Eat These Ingredients to Slow The Aging Process | Naomi Whittel on Health Theory

This is crazy. I feel like I just accelerated my aging overnight. Something happened and it's really weird because it's taking so much more time to sort of bring my glow out and my skin feels dull and I feel like dull energy-wise and this is not going to work for the amount of things that I want to do in my life. So, let's say on average you have 60 60,000 thoughts in a day, right? If you are stressed and you're sympathetic and you're and you're feeling anxious and your cortisol levels are higher, it can pop you out of ketosis quickly, which is super weird. So, upregulating staying parasympathetic is something that's very important to me and then also managing my mind, my mindset. I mean, you look at all these different cultures and how they move. Exercise is like a man-made activity and it's sort of like processed food. That's a bold statement. Ready, welcome to Health Theory. Today's guest is Naomi Whittle, known as the Indiana Jones of wellness. She's the founder of Reservage, which was at one point the fastest-growing mid-size company in the nutritional supplement industry. She's also the former CEO of Twinlab and now the founder of Simply Good Fats. Additionally, she's the New York Times best-selling author of Glow 15, a science-based plan to lose weight, revitalize your skin, and most intriguingly, invigorate your life. So, basically reading your book, I was like, all right, this is essentially the fountain of youth in the real world, which I love. [laughter] Um, talk to me about the foundations of youth. What can we really be doing right now to feel younger, look younger? What are the keys? I think that it's it's about really allowing our body to do what it naturally wants to do and we live in an unnatural world, right? There's so much pollution, there's so much contamination in the soil. We We We struggle every day just to sort of ward off the challenges that is our environment. And most of our health is affected by what we can't see, right? So, it's the pollution that's in the air that we're breathing inside of our house. It could be what's in the insulation. I mean, there's so many factors. And for me, um I was born in Switzerland. I was literally born on a biodynamic farm. So, that's like organic on steroids. Um my dad's a chemist, my mother's an artist, and they were obsessed with keeping me healthy. Like, they would move my stroller and my pram like away from the street, so I wouldn't breathe in fumes. Wow. And it's weird because I had I was born with autoimmune disorders. So, I had already a struggle when I was first born. And what was my biggest struggle was I was unable to sort of process a lot of the contaminants that I would be bringing into my body. So, I knew intuitively at a young age that I needed to help my body sort of like detox. I didn't sweat much. I couldn't really eliminate a lot of what was building up, and it created this fire and inflammation, and I was covered in eczema. It made me pay attention to things that like most kids wouldn't. I I always wore clothing where you could never see my skin. And yet, it still totally screwed with my life. I I um was always feeling unattractive. It would bleed. It would pus. It was very ugly. So, I was like, "I'm dealing with this ugliness that hurts me. Like, it physically hurts. And yet, I know that the organic food that I'm eating, the ways the products I'm putting on my body have to be such that they don't inflame it. And so, I was always sort of chasing what would give me that sense of energy cuz I had so much desire inside of myself to sort of reach for whatever it was. Like I was 6 years old when I ran away from home and I did it for the first time. It wasn't because my parents were like mean or hurting me or anything. It was just this intense curiosity. I wanted to see what was out there. And I didn't want to be inhibited by my biology really. I was in my mid-20s when I first went to Okinawa. I didn't go to Okinawa because uh you know, it's a beautiful part a beautiful island off of Japan. I went there because there are a large group of centenarians. They're more than as a proportional basis than other parts of the world. And I knew that I couldn't just read a book to sort of discover what was there. I had to go and touch and feel and see with my own eyes. And when I got to Okinawa, I learned some really interesting things. I learned that when I ordered a salad, it wasn't like the lettuce that we eat on our salads. It was filled with these like super herb rich nutrients that I had never experienced before. So I was eating like all of this parsley and all these different wild herbs I had never had before and that was their salad. Or that pork was a really big part of their diet and I didn't know that. Or that when you sit down with them, you know, they're going to joke and laugh three or four times more than we do. And they're always on their bikes. Could be a 90-year-old woman