Life By Design with Dr. Jamie Richards

With the 2018 winter here, this Best Of episode of Life By Design is more relevant than ever!

Antibiotic resistant bacteria are here. For the 1st time ever, the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) is starting to classify germs based on their threat level. Should you be concerned? If so, what can you do?

What we covered:

• Where did super germs come from? How did they get here?
• Should you be concerned?
• What if you have a loved one that has a weaker immune system like a baby or an elderly family member... are they at risk?
• The one principle that works EVERY TIME for fighting against not just one type of bacteria, but ALL bacteria.

Happy Holidays.

When deciding what "Best Of" podcast to play over the holidays, we kept coming back to our 100th episode extravaganza. It was a tremendous recap of where Life By Design began, as well as some highlights (low-lights) and lessons learned.

We were humbled to make it to 100 episodes and continue to be blown away by the ongoing response at #251!

From all of us at Life By Design, we would like to extend our most gracious thank you to all of the Life By Design Podcast listeners for your comments, your questions and support.

We hope you enjoyed our introduction from our very special guest!

What we covered:

• How the name Life By Design was created.
• Who influenced some of the key Life By Design concepts.
• Which strategies have changed from the original recommendations.
• What is the ONE thing Dr. Jamie and Dr. Kreso love most about the show.
• Don't miss the bloopers and outtakes at the end.

This week, we thought we could head in a totally different direction. We've never been against drugs, medication or anti-medical in any sense of the term. At Life By Design, we acknowledge that 1) you (the individual) has the right and responsibility to chose your own healthcare - whatever that choice may be. 2) That checking for and correcting interference in your spine and nerve system, although absolutely unique and amazing and vital to your health and wellness, like everything else, has its limitations. We understand that, since you listen to this podcast, you likely try to avoid medications as much as possible and as a result might be interested in medical marijuana as an option. However, since it's outside of our scope we wanted to bring in an expert from another field. On this episode, we bring on Dr. Rachna Patel, a medical marijuana doctor, to answer the questions that we are commonly asked in practice about medical marijuana. The most interesting part of the interview is how and why Dr. Patel turned to medical marijuana to help her patients. It was because she felt that the traditional drugs used to help were "not very helpful, potentially harmful and weren't addressing the cause of the problem." The purpose of this podcast is to help you shed some light on the topic and ask some important questions about medical marijuana. What we covered:

• Is medical marijuana safe for your condition?
• Do you have to smoke medical marijuana or are there other, more discrete, ways of taking it so that not everyone has to know that you're taking it?
• Are you going to get addicted to taking medical marijuana?
• If medical marijuana is so effective, then why hasn't the government recognized it yet?

Losing weight has been ranked as one of the most difficult things to do.

That's why I wanted to discuss it with someone who has just recently done it... me.

It might seem shocking that I got myself into a situation where I wanted to lose 25 pounds, especially since I know (and am consistent with) so much of my healthy rituals.

That's precisely the point of this episode...

Since I have an extremely high level of self-awareness, I am able to describe the exact environment and situation that created this undesirable result.

I also want to share my thinking process, planning process and action steps that I took to lose 25 pounds... which when followed is "effortless".

The purpose of this podcast is to give you greater depth and a deeper understanding of the belief system, vision and strategy required to lose weight. Yes, I also shared tactical strategies, but I believe my thinking and planning around my problem and goal will be more beneficial for you to hear.

I'm willing to bet you already know (mostly) what to do; eat better and move more. So the question then becomes - why aren't you doing it already?

What we covered:

• The environment and circumstances I was in, that lead to my undesirable weight gain.
• My beliefs about my health.
• My vision for my health.
• My purpose for trying to lose weight.
• My strategy (and actions steps) for losing 25 pounds.

This podcast started with an Instagram post. I (still) have an unhealthy relationship with food. I still run to food when I feel uncomfortable or threatened, and I still get the urge to reward myself (with food) when things go great. It's not a habit I'm proud of, and although I've gotten much better at mastering it, it's still there to various degrees waiting to show it's ugly head when I'm tired or stressed out. I didn't want my children to develop the same habit. I want Ari and Vedran to have a healthy relationship with food; I want them respect food, that we (Western Civilization) are beyond blessed to have it available all the time, and that the primary purpose of food is not pleasure but fuel. So far, I'm proud to say I think we've done a good job in the face of strong adversity. Although I openly admit I have no idea where it will lead, I'm happy where we are so far. The purpose of this podcast is to share our strategy and mindset with you to 1) Give you something to try and 2) Give you something to consider. What we cover:

• Parents are still the greatest influence (thankfully) on their children. We spend the most time with them, and they have a tendency to become a lot like us.
• Children pick up on the emotion behind everything, they are always watching and listening...just think of your own childhood experience with your parents.
• How to deal with outside factors (day care, grandparents, etc.) feeding your child in a manner that is completely unacceptable to you.
• Why the long game is the only game when it comes to children and how you need to adjust your focus.

In an interesting and well thought out blog, blogger Becky from yourmodernfamily.com, tackled an important and sensitive issue. Namely... what the heck is happening to our kids? Why are is there more depression, suicide, and just plain old apathy affecting today's young people? The blog was called "The scary truth about what's hurting our kids". In it she makes a lot good arguments and brings up some interesting discussion points throughout. There is little disagreement that it has become much more difficult to be a child today than it was even 10 years ago, but there is MUCH to discern as to why children are having a harder time. We are constantly sold the same reasons - technology, more pressure, distracted parenting, bullying, etc. Are these really the reasons, or could there be something more happening? Is stripping technology away from our kids the way we are going to make them better, or should you be spending your time elsewhere? The purpose of this podcast is to begin (because it's a massive topic) to discuss a strategy on how to create a healthy, happy and self-sufficient child that can handle the pressures of the modern world. What we cover:

• Does technology create a more difficult environment, or does it just expose something that has always been happening?
• Is it harder to be a kid today than when we were growing up and how do we address the new challenges?
• What is the most important thing we can give our kids to shield them from the outside world?
• What can we do as parents to ensure developing healthy, happy and productive kids who are excited about life and not scared to death?

