I’ve got all the beef tallow. We’re good.”
Peanut oil is expensive. We spent almost $80 on peanut oil.
This is the problem. Everything is up in price.
The White House says it’s not. The White House says this is the lowest Thanksgiving ever in the history of every Thanksgiving ever.
I’m having a hard time with that. I know how much I spend on turkeys alone.
It was expensive.
This is the thing. Eating healthy is a little bit pricier than eating junk food. What are they saying? A McDonald’s in California to get a Big Mac meal is $18.
It’s $16 or $18. It’s ridiculous. You can make a healthy meal for less than $16 if you’re buying the ingredients yourself. You can spend your money maybe a little bit less buying junk food. You could spend your money later buying that and you’re going to spend it on cancer treatments, diabetes medications, or whatever happens. You’re going to spend it one way or another.
We’re going to spend the money on our health at one point in time or the other. What they say is we bookend our expenses for our health at the beginning and the end of our lives. The first ten years when we’re born, our folks are paying a bunch of money to make sure we’re still healthy and that we survive. The last ten years are expensive because you’re barely moving potentially.
I had one patient. She is wheelchair-bound. She can get up but she has a very poor balance. She got worse during COVID because she wasn’t getting checked. She commented, “Every time somebody touches my calves, they hurt.” I told her, “It’s because you don’t get up and move. You are not walking. There is a pumping cycle of all of our lymph flow. If that stuff builds up, it’s toxic. It burns. The only way to get that working and moving again is to get up and walk.”
She is certainly in a situation where she’s having a hard time with it. Whereas a couple of my nuns who are coming back in, there was one that when she first came back, it was like, “This is a fifteen-minute visit. It’s going to take forever.” This time, it took five minutes to get her to the table, get her adjusted, and then get her resting, which is about the normal pacing for a patient. We’re going to spend that money one way or the other. Food, peanut oil, and all these things are expensive. What is a quality product? There are a bunch of junk products out there that in the end are not worth anything.
In the class that I teach on Wednesday nights at my office called Half Hour to Health, we talk about the difference between healthcare and sick care. Sick care is what most people think of as healthcare. Sick care is cancer treatment, a joint replacement, or even drooling on your teeth because you have a cavity.
That’s what health insurance covers.
Health insurance is sick insurance. We need to call it sick insurance. It’s not health insurance. I’m glad it covers that stuff because if my leg falls off, I want it to get sewn back on properly. Healthcare is what we are trying to focus on. What this show is about is actual healthcare, like why we talk about food, the amount of water you need to drink, moving our bodies, and chiropractic care. I want everyone when they hear healthcare decipher in their brains, “Is that healthcare or sick care?” Typically, it’s going to be sick care.
Health insurance is sick insurance. So we need to call it sick insurance. It's not health insurance. It's sick insurance. Click To TweetI’m looking it up. I believe it was Voltaire who said something like, “The purpose of the doctor is to distract the patient while the body heals itself.” The reality is that we only heal from within. We’ve got all these wonderful supplements that I’ve got here that I recommend because you need some of them. Your body has the capacity to make most of this stuff. You sometimes need a little bit of extra from time to time to help you along the way.
I was chatting with another patient who was in. She, her husband, and her son are all doing animal-based. She feels great. She’s eating butter like it’s going out of style. She’s like, “I’m not gaining any weight.” I’m like, “It’s because you’re getting all that vitamin A and all the vitamins that are in real butter,” which are replenishing her system. I told her to watch out because at a certain point in time, as she continues to consume the butter, the scale is going to finally start creeping up. That would have been the limit of the nutrition she needed from the butter. It becomes storage.
It is excess calories. A lot of people don’t realize that if you’re doing low-carb, keto, or carnivore, you can still overeat and gain weight.
For my four days over at my dad’s place, I didn’t walk the whole 40 acres. I probably walked about 20 acres a day in various little spots. As I was joking, Dad drives the tractor from spot to spot from where we need to do chainsawing. He doesn’t let anybody ride because that would be dangerous. That makes me a little sad because I could safely hop on the back of the weighted toolbox and not have a problem with it but that means I have to walk. I was anywhere from 15,000 to 20,000 steps a day, and then what was I doing? I ate probably a couple of pounds of beef every day and a little bit of extra turkey. I’m like, “We got turkey.”