and she's biking around. This constant like paleo movement in a way, right? Like we've taken sort of our diets back to where they used to be in many ways and now there's an opportunity for us to do that with movement and exercise. And I learned about creating youth inside of my body through these different cultures, these different people and that's to me the key. So the keys I would say are this um autophagy, which we'll talk about. Autophagy is in Greek, it means auto self, phagy to eat. So, it's self-cannibalization. That's number one. And I think number two is just embracing that joy. Whatever that means for you, for me, you know, for us, like we love to optimize and hack and find the best performance that we can experience in our life because that allows us to accomplish what it is we want. So, I think those two keys, working with our own biology, because our bodies have the answers. Like we know scientifically we can live to 120. Mhm. All right. So, you talked a lot about, okay, we've got pollutants and we've got things you can avoid, you've got things that you can do, you've got diet, you've got exercise. There's this whole universe of stuff. And what I want to do hopefully in the next hour is really tease this stuff out into things that are hyper actionable. So, um if we were going to build our fountain of youth from scratch. So, you've given us a couple of key ingredients. How do we avoid the um tinfoil hat-wearing sense of like trying to avoid all of the pollutants and everything um cuz I know part of your story of curing the eczema, you found this Chinese herb, you ate it, it actually really helped, it was very beneficial for your skin, but then later when you were trying to get pregnant, you realized that you had ingested a lot of heavy metal toxins. So, now you take the soil very seriously. And I've had, "Oh my god, like if I had to go research where like everything is coming from, I'd lose my mind." Yeah. So, how do you like start making this simple for people? I think it's it's it is complicated, and I hate saying that, right? I want to tell us all like it's it there's a simple way of doing it. Um at the end of the day, if we can find a couple of, you know, foods from our farmers market that's grown locally that can nourish us from like a functional food perspective. And then when you're there, maybe there are a couple of 1 2 3 different stands that are organic. And once you tap into those, they can become your friends. I mean like these are the people that are nourishing you physically, right? So I try to buy 80% as much as we can, we buy from the farmers market and we're friends with the people at the farmers market. So that to me, if they're organic, that's a great place to start. And then you can optimize it by really focusing on like the super herbs. Cilantro, parsley, rosemary, I mean any of What makes plants super in particular? They're like it's like a superfood. So an avocado is a superfood. These are super herbs because they have such nutrient density and then using those as sort of like the foundation of what it is that you're eating. So pesto in my house is not a side condiment. It's not something I add in. It's a base, right? And there are so many different types of pestos. So that's one way to activate the youth inside of your cells. Okay, so now are you getting into autophagy when you say activate? What do you mean? of it, everything that I'm speaking about has different effects. So if I'm going to talk about a super herb, it's going to have a variety of different benefits to your well-being. let's dive into those. And so I'm I'm taking in the herbs, what am I getting exactly? So you're getting antioxidants, you're getting polyphenols. Let's Let's pause on polyphenols for a second. I think this is a big one. You go deep into it in the book. It'd be great for people to understand exactly what those are and what they do for us. So polyphenols are essentially like a supercharged antioxidants. So they have micronutrients in them. So polyphenols are found in red wine, they're found in the grapes, they're found in the skins, the seeds, the stems, they're all over the place. But what they're so good at doing is really helping your body to repair from a lot of the damage, the environmental damage, and they fight off that damage. So, in my book I call them I have a series of them that are called power phenols because not only do they protect us from all of that junk, but they also help our body to truly repair itself, which is why I love them so much. So, that's resveratrol. So, you can have a good glass of wine. There's this crazy, beautiful fruit in Calabria, Italy, called the citrus bergamot fruit. It's like a combination of sort of a lemon and an orange, but it has tons of polyphenols, tons of flavonols. So, when you eat this fruit, and I was taught to eat the white part, the pith, you're getting all of these flavonols and it's like jacking up your autophagy. So, again, that's um a great that's a great