How To Lose Weight With 5 Key Habits

Introduction to Dr. Laurie Marvis 0:00

Well, thanks so much for joining us today. Today we have an excellent guest. We have Doctor Laurie Marvis. Doctor Marvis is a family physician as well as a lifestyle medicine physician. And she's been using food as medicine since 2012. She has a license in all 50 states, so she can help people throughout the country with behavior change and nutrition change to improve their health, improve their weight. Thank you so much for being with me today, doctor Laurie Marvis. Well, thank you for having me.

I'm excited to be here. And Doctor Marvis today is going to talk with us about sort of her five tips for healthy weight loss. Is that right? Yeah. I'd like to definitely talk about the the levers that we know we should pull, but we struggle to pull. So yeah. Yeah. So that's a good way to say it that we know we should do. But we struggle. Right. Because a lot of us kind of have a sense of some of the things we should be doing, but like, how do we make it happen? Right? Especially in today's fast paced modern world, it's very hectic and stressful.

And yeah, we need all the help we can get. Well, let's start with the first one. So when it comes to nutrition and balanced diet, can you help us understand how a balanced diet contributes to weight loss, and what are the key food groups that we should be working to achieve to have that balanced, nutrient dense diet? Yeah. And I think we kind of talked a little bit about this before we we started recording today and is understanding everybody is coming to a weight loss journey from different beliefs and traditions and cultures and all sorts of, you know, maybe there's some mental health components, there's some unhealthy relationships with food.

So everyone needs to understand that their journey is unique and we need to address it as such. However, in the United States and across many places in the world, we are fiber deficient. And so I typically lean towards a whole food plant based diet. And I will speak to the benefits of eating more plants. And however you want to engage with fiber in your in your life, that's completely up to you. But I do know I've been eating a wholesome, plant based diet for 12 years, and I've only seen wonderful things in regards to my.

Balanced Nutrition and Fiber-Rich Foods 2:25

I've always been pretty healthy, but I, you know, I'm in my mid 50s, my daughter's a doctor. I mean, I'm not exactly young these days, but I feel pretty good. But some incredible benefits to patients, including one patient up to 350 pounds. Weight loss. We've had multiple with over 200 loss of 100. And so there's wow. Such an important element here. Yeah absolutely. So what happens when you start adding more fiber to your plate? A couple of things. Number one we understand weight loss is a calorically balanced equation.

Right. You have to have some type of caloric reduction to actually see weight loss occur. But how do you do that and not feel deprived and, you know, not walk around hungry. Well, there's some mechanisms that can occur when you eat a whole food plant based diet on the physiologic level, but also what happens is you're starting to really improve things like chronic disease. Maybe you'll be able to also stop certain medications like insulin or something. If you're an uncontrolled diabetic and you're in high doses of insulin, which of course we need insulin.

It's a very important hormone and medication, but it can be weight promoting in some places. So here we are looking at one. We're going to be improving how you feel. Then you'll start moving more. You sleep better. And all of this kind of feeds upon itself. So this is a very anti-inflammatory diet. So when you combine the phytonutrients of fruits, veggies, beans, whole grains, nuts and seeds, you're going to find that again. The fiber will still you up, right? So you will be eating much less calorically dense foods.

That in and of itself is where the caloric reduction occurs without you even trying, not having to look about, you know, counting your calories and feeling deprived and you know, why not doing it through the next meal? Because you're like, I can only have this much. But when you start thinking about all these amazing foods now, nuts and seeds can be obviously very calorically dense. But these are a good source of healthy fats, and you certainly need to consume those on an a great basis, especially walnuts are amazing benefits to not only longevity, but brain health and heart health.

You have chia seeds and ground flax and hemp seeds, great sources of protein. And again the Ala the short chain omega is. So with all of that you can think about. Also if you have hypertension I just finished Hypertension Summit. Wonderful. Nitrates and different things occur in those dark green leafy vegetables. And then you start thinking about the, resistant starch that occurs in your beans. And we're talking about in fruit. You know, your health, your gut health when you get the, butyrate production by the little bacteria, they're just going at it reduce, risk for things like colon cancer and rectal cancer, things like that.