While you only ate the sweets on one day, I was eating pieces of baklava for the next couple of days. I was trying to split a little bit so that way, I didn’t eat the whole thing because I knew I could. My adage was two pieces of baklava. I was at a half-piece. That was better. I didn’t have the gluten issues that I normally do. It was probably because I’ve cleaned up my gut significantly. In the end, I knew I was going to come back lighter simply because of how I was feeling on the drive back.
I wasn’t concerned about the calories I was consuming because I spent four days walking everywhere out in the cold. I was sometimes sitting in a tree but not for very long. My body was in calorie-burning mode. I’ve been eating 2 pounds of chuck roast all week. It’s still in a calorie-burning mode. It’s a matter of setting up that furnace, as it were, to burn the calories that you are consuming in a meaningful manner as opposed to eating willy-nilly, adding on the calories, and gaining that weight.
You are pretty close, if not at your ideal, body weight unless you want to add muscle.
I’d be better at 180.
Where are you at?
190.
You have 10 pounds that you think you need to lose. That’s a different perspective for someone like me. I do need to drop some weight. Being on the keto diet, what they say is you stop being so hungry. The truth is you are. My body’s consuming itself because I’ve got lots of storage that I put on over the years.
When being on the keto diet, what people say is you stop being so hungry and the truth is you are because now your body's consuming itself. Click To TweetWe all do. People are like, “If all I do is get into fat-burning mode and I get down to 5% body fat, I could starve to death.” You won’t. With the amount of energy you have at 4% to 5% body fat, for women, you’re messed up at that point. That’s going to screw up your hormones. For men, that’s still a three-month supply of energy before you’re going to have real problems. We have more energy than we need if we’re carrying around a little bit of extra belly fat or weight on the hips and thighs. It’s never on the muscles or the gun show. Sometimes, it’s in your face. It does live there.
That brings up the point of New Year’s resolutions.
They’re dumb.
I agree. I’ll eat whatever I want because people are starting to bring stuff into the office. There are cakes, cookies, and all that stuff. I appreciate that so much. I do give that away. As the years passed, I may have eaten it. I’m not doing that in 2023. I started my New Year’s resolution when I decided that it was time and I was done feeling like crap all the time.
It doesn’t need to be at New Year’s time.
Waiting until New Year’s is silly.
We’ve got an older episode that didn’t come out until much later talking about New Year’s resolutions. At a certain point, why do all the gyms do great for the next couple of months? It’s because everyone says, “I’m going to make a change.” They sign everybody up at a premium. You pay for maybe two months’ worth before you cancel it. That helps keep them in business. There’s a whole strategy there. I don’t blame them. It’s great. Periodically, I would like to go to a gym that’s got a nice sauna. The problem is you get in there and everybody’s doing it. You’re like, “I don’t even want to start.” The regulars hate it.
They go in February. They can’t wait until February because everyone quits.
They know it. You’re better off learning how to be a regular and put up with this crazy push at New Year’s as opposed to trying to start at New Year’s and trying to find the thing at the gym that’s going to make you happy. You’re not going to find it. You’ve got to find the thing that you’re going to do if there’s a physical activity. I had 3 or 4 people ask me, “What should I do exercise-wise?” I’m like, “What do you like to do? What will you do repeatedly?”
I suggested pickleball to a couple of folks. They’re like, “We don’t have pickleball down there.” I’m like, “You might have to start it.” I joked with somebody else who had played pickleball. He says, “I kept on throwing my shoulder out. I quit.” I’m like, “That’s fair.” You find whatever physical activity that you’re going to do on the regular. I’m weird that I like a cannonball with a handle but that works for me. You and I have talked a lot about getting a kettlebell for yourself at home but you get into that little gym of yours that you have been working with the trainer and love it.
It works for me. If anyone’s been on my Instagram, my two twin girls and I, work out together, all 3 of us. We have a trainer. If I said that they were doing something wrong or a form problem, I am in trouble because I’m not right. What I have done is I have Natalie. We should get her on sometime. She’s so interesting. She’s trained as an occupational therapist and has become an amazing trainer. She helped us. For her, it’s not just about training. It’s about breathing, the form, and all those things, even social and emotional things that are happening. I’ve never had a trainer that thinks the way she does. It’s been eye-opening. I enjoy her.
It’s finding that person who looks at things in a way that you can identify with. I had another patient in. She’s like, “I’ve got these little lightweights. I don’t want to lift weights.” I’m like, “At your age, you should be focusing as we get older.” If you are over 35 and not training with weights, you need to lift heavy things. You don’t need to be crazy like I am with a goal of 32 kilograms in both arms overhead. That’s my goal. That’s strong enough.