one. Green tea, so you'll drink I'm sure a ton of matcha and green tea when you're when you're in Japan, and that's just filled with tons of polyphenols, and it's so powerful. I mean, you get them in coffee, you get them in a lot of different places. Okay, so um we're getting our polyphenols, our power phenols. How are we kicking off the autophagy mechanism? So, you you used a really simple, clean analogy, um which is imagine you cook a meal in your kitchen, and then you clean the kitchen up, you take the trash out, it's all nice and clean, you're sort of reset back to zero. And that was how you explained um what autophagy is. Yes. Give us a little bit more about what's going on at the cellular level. Like what that looks like. Um we've talked about it a little bit in terms of fasting, which is how I've always heard it. Like you're the first person I've I've heard really go into there are other ways to kick you into that other than just intermittent fasting. Um so, it'd be really interesting to understand a bit more about what's happening at the cellular level and then how this stuff is kicking that off. So, for me it came out of necessity, right? I was in my late 30s and I was on QVC all the time and I remember one day I was getting my makeup done and I was like, "This is crazy. I feel like I just accelerated my aging overnight. Something happened and it's really weird because it's taking so much more time to sort of bring my glow out and my skin feels dull and I feel like dull energy-wise and this is not going to work for the amount of things that I want to do in my life." And I think for every single one of us, right? Sometimes you can have this feeling of, "Oh my god, I'm like held back by just sort of this toxic feeling inside." Um, and I became really passionate about this idea of "What is it at the cellular level that will give me that energy back?" And I knew that my cells were either building, like building up, you know, through the protein and the different nutrients, or they were detoxing. And this is very much the layman's thought process. I was just thinking they're eliminating crap, right? Like my cells are either building on themselves and they're replicating or they're eliminating junk and maybe they're dying off. But I didn't know that there was an actual biological process that occurred. So, fast forward to Italy, I'm in the orchard with this brilliant PhD, Dr. Elizabeth Janda, and she opens up a citrus bergamot fruit, shows the white, gives it to me, I'm eating it. We go back to our lab, we're drinking this tea all day long, this citrus tea. I'm like, "I love this tea, but what's the deal?" Like I've never drank so much tea other than when I was in Japan where they were just drinking green tea three, four five cups a day. And she was doing the same with the citrus tea and she's like, "Oh, it's my anti-aging secret." And um it activates mitophagy. Like that what's that word? And I started to learn from her. She explained to me that this process is something that we all have in every single one of our cells. It's almost like a little doctor inside of each of your cells that says, "Okay, time to recycle this part. These organelles need to be removed. This needs to be killed. This needs to be strengthened. And so autophagy is like this brilliance within our cells. And there's so many ways to activate it. And there are so many ways to deactivate it. You don't always want to keep it on, right? Like it's it's kind of like the ocean back and forth. So she told me about it. And I came back to US. And I was obsessed. And I was on a mission. And that was like five years ago. And I knew when my when I looked at my skin and I saw that I had experienced these accelerated agers. And I looked older than I was. And I actually looked at a picture of my mother at 37 years old. I grabbed this photo of her. And I looked at a picture of me and I looked so much older than she did. Oh. Like this is really messed up. Like I know I put a lot more stress on myself. You know, I travel around the globe like on average eight times a year. Whoa. Yeah, I'm I'm on the go. Um so I'm dealing with a lot of that. I have four kids, you know, built I was running, you know, Twin Lab, CEO of Twin Lab. I had sold my company to them. Um public company. So all of these factors put stress, but still I shouldn't have been looking that much older than my mother. And so that's when I got into activating autophagy. Okay, that's really interesting and let's um sort of bring it down from the scientific for a second because so I heard you on um Bulletproof Radio and Dave was talking about how I wow your skin really looks good in person. And so the second I saw you I was like, "What's the deal with this guy?" It really is fascinating seeing you up close. Like truly your skin is phenomenal. Um so now becomes a question of what are you doing on a daily basis? You've talked about things you put on your skin which I thought was super weird but maybe you want to go out and