Weigh different.

Medical weight loss vs healthy weight loss.

The problem: Partial approaches

What we have today in the loose and incoherent medical weight loss, wellness, and fitness industries is severe fragmentation. Due to traditional disciplinary boundaries we have disciplinary and institutional ‘silos’ each offering a true but partial approach to health problems and fitness solutions: we have specialists in the various sciences such as nutritionists, exercise physiologists, health psychologists, sports psychologists, and their counterparts in the applied technologies: registered dietitians, personal trainers, health coaches, and wellness coaches each specializing in a single dimension of human experience offering partial solutions from narrow specialized disciplines.

They don’t talk to each other. They can’t really, due to largely incommensurate terminology and jargon barriers, and they have little professional incentive to communicate anyway – their education, experience, journals, incentive structures, and career paths tend to be narrowly intradisciplinary rather than broadly inter- or multidisciplinary. Worse, there’s a tendency among many to believe their specialization is the most important to the exclusion of other specializations addressing other dimensions of total experience. Worse still, within each specialization are schools of thought who tend to think their philosophy, ideology, or methodology is the one true way.

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

Abraham Maslow1

The barbarism of specialization

In this fractured state the interrelationships between fields of learning are lost and knowledge is not seen as a unified whole, a widespread condition in the modern age of specialization that the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset referred to as the ‘barbarism of specialization:’

1. The scientist who is only acquainted with one science, and even of that one only knows the small corner in which he is an active investigator ... even proclaims it as a virtue that he takes no cognizance of what lies outside the narrow territory specially cultivated by himself, and gives the name of “dilettantism” to any curiosity for the general scheme of knowledge ... This new barbarian is above all the professional, more learned than ever before, but at the same time more uncultured – the engineer, the physician, the lawyer, the scientist ... Civilization has had to await the beginning of the twentieth century to see the astounding spectacle of how brutal, how stupid, and yet how aggressive is the man learned in one thing and fundamentally ignorant of all else. Professionalism and specialism, through insufficient counterbalancing, have smashed the [modern] man into pieces; and he is consequently missing at all the points where he claims to be, and is badly needed.
   

2. José Ortega y Gasset, lamenting the decline of liberal education in favor of narrow job training.
   

3. We used to educate whole human beings.
   

4. Today it’s job training: we train accountants, doctors, lawyers, etc.
   

The compartmentalization of the various dimensions of human experience into manageable pieces and parts is necessary for the advancement of knowledge in each – naturally no individual can know everything in every field – so specialization in the research enterprise is necessary and desirable. The problem is that no one is pulling all the pieces back together for holistic application to whole people. As long as specialists just treat parts and pieces of whole human beings, the compartmentalized treatments are not merely partial and incomplete, worse, they can be reductionistic, insulting, and ultimately dehumanizing to patients and practitioners alike:

1. Related to that difficult issue of how to define or even locate ‘illness’ is the converse and equally impossible dilemma: what do we mean by ‘health’? Once it is understood that a human being is not simply an assemblage of parts, but contains emotional, mental, and spiritual dimensions that cannot be reduced without remainder to material processes, then what exactly does ‘health’ mean in such a multidimensional being? How many levels of complexity – physical, emotional, mental, spiritual – should be treated? Can I be healthy if I am spiritually malnourished? If a Nazi’s blood tests come back completely normal, is that person healthy? ... And there is the painful dilemma: as a professional, you might indeed have to specialize in one particular area and ignore and compartmentalize all others; but as a human being, you simply cannot do so and retain any sort of basic sanity or decency. The more effective you are as a health professional, the less a human being you often find yourself becoming.
   

2. Ken Wilber, Foreword to Consciousness & Healing: Integral Approaches to Mind-Body Medicine
   

While we certainly need the great contributions of highly trained specialists expert in their vocational skills for accumulating data in the various fields of learning, we more importantly need liberally educated generalists expert in the creative integration and application of knowledge to whole multidimensional human beings in the proactive wellness and personal growth arena, similar to the general practitioner or family physician model in medicine.

