Drug & Alcohol Intervention Help - We Get Them In to Treatment : NYC Intervention Specialists

Intervention Zone

Folks call us, with questions on how what we do is different than “as seen on TV?”

We get the friends and family ready to invite the identified loved one to a Family Meeting. This invitation makes for an ambush free zone. It encourages love and honesty by practicing love and honesty.

We help you help them – and begin radical change in the life of someone who oftentimes is dying for it. Let us show you how.

- Brad Lamm, BR-I
Board-Registered Interventionist

It arrived yesterday by messenger from my publisher – a box. A cardboard box, with my name on the label, and a word written on the front in felt-tip pen: BOOKS.

My books. In hardcover. Like the ones that will hit the bookstore shelves in January and ship from online retailers December 22. It’s beautiful. I opened the box up and the fam huddled around the box. Scott, and Oliver, and Bandit. And the books. Was a pretty cool feeling I must say holding that pretty red book in my hands for the very first time. I ran up to have lunch with my friend Dean Sicoli and handed him one. “Send it to me! I want you to write something in it.”

Cool!

I gave the first inscribed copy of HOW TO CHANGE SOMEONE YOU LOVE to Cathay Che. At Cafe Grumpy. It was anything but.

So, cannot wait to hit the road, Jack, and inscribe one for you and yours.

Here’s to new chapters, and books and such. Powerful punch.

x
Brad

photo: simone martin

Here I am, at 43 years old. Wow. When my dad was 43 it seemed so old to my young eyes. “Gosh, but you’re old…” I can hear myself telling my pop.

So here I stand. Recovered and learning and helping and growing in life. What a blessed life it is. Hooked no more.

Since that day my friends said STOP – YOU NEED HELP, so much has changed. I’ve gained, and lost. I’ve struggled and triumphed. I’ve quit smoking. I’ve learned to eat right. I got my teeth fixed. I went back to school. Learned how to be an honest man; how to quit lying. Changed alot.

I became a Board-Registered Interventionist and built a vibrant private practice unlike any other in the world. I have helped folks get better and heal in my private and public life.

I got married! I have a blended family – with three pooches and lots of barking depending on the moment. I have worked with thousands of people, including some for The Dr. Oz Show and The Oprah Winfrey Show. My work has helped to begin a shift to the very paradigm of change, and how it happens.

Fine, fine, fine.

I have a book that comes out in a couple months now as a lead title from St. Martin’s Press. Amazing, all of it. Because, back during that summer of 2002 I had given up and given in to the fact that my addictions would kill me. I had tried to stop, but always restarted the things that were killing me day by day. Didn’t know when, but I knew I would not survive much longer on that path. The alcohol, meth, xanax and cigarettes. The rage and pain and blame and shame. Carrying it all around like a sack of dead chickens.

But then change began and life got better. In centimeters at times, progress was made. By yards at still other times, life got better and from the ashes of a broken, defeated, addicted life came wholeness and good.

So be encouraged. To moms, and dads and sisters and wives: Change begins. People recover. And you can help them get there.

Throw out the old lies about hitting bottom, toss away the myths that your loved one has to want to change. When you’re addicted, sometimes all you know is that you want the drug. There is strength in numbers as we step in to interrupt the behavior, the addiction, the chaos and offer a loving change plan.

This is my 2009 count down. It’s been a banner one. Really good. Great even. I’m not the lucky one – you are too. As you step out in faith to create change in your defeat and hopelessness, we’ll do this together.

Onward,
Brad

Take three and call me in the morning. Three breaths that is. I invite you to do something different. Different action yields different results. I promise.

I spent an hour on WFAN this morning, the nation’s biggest AM radio station. I share it with you here: http://podcast.wfan.com/wfan/1821613.mp3

Onward,
Brad

The deal is this – it’s not metabolism or genes. It’s the food we put in our bodies that make them swell and hurt and grow beyond what they are intended. From the headlines today, the not-so-shocking claim that one in five preschoolers are obese.

We see them on the street, at the store, in our own home. It’s not the food – but it’s the food.

Huh!?

We confuse our wants with needs, then over time these become cravings answered as a matter of habit. We are dying to eat.

So here is the wake up call to every parent, caregiver, aunt, uncle, brother or sister – the answer starts with you. I call you to share and model how to eat, how to move, how to live in relationship with food rather than being enslaved by it.

You are the change you seek.

Talk it out and be in relation with one another instead of in relation to food. Listen for that tiny bell that signals FULL. Let your conversation expand; allow your love and care be a balm to living. A thing that fills you up on the inside that doesn’t expand your outside.

- Brad

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20% of U.S. preschoolers are obese

Researchers were surprised to see differences by race at so early an age.

Overall, more than half a million 4-year-olds are obese, the study suggests. Obesity is more common in Hispanic and black youngsters, too, but the disparity is most startling in American Indians, whose rate is almost double that of whites.

The lead author said that rate is worrisome among children so young, even in a population at higher risk for obesity because of other health problems and economic disadvantages.

“The magnitude of these differences was larger than we expected, and it is surprising to see differences by racial groups present so early in childhood,” said Sarah Anderson, an Ohio State University public health researcher. She conducted the research with Temple University’s Dr. Robert Whitaker.

