Obesity. The Physical Emotional and Financial Costs With Dr. Jonathan Colter
Dr. Jonathan Neal Colter was a practicing chiropractic physician in North Carolina for over 20 years. During that time he was exposed to patients suffering from various health conditions ranging from cancer, high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, chronic illness, degenerative arthritis, and depression.
He is passionate about health and believes that under the current model of health care, a patient presents with a problem and the doctor addresses that problem.
Twenty-plus years in practice have taught him that this model does help restore health to the body. This merely treats SYMPTOMS and allows the UNDERLYING PROBLEM to go unresolved.
The purpose of his blog is to expose readers to information that can help transform each of us to a new height of better understanding and self-awareness. In doing so, it will empower the reader to take back control of his or her own life and recognize what it requires to truly experience GOOD HEALTH and TRUE HAPPINESS.
Follow Jonathan HERE
Transcription:
Intro 0:03
Recovery After Stroke podcast, helps you go from where you are to where you’d rather be.
Bill 0:13
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to everyone listening wherever you may be, you are listening to Recovery After Stroke podcast. I’m your host Bill Gasiamis.
Bill 0:21
And in this special episode, I’m very excited to be interviewing a very special guest from way over the other side of the world in North Carolina, North Carolina, in the US of A, My guest is Dr. John Colter, who grew up in New York and attended college at New York University, where he planned on practicing law.
Bill 0:44
Realizing that successful litigation meant winning at all costs, Dr. Colter saw a different and more positive direction in life. His love of health, exercise, and nutrition pointed him in the direction to become a physician. He attended Palmer College of Chiropractic in Iowa in 1990.
Bill 1:05
And after graduating, he moved to North Carolina to begin his practice. He opened his clinic Huntersville family chiropractic in Huntersville, North Carolina in 1994. The practice included nutrition, chiropractic, and exercise. Dr. Colter met his wife Elaine in North Carolina and married in 2003.
Bill 1:29
His family increased in size when they rescued a beagle named Tucker in 2014. And today is seriously cute from the photos I saw. In 2014, Dr. Colterr retired from active practice and sold his practice to a wonderful doctor, Dr. Takanisha Tyler who chose to keep the clinic name Huntersville family chiropractic alive for the next generation of patience. He is 55 years young and real He’s in great shape by the photos I have seen. He has some seriously well-sculpted biceps.
Bill 2:08
Dr. Colter’s wife Elaine is 53 years young and is the managing member of an anti-aging business that uses microcurrent to naturally restore her client’s youthful appearance. Tucker recently turned four years young and loves to chase squirrels, rabbits, and deer. What a life.
Bill 2:29
After retiring from active practice, Dr. Colter’s passion for health continued. He recently started a blog site called all about healthy choices.wordpress.com which has gained popularity around the world. And it and it was on this site that I came across Dr. Colter’s blog post, I basically and the physical, emotional, and financial costs. Welcome, and good morning Dr. Colter.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 2:59
Thank you.
Bill 3:01
One of the things that I’ve been doing, since having my own health challenges over the last three years, is attending to troll the internet for amazing articles that support my way of thinking about how to go about regaining my health.
Bill 3:22
And when I came across your article, it was the reason why I decided to contact you because it felt for the first time that somebody was actually using my own words, to tell a story and to write an article about a topic that’s really hot at the moment, which rightly so.
Bill 3:45
And that was basically, one of the reasons why I’m interested in AI basically, is because one of the other things that I do as a stroke-safe Ambassador is to raise awareness for the National Stripe Foundation.
