Living A Full Life

Why Quick Fixes Fail And Habits Win

• Full Life Chiropractic • Season 4 • Episode 8

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Brace yourself for tough love and simple truths. We’re cutting through the noise of New Year hype, miracle meds, and diet fads to show why real, lasting weight loss comes from habits you can repeat for years, not weeks. With obesity rates near 40 percent and three in four adults overweight, we connect the dots between cultural comfort, ultra‑processed foods, stalled life expectancy, and the daily choices that quietly shape your future health.

We dig into why GLP‑1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy can support appetite but fail to fix diet quality, movement, or self-discipline. Then we rewind to a leaner food culture—vegetables, moderate protein, simple carbs—and translate those patterns into modern, doable steps. You’ll hear a clear breakdown of the four non‑negotiables: cut refined sugars and carbs, choose whole foods over processed boxes, move every day and lift something, and use honest tracking to keep yourself accountable. Expect straight talk on seed oils, liquid sugar, NEAT, strength as fall insurance, and how “shopping the perimeter” outperforms chasing labels.

If you’re ready to trade quick fixes for repeatable wins, this conversation gives you a no‑frills playbook. We cover practical ways to hit protein targets at breakfast, rack up 10,000 steps without living at the gym, and set behavior goals that actually change the number on the scale. Most of all, we ask you to vote with your cart and calendar—because companies sell what we buy, and your environment becomes your habits. Subscribe, share this with someone who needs a nudge, and tell us: what’s the one habit you’ll lock in for the next 60 days?

