I lost 35 pounds and several sizes in three months. I didn’t do it by dieting. I did it by changing the way I eat. There’s a difference.
What led me to this was thinking about my health in a whole new way. After trying to navigate large amounts of conflicting nutritional information and trying on new diets over the years (many of you can relate), I had an insight based on the Organizational Physics principles I teach every day.
I took the Universal Success Formula from Chapter 1 of my book Organizational Physics: The Science of Growing a Business and made a slight modification to the terms. The original formula looks like this:
The Universal Success Formula explains why any system will fail or succeed.
If you’re new to the Universal Success Formula, all you need to know is that any system is acted upon by entropy and will eventually fail unless new energy is added to the system. Once you decrease entropy, the energy available for integration and success increases.
For example, imagine that you have a friend in the hospital. He can’t go out in the world and be successful (high integration) because most of his available energy has to go towards healing his illness (entropy). Once he recovers, entropy will be lower and he’ll have more energy to re-integrate into the world and thrive.
Applying the same concepts to health and diet, the Universal Success Formula can be worded like this:
Health is a function of vitality over entropy.
Think of your health as a highly organized system — body and mind — which is acted upon by entropy over time and fails unless it continues to have new energy sources that you can assimilate. Entropy, in this case, can mean inflammation, congestion, and any other state of less-than-optimal functioning in the body. Vitality is synonymous with integration. It is a state of high energy in which you are thriving in relationship with your environment, continuing to obtain energy from it. When inflammation-related entropy is high, for example, it’s harder to convert new energy sources and vitality is naturally lower.
Put another way, at any given point in time, the body/mind has a finite amount of energy. It must get new energy or fuel from external sources. Food is fuel. Water is fuel. Thought is fuel. Relationships are fuel.
Good fuels are those that the body/mind can easily convert into new energy and that don’t increase entropy in the system. Bad fuels are those that the body and mind can’t convert easily, increasing entropy over time. Like a car with too much gunk in the fuel lines, your body just can’t drive as efficiently. The bottom line is that you want to utilize good fuel sources that don’t cause systemic harm (i.e., increase entropy) and are easy to convert into new energy.
Using this formula as a metaphor, I simply began to assess how foods impacted my energy level and which ones seemed to be contributing to inflammation in my body. When did my blood sugar shoot up or bottom out? When did allergies seem to strike? When did I feel more moody or unusually tired? In this process of trial and error, I also relied on expert opinions about which foods cause inflammation and which ones don’t, using these opinions as suggestions for exploring what works best for me.
I made a 30-day commitment to cut out inflammatory foods. For me, this meant eliminating all grains, sugar, and refined anything. Please note I’m not saying that’s what you should do. Health and diet are a very personal thing. There’s no one-size-fits-all. What I’m saying is that, if you want better health and fitness, you’ll want to eliminate any sources of high entropy from the system and increase your body’s access to good fuels. Period. You can start with expert opinions, but you’ll want to closely observe, first-hand, what works and doesn’t work for you.
In my own journey, after 30 days, I felt great. I had lost some weight and especially a lot of puffiness in my face and waist. I decided to keep going, continuing to pay attention to those things that cause inflammation and eliminating them. It’s now been 5 months and I’m still going strong. It no longer feels like a diet but a new way of living that has increased my vitality and become second nature to me.
I hope this perspective helps you tune in and amp up your own personal journey to health and wellness as well, wherever that path may lead you.
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There is a growing body of evidence that points to chronic, low-grade inflammation as a kind of a “unified field” explanation of disease. That is, some researchers now believe that low-grade inflammation is associated with everything from Alzheimer’s and arthritis to diabetes and heart disease, and may even be the cause of most chronic diseases.
If you’re interested in supporting evidence that inflammation is the enemy of good health, you might take a look some sources that I found helpful:
– Why You Get Fat (3-minute video and I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t know this 30 years ago)
– Genetic Roulette (documentary on how GMOs cause increased inflammation).
– The No-Grain Diet (I read this book 4 or 5 years ago but didn’t have the wherewithal to follow it. Making the connection between entropy and inflammation finally helped me commit to change and it was surprisingly easy. Go figure.)