do it. [laughter] Um and you were talking about like coffee grounds and all kinds of crazy So walk us through the things that you eat and then walk us through the things that you apply externally. Okay. I I consume tons of super herbs, tons of power phenols, Okay. um which is like cacao and and a lot of those things. I eat a ton of microgreens. So that's like broccoli sprouts. Microgreens? Yes. So like little sprouts. Uh-huh. So when you go to Japan you should be taking sulforaphane which comes from the broccoli sprout because it's an incredible autophagy activator and detoxifier. So you're going to be in a very polluted city. Yeah, you can take it in a supplement form. You can find it anywhere. Sulforaphane um is is really awesome. Okay. So I take those foods, those supplements. I personally um really benefit from a ketogenic diet. It reduces the inflammation in my body. There's maybe what 15 or 20% of the population that does well on a low-fat carb-rich diet, but the rest of us just are better off, you know. I'll very much put myself in that camp. Um do you live in ketosis like year-round? Yeah. I only got um really into it about a year and a half ago myself personally. I had um maybe 8 years ago, one of um, my translator had cancer and so we put him on a ketogenic diet um, with his cancer and that was many years ago. And um, that was based on Thomas Seyfried's work and um, one of my children, my 7-year-old has suffered from seizures so he's ketogenic. So, he was ketogenic before I was. And uh, a year and a half ago, I was just like I have to figure out how I myself, my family, my mother, I mean you spoke about metabolic um, disorders and you know, metabolic syndrome and and and obesity and morbidly obese. Um, when we moved to this country, my mother developed metabolic syndrome. Interesting. And uh, that has been the most one of the most painful things for me personally cuz I couldn't solve it for her. So, a year and a half ago, I interviewed over 80 experts and I created a documentary called The Real Skinny on Fat. It's a free documentary, it's online. And um, I got so inspired by these genius minds that I went ketogenic and I haven't gone back. Wow, so if I took your blood right now, mhm, ballpark, where would your ketones read? [clears throat] Probably like 1 to 1.2, somewhere around there. all the time? Yeah. The biggest impact on our ketone levels are usually it's usually our mindset, right? What? Yes. Go deeper on that. What do you mean? Meditation? So, meditate So, if you're sympathetic, if you're in a a state of Sympathetic nervous system. Nervous system, but it's also related to mindset. So, let's say on average you have 60 60,000 thoughts in a day, right? If you are stressed and you're sympathetic and you're and you're feeling anxious and your cortisol levels are higher, it can pop you out of ketosis quickly, which is super weird. So, upregulating, staying parasympathetic is something that's very important to me, and then also managing my mind, my mindset. That was really interesting. I've never heard anybody say that before. I am such a believer that the mind is terrifyingly powerful that I'm I'm very open to believing that. So, one I've suffered from anxiety just massively. I won't say that I've noticed an impact from diet. So, when I go hardcore ketosis, which I do a few times a year, I'm always high fat, essentially zero carb, moderate protein. But, a few times a year I'll go like deep into ketosis. I've never noticed any sort of correlation between whether I'm feeling anxious or stressed and my levels, but that's interesting just cuz I haven't paid attention. It's entirely possible that some of those fluctuations It's real. I was on the phone with Dr. Dominic D'Agostino 2 days ago. He's published papers on anxiety and ketosis. So, there is real data proving that it can reduce anxiety and and shift your your state. Okay, so that I'll believe. I I just hadn't heard that it actually affects your ketone readings, which is interesting. Okay, so you try to stay in a parasympathetic state to keep your ketones elevated. Yes, and not all the time, right? Like there's a place where you want you want to be sympathetic, right? There are times you just don't want to be chronically in that. Okay, so to bring that all together, and then I want to keep going down the list. So, obviously what we're eating really matters. We've touched on that a little bit. Staying in the parasympathetic, so what we'll call rest and digest, or what is often referred to as rest and digest. You're doing meditation. You don't do a ton of exercise, at least as far as I understand. I love cuz I hate exercise. like there's data now showing us that just twitching, like if we were sitting here twitching, that's the kind of movement that can really impact our health. Like it's crazy. You know, there's so like any sort of micro moves using like once an hour doing little things. I mean, you look at all these different cultures and how they move. Exercise is