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America's weight loss obsession is a joke. Year after year, people buy the next magic bullet: pills, jabs, hormones, but they aren't willing to do the basics. Eat real food, move hard, and take responsibility for their body. That's why we we're the sickest, fattest, rich country on earth. Welcome to another episode of Living a Full Life. I'm Dr. Enrico Dolcicori, and it is 2026. Happy New Year to everyone. I don't know what it is about middle age. You know, the lifespan of the average American is just shy of 80. Still, still, we haven't increased that. Let's say 80. So yeah, 40, you know, 38, 39, 40 is the middle of your life according to that statistic. And when you look at life that way and you see that and you sit and you pause it, I'm there too. I'm in my 40s and you sit there, and you're like, wow, the runway is half as long as it used to be as a kid. You kind of start to think different. And I'm starting to realize why my parents, when I was young, were like, hey, we just don't care. So you can shut your mouth and do this. I was like, whoa, where did that come from? Because you reach a point in your life where you're like, these things just don't matter. The shoes that you wear, the clothes that you buy, the cars that you drive, they just don't matter. And I see this podcast after doing this, it's gonna be our fourth year in the podcast. We're still in season three, but um, and I'm seeing it in myself. I'm like, I gotta no more PC stuff. Let's go. Let's let's go. I'm not gonna go Joe Rogan on you, but let's go. Unapologetic truths of of what you need to know. And uh let's let's move forward. I know everyone, and this podcast comes as I just came back from the gym. What the heck? Like January gym. Holy smokes, I regret it, but I I'll I'll go. Um I'll deal with you people uh who will quit in two weeks and still be fat in March. So good for you. But for the rest of us, what we need to look at is this epidemic is crazy. I see it now as I'm in, you know, I'm Gen X or whatever it is, the millennials go through it, the Gen Z's are going through right now. My kids, and I'm looking at it just history just keeps repeating themselves. It used to be the magic shakers you would get on, the magic pills that you would take, the uh ephedrin you would take to raise your heart rate to lose weight, the Weight Watchers, the Jenny Craigs, the it just keeps repeating itself. Now it's like injections. There used to be uh steroids when I was growing up steroids, juice, all that stuff. There was there that we're just calling it TRT. Well, it's to it's replacement therapy for you. It's not you're not juicing, you're just doing TRT. What the heck, people? Come on, let's call a spade a spade and be real for once, because it just keeps repeating itself. So the cold hard facts. If you're creating New Year's resolutions, let's stick to them this year. Let's do it, let's motivate you in the right way. And in order to change habits, you have to change your daily activity. You have to just change it, drive a different route to work, wear different colored pants, buy different shoes. Just change, you cannot repeat the same thing day in, day out, expecting a different result. I'm pretty sure a very smart man said that's the definition of insanity. So let's change this insanity, right? Each and every individual, if they just take 1% improvement in their life, the consciousness of the entire population grows by a lot. And that's the whole point of taking action. So the actual data, obesity, is it getting better with all these drugs? Is it what's happening? Here's the fact 40% of U.S. adults are still obese. That's nearly half of the population carrying fat that increases disease risk. We know the diseases. We've done many episodes on this. 73 to 75% of adults are overweight. So three in four people are overweight in America. There's a good chance someone around you, maybe you, in this category, severe obesity is still at 10% of the population. 10% of the population. So that what that 85% of the population is not in a healthy range. About 15% of people living in a healthy range. Now, BMI is not my favorite. You know that from the previous podcasts, but this trends we have to look at. Obesity has at least doubled over the past few decades since the 70s. Without dramatic change projections, you know, we warned that overweight and obesity will continue climbing unless real lifestyle shifts occur. This is from health data from 2024. It is still the same recurring conversation we keep having over and over. Worldwide, obesity has more than doubled since 1990. But it's especially bad in high-income countries like the US. And we'll get into that. Most people aren't just slightly overweight. A majority are living in a body state that is tightly linked to chronic disease, and hence why the life expectancy is not getting better in the greatest age of humanity, is right now. It's the best time to live in the entire history of the planet, of humans, is right now. We're not getting eaten by lions, we're not getting our huts raided by villagers, we're not getting bombed, we're not getting attacked, we're not getting, you know, we can go out there and just live freely. It's the best time in history to be alive. This magic stuff that's been out in the last five, six years, like Ozempik, Wagovi, Mangurno, they're trending, but they aren't magic. They work while you take them, and many regain weight if habits don't change. Only a small slice of Americans, 2 to 4%, are actually on these medications for weight loss, despite the hype. It's a little bit higher on how many people are actually on the drugs because of diabetes and reasons that they should be on them. Even experts say these injections don't fix diet quality or