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The Top 5 New Year Real-Solutions For 2009

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

From my own experience in counselling people over the years I would suggest that New Year’s Resolutions don’t work.

How about some Real-Solutions instead.

Here are the top 5 goals you might have (or you should have) as resolutions, and although you could see me in person instead here are the cheap, often no cost, steps to turn airy-fairy resolutions into New Year Real-Solutions.

Resolution 1 - Lose Weight

This old chestnut has to be the top of the Resolution list, but are you planning to just repeat the same old mistakes you made before?

Real-Solution 1 - Behave Thin

Stop with the dieting. Diets and diet mentality is a weight cause, not a cure. Make eating changes you can live with for the rest of your life. You too can eat and be like a naturally thin person.

Action Steps…

  1. There are about half-a-dozen reasonable books / courses on these natural eating approaches. The most effective I handout / sell in my own practice is this one I recommend on Amazon here.
  2. For longer term support access the online McKenna website here
  3. Free version - Join my blog list at the top of the page, or if you are in my home town of Adelaide the local list here, and you will get a 30 minute mp3 of all the steps you need.

Resolution 2 - Improve Musculoskeletal Health

Most people would have this on their list, except that most people have given up. Often people want to improve their fitness for example, but they are scared of injuring themselves or making their current aches and pains worse.

Headaches, back pain, hip pains, arthritis, neck pain, etc etc etc. Enough is enough. Stop taking short term measures, or forking out for never-ending sessions of chiropractors, doctors, physios and all those other health professionals.

Real-Solution 2 - Self-Improve Postural Alignment

Treat the cause, which is almost always a postural problem caused by our all-too-convenient, ergonomically-designed, splinted, orthoticed, hunched-over lives.

Sure physios and chiropractors can put you back in alignment, but they won’t keep you there. You need the flexibility and muscle strength to do it for yourself at home, and you want it in days and weeks, not months or years.

Action Steps

  1. Visit one of Pete Egoscue’s clinics all around the US, or pay for online treatment at www.Egoscue.com
  2. Buy one of Pete’s books. I’d suggest ‘Pain-Free’ is the best place for most people to start. The copy I had autographed by Pete is the book I would take with me on a desert island (it’s a fun read as well as being in depth and practical.) ‘Pain-Free’ is the book I have sold / handed out over and over to patients and throughout my family. Order ‘Pain Free’ at Amazon here.
  3. For free: Go to www.Egoscue.com and click on Where is the pain to get a pair of exercises specifically for whatever body part ails you. Get functional fast.

Resolution 3 - Manifest Greater Success

In such turbulent times of financial crisis and worry, this might be higher on people’s list than usual.

Finally much of the hype has died down on the Law of Attraction. Thank goodness. Add in Giver’s Gain, attitude of gratitude, positive energy, Pay-It-Forward, karma, The Secret, or any of 100 other variations but the idea is that what you send out comes back to you 10 fold.

This is one of those self-help ideas that it is worth acting upon.

Real-Solution 3 - Manifest By Taking An Action

I was reminded of this when one of my former patients came to me after he was diagnosed with a severe and medically fatal form of cancer. He went off to a course with a guy I suggested interstate and came back and said something very strange to me. He said, “I don’t know how to say thank you to people. I need to learn to do this.”

Action Steps - all these are free

  1. Get your problems in perspective. If you’ve been caught up in a psychiatric diagnosis (aka label), then take this antidote test that measures your strengths, instead of your weaknesses. Details are here.
  2. Improve your happiness simply by writing down, once a week, 5 things you are grateful for. Check out the research evidence here.
  3. Recognize, appreciate and acknowledge others. Think of someone right this minute, and turn that thought into something that you and they will remember for a lifetime. Take action on your inner promptings with my compliments here.

Resolution 4 - Make A Change In Yourself

From stopping smoking and cutting back on alcohol, to sorting out how to get “unstuck” in your life, to learning a new skill there’s something in here for every one.

Real-Solution 4 - Don’t Kid Yourself About Changing

If you’ve failed before, get help. If you have a motivation problem check the fundamentals first. Maybe you’re better off not having that as a goal at all. Think about it.

Action Steps:

  1. if you are really stuck, two help-all products are the CD Your Instant Life Revolution and my own online “Self Help Meeting”
  2. For free: Habit Change 101 from the top internet self-help guru is right here.
  3. For free: Want to learn a new skill? This will multiply the chance you’ll succeed.