like a man-made activity and it's sort of like processed food. That's a bold statement. I'm going to clip the out of that. Okay, so talk to me more about that. So, if exercise is like processed food, meaning you can do too much too hard in ways that aren't beneficial? It's unnatural in the ways that we've made it, right? So, we go to the gym, we go to our gym, we do certain moves. I mean, I love to weight train. I'm weight training right now. Like I'm getting ready for the front cover of of my next book and I'm ecstatic about that. But, that's an unnatural process. So, what we've done is we've taken out movement, these everyday natural moves that really are good for our body and we've made it we've compartmentalized it in such a way that it it's not necessarily giving us the bang for the buck. So, what's the sort of ultimate fountain of youth style workout? I think it's different for every single person. So, in my book, we talk about resistance training and that could just be your own body weight. Um, we also talk about interval training. So, what I'm doing right now is a lot of weight training, um, but it's not what I do normally. I focus on um, strengthening my glutes because they're such important muscles, um, that really sort of give that cascade of of energy throughout our body. Specifically the glutes or the entire set of leg muscles? Primarily the glutes because so many of us are quad dominant. Um so I I really like to focus on that. Um I've been trained to do things like skipping. Um I do a lot of skipping backward, forward. Uh I like to be outside as much as possible and there's new data that shows us if you can be looking at water and outside when you're moving, when you're exercising, the benefits are so much greater. For me it could be very different than what's what's right for you and um I just find that the less we have like specific boundaries on on movement, the better off we are and the more our bodies really benefit from it. Do you have ways for people to um judge what's working, what's not working, to notice the patterns? Cuz like usually people are going to say, "Well, how do you feel?" Yes. Problem is you can be fatigued from doing a workout that 3 days from now actually would be very beneficial and you probably should stick with it. Um but because it made you so tired or it made your muscles sore, like what do you tell people to to pay attention to? I think it's about how you perform in your life. Like I have um so much desire inside of my mind to do so many things in life to me is like every moment I want that I I want to optimize every single hour. So I don't want the energy that's in my body to hold me back. So what I'm paying attention to is how long am I feeling good in the day? So I want to be able to have a 16 to 18 hour day and I'm mostly paying attention to my thoughts. So if I start to have negative thoughts, I'm starting to beat myself up at whatever it is, I'm like, "Oh, that's fatigue going on." Because my my state, I'm not shifting it. I mean, we talk about Tony Robbins. Like, I fell in love with him probably when I was a teenager and used his work to really guide me and I developed that ability to create state very very quickly. So, if I can't maintain state about that. It's so interesting. You really um go so seamlessly back and forth between what you eat, how you exercise, and how you think. I think that's really powerful and hopefully people are paying attention. That's exactly why I do a show on mindset and a show on health because you you absolutely must do both. Talk to people about state change. I think this is super important. Yes. The reason I can shift my my state, the reason I have the ability to do what I want to do is because of my love for health. So, my love for health is about really helping people, myself, my family, you, anyone have a better version of their own life so they can reach their potential, right? And we can do that in so many different ways with different patterns and systems, but it starts here, no question. The thoughts, the feelings, the beliefs that we have are everything. And then the food, the movement, um all of the other stuff sort of supports that. So, talk to me. How do you wrangle in your own mindset? So, one obviously is the awareness of oh, maybe I'm fatigued or something cuz I keep coming back to negative thoughts, but even that is a level of self-awareness to understand that the negative thoughts aren't necessarily driven by reality, which is where I think most people get hung up. They think that negative thoughts are real and that's why they recur so much. And so, oh, I should beat myself up over this because I really am a loser or whatever. Um not realizing actually no, there's these other triggers that cause that and that becomes something to be aware of in and of itself, but the negative thoughts related to something else. Um so, okay, you catch yourself, you're in a negative spiral, what do you do? So, what I do is I change my physiology, what