lifestyle. We know that there is no magic pill. Pills can sometimes help people, but they don't cure laziness, remove sugar addictions, increase strength or endurance, or give someone self-discipline. In the 60s and 70s, my mom and dad talked about this. My mom grew up in Athens, Greece. She's like, we used to go to the beach. We love the beach, thalassa, the thalassa. That's the ocean, the sea. We used to go to the beach, and there was no fat people. There was none. No one was overweight. Everyone was actually kind of skinny. She used to call a lot of people scrawny. Everyone was kind of scrawny. And that's because of the diet. The diet was medium protein. You know, meats were expensive, still are. Meat was expensive, so people had it three, four, five times a week. Um, carbohydrate, healthy amount of carbohydrates, mainly from fruits and uh fresh-baked bread or whatever was being baked in the house. And and uh vegetables, lots of vegetables. Vegetables pretty much stocked the meals, both for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Coffee, uh, same types of things there. Very Mediterranean type diet. Olives were expensive, so you had a little bit of olives for dinner, maybe you know, a couple like three or four in your Greek salad. I mean, she she just painted this picture of that was Athens, Greece. And then I look at pictures of, you know, uh Daytona Beach, um, Huntington Beach in California, Laguna Beach from the 70s, and it looked the same. Looked like people were pretty healthy going to Elvis Presley concerts. Looked pretty good. And things have changed since then. And what has happened is culture has adapted to obesity. We've made it okay. No more body shaming, no more, and that's right, we shouldn't ever make anyone feel bad for who they are. But the cultural shift that happened in into the late 80s and 90s, what another thing my grandma used to say is if you were overweight, you couldn't go shopping for clothes. Like if you were obese, you would never be able to find clothes. If you were overweight, you wouldn't be able to find clothes because the sizes only went up to so much for women's dresses, sun dresses, whatever it was. And I and I thought about that. I'm like, well, what did you do? I mean, there was people that were it's like, yeah, people had thyroid conditions, they were overweight. Absolutely. They would sew their own clothes, they'd go to a fabric place, buy their own fabric, and make their own joint, they were beautiful, they did their own thing. And then the cultural shift happened, which made it okay. And then clothing manufacturers were like, hey, let's do size 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 28, 460, and let's keep doing that. And it made it accessible. And what that did mentally as a society is made it acceptable to be obese. Hard knock fact that I probably would have never said on a podcast last year, but that's what you're getting this year, is the truth. And because we've made it okay, we've been compliant, and compliance creates laziness, comfort creates laziness, and America is a very comfortable place. The immigrants, the the friends and families that have moved here from Europe, that's my you know, my my descendants, all in their own languages, Italian, Greek, German, define it the same way. America is comfortably big, not obese, big, like tons of space. You can drive big cars, wide roads, you have grass that you can cut. It's comfortable, it's the land of opportunity. They've said that for generations, up until today. They still said for Pete's sakes, I came from Canada to here for the same reasons. Like it's just more opportunity. It's a great country. And what that does is naturally instills laziness because everything is accessible and you're gonna be okay whether you're pushing hard or pushing medium. And I hope that makes sense. When it comes to your health, you cannot slack, you cannot be a slacker. Slacking slides us towards illness and you deal with it. So when you when you slide that way, stop complaining and stop bitching. You let it slide that way. Take ownership and take the seesaw and tip it the other way towards wellness. And once you do that, it's a harder climb to get it back, but you can get it back. The body is designed to thrive, it's not designed to stall and just survive. It's not, it's designed to thrive. Pretty amazing stuff. So this lifestyle is not a quick fix. We eat junk. This is the issue. It's we're surrounded by junk. Many of you eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and 25% of it's junk still, and you still think you're doing a great job. Ultra-processed foods dominate our diet, filled with sugar, cheap carbs, and calories that don't satisfy hunger. They're processed with rancid oils that directly stimulate cancer, and the real food barely makes a dent. Studies show diet quality predicts health far more than any pill or injection. I remember about 12 years ago, I was in Canada talking to a group of people about health, and I said you got to buy organic whenever you can. And this lady stands up and just she's like, the organic food is contaminated anyways, and it's not even really organic, and you can't get away from pesticides and herbicides. And you know what? She was right. She was right. But but the media created so many articles up there saying how organic food is just more expensive and not useful that the the mindset, the cognitive mindset of the community shifted to, oh, you don't have to eat organic food. It's a waste. And chemicals are okay. That's what rubbed me the wrong way. Chemicals are not okay. The point of eating organic is to minimize and limit the amount of exposure to the chemicals. See how we can shift the narrative with anything, with statistics, and move it back and make people comfortable