The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Stop Dieting, Start Thinning – 9 Golden Rules of Weight-Loss for People Who Love to Eat By David Medansky

Episode Date: October 1, 2022

Stop Dieting, Start Thinning - 9 Golden Rules of Weight-Loss for People Who Love to Eat By David Medansky

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss i'm hostess voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we hope you're strapped in today oh my gosh it's monday we got another beautiful show up on the deck there. And we're talking to an amazing author. We put us always into the Chris Foss Show podcast Google deck.

It's the Google deck today. And we put in their amazing authors and they just come to us. And it's amazing what we have going on with the show. As always, refer the show to your family, friends, relatives, and all the things we're talking about there. Go to YouTube.com, Fortress Chris Vosk. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Vosk. Go to all our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all those crazy places the kids are playing today. We're going to be talking to an amazing author about his books on dieting. His future upcoming book, Stop Dieting, Start Thinning. Comes out December 13th of 2022.

David Bedansky is on the show with us today. We'll be talking to him. In the meantime, let's make some announcements on some future shows we have coming up. So you'll stay tuned and refer the show to your friends. We have David Enrich is going to be on the show from New York Times. Servants of the Damned, his new book that's coming out. You're probably hearing about this. You're seeing him on TV right now and some of the crazy stuff that he reports in the journalism, his book. We have Cynthia Covey-Holler, who is the daughter of Stephen R. Covey. You may remember Dr. Stephen R. Covey on the show. Her life, live life in Crescendo is going to be later on this week.

And the co-founder of the Carlyle Group, one of the most successful, what is it? One of the most successful, the big funds that they do, the big private funds that they do. How to Invest, Masters of the Craft will be on the show with us later today. And last but not least, David Medansky is on the show with us today. He is a top selling author and speaker. He's known as the diet contrarian. David has identified nine golden rules of weight loss for people who love to eat. He has helped countless people lose weight and keep it off without dieting, exercising, counting calories, or buying special meals or product. He struggled with his own weight issues until July 2016 when his doctor told him to either

lose weight or find a new doctor. Wow, puts the hammer down. During the next four months, David shed 50 pounds, almost 25% of his total body weight, and has kept it off. He understands your frustrations and challenges to lose weight. Now his mission in life is to teach you the nine golden rules of weight loss. So we're going to learn a lot today. So you too can lose weight, have more energy, feel better, look better, and improve your overall weight. Welcome to the show,

David. How are you? I'm doing great, Chris. Thanks for having me as a guest today. Thanks for coming. We certainly appreciate you. The new book, Stop Dieting, Start Thinning, comes out December 13th, 2022. And we should probably also plug your recent book from October, 2021, Break the Trains of Dieting, Nine Fundamental Must-Have Principles for Healthy Weight Loss. You guys can pick that up wherever fine books are sold. So welcome to the show, David. Give us your dot coms, your plugs, wherever you want people to find out more about you on the interweb edges. Sure. People can find me at IamThinning.com. That's capital I-A-M-T-H-I-N-G.com. They can put my name in and find me on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram. And I'm always happy to

answer questions if people want to send them to me in a direct message. There you go. So tell us about your new book. I don't see it's up on Amazon yet, but it's coming out in December. Tell us about the new book, what it entails, and what motivated you to write it. I'm super excited about the new book coming out because it's a condensed version of Break the Chains of Dieting. Break the Chains of Dieting has won nine awards so far, and it's also been recommended and endorsed by Jack Canfield, co-author of Chicken Soup for the Soul. Oh, wow. And that book, Break the Chains of Dieting, has a lot of short stories, fables, and analogies with life lessons.

