Contributor: “Dr. J”
Dr. J offers his irreverent, slightly irrelevant, but possibly useful opinions on health and fitness. A Florida surgeon and fitness freak with a black belt in karate, he runs 50 miles a week and flies a Cherokee Arrow 200.

I don’t talk about being a surgeon in a hospital very often — I guess that would be a busman’s holiday for me — but I thought that today I would talk about some of my experiences with the crazy world of hospitals.

I was born in a very small hospital in a very small town. When the town built a larger hospital, it converted the old one into a house of worship. Years later, I toured a storied old hospital which had been founded in 1669: The Kings Hospital in Dublin, Ireland. Walking through those dingy stone staircases and dark narrow hallways felt more like being in an old cathedral than in a hospital.

As a teenager, my dad, who is a doctor, used to take me to Cook County Hospital in Chicago. I still remember how the nurses in the operating rooms would carry flyswatters in the summer because of all the flies that came in through the open windows with the warm breezes.

That iconic hospital certainly wasn’t a place of worship yet, but I suppose I did have a type of worship for the daring people that worked there, performing, in front of my wide-eyed wonder, miracles.

My first experience as a graduate student in a hospital was on a rotation watching my school’s surgical residents at work. I became friends with several of them and eventually one of them became my boss at Florida. Continued: Dr. J recalls his hospital history

Contributor: “Dr. J”
Dr. J offers his irreverent, slightly irrelevant, but possibly useful opinions on health and fitness. A Florida surgeon and fitness freak with a black belt in karate, he runs 50 miles a week and flies a Cherokee Arrow 200.

Finding our way in life can be a daunting task. There are many voices in our heads. Some are from our parents or other authority figures from our childhoods telling us what we should and shouldn’t do with our lives. Some are from ourselves, but they are more that rebellious voice left over from those formative years, always saying the opposite to all the “shoulds” we’ve heard. Finding your true path amid the many voices may not be as easy a task as we might imagine when we first begin our voyage. Continued: The trouble with doing what you love, and what holds us back and propels us forward

Contributor: “Dr. J”
Dr. J offers his irreverent, slightly irrelevant, but possibly useful opinions on health and fitness. A Florida surgeon and fitness freak with a black belt in karate, he runs 50 miles a week and flies a Cherokee Arrow 200.

A psychological defense mechanism is a mental process — usually unconscious — that protects the person from shame, anxiety, conflict, loss of self-esteem, or other unacceptable feelings or thoughts.

Many of these defense mechanisms are learned behaviors from our vulnerable childhood, when, because of our perception of various, often-difficult experiences, we needed to protect our innocent, developing selves.

When these emotions became too overwhelming for us, we sought safety by employing psychological defense mechanisms.

A defense mechanism becomes pathological when using it causes the physical or mental health of the individual to be adversely affected. This should not be confused with healthy, conscious coping strategies or skills, which can minimize or tolerate stress or conflict while functioning to solve personal and interpersonal problems.

When we are attempting to make a change in our lives, it can often be useful to look back at our past behavior patterns. This can offer us significant clues as to why we have failed and why we have succeeded.

Patterns that lead to success are usually easier to identify, and for most of us, working to improve them will not be as useful as identifying and overhauling patterns that continually cause our failures.

Individuals tend to fail in the same ways, for the same reasons, over and over again, while at the same time being unaware of that pattern of behavior that results in that failure. Continued: Rationalization, Denial and Paula Deen

Contributor: “Dr. J”
Dr. J offers his irreverent, slightly irrelevant, but possibly useful opinions on health and fitness. A Florida surgeon and fitness freak with a black belt in karate, he runs 50 miles a week and flies a Cherokee Arrow 200.

