It started as a stop gap measure to stop gaining weight and to become more healthy, but over time, this has really turned from a diet to a lifestyle change. It’s important that people when they consider becoming healthier, they look at it in the long term view. Too often we look at weight loss in the short term, and we are always let down by the results as we are looking for the quick and easy fix. When we look at health in the long term, we focus more on the well being and long term ability to turn the direction of the ship as we all know that it will take small steps gradually to get the ship that is our life to make any dramatic course changes!

I’ve decided to start writing this down as I’ve been asked by many friends and family what it is that we’ve been doing and what they need to do to get on-board. To help put a foundation to this, I’ll start by calling this process OKL, or Organic Koch’s Lifestyle. I figure that most diets and lifestyle changes all have names that are rooted in the creator, so the name just seemed to fit for what goals we were trying to achieve. Again I cannot stress this more, you WILL NOT achieve rapid weight loss on this, so if that’s what you are looking for, LOOK ELSEWHERE! Do a Bing search for Rapid Weight Loss, and go crazy!

What you will find is that if you are concerned about any of the below:

1. That the majority of the mainstream foods that are consumed are more manufactured than anything close to a whole food.
2. There seems to be an unconfirmed correlation between the foods that we consume and diseases that seem to be plaguing all who consume in the Western ways.
3. You have family members who have been afflicted by diabetes, coronary disease, autism or cancer.
4. More and more foods are available out of convenience and less is being prepared from scratch.
5. Marketing has become more savvy and it’s become more and more difficult to understand what’s in your food and what you should be eating and what you should steer clear from.
6. You think your eating right, but you can never seem to lose the weight.
7. After you eat, you feel like going to sleep.
8. Food doesn’t seem to fill you, and you feel you have to eat more in order to be satisfied.

These are all symptoms or biproducts of our current state of things. As a nation, we are a people who have lost sight of being aware or the educated consumer, and we’ve let our government provide their own insight on guidelines that we have ignored and allowed to become more and more a part of our lives. I say this now, and perhaps will continue to say throughout, but the first thing that you need to do on the OKL is to STOP EMBRACING IGNORANCE! Wake up people! A lot of what the OKL is about is understanding from common sense what we think we should be doing instead of just going with the crowd or allowing the experts in a particular field to pass judgement where there is clearly no 100% guarantee that what they are saying today won’t be overturned or changed by another study a year or two down the line. It is our own responsibility to take control of this ship and to drive it where we want to go.

Realistically if you follow OKL, you should:

1. Have more energy than you did before (now I’m not saying you are going to recover a youthful energy that you experienced when you were 20! But compared to where you were before, you should feel more energy available to you throughout your day).
2. Lose weight. This may not be all at once, and certainly it will be done safely as you should see your weight drop over time. This is important, as with anything, if you make drastic changes without giving your body time to adjust, you risk more health issues as you are being unfair to yourself. Give yourself adequate time to adjust and you will find that you are less stressed about the process as a whole, but also in the long term you will lose weight. It is not uncommon though at first, to drop a considerable amount of weight initially, but that should not be expected to be a long term response when following OKL.
3. Be able to go into any food situation and be more aware of your surroundings. I use the example, if you are an expert hunter, you know where to go, with what equipment to go with, and how to survive that situation and to make out with a kill. The same goes with food, if you know what you are looking out for, and ask the questions, you will come out ahead of the pack and feel better about yourself for doing so.
4. Form good habits around shopping, cooking, and consuming that will over time become second nature to you and feel less like a chore and more like a mission in life that you make the time to do.
5. If you are concerned about diseases, this ISN’T a plan to prevent those from happening, but it will give you an edge in making sure that you are doing everything you can to eat in a way that shouldn’t make any underlying condition worse than you would be on a poor nutrition plan.

The second thing that you should consider when looking at OKL is you HAVE TO BELIEVE IN WHAT YOU ARE DOING! If you do not believe in the process or the principles, STOP NOW. If you start on the back-foot I do not expect you to do anything more than to frustrate yourself even further and in the end you will become more and more skeptical over diets and lifestyle changes than you really ought to be. Also immediately get it out of your head that this is a diet–this is the furthest from a diet that you can go, as OKL assumes right off the bat that you will be eating this way from this day forward. There is no assumption or plan or methods to stop OKL once you get started–sorry! If you want a diet, go do another Bing search for diets and have at it (as you can tell I really enjoy internet searching!). OKL is by it’s very nature a LIFESTYLE CHANGE. Get that into your head at the start of this, and we’ll all be on the right foot forward!