And I applied those life lessons to eating healthier and losing weight without going on a diet because, as we all know, diets are temporary, extreme, hard to stick with, and a lot of them are potentially dangerous to our health. Yeah. It's amazing how people go through life on crash diets. I've been guilty of that where I do crash dieting and stuff. And I like the idea of fables and stories and lessons because what I found when I lost weight, and my audience is pretty familiar with this sort of process, is I had to reconfigure

my mind, my attitudes towards food, my attitudes towards dying. And fables and stories from some of the people I read helped me reprogram that brain mindset. Is that kind of what yours does as well? Oh, absolutely. And as you mentioned, people do a lot of fad diets. I call fat, fat and desperate. On average, a person will attempt 126 different diets during their lifetime. So what does that tell you? It tells you diets don't work. And what I normally advocate for people is if you want to lose weight, don't go on a diet instead change your diet yeah because you you really have to permanently change your life and your attitudes towards food and what you're doing you can't just go on a crash diet and then next week you're at mcdonald's eating fries and you know drinking

shakes and and all the sugary crap that's out there you You really have to change. It's a lifestyle change. It's a lifestyle, it's habits, and it's also changing what you eat. And it's also a mindset. There you go. There you go. You have to change what's going on in your brain, your attitudes towards food. One of my foods is my mother used to, when we'd go to the store as a kid, and I think a lot of people go through this experience, at least they used to. And my mother would always be like, if you guys are good at the store, you don't cry, you don't scream, you don't beg for the sugar cereal. You know, the cracked sugar cereal that will send you through the moon. My mom was always smart enough not to buy that.

But, you know, we'd beg. But she would say, you know, hey, if you're good, you'll get like a candy bar or a pop or something. I think it was usually a candy bar or something, but it would be a reward. And ever since then, I would go to the store and when I'd be at the store buying food, I'd be like, oh, I went to the store today. I deserve rewards. So I'm getting a 12-pack of Mountain Dew and a giant candy bar and a bag of Doritos. You're going to treat yourself, huh? Yeah, I had this reward mentality that food was a reward. I'd be like, what the hell, go get me a giant fat steak or some fatty chicken somewhere.

It was a reward. I had a good week. And I had to break that chain of thinking food was a reward. Exactly. We look at food in the wrong way a lot of us use it for comfort to release stress or as you mentioned as a reward as opposed to fuel for our body because our bodies are incredible machines so you want to make sure you give it the right fuel people take better care of their automobiles than they do themselves that's a great analogy people really do they take care of their automobiles than they do themselves. That's a great analogy. People really do. They take care of everything. Like you go to their home, it's spick and span. If they're clean

people, you know, they want to make it look good. They take their car and they get it. Meanwhile, they'll just shove whatever poison, you know, into their food, in their mouth. You know, I had to realize that a lot of food we eat, especially if it's fast food or if it's some of this garbage food, there's not a lot of nutrients in it. That's why you're still hungry after. Well, it's made with chemicals. A lot of the food is highly processed or manufactured. And when it's manufactured, it means it's made in a laboratory with a by a person with a lab white coat as opposed to nature so the other thing a lot of people don't realize is our food is being scientifically engineered it has been since the 1980s to optimize our cravings for fat salt sugar and texture so what it does it creates an addiction and that's where Oreo cookies are more addictive than cocaine.

Really? Absolutely. The research proves it. Wow. Now, do you have to snort the Oreo cookie or do you eat the Oreo cookie? Well, I don't touch it now. But when I was getting my weight, I would go through a whole canister of Pringles potato chips and still crave more and wonder why.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I got some of that from the, I remember the supersized movie back in the day where the guy was eating McDonald's for 30 days straight. Yeah. And he's like, I'm, I'm always hungry because there's no nutrients in there. If you watch, if you've read some of the Franken meat, a lawsuit that went into, I think the the Chicken Nuggets or something, where the judge coined the term Frankenmeat. And I just think of that every time I think of McDonald's now. I'm like, Frankenmeat. And you're right, we eat for taste. My mom does something funny where she's learned that you do eat for taste, but you really don't want that stuff in

your system. And so what's funny is she'll take and she'll eat like a chocolate and then spit it out. She won't swallow it because she recognizes that she likes the taste, you know? And that's one thing I had to realize that, you know, the salt taste and different things, I was eating for the taste. I mean, you don't eat, you don't say to yourself, hey, let's put some poisonous crap that's been engineered in a thing to manipulate me like a monkey by some scientist in some McDonald's lab. I think we're losing McDonald's as a sponsor at this point. But that's okay. We don't need that.