Resolution 5 - Help Out The Planet

Oh boy should this be on people’s New Year’s Resolutions. Think bigger than yourself. Unfortunately it rarely gets a mention.

Real-Solution 5 - Help Yourself (By Helping Out The Planet)

Call me a cynic, but I don’t think changes will work unless they are already in your self-interest.

Turning off the tap as you brush your teeth is fine, but I really think water just needs to be lots more expensive in the first place so people have their own incentive to think twice. Give people the consequences and habits change so much more easily.

Action Steps - these are free (or better)

  1. Find food that tastes good beyond the first chew. The most environmentally damaging food (eg those that required lots of transporting from far away, those that are out of season in your area, those that are mass produced for their pristine appearance alone, those that have lots of processing and packaging) often just don’t taste as good. It doesn’t have to be organic. It can be home grown.
  2. Spend less. One of the best things about this financial meltdown is that it will get people to spend less and spending less on fuel, new gadgets, electricity, food, clothes, etc etc is almost always an environmentally good thing.
  3. Try out Freecycle.org My wife has been using it for the past 3 months or so and has only one suggestion - get in quick on the good stuff because it can go VERY fast.

Well there you go.

I’ve left off financial goals such as getting out of debt, making more money, and finding better investments than the stockmarket because I don’t usually cover these in my counselling practice. You can email me if you want my suggestions on those.

But I hope this has included something you had on your Resolution list, and given you a way to make it really happen before next New Year.

-Dr Martin Russell

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The LAP-BAND Solution

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

No, this is not my line.

“The LAP-BAND Solution: A Partnership in Weight Loss” is the title of a book by Australian surgeon Dr Paul O’Brien which I read with interest when one of my patients found it in a library and showed it to me.

Since the start of 2007 I have been doing public talks on the myths and facts about weight loss.

The key question I ask people at those talks is this…

What would you advise someone who wanted to lose a SIGNIFICANT amount of weight LONG-TERM?

By which I mean, what actually works to lose >10% of bodyweight for >5 years.

People will come back with all sorts of answers.

I’d love to be able to say it was some sort of psychological intervention, but I can’t (more on this later.)

The fact is that the only research-PROVEN answer is an operation.

There are a few types of stomach operations for weight loss, also known as bariatric surgery, but to my mind they fall into two camps; ones that irreversibly rearrange the gut in some way, and ones that leave your insides intact and put in some sort of stomach banding instead.

The commonest operation of the first type is called gastric bypass surgery, and it is popular in the US.

The most well-known of the gastric banding type is LAP-BANDing (TM), and it is the most popular in Australia.

In “The LAP-BAND Solution” Dr Paul O’Brien is described as one of the originators of this device, and has extensive experience in academic, research, and professional areas of obesity and bariatric surgery.

The book therefore promised to be an authoratitive text, and also very pro-LAP BAND(TM). It was both of these.

It is also fairly readable which is a nice bonus too.

The best bit about finding people who have one solution to a problem, is to listen to what they say about other suggested solutions. They will tend to be scathing.

Here’s what Paul O’Brien says about drugs…

The long-term efficacy is poor and the long-term safety is unknown … the average weight loss after 1 year of orilistat [Xenical] is about 7 lb (3 kg) and for sibutramine [Meridia or Reductil] is 10 lb (4.5 kg) … these results are just not good enough.

Here’s what he has to say about weight loss by dieting and lifestyle modification…

The commercial weight-loss centers have made fortunes by promising excellent weight loss through various twists on the “lifestyle” methods, and their constant advertisements always show the classic “before and after” pictures. Invariably, the “äfter” picture is only a few months after. They do not show the “after” pictures at 5 years.

A recent comprehensive review of all the high-quality scientific studies of the options for weight control has found that there is no evidence of a durable effect from any current lifestyle intervention methods for obesity.

The only problem with this statement is that the review he refers to is in fact from 1997. Not exactly ‘recent’ in my opinion.

Still, the last 11 years haven’t proven any better studies that I am aware of either.

[The approach I recommend has not been proven in the research, and since there is no pill or expensive program, ie no money in it, I very much doubt the required multi-year studies will ever be done.]

However, my patient was already losing weight without surgery.

She gave the book to me for an entirely different reason.

She pointed out that the book talks about patients with a LAP-BAND(TM) learning to eat in an entirely different way - a way that mimics many (but not all) of the things I recommend in my non-surgical, non-dieting approach.

This is really interesting.

What if surgery is merely an extreme way to change someone’s eating behaviors?

I don’t think that is all of the effect, but I certainly think it is some of it, and maybe all of the long-term lasting results.

