Interview with Dr. Ian Smith
We let him into our homes with VH1's Celebrity Fit Club, now it's time to let him into our health. Dr. Ian Smith is arguably the leading health advocate in America today and we discuss everything in this must hear interview including Dr. Smith's historic program, The 50 Million Pound Challenge. Click the play button to listen or read the entire interview below.
Ernesto Martinez: Hello and Happy New Year everyone! This is Ernesto with ‘My Lifestyle Diet’, and as we begin this new year, I am very pleased to have one of the top medical consultants in the industry joining us today. Award winning author, radio / television personality, physician, health advocate, and the founder of the 50 Million Pound Challenge, Dr. Ian Smith. Dr. Smith, thank you for taking the time to do this interview.
Dr. Ian Smith: Thanks for inviting me, Ernesto. I am glad to be with you.
Ernesto Martinez: My pleasure, my pleasure! Now you are the creator and founder of what I call the official crusade against obesity, otherwise known as a 50 Million Pound Challenge, located at www.50millionpounds.com. I understand the concept of this challenge was based upon your extremely popular book, 'The Fat Smash Diet'.
So here you are today with your program well over the 3 million pound milestone. That's over 3 million pounds lost to date. How are you holding up and what do you think of the success of the 50 Million Pound Challenge up to this point?
Dr. Ian Smith: I'm tired and my team is tired. It's been a very exhausting, but extremely rewarding experience. We started back in April 7, 2007. We launched at the nation's capital in Washington DC, and the idea was I just got tired of talking about the needs for us as a country to get healthy, I got tired of reading the headlines about how our waistlines are increasing every year, our children are now in jeopardy, and I said, you know what, it's time to kind to get into the trenches and do something about it.
All of us can sit on the morning shows and talk about the new statistics but, a few of us are actually getting in and rolling up our sleeves. So the 50 Million Pound Challenge is my effort, to roll up my sleeves along with my sponsor State Farm and to really spread the word and give people, here is the key, give people the tools that they need to actually make some changes in their life that will bring them some pleasurable results as far as weight loss and becoming healthier.
Ernesto Martinez: At the outset of this project, I know you urged and specifically challenged the African-American community to participate in this historic program, but I believe there is a misconception within the online community that the 50 Million Pound Challenge is only for African-Americans. Can you clear this out for me? Who can actually take advantage of this free program?
Dr. Ian Smith: The simple answer is, this is for everyone. But let me explain to you the historical context. When we first started the 50 Million Pound Challenge, it was always available to everybody. We don't ask you your race, your religion, it's a website, you sign-up and you are more than able to use the free tools that we offer on the website. We were targeting African-Americans because if you look at the data, while the entire country is overweight or obese, about 67%, If you look at the statistics for African-American, they are really almost off the chart, almost 80% of women are overweight, and almost 70% of men and boys and girls 25 to 19% respectively are overweight. And so what we wanted to do was we wanted to target African-Americans, make it available to everyone.
Unfortunately, people believed that it only was for African-Americans and that was not the case. So in the brand new year 2009 if you take a look at the website now the website makes it apparent that it is available to everybody. Listen, weight loss and obesity, these things cut across all racial lines, gender lines, religious lines and political lines. And by no means do we want to deprive anyone who is in the battle of their life to lose weight and to regain their health, we do not want to deprive them of the tools and the information they need to get there.
So yes people do get confused thinking that it was only for African-Americans, but let this be in an official pronouncement that this is available for everybody.
Ernesto Martinez: My family is from Puerto Rico and my beautiful wife's family is African-American from Baltimore, Maryland, and I completely agree with you. It knows no bound, this obesity problem. How concerned are you regarding the trend we are seeing of self-inflected diseases caused by obesity and what do you foresee happening to future generations if this problem doesn't get corrected?
Dr. Ian Smith: Well, I think that hopefully that we kind of hit rock-bottom, I hope. I hope that with all of the releases of studies saying that young children are now developing Type 2 Diabetes, a disease that we typically saw only in adults. That young children are having indications of potential heart disease and showing high blood pressure. I will hope that we reached a point where the country says, enough is enough and we have to do something about it. It's like a pendulum swing. These things take time. It takes time for the pendulum; it's very slow to swing back. I am hoping that the pendulum is now swinging back and we will start gain momentum.