Bill 4:00
In Australia, to the general public about how to go about preventing stroke. And quite simply, if we reduce obesity, we reduce stroke. It’s as simple as that. And I wanted to hear your thoughts on the matter of obesity.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 4:22
It’s interesting. Obesity is now diagnosed as a disease and what should be diagnosed as a stroke should be diagnosed with cardiovascular disease diagnosed as a symptom, because none of these explain the underlying causes of why people experienced these different health maladies.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 4:43
So what we really need to do is we need to take one step further back and say, why did this person experience this symptom? realize the traditional allopathic approach to something like this is you find a simple To identify a symptom, you do sometimes have a tendency to confirm the symptom.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 5:04
You then Medicate the symptom. If you do something like this, how are you ever going to actually correct the underlying condition? The medical model right now taught in medical school is to basically treat chronicity.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 5:19
What you do is you take a condition, and you provide something that keeps the condition from getting worse, not really turning it around, and either making it show improvement with it or rectifying it together.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 5:34
So what we need to do is we need to take one step back, and when we’re given something, and told that this is something that we need to take, we need to ask the doctor two things. The first one is what’s my diagnosis? Because when I was a treating physician, patients came to me and I asked them so what did your doctor tell you was wrong? They said they gave me this pill.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 5:57
They never told me what was wrong, but they told me This, how can you get better? You don’t know what’s wrong? Yeah. So this is really how I approached my patients and started teaching them that they need to learn more about their own bodies, and their own health so that we could empower them to take control and use the doctors, all of us. For our knowledge to assist. We are supposed to basically be supplements to their care, not responsible for their care.
Bill 6:26
Yeah, it’s the old age of, you know, give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day teach him how to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 6:34
Absolutely, absolutely.
Bill 6:37
So one of the challenges and I’m not sure. So as a doctor, you speaking you might find that you might have found something similar one of the challenges that I have when I attend one of these presentations and speak to people is that my voice is muffled almost immediately after the people walk out of the particular event when I’m talking It’s muffled by the unbelievable amount of conversation and noise that you hear from the corporations about feeding people,
Bill 7:12
Foods that are not necessarily achieving anything other than filling their coffers with money. Tell me about that part of the challenge that we face, you know, how do we go about resolving that matter?
Dr. Jonathan Colter 7:27
The first thing you have to do is look at corporations and look at if you were a corporation, and someone said, here’s what we’d like you to do. We’d like you to reduce your profits to the benefit event mankind. Well, it’s a noble gesture with corporations of stockholders, and they are responsible.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 7:46
What happens is people stop looking at people, they start looking at businesses, and they look at finances. And the last thing that we look at our individuals, what we need to do is to reverse that because the corporations are not going to do it
Dr. Jonathan Colter 8:01
The way you reverse corporations understand they produce what we asked them to produce, and if we were not buying their products, they wouldn’t be trying to sell them to us. Regardless of how cheap they are, they would be losing money.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 8:16
So what we need to do is we need to start understanding, what are we putting in our mouths. People think that eating processed foods because they’re cheap, is the way to go. Because people have limited resources. It isn’t cheap. Because if you actually look at the long picture, which people don’t do, they look today, you have to look over the next 30 years.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 8:37
What you’re going to see is the dollar you spent today, instead of the $3 you spent on a better healthier product is going to cost you in illness care, surgery, and other medical conditions and none are going to cost you much more men the additional dollar or two that you’ll be spending on food today and by spending the additional dollar or two today, your quality of life over the next 30 years is improved as well.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 9:08
We’re not just interested in longevity. We’ve done a great job at increasing people’s longevity. We’ve done a horrible job that is improved, improving the quality of people’s lives over that longevity.
Bill 9:21
Yeah, it tends to be with prolonged death.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 9:27
The End The reason, is that it’s incredibly lucrative. I mean, look, it’s not even being nasty here. If it truly is, you look at any stage of chronic cancer care. It is an incredible, incredible, profitable business. These people were using natural products to feed their bodies so that their own immune systems could actually attack a disease. Can’t patent that you can’t patent plants.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 9:58
So it’s Is the profits just over there? No. Again, I think the medical field absolutely is an important field. I think overall, most doctors are caring people. But the medical field specialty is acute care. Get people over a hump. You know, you get into a car accident, you don’t go to a naturopath, you go and you make sure life-threatening conditions are stable.
Bill 10:22
Yeah.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 10:23
Then you begin doing for the body what it needs to get healthy. And that’s not giving it drugs and giving it things that actually compromised the immune system to function.