So again, we are a fiber deficient nature, nation. Excuse me, but I would say probably on average, if you look at the research, 12 to 15g of fiber per day per person, and they include, like, you know, French fries and like that we're currently getting that's all people are currently getting. That's not how much people need. That's how much people are getting. On average. I was like, whoa, that's not how much people eat. Yes. This is yeah, they do recommend 25 for women, 35g for men even that I think.

So that anemic recommendation, that's the minimum upwards. That's the minimum. And when I am looking at my dietary intake when I actually started, I'm hitting upwards of 75 80g per day. If you look at the Paleolithic poop and see what actually the our ancestors ate, they're eating 100g plus the protein or protein of, fiber per day. And it's utterly amazing to think we live in this world of this ultra processed food and so many people, are deficient. And so regardless of what camp, those who say eat whole foods, the number one thing is get rid of those ultra processed foods.

They're nothing but trouble. Pro-inflammatory, very calorically dense and really just lead to malnourishment on the micro level and macro level. So yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And gosh, what a wealth of information there. So I heard a few things. Eating fiber will push other things off your plate. Right. So if you're eating leafy green vegetables and you're eating baked beans and lentils and fruit, then you don't have to worry about not eating, say, potato chips because you are full from hopefully eating something else instead, right?

It pushes the other things out of your diet instead of coming from this place. If I can't have food, these are foods that I could eat without having to stress about a whole ton. So I love I love about this and absolutely that most of us are eating at best half of the minimum we should be eating. But like there's not really like it's hard to overdo the fiber, would you say? Yeah, well it depends. Right. So if you have someone who is just starting out and they've been very fiber deficient, they might have some struggles in the GI area.

They might notice that they're feeling bloated or very gassy. Those are just the microbiome coming back online and going, oh, I have fiber. Let's get down and start jumping. And so the fiber is just doing what the, you know, the the bacteria just doing what they need to do is really chomping down on this fiber and creating an environment that really decreases your risk for many, many things, your your health. Really. If you think about your gut microbiome, it is such a wonderful place to start thinking about how can I improve my health?

How can I improve my gut microbiome? And it starts with fiber. But yeah, so you can get in a little bit of trouble if you go for the black beans and, you know, two cups a day and everything, you might want to start with lentils, but again, cooking your food, blending your food, that will help. But other than that, you really are going to struggle to overdo anything on the fiber. And if you do feel some little gut adjustments that maybe that microbiome home sort of growing, getting active, getting healthy, and hopefully over time your body will sort of adjust to to that and get used to it.

Will. Yeah, I will say anywhere between two weeks to six months, depending on the individual. Now, if you have someone who has, inflammatory bowel disease or something and they say like, yes, I'm going to eat some, you know, a whole plant based diet, they'll hear some amazing case reports of people reversing certain autoimmune diseases. Remember, medications are required. We got to put out the forest fire first. You know, don't just abandon your current treatment protocol with your doctors. You need to speak to them.

So you may want to start incorporating some foods. And now those type of foods may need to be blended and cooked and really being paying attention to easily digestible forms like starches or something like that. Really thinking about how you can start incorporating some of those foods in certain circumstances. Yeah. And then I also love what you said about, you know, focusing on those whole foods and backing away from those processed and ultra processed foods. Right? The things that come in a package, the thing that you can't really recognize what the original food even was, has you know, 40 ingredients on the back of the package.

Those things are designed for us to over eat, right? So, you know, a company that's making millions or billions from this product has made it so we will eat and eat and eat that product. But it's hard to overeat black beans, right? You can only eat so many of them. They're delicious. They're good. But at a certain point you do feel full from them, right? Right, right. And it's not the food that your mind goes to when you're stressed out or lonely or, you know, it's like, I'm gonna need a can of black beans or some broccoli.

You know, you're going to the ultra processed foods that have the high sugar, the high fat, the high salt, which just, you know, wreck havoc on your poor body because we weren't made to be consuming these foods. You know, we didn't evolve to eat ultra processed foods. So it's a very important message that if that's the one thing someone will do is remove the ultra processed foods, their health alone would improve. Yeah. On that one. Okay, I love it. So reduce ultra processed food and then start integrating more of those fiber rich foods.