The 50 Million Pound Challenge is my initiative to make things happen. But there are other initiatives out there, some at the grassroots community levels, some of the federal levels, some in churches. So I am hoping that with all these different programs that are not made available to people that we will be able to gather enough steam to really reverse these trends.
Now remember this is not an overnight proposition. We didn't get into this trouble overnight. We are not going to get out of it overnight, but I think that we are amassing a critical voice that says, that we have to do something about it and the hope is now that we can go with the legislation, we can go get the Congress support behind initiatives, real initiatives by the way, not just hand waving, but real initiatives to help people, and the key here is this, our campaign is completely free and one thing I have learned is that people do have economic barriers to losing weight and becoming healthy and we have to try as much as possible.
It's not always possible, but try as much as possible to remove economics out of the equation, and so at our website at 50millionpounds.com, you don't have to pay to register, you don't have to pay to use all the tools that we have on the website or to engage in the support we have more than 16,000 teams on the site. All these things are made available for free and that at least will allow to realize they do have access to help.
Ernesto Martinez: I want to say big kudos to State Farm for stepping up as a company and supporting this cause, and do you think Corporate America is doing a better job of positioning themselves and promoting healthier lifestyles?
Dr. Ian Smith: I think Corporate America is doing better than what they have done in the past. I think there is a big, big, big gap still that they have to cover. Let me explain something to you. State Farm has been overly generous in their support of the 50 Million Pound Challenge, and here's the company, a Fortune 500 company that doesn't have to do this, but realizes the value of this for people; realizes that this is the classic example of corporate citizenship.
The idea of giving back to the community, giving back to people, helping people. It's not always about making money, it's about helping people and I feel like more corporations are in the financial position, are in the influential positions, to be able to give back and just help people. I mean -- one hand washes the other. We patronize all these businesses, whether it's a car dealership, whether it's a clothing store, whatever it is, we patronize these businesses, computer stores.
The least I can do is, you know what, we've made a tidy profit this year, we have been making profits, let's give some of that back and help people, really make some changes in their life. Let's help our customers, who by the way have helped make us very successful in businesses and so I can't begin to tell you the extent to which State Farm has been critical in this. In fact, we do have a part of the initiative where we put more than 1.9 million, 50 Million Pound Challenge kits in State Farm agents offices across the country.
Anyone, you don't have to be a State Farm customer, all you have to do is walk into a State Farm agent's office and say, can I have my free 50 Million Pound Challenge kit? If they don't have anymore on stock, they will order them for you. That is how important and integral State Farm has been to our success.
Ernesto Martinez: Now your new book is called, 'The 4 Day Diet' and it's set to release on Dec 30th. The book should be available for purchase online, and in all major book stores across the country by the time this interview is released. Tell me a little bit about the book and what makes 'The 4 Day Diet' different from the 'The Fat Smash Diet', 'Extreme Fat Smash Diet'?
Dr. Ian Smith: First of all let me say, I think The 4 Day Diet is the best diet book I have written, and the reason why I think that is not because the others were not good, because I like them also. But what 'The 4 Day Diet' does is it becomes two books in one. The first half of the book is all about the psychology of dieting. People don't talk about motivation. How do you get motivated?
How do you stay motivated? How do you decide to set realistic weight loss goals? How do you appreciate milestones? How do you reward yourself? These things are as critical as counting calories and looking at your card counts. So people don't often talk about that when it comes to dieting, but my belief is that your mind has to be in the right place first before your body will follow. So 'The 4 Day Diet' starts off taking about these types of things.
Then the second half of the book is the actual plan, I am excited about the plan because something I developed called a Modular Eating Plan and what it is each four days you begin to eat something different. So the diet is broken down into four day modules.
So for example, one module is a detox module, another one is heavy on proteins, another module is heavy on fruits and vegetables. One is heavy on regular food like spaghetti and pizza and hamburgers. The idea is people tend to complain about programs, diet programs because the number one complaint is they are tired of eating the same food, the monotony. 'The 4 Day Diet' answers that. 'The 4 Day Diet' never, never, never allows you to get comfortable or get bored because you are always eating something different in four days.
The last thing I want to say about this particular part of the program is, that with the seven modules we have on 'The 4 Day Diet', what it does is it allows your body to increase its metabolism, that's very important when people talk about weight loss.
Basically, the exercise changes that you undergo, that the book suggests as well as the dietary changes, keeps your body in an optimal position to burn those calories the best, and so the 'The 4 Day Diet' is a program that anyone can do, I say listen, you can do anything for four days, think about it.
