Transcriber: Synara Castro Reviewer: Claudia Sander
Today, let me tell you all about the particularities of pink monkeys.
Pink monkeys lived happy, healthy lives.
Pink monkeys went to school in the day
and spent their evenings swinging off the branches and playing monkey games.
Adult monkeys went to work
to gather seasonal fruits and vegetables for the dinner table
and tended to their little ones.
The monkeys were particularly excited about the fruit season,
and they waited for the yearly mangoes to come on the trees.
As time went by,
grandma and grandpa monkeys passed away when their time came.
And the world moved on, as by the rules of nature.
The pink monkeys were lean, healthy and happy.
They rarely felt sick,
and there were no widespread diseases in the entire pink monkey population ...
until about 150 years ago.
Things changed for the pink monkeys.
Industrialisation, capitalism, agriculture, technology,
all of them came into the picture
and brought their vested interests with them.
What good was a race of healthy, happy and nature-loving monkeys?
There was no money to be made there.
Giant corporations, of course, exploited the monkeys.
What if the monkeys' favourite fruit - if you remember, the mangoes -
was available on demand 24/7?
They thought that the monkeys would not be able to resist.
And that is exactly what happened.
Food that was otherwise seasonably available once a year
was now available 24/7 in supermarkets right next to the monkeys' homes.
And soon enough, the pink monkeys were addicted.
The age-old wisdom of healthful nature was lost.
The entire food that they were consuming
every single day
made the monkeys lethargic.
It made them stay indoors
rather than go out and swing on branches and trees like they used to do.
They started living in a faster, more competitive world.
Less sleep, more stress.
They needed three coffees a day to stay up,
alcohol and drugs to relax,
cigarettes to stay alert, and pills for headaches and migraines.
Today, this is the race of pink monkeys.
One in five baby monkeys is overweight or obese.
One in three is at risk of a chronic condition
related to their heart
and other inflammatory diseases.
One in five is at the risk of cancer.
Chronic depression, anxiety, thyroid, PCOD, asthma are all so common
that it's become almost normal to have these.
The corporations' interests lay vested in keeping these monkeys sick.
Today the race of pink monkeys
continues to deteriorate, slowly and steadily.
A great story, right? A classic case of self-sabotage.
Does it sound familiar?
If you haven't guessed already,
this race of pink monkeys is all of us: the entire human race.
And today, I'm here to make that claim:
that all of us are living in a healthcare pandemic
that we are unaware of.
We are all sick, and we are the pink monkeys.
Let me attempt to prove that.
I want you all to stand up for a minute.
(Chairs scraping)
Thank you.
If your life, the lives of your family or friends
has been affected by any of these, please have a seat.
Cancer.
Diabetes.
Mental health problems.
Heart problems.
Obesity.
The rest of you may sit.
As expected, almost or at least 59% of you
are sitting down.
And you don't have to feel alone.
My own mother went through a painful two years of breast cancer;
she lost all of her hair
and had to go through the physical and emotional trauma of chemotherapy.
Soon after, I went to get an ultrasound of my breasts.
Turns out I have the same conditions
that have a high risk of someday become a malignant cancerous tumour.
Both of my grandparents
are on six different cholesterol and blood pressure tablets,
and there's heart disease running in our family.
These diseases, these silent killers, are also called NCDs,
or noncommunicable diseases,
that are affecting or have affected at least one person we all know.
And I know if I go on living an unhealthy lifestyle,
I'll have an 85% chance to have if not one but all the above diseases -
the burden that our families gave us, a burden we might give our children
and a burden none of us have asked for.
Yet, at the end of the day, we all light up a cigarette
and with a beer in one hand say, "You know? This won't happen to me.
Problems and sickness are always for other people.
All I care about is that I fit into that tight dress
as really what I'm wearing looks good, right?"
That's what I thought as well.
Let me tell you all a bit about myself.
I was born an obese baby.
I've deleted all the pictures; this is what I have.
I was born an obese baby
and stayed overweight until a few years ago.
Imagine me two and a half times.
According to my family, I was a healthy child.
You know the definition of a healthy child in India, right?
My parents used to give me ice cream and a pack of chips every day after school
because I did well in my studies.
I never played sport in my life because I was not encouraged to.
Boys never looked at me, and girls always loved me
because they always looked good next to me in pictures.
I got bullied a lot,
I have even got called "the equator" at school.
I cried a lot after looking in the mirror.
And my self-esteem dropped to an all-time low.
Consequently, I went through the mental and physical strains
of trying to be a good-looking teenager,
only to starve myself and then binge on food -
a treacherous cycle that never seemed to end.
I was in an emotionally abusive relationship with my body,
and I didn't even know it.
