Why UnHealthy? The Story Behind the Name

Why would I call my show the Unhealthy Podcast? Listen up and I'll tell you.

Hello friends. Uncle Marv here and welcome to The Unhealthy Podcast, a show where we explore the world of healthy habits, lifestyles, and behaviors and learn how to transform them into healthier ones. Well, welcome to this Tuesday evening if you're listening pretty close to it. And I'm going to do a quick show here.

I want to give a couple of updates on where I am on the goals that I've set out early on. And I want to also talk about some of the feedback that I've gotten while doing some prep work with guests that will be coming up in the shows and talking, of course, with friends and families and getting their ideas about the show so far. And of course, the first thing that people say, why would you name a show unhealthy? It's not positive. Well, basically the bottom line is I think I've described it pretty much in my opening where I say that we're talking about unhealthy habits, lifestyles, and behaviors, and we're going to learn how to transform them into healthier ones.

So pretty much the first thing that I had to get through was the fact that I was ignoring a lot of the things that I was doing that was, quote, unhealthy and just simply focusing on the things that I thought would do the trick. And I found out that, you know what? You got to go back and take care of the unhealthy stuff too. You've got to identify them. In some cases you can transform them, in other cases, you have to eliminate them.

And that's what I want to do on this show. And I want to spend some time chatting with folks and talking about all the things that are considered unhealthy. And one of the things that we need to do, first of all, is identify what is unhealthy. And I know that I've mentioned in previous shows that we understand that unhealthy things include foods. We know that they include habits, relationships.

Unhealthy habits can lead to various health problems diabetes, heart diseases, stroke, cancer. Even unhealthy environments can lead to health problems, exposure to things like lead and air pollution. But basically, unhealthy refers to anything that is not conducive to good health or in the opposite way is harmful to health. And this can include physical, mental, or moral aspects. So obviously, the easiest things to refer to are the foods.

Things that we've identified as highly processed items such as fast food, snacks, foods that are low in nutrients, high in empty calories, and full of things like refined flowers and sodium and sugar. And I want to give you a quick update. I know that when I started the show, I said one of the things that I wanted to do was I wanted to lose ten pounds. And I didn't give you very many specifics on that. And I'll come clean and say that well, ten pounds was basically the ballpark.

So where I am personally, just so that you can understand my position, I got to the point where I looked down on the scale and I saw that I was at, I don't know, it was 232 or 233. So that may not sound like a lot. Most of you that know me know that I was an athlete and that, you know, what, a person that's 5859, 230 pounds played sports, probably not bad. But the problem is I had a little bit of a belly. I have a little bit of belly.

It's not gone, it's still here. So it was really a couple of things. Yes, I wanted to lose the pounds and my target weight was actually 220, and that was going to be the first leg in my journey. I wanted to set a goal that I thought that I could do within a month and would be a starting off point to get me to where I wanted to go long term. Now, I know that if you look at a lot of the studies, they say ten pounds in a month is unrealistic, in some cases unhealthy.

But I knew that there were things that I had done in the past that I could lose a few pounds pretty quick, and if I set my mind to it, I'd get there well over well before the weekend. So this is being taped after Labor Day weekend. So the Friday before Labor Day weekend, I was at 232.2. So in the spirit of the law, I had lost the ten pounds. But in the letter of where I wanted to go, I still wanted to get to that 220.

But of course, Labor Day weekend and with all the festivities and stuff, I did okay, I'm not overly out of whack and I've backed up a couple of pounds, but I still have a few days to get back down before I left. But I did not reach the goal of 220. The other thing that I wanted to do was have a flatter stomach. And that was just more of a thing that I wanted to do just because at this conference that's upcoming, I'm actually going to be the MC and I'm going to be on stage for three straight days. And I thought, you know what, I kind of want to look like I'm in a little better shape this year than I was last year.

So that was why I wanted the flat tummy. Now I will say my tummy is down, but it's not flat. But I'm okay because I did move in a positive direction and it'll be okay. I'm not going to die. So, of course the question is, I did that.

The conference will be over soon. Now what? And this is where some of my upcoming guests are going to play a big part of that, because when I was doing some prep for some other stuff. I was talking with somebody and we were talking about the people that do things for a specific goal and then when they reach that goal, it's like they don't know what to do next. And so here I am at this place where I've essentially hit my goal.

The conference is here and when I get back now what? So, part of a couple of future episodes, we're going to be talking about the mindset of where things are. And there's a lot of things that are triggered because of our brain chemistry, because of our environment, because of how we were raised and things of that nature. So there will be a couple of shows on mindset and we're going to talk about things that are chemical within ourselves and the fact that we have cravings. And that was one of the things that I had to struggle with.

I have a big old sugar craving. So trying to get rid of sweets and sodas and stuff like that was a bit hard. Now I've done pretty good. I've got my soda down to if I don't do zero, I do one a day, which is a far cry from what I used to do. We are cutting out the sweets in the morning, things like the cinnamon rolls and extra breads cake, all that sort of stuff.

So we're on our way. But I wanted to at least come clean 100% on where I was in my journey. So the first part of this podcast is really going to be about understanding unhealthy and identifying it and then figuring out a way to go to the next step, which is essentially the process of change. Because we know that changing unhealthy habits and lifestyles is challenging, but it's possible with the right approach. So now once I've gone through and identified stuff, I'm going to talk with other people that have had unhealthy points of their lives and they've identified where they were and they've made the changes to transform themselves and get to a healthier place in their life.

So that's going to be the second part of this podcast. We'll talk about, again, understanding what unhealthy is, identifying those, talking about the process of change, and of course, going into some practical tips for transformations and making it a lifestyle process. This is not going to be a four week program, a four month program. This is going to be making changes for life. So we are going to talk about all the things that may not relate to just me, but relates to everybody in terms of nutrition, poor digestion, unwanted weight gain, saying yes to everything and not taking time for yourself.

There is a new school of philosophy that talks about the way that we see ourselves in relationships to others, where we say yes to everything. We fail to say no and are too busy people pleasing and not taking care of ourselves. So we're going to talk about those types of things. We're going to talk about even things like watching too much television. So all that's going to happen and we'll break down, in a sense, practical tips for everybody.

It's not just identifying the unhealthy habits and saying, make the change. We're going to talk about setting small achievable goals, taking one step at a time, understanding that we have to be patient, but persistent. Developing new habits takes time, so we'll have to do that. We're going to seek support from friends, family, professionals, and practice self-compassion, as we did. Oh, I did a show earlier, if you remember, with Lori Saitz.

We're going to focus on stress management and relaxation techniques. So all of these things are what's going to be happening with the show. And that's why I called it the Unhealthy podcast. Yes, we're going to work on getting healthy, but we first got to identify what is unhealthy. So that's what we're going to do.

Well, that's it. I wanted to do the quick show. I'm going to go now, get ready to head off to my conference. Just remember that we will be doing a lot of these shows here over the next few weeks. I've got Coach l coming back for some relationships talk.

I've got the person I talked about. We're going to talk about the brain and the chemistry that goes along with our cravings. We're going to have a few other people on. We're going to talk about grief. We're going to talk about sickness.

We're going to talk about all these things. So join me in the future. And thank you for listening to this episode of Uncle Marv's Unhealthy podcast. Join us again soon for more tips and advice on how to live healthy and be happy.