Why would I say this?

Because I have worked with people who lost weight with surgery, but then gained much of it back again. Their results didn’t last, and I then teach them the additional changes.

Every method of weight loss reports some successes.

Some of people even keep the weight off long-term.

A few become celebrities (eg Biggest Loser winners) and their new life then depends upon keeping the weight off. That might help as motivation.

But I think there are another group of people who discover a few other tips and habits that give them the success they need - effortlessly.

I think they discover, albeit accidentally, the non-dieting method that naturally thin people live unconsciously and automatically.

If you are over-weight enough to qualify for surgery, then it certainly is worth pursuing. In the US you might need to push to get access to LAP-BAND(TM) because apparently insurance companies are still trying to avoid paying for this, but I agree with Dr O’Brien that it is a better option than gastric surgery, if for no other reason than it is entirely reversible.

But also know that you can make many of the same changes without surgery, and all for free!

Here’s how.

Enter your name and email address for the blog notification list at the top of the page here, and you will be sent a complete audio of all the steps I suggest.

[If you are in my home town of Adelaide, then you can get the Adelaidean-only emails with the same audio here instead.]

-Dr Martin Russell

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Human Limitations

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Human beings are remarkably limited creatures.

We can only handle a small range of physical enviroments. We die if we are too hot, cold, get too little oxygen or too much carbon monoxide. We can’t see X-rays or radio waves or even infrared or ultraviolet. We can’t hear dog whistles or most geological rumbles.

Heck we can’t even detect magnetic energy.

We can’t fly like a bird. We can’t run as fast as most cats or dogs. We can’t go underwater very far at all.

But for almost all of these physical limitations we have found a way around them with our ingenuity and creativity.

More interesting are the psychological limitations.

There are many such limitations we have, but a Dr Albert Bartlett claims there is one that stands out…

“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”

I would expand this to include other areas of non-linear thinking such as the reality-shattering 80/20 rule.

But rather than get bogged down in jargon, let’s simplify it.

Removing limitations is fun.

Let Dr Bartlett take you on a whirlwind tour of undoing one particular human limitation…

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5051121482067161853

[This video is in fact the first half and the other half seems to be lost to the world. However there is a complete transcript you can find here.]

-Dr Martin Russell

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Self Help… Thinking Bigger

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Self help can often seem very individual and isolated.

However when I say ’self help’ it includes the idea that no man/woman is an island.

If you are reading this then chances are you are in a very priviledged position compared to most of the 6+ billion humans on this planet.

There is an entire world around us and lots of other people in that world too.

As individuals our fates are often tied to the people, culture, financial system, politics etc etc around us.

However if you don’t take these bigger factors into account, your own individual efforts can end up swamped by the tide of history.

One of these factors is this…

I do not believe that the next 20 years will be ANYTHING like the last 20 years.

What works today, will often NOT work tomorrow, because the future will not just be a straight line continuation of the past.

Helping yourself will show others that it is possible.

Helping yourself will also put you in a position to help people who haven’t planned for an altered future.

Like they say on airplanes safety instructions, “Please make sure you have your own oxygen mask on before assisting others.”

I encourage you in these turbulent times to view these videos here as a starter…
http://www.chrismartenson.com/crash-course

Take these bit by bit. Each one is a treasure of bigger thinking, and it is the best presented version I know of how thinking bigger can really be self help.

Oh, and just for the record, I only go along with with 95% of everything he says. I’ll let you judge what the 5% is.

-Dr Martin Russell

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Exercise And Weight Loss… The Final Nail?

Sunday, October 19, 2008

The problem with studying exercise for weight loss is that you can’t really disguise the exercise.

If exercise came in a pill you could do it.

You could get a big group of people and randomly give half the pill with exercise in it, and the other half a dummy, sugar pill that looks, smells, tastes etc just the same (aka a ‘placebo’.)

This is the scientific way to test whether pills works for weight loss.

But what about exercise?

It’s a bit hard to have a ‘dummy, sugar pill’ for physical activity. The sweating and heart-pumping bit sort of gives it away.

What this means is that for exercise for weight loss there is no way to do the gold-standard of a “double-blind, placebo-controlled” study.

Is this a problem?

Oh my wordy, YES!

Time after time it has been shown that the psychological power of medicines is a huge part of their overall effectiveness.

But is this specifically a problem for exercise and weight loss?

Well I only know of one good study that covers that question.