Study finds obese kids have arteries like 45-year-olds’
Many overweight children and teenagers could have severe cardiovascular disease in their 20s and 30s, causing a healthcare crisis. Early identification of the problem is a key.
By Thomas H. Maugh II / The Los Angeles Times / November 12, 2008
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The arteries of many obese children and teenagers are as thick and stiff as those of 45-year-olds, a sign that such children could have severe cardiovascular disease at a much younger age than their parents unless their condition is reversed, researchers said Tuesday.

“It’s possible that they will have heart disease in their 20s and 30s,” said Dr. Geetha Raghuveer of the University of Missouri at Kansas City, who led the study presented at a New Orleans meeting of the American Heart Assn.

—-

So begins an article in today’s LA Times, telling us what we already know if we slow down and seek an answer in the calm creamy center of the truth.

We. Eat. Way. Too. Much.

And no, it’s not about genetics, or nutrition, or goodness sakes, the cries of I’M HUNGRY MOM! There is a hunger that exists to be fed, to be full, to have enough, to take more and put it in. The result is we get heavier and heavier, fatter and fatter, stuffing the food in to fill the hole; to meet those needs that have nothing to do with any of the four food groups.

Some will go the other way – purge to rid the body of the binge. Others trend toward anorexia, diuretics or laxatives. Dependency? Yes. FEED ME!

Shades of Hope in Buffalo Gap, TX has been treating disordered eating with great effect for many years. They are tops in this field.

Overeater’s Anonymous (www.OA.org), the 12-Step Action Group (I won’t use the phrase “Support Group”), in your own neighborhood is a terrific place to start for many. It’s free, and offers a message of solutions.

At some point, we claim ownership of the behavior that is killing us. Action = Life. I have a tattoo that says just that, on my right arm. It dates back to the early 1990s, days when I had hope for change, but had not yet experienced it in any lasting way.

What a perfect day to begin change. If it’s a tough nut to crack in your own mind, put a pen to paper and write a list of the Five Things to Change in your world, IF YOU COULD. Email me your responses. I can’t wait to hear!

Change begins.

In obese people, the fat tissue often produces too many bad hormones and too few good ones, says Susan Fried, director of the Clinical Nutrition Research Unit of Maryland at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.

Fried and other scientists discussed the latest research on fat cells here at the annual meeting of the Obesity Society. Fried talks about the relationship between obesity and fat cells.

Q: Do people have different numbers of fat cells? 
A: A person at a healthy weight might have 10 billion to 20 billion, and an obese person can have up to 100 billion. Babies are born with about 10 billion. You naturally increase the number of fat cells, like other kinds of cells, as you grow.

Q: Is everybody born with the same number of fat cells?
A: No. There is a genetic component to how many you have, but I would say less than 5% of obese people have a genetic tendency to have a greatly excess number. It appears in animal experiments that animals that are overnourished in the womb and shortly thereafter tend to have more fat cells.

The number can increase at any time if you overeat long enough and hard enough. When your fat cells get to a maximum size, they send a signal to (fat-precursor) cells to become full-fledged fat cells. It may be that having too many hungry fat cells somehow makes us eat more.

But overweight people (those who are not obese but are one to 30 pounds over a healthy weight) don’t generally have an excess number. You can gain 30 pounds easily by increasing the size of current fat cells and not adding new ones.

Q: What do white fat cells do?
A: White fat cells store energy and produce hormones that are secreted into the blood. In theory, if we overeat, our fat cells will produce a little more of the hormone leptin, which will go to our brain and tell us we have plenty of energy down here; not to eat any more. If it worked perfectly, no one would get fat, but it doesn’t work perfectly, so many of us do get fat.

When fat cells are small, they produce high amounts of some hormones such as adiponectin. It is a good guy because it keeps the liver and muscles very sensitive to insulin and fights diabetes, heart disease and other diseases. But in obese people, fat cells tend to shut down the production of adiponectin, and that has bad effects on health, and it’s one reason people develop diabetes and heart disease.

Q: Does losing weight shrink the size of your fat cells?
A: If you are eating less energy than you require, your cells release fat for fuel and then shrink. If you are obese and have 100 billion fat cells and you lose a lot of weight, your fat cells may go down to a normal size, but you still have 100 billion. So you may still be overly fat, but you will be healthier since small fat cells produce more of the good fat hormones like adiponectin.

Q: Can you explain the new discoveries about brown fat?
A: While a white fat cell stores energy, a brown fat cell’s job is basically to generate heat. We always thought brown fat was only in human babies and helped keep them warm. Now there is more evidence that there are more brown fat cells in adults than we originally thought. Brown and white are not really related because they don’t come from the same precursor cell or stem cell.

Brown fat cell comes from the same kind of precursor cell as a muscle cell. Even though there are very few brown fat cells in adult humans, it looks like there is a lot of variability between people. There is increasing evidence that some humans, particularly lean ones, tend to have brown fat cells mixed in with their white fat cells in some regions of their body. So if we can figure out how to persuade the body to make more brown fat cells, we may be able to fight the tendency to gain excess weight.