It's true, you can lose weight on these high-animal-protein, Atkins-type diets, but you're mortgaging your health in the process.
— Dean Ornish
I'm first and foremost a scientist.
When you eat mindfully, by paying attention to what you eat, you get more pleasure with fewer calories.
You can meditate on almost anything: a prayer, song, image or word. Close your eyes; sit in a comfortable position. Take a breath, and say the word out loud, emphasizing the humming sound at the end. When you come to the end of the breath, take another one and say the word again. And so on.
Physical exercise is a great way to discharge stressful feelings that accumulate during the day.
What we do eat is at least as important as what we don't eat.
Multinational food companies can play a large role in helping to prevent chronic diseases around the world by offering healthier choices in the United States and abroad.
Small changes in diet don't have much effect on preventing coronary heart disease and cancer. But bigger changes in diet and lifestyle may prevent heart attacks in almost everyone.
Meditation is the practice of giving something your full attention and awareness. When I eat a truffle, for example, I focus fully on it and involve as many of my senses as possible.
Earlier in my life, I had a tendency toward depression.
When we understand the connection between how we live and how long we live, it's easier to make different choices. Instead of viewing the time we spend with friends and family as luxuries, we can see that these relationships are among the most powerful determinants of our well-being and survival.
Eating bad food does not make you a bad person.
For much of my career, I've studied health and how it's intrinsically tied to lifestyle.
In business, when you can meet an unmet need that is this primal, even meeting it in a superficial way can create a multi-billion-dollar business - e.g., the chat rooms in AOL when it first came out, or the lounges in Starbucks, or the billion people who are on Facebook - even though these are hardly the most intimate of life experiences.
The power of the Internet is also its limitation - it provides access to large amounts of information without providing guidance on how to sort out what is credible and what is not.
I strongly believe that the Founding Fathers of our country got it right: power corrupts, and any time you have too much power concentrated in one place, it tends to get abused, so checks and balances are always needed.
Concepts such as 'risk factor modification' and 'prevention' are often considered boring and they may not initiate or sustain the levels of motivation needed to make and maintain comprehensive lifestyle changes.
Alas, bacon and eggs are not health foods.
Anything that takes you out of the context of being separate is healing. Anything that takes you out of the context of separateness is intimacy.
The choices you make each day in your diet and lifestyle have a direct influence on how your genetic predisposition is expressed - for better and for worse. You're only as old as your genes, but how your genes are expressed may be modified by exercise, diet and lifestyle choices much more than had previously been believed - and more quickly.
When you're feeling stressed, your breath becomes more rapid and shallow. Take some slow, deep breaths, which will reduce your stress level almost immediately.
Make choices to empower yourself.
An Asian way of eating and living may help prevent and even reverse the progression of coronary heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, prostate cancer and breast cancer. Incorporate more fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, soy products and fish in your diet. Eat at home more with your family and friends.
The diets and lifestyles in many other countries are much healthier than in the United States.
Awareness is the first step in healing.
Even a small amount of dark chocolate can be exquisitely satisfying if you meditate on it.
Getting through the day becomes more important than living a long life when you have no one else to live for.
Connections with other people affect not only the quality of our lives but also our survival.
In our home, we serve mostly healthful foods.
Knowing that changing lifestyle changes our genes is often very motivating - not to blame, but to empower.
Intimacy is healing.
Nowhere is the power of the Internet for improving people's lives more evident than in health care.
Too much power in any institution tends to stifle innovation.
Reimbursement is a major determinant of how medicine is practiced. When reimbursement changes, so do medical practice and medical education.
Your body has a remarkable capacity to begin healing itself, and much more quickly than people had once realized, if you simply stop doing what's causing the problem.
There's a tendency to dismiss anything having to do with love and intimacy in medicine because it's hard to measure.
To the degree you eat less of the bad carbs and fats and enough of the good carbs and fats, you're likely to look better, feel better, lose weight and gain health.
Intimacy and community buffer stress.
How you eat is as important as what you eat. If I eat mindlessly while watching television, I get all of the calories and none of the pleasure. Instead, if I eat mindfully, paying attention and savoring what I'm eating, smaller portions of food can be exquisitely satisfying.
It costs less to eat and live more healthfully. Walking, loving, meditating, and quitting smoking are free and require no special equipment.
If you're at high risk or are trying to reverse heart disease or prevent the recurrence of cancer, you probably need to make bigger changes in diet and lifestyle than someone who just wants to lose a few pounds and is otherwise healthy. If you just want to lower your cholesterol, weight or blood pressure, begin by making moderate changes.
When we exercise, it feels like we're really out there doing something, whereas spending a few minutes with your eyes closed in meditation may feel a little, well, wimpy.
A little dark chocolate in small amounts often helps lift me out of those blue moments. When I walk into my favorite store on Union Street in San Francisco that sells high-quality chocolates from around the world, I feel like, well, a kid in a candy store.
Rediscovering the wisdom of love and compassion may help us survive at a time when an increasingly balkanized world so badly needs it.
Your genes are not your fate... if you change your lifestyle, you change your genes.
Nobody wants to feel controlled or treated like a child.
Trust leads to intimacy, which leads to healing and meaning. We can only be intimate to the degree we can make ourselves vulnerable. But when we open our hearts, we can get hurt.
Although many people believe that the primary emphasis of my work is about diet, it's not. What we eat is important, of course, but what comes out of our mouth may be more important than what goes into it.
I'm as deeply suspicious of big government as anyone. I'm strongly in favor of universal coverage but not single payer.
Bureaucracies tend to perpetuate themselves, whether they are multinational corporations or large government institutions such as Medicare, often at the expense of those that they are supposed to serve.
