Spring Into a Thinner You

Additional Info

• Segment Number: 1
• Audio File: wellness_for_life/1515wl5b.mp3
• Featured Speaker: Wayne Anderson, MD
• Guest Website: Take Shape for Life
• Guest Facebook Account: facebook.com/TakeShapeForLife
• Guest Twitter Account: @takeshapeforlife
• Guest Bio: Dr. Wayne Scott Andersen is the Co-founder and Medical Director of Take Shape For Life and the Co-founder of the Health Institute. His groundbreaking book, Dr. A’s Habits of Health, is a core component of the successful program. He and his wife Lori were the first Presidential Directors and have had a huge influence on the 10,000+ Health Coaches. Dr. A is the heart and soul of Take Shape For Life.  An innovator and tireless champion of America’s health, he is dedicated to providing the means for those who want to make a difference in the fight against obesity. He is the former Director of the Surgical Critical Care Program and Chairman of the Department of Anesthesiology at Grandview Hospital.
• Transcription: RadioMD Presents: Wellness for Life Radio | Original Air Date: April 10, 2015
  Host: Susanne Bennett, DC
  Guest: Wayne Anderson, MD
  
  You're listening to RadioMD. She's a chiropractic, holistic physician, best-selling author, international speaker, entrepreneur, and talk show host. She's Dr. Susanne Bennett. It's time now for Wellness for Life Radio. Here's Dr. Susanne.
  
  DR SUSANNE: When springtime rolls around, millions of people get motivated to exercise off all of the holiday pounds added during the winter months. Now, Dr. Wayne Andersen is co-founder and medical director of the Take Shape for Life program and is here to help us spring into thin.
  
  Thanks for being here with us on Wellness for Life.
  
  Now, Dr. Andersen, tell us about your program, Take Shape for Life. What is it and why did you start it?
  
  DR ANDERSEN: Well, thank you for having me on your show, Dr. Bennett, and I'm pretty excited about Take Shape for Life. We've literally helped almost a million people now over the last 15 years create health in their life. I'm a critical care physician. I was one of the first board certified intensivists in the country and pioneered that specialty. Well, in 2001, I decided to move upstream and really focus the rest of my career on helping people create health. So, what I did is I moved from Dayton, Ohio, where I practiced. Ended up moving to Oregon and started this company as a way of helping people create long-term health. What I realized and what's really cool about it is, just yesterday, a study came out showing diets themselves really don't have any long-term effect on peoples' health or their life. What's required is support, a social network and a specific system. That's what Take Shape for Life is. In 2006, the New England Journal of Medicine came out with a study that showed that people that hang around obese people get obese, even if they're not physically next to them because, by their nature, by modeling the same people. So, what I did was reverse engineer that and I took and built a partnership with a company called "MediFast". And Medifast has been making meal replacements since 1980. What I found was, if we could have people start on these programs, lose 2-5 pounds per week, within the first 2-3 weeks, when they felt better and had more energy, we would then move forward with a coach and help them start to learn the habits of health. It's kind of like we've been talking about before, but here's the deal. If we can help people start to eat healthier, move more, handle stress better, start sleeping better and put all those things in a system where we cannot intervene in someone's busy time, what we find is, most people it's hard for them to overcome the logistics and the psychological barriers of living in modern America which you know, Dr. Bennett, is an obesogenic world. Everywhere we go, someone's trying to feed us energy dense food or have us sit down on our rear. So, if we can reverse that trend and have a coach that's been there before that now helps them, that's a pretty cool thing.
  
  DR SUSANNE: Oh, I think so, too. I mean, I took a look at your website, Take Shape for Life, and it was really interesting, particularly some of your people—the people who want to lose weight and get healthy. They actually become health coaches themselves.
  
  DR ANDERSEN: Well, it's so critical because, you know, if I look at the evolution, even the best programs out there, some of the ones people have heard before, they give you some support and a little socialization but what we've done is create this thing called the "bionetwork" and the bionetwork, you probably haven't heard that word. I made it up. It's a living network of people who, on the inside, helped themselves become healthier and now are reaching out and paying it forward and helping others. What's cool about that is, once you start creating health in your own life and then you start helping others, it really reinforces. As you know from being in medical school, you "see one, do one, teach one." Once you're teaching other people, that's when you really start to understand and comprehend. So, our clients and our patients become coaches. Our coaches, then, move forward and start to build really cool teams of like-minded people and then together we make all the difference. You know, they say "pick the five people closest to you" and I bet you have your same habits. You're around the same health, the same weight, make about the same amount of money, so if we can create a place where people can come, have a coach, be a part of something that's really cost effective—it doesn't cost them anything other than regular food—and then change their orientation so health becomes a priority, that puts them in an underlying structure where now we create a microenvironment of health and they can actually go into this obesogenic world and put a protective bubble around them. In fact, in my New York Times best-selling book, Discover Your Optimal Health, I have a really cool diagram that shows that protective bubble that allows you to go out in this crazy world where people are trying to feed you all the wrong things and keep you from moving and now puts you so you can create health for yourself, your family and the people that are important to you. As you know, when you're socially interacting in that environment we're attacking not just the biomedical part of our health, but also, Susanne, the psychosocial.
  