Everyone knows that our educational system is in trouble, this is not a secret.

Falling standardized test scores, lower literacy rates, children not being able to do simple math or construct paragraphs with correct sentence structure, are just the tip of the iceberg.

It was announced earlier this week that Finland, as an attempt to fundamentally disrupt a failing system, is going to end all subjects in school.

Unfortunately, this is not a radical, bold new move, it is exactly along the same lines of thinking that has been making education worse and worse.

The problem with education is not a the people (in fact teachers and administration have never cared more about their students than today), it's not a subject problem (well it kind of is, but at a deeper level), it's a core philosophical problem.

Until and unless children are taught in a way that is congruent with the way the human brain works, we will always have the same educational problems.

The purpose of this podcast is to discuss why removing 'all subjects' is a bad idea and how to make education better.

• Why knowledge is important to you and your children's life and why you can't make actual learning important enough.
• Why our modern educational system is in trouble and what we can do to fix it. HINT: The issue has nothing to do with the people in the system - teachers are some of the most caring people on the planet the problem with the system is, imagine that, philosophical.
• Why removing subjects from school is a huge step in the wrong direction. Removing structure from school is not a radical new way of thinking, it's more of the same way of thinking that's already ruined education.
• What you can do at home to help your child.

The often repeated mantra at Life By Design Inc. is "we don't guess, we test."

At the heart of this statement is the message to not only rely on subjectivity to determine your quality of health (or most other important things in your life).

People with no previous subjective indicators for heart disease, die daily from heart attacks. This means one day they felt great and the next...

Do you see the problem with using how we feel as the main criteria for whether we are moving towards health or away from it?

This is where bio-markers come in.

What is a bio-marker? It's an objective measurement of the physiological processes that occur in the body.

The great news is many of these bio-markers can be used to predict our chances of living a long life.

In today's episode we discuss some of the best ones and what you can do to boost your longevity.

What we covered:

• The ONE mistake not to make when using bio-markers to determine the quality of your health.
• A marker far better than total cholesterol to grade your cardiovascular risk and for women, to judge your chance of dying from anything!
• Details about an important mineral you need but are likely deficient in. Your lack could shorten your lifespan but it doesn't need to...it's super easy to fix.
• How your omega fat profile can dictate the health of your cell walls and what that means for a long healthy life.
• Tale of the tape. What your waist circumference should be in order to maximize your chances of wearing those pants for a really long time.
• A metric with MAJOR ramifications if you don't keep it in check (and of course how to do that).

We've all heard the stats: Over 50% of marriages end in divorce. Truth be told, we've actually heard it's over 60% now. Is this really surprising? Look at the world that we live in; we are being taught that emotions are superior to reason, that salvation lies in the opinion of others, that being moral means thinking of yourself last, that you can fake success and that you can have the life you want without any effort. You might be thinking what does this have to do with my marriage or romantic relationship? The answer is: everything! Romantic relationships expose who you are as an individual. If you are not 'solid' on your self-esteem, vision, purpose, and self-awareness, how could you ever dream to be the backbone for someone else? If we ever want to fix the relationship problem that is plaguing our society we have to do the opposite of what we've been doing; mainly, we need to look within ourselves for the answers. The purpose of this episode is to discuss this great article and help you discover a way to set realistic expectations while fulfilling your partner's as well. What we cover:

• Are unmet expectations really the silent marriage killer or could it be something else?
• Why marriage and relationships, especially when children are involved, do not strengthen you, they expose you. The sure-fire way to make sure you're not caught with your pants down when the tide goes out.
• How and why self-awareness and rational selfishness are the keys to setting expectations and communicating them in a way that will help you feel empowered.
• Why marriage should be treated as a business deal and not privy to over the top emotions and unrealistic regulations.

Oct 18, 2017, will always be remembered by Canadians. That was the day that Gord Downie, leader of The Tragically Hip and Canadian Icon passed away. The Tragically Hip have been called a Canadian treasure, the national band of Canada and many other flattering things have been said about them. Gord Downie was (and will continue to be) a role model and an influence. He inspired many in Canada, his vision reached much wider than music, and he had a lot to say. Role models are a real and powerful force in your life. If you have good ones you can overcome the worst that life can throw at you and still be successful. If, on the other hand, you (either consciously or unconsciously) have selected poor role models your life might never reach it' s full potential. The purpose of this episode it to help you understand why having and worshiping heroes is a key to success; and how to choose a proper role model. What we cover:

• Issac Newton said, "The reason I can see so far is that I've stood on the shoulders of giants." Role models are an excellent shortcut to help you become the person you want to be in order to achieve the things you want to achieve.
• Choose your role models carefully and you can even be selective in that process. It's OK to look up to and admire someone, that's human nature, but you don't have to accept all of them. You can pick and choose which parts you like and which parts you don't like. Tiger Woods would have been an excellent golf role model; not so much in the relationship department.
• Role models are art in motion. As a human being you need art to survive. Your role model - in a very real example - embodies that. Be very careful who you choose.