Our veggies are really come from our beans. Our lentils are nuts, right? Exactly, exactly. Okay, so the second half that I think we were going to talk about for improving our health and our weight was around physical activity. So can you tell us about how regular physical activity can help the weight loss process, and maybe some suggestions on what sort of activities people can get started on? Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, we need to understand you cannot exercise the kitchen. Right. So you're not going to be able to out exercise a bad diet.

However when you look at the research exercise helps you sustain your weight loss. And one it makes you feel good. It also can really interesting research showing that it can kind of counter the the poor sleep habits that you may have right now. Hopefully as you start eating better, moving more, you'll start sleeping better. But movement is such an important piece and how you can get started and just start small. I had a patient is an excellent example of how starting tiny can really build into a wonderful snowball effect over your across multiple dimensions of your life.

Number one is she did see me. I see her regularly, and I was just trying to get her to start walking. Habit. She was Doctor Morrison with time for a while, and I was like, well, tell me, when are you outside as well? I'm outside when I go to my door to get in it, to go to work, and then I'm driving back and I'm exhausted. I get out of my car to go into my house and, you know, she's basically trying to tell me, it's like, I don't care what you're saying, I don't have time. I was like, okay, you're outside, you know, parked in your driveway, open the door, walk to the end of the driveway and back.

Can you do that for me? She goes, are you serious? I'm like, yes, I'm serious. She does okay. I was like, I really need. I made her pinky promise in my clinic and, she is really funny. She's like, all right, fine, I'll do that as like, you know, you got to make it something that you absolutely can do. And she said, I can absolutely do that. So she walked to the end of her driveway and back, and by the few days she's like, this is ridiculous. I can walk around the block before you know it, she's walking 2 to 3 miles, lost 60 pounds in reverse or type two diabetes.

So I you know, this is literally starting with walking to the end of the driveway, cursing me the whole way, I'm sure, and then walking back. But then the point here is that tiny habits make a huge difference. Another one that's really kind of fun to share was a more recent patient, and we were talking about her exercise and she's I'm just so busy. I'm like, okay, tell me one habit that you do every day that I don't care if you were in the middle of the jungle or in a New York sun, you know, rise, tall building or in the middle of traveling.

What's the one habit that you do? She was. I drink my coffee in the morning. I'm like, okay, wherever that habit is occurring, I need you to do something. Can you do push ups on the wall, push ups against the counter, squats? What you did was I could do push ups against a counter. I was like, okay, I want you to start with two. And she's like, while the coffee's brewing, I need you to do two on the counter. She's like, okay, I can do that. So she started, well, I kind of let it kind of slide. I didn't follow up about it regularly, and it's like two months later, she's like doctors.

You've been asking me about my push ups. I'm like, well, tell me about your push ups. She goes, well, I'll tell you, I can do 60 now. I was like, really? And she's like, she's like, I was like, if she goes, look at these guns right here.

Exercise, Walking, and Strength Training 13:55

And I'm like, this. Some pretty piping hot guns. And this is a woman in her mid 60s. We're building confidence. We're getting stronger. I was like, and now we need to push it envelope and start. You know, maybe some knee push ups on the ground. What other physical things can you do. So certain types of activities what exercises should you be doing? One, some type of cardiovascular exercise where you're getting your heart rate up a few times a week, or maybe even a part time to tip, you know, finish a sentence next.

Resistance training is such a critical, critical piece, especially as we get older trying to really prevent sarcopenia, which is literally loss of muscle mass, making sure you're eating enough protein to make sure you're maintaining that muscle mass, especially as we get older. And so resistance training at least three times a week, 2020 five minutes, where you're doing big compound movements, you know, squats, dead listings like that really thinking about. And if you have been injured or you have things like osteoporosis, make sure you speak to your doctor about a physical therapy referral so that they can create the plan plan that's appropriate for you.

And then finally, I think some flexibility mobility is really, really key here. So you might actually be doing all the walking or the running of the swimming biking. And then you're doing resistance training, but you still struggle to maybe touch your toes or, you know, doing some rotational motion, and really struggle at the end of a moment, movement for a particular joint that is really important to pay attention to, because that will really speak to longevity. Falling activities of daily living.