That was probably the worst part of my life,
all up until I decided to change it all.
Today, as a mentally and physically healthy woman standing before you,
I haven't fallen sick in the last two years,
I have endless energy throughout the day, I can lift 200 pounds off the floor,
I can run 15km without stopping, I can do multiple pull-ups ...
Thank you.
(Applause)
Of course, I love the body I used to hate.
People always ask me, "Priya, how did you do this?
Which dietitian did you go to? Which supplement did you use?
Tell us the secret, tell us ten tales, tell us a shortcut, anything.
How did you get there?"
Today, I'm going to tell you all how all of you can get to where I was.
Are you all ready to hear the big secret?
(Audience) Yes.
So, I'm going to tell you the truth.
The truth is all of you already know exactly how to get there.
So, I can sense a lot of disappointment.
Sorry, I am not here to give you a pill.
I'm not here to give you a supplement, and I'm not here to tell you
that one glass of red wine is equal to one hour at the gym.
Okay? It's not!
Now, I know if you are wondering, if you all already know what to do,
why are you like this?
Why aren't we able to do it? Why are we still the pink monkeys?
So, let me get this straight.
Are you all trying to tell me that you don't know what junk food is?
We all know what it is, right?
We all know that we must cut sugar off our diet.
We all know that we must exercise five times a week for 20 minutes a day,
that we need to sleep for eight hours a day,
that we don't need to smoke, that we need to stop eating junk food.
We all know these basics, and it's so frustrating for me
that even though we all know this, none of us do anything about this.
We all want to pay for some shortcut, we want to pay for some pill,
we always want to ask someone for tips, we want to read all these articles.
And we're just not reading the basics that we already know.
The key to being healthy,
the key to building long-lasting healthy habits
is to take small steps, make small changes and use your common sense.
Because we all need to change our lifestyle.
We need to change the way we look at our food.
We need to change the way we look at our physical activity
and of course, we need to change the way we look at our sleep.
It took me four years to get to where I am today.
And the reason it took me four years - and four years is a very long time -
the reason it took me four years
is because I was trying everything under the sun.
I even bought those vibrating heated bags that make you lose weight.
I'm that person who buys those things online.
I realised that I was completely avoiding the basics that I already knew.
Trust me, if I was just doing the basics, I could have done this immediately.
And the moment I started focusing on what I already know -
what we just have spoken about - everything started working in my favour.
So, I asked myself, why is it that I wasn't doing what I already knew?
Why is it that none of us are doing what we already know?
And the only difference that I saw between the old me and the new me
was the reason "why".
And I realised that I had a strong enough "why"
and a strong enough motivator that pushed me and guided me
and took me to actually implement what I already know today.
Now, if you see all the "whys" I have, my own "whys" drive me every single day.
We all have a short-term goal, and that short-term goal I know.
All of us want to look good, all of us want to lose weight.
The first question people ask is how do I lose by phases and stages?
But that is a short-term goal, a subset of the longer-term health goal,
the longer-term "why" that I want you all to calculate today.
My "whys",
whether it was me becoming stronger, whether it was me climbing a rope,
whether it was me becoming a role model for my own family to be healthy.
Or for example, today, my "why"
is joining a healthcare organisation called HealthSetGo,
which is now putting thousands of children in a path to health.
These are all my "whys".
I know change is hard, I know you are not used to doing this.
Like we already established, we are not taking shortcuts, OK?
And I'm not saying don't have any weekends.
I'm still that person who loves her burger and some fries; that's my weakness.
I am not telling you can't have those things.
So, I'm going to give you a hack,
the only shortcut I am going to give you today.
And that shortcut is the 80-20 rule.
And 80% of the time I want you to make a commitment
that you're all going to do the basics that you already know.
Do the basics, make small changes,
take small steps and 80% of your entire lives do these basics;
the rest 20%, let's pretend you've never seen me,
we've never had this talk, I was never talking to you,
delete this all from your memory, alright?
So now I want you all to close your eyes. Please close your eyes.
I will tell you when to open them.
And I want you today to find your "why",
find the thing that will drive you, find what will motivate you.
We don't want to wait for another heart attack in our family.
We don't want to wait for somebody else falling sick.
We want to be the role models, we want to be the motivators.
Please open your eyes.
When the going gets tough, when you are feeling weak,
you just need this "why" that you have found
is going to push you harder in the right direction.
And trust me, it's going to get much easier over time.
It's just going to become a way of life, like it has become my way of life.
It's not a struggle anymore,
it's not something hard that I'm doing every single day.
And I hope that using our "why"
we can all eliminate disease from this world.
We can all change this world and save the pink monkeys.
Thank you.
(Applause)