Life By Design with Dr. Jamie Richards

"The thing about common sense is that it's not so common." Voltaire Nutritionally, the whole world has lost it's mind. How can you have one group telling you to eat meat and another telling you avoid it. They both can't be right, but they both can be wrong. Every once in a while it's important to go back and remember the principles from which you operate, check your premise to see if you're getting the results you want, and make any adjustments. The fact that you're human means that ideas and principles rule your thinking and your actions. It's like your computer code. If you're not happy with your results, yes it's important to check your actions but every once in a while it's vital to check your code. We spend enough time interacting with patients, reading articles and scrolling social media to know that diet, more precisely lack of results from diet, is a sore spot for a lot of people. The purpose of this podcast is to review and, in a way, reinstate the principles of Eat By Design. What we cover

• Why our relationship with food and how we view food, is the most important and overlooked step in solving most of your issues with food.
• An overview of the first 4 Eat By Design principles and how they apply to your life.
• Why it's important (and unfortunate) that you need to read studies and make up your own mind in the realm of nutrition.

Do people with high self-esteem adopt an open (power) posture, or does an open posture produce high self-esteem? In general, it's commonly believed that your feelings produce your outward appearance, but that concept is being challenged. In the late 70's Richard Bandler and John Grinder founded a controversial psychological technique called NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming), which challenged many of the beliefs in modern psychology. One of which was the idea that you could (through various methods, one of which being posture) change your own moods, emotions, and behaviours. Of course, NLP was dismissed, and Bandler and Grinder labeled quacks, even though many people have studied NLP and noted that it had helped them in their lives. On today's episode, we review an experiment involving posture (power posing) on 108 German 4th Graders. What we cover

• The general idea in psychology that feelings/emotional states produce physical posture and other physical traits.
• The results of the study.
• Our interpretation of the results and how we think that applies to children's self-esteem and health in general.
• Can you leverage any of this information to produce a state of higher self-esteem in yourself or your children?

How do you prolong healthy aging?

For us healthy aging is normal aging. We know that we are not getting any younger and that eventually, we will die.

In the meantime, since loving your life is essential to Life By Design's core beliefs, we want to do everything we can to ensure the quality and length of our lives.

Today we examine a study looking at the difference between surviving and thriving. What does that look like in terms of the body's nutritional requirements.

What we cover

• The Triage Theory. How a modest deficiency of one of the nutrients/cofactors, triggers a built-in rationing mechanism that favors the proteins needed for immediate survival and reproduction (survival proteins) while sacrificing those needed to protect against future damage (longevity proteins).
• How that plays out in real life.
• The vast deficiencies that exist in society in terms of nutrient density. The authors note what vitamins and minerals are required for longevity and survival and just how deficient populations typically are.
• The difference between thriving and merely surviving. Why that is a central concept for your success.
• Ideas around supplementation, and do you really need to, or can you get all that's required with your natural diet?
• What that diet should consist of and where should you start with your supplementation, if at all!

"Chronic low back pain (LBP) is the most common cause of disability worldwide. New ideas surrounding LBP are emerging that are based on interactions between mechanical, biological and chemical influences on the human inter-vertebral disc (IVD). The degenerate IVD is proposed to be innervated by sensory nerve fibres and vascularised by blood vessels, and it is speculated to contribute to pain sensation. However, the incidence of nerve and blood vessel ingrowth, as well as whether these features are always associated, is unknown." In English, it means that the discs of your spine have both nerve and blood vessels going to them. The authors of this study wanted to see if there was a difference between healthy and unhealthy discs and how many nerve fibers and blood vessels they had. The purpose of this podcast is to discuss this study, its possible applications and if it should change how you're taking care of your spine. What I Cover:

• The current models of spinal pain and spinal degeneration.
• The difference between specific and nonspecific low back pain, which is most common, and the origin of the pain.
• The findings of the study, including the seemingly contradictory finding that degenerated discs had more nerve and blood vessels.
• The possible mechanism behind the fact that damaged tissue has more nerve and blood vessel innervation than healthy tissues.
• What does this information mean clinically? Does it change what you should be doing for your health?
• Does this change or alter anything you've been doing already?

Dr. K here... My relationship with food used to suck. It's hard to admit that to you. Growing up, food was the go-to for everything. 'Have a bad day? No problem, let me make you a pie'. 'You made the team? Awesome, let's celebrate, let me make you a pie.' Let me be clear:

• I used to think fat made you fat,
• I used to think carbs made you fat,
• I used to think anything that wasn't organic was poison,
• I used to think sugar was the devil,
• I used to think fructose was the devil,
• I used to think fruit made you fat,
• I used to think I had to eat small meals,
• I used to think breakfast was the most vital meal of the day,
• I used to think saturated fat and cholesterol would kill you,
• I used to think skipping a meal was metabolic suicide,
• I used to think eat all your meals was metabolic suicide,
• I used to think too much protein was going to kill my kidneys,
• I used to think grains were a food group,

And, I got most of this from well-meaning and smart people. On this podcast, we discuss two big-ticket pieces of diet advice that made a massive impact on my diet and my health. What We Cover:

• What allowed me to take the depravity and stress out of eating.
• What helped me keep on track during this stressful crises.
• Two pieces of advice that really changed my outlook on nutrition and dieting.
• How to apply this advice to your own life.
• How to properly set goals around your nutrition.

Anytime you deny your nature as a human being, you are hurting the most essential part of yourself, namely your mind and consciousness.

Such is the case with the common saying - don't compare yourself to other people.