A great test to do is a sit sitting and rising. Can you lower your body without using your hands or knees to the ground and then bring your body back up? So if you're over the age of 55 or so and struggle to do that, that is something to pay attention to. And that doesn't mean you have to be able to do that perfectly. But can you make some advancements in doing that? And so just seeing where your weak spots are because as the body ages, which it will, that's just the reality of the world. In our life, you can make some big differences by, again, just paying attention to a few things and seeing what you can do.

But yeah, these those are the most important things, I think, when it comes to, physical movement for sure. Those were really powerful stories. And Doctor Morris, I think I have like the same patient. I have the same patient with the walking where she, we, she actually physically could only walk to the, the mailbox, you know, the end of the street. Because she was so short of breath and, she started doing that every day. She started getting on a treadmill, and she would start with one minute on her treadmill.

And over the course of several months, she got up to an hour of walking on her treadmill day, and she ended up losing, about 100 pounds. And it was just amazing. And like you said, it all snowballs, right? Like you start with that small change, but then it was easier to eat healthy, right? Like it just all started going together for her. So I think that was such a powerful message like start somewhere. And we know that, you know, we used to think you had to do a lot of exercise to get a benefit and you do get more benefit from more exercise.

But we are starting to realize that so much of us fit so much, that small amounts of movement are actually really powerful to. Yeah, you can just move, you know, movement, little bites of it. Right? There's some interesting studies on like running up stairs, up or down or doing jumping jacks for like 20s you know, a few times a day that alone will have some improvement, you know, just some really interesting things, any type of movement you can. And it's the 10,000 steps per day started as a marketing ploy.

But if you look at the research, even just around the research of Alzheimer's, what they actually found was around 9800 steps per day in decreases your risk of Alzheimer's by 50%. There's correlation here as far as causation. You can go into the intricacies. But again, it gets back to movement and really seeing the benefit of moving your body in whatever capacity you can at this current time. Let's move on to habit number three, which is about hydration. So can you tell us about how hydration is important for weight management and how much water do you recommend people should drink in trying to support their weight loss efforts?

Yeah, so I think so many people walk around dehydrated when we're drinking things that dehydrate us. If you're drinking highly caffeinated foods, or maybe you're on medications like diuretics for hypertension control, things like that. We're walking around in a state of dehydration. And so really, if you're having fatigue, headaches, difficulty sleeping and you're just don't know what's going on, try increasing your water. And, I mean, you can do I like I like your you can see I like Lacroix. You could do the sparkling water if you want, but just plain old water.

Right. You might want to put it through a water filtration just because you don't know if your city water is or if you're doing well, water. But again, that that's outside of this conversation, but making sure that you're drinking enough fluids throughout the day. So I would start maybe 8 to 10oz per hour during your waking, you know, eight first 8 to 10 hours a week. Now, if you have a history of heart failure where you have renal issues, you might want to speak to your again, your doctor. You might be on a limited protocol for fluid just because if you have heart failure and things like that, you need to be very mindful.

But again, for the majority of humans, we want to make sure we're drinking like 8 to 10oz per hour of the first 8 to 10 hours your weight. And you will probably do okay. Now, of course, if you're a smaller person, you might be, oh, oh, we can't drink that much. But if you know, if you're a larger person or you're exercising, may obviously need to increase that biggie. Paying attention to electrolyte balance and stuff as well. However, sometimes people really struggle with your nighttime urination.

This is where I think it's important. SIP. Don't gulp. Because the rate at which we actually consume fluid can actually affect our ability need to pee more often. So paying attention, you know, maybe two hours prior to going to bed and try not to gulp later in the evenings, avoiding the caffeine, foods or drink. Scuse me. That will help with your nighttime urination. Needs. It's a good point. Yeah. So if it's keeping you up at night, like, you know, stop drinking maybe two hours before bed, don't it?

Don't try to catch up right before bed. That is not the time to catch up on all the water. You missed out. Start again the next day. And you know, some people are like, well, maybe I'll just drink again first thing in the morning. Please don't do that. Right. So if you're rapidly drinking water, remember poison is in the you know, the dose the poison is the dose, right. So when you think about, water or anything, you can get too much at once. Water if you're drinking. Seriously, like a full gallon in less than five minutes, you can get what we call hyponatremia.