Bill 10:33
Yeah, it’s really our responsibility once the diagnosis has been provided and the medical care has been provided. And the doctors and the field have made us able to go home, it’s really our responsibility to then take it to the next level, and ensure that whatever it was that got us in there in the first place, is a pattern of behavior that’s not repeated, so that we don’t end up there again.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 11:00
You’re absolutely right. You said the word pattern of behavior. I, most of the time we use the word lifestyle we have to learn how we adapt to a new way of doing something and people are resistant to change. They really are.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 11:13
You know, when people go into that coronary bypass surgery, my own father went for this. He told me afterward when I said, so now, now that you’ve experienced having died in the chest cut open, is that provided enough incentive for you to change behavior? He said they fixed the problem, I should be able to go right back to doing what I was doing before.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 11:33
I said, No, what they did was they fixed two arteries jamming bars you have in your body, they didn’t touch any of the other ones. If you continue to do what you have been doing in the past, you will continue to get the same results in the future.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 11:48
So this was my attempt at a wake-up call people need and I told you in the past two words that people listen to to change behavior. They both start with one Pete, and the two words are pain and pleasure. If you experienced enough of either one of them, you will now change your behavior. The object is to learn to turn to pleasure. First. Most people require the pain first, I suggest you reverse that.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 12:19
Because if you can do something in it with a new pattern of behavior that creates positive results that you can live more and have, and be able to do more of what you want in life. That sounds a whole lot better than breaking down, having to do something to fix back up to go back to the pattern that broke you down and repeat that process because that’s what healthcare today is. It’s really a disease.
Bill 12:44
That’s what we’re facing. I recently realized, in my own recovery from my own challenges, Dr. Carter that it really is the same amount of effort that I put into my previous unhelpful behaviors that I’m now putting into my helpful behaviors, there’s not any more effort in my part to actually get a better outcome.
Bill 13:09
And just making myself aware of that and getting my head around that meant that I was really able to quickly shift from, you know, things like smoking, excessive drinking, and eating the wrong foods to the exact opposite. And now I become addicted to not smoking. And I’ve become addicted to not eating those terrible foods.
Bill 13:33
And I don’t feel like I’m making any effort to go down that path. So I just wanted to share that because that was really a very simple change that occurred in my mind with dramatic, fantastic outcomes. You know, for my health, I’ve just felt better than ever before. And it’s almost like I had to have these bad experiences in my life and bad health to learn that well, you know, you can actually experience great how at no additional effort, expense, or, or, or anything else so, so that was really good.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 14:09
It’s interesting, we view leading a healthier lifestyle, almost as a punishment. You know, we want to do behaviors that are bad for us, we know them and for us, we feel the end result of them. We don’t have energy.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 14:27
Our stress levels are high makes us more prone to being sick. We don’t enjoy all the things in life that we can family becomes a stress work becomes a stress. If all of a sudden we start changing behaviors that work in a positive light, we start feeling better. The thing is people need to understand the modification of lifestyle doesn’t mean going down this path of punishment.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 14:50
It’s going to be something that’s going to lead to a more productive, more fulfilling life. You just have to give it a chance once they get on the path like you just Right, it becomes the new natural path from hormonal firing hormones that trigger these cravings.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 15:11
And once you start firing once you stop firing these cravings, then the sense of need dissipates. So the McDonald’s, the ice cream, that doesn’t mean you can ever have them I want to believe in moderation. Why I care about this is that people first put in what they need, then put in things that they want.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 15:31
This way you’ve already fueled your body with food that it needs to be able to run. This is an important concept that sometimes people speak about. They’ll use the analogy of a car. If you put bad-quality gas into your car. Initially, it runs fine. After a short period of time, all of a sudden the car starts developing symptoms and starts kicking. It’s not running.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 15:55
You’re popping noises. Ultimately, the engines are effective the transmissions are effective The radiators that the whole system is affected, and our bodies work in the exact same way. It’s just that guy created this amazing body that can put up with so much so much stress that a lot of times we don’t realize it for many, many decades. But again, if you use the analogy and understand that the human body is a machine, just like a car is a machine, and if you put that stuff in, then responses are going to occur. It’s just a matter of when.
Bill 16:28
Yeah, I totally agree. I wanted to ask you a little bit now about your time in practice, and the kind of results that you saw with your pate, your patients that came in with, I imagine, you know, sometimes a large number of symptoms over a long period of time, and how they were able to regain their ability to be healthier and better.
Bill 16:55
And what were some of the common things that you noticed in people that were able to To be less dependent on Dr. Coulter in practice, rather than the ones that were coming back regularly and sort of still dealing with the same challenges?
