Got Summit Fatigue? Focus on Healthy Habits.

Got Summit Fatigue?  Focus on Healthy Habits.

Many of you probably receive constant invitations to participate in on-line plant based summits or symposiums that include presentations from numerous experts.  For a short time period, you have access to some free presentations, but most of us don’t have time to watch all the presentations in the time period given.  Once the presentations are no longer available for free, the entire package of presentations is available to purchase.

I have never purchased a summit package, but I have watched a few experts whom I respect during the free time slots.  One thing I noticed with some of these summits is that they include “experts” who promote drastically different dietary approaches for optimal health.  This really pisses me off as people who purchase these packages probably end up more confused about nutrition then they were before participating in the summit.

The summits that have experts who just slightly differ with their dietary recommendations often result in participants driving themselves crazy by needlessly complicating their WFPB approach by majoring in minor details.

One Expert Who Refuses to Participate in Summits

I often wondered why I never saw registered dietitian Jeff Novick as a presenter in any WFPB summit.  He recently wrote a tremendous article explaining why he avoids these summits like ugly avoids a mirror.  Read the article below:

The Road to Success: Creating Healthy Habits

by JeffN » Wed May 30, 2018 11:15 am

I have often discussed the importance of simplicity in achieving and maintaining both short-term and long-term success. I am going to add one more issue that often gets missed in this discussion and that is the issue of habits.

What we are trying to do here is learn new behaviours and make them into habits. We are trying to break old unhealthy habits and develop new healthy ones. These include learning to be more active and learning to eat healthier. And, while there are several keys to developing a new habit, two of the most important ones are consistency and repetition.

While simplicity is important, so is consistency and repetition. This issue has come up quite a bit lately in discussions and counselling with clients and I believe it is partly (if not largely) due to the influence of social media. Social media is giving us access to an enormous amount, and constant flow, of information.

In the last few years, there have been many online “summits, documentaries and symposiums,” which seem to attract a lot of attention and viewers. I have been invited to be a speaker to many of them and have always declined. I am not a fan of them for many reasons.

In one of the closed FB groups that we help facilitate, one of these summits was mentioned as a source of good info for someone’s family member who was newly diagnosed with diabetes and I was asked if I would be in it. I responded as to why I disagreed about the documentary, the info in it and why I wasn’t in it (which I was asked but turned down).

Then I said…

“The main problem with these “documentaries” is that half the experts in it don’t know what they are talking about and recommend approaches that are not healthy. While you and I may be able to tell the difference, someone new to this can’t. And while you may be able to point out to them the differences, to them they all sound like experts.

They may say to you, but this seminar is promoted that everyone in it is an expert, so why are you only picking these few experts and not those few. Maybe this McDougall (or Barnard or Campbell) guy you pick is the quack and this other doctor you say is a quack, is the true expert.

If you notice, I am never (ever) in any of these documentaries or online symposiums etc. and that is why. I don’t see how providing the opinions of so many so called experts who all differ helps and how adding mine to it would in any way help anyone. That is, other than the person who organized its bank account. They are a great profit machine for the organizer and the more “experts” they can get, the more the profit potential for them in selling the aftermarket packages. They then can share some of this profit with the experts based on how many aftermarket packages they can sell to their followers. To me, it is too much like a pyramid or MLM scheme.

More importantly, I think it creates doubt, confusion and misunderstanding. My work, covering 3 decades is available for free in a moderated controlled forum, where you can ask me a question and get an answer directly from me and have an intelligent conversation with me. No pressure to get people signed up or to buy anything or to see/hear any conflicting info and you don’t have to worry about 2 dozen other so called experts joining in with their own opinions.

Which brings me back to why habits developed through consistent repetition are one of the keys to changing behaviour.

I don’t just see this flood of information as unhelpful, I see at as troublesome.