Sodium will decrease very rapidly, and that can put you, your life at risk. So again, try not you know, there's kind of like the weekend warrior syndrome, you know, like I'm going to do it all at once. Well, let's slow down the horses here and, you know, kind of pace yourself. It's a marathon, not a sprint. And but you do need to pay attention to your hydration. And you'll feel better. You'll think better. You'll be more awake. You'll just feel better. Yeah. I like your idea or your suggestion of, you know, your eight ounce glass, like every hour, because it kind of gives you a little metric, a little check off and some of them, some water bottles and things.

Now we even have like a timer on them or something like that. So if you don't naturally remember to do it, you know, using some of those tricks to help, remember to to get your hourly glass of water in. And it's important to remember that with any behavior you need three things to occur. You need a prompt and you need the ability and motivation. So if you have the motivation to stay hydrated, great. But you also need a prompt. So that's where maybe putting your in the water in front of you or setting it there, or a prompt of a timer exactly on your phone or your watch that will allow you to.

And then if it's nearby, you have the ability to do it. So if you look at, you know, BJ Fogg's work, it's amazing. But when you put those together, motivation, ability and a prompt, that's when a behavior will occur. So if you're wanting to do something or create a behavior or an environment that will support a behavior

Hydration Habits for Weight Management 22:05

and really, you know, promote and allow you to do that, think about what you can do to employ, like I said, the prompt to trigger the ability to do it and the motivation. So I love it. Okay, perfect. So water but but evenly throughout the day. I think that's, important thing that maybe some people don't, don't naturally do. So habit number four was going to be around sleep. So let's discuss that relationship between the quality of sleep and weight loss. And what are some of those practices that we can do to to help our sleep.

Right. So when you look at the data, you know, those who have, less optimal sleep will be at higher risk for obesity for a variety of reasons. But number one, when you think about your sleep, if you are snoring or you're waking up fatigued or someone saying, oh, I notice your gasping or running, please, please, please a sleep specialist get a sleep study. Let's not ignore the fact that you might have sleep apnea. You might need some type of, intervention to make sure that we're not putting your your risk at higher risk of, you know, heart attack, stroke, things like that.

So, when you look at the science, also, people who are sleep deprived live shorter lives. So to sleep is really important if you think about it. We spend about a third of our life asleep. Well, there's a lot of things going on, right, that even just speaking the brain, your metabolic, health of your brain, think about, high rise building. Right. And if you see workers during the day and they're doing their thing, and then the lights go off, well, then someone comes in around, you know, 11:00, and they flip on the lights.

They're cleaning their brains, doing the same thing. Right? So the cleanup crews coming in and cleaning up the metabolic waste, setting those memories away into the storage data files. And really, that's an important thing to remember, especially between the 11 p.m. and 4:00 am. I will have patients. I'm like, yeah, yeah, I sleep fine. But they'll go, hey, let's talk a little bit more about your sleep habits as well, because they're maybe they're tired, right? They're asleep, but I don't I sleep okay, but they're going to bed at one in the morning and getting up at like, you know, seven or something.

I'm like, this is not good sleep behavior. Well, let's let's dive a little deeper. Or maybe they're on their, you know, phone or iPad or watching TV right up until the moment that they go to sleep that our brains are light sensitive. Right. There's a gland in the brain, even those who are blind will be affected by the light. And so early morning sunshine tells the brain, you wake up right now in 16 hours, you're going to be ready for bed. So the getting ready for bed actually starts in the morning.

So think about it that way getting some early morning sunshine ten 15 minutes and then maybe even getting some evening. You know, as the sun is starting to rot, to settle, there's different, intensities of light will make an effect on your brain. Maybe trying to get rid of the overhead glaring lights in the evening will be helpful as well. So you want to avoid, any type of large meal about three hours before bed. You want to make sure also that you're, avoiding caffeine. Probably at least 8 to 10 hours before bed if you're especially if you're very sensitive, there's some adenosine issues there that will, keep you from being, sleepy.