And so even if you are in one of the modules you don't like, let's say it's a pretty tough module, guess what, in four days it's over and you don't have to worry about it. So I am excited about the book, some people who've gotten the book early have lost weight, a significant amount of weight, People I have researched the book with they lost. In fact, one woman in fact lost about 60 pounds in about five months.
So I am really excited that we can release this to everybody and people are going to jump on the new year with 'The 4 Day Diet'.
Ernesto Martinez: Your contribution to humanity in helping change lives is monumental. Your resume is stellar, but I've got to ask, how does this become your calling in life? I mean, why do you care so much about helping people change? Have you been directly affected or impacted by obesity?
Dr. Ian Smith: I got into this kind of through the back door, believe it or not. If you would have asked me this many years ago, what I would be doing this, I would have laughed at you, I mean, I was training to be an orthopedic surgeon and what happened was, I was also while I was training, I started writing a column for Time magazine in the Personal Health section in the back of the book, and I realized that I was getting a tremendous response through the readership and the emails were largely dominated by questions about nutrition, about metabolism, about weight loss, about supplements, and these were the things that people wanted to know about.
And I realized that there was this huge, huge hunger..... pun intended. There is this huge hunger out there in the marketplace to know more about these particular issues and no one had the answers.
People decide to go to reliable sources. I felt like my responsibility to my readership was to be able to give them the truth even if the truth was tough, to give them the truth about these issues. And so I really went on a crash course myself and learning about all these different topics that I have not learned in medical school because they don't teach these -- and weren't teaching these things in medical school. But I learned all the stuff about nutrition, and diets, and metabolism, and how exercise works in there.
And what happened was slowly but surely I started becoming a diet expert because I was providing this information and more people wanted the information and I loved learning and giving it to people and it became my life calling to really help people who are struggling and have struggled, who are good people, good in heart, good in mind, who want good things, but they are just suffering from this issue and I try to just help people and it feel good to do that.
Ernesto Martinez: My notes tell me you're scheduled to be the Keynote Speaker at the Greenville Hospital System's Minority Heath Summit sometime in April. Are there any of the big plans or projects you have coming up in 2009 that you can tell us about?
Dr. Ian Smith: I have a very active, busy professional life. I am always on the road, January I am on the road in 10 cities and if you go to 50millionpounds.com and look under Events you can find out pretty soon what my 09 schedule will look like for public events. But I try to stay busy, I go to churches, I go to schools, I go to corporations, I go anywhere where people really want to make a change in their life, where people really want to take advantage of life.
One thing I'd like to tell people is this. Too many of us in America are just surviving, we are not living, there is a huge difference. And sometimes we have to sit down and think about it for a minute.
Trying to pay the bills on time, living check to check, trying to make sure you've got enough food. We survive but living is much different, and what I try to do is if anywhere I can go and talked a bit about living and enjoying themselves, and being happy, and being one with the environment, and loving each other, these things, they sound very soft and fuzzy and very zen like, but what I have learned.
And listen I am a Western-trained physician, very concrete scientific, hardcore. But what I have learned is to have an open mind, and when you have an open mind to new things and to new way of looking at things, it can have a tremendous impact on your life. So anywhere where someone will give me a podium to talk and try to reach out to touch people, I am there to do it.
Ernesto Martinez: Dr. Smith on behalf of ‘My Lifestyle Diet’, we really like to let you know how proud we are of you and what are you doing to change lives. I wish you the very best success in 2009. Keep fighting the good fight and I look forward to talking with you again in the near future.
Dr. Ian Smith: You've got to realize that this great country is built on the backs of those before us, and all of us have a responsibility to the generations that came before us and to the generations that came after us, to leave the world in a better place. We are only temporarily custodians of this great civilization. And so my responsibility the way I look at it, is to try to help somebody, to leave a legacy not that how many buildings I have owned or how many houses I have build, but to leave a legacy, a positive legacy of giving back to people so that their road in life maybe a little smoother than mine was.
Ernesto Martinez: Excellent! Thank you so much Dr. Smith.
For our readers and listeners, you can gain access to the 50 Million Pound Challenge website and all the free weight loss tools by clicking the link at the bottom of this page. After you sign-up be sure to join the My Lifestyle Diet team and let's make history together. Thanks for stopping by!
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