Unfortunately, there is currently no discipline, degree, or profession called ‘health,’ ‘fitness,’ ‘wellness,’ ‘weight management,’ or ‘personal growth’ that brings all the related but currently separated specializations together into a multidisciplinary vehicle for whole human beings. This is a major problem. The currently fragmented, fractured weight loss, wellness, and fitness industries are inadequate to serving whole multidimensional human beings.

The solution: A holistic all-in-one approach

Not only do each of these traditional fields of human inquiry offer partial truths, pieces of a larger picture of human potential, but each school of thought within each discipline also has something to offer, a different perspective or voice that has survived the test of time and deserves inclusion in a larger perspective. Each approach deserves a place at an inclusive table of human potential, so to speak, in order to honor the contributions of each.

In all intellectual debates, both sides tend to be correct in what they affirm, and wrong in what they deny.

John Stuart Mill

Perspectives that lack evidence or efficacy tend to be selected out of existence over time, while those that survive do so because they speak to fundamental truths for a significant number of people, sometimes just certain ‘types’ of people who respond best to approaches appropriate to them but perhaps not to others, and such approaches, subject, of course, to rigorous validation by communal confirmation or rejection based on reproducible evidence and falsifiability to separate legitimate knowledge from mere untethered belief, cannot be excluded from due consideration and appropriate integration into a larger whole. If legitimate approaches are excluded due to narrow ideology, your solution is not truly inclusive, comprehensive, holistic, integral.

1. Everybody is right. Everybody has a grain of truth that has to be included ... No human mind can produce 100% error. Or, we might joke, nobody’s smart enough to be wrong all the time. Therefore, every single major approach to human knowledge has some degree of truth, and the integral approach insists upon honoring those truths. The tricky part then is how they all fit together, and that’s where the game gets interesting. But it’s an entirely different kind of game to play. Usually if you go to school in philosophy, or go to school in psychology, or in any of the disciplines – if you take up a school of psychotherapy, for example, they’ll spend a great deal of time telling you why the other schools of thought are mistaken ... We don’t take that approach. For us, every single approach has to have some grain of truth, and so now you’re asking a different question and you’re playing a different game, and the game here is: how do they all fit together into a larger coherent structure that honors all these important insights?
   

2. Ken Wilber2
   

An evolutionary inclusive epistemology makes room for the findings of each of the disciplines and schools of thought within them in a larger picture, map, or model of possible solutions, excluding no legitimate approach or dimension of total experience, only their exclusive claims to absoluteness. Beyond interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary, this approach is explicitly cross-disciplinary or transdisciplinary, transcending traditional disciplinary boundaries, ideologies, and cognitive biases in order to see whole multidimensional solutions for whole multidimensional people. This is due to a broad theoretical structure based on fundamental dimensions of human experience, not from any one of the modern sciences integrated, but from postmodern philosophy that includes and thus transcends them.

1. Matter and form are inseparably correlative. Matter without form is unintelligible; form without matter is empty. Form gives intelligibility to matter; matter gives content to form. This insight about form and matter has relevance for us in our consideration of the forms of learning and of the subject matters that they inform, or to which they give form ... Which forms are truly transcendental in the sense of being applicable to all other forms of learning considered as subject matter and, in addition, reflexively applicable to themselves? ... History is thus seen to be a truly transcendental form of learning, both universally applicable to all forms of learning and even reflexively applicable to itself [historiography]. The same holds true for philosophy. We can speak of the philosophy of other disciplines – the philosophy of history, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of poetry or art, the philosophy of law, the philosophy of medicine. We can also speak reflexively of the philosophy of philosophy itself ... when the form of learning that is philosophy is applied reflexively to philosophy itself as a discipline ... Science as a form does not take other disciplines, second-intentionally regarded, as subject matter ... There can be no science of philosophy as there can be a philosophy of science – no scientific understanding of philosophy as there can be a philosophical understanding of science ... And there is certainly no science of science – no scientific approach to the study of science as a discipline in itself ... Science falls far short of being a transcendental form like history and philosophy ... As truly transcendental forms of learning, history, philosophy, and poetry [the humanities] are coordinate with one another. Science, not being a transcendental form of learning, is not coordinate with them. However, science is a basic form of learning even if it is not a transcendental form.
   

