Written by: admin

Category: Uncategorized

Published: October 2022

Over the years, I’ve collaborated with an eminent Australian polymath (Dr. Grant Donovan of Perth) in conducting research on lifestyle change. Our work has focused on understanding whether adults have a better than 50/50 chance of benefiting from efforts to improve their lifestyles. Our double-blind, crossover, randomized horizontal and dignified trials have explored a simple but profound question that others have taken for granted, namely, can humans do it? That is, can individuals convince themselves to change their lifestyles and, more important, sustain over time whatever healthy habits they wish to adopt? If not, then clearly the frustrations of failure and increases in learned hopelessness make it highly unlikely that attempts at lifestyle improvements will have much chance to succeed and be beneficial. Repeated failure at lifestyle change are worse than never even trying to live healthfully, as the frustrations and disappointments lead to lost interest in change, lower self-worth and thus poorer health status.

Our studies have shown, conclusively we believe, that most people can’t do it. We refer to this phenomenon as I can’t do it or ICAN’TDOIT. Once the nature of this reality is understood, those who still desire to attempt positive lifestyle changes will have a better chance for success, since a rare few can in fact do it, if somewhat gifted by favorable circumstances and aware of the difficulties. Everyone should be willing to pay attention to ways that boost success rates.

We found that living healthfully is too demanding largely because most are not prepared for the obstacles in the way. Make no mistake–if everyone could put into practice and sustain healthy choices, they would. Who wants to be sick and die prematurely? Who wants NOT to look good and have ample energy and live life to the full? If it were easy, everyone would accept responsibility for a high quality of life by choosing to exercise vigorously on a regular basis, eat well, manage stress, think critically and do all the rest. After all, wellness is, as I have long preached (in a secular fashion), fun, romantic and hip, sexy and free. It’s a richer way to be alive. Live dgspeaks.com and you will be stronger and better looking, have higher morale, superior bowel movement and more antibodies to resist pandemics.

You’d be a little crazy not to live this way–IF YOU COULD. However, the lamentable situation we discovered is you probably can’t, which we abbreviate as ICAN’TDOIT.

Napoleon Hill, author of the famous Andrew Carnegie formula for money-making entitled, Think and Grow Rich, studied several thousand people–and concluded that 98 percent of them were failures. This might be a little harsh and an overestimate. Still, it was interesting to think about the thirty major reasons he thought accounted for why so many fail.

When Grant and I looked at Hill’s explanations for explaining failure at making money, we concluded that twenty of Hills reasons apply as well to attempts to live healthfully, along the advanced lines of wellness lifestyles.