It's finding that person who looks at things in a way that you can identify with. Click To TweetYou do need to be doing something physical to build muscle mass if you can but certainly maintain your muscle mass as you get older. One of the questions of the things that you can do that if you want to make a New Year’s resolution, ask those questions. What can you do? What are you willing to do to make a change to make a change?
You’re reading this and it’s December 28th, 2023. It’s not January 2nd, 2024. What could you do? What will you do?
As a simple solution, you can say, “I can eat more protein.” As we get older, we do not process protein as efficiently as someone younger. Yet, I see so many people where a couple in their 60s or 70s will go in and they’ll split a fish sandwich between them for their dinner. I’m like, “You both need to get two of those, eat all of the fish, and throw away the bun.” It’s like keto. You don’t feel like you need to eat except you need to eat.
If you’re not getting enough protein, your body’s going to find the protein. That’s in your muscles.
He’s silly. If you like third-grade boy humor, he’s hilarious. The guy’s name is Ryan Humiston on YouTube. He was talking about how even at a deficit you need, if you’re trying to lose weight, you still need more protein. We’re looking at 1 gram per pound of body weight. It’s effectively what it is or sometimes more. It’s sometimes 1.2. If you are 180 pounds, that could easily be 180 grams to 220 grams of protein.
One of the things that my trainer said, and she does lots of research on this, is a gram of protein per ideal body weight.
This is where we go back and forth on this. Honestly, I don’t disagree with that thought but my thinking is we have to make it easy. For people who are reading, it’s like, “My ideal body weight would be 180 pounds. Therefore, I want to be 180.” If you’re overweight, pushing more protein will help you burn that body fat. What you want to do is increase your body’s ability. Are you going to sit down at lunch and eat 2 pounds of chuck roast? I did. I’ve done that every day.
I believe you can. I cannot.
It took me time to work myself up to be able to consume that. This is my body slowly building up the ability to have that much protein in a sitting and even be able to want to eat that much. That’s a lot of meat. I’m not going to pretend it’s not. I’m pushing where I’m having all this extra protein to keep the momentum that I’ve built up. It is more a matter of how you can work yourself up to that. What is about 200 grams of protein? You’re talking about 2 pounds of red meat. Figure out what the numbers are.
We’ve talked about chronometers and other things. That might be a simple strategy that you say, “I’m going to do this, download an app, and start tracking my food consumption. I’m going to buy a scale to see what I’m doing and finally call that crazy bald chiropractor because the blonde one is too far away. I’ll say, ‘I need to make an appointment to check to make sure my head’s on straight so that can do all the things that I want to do.’” It’s a timing thing. You have to make that intention and start doing the steps. Can you do all of them in a day? No. Can you do all of them in a month? Probably not. You’ve been working for a month and a half. Do you know what your scale change has been?
It's a timing thing. You just have to make that intention and start taking the steps. Click To TweetIt’s about 15 pounds.
Do you want to share how much further you have to go?
About 55 pounds more.
You’ve started. The question is it’s an exponential curve. It’s like, “When does it taper off? Exponential, you can go better. We can get to that ideal weight faster.” That ideal body weight is an interesting number. It gets us in trouble because I can look at what the scale is and make the math faster there than trying to figure out what that ideal is.
If somebody’s reading and they’re 350 pounds though, trying to get that person to eat 350 grams of protein is where we get into trouble.
I would like to see them get to that and try that. If they can do that and work themselves up to that, by the time they meet that spot, they will have dropped 100 pounds.
That is true. If you focus on protein on your plate and eat that, even if you have a carb on your plate, you’re not going to be able to eat it as much because your stomach’s going to be so filled with protein. Eating the protein first on a meal might be a way to get to that. If you have a steak and French fries on your plate, which I don’t recommend, eat your whole steak first and then whatever three fries you can fit in your mouth.
We talk about eating all these protein levels. They’re the big powerlifters. Brian Shaw stands 6’7” or something like that. Standing next to his wife, she looks like this itty bitty tiny thing. She’s 5’7”. He is this massive beast of a man. They’ll buy a bunch of burgers and fries and try to eat all of it. He makes it into a show. They’re playing around. Even if they can’t put down some of these stupid levels of meat, in the last one I watched, they ended up getting paddled for not eating enough meat. All I know is I want to go to this place and at least have one of their burgers. The burgers look good.