2. Mortimer Adler, A Guidebook to Learning for the Lifelong Pursuit of Wisdom3
   

1. You still have to go out and do art, you still have to go out and do morals, you still have to go out and do science*. Philosophy has always been the coordinator of these. Philosophy has always stood back and said, “This is how they all fit together,” and this is driven out of a sense of wonder about, “why am I here?” and, “what’s going on?” and the really deep fundamental questions that human beings ask.
   

2. Ken Wilber, Return to Source: Philosophy and The Matrix
   

* Note: arts, morals, and science; the beautiful, the good, and the true; episteme, phronesis, and techne; self, culture, and nature; Buddha, Sangha, and Dharma; Jnana Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, and Karma Yoga; etc., are all variations on first, second, and third person perspectives reflected in the pronouns used in all natural languages. This is one way of dividing reality. Another way that provides a bit more granularity on the map is described in the next section:

Integral perspectivism: “The science of the whole4”

There are at least eight major perspectives of an integral or inclusive epistemology as pioneered by philosopher Ken Wilber, the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ perspectives of each of the four fundamental realms of human experience expressed through the case and number pronoun dimensions used cross-culturally in all naturally evolving languages: subjective (subjective case/singular), objective (objective case/singular), interobjective (objective case/plural), and intersubjective (subjective case/plural); or the intentional, behavioral, social, and cultural aspects of life, what Santa Fe Way applies as the mental, physical, financial, and relational dimensions of a greater Integral Wellness™.

These eight perspectives are revealed, disclosed, studied, or enacted by the following reliable modes of inquiry, tools of knowledge acquisition, methodologies, injunctions, or paradigms from the various branches of learning for obtaining reproducible evidence-based knowledge from verifiably repeatable experiences, which when combined provide a multidimensional polyvalent holographic view of any occasion, event, process, system, or moment in time, listed from the simplest to the most complex:

1. •Classical empirical science
   

2. •Cognitive science
   

3. •Systems & complexity theory
   

4. •Social autopoiesis
   

5. •Structuralism
   

6. •Phenomenology
   

7. •Ethnomethodology
   

8. •Hermeneutics
   

Philosophy is the branch of knowledge that integrates the findings of these methodologies into a cohesive whole5. Each of these methodologies or modes of learning in isolation reveals a true but narrow slice of life resulting in partial or potentially harmful solutions if the other perspectives are ignored by specialists more loyal to their particular perspective, profession, methodology, or ideology than to the whole people for whom the professions exist to serve. An approach that leaves out any of these important perspectives or paradigms is inadequate according to available knowledge at this point in time. An approach that claims to improve life must be as broad as life itself.

1. The word integral means comprehensive, inclusive, nonmarginalizing, embracing. Integral approaches to any field attempt to be exactly that – to include as many perspectives, styles, and methodologies as possible within a coherent view of the topic. In a certain sense, integral approaches are "meta-paradigms," or ways to draw together an already existing number of separate paradigms into an interrelated network of approaches that are mutually enriching.
   

2. Ken Wilber, Foreword, in Frank Visser, Ken Wilber: Thought As Passion
   

These methodologies or paradigms can be integrated into a meta-methodology or meta-paradigm if only their tendencies to narrow exclusiveness are excluded and conventional disciplinary loyalties to particular methods yielding partial truths are replaced by loyalty to the larger ends served equally by all such means, methods, and modes: knowledge, understanding, and wisdom and their practical application to whole multidimensional people and their problems, goals, roles, and lives.

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Aristotle, Metaphysics

The desire and pursuit of the whole is called love.

Plato, Symposium

The highest wisdom is not founded on reason alone, not on those worldly sciences of physics, chemistry, and the like, into which intellectual knowledge is divided. The highest wisdom is one. The highest wisdom has but one science – the science of the whole.

Tolstoy, War and Peace

A different perspective on weight management

The following sciences, technologies, & methodologies can all contribute to a weight management system:

These methods are brought together as components of a larger integral approach to healthy weight loss. Each is a tool for helping people lose weight. Most people don’t need or want them all, but they’re available.