And then again, the piece here is you're waking up multiple times in the middle of the night for a variety of reasons. Are you stressed? Are you getting, you know, kind of the monkey chattering, going on at one or 2 or 3 in the morning? You know, there's some stress techniques. There's things like meditation, there's mindfulness practices, there's yoga nidra, which is kind of like a body scan practice.

Sleep, Recovery, and Weight Loss 25:45

There's tons of things you can do to improve your sleep. Exercise will help your sleep. And then in addition, ask your doctor if there's any medications that you might be taking that could be disrupting your sleep as well. I think we really neglect side effects of medications. Doctors are really, really busy, and there's such a polypharmacy that occurring right now. Like, I don't even know. It's the interactions and medications, the side effects of medications. We absolutely will maybe need some medications, but at the end of the day, let's pay attention to potential side effects.

So sleep is really, really critical. Even when you think about hypertension. There's a natural what we call nocturnal dipping that occurs overnight that if you do not, have that happen because you're awake or you're stressed, you may be at higher risk for hypertension. And people are like, why is my blood pressure not dropping? And my weight's good, I'm exercising, but they have horrible sleep. Well, very well might be related to that. So again, at the end of the day the mental health piece is also very important, especially in regards to weight loss.

There's a lot of, you know, feeling of emotions and not necessarily feeding your actual, nutritional needs for your body. Right. And so if we can sleep better, we feel better mentally. We're probably more likely to exercise and eat and make healthier food choices, which will all again, all encompassing, help with your weight loss. Yeah. It all. It all goes together. And sleep is like both directions, right? If you get poor sleep, it affects your mood. But if your mood is not in a good place, that's going to affect your sleep.

And then like that underlying thing, which is a great segue into the next thing to talk about, which is stress, right? So how how does stress affect our ability to lose weight? And what are some effective stress reduction techniques that people can use in their weight loss plan? Yeah. So I think, you know, I'm being in my mid 50s and having patients, I tend to attract that audience and mostly female, you know, 45 to 65 ish. Somewhere in there. Many of them are going and going through perimenopause and menopause.

So there's a lot of, you know, thinking about the physical component here. There's some hormonal fluctuations that occurred that could be stress related because you're like, what's going on with my body? It's causing sleep disruptions. I'm more moody. We also live in a very intense modern culture, especially in the United States. There's so much stress and I think almost self-induced stress as well. Right? We try to stack so much in our lives that there's no space to allow ourselves to actually breathe. And, you know, recover from everything that we're dealing with in our lives.

You know, we're very busy humans, but how much of that do we really need? Right. And then we also then, you know, I call it doomsday scrolling, right? You scroll through the Instagram feed in the Facebook feed, and you're comparing yourself to someone's highlight reel of their life. I guarantee you their life is not what you're seeing on Instagram. That's just the realities of the world. But unfortunately, that's kind of how we are. Like, we're never feeling quite good enough. So first of all, I would say look at where the stress is coming from.

Is there any way you can create space? And space is really important. That's the place that you can find a point to breathe and maybe connect with nature, maybe go for a walk, maybe find time to exercise, connect with loved ones outside of technology, maybe sit down and have dinner without your phones, you know, actually listen to each other and have conversations and create those very important social ties for longevity and just a healthy, thriving life. And so when you think about it, I add, there is a there's an interesting I have it here, actually, because I just did another live, interview right before we talked, and it was really speaking to, stress management.

But there's some really interesting things you can do. And just managing your own stress for like, yeah, I'm stressed, but I'm better because I'll ask and take questions for patients. And they're like, I deal with stress, great. But when I do like I'll do this a little short. Two question like, how are you dealing with this? Do you find yourself anxious or do you find yourself, you know, worried? Most days they're like off the charts, right? But then they'll turn around and say, but I handle stress. Well, even though they're worried about everything every day, multiple times a day.

So there's a really interesting thing you can actually use this called the perceived Stress Scale. And it's a 10 or 14 question, scale. Like you can say, one of them is some of the questions. Let me pull out some here for you is in the last month, how often have you been upset because of something that happened unexpectedly? How often we thought that you were unable to control the important things in your life and anyway, so you score it, and then that is a great starting baseline because it's your self answering it.