Dr. Jonathan Colter 17:12
I used to term earlier on called empowering patients. When I first met with a patient, I had to in a very short period of time learn what the patient’s needs actually were. So when I would go through a full console, which included the full health history, full individual history, and full physical examination, I saw where the patient was not only physically, but mentally.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 17:38
What you have to do is you don’t address any health nowadays, from one perspective. When patients came into my clinic, it didn’t make a difference when they came in with musculoskeletal pain, or heart ailments or any other condition that they weren’t even aware of. They still were told six things need to be done.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 18:00
My clinic is for them to be healthy. And the six things I usually told them and see if I remember the hall. I told them that nutrition had to be modified because I would discuss this with him during the concert, like finding out what they’re doing.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 18:15
Because of poor nutrition is going to lead to I told him, all the symptoms are not going to treat their symptoms, I’m going to get to the root of the cause getting to the root cause leads to the reduction or correction of symptoms.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 18:28
So we spoke about nutrition, we talked about hydration. People don’t drink water on they don’t like it. I don’t care. It’s easy. It’s necessary. You do it, you know, and I would tell them if they don’t want to do it. I respect that. I can’t help them. So they knew right from the get-go.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 18:47
I wasn’t a traditional doctor that just listened and then either gave them something or did something. They knew that they were going to have to start making some changes. And they knew that they were going to have to be involved in this.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 18:59
The third component That was addressed was naturally chiropractic. If there are nerve communication problems, then the body’s not going to be able to it’s like the game telephone. If you send him in a circle with 10 people whisper a message in the first person’s ear all the time it goes all the way around. And the last person has to say with the messages are completely different.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 19:21
While the body goes through trillions of these neural connections, and if they’re not communicating properly, the end result is going to be incorrect. So that had to be addressed as well. Stress Reduction. People are stressed to the gills which lead to hormone imbalances lead to cortisol problems and adrenaline problems.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 19:39
If these things aren’t addressed, long-term health is not going to be achieved. And the final thing was sleep. You must be able to get the rest the body needs no I used to get patients telling me all the time, they would brag they only need three to four hours, and maybe that is what they felt. But the bottom line is the body needs six to eight hours to your cup.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 20:01
And if you do all these things, you will strengthen your entire body. you strengthen your entire body. I don’t care what your symptoms are, they will. And that’s how I used to approach my patients. And they really appreciated that.
Bill 20:15
Yeah. And I imagined that then they initially, potentially would come in more often at the beginning, and then later on, it would seem less than less and less, and then that would have a follow-on effect on other aspects of their lives as well. And on other things that were challenging them.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 20:32
Sure, any object, which my patients used to laugh about, I used to tell them from the get-go, my objective is to see them as infrequently as possible because my goal was to maintain their health, not to keep fixing it because they kept breaking it by doing the same role.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 20:49
So all of a sudden that took the monetary compensation. Basically, I’m saying I want you to pay me less. But what I wanted them to do is understand that they didn’t need to be That that was that is not a model of health.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 21:03
A model of health is them taking control of them doing the things they need to do and me guiding them so they could actually get these things done and then monitoring to make sure little things aren’t being on fire. Remember to exercise I said six things I can barely sit by exercise is also essential we must move the whole lymphatic system in our body.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 21:24
Everyone knows the cardiovascular heart wants to circulate blood throughout the only way your lymph system circulates limp is through movement. And then look at it anything that stops moving, dies. So movement is essential. I use the word exercise, but exercise can be modified to the individual person. It requires movement.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 21:48
So the sedentary life of coming home and then just flopping in front of a TV and that being the end of your day. My patients knew that that was going to be the way that their end of day was going to end
Bill 22:00
Well, so that sounds very comprehensive. And it sounds very doable and extremely achievable. So nothing really dramatic there like a drink of water. I mean, go figure. So let’s talk a little bit more about obesity, though. And the things that you started to see as the obesity epidemic started to get worse. Are we noticing in patients that were presented that you weren’t perhaps noticing at the beginning of your time in practice?