Santa Fe Way integrates the general orientations and applications of these related but separated fields and customizes them for each unique person while screening for special needs that can be adequately served by highly trained specialists in each of the component disciplines.

The basis for this integration is Integral Yoga, or Purna Yoga, Sanskrit for full or complete yoga, founded by Sri Aurobindo and expanded to its full potential by contemporary philosopher Ken Wilber in his Integral Theory.

Yoga is a spiritual practice for physical, psychological, and spiritual development, not a metaphysical belief system or religion so it can be practiced by anyone regardless of your current belief system.

Santa Fe Way is building a network of the top conventional, alternative, complementary, holistic, and integrative specialists across the human sciences for the more in-depth focus specialists can provide as needed by clients.

Santa Fe Way integrates and applies these methods developmentally to lead you from neutral health to positive wellness and fitness, but if you have therapeutic needs that require remedial attention to first bring you from illness to health, I’ll refer you to the appropriate specialists.

These diverse techniques and technologies are integrated through an epistemological stance or frame of mind I refer to as ‘open-minded healthy skepticism’ in contrast to either narrow-minded skepticism on the one hand, or gullibility on the other. The latter stances suffer from a cognitive bias called ‘confirmation bias’ whereby one’s mind is already made up and one seeks evidence to substantiate one’s views while overlooking or ignoring evidence to the contrary.

Open-minded healthy skepticism is genuinely open to all approaches from all sources as the first step, but then scrutinizes them in the light of evidence to discern among those that work in practice from those that may sound good but don’t actually work.

It seems to me that discriminating or discerning wisdom consists of both steps: 1) the open-minded gathering of all possible approaches, as well as, 2) their rigorous scrutiny to determine which actually work.

The result is a diverse body of evidence-based validated approaches. This ‘middle way’ avoids the extremes of narrow ideology- or methodology-based toolboxes as well as grab-bags of wishful thinking that don’t discern time-tested techniques that work from passing fads and fashions that don’t. The process is evolutionary: differentiate and integrate, negate and preserve, transcend and include.

Holistic wellness for the whole person

We are complex, multidimensional, compound individuals embedded in larger, yet more complex environmental, social, and cultural contexts. Both human development as well as the converse degeneration that shows up in such overt degenerative conditions as metabolic syndrome, obesity, type 2 diabetes (high blood glucose), hypertension (high blood pressure), atherosclerosis or arteriosclerosis (heart disease), osteoporosis, sarcopenia, arthritis, etc., are multidimensional phenomena, and these complex multidimensional problems require multidimensional solutions for preactive prevention as well as proactive reversal. Any condition that is degenerative is also regenerative along the same developmental pathways, but in the opposite direction in an upward spiral of regeneration rather than a downward spiral of degeneration or regression.

A developmental/generational/growth approach includes yet transcends a reactive/remedial/therapeutic approach: while a traditional therapeutic approach can reverse overt clinical symptoms and return you to a state of ‘normalcy’ or neutral health characterized by lack of obvious disease symptoms, a developmental approach gets at the long-term root causes deeply embedded in our lifestyles, the larger contexts that our bodies adapt to, that cause the obvious symptoms manifesting or ‘presenting themselves’ for attention on the surface of sensory awareness, and treatment can continue beyond the mere amelioration of negative states, according to your goals, taking you all the way to optimal thriving and the fulfillment of your potential.

Form follows function.

Horatio Greenough

The modern medical military model

The modern medical military model is great for combating communicable disease and other problems at the physical level of complexity that have immediate and obvious primarily physical causes and effects, but is ill-equipped for handling multidimensional long-term degenerative disease due to it’s outdated Newtonian/Kraepelinian mechanical worldview, reactive short attention span, and tools that can only see physical objects in the world of the terribly obvious. It’s useless for getting at deeper lifestyle beliefs, attitudes, and habits below the surface of sensory awareness.