The researchers didn’t invent a dummy, sugar pill, but they did the next best thing as Ben Goldacre at Bad Science reports…

Alia Crum and Ellen Langer from Harvard psychology department took 84 female hotel attendants in 7 hotels. They were cleaning an average of 15 rooms a day, each requiring half an hour of walking, bending, pushing, lifting, and carrying.

These women were clearly getting a lot of good exercise, but they didn’t believe it: 66.6% of them reported not exercising regularly, and 36.8% said they didn’t get any exercise at all.

The study abstract reports that one group of the hotel attendants was…

…told that the work they do (cleaning hotel rooms) is good exercise and satisfies the Surgeon General’s recommendations for an active lifestyle. Examples of how their work was exercise were provided.

Subjects in the control group were not given this information.

Although actual behavior did not change, 4 weeks after the intervention, the informed group perceived themselves to be getting significantly more exercise than before.

As a result, compared with the control group, they [the hotel attendants who were told that their cleaning job was in fact 'exercise'] showed a decrease in weight, blood pressure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index.

These results support the hypothesis that exercise affects health in part or in whole via the placebo effect.

Now here is the really interesting bit.

HOW MUCH weight did people lose in 4 weeks merely by being thinking they were exercising?

These details are from PsyBlog…

The average weight of those in the intervention group reduced from 145.5 lbs to 143.72 lbs. Over the same period the control group showed no significant change. For those of you working metric-style that’s 66.14 kg down to 65.33 kg.

That’s weight loss of almost 2 pounds, just under 1 kilogram, in just 4 weeks.

Not bad huh, for doing nothing extra?

So here’s the kicker.

Doesn’t that sound scarily similar to the 1 kilogram or 2.5 pounds in 12+ weeks that is the ENTIRE benefit of exercise anyway?!!!

[If you didn't know this was all exercise does, see my previous post with the scientific evidence.]

Exercise, if done for weight loss alone, has suddenly become not just a minor factor, but instead an utter waste of time!

Could this really be the final nail in the exercise / weight loss coffin?

Massive industries of gyms, fitness equipment manufacturers, personal trainers etc etc hope it’s not true.

But what is there left that could resurrect exercise as a real weight loss tool?

If any one knows, I’m all ears.

-Dr Martin Russell

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Exercise For Weight Loss

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

There is so much misinformation around about the benefits of exercise, particularly in regard to weight loss.

But let’s use a bit of common sense, shall we?

When we get active ie exercise, we use up energy.

If you don’t eat more calories, then this energy has to come from your body stores ie from fat.

So exercising more will burn off fat, and you will lose weight.

Simple, isn’t it?

NO!!!

Common sense has failed you and everyone else who pushes this line of thinking.

Don’t kill the messenger. I’m just passing on the researched reality.

Exercise has a pitifully small weight loss advantage.

Mild to moderate exercise removes an average of less than 3 pounds / 1 kilogram.

Vigorous exercise produces barely any more weight loss at 4 pounds or 1.5 kilograms.

That’s all!

Now that isn’t to say exercise doesn’t have other important. It does.

Exercise tones up your muscles, improves your heart, is a more effective mood enhancer than anti-depressants, helps you live longer, among other benefits. Pretty important if you ask me.

It’s just that exercise isn’t all it’s cracked up to be for losing weight.

This totally non-commonsense finding is systematically proven by a review of all the best literature on exercise put together by the most authoritative research collation body in the world, the Cochrane Collaboration. They are not sponsored by medical companies so they are uniquely independent reviewers.

The header of their “Exercise for overweight or obesity” review does indeed say…

We found that exercise has a positive effect on body weight

But buried lower down in the sleep-inducing technical details they admit how miserably small the weight loss is…

When compared with no treatment, exercise resulted in small weight losses across studies. Exercise combined with diet resulted in a greater weight reduction than diet alone (WMD - 1.0 kg; 95% confidence interval (CI) -1.3 to -0.7). Increasing exercise intensity increased the magnitude of weight loss (WMD - 1.5 kg; 95% CI -2.3 to -0.7).

The small weight loss is the same whether you exercise for 6 weeks, 12 weeks, 6 months or 12 months!

Not only that but no matter what type of exercise it is, the results are still unerringly the same.

You can check out the full study here.

In summary.

When someone, a gym instructor, a personal trainer, a friend, a health adviser, or even a medical authority, tells you that exercise will help you lose weight, I invite you to challenge them.

Ask them how much weight they think exercise will help you lose and watch them ignore your question, squirm, or outright invent stuff.