For instance, let’s use either the simple habit of exercising every morning or eating oatmeal and blueberries for breakfast. You go to the 10-Day program and learn that going for a 30-minute brisk walk a day is good for you and will help in many ways. You also learn about the food, like having oatmeal and blueberries for breakfast and you hear me, Mary, John, Doug, Heather, etc. all say, sure, you can just have a simple bowl of oatmeal and berries for breakfast every day and be fine. These recommendations easily fit under the heading of simplicity and can easily be consistently repeated to help develop new habits and behaviours.

You arrive home and start doing both and after a week are feeling better. You are consistently repeating behaviours and developing new habits.

But then, you go online and join a FB group and sign up for some WFBP newsletters, or maybe even an online summit or symposium and start watching some weekly webinars or youtube videos.

First, you start seeing all these new recipes, variations of recipes, cooking tips and cooking gadgets. You also hear different information on ways to exercise and realize that quite a bit of this information is conflicting and confusing with what you learned. Some say it is better to exercise at this time and not that time, to do this exercise and not that exercise, do eat at this time and not that time, to eat this many meals and not that many meals, to only buy this type of oats or that type of oat, or no oats at all, to only eat between these hours or not after this hour.

Since all these voices proclaim to be (or are billed as) WFPB experts, you start trying all these new things out. The next thing you know it’s been a few weeks, or months and you are still hearing “new” information all the time with much of it conflicting and confusing and you’re still trying them all out. This week it is intermittent fasting and sprinting, and last week it was avoiding gluten and why resistance exercise is more important than aerobic. Two weeks before it was high intensity intervals and not eating before noon.

Problem is, none of this has helped develop new behaviours and new habits through the consistent repetition over time. The only new behaviour you have learned (or reinforced) is to keep checking every day and week for the latest piece of information to try that you hope is going to be the answer. And you remain confused.

Now, if you had spent the same few weeks just making sure you had a breakfast of oatmeal and berries every day and went for a 30 minute brisk walk most days, you would have (or be well on the way to developing) two new behaviours because of the consistent repetition of them. You would have also had the time to figure out how to make sure you always have enough oats, enough fresh/frozen berries around and how to adjust your schedule so you always have time for a 30-minute walk in the morning. They are now part of you and your daily life.

When you are at the program, you get the same message from me, Doug, Mary, Heather and John. Find a few simple recipes you like and repeat them. Find a simple and safe form of activity you like and repeat it.

For the record, the research on the power of consistent repetition of simple changes to form new habits and behaviours is fairly consistent and strong. For some, it may take a week or two, for some, a month or two, and for a few, a little longer or shorter than that. But in the end, the process is the same, consistent repetition of simple changes forms new habits and behaviours. 

Healthy through habit: Interventions for initiating & maintaining health behaviour change. (This link is to the full journal online. This article starts at page 79) https://behavioralpolicy.org/wp-content … e1_web.pdf

How we form habits, change existing ones https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 … 111931.htm

The average older American spends much of their time on their (ill) health, their medications, their aches and pains, and going to and from doctors, specialists, surgeries, etc. It is not just part of their life, for many, it is their life. It is their identity.

When they would come to me for help, one of the questions I would ask them is that if they were able to get healthy and no longer needed all those medication, have all those aches and pains, and no longer needed to go to all those doctors, specialists, surgeons, etc., what would they do with their time and their life? For many, it was a powerful question because this has been their life for several decades. Answering it was a key to their success.

Today, I ask the same question of many who are trying to work on these programs. What if you no longer needed another webinar, another conference, another breakfast recipe, another new way to time your meals or combine your food, another cookbook, another variety of berries or oats, another form of exercise, etc. etc. What would you do with your life?

This is why I wrote the post, Get A Life! viewtopic.php?f=22&t=57638

Somehow, we have a history of clients who have been able to maintain high levels of success on these programs before any of this “constant flow of info” was available.

Find a few simple recipes and a simple and safe form of activity or two that you like and then repeat over and over (and over and over).

In Health Jeff

Final Thoughts

I’m very appreciative of this article and I’ll refer to it every time I find myself over-complicating my approach to wellness.  Find some healthy dietary and fitness practices and do them on a regular basis.  I’ll leave you with this quote from some Greek guy:

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle

Stay healthy and strong!