The postmodern organic developmental/generational approach to degeneration and regeneration is more appropriate to the times and more adequate to the task, while leaving behind the reductionistic dehumanizing medical/military baggage and its short-term quick fixes (liposuction, bariatric surgery, drugs, unhealthy starvation diets, plastic surgery, and other bizarre modern equivalents of leaches) that don’t get at the underlying causes embedded in unhealthy lifestyles, the background contexts invisible to the narrowly focused microscope. The modern medical microscope can only see the ‘leaves’ of the problem obvious to the enhanced physical senses, while the postmodern wide-angle lens also sees the ‘roots’ below the surface of sensory awareness because it sees whole systems not just the obvious visible parts in the sensori-motor world of the terribly obvious of which even cats and dogs are aware.

The modern medical military approach is to hack at the visible symptomatic leaves with medical ‘interventions’ requiring patient ‘compliance’ to doctor’s ‘orders’ within a hierarchical authoritarian relationship for ‘combating’ ‘fighting’ ‘battling’ or ‘killing’ disease until obvious symptoms are gone. This was entirely appropriate in the era of combating communicable disease at which it was extremely successful.

Postmodern systems thinking to the rescue

The postmodern systems holism approach is to pull the problems out permanently by their causal roots, restoring balance through healthy lifestyle changes that heal the whole person from the inside out. This emphasis on a balanced lifestyle is the natural, sustainable solution for successful long-term healthy weight loss achieved through a relationship of equals, partners in wellness.

The way practitioners and professionals see and understand the problem directly shapes their proposed solutions whether or not they’re consciously aware of the worldview or lens through which they interpret reality: whereas the modern medical reactive/remedial/symptomatic/therapeutic/allopathic approach can take you from illness to neutral health, the postmodern proactive/developmental/holistic/integral alternative can take you from illness to health to wellness because its definition of health is broader in scope, its theoretical underpinnings are deeper in substance, its corresponding standards for results are higher in quality, and its temporal perspective is longer-term. Why stop at just being ‘not sick’ with the help of crutches when you can experience optimal wellness in accordance with your potential? Especially when natural weight loss programs are now, finally, tax-deductible?

To recap the current weight loss and fitness situation: on the conventional problem-focused/remedial side of the fence that can take you from illness to neutral health, we have physicians who cure diseases and disorders by reacting to measurable physical symptoms that manifest or ‘present’ as obvious physical problems in the gross physical body; psychiatrists who react to problems of the brain; psychologists who react to problems of the mind at a higher level of complexity; the rapidly growing field of philosophical counselors treating broader, deeper life issues at a yet higher level of complexity; and general practitioners or family physicians who are supposed to bring it all together for general application as well as appropriate referrals to specialists.

On the proactive/developmental side of the fence that can take you from neutral health to wellness we have nutritionists and dietitians who proactively focus on optimal dietary intake; exercise physiologists and personal trainers who proactively focus on optimal output/activity; health psychologists and coaches who proactively focus on adopting healthy behaviors, habits, and lifestyles; sports psychologists and life coaches who proactively focus on mental fitness, time management, and success; but there is no proactive counterpart to the medical general practitioner who brings it all together into a comprehensive package for whole people ... until now:

Introducing the Weight Wellness Pro™

What’s a Weight Wellness Pro™? Someone who has demonstrated broad competence across the human sciences, technologies, and methodologies applicable to healthy weight loss and wellness by accumulating the top certifications in the technologies of transformation subsumed by Weight Loss Santa Fe Style™, as well as broad familiarity with the various specializations in the weight wellness toolbox.

A Weight Wellness Pro™ is the postmodern proactive goal-focused counterpart to the modern reactive problem-focused general practitioner, but without the Newtonian medical/military baggage and detached impersonal hierarchical relationship. Your personal counselor, consultant, coach, and trainer to help you solve your biggest problems, reach your biggest goals, fulfill your potential, and improve your life – your partner in helping you create a preferred future. A Weight Wellness Pro™ can help you integrate the healthy lifestyle habits necessary to make weight wellness a long-term lifestyle.