If they disagree with the study above then have them send their research proof to me. No one has yet.

Bust the myth-making.

Truth is that yes, on average, exercise will lose you weight. Just not much.

-Dr Martin Russell

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The Diet Spring Clean

Monday, September 15, 2008

Welcome Readers, old and new … it’s Spring in the Southern Hemisphere!

Time for that famous phrase “spring clean” - making sure things are not just tidied away or half-done, but thoroughly cleaned out ready for summer.

Do you want to lose weight, a little or lots?

Do you want to stop feeling guilty, or ‘out of control’ around food?

Have you tried eating differently, and either it was great for a while but then fell back, or it simply didn’t get the results you wanted at all?

Then this is could well be for you.

But What Is A ‘Diet Spring Clean’ ???

Thanks to Radio 5AA’s Amanda Blair, who herself ended up using just such a non-dieting approach through her own trial and error, for letting me announce this on her show on Sept 24 and recommending people come here to find out more.

I’m anti-diet, because for 95+% of people they don’t work in the long term.

People who go on diets are likely to regain all the weight they lost if not more, AND end up feeling bad and guilty about their eating as well.

Not a good result!

So instead, I’m proposing a whole clean-out of your approach to your weight, what you eat (the original meaning of the word diet before “the industry” took it over), the way you eat, your mindset, and food in general - a total “diet spring clean”.

What could possibly sweep clean aside all those rules, restrictions, “healthy” hints, nutrition tips, calorie counting, and “helpful advice” that infests the media, our friends and families, and often ourselves?

Four simple steps…

  • Step 1.  When you are hungry, eat.
  • Step 2.  Eat what you want (NOT what you think you should.)
  • Step 3.  Savour every mouthful.
  • Step 4.  When you are full, stop.

That’s it. Really.

No pills. No surgery. No meal replacements, shakes, supplements, counting, points, calories, carbs etc etc etc aaaAARFGH! Stop!

Everything else is unnecessary clutter and garbage, until and unless you have these 4 steps in place.

Skeptical?

Good. I would be too.

In fact I was very skeptical when I first came across this, and I needed to know much more.

I’ve set up a way for you to learn more too. There is an interview with complete detail of the 4 steps packed into a short 27 minutes, and it’s all yours completely for FREE.

Simply put in the details so we can send you local Adelaide details including the interview. Type in your name, email address, and click Send.

Full Name:

Email Address:

-Dr Martin Russell

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Psychological Magic

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

One of my favorite lines in hypnosis is the idea that you “know much more than you know you know”… at least unconsciously.

There is so much information in the world that it is impossible to take it all in consciously.

You know a part of it, but what do you know without recognizing it.

As I write this there is the feeling of my shoes on my feet, the hum of the computer and the color of the walls around me that I ‘know’ at least at some level but I take for granted.

I loved magic as a kid but ended up in mind tricks instead. The two are very linked as thisvideo shows.

[This may seem like a pretty simple bit of magic, but it gets more interesting about half-way through.]

-Dr Martin Russell

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Introducing Gavin de Becker

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

One of the biggest aspects of self-help is most certainly safety and it’s opposite, danger.

A huge chunk of psychiatry is taken up with the manifestations of this issue - anxiety, phobias, worry, self-confidence issues, paranoias, anger, violence.

A patient of mine gave me the trememdous gift of introducing me to a man who specializes in helping people living in anxiety and fear.

For those of you like me who hadn’t heard of Gavin de Becker before, he is an American specialist in security issues, especially for governments, corporations, and celebrities, and yet his core message is very much for individuals in our everyday life.

When he was 10 Gavin de Becker watched his mother shoot his stepfather while his 2-year-old sister slept in her bedroom. When he was 16, his mother, a heroin addict, killed herself. Violence and things to fear has been an integral part of his life, and his work.

I was first given his book “Protecting the Gift: Keeping Children and Teenagers Safe (And Parents Sane)” which was more meaningful for the fact that I have 3 young children of my own…

A generation ago, in Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, Benjamin Spock told parents that they already possessed most of the important knowledge about their children’s health. Similarly, when it comes to predicting violence and protecting children, I submit that you already know most of what you need to know.

You have the wisdom of the species, and the expert voice that matters most is yours. Yet, society has trained us to believe that we don’t know the answers, that professionals know what’s best and that good parents listen to them. As a result, we have come to believe that we will find certainty outside ourselves. We won’t, of course, but we can find the illusion of certainty, particularly if that’s what we’re willing to settle for.

-Dr Martin Russell

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