What’s one thing that a reader could do? Instead of calling it a New Year’s resolution, I’m going to call it a habit change. Let’s talk about options for habit changes so that they can start doing one thing at a time.
Start looking at what are the things that you know are not healthy for you. Let’s say you like your Diet Coke. Switch to water. That’s going to be a huge, big one. That’s going to take some time and effort. It sounds like they’re empty calories that they don’t add but they do. They’re adding body weight that you don’t understand. There are other gut microbiome issues. If you switch to water, that’s a change.
If you’re trying to cut the cord on diet soda or soda in general, I wouldn’t start being like, “I’ll do sweet tea for a little bit.” Go cold turkey for three weeks. All you drink is water. Drink water. If you want to drink coffee or unsweetened tea, that’s fine but drink the water. That would be an incredible new habit for the new year rather than a New Year’s resolution.
Another great little habit and it gets into the fasting side of things is to eat your last meal on Sunday night. You can have coffee. You could have tea or something else, not these soda pops or beverages but don’t have another meal until dinner the following night.
It’s a 24-hour fast.
It helps you realize, “I can make it a day.” A lot of people have had extra calories on the weekend. It’s easier to make it to Monday dinner because most Mondays are crazy busy anyway for people. Simply download an app that starts saying, “How much food am I eating,” and say, “What is 100 or 200 grams of protein?”
The habit would be tracking either macros or in general, protein grams or something like that.
I’m going to tell people that there are so many macro calculators out there. You can go to all of these places. Type in macro calculator and say how much you weigh, how much you want to lose, and how fast you want to move. They can do all of this stuff. Whether you want to do a keto version of it or a traditional version of it, it’s too much work. Try to boost your protein to your body weight. If you are 350 to 400 pounds, you’re not going to hit that goal immediately but how close can you get to that goal on a regular basis that you start seeing the changes happen? Prioritize protein. The more you do that, the better off you’re going to be.
Another one is a lot of people are dehydrated so drinking a good amount of water. Typically, they say half your body weight in ounces or something like that. In general, if you drink 3 glasses of water a day and that’s all you drink, maybe drink 5 or double it to get to the point where you’re making a habit change. The habit change could be, “I bring my water bottle everywhere with me.” Fixate on the habit, not so much like, “That’s going to make me lose weight.”
The systems over the goals are always going to serve you better. You did the Hard 75 a couple of years ago. I liked those habits because you read for half an hour. There was a page count.
I’d have to look it up. It’s twenty minutes of reading. I set a timer.
Set a timer, do the reading, put your phone down, and look at a book for 20 to 30 minutes.
This was a self-improvement, business, or something book. It’s a non-fiction book. That’s what they wanted you to read.
The other one that the Hard 75 came out with was doing something physical twice a day but one of them had to be outside. It was bitter cold around here. I walked out bundled up in a jacket and hat and realized, “I didn’t need this.” I’ve got it with me in case it gets cool tonight because it’s getting late. I set a goal that I wanted to get to 9,000 steps a day for my tracker. If I’m over 5,300, I’ll be surprised. I was on my feet most of the day outside at lunch. I’m not going to get another 4,000 steps. I’ll hit about 7,000 but I set a goal for 9,000 because that’s where I want to be. Last time, it was 15,000 to 20,000. I walked a lot.
If you set your New Year’s resolution as your goal, like my goal is to lose 55 pounds and that’s my resolution, none of that. It’s the habit. My habit change is this and this supports my goal.
What happens when you lose 55 pounds?
I’m done. I’m good. I’ll start eating McDonald’s. It’s great.
The problem is the rebound. You’ll gain 65 back. You want to release. You want to create habits that will return your body to your ideal body weight that you have decided is another 40 pounds down.
For the first time, I’m looking at this habit change of how I’m eating as a habit change. I was out to dinner with my future new associate, Dr. Ladd, who has accepted the physician role. We were with her future husband and my husband. We went out to a nice dinner. I had steak and scallops. It was delicious. I had vegetables with that but I didn’t have the potato or anything.
We were talking about diets because we all do something to be healthy. Dr. Ladd’s fiancé asked, “How long are you going to do keto for?” I said, “Forever.” I meant it. I might have a day like Thanksgiving, Christmas, or a birthday where I have a dessert but that’s it. It’s a day or a meal. I’m not going to eat like that anymore. It’s not the way I want to live.