Dr. Jonathan Colter 22:27
I would say, as things moved on, the ability to get fast type of foods and processed foods became more and more common. And what happened was, people were turning to these more because job requirements were requiring more hours of work. And one of the things that I tell patients was, it’s easy to prepare foods so that you do not get stuck into this.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 22:55
Well, I’ve got to eat something and I don’t have anything that’s fast What I did for myself, I told my patients this and they said, you know, that just makes sense because my time was limited. I used to make my meals, my dinners that I would actually eat during lunch.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 23:12
On Sunday, I would make five meals that will last me Monday through Friday, I would use a baking sheet, I put the foods on the sheet, and I would prepare some spices on them.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 23:23
So everything in flavor, I would place it in the oven, it would come for 30 minutes. It was done while it was cooking. I was doing something else. So I already had the meat and what it also does, which is wonderful. It gets rid of the emotional component that people have with food. I knew what dinner was I didn’t have to say, What do I feel like tonight?
Dr. Jonathan Colter 23:47
So that’s important because what happens is people constantly try to satisfy this what do I feel like versus what do I need? And what I try to teach people was, you’ve got to eat me first then satisfy that additionally, it’s still there. So that’s really what I would say. I know as I saw more and more people turning to what I would call non-food sources for their nutrition, that just led to the expanse of your waistlines.
Bill 24:19
Well, so I really love what I just kicked you picked up you saying that about the difference between what do I feel like for dinner? And what do I need for dinner? That just completely changes in my mind just thinking about that and the conversation that I often have with my wife, you know, for dinner, we often don’t feel like cooking.
Bill 24:45
And, we still do because that’s, you know, the responsibility that we have to our health and our children. But we most of the time, don’t ask ourselves what we need for dinner to fuel our bodies to make us well so that we can Go about being who we want to be the rest of our days.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 25:05
And you know something, one of the things that people fight all the time you know, you hear the word food journal. Anytime you hear the word food journal, usually, it’s associated with people that have weight problems that are being told they need to do this because a nutritionist has to see what they’re doing. Bill, I’ve been using a food journal since 1995.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 25:28
I have the records of it. I haven’t deleted any of the meals that I’ve had since that time. Basically, because I do a lot of research and so I’ve entered everything I have every single day other than when I went away on vacation.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 25:44
Since 1995, it is not a punishment, here’s the deal, if something changed with my blood chemistry, and all of a sudden something started going wrong. I’m proud of a track record that I can look back on and say let me see what I need to change. If you don’t do something like this, you have no idea what you’ve been doing.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 26:04
How can you possibly approach it from any scientific point of view of saying, here’s what I now need to try to do, because this pattern is no longer working, you have no idea what the pattern is? So it’s not a punishment. I’m initiate and I’m still doing it. So it’s not because you’re overweight, that you need to keep a journal. And the computers today, make it easy.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 26:25
My journal takes me three minutes a day, and I don’t add anything. All I do is look for the food in the journal and drag it into the box that says, here’s what I’ve eaten today. And I’ll tell you how much of it I carried. And it does all the math.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 26:40
So I know exactly how much protein how much carbs, and how much fat I know 32 micronutrients, I know total calories, and it tracks my metabolic rate. It does all the work and all I have to do is say, Here’s why. It’s that simple.
Bill 26:57
Yeah, and then it’s an amazing tool. For the future to look back and say, Okay, this is what I’ve been able to achieve in my house. This is going to be when I get to interview you in 30 years, I’m going to ask Dr. Carter, what is the secret to your health and your life? You can say, well, I’ve got 50 years of a food journal, you can go back and have a look at that, right?
Dr. Jonathan Colter 27:19
That’s exactly what I will be able to do.
Bill 27:22
So I’m looking forward to that interview in 30 years’ time, it’ll be some achievement actually. There are a lot of other topics that you talk about on your blog. And I wanted to ask you a little bit about why it was that you decided to start blogging about these types of topics and particular health and because I just by chance came across it and like I said, I just fell in love with the way that you wrote and spoke about the topic of obesity and following the rest of your posts.
Bill 27:58
There’s a lot to be gained. Reading something like that, even if it’s just giving people another perspective, something different than they’ve heard before. What was it that made you decide that you’re going to start writing about these things?