with buying non-organic produce. That's just one example. I could sit here all day and make this a four-hour uh podcast. We don't need to do that. That's just one example that came to my mind. So we're surrounded by this stuff, and we have to do our best to minimize the amount of toxins that go into our body. That's step one. If we're eating a toxic lifestyle, it doesn't matter if you're high protein, low carb, uh, South Beach diet, Mediterranean. If there's toxins coming into you, you damage your thyroid, your liver, and your metabolic system. It's just the way it goes. Number two, we don't move. These are the top two things that we just do wrong: sedentary lifestyles or normal office job, screen time, minimal daily exertion. It's not a genetic shift, it's a behavior shift. Sally comes up to me and tells me, hey, you know, I'm obese because it runs in my family. I'm like, Sally, no one in your family runs. That's why you guys are obese. That's the truth. Oh, 2026 is gonna be fun, isn't it? It's gonna be awesome. I'm gonna get in a lot of trouble this year. Uh, people want to blame theories, toxins, greens, hormones, ads. We blame everything but ourselves. And instead of confronting the basics, eat fewer refined carbs and sugars. Number one, here they are. Do these four things and you can turn off the podcast. Eat fewer refined carbs and sugars. One, choose whole foods over processed foods. If you walk down the center of the grocery store and you buy a box, you fail. If it's in a box, you fail. There's no way a box has one ingredient in it. It's got tons of ingredients in it. Move daily, lift some weights, lift something for Pete's sake. Do something. Increase neat N-E-A-T, non-exercise activity thermogenesis. That's just like going for a walk. Increase it. Track calories and your macros if accountability is needed. I love that uh accountability thing. My fitness pal is free. Download it, track it for 10 days straight. Watch how many calories you're actually eating. And we actually have a calorie podcast from over a year ago about the myth of calories. Who came up with 2,000 calories a day? That person deserves to go to jail. Guntam Bay. They gotta go to Cuba. Like get rid of this person. Where did 2,000 come from? If you're 5'3 or 6'6, I mean 2,000 is not the number. It makes no sense. A different story for a different day. So do those things. That is how you create a new resolution for 2026 is by making those four things a top goal for you, whether it's weight loss, living healthier, feeling better, better sleep. It all starts with those four things. And you can't cheat on any one of those and expect a different result. That's what we're saying by changing habits. Health consequences of being overweight. Do we really need to go over this over and over again? Healthy people 2020. That was me growing up in high school and college. Healthy people 2020, the whole plan for healthy people 2020. Well, that didn't work out. Higher risk of type 2 diabetes if we're obese, increased rates of heart disease and stroke, joint degeneration and mobility loss, greater risk of certain cancers, chronic inflammation and immune dysfunction, higher health care costs, and lower quality of life. I mean, we have people, you know, that a 40-something-year-old comes and is like, I need a hip replacement. I'm healthy, I'm skinny. What's going on? Why me? Why me? How much soda did you drink, Carl? Oh, I didn't know that was bad. Well, it's it's not bad if you have one a month. How many do you have? Two or three a day. Oh, yeah. Well, enjoy your osteoporosis. We have this stuff is out there. And we point the blame to the corporations. We're like, why would you make something that kills our children? Because you buy it. Because you buy it. If you buy it, then they'll keep making it. If you don't buy it, they'll stop making it. You guys sometimes go to Costco, like, oh, they don't have the that brand of um cereal or oatmeal anymore or whatever. Like, what happened? Why is it why is it gone? Why you got rid of it? Well, because they weren't selling it. They got rid of it because it wasn't selling. Supply and demand. It's you guys are American. Come on, you know this. You made up the whole supply and demand theory. I mean, it's you guys created capitalism. Come on. And now you're complaining? Spend your money where you want it to keep going. And if we if we don't do the right things, then they're just going to keep making those products. They buy, they sell. They're cheap. They're easy to just get off at a convenience store, right? Sodas, chips, all easy snacks. Parents come in all the time. My kid's so picky. All they eat's chicken nuggets. And I'm like, where did they find chicken nuggets at two years old? They get up, call an Uber, drive to the grocery store, went down the freezer section. Your two-year-old bought a bag of uh chicken nuggets, went to the till, paid for it, took the Uber home, put them in the oven, cooked them, ate them. Like, oh, these are good. That's what your two-year-old did. Who bought the chicken nuggets? Who fed it to their kid? 2026 is gonna be a lot of fun. It's gonna be great. We're gonna make a lot of mommies cry. Okay, so let's cut the fluff and come back to the basics. Move daily. Not just gym days. Daily movement matters every day, not just the days you go to the gym. Strength training, walking 10,000 steps, basic equals the minimum. We have to do that. We have to make the basic curriculum the minimum for us. The the new devices that you wear, your Apple Watch and all those things, this is where the 10,000 step challenge came from. Fitbit. Fitbit did this when they first came out and they took the 5k and converted it to steps. If you wonder how far 10,000 steps is, it's about for the average 5'7 male, about 5k. You're