Simple Life Changes Can Reverse Chronic Diseases
An EcoChi Vital Abstract
This podcast was recorded September 25, 2019 and hosted by Oprah Winfrey, Super Soul Conversations, OWN. Oprah Winfrey invites medical pioneer Dr. Dean Ornish and his wife Anne to her vegetable garden in Maui to talk about their new book, “Undo It!: How Simple Lifestyle Changes Can Reverse Most Chronic Diseases.”
The more diseases we study and the more underlying mechanisms we look at, the more evidence we have that simple changes can make such a powerful difference in people's lives in ways we can actually measure. I think our unique contribution has been to use these very high-tech expensive state-of-the-art scientific measures to prove how powerful these very simple lifestyle changes can be. The lifestyle medicine, as you mentioned, is this field of using lifestyle changes not only to help prevent disease which we all know- but actually to reverse it sometimes in combination with drugs and surgery. At 19 I already figured out how I was ready to do myself in and I met a Swami at a cocktail party who was glowing- it's like what am I missing here?! He went on to say what probably sounds like a new-age cliché, but it turned my life around. Nothing can bring you lasting happiness. But, it's our nature to be happy and peaceful. You have it already and not being mindful of that, we end up running after all these things. If only I had more money, more power, more beauty, more sex, more accomplishment, more fame - then I'd be happy, then people would love me, then I wouldn't feel so bad, so lonely and depressed. And what he taught me was that once you set up that view of the world, however it turns out, you lose because you will never be happy. What the Swami said is that in one of the ultimate ironies is that we have that already- it's our nature to be happy and peaceful and loving. Basically, eat a plant-based diet, meditate, do yoga, exercise, love more and you know you'll heal. So, I thought, let me give that a try. I was so agitated I couldn't even sit still long enough to meditate so I meditated while walking around. Then I began to get little glimpses of what that meant, and it turned my life around. I got off of all medication- I knew that wasn't my life's Destiny. Swami taught me to listen to that little voice and what he said Is, that the power of meditation is it quiets your mind and body down, so you begin to focus better. When you can focus energy to gain more power you begin to do whatever you do in school, music and sports-you do it better. But the more important thing is that you rediscover yourself. Different diseases, different treatments, but they're not as different as they seem because they share many common origins and pathways. I realized that they're really the same disease masquerading and manifesting in different forms, and with all this interest in personalized medicine we found it was the same Lifestyle Changes; eat well, move more, stress less, love more, in all of these studies we did over the last four decades could reverse all of these different conditions.
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