But no. And we have to, like you say, this is a really important thing. Recognize that our food is scientifically engineered to manipulate us to enslave us to to get us hooked just like cocaine or any other drug you know people don't look at food as a drug they're like oh those people on drugs over there they're bad i'm gonna eat this whole pound of ice cream you know recognizing you know the the high fructose corn syrup and stuff it's out there i I mean, it's really highly addictive. Yeah, especially M&M's.

That used to be my downfall or Hershey bars. The list goes on. Soda is the worst thing people can drink in diet soda. I get that argument all the time from people who I coach. Well, diet soda has zero calories. How does it cause weight gain? Well, it's because of the aspartame, which is the artificial sweetener that's in it. And aspartame has 92 known side effects.

And one of them is weight gain because, number one, it inhibits your body from absorbing vitamins, minerals, and nutrients. So now your body's in what they call starvation mode because you're not getting the right fuel for it. And it also increases your cravings for sweetness. So now you crave to eat the donut, the cake, the pie, the cookies. The other thing a lot of people that I learned, the reason they don't, they feel hungry is they're dehydrated because they're eating stuff like pop and different things. You know, you're talking to some guy who used to put down 10 to 15 cans of Mountain Dew a day and then drink vodka at night for 20 years. Well, no, you're 100% right. That's the number one golden rule is to drink water. And because in the U.S., 75% of the U.S. population is chronically dehydrated, meaning we don't drink

enough water, is a direct correlation to 72% of the U.S. adult population being overweight. And what happens, a lot of times we think we're hungry. We're actually thirsty. And when you drink water, then you feel more satisfied. And it's also filling. It also acts to help clean your system. The other thing is our bodies are 60% to 70% water. Not soda, not diet soda,

not fruit juices and not fruit-flavored beverages. There you go. There you go. It's really wild. What are some other things that you cover in the upcoming book that we can tease out? Oh, I'll give all nine golden rules because I also tell in the book what to do but also how to do it. And at the end, I talk about having an accountability partner and where a lot of

people will talk about how to get an accountability partner or what to do. I actually explain how to do it and what to do during the conversation or Zoom conversation. So everything's there for everybody. But the nine golden rules is drink water, avoid processed or manufactured foods, eat whole foods, which I call real foods, eat small portions, eat slow, get sleep, give your system time to digest, which is the intermittent fasting,

think positive, have physical activity. I advocate walking because if you're upright and can move forward, you can walk. And the other one is to sleep more. So that's it. I mean, but people think, oh, that's simple. I know that. And I always tell people, sure, I understand. You know that. Are you doing it? Are you doing it? No. Well, why not? You know what to do. Why aren't you doing it? Why aren't you doing it? You know, sleep is so important. That's one thing I learned losing the sleep is so important. I have to get eight hours of sleep. If I don't, I didn't lose weight. Now, sometimes I've done during COVID, I kind of went on this weird binge. I think I was secretly had anxiety or something. I just went on a binge where I was

sleeping for four hours and then I would take a four-hour nap later on in the day. So I was spreading it out. Well, I wouldn't lose weight. Sometimes I go up and wait during the first four hour period. When I take the second four hour period, I go into my really deep REM sleep and I would lose two or three pounds and then I would really lose weight. But yeah, a good solid eight hour sleep really makes a difference in weight loss. When you wake up in the morning, you see it on the scale and your body needs that time to fix all your problems with your body, flush all the crap out of your system, and sleep is so important. Absolutely.