supposed to be walking and moving about five kilometers a day. Yet you guys will sign up for a 5k run and then get a medal at the end and be so proud. You're supposed to be doing that every day. Every day. And you're acting you're getting a medal for this because you paid 40 bucks for the event. Come on. Now a marathon. Now you deserve a medal. It's the basic. We are rewarding subpar culture. And I'm just, I guess maybe I'm just a tired bystander. Just a tired bystander of watching this when the solution's right in front of our face. Quality nutrition. Quality nutrition. Eat protein with every meal. The protein studies are off the chart around the world. We just know lack of protein leads to muscle weakness. Muscle weakness decreases our life expectancy because of accidental death. Falling, um, hemorrhage, fracture, embolism, blood clot, whatever happens from trauma from falling at 71 years old, at 62 years old, whenever it happens, that's what decreases our life expectancy. Ditch sugary drinks. Why consume sugar in liquid form? Oof. Whole natural foods are always, always better than any type of fast food. Any type of fast food. Even the healthy fast food joint, just a little side the oils that the problem is the oils. None of them are importing cold-pressed organic olive oil from Sardinia, Italy. None of them. Why? It's super expensive. They're not gonna cook your French fries in cold-pressed olive oil or drizzle that on your salad at the fast food joint. It's because it's expensive. What's cheap? Rancid sunflower oil or canola oil. That's vegetable oils. And those directly create oxidation in the body, stress that throws cells into complete atypical mode, which can increase sharply the risk of cancer. Accountability, number three. This this has been big since our weight loss program six years ago when I implemented it. It's whole foods and intermittent fasting, and people pay us. I'm like, why are you paying us to tell you to skip breakfast and eat whole foods? It's the accountability. Every day they they're like, I just listen, man, I just need some help. That's what this podcast is for. That's what everything I do is for to help people. That's my entire life. I literally get up every morning, go to a clinic, help my community, come back home. I've been doing it for 20 years. That's what we do. And I'm feeling and what do I do on my spare time? Find other ways to help people. Podcast. Podcasts, weight loss programs, virtual programs to just help more people. So track progress. Track it. I love the My Fitness pal. Get it. If you're gonna, if you have any resolutions this year, get it for fitness, for weight loss, for nutrition, get that and track. It'll be eye-opening for you when you set your macro goals in there and you see, oh man, I eat a lot of salt, or I'm not getting a lot of um micronutrients, or I'm missing the boat on my on my I'm overeating fat, maybe because of some of the things that you choose. Maybe it's peanut butter or avocado, or you eat, you know, maybe you eat two avocados thinking it's healthy for you, and you're like, holy smokes, there's my daily fat uh intake just in for breakfast on my avocado toast. So there's little things you learn through that. And just by doing, I say 10 days, but really you should be doing it for 60. 60 days because you'll create habits as you learn as well. 10 days is just a quick snapshot of being like, wow, I learned something, but 60 days is like, oh man, I learned stuff and I've created a new habit. That's a double win right there. Set behavior goals, not just outcome goals, behavior, not just I want to get to 145 pounds on the on the scale. Set the goal, but set your behavior. I want, yes, I want to get to 45, uh, 145 pounds on the on the scale, but I want to be uh never skipping breakfast again for for the rest of 2026. I want to make sure breakfast is my priority for 2026. That's it. That that's the behavior goal. Then you use my fitness pal and you cultivate your breakfast to be the right protein base, the right amount of carbs, a little bit of fat. You start your day off great. 50, 60 gram protein day, 40, 50, 60, whatever you need, grams of protein starts your day, and then you can just taper off through the day and and just snack and eat uh smaller meals. Stop waiting for permission to be disciplined, drop the entitlement. The body doesn't care what you feel, it responds to your actions. If we're serious about not being fat, we have to stop pretending pills and injections fix the problem. You can't afford them for the rest of your life. You can't afford trzepatide for 400 bucks a month for the rest of your life. You're gonna quit. Believing sugar-laden ultra-processed foods are fine. They're never fine. Slap yourself on the other wrist when you buy it. Eat it, but slap it. Slap yourself, please, or get an elastic band around your wrist and just snap it every time you buy it. If I see a bruise on your wrist, I know what's going on. Expecting miracles without sweat and effort. Weight loss isn't glamorous, sexy, or easy. It's boring. The real eating, the real movement, the real effort. That's how winners sculpt bodies and their health. More importantly, sculpt their health. 2026. I wish you all the very best. The passion that comes out and will continue to come out is maybe the Italian part of me. I don't know. But it's going to be hard knocks. It's going to be real truth. Give me some feedback on this episode. Was it a little too much? Uh let me know. If it wasn't, if it was great, I'll keep this tone and frequency going for the rest of the year. Stay well, stay healthy, and have a joyful and blessed 2026.

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Dr. Enrico Dolcecore

Host
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Dr. Christine Hafer

Co-host