Are we saying you should compare yourself to others?

Not really, more like you can't stop comparing and contrasting since it's literally how your mind learns. It's one of the traits that makes you a rational human being!

Our mind forms concepts and ideas by comparing. A child learns concepts like blue, red, fire truck, dog (literally all of human cognition) by comparing, so to label it 'bad,' is terrible for the human psyche.

"Isn't it harmful to compare yourself to others when you should be focusing on yourself?"

More on that in this episode...

What We Cover

• Your nature, why it's essential and why going against it is the most disastrous long term mistake you can make.
• How society is attacking your very nature, why it's destructive, how to avoid it and what to look for.
• Why it's your standard you need to change, not your mental processing.
• How to know what standards to look for.
• Why the clearer you are on what you want, the better and easier your life will get.

To say that the recent events (more so the reactions to said events) haven't shaken up our lives, would be a tremendous understatement. We all react differently to stress and stress impacts us differently depending on where we are in our lives. If you're in a better spot - great relationships, support and solid finances... you will handle your stress better then someone who has poor relationships and no support. One of the things we all have experienced from this current crisis, is the development of habits and routines that we know are not helping us reach the best in our lives. Whether it be sleeping in, more alcohol consumption, poorer nutrition, less exercise; for one reason or another, we've developed habits that we would like to change. But how do we do that? On today's episode of Life By Design, we looking more deeply into creating habits. We use Charles Duhigg's fantastic book, The Power of Habit, as a framework to view this subject. What We Cover

• The human mind and automation.
• How and why we depend and need habits and routines to function.
• The three components (yes, there are four, but let's keep it simple) that constitute a habit and how most of the books and thinking around changing a habit are focused on the wrong component. This is where, in Duhigg's opinion, most people mess up their new habit forming work.
• What you can do to create new habits that you'll be proud to have.
• Why it might not be the right time to create new habits and that's OK.

Once upon a time, in fairy tale land, it was believed (and unfortunately, it is still believed by many in health care, especially those who make the decisions) that pre-existing damage done to your cervical spine was not a barrier to the recovery of whiplash. Think about how absurd that sounds. If you had had two homes, one brand new, the foundation was just poured with the latest and greatest material and technology, the second, worn by seeing its fair share of storms and nature, and hit with an earthquake...which one would do better? A 5-year-old would say the new home with minimal trauma. How is it that a neck with pre-existing damage and degeneration wouldn't respond the same way? It can and would, according to the latest data, more than 50% of people in car accidents who have had previous cervical degeneration, don't recover from the accident. The purpose of this podcast is to examine a recent article looking at whiplash injuries and pre-existing cervical degeneration to help those who are frustrated with your lack of recovery from a car accident. What We Cover

• What's considered cervical degeneration and how does that affect your overall health? It's important to understand there are various 'opinions' on what constitutes degeneration and how that might or might not be affecting your health.
• The mechanism of whiplash. Knowing what to look for and what to ask could help you understand your condition.
• You're not crazy. One of the most challenging things about caring for patients who have been through car accidents is the psychological effects of people thinking you're nuts. This study says otherwise.

CLICK HERE to read the study.

In order for anything to grow and develop, you need the proper environment. Tomatoes don't grow in Antarctica and maple trees don't grow in the ocean. Unfortunately, we don't live in an environment that is conducive to the development of genuine mental health for the majority of the human race. Of course, some humans will be able to do it, but for the majority of us, the soil is just not fertile - unless you know how to make it fertile. The process of making the environment fertile for you to develop your mental health involves developing your awareness and recognizing how the deck is stacked against you. Confusing? You bet, listen to the episode and let us explain what we mean. What we covered

• Like everything in the universe, your nature (the way you are) dictates what you need. For humans to survive and thrive (AKA mental health), we need to use our minds. It is precisely the human mind which is on trial in our modern culture.
• Some of us are taught to question and think as children, but as we turn into adults, if you ask the wrong questions, you are accused of being a 'conspiracy theorist' or worse. This means you can be threatened, shamed and censored (forget tolerance for those people) into thinking you're wrong. A healthy mind doesn't respond to force; it responds to reason.
• We are being taught that the group is superior to the individual and that we need to sacrifice our wants and desires for the benefit of the group. How can you have mental health when your mind (the only one you have) is placed as inferior to the "collective consciousness?"

Does your diet affect your pain levels?

In a study published in PubMed, researchers examined three groups of adults all between the ages of 65-75 diagnosed with knee pain.

The participants were asked to follow one of three diets for a period of 12 weeks while functional pain, self-reported pain, quality of life, and depression were assessed every three weeks using questionnaires.

Oxidative stress was analyzed in serum before and after the diet intervention using a TBARS assay. TBARS is thiobarbituric acid reactive substances, which is a measure of oxidative stress as a product of AGEs.

Osteoarthritis is the most prominent form of arthritis, affecting approximately 15% of the population in the United States. Knee osteoarthritis has become one of the leading causes of disability in older adults.

Besides knee replacement (which is still unclear as well), there has not been a very successful way of handling or reducing the pain or the damage done in osteoarthritis patients.

Drugs that do reduce pain are a concern due to side effects and the potential for addiction development.

The results showed that the low carbohydrate group had dramatically reduced pain scores, significantly increased quality of life scores and, decreased TBARS.

What we cover

• The study, the limitations of the study and the results.
• Interpretations of the results.
• Possible mechanisms explaining the results.
• The possible applications of this study into your daily life and what we believe you should change.