These related and overlapping fields are integrated by Santa Fe Way because they are pieces of a larger picture: the elements of a more complete human potential, self-actualization, or personal growth technology of transformation evident when seen through the lens of integral perspectivism, the science of the whole. Combining these fields and offering them as a complete healthy weight loss program is the first level of innovation offered by Santa Fe Way.

Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts.

Richard Buckminster Fuller

How do they all fit together?

The second level of innovation leverages this combination to its fullest potential by realizing the inherent synergy of these overlapping fields, creating a service far greater than the mere sum of its parts: rather than merely patching these technologies together by joining them where they intersect or overlap, they are thoroughly integrated into a larger cohesive whole, utilizing the fundamental dimensions of human experience as the broadest, most inclusive organizing principle. There are any number of ways they can be integrated into a unified whole, and of all the major systems out there6, Ken Wilber’s integral approach is, by far, the most inclusive, comprehensive, and internally coherent. Santa Fe Way applies Wilber’s integral approach, what I call ‘Integral Wellness,’ to the field of weight management, in an approach I call Weight Loss Santa Fe Style™.

When the integral approach is applied to human health and growth, or more accurately, when human health and growth is seen through the lens of integral perspectivism, the result is a broad comprehensive conception of human being, living, growing, and acting in the world that includes the following broad dimensions of life expressed through the ‘wellness’ meme, which subsumes both ‘horizontal’ health and ‘vertical’ growth:

These spheres of life include the lines, domains, or 'modules' of human development as dimensions of wellness. Human beings grow and develop through stages of development or levels of complexity, from the simplest to the most complex. Just as growth through these stages can be accelerated, degeneration can be reversed through regeneration.

But this is only half the story, the synthesis/integration side of the equation. The other half is the customized application of this synthesis to you. This element of the integral approach, types, is perhaps the most relevant to you because types are the ‘keys’ for unlocking the potential of each of the integrated elements for you.

Customized wellness for the unique person

Each person is not only a whole multidimensional human being requiring holistic multidimensional solutions, but is also at various places or positions, usually called types, along each of these dimensions and naturally responds best to protocols that fit their unique combination of types, differences, preferences, and goals. Santa Fe Way respects your individuality with a highly customized program tailored to fit you based on your unique combination of customization variables, resulting in a customized program that naturally fits you best.

Customization is the third level of innovation introduced by Santa Fe Way in order to apply the universal principles of component technologies to the particular variables of unique individuals. This is accomplished through the utilization of state-of-the-art customization techniques drawn from the cutting edge of each of the component technologies and combined for the first time to provide the highest degree of customization available today.

The resulting customized protocols provide you with more precise advice for achieving your goals than universal one-size-fits-all recommendations that fail to take into account significant individual variations, differences, preferences, and goals. This customized fine-tuning to your unique characteristics optimizes your benefit-to-cost ratio for achieving your goals: customized protocols maximize results while minimizing the costs of achieving them because you are unique and naturally respond best to protocols that match your unique combination of customization variables. Follow a path in alignment with your unique individual nature: one customized just for you.

The key to getting rapid weight loss results is to replace guesswork, fads, anecdotal advice, and trial and error experimentation with precise scientific customization in order to leverage your time and achieve your goals rapidly. Train smarter by taking advantage of this knowledge: try customization for a change.

The personal transformation process

The fourth level of innovation of the Santa Fe Way is customization over time through the framework of a practical goal-forming and goal-achieving process, leading you through every necessary step to goal realization. The whole process is goal-directed, so each client’s journey is unique according to your self-determined goals for the future.

This journey is based on the volitional powers of the will as animated by the proactive vision of the intellectual imagination; guided by prospective ethical principles including the vital importance of ambitious goal-setting and the clarity provided by the distinction between ends, means, and resources in the form of intrinsic, extrinsic, and utility goods; and constrained only by the limitations of the past: your material circumstances revealed in your health history.

Santa Fe Way: The art & science of Weight Wellness

The Santa Fe Way is the unified weight wellness perspective applied through a customized personal transformation process. The focus of the first two innovations, the combination and integration of component technologies, is the end, result, or destination of your journey: the benefit of sustainable weight management and whole-life wellness; while the focus of the latter two, the customization and proactive application of this technology to you, is the means, process, or journey whereby this benefit is achieved by you.