It’s not good. People are like, “Do I have to do keto?” No. You can go back and check out our episode which we did all of the different ways. Keto is one of the better ways to lose weight. It’s a dietary choice. It’s a way of eating that is helpful to change body structure to be healthier. I was chatting with another patient who looked over at my bookshelf. I’ve got the four 4-Hour Body there, which is where the low-carb diet comes from. Sure enough, it’s there. If you’re reading this for the first time and you haven’t gone back to our older episodes, it might be a good time to go back and refresh your brain. That one is good on YouTube because there are some visuals. Maybe it was Healthy Routines for Healthy Living, Episode 24.
You’ve got to set up the habits. What habits do you want to do? Do you want to change how you eat? Do you change all the habits at once? No. You say, “I’m going to do this one this week, implement it, and make it happen.” One of the habits that I’ve been trying to get to, and I don’t know if I’ll get to it, is that I want to play my bass, practice, and work my way through this 100-slap bass riff book that I picked up that I haven’t gotten to. I figure if I work on 1 or 2 of those in a week, I’ll work my way through that book and be able to slap the bass like a funk master. That’s what I’m looking for.
I have to sit down and do it. It will take 30 minutes. After we finish here, I’ve got to reset some stuff, clean up the office, head home, work on my wife because she needs to get adjusted, and then eat dinner. By that point in time, it’s going to be 9:00 and I’m not going to have anything left in the tank. That is unfortunately part of me trying to figure out my schedule so that I can make those changes. Maybe on Thursday nights, I’m not going to touch the bass but maybe on Monday, Wednesday, and the weekend, I’m going to have plenty of time to do it. It’s making those decisions, like getting out and going for a walk every day. Maybe it’s only fifteen minutes.
It’s starting a walk. Start a walk every day.
Let’s say we’re using lunch. Finish lunch, go for a five-minute walk, turn around, and come back. It can be that simple.
That’s not a New Year’s resolution. It is a new habit change in the new year. Start whenever you’re reading this. I don’t care if it’s February 2024, still December 2023, or 2026. Don’t wait to change a habit. Change one habit or one thing now and then do it again tomorrow. Once that becomes a habit and you’re a few days or weeks into it and you feel like, “I can continue that,” that’s when you do the next step. Don’t try to do it all at once. If you do it all at once, that will most certainly be a failure.
Your brain will explode in the worst possible way.
I’ve had that happen multiple times. My win for the day is I’ve been taking care of this mom who has been with me as a patient before she was pregnant. She got pregnant. This is her third baby. She had the baby. He came in for his first adjustment. If anybody wants to see that, it’s on Facebook and Instagram pictures. That would’ve been on 11/30/2023 if you’re looking back on the timeline. He did well. She got adjusted, too. Mama and Baby are super healthy and happy.
I’m getting referrals from other upper cervical docs. I had a bunch of spontaneous new patients walk into my office taking new pictures. We’re slowly getting them and their families all set up. I’m excited. It was a very good week back from Thanksgiving 2023.
It was busy.
Surprisingly so because oftentimes, this is when things slow down. I wouldn’t mind so I can do some planning but that’s not going to happen and I’m okay with that, too.
I don’t want it to slow down. I’ll be more effective with my time.
Speaking of which, let’s wrap up. Dr. Bagley, where are they going to find you?
I am in St. Louis, Missouri on the Westside. I am at PrecisionChiroSTL.com.
I’m in Springfield, Illinois, which is also on the Westside as oddly as that is. I’m at Keystone Chiropractic. That’s KeystoneChiroSPI.com and all the socials. I am @KeystoneDoc on Instagram. You have a happy new year. We want you to have a happy new year and be safe coming back if you’re going out to enjoy yourself. Enjoy your New Year parties if you’re going to do that kind of stuff but at the end of it, realize you’re changing habits. Figure out which one habit you’re going to change and keep to it through 2024, and then maybe in a couple of weeks, pick another one and change that one. You have a wonderful day. We’ll see you for another episode soon.
Important Links
- Eat Healthier This New Year! – Past Episode
- 4-Hour Body
- Healthy Routines for Healthy Living – Past Episode
- PrecisionChiroSTL.com
- YouTube – Blonde & the Bald
- Facebook – Precision Chiropractic
- Instagram – Elizabeth Bagley
- @KeystoneDoc – Instagram
- https://Linktr.ee/TheBlondeAndTheBald
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