There isn't an industry with more experts that completely disagree with each other than the weight loss industry. You have experts with PhDs telling you that a high protein diet is the best way to eat, and they have the studies to prove it, and then you have other experts also with PhDs telling you the exact opposite, that a low protein diet is the best way to eat and they also have the studies to prove it. Which Ph.D. should you believe?
On top of that, you have foods like eggs that one day the experts tell us that they are good for us and the next day they tell us that they are bad for us, and of course, they have the studies to prove both of their opinions.
Which expert advice should people follow? They all have degrees, and they all have studies to prove that their way is the best.
You need to know that just because somebody has a degree does not automatically make their opinion better than a person without a degree. Plenty of people did not finish college or didn't go to college at all and made a massive difference in their industry. One of the best examples is Thomas Edison, who has been called America's greatest inventor. Thomas Edison was a self-educated man with no degrees. A more recent example is Tony Robbins—another self-educated expert in his field. Tony Robbins is considered one of the best life coaches in the world. His understanding of human psychology is amazing, and, in many ways, his understanding of human motivation is better than people with degrees in psychology. The teachings of Tony Robbins have made a big difference in my life. He has developed his own techniques and other practices to help people improve their lives, which work better than those created by people with PhDs and other degrees. Steve Jobs is another college dropout that made a massive impact in his industry.
These are only three examples of people with no degrees making a difference in their field.
I hope you don't misunderstand me. I am not against people with degrees. I am saying you don't automatically believe somebody's opinion over somebody else's just because they have a degree in that subject and the other person does not.
I have a degree in Culinary Arts. I graduated from one of the world's top cooking schools, The Culinary Institute of America. I love what one of my chef professors told us. Getting a degree from a culinary school does not make you a chef. It just gives you the tools that will help you accelerate your career, but it is not the only path to becoming a great chef. Most great chefs never went to school for cooking. They learned on the job. My father was a great chef, much better than me, and he never went to cooking school, and I did.
It's the same thing with anything you would like to learn. You can go to a school and learn it, or you can learn it on your own. Getting a degree makes your life easier because it confirms to other people that you studied that subject and learned it well enough to pass. In contrast, a person without a degree has to work a lot harder to prove to others that he/she knows his/her stuff.
But learning things on your own and not going through a school has its benefits too. For example, you are free to follow your intuition, which most schools don't teach. As a matter of fact, formal education can limit your ability to use your intuition and think outside the box.
I believe using your intuition is the best way to get answers. Tesla, not the car, the inventor, which I consider one of the greatest inventors who ever lived, used his intuition and imagination to develop all his inventions.
Here is a direct quote from Tesla:
"My method is different. I do not rush into actual work. When I get a new idea, I start at once building it up in my imagination and make improvements and operate the device in my mind. When I have gone so far as to embody everything in my invention, every possible improvement I can think of, and when I see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete form the final product of my brain."
Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Inc. and a college dropout, had this to say about intuition: "Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion."
"Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on," AZ QUOTES.
The bottom line is that just because society has brainwashed us to look for answers in people with degrees, it does not mean people with degrees have all the answers or the correct answers. There are many ways to accumulate knowledge and become great at what you do without getting a degree, and Thomas Edison, Tony Robbins, and Steve Jobs are just a few examples that perfectly make that point.
The lesson I want you to take from this is that don't just believe the message because the person who delivered the message has a lot of letters after their name. Look at the message and see if it makes sense to you. As history has clearly shown us, you don't need a degree to figure things out and come up with great inventions and solutions to problems.
Now let me get back on the subject of weight loss. All these contradicting expert opinions have confused people about what they need to do to lose weight and get in shape.
Here is the problem with a confused mind. A confused mind takes no action, and if it does take action, it quits within the first obstacle because it is not 100% certain what it is doing is the best way to go.
Many fitness professionals believe that people are lazy and don't have their priorities straight, so they take no action to improve their health and lose weight.
I strongly disagree with those fitness professionals. There was a time when I first got into the fitness field that I did share those views, but after 31 years in the weight loss industry, I discovered that people are not lazy. However, they are confused and misled.
They are confused by all the contradicting information they read and are misled by many of the myths and half-truths promoted by experts with degrees who special interest groups pay.
With all the misinformation and contradicting information, I can understand why most people don't take action to get in shape. And of the people who take action, 95% fail anyway.
For any weight loss program to have a chance of helping people achieve sustainable weight loss, it should first clear up some of the confusion that exists in the weight loss field before it explains to people what they must do to lose weight and get in shape.
Here I want to explain a bit about how I came up with the solution to sustainable weight loss and what I base it on.
I got into the fitness field in 1992, and I was as confused as everyone else for the first 10 years in the fitness field. I initially thought that I would find the answer by looking at studies. The problem was too many studies contradicted each other. I found studies to prove that a high protein diet is the best way to eat, I found studies to prove that a low meat diet is the best way to eat, and I found studies to prove everything in between.
My aha moment was when I realized that many things I had learned in school about proper nutrition and how to get in shape completely contradicted how I was raised. You see, I was born and raised in a very healthy region in Greece. When I lived there, thin and healthy was the norm, people lived long, healthy lives free from most diseases we associate with old age, and I thought that cancer was rare. So obviously, the way we lived and ate in Greece was much better than was I was learning in school. That is when I started looking at studies a little closer, and here is what I discovered. Most of the studies were paid for by special interest groups trying to prove that their product has some great benefit so they can sell it easier. I also discovered that studies can be easily manipulated to show whatever you want to prove. So although looking at studies can be helpful, I would never find the solution by just looking at studies. I had to look elsewhere, and what better place to look than my upbringing? The simple fact was, whatever we did in Greece when I lived there was very good for our health and weight.
When I started looking at other healthy regions around the world, like Okinawa, Sardinia, and Ikaria, a pattern emerged. There were 5 behaviors that all healthy regions had in common, including where I was raised in Greece. These behaviors were not just about the food we ate, but how we ate, the fact that we took regular breaks from food, and how active we were.
What was also great about these 5 healthy behaviors was that they were very easy to live with and quickly became habitual with a bit of practice. In contrast, the healthy behaviors I learned in school, through which I was supposed to help people lose weight and get in shape, like, counting calories, measuring your food, figuring out micronutrients, and intense workouts, were very hard to live with and could never become habitual.
Once I started applying what I was learning from researching healthy regions and reflecting on my upbringing, my clients began to see the best results, but not just that. They also had an effortless time maintaining the results because the healthy behaviors through which they achieved the results were very easy to live with.
So, my approach to weight loss and health is based on more than just studies but on how people in healthy regions live and eat.
To make my approach available to as many people as possible, I have 3 ways people can join. People can learn my system through my online coaching; they can come to my facility, Live Your Way Thin, located in Danbury, CT, and through my online course, The Stavros Method.