Dr. Jonathan Colter 28:17
Initially, I was on Facebook, which I am so not computer literate. But eventually, I learned how to get on that. And I started writing on a very short basis because the articles that you write on a blog will be much longer naturally. But I started writing on various health topics.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 28:36
And I started getting private messages, not regular Facebook posts with private messages saying, this is really good information. you’re exposing it to 40 5060 people, you need to get this information out there. So I said, Well, how I do it, and they said,
Dr. Jonathan Colter 28:54
Well, you got to start a blog. And I said, I know the movie The Blog, but I don’t know exactly what a blog They started, they started saying, Are you dating yourself? Here, we’ll, we’ll tell you what you need to do. And they started giving me some advice. And I went on the Internet and I got some assistance and started it. And I think I’ve only been doing it now.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 29:17
Probably be about a month or so. And it really they were correct. It’s made its way all the way around the world. And I’m getting a tremendous amount of feedback on the topics because these topics are desperately seeking information people need and I don’t even want to use the word alternatives today because these aren’t alternatives.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 29:43
These should be the natural first-line approaches when your stomach hurts in the lower right quadrant. You don’t go and have your appendix removed. You probably take some Pepto Bismol start-up and do things accordingly. Don’t just jump out there. Well with health it’s the same thing. You start conservatively, it’s not enough you add on top of it.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 30:05
So this is basically what my blog site shares with people and shows them the different things that they can do. And very, very realistically, it’s, it’s one of the most important words I use when I talk to people because most people are so overwhelmed with exercise and nutrition, I just don’t know exactly how to do it and what to do.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 30:25
So you start slow and you start losing, and suggestions I made to people, I’ve just made it very, very doable for instance meals, instead of changing everything made to start with because just to dramatically change, you start with plate size, you start with going from a dinner size plate to a salad size plate, you’ve already reduced the calorie intake may not be the right foods, but at least they now understand the concept of less nutrient fewer calories.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 30:54
And then from there, you start changing individual meals. I call it the meal substitute. Tell me what you have for Breakfast. Well, most of the time to coffee and a bagel, I tell you what, let’s substitute. Do you like eggs? Do you like this? Do you like it? You find out things they like.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 31:10
And they go, Yeah, I like that. Because they have this in place. And they start doing that twice a week, that’s all. So you slowly start making these changes before they know it. They now know the information.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 31:24
They know what’s in the food, they know what they should be eating. And they’ve been doing it so the transition isn’t so dramatic. And the only difference between weight loss and weight maintenance is quantity, if you’re doing it properly.
Bill 31:40
Yeah, well, that’s really good to hear. It’s refreshing to have a different point of view, at least I know from my perspective that when I became unwell, some of the questions that I asked didn’t have answers and the people that I asked were people that I thought would know and the questions weren’t that hard.
Bill 31:58
Is this something I should be avoided? Eating or something I should start eating as a result of what I’ve been diagnosed with that will help me do what I’ve got to do on my path. And when I go home, rather than just expect you guys, you know, to cut me open and take things out, etc.
Bill 32:16
And more than once why many more times more than once I had, you know, doctors and surgeons come back with the same response, which was no food probably won’t make a difference it nothing you should do that you’re doing, you know that you’re still that you’re currently doing should change.
Bill 32:40
And I found that really bizarre because if I was smoking, surely smoking was something that I should stop doing. And yes, they did mention that in passing. But that’s something that I consumed was going in my mouth, and it was affecting my body.
Bill 32:59
And I thought that Alcohol was another one of those things that were going in my mouth and affecting my body and particularly with brain injuries in recovery from injury to the brain, alcohol is something that we should not be consuming for at least a couple of years during that time yet no one thought they’d mentioned that the first I heard of that was through the National Stroke Foundation, which by the way in Australia does an amazing job at educating people about how to recover their brain health.
Bill 33:28
So I found that really interesting, and I just really enjoy hearing what you’ve got to say about how we can go about regaining our health and how simple it actually is. As we come to the end of this recording an episode. Just wanted to ask you what was in store for you in the next few years. What have you got in mind, how will you be filling your time?
Dr. Jonathan Colter 33:56
I plan on continuing with the blog though what I plan on doing is doing more lecturing, I’m probably going to be setting up engagements throughout the United States and doing these speaking engagements on these various topics.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 34:11
There’s like I said, there’s a tremendous demand for people looking for this type of information because they find that what currently exists isn’t getting the job done. And what’s interesting is the medical field is coming up with the same conclusions.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 34:29
I just heard on a live functional medicine broadcast. Dr. Kelly Brogan, a traditional medical doctor obstetrician, trades in psychiatry. just talked about how broken never model is and if you follow it, you will never achieve health.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 34:54
When your own profession is making these kinds of statements and she is a bright woman Huh, you, you have to start questioning, do we continue doing the same thing? Because, again, walking into a wall hurts? How many times do you need to walk into before you change directions?