What the research shows is a person who's sleep-deprived will consume an extra 500 calories per day. Really? Yeah, because you're like trying to find fuel to drive yourself because you haven't had rest, huh? Yeah, you want to keep that energy up and so you eat the sugary stuff or the energy drinks. What they also found is to lose a pound, you need to reduce calories by 500 calories per day for an entire week. And that's where the fallacy comes in when you see the national brands about losing 15,

20, 30 pounds the first month guaranteed. You can lose the weight. Most of it you won't keep off. So usually what I ask people is, would you like to weigh 24 to 48 pounds lighter by this time next year? And most people are like, well, yeah, that'd be great. Okay. Can you lose two to four pounds a month? Not a week, a month. Well, most people say yeah i could do that that's doable well if you do that consistently on average for 12 consecutive months because some months you'll lose more and some you won't lose any over a year you'll be 24 to 48 pounds lighter by that time the problem arises that everything is instant gratification we all want to be slim overnight and what I tell people is, you didn't gain your weight overnight,

you're not going to lose it overnight. Yeah, I mean, some people put it on for years. It took me years to put mine on. It takes time to get them off. And, you know, it takes time. Yeah, a nice slow method makes it so that people don't feel, you know, what's that old saying, you know,

the portion of the word diet is die. So people are like, I'm dying, I can't eat. You know, that was another important mindset that I had to learn, that you're designed to live off your fat, and your body stores fat so you can live off it. And we live for a winter that never comes because it used to be we would, you know, store up some fat to live over a winter because we were cavemen and we had trouble hunting in the winter.

And, you know, you can't farm and have gardens in the winter. You know, in caveman times, we had to put on some weight so that we could survive winter. But nowadays we live in, you know, year-round 70 degree temperatures. So we eat for a winter that never comes, and we keep putting away for a winter that we never really see. We have food 24-7 year-round. Well, not only that, we were talking about intermittent fasting, and most people don't realize back 100, 200 years ago,

people didn't know when their next meal was going to be. And we are blessed today, or cursed, depending on how you look at it, with an abundance of either food or food-like products that I call edible products. You know, the manufactured Cheetos, the chips, the pretzels, things like that, that aren't really food. And what's interesting is most people can do an intermittent fast without realizing that. And what I mean by that is if you stop eating three hours before you go to sleep and you sleep for eight hours, well, that's an 11 hours before you wake up in the morning.

And what I recommend for people is drink water first thing. So I usually have a 20 ounce glass of water to rehydrate. And then it keeps me full and I don't have to eat my first meal, which they call breakfast, means break the fast until nine or 10 or 11 o'clock in the morning. And I feel fine because a lot of people get up at 6, 7 o'clock in the morning and they're hungry. Well, again, if you drink water because you're hydrating, then you don't have to worry about having your first meal until a couple hours later. You know, that's really important. My first thing is usually coffee in the morning. And sometimes it really hits me a little hard. I'm going to start,

I just made a note to myself that I'm going to start drinking water in the morning, a big glass of water in the morning before I hit the coffee. Because you're right, you're kind of probably dehydrated a little bit from the night before. I didn't think about that because I feel more dehydrated after my coffee. Well, exactly. That's what I do. I have my glass of water, then I have a cup of black coffee. Some people like to put their sugar and cream in it. I recommend it black, but it's each their own. If you can reduce the amount of milk or creamery put in or reduce the amount of sugar, you'll be a lot better off. And speaking of sugar, Starbucks, unfortunately, a lot of their greens will have between 50 and 70 grams of sugar. And then our bodies only need between 25 and 70 grams of sugar when our bodies only need between 25 and 30 grams

of sugar for the entire day you know what i recommend is if you have to put a lot of sugar and milk in your coffee you're drinking awful coffee you're just drinking crap coffee so i recommend go to coffee review.com buy some high-quality coffee. If you buy high-quality coffee, and the funny thing about it is, it's not that much more expensive than for, you can buy a bag of coffee beans of high-quality. You know, they have on their site, coffeereview.com. I should be getting paid for this. They have ratings, like you buy wine, like 95, 100, 90 to 100.

You know, they have ratings of coffee. And there's different coffee producers you can buy from. And literally, you will pay what you spend in a day or two at Starbucks for a bag of coffee. So you're going to save yourself a fortune. And if you buy high-quality coffee that's 90 to 100, you don't need to put sugar or milk in it. The taste and the quality of what you're going to buy is going to work for you. And then you don't have to put the milk fat in there. You don't have to put the sugar in there, and you're drinking good quality coffee.