The first two innovations regarding scope can be considered the ‘science’ of weight wellness (science in its broad sense, as ‘the science of the whole’ in contrast to narrow empirical-only science), while the latter two regarding practical application to unique individuals can be considered the ‘art’ of weight wellness. Together, they comprise the art & science of weight wellness, the means whereby the philosophy of weight wellness is actualized in a complete healthy weight loss system: systems thinking applied to sustainable weight management, Santa Fe style.

Reintroducing fun!

Somewhere along the way in the overanxious scientific era several of the most important things in life, intangibles beyond the view of the detached gaze of science, were analyzed out of serious consideration. While modern science focused on objects of perception that have simple location in space-time, the most important aspects of life regarding the subjects doing the perceiving, the subjects who are aware of these objects, were neglected. Such things as joy, love, play, passion, and fun were deemed worthy of the attention of poets and 2-year olds.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

In the postmodern era fun and play are making a comeback. The fifth level of innovation in the Santa Fe Way is to collapse several dualisms regarding ends and means in the way we think about losing weight by making playful fun an integral part of enjoyable sustainable weight loss.

Weight Wellness the Santa Fe Way

Welcome to an evolutionary holistic systems approach to healthy weight loss and whole-life fitness. Santa Fe Way is the state-of-the-art in weight management: holistic in scope, integrative in inclusiveness, customized in content, modular in design, flexible in delivery, practical in application, sustainable over time.

The Santa Fe Way is a nondual approach that embraces everything and excludes nothing, an approach as broad and deep as life itself, excluding neither any of the viewpoints, perspectives, or philosophies that inform life nor the passion, play, fun, joy, and love that make life worth living.

Footnotes:

1. 1.Maslow made this comment in criticism of religious adherents of behaviorism, the ‘first force’ in Western psychology, and psychoanalysis, the ‘second force,’ both important contributions but reductionistic and exclusionary. Maslow is the only person to have founded two schools of thought in Western psychology: humanistic and transpersonal, the third and forth forces, respectively. While psychoanalysis focuses on what can go wrong during the first five stages of human development, a very important contribution but hardly the whole story, transpersonal psychology focuses on the highest stages of human development and for that reason is the only school of Western psychology open to Eastern psychological systems such as Vedanta Hinduism and Vajrayana Buddhism that have extremely sophisticated phenomenologies of the highest stages of human development, as well as advanced methodologies for growing through them, the product of at least three millennia of continuous evolution. There is no equivalent in the West which is just now beginning to become aware of the existence of these higher stages of development, thanks to the efforts of developmental pioneers such as Maslow, Alexander, Brown, Engler, Wilber and others who are updating models of human development accordingly. For more on these more recent schools of psychology, see Maslow’s Toward a Psychology of Being and The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. The best introduction to transpersonal psychology today is perhaps Paths Beyond Ego, an anthology of transpersonal pioneers.
   

2. 2.The contemporary psychologist, philosopher, and pandit Ken Wilber is the founder of the school of integral psychology, what some are beginning to call the ‘fifth force’ in psychology that integrates the contributions of the previous four as well as the other schools of thought in Eastern and Western psychologies into the most comprehensive model of consciousness yet. Wilber is the most translated philosopher in the world today, credited with creating the first genuine world philosophy that embraces and integrates the truths of the world’s great scientific, psychological, philosophical, and spiritual traditions East and West; is the first person to have his collected works published while he’s still alive; and is the mentor of some of today’s leading spiritual teachers such as Deepak Chopra, as well as having admirers in President Clinton and Al Gore. His work is fascinating. If your worldview is traditional/religious/conservative, I recommend starting with A Brief History of Everything; if your worldview is modern/scientific/libertarian I recommend Integral Psychology; if it’s postmodern/pluralistic/liberal I recommend starting with A Theory of Everything, then perhaps his magnum opus Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution; if it’s postliberal/existential/integral I recommend The Eye of Spirit, then perhaps Integral Spirituality.
   