(CC) lifescript/Flickr

Her History

Ms. Deen came a long way from her simple Southern roots as a small-town Georgia girl. Her voyage has not been an easy one. After moving to historic Savannah with $200 and two teenage sons in 1989, she went on, through hard work and determination, to overcome agoraphobia, raise her children and publish four cookbooks, the first being self-published. She eventually reached both national and international recognition and appreciation for both her cooking and wonderful persona. Continued: Dr. J’s open letter to Paula Deen

Contributor: “Dr. J”
Dr. J offers his irreverent, slightly irrelevant, but possibly useful opinions on health and fitness. A Florida surgeon and fitness freak with a black belt in karate, he runs 50 miles a week and flies a Cherokee Arrow 200.

The state of Georgia recently started a campaign called Strong for Life to educate their populace about the prevalence and problems of childhood obesity.

Stop sugarcoating it, Georgia!

The campaign features billboards, commercials, and print ads presenting a strong message to a state with nearly one million overweight or obese children. Continued: Pros, cons and implications of the Strong for Life initiative

Contributor: “Dr. J”
Dr. J offers his irreverent, slightly irrelevant, but possibly useful opinions on health and fitness. A Florida surgeon and fitness freak with a black belt in karate, he runs 50 miles a week and flies a Cherokee Arrow 200.

(CC) davidgsteadman/Flickr

With the joys of the holidays and the recent New Year’s celebration, have you by chance found yourself caught by that speed-binging trap for that shameful behavior of Eating Under the Influence (EUI)? If so, you are not alone in being issued a citation for that risky transgression of EUI!

Sure, you may have great, or not so great, memories from your former wild and crazy days when your EUI-stimulated creativity allowed you to invent some memorable, early-morning meals like cookie soup or Twinkies in chocolate syrup, followed by a round of Tortilla chips covered with cinnamon, dunked in the melted ice cream du noir.

Of course, we were all indestructible back then, but now we are adults, and there are many health, wellness, and fitness reasons to avoid EUI. Continued: Detrimental effects of drinking alcohol

Contributor: “Dr. J”
Dr. J offers his irreverent, slightly irrelevant, but possibly useful opinions on health and fitness. A Florida surgeon and fitness freak with a black belt in karate, he runs 50 miles a week and flies a Cherokee Arrow 200.

Plaxico Burress is an outstanding player in the National Football League. After a successful college and early promising professional career, everything looked rosy for the now multi-millionaire. Then on that fateful evening of Nov. 28, 2008 at a New York nightclub, he shot himself in the leg trying to stop his concealed gun from sliding down his pants. In addition to his self-inflicted damage, he also received a two-year prison term for the error of his ways.

The expression, “To shoot oneself in the foot,” may have a soldier or cowboy origin, but it usually refers to doing something that damages one’s ambition or career, or acting against one’s own interests and behaving self-destructively and stopping one’s own progress.

Whether it is that diet that got off to a great start, our new health and wellness program that we have embarked on, or a multitude of other self-improvement issues — perhaps involving budgeting money, looking for employment, continuing our education and so forth — shooting ourselves in the foot is an all-too-common occurrence.

Usually the origins of pulling that trigger and shooting ourselves are rooted in fear. These fears or leftover issues from when we are younger are not always obvious ones. Many people have a fear of failure often based on their past experiences, which can lead to a negative spiral of hesitation and self-doubt. The result becomes that we tend to feel inadequate and look for ways to sabotage ourselves. Facing these fears with positive actions is paramount to changing these entrenched behaviors.

Remember, hard issues require these personally challenging hard solutions. If it was an easy issue for you to resolve in the first place, you would have already done it! Continued: How to move forward and tackle tough problems

Contributor: “Dr. J”
Dr. J offers his irreverent, slightly irrelevant, but possibly useful opinions on health and fitness. A Florida surgeon and fitness freak with a black belt in karate, he runs 50 miles a week and flies a Cherokee Arrow 200.

Ed. note: Enjoyed this post? Click the “Like” button below and be sure to “Like” the CalorieLab Facebook page.

Contributor: “Dr. J”
Dr. J offers his irreverent, slightly irrelevant, but possibly useful opinions on health and fitness. A Florida surgeon and fitness freak with a black belt in karate, he runs 50 miles a week and flies a Cherokee Arrow 200.

(CC) bark/Flickr

“When you really want to, come back and I’ll give you the real book!”