Starbucks is not quality coffee. In fact, I think it's syrup most of the time, really. Exactly. The other thing, we were talking about foods being supersized. A lot of people don't realize our portions have been supersized without us realizing it. And the reason I say that is in the 1900s, the average size dinner plate was 9 inches in diameter. Holy crap. Today, it's 12 inches.

And at restaurants, it's 13 to 15 inches because they want to charge you more so they feel like you get a better value. Holy crap. plate as a dinner size plate on the salad plate it looks like you're getting a lot more on a dinner size plate looks like you're getting a lot less which is why people tend to overeat and they call it the delboa illusion the delboa illusion do i have that yeah yeah that's that that makes sense you know people can the studies have shown that people can come here from europe and they can kind of eat the same foods, but they'll gain weight because of our portion. You know, like my friends in Europe all the time, they're like, I'll post something from my food. And they're like, Jesus, you guys eat a lot of food. That's like a giant portion over here, man.

It's like jumbo portion. Yeah, exactly. So I use a salad plate now instead of a dinner size plate. Ah, I like that. I might start doing that because I'm really bad at it. Even with my salads, I probably throw too much in there. There's probably too much dressing and there's too much. I throw a lot of stuff into my salads. I've learned to eat a salad a day and I've learned to make good salads. Some of what you're talking about, I guess,

is in your prior book. Do we want to plug or tease anything out in the prior book, Break the Chains of Dieting? Sure. One of the stories I talk about is the pot roast story, and I'm sure you're familiar with it. And for the audience, just in case they're not, there's a young lady who's hosting a dinner party, and she makes a pot roast. And one of the guests says, oh, this is delicious. Can I get the recipe? And the hostess says, of course. She writes it

down. The guest looks at it, says, well, why do you cut the ends of your pot roast off before you cook it? And the host says, I don't know. That's how my mom taught me. So she calls her mom the next day and says, mom, why do we cut the ends of the pot roast off before we cook it? And her mom says, I don't know. That's how your grandmother taught me. Call your grandmother. So she calls her grandmother and grandma thinks for a minute and says, oh, because when I was first married, the pot I had was too small. So I had to cut the ends off of the pot roast to make it fit. So the moral of that story is we eat a certain way or eat certain things because that's how we're taught to eat. So you have to think about why you're eating a certain way or a certain time or a certain thing

to figure out, do you really want to keep doing it that way? Yeah. It's interesting how much we learn our food habits from our parents and our eating habits from our parents. Like I've noticed that, you know, fat people have fat kids. I'm not, I'm not shaming anybody. And really, as far as I'm concerned, people should be, Hey, you're, you're eating way too much. We need to be still doing that in society. Uh, I'm not sure shaming is the right word, but we, we still need to have people going, Hey, you're, you need to back off the foods. I wish somebody had had to kick me in the head a few more times over the years instead of going, oh, you're fine. We love you the way you are, Chris. No, don't.

Please. No, you're right. I was fortunate. My doctor told me, you know, I was 61 at the time. He says, dude, you know, based on your lab results and being overweight, you got a 95% chance for a fatal heart attack. He goes, you got two options, lose weight or find a new doctor. He goes, because I don't want you dying on my watch.

And he strongly encouraged that I find a new doctor because he'd been at me for eight years to lose the weight, and I hadn't done anything. Like most people, I procrastinated. I waited until after the holidays, after the vacation, after we go to a restaurant with our favorite friends, little things like that. We all make excuses.

So the light bulb went off, and I took action. I lost 50 pounds, 25% of little things like that. We all make excuses. So the light bulb went off and I took action. I lost 50 pounds, 25% of my total body weight and I kept it off. And then just recently this June, I was 67 and I hiked Kilimanjaro. So I was real proud of that. Wow. That is awesome, man. Hiking Kilimanjaro, man. How old? 67. Damn. I'm 54, so now I feel like a boob. I need to catch up if I'm hiking for that long. So what are some other things we can tease out in the book to get people to pick that up?