Bill 35:16
That that’s my philosophy, pretty simple philosophy and to answer that question, just so that everyone knows that I’m on the level here once.
Bill 35:29
Now, this podcast, as you know, is called the transit lounge. And the transit lounge for me means that usually it’s a place where we sit when we’re about to embark on somewhere we want to go and often we want to go there because where we are currently is not somewhere we’re enjoying being in the context of this podcast,
Bill 35:52
What would you say to the listeners about one of the first things or one simple thing that they could do to begin taking that different path from where they currently are in their health to where they would rather be
Dr. Jonathan Colter 36:09
Simply what I would recommend, and I’ve recommended this to my own patients, you go home, you get a piece of paper and a pen. You write down what you know, you should be doing. Just start with that list. And then what you do is you take each individually take one thing on the list, and start doing it.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 36:30
This is what I mean by self-empowering, it’s, you know, something, feel people know that they’re not supposed to be eating fried catfish every night and other fried foods and hostess Twinkies and cake. They know that they’re supposed to be eating more vegetables and fruits, they know they should be having lean protein.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 36:47
So it’s simply going from knowing to doing it’s called action. So what you do is you start these action steps and you have done what you need to do. Start with it. Then what I highly encourage, if you don’t know what to do from there is to find a professional with experience who can help guide you.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 37:10
There are wellness coaches and consultants, and there are lots of professional organizations willing to do and want to do this. So as you see that you’re ready, because that’s the big thing, just like smokers, you can talk From Here to Eternity until they are ready to change, they won’t. Once you are ready to make the change, make the commitment to yourself.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 37:36
Say that you know something, I’m worth it. It’s my life who’s going to care more about my life than me? The answer is no one. So once you’re ready to make that commitment, you’re all set to go start with a list. Seek out professional help, you need additional assistance, you’ll find out how much easier to talk
Bill 37:59
Fantastic Now, where can people go to get a little bit more information about you? I mentioned that blog earlier, could you just repeat the logins and where else they could find you?
Dr. Jonathan Colter 38:10
Well, the blog sites, they can either find me on the blog site for that. I give people my email address, my email addresses my initials J, N, as in Nancy, C the word THE, D as in dog C as in [email protected]. So that’s [email protected].
Bill 38:34
And I know from experience that you’re very quick responding to emails,
Dr. Jonathan Colter 38:41
I will respond quickly, I know that you know, something, if you don’t, people lose their own motivation. So if I find a person who’s excited about change, I want to make sure they’re ready to start today. And you’d already mentioned my blog site. I think you might have to use the letters HTTP s as in Sam, before it, followed by a colon with front slashes, and then it’s all about healthy choices.wordpress.com.
Bill 39:13
That’s it. Fantastic. Well, that brings us to the end of this episode. And the reality is that this is way too short an amount of time to be spent with you. I look forward to keeping in touch with you in some way from here on and perhaps even having another opportunity to record a conversation with you in the future.
Bill 39:34
I wish you all the success with the next part of your career and hopefully, you get to get in front of as many people as you possibly can, so that you could start shifting people’s ideas around food and how to go about also maintaining a healthy lifestyle. I really thank you for your time and I really appreciate you Having given me about an hour of your time this morning.
Dr. Jonathan Colter 40:05
It’s my pleasure. I appreciate the opportunity. Thanks, the doctor called up all the best. Thank you very much.
Intro 40:14
This has been a production of https://recoveryafterstroke.com/. Check out our page on Facebook and start a conversation by leaving a comment at https://www.instagram.com/recoveryafterstroke/. Subscribe to the show on iTunes and check us out on Twitter. The presenters and special guests of this podcast intend to provide accurate and helpful information to their listeners.
Intro 40:40
These podcasts can not take into consideration individual circumstances and are not intended to be a substitute for independent medical advice from a qualified health professional. You should always seek advice from a qualified health professional before acting on any of the information provided by any of the transit lounge podcasts.