  DR SUSANNE: Yes. That is so important. I love your philosophy, the bionetwork. You know, being motivated, being able to inspire others. You're doing an incredible job. You also have the "Be Slim Club". Can you tell us a little bit about that?
  
  DR ANDERSEN: Yes. That's designed for people like they become part of our health coaching network from the standpoint of they have their coach, they're part of our system at Take Shape for Life and then, what we do is, for being part of that, they buy our healthy products, they get a progressive discount because we want to always be loyal to those people. They also get other benefits. You know, one of the things we like to provide is through the Habits of Health system, and again, the organization, where they have healthy peers. So, they get a coach for free. What's cool about that is, you have someone who's probably been where you are now and is there, will listen to you. One of the things we teach our coaches is empathetic coaching. We want to become great listeners and really find out what's important to people. All of that coaching and all those things we provide is free because we want to provide a solution that costs no more than regular food and allows people to move forward and have a partner, someone to help them because, you know, it's a really tough thing to do on your own. It really requires the support. When you have someone who cares about you and truly can help you make a difference and keep you accountable in every which way you want—on text messaging, on emails, on the phone. Even now, we're using stuff like Zoom where our coaches do individual Zoom calls so they can look at each other face to face. We figure out what the client or patient wants and then helps them do that. We have more and more physicians. You know, almost 25% of our health network, our bionetwork, are now health professionals that want to move upstream as well, like I did, and help people truly create health in their life—not put them on more medicines or surgery.
  
  DR SUSANNE: Yes. I love that fact that you've got so much support going for the people, the audience that you serve. You know, you mentioned briefly about your meal plans and you actually have meals that you sell. Is that correct?
  
  DR ANDERSEN: Yes. And they cost no more than regular food. What we have is during the weight loss phase, we help people rapidly lose weight, and they do it safely. They're eating a complete meal replacement. It gives them all the right vitamins and minerals and as they lose weight, what it does is it changes. You feel better. You have more energy. You start feeling better. People are noticing that and it really helps reinforce, inside of you, it creates that incentive, that intrinsic motivation so that people say, "You know what? I really like what's happening to me and I want to continue it. So, that's when our coach works with you and starts working, not just in what you're eating, but starts teaching you so that, you know, you go out to restaurants that you know what to eat, how to eat healthier, you know, the Habits of Health system has a color-coded system that shows you to make sure you're eating the healthy foods and staying in the lower carbohydrates and balanced carbohydrates; eating healthy fats and staying away from saturated fats; and giving you the proper amount of nutrition so that you can move forward and make all the right choices and help you incorporate into your day, more movement. It's not the 3 hours of exercise that matters per week and when I wrote in 2008, the Habits of Health, we talked about that and now, in the last 6 months, three studies of independently collaborated studies that say basically, what we're doing now, it's our day to day movement: getting up from our desk, moving around more, going for walks, standing at work rather than sitting and using your phone—all these are little bitty steps that, put together, can change your trajectory towards moving toward optimally healthy; from sick to non-sick, and now puts you on a trajectory for the rest of your days which is pretty cool.
  
  DR SUSANNE: I love everything that you're saying. It's so funny you talked about standing. Right now, while I'm interviewing you, I'm standing.
  
  DR ANDERSEN: I love that! I love that.
  
  DR SUSANNE: Yes. It's the way I do all my interviews and I do a lot of my work. I love what you're saying. Thanks so much. You know, everyone, go to DrWayneAndersen.com. You spell Andersen with an "e" at the end. Dr. WayneAndersen.com. Go look for his books. He's got plenty of books, but also the Take Shape for Life program. He's got it there. Really appreciate all the things that you've said here. I know, gosh, I'm going to have to have you back one day because there is so much information that you can provide for us. Really appreciate it, so everyone, you can also go to my Wellness for Life Radio show page on RadioMD.com.
  
  This is Dr. Susanne sharing my natural strategies for ultimate health and wellness right here on RadioMD. Until next time, stay well.
• Length (mins): 10
• Waiver Received: No
• Host: Susanne Bennett, DC