Of course I’m sure anyone reading this has or does really want to, so here’s the real book. Continued: Dr. J’s free eBook on weight loss

Contributor: “Dr. J”
Dr. J offers his irreverent, slightly irrelevant, but possibly useful opinions on health and fitness. A Florida surgeon and fitness freak with a black belt in karate, he runs 50 miles a week and flies a Cherokee Arrow 200.

“Genius simplifies complexity and stupid complicates simplicity” is a personal saying of mine. When it comes to living our lives, ’tis a gift to be simple.

As humans we have evolved our large brains, multifaceted and complicated, yet when we finally created computers as our thinking progeny, we made them as simple binary devices.

Health and fitness at its essence is also quite simple and binary. Calories in and calories out. Lift the weight up and put the weight down. Move one foot and then the other. I didn’t say easy, I said simple, yet easy is also simple except for one slight problem. Somewhere between having that simple thought — to lose weight, for example — and the simple actions that are required to accomplish that task, many of us tend to need to complicate it.

We ruminate about our emotions, habits, beliefs, recovery, self-worth, self-abuse, self-hatred, subconscious thoughts, conscious thoughts, weaknesses, fears, being ridiculed, shamed, embarrassed, our core values, inner conflicts, inadequacies, failures, clinging nature, trying and so forth.

On the other side of the scale of action is doing. No thinking, no trying — doing.

So many times in our lives we are faced with challenges. These struggles are enough as they are without us making them even harder.

Simplicity is a gift you can give to yourself: Stop thinking, start doing!

It doesn’t get any simpler than that.

Ed. note: Enjoyed this post? Click the “Like” button below and be sure to “Like” the CalorieLab Facebook page.

Contributor: “Dr. J”
Dr. J offers his irreverent, slightly irrelevant, but possibly useful opinions on health and fitness. A Florida surgeon and fitness freak with a black belt in karate, he runs 50 miles a week and flies a Cherokee Arrow 200.

(CC) Lululemon Athletica

Whether it affects that child with ADHD who has difficulty sitting quietly in a classroom or an adult who can’t keep from eating that 770-calorie Cinnabon that they see and smell in the mall food court, too-frequent impulsive behaviors can be a consistent source of creating problems in our life.

Now a simple, effective and readily available treatment for this impulsivity may have been discovered, and we won’t have to wait for laboratory testing or FDA approval to use it in our lives: exercise! Yes, researchers from Spain and the United States have demonstrated that exercise may encourage healthy eating by actually changing the parts of the brain that influence impulsive behavior. Continued: Exercise and brain function

Contributor: “Dr. J”
Dr. J offers his irreverent, slightly irrelevant, but possibly useful opinions on health and fitness. A Florida surgeon and fitness freak with a black belt in karate, he runs 50 miles a week and flies a Cherokee Arrow 200.

(CC) Ben Ostrowsky/Flickr

“That’s huge to get that momentum going,” said Tim Tebow of the Denver Broncos. “I talk about it, but I really believe it and it’s huge — once you get the momentum on your side, I think it’s a huge advantage. No matter who you are, I think it’s much tougher to be stopped when you’ve got that mo going for you.”

Tebow made that statement in a postgame interview shortly after his team won their third game of the season under his fledgling leadership. Continued: Momentum and goals

Contributor: “Dr. J”
Dr. J offers his irreverent, slightly irrelevant, but possibly useful opinions on health and fitness. A Florida surgeon and fitness freak with a black belt in karate, he runs 50 miles a week and flies a Cherokee Arrow 200.

(CC) Poster Boy/Flickr

“Fast food is killing our kids,” was the September 15 headline in the Independent Newspapers South African editions.

The comment was made by Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi in a statement about his proposed plan to deal with his country’s fast food industry at a summit on non-communicable diseases. His plan involves eliminating high-fat children’s meals and replacing these with healthier options. In addition, he said fast food companies would soon be banned from marketing their unhealthy products on TV during children’s programs and that free toys with meals might also be prohibited.

