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How to Sustain the Lifestyle Changes
I was a psychologist for 20 years when I began to experience serious chest pain. Before I could say, "Wait! I'm too young!" I had my chest cracked open and quadruple bypass surgery.
This shouldn't have been a shock, because i was warned for years that my lifestyle was killing me. My doctor urged me to exercise more, lose weight, and smell the roses. I followed this advice for awhile, but soon I was back to my same old ways. After surgery, I wrote a book, A Change of Heart, and opened the Center for Cardiac Wellness. My second book, Cardiac Wellness: How to Sustain the Lifestyle Changes you need for a Healthy Heart, is based on my experience counseling hundreds of heart patients over the past 11 years. We now understand that heart disease is essentially a disease of lifestyle. No less an expert than Dr. Dean Ornish says "many people can begin to reverse their heart disease simply by changing their lifestyle."Yet understanding alone clearly isn't enough to motivate people to sustain heart healthy lifestyle changes. Consider this alarming statistic quoted by Dr. Edward Miller, Dean of the Medical School at John Hopkins University "If you look at people after coronary artery by-pass grafting two years later,90% of them have not changed their lifestyle."Why do reasonably intelligent people like me, fail to sustain lifestyle changes they need to keep them alive? The vast majority of my patients were simply too exhausted and depleted to sustain beneficial lifestyle choices. Energy and Self Control It takes energy (glucose) to fuel all your activities. Self control is one such activity. Without energy you cannot exercise self control or willpower. It's impossible to sustain a healthy lifestyle without self control. But self control is a limited energy source. You can use it up in one area and not have it for the next area. Willpower is like a muscle. When used too intensely, it gets worn out and can fail. "If you're at a party and exert energy trying to maintain a good impression, you'll be less likely to resist those potato chips" Roy Baumeister, Ph.D., Florida State University.
Good news: the more you exercise the willpower muscle, the stronger it gets. Stick to an exercise program or control spending and you have more energy to resist junk food, tobacco and TV.
Profile of a Heart Patient:
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Heart patients are fighters. They are battling heart problems, toxic feelings, and unresolved
issues of the past
* Exhausted, there is little energy for self control Two Prong approach to sustain a heart healthy lifestyle 1) Stop the energy drain by overcoming false beliefs 2) Follow 9 steps to beef up your willpower muscle.
False beliefs drain your energy by requiring you to suppress or avoid troublesome feelings, thoughts or actions. My heart patients often accepted these false beliefs as helpful guidelines to living.
1 - Keep your guard up - don't be vulnerable. Don't trust. The nine steps increase your willpower muscle by requiring you to exercise self discipline.
1 Open your mind - recognize when you're being defensive
A new mission in life is more than a change in what you do. It is a change in who you are being. You have a better chance of sticking to lifestyle changes when you change who you are.
You don't see people in the same way and false beliefs tend to disappear. Energy that was bound in self defense is freed up to make healthy choices; you become the one in ten that is able to sustain a heart healthy lifestyle. |