3. 3.Time Magazine called Mortimer Adler “America’s foremost philosopher.” While at the University of Chicago he was Chairman of the Board of Editors of the Encyclopædia Britannica and author of its one volume Propædia, or Outline of Knowledge, the most comprehensive organization of Western knowledge to date and topical guide to the Encyclopædia Britannica. Adler co-founded the Great Books of the Western World program, authored its Syntopicon of great ideas, co-founded The Center for the Study of the Great Ideas, and encouraged two of his students to adopt the ‘Great Books’ curriculum at St. John’s College, one of the most prominent liberal arts colleges (with two campuses in Annapolis, Maryland and Santa Fe, New Mexico, with the latter campus also offering an Eastern Classics program). He founded the Institute for Philosophical Research, launched the Paideia movement for educational curriculum reform, authored over 60 books including the modern classic, How to Read a Book, and was a world federalist. A Guidebook to Learning for the Lifelong Pursuit of Wisdom is a fascinating journey through the history and philosophy of the organization of knowledge in the Western world from Plato and Aristotle through Bacon, Locke, the French ‘encyclopedists,’ to the 20th century Encyclopædia Britannica. These eclectic cataloging projects of modern Western liberalism paved the way for post-postmodern integralism, which took the next step beyond mere tolerance and celebration of diversity to the actual integration of the partial truths of premodern, modern, and postmodern cultures East and West, North and South by discovering the underlying cross-cultural species-wide patterns that link them into a genuine human or world psychology and philosophy, by integral pioneers Sri Aurobindo, Chaudhuri, Gebser, Feuerstein, Graves, Beck, Laszlo, Leonard, Murphy, Wilber, and others.
   

4. 4.“Integral Methodological Pluralism,” “Integral Epistemological Pluralism,” and “Integral Perspectivism” are Wilber’s phrases and have a nice Western ring to them friendly to Western epistemology and particularly the green meme, but the approach could also go by the name “Epistemological Nonattachment” to emphasize nonattachment to any particular methodology a researcher may be trained in at the expense of other equally valid modes of inquiry; or conversely, and perhaps more accurately expressed in positive terms as, “Epistemological Equanimity” meaning attachment to or the embracing of all methodologies equally in order that a whole body of knowledge can be seen more clearly as a nondual/integral unity rather than chopped up into slices of reality revealed, disclosed, or enacted by methodological chunks of perception and conception.
   

5. 5.Philosophy is the “Queen of the Sciences” necessary for both the epistemological foundations of science as well as interpretation of raw concrete scientific data into formal theory for assimilation into the higher goods of the mind: organized knowledge, understanding, and wisdom, the objects of study in philosophy (the formal and postformal operations stages of cognitive development necessary for philosophy emerge after the concrete operations stage necessary for understanding science). Philosophy is the branch of knowledge that stands back to see the larger contexts that the obvious pieces focused on in the foreground of concrete scientific observation fit together into, to detect the underlying patterns that connect all the apparent pieces into larger wholes, to discover ‘the order in the chaos,’ the underlying unity behind the apparent diversity of form evident to the senses and their instrumental extensions as apparently discrete objects of perception. As a transcendental form of learning it’s the only branch of learning capable of such a synthesis: while science analyzes wholes into parts, philosophy synthesizes parts back into greater wholes. Creative synthesis is a higher-order operation than logical analysis: synthesis ‘operates on’ and transcends the results of analysis. In using Tolstoy’s phrase “the science of the whole” I use ‘science’ in the same sense that he does: ‘broad science’ as Wilber says, or knowledge based on experience in contrast to the ‘narrow science’ of scientific materialism that reduced science to only empirical sensory experience, until quantum physics and Einstein’s relativity revolution demolished scientific materialism in the 1920s.
   

6. 6.Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits, Anthony Robbin’s system, Dr. Phil’s system, Patrick William’s Total Life Coaching.
   

Education consists of discovering the interconnections between things.

Vaclav Havel

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen, and thinking what nobody has thought.

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

All revolutionary changes are unthinkable until they happen – and then they are understood to be inevitable.

Theodore Roszak

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