Well, another story, you know, talk about the airplane. If you fly from New York to Los Angeles or Las Vegas, no Los Angeles or vice versa, and you're off one degree, you'd be off 150 miles. And most of the planes, they are autopilot. And so the plane's always correcting about 90 to 95% of the time. So what I tell people is when you're attempting to lose weight and you're changing your eating habits, lifestyle and diet, don't be upset if you're not perfect. You want to think positive. So keep adjusting. If you have a bad day and you cheat, next day start over again. Just don't make it a habit of starting over every day. The whole thing is just keep correcting your course on your weight loss journey as autopilot does for an airplane.

And then you'll get there. What do you think about cheat days? I have these people that are like, I cheat once a week or I have a cheat day once a week where, you know, I go out and we pig out and eat whatever we want. And I'm just like, damn, that's just, that's, that's too hard for me. Like if you, if I go out a cheat day ends up being two or three days, cause you're like, ah, still on your cheat day. And what the hell? Well, I'm not in favor of cheat day. What I am in favor is not being a food purist. I'm not a purist by any stretch of the imagination. I'll have a piece of pumpkin pie or pecan pie during the holidays. I like chocolate cake.

What I do instead of eating the whole slice at one time, I break, you know, I'll have it over three or four days. So I eat smaller portions. There you go. So I get a little taste. So I don't deprive myself. I just don't make it a habit. I don't make it a routine.

When you have a cheat day every week, then you look forward to indulging when you don't really need to. But if you're out on a special occasion and you want to have the ice cream, go ahead and have the ice cream. If you want to have a glass of wine, have a glass of wine. Just don't beat yourself up over it. Normally what I tell people is if you're really committed to reducing the weight and keeping it off, first lose the weight because it's easier to lose it than it is to indulge as you're attempting to lose it. Yeah, that's definitely true.

Anything else you want to tease out on the book before we go out? Well, yeah. What's of concern to me is that 80% of the population above age 50, the 50-plus generation, are either type 2 diabetics or pre-diabetics. 96 million Americans are pre-diabetic. It's about one in three Americans, and eight out of 10 of those don't even realize it. And it's getting worse, and that's because of the food we're consuming, because it's poison. We don't realize it all at one time, and it builds up over time. And if you're a pre-diabetic, what it means is if you do not change your eating habits and lifestyle, you'll be a full-blown type 2 diabetic within

seven years. And type 2 diabetes is not only preventable, it's reversible. And so you can improve and not have to worry about it. And that's getting to be alarming with the population, you know, aging as we are, especially my age group where they're having all these illnesses that are preventable. Yeah, a lot of people are being diabetic. And a lot of my friends that were told they were borderline diabetic or going down diabetic and their doctors gave them a kick in the butt. You know, they changed their diet. They lost the weight. They got better.

It is kind of reversible in certain cases. And you just don't want to end up, you know, the older I get, the more it seems like my system slows down. And so, you know, it's hard to lose weight when you get older. When I was young, man, I just, you know, I'd go on a diet and lose weight and it'd just burn off. But now the older I get, the harder it seems to be to come off. No, I agree with you. When I was younger in college, I was eating a pound bag of M&Ms, having pizza and ice cream, never gained a pound. However, I was running, you know, four to five miles a day and I was playing, you know, sports in college and burning it off.

Now I just look at the food and I gain the weight. Yeah, that's true. Or think about it. Yeah, most definitely. So let's see. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs and learn gained the weight. Yeah, that's true. Or think about it. Yeah, most definitely. So let's see, give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs and learn more about you. Sure. They can go to IamThinning.com and they can find me on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram. It's my first and last name, David. Last name is Medansky, M-E-D-A-N-S-K-Y. Like three words, me, Dan, and Sky. Just make it sound Polish. There you go. There you go. Well, thank you very much, Dave, for being on the show.

We really appreciate it. Thank you very much for being on the show, David. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Chris. There you go. There you go. and thanks to my audience for tuning in be sure to order up the book Stop Dieting, Start Thinning December 13th, 2022 and also pick up his current book that you can find wherever fine books are sold

Break the Chains of Dieting 9 Fundamental Must Have Principles for Healthy Weight Loss thanks for tuning in be good to each other, stay safe and we'll see you guys next time