Nobody else. You see it. You don't have to report it to anyone. But if you want to use XYZ information to talk to your doctor about what they maybe need to do for you, that would be fine too. But when we think about dealing with the distress, we really got to create space and finding things that we enjoy and remember. It's okay to say no, you don't have to say yes to everything. And I think that was directly to me. I you're speaking to myself right now. I don't have to say yes to everything. Yes. You're taking on the summit.

I it's one of those things. I totally appreciate that. So the the factor here is this just to know that you, you you nobody's going to come to save you. You have to do this yourself. And that at the end of the day, when you're at the end of your life,

Stress Management and Mindfulness 31:25

what are you going to be wishing for that you did that one last thing at work and answered that one last e-mail and that one last text, or there you're going to be so thankful for taking time and space in your life to enjoy your loved ones and building those memories and affecting their lives and potentially generations and beyond. So really important factors here to really maybe you do a radical, shift in your life. Maybe you need to rethink about a few things. With that being said, we're going to, sell all of our properties and actually start living full time on an RV and travel the United States.

All my kids are across the United States, so we're going to go see each of them, my husband and I, and, go harass him for a bit and enjoy hiking in nature, which is where this is. That's my Nevada nature. And, yeah. So I'm like, there's no time like the present. So for you, that seems very radical to many people, but me and this is what we're ready to do it and we can. And so let's go. And so that's what I say. If it's a little girl or if it's a big girl, whatever your go is, just go because you the last thing you want to do is regret.

And next week will not be the perfect time. Next week may not be here. We are not promised anything but this present moment. So please, please, please understand mindfulness is such a key. Living in the present moment will decrease trust. Such an amazing degree. And, I didn't fully understand that till I really started practicing mindfulness techniques. So yeah, powerful stuff actually. I think, you know, the big take home I got from that is that some people may not identify that they are living in a state of stress.

Right? It is so much a part of our modern world and, and sometimes even, like encouraged, right, that we should all be so busy, so productive and that that pressure and stress may be a normal feeling in our society. So I love that idea of that stress scale. What can you say the name of that again. So people, if they want to try that out, it's. Yeah. So it's the perceived stress scale. The perceived scale. Yeah. Yeah. The perceived stress scale. Yes I think that's good because sometimes we don't have insight into those things.

Right. Like we think like this is normal. Everyone around me is like this. And and if stress is really this underlying thing, it's going to wear on you, it's going to make it hard to lose weight. It's going to affect sleep. And so you may not even realize that you feel like you are under stress all time. It may just be part of such a normal to to someone. Yeah, I think so. I if you are always feeling like this discontent or unease or feel like you're always complaining about things and you're just always like me and nothing's ever going my way, there is absolutely some underlying stress that needs to be dealt with, and it may not be to the point that you're like, man, I'm got major depressive disorder or, you know, generalized anxiety disorder that maybe require medication.

Although I'm sure if you ask your doctor they would prescribe you something, but that's not getting to the root cause, right. Because those stresses will still be there. We build on top of each other. But we really need to go to the root cause. And honestly, most of the time it's our thoughts in how we're we're constructing our thoughts and how we can start speaking differently to ourselves. Is it's such an amazing thing. This little 3 pound organ between our ears is it really can make, you know, their ear cup is either half full or half empty.

And I can't even tell you that. Sounds like, you know, I'm like, yeah, okay, whatever. There is a very powerful statement to think about living in this present moment and seeing things in a more positive way. It will rapidly change the quality of your life. And, I guarantee you're going to see markers of health improve, like your heart rate variability and different things that you can measure even on a physiologic level with stress. And, yeah, it's it's it's powerful. And I would wish everybody could find living like this cuz I think we'd have a different world for sure.

Was it? Well, thank you so much, doctor Marvez. I loved your five tips for, weight loss habits. I think that was really helpful information. And if people want to find you or connect to you or get more of your resources, is there a place they can do that? Yeah, they can just go to doctor more resort comm. It's Dr.. And they are b as in boy as an icon and everything's there I've got a podcast I do a free newsletter for for you tube. I'm, I blabber on there all the time about different things. So you may or may not find it helpful, but if you want to check it out, feel free to.

Well I can I've talked to you forever so I bet there is lots more gems on your on your site. So thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.