The reasons he gave for these draconian measures were that far too many children were at risk of contracting non-communicable diseases, including diabetes, hypertension and obesity. You see, these non-communicable diseases cause over 60 percent of all deaths around the world, and by 2030, it is estimated that non-communicable disease will be a major factor in about 75 percent of global deaths. Continued: Data on fast food and children

Contributor: “Dr. J”
Dr. J offers his irreverent, slightly irrelevant, but possibly useful opinions on health and fitness. A Florida surgeon and fitness freak with a black belt in karate, he runs 50 miles a week and flies a Cherokee Arrow 200.

Every living creature has a need for comfort, especially during difficult and challenging times.

Food is something that many people use as a way of comforting themselves. However, when our comfort has outlived its usefulness, or reaches a point where it is causing us harm in the present or will cause us harm in the future, we need to reevaluate and change our behaviors.

The Binky

It’s quite possible that our first real test of willpower and dealing with an emotional attachment to something that comforted us was when we were faced with having to put down our pacifier, often referred to as a binky. The name “Binky” is actually a trademark for a pacifier product owned by Playtex, which registered it in 1935, whereas the term “binky” has been around for a while longer, usually referring to “any little mechanical contrivance,” or as a name for anything small and either inconsequential or cute.

The prolonged use of a pacifier has been demonstrated to cause problems. It can interfere with breastfeeding, especially if introduced to the newborn too early, may make children more prone to ear infections, physically delay speech and even cause dental problems with extended use.

The widespread occurrence of attachments to pacifiers, as well as their importance as security objects, can be a normal part of development for a majority of infants, provided that pacifires are not used for too long. This creates the problem of putting down the pacifier. Continued: Elmo Psychiatrist

Contributor: “Dr. J”
Dr. J offers his irreverent, slightly irrelevant, but possibly useful opinions on health and fitness. A Florida surgeon and fitness freak with a black belt in karate, he runs 50 miles a week and flies a Cherokee Arrow 200.

(CC) puuikibeach/Flickr

There is a saying that goes, “It’s easier to stay out than to get out.” If I were you, I would carry this saying with you like it’s gold, because when it comes to your health, it is.

Almost every study supports the unfortunate news that once you have become obese, it is not only hard to lose weight, but it is much harder to maintain a weight loss than if you were just maintaining that normal weight in the first place. Bob Wieder recently addressed the data collected by the Weight Loss Registry with his column titled “The 10 Commandments of Weight Loss Management.”

From reading that, I’m not sure which is harder, 40 years in the wilderness or maintaining our weight loss. Continued: The science of weight loss and maintenance

Contributor: “Dr. J”
Dr. J offers his irreverent, slightly irrelevant, but possibly useful opinions on health and fitness. A Florida surgeon and fitness freak with a black belt in karate, he runs 50 miles a week and flies a Cherokee Arrow 200.

One of the scariest stories I ever remember reading was Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.” It is the story of a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition who has been condemned to death and finds himself in a pitch-black cell. He discovers that this cell has a deep pit in the center and a large swinging pendulum descending from above. His inevitable death will come from either falling into the pit or being cut in two by the pendulum.

Every year at this time, as in Poe’s story, the Halloween pendulum swings around and the fears of once again falling into that ever-present candy pit present themselves.

The average trick-or-treater brings home at least 50 pieces of candy, according to Kid’s Health, and many little adorables receive over 100 candies! Twenty percent of those polled admitted to eating all of the candy that night. Most of the rest said they ate the candy over the next two weeks. Half of the children said that their parents set limits on how much candy they could eat per day. (I wonder if these kids counted the “before” and “after” amount after giving it to their parents to watch for them.) The other half of the children had no limits set on their consumption.

Of course, it’s not just the children that are exposed to this candy onslaught. From the time the candy is bought at the store, carried home, stored and finally distributed to its consumed end point, many helpless adult candy recidivists have dug into the stash, not to mention the candy toll that is collected by parents at the back end of the evening’s loot gatherings! Continued: The history of candy and Halloween