I learned from Tony all those years ago, right? So, I learned about NLP, neurolinguistic programming, right? you use matter. The words we use matter. Our physiology, our body, the way we hold our body, our breath, all these things matter so much. And for me, I felt so badly about myself because I was covered in this fire, this inflammation of eczema. And um moving from another country and moving to the US, although it was an English-speaking country, I was like I am painfully, truly painfully shy. And so, it was such a culture shock moving to this country. Um I went through so much that I had to just figure out like how I was going to get through the day and and live my life. And so, I used quotes, you know, if if you can dream it, then you can truly make it happen. And I learned that my subconscious was everything. So, if I could start working with my subconscious at a very young age, which I did, through meditations at night, um I still do it to this day, You do guided meditations? got So, I do guided meditations. I love it. I mean, I'm just every night, I clean my brain. Okay, that's a really interesting way to say it. So, um and I'll even loop that back cuz you used the cleaning analogy for autophagy, and now we sort of [clears throat] have the same thing happening in your mind, which is really interesting. It's a huge theme that plays in the book. Um so, let's uh ride the autophagy horse a little bit more here, which I think is super super interesting. So, this idea of cleaning things up, of getting rid of the negative thoughts, getting rid of the broken cells, um and getting back to a state of sort of optimal performance. So, one thing we haven't talked about, um I know you talk about intermittent fasting. I'd love to hear about that. I'd love to hear about your protein cycling. I'd love to hear about timing. Like, how does all that work together? topics. So, um we can start with intermittent fasting. So, for me, I've been fasting for 25 years and I've always been doing it for health reasons. People fast for religious reasons, all different reasons. I do it for health. And um it is to me my favorite tool in my toolbox. Uh so, I did tons of juice fasts, water fasts, everything under the sun. So, I started to get into intermittent fasting then, loved it, had so much more energy. Okay, that's what I was going to ask. You say you love it. Not eating sucks almost universally. So, what's the love part? Um the energy, the mental focus. Like, it just allowed me to benefit from my day by 20 30% more. So, I that's what made me love it. And then, the research has really blown up over the past couple of years around intermittent fasting. And now we know so much more about it. And so, if you can add 2 more hours where it becomes an 18-hour fast, it's exponential the benefits. Just think of it this way. When you're a sugar burner, you have 2,000 calories in your fuel tank. I use 2,000 2,100 calories every day, just regular. When you're using your fuel tank that's made up of fat, you have access to 40,000 calories. So, like the thought around when you need to eat, when you're hungry, is just so different because you have a massive reserve. But, I like to intermittent fast every other day. And so, that helps my production of ketones, it helps activate the autophagy. And autophagy is really just going in there and cleaning up. Why don't you do it every day? Based on like the world's top researchers on the topic. Um their recommendation was to do it every other day. You can do it every day. If I do a 5-day water fast, I'm activating it very deeply. You do it through exercise. You do it when you sleep. Um you mentioned the timing piece. So, timing, as we all know, matters. Like, when think most people know that in food. Really? Not in food. Yeah? Like, they definitely get it in other areas, but even even timing for me is very new. I used to think it was total And then, because Lisa's gone through such catastrophic microbiome issues, somebody was like, "Have you ever tried not eating for 3 hours before you go to bed?" Mhm. And I thought, "Why would that matter?" Like, that didn't even make sense to me. But, we thought, "We'll We'll try anything at this point." And that was a huge That may be the biggest breakthrough for her. Was just it. stopping eating sometimes four or five hours before she goes to bed, and it makes a huge difference. Mhm. Um so, one, what is your window? How far do you stop eating before you go to bed if that's part of your timing? Um and then, how do you think about timing in terms of macronutrients? Okay. So, the reason I care about timing is every cell in our body, not only does it activate autophagy, but it has a little clock in it, right? So, that rhythm, that circadian rhythm, that won the Nobel Prize the year after autophagy did, so in 2017. And so, if the idea of when I sleep and for how many hours, that's just tapping into my own rhythms. And those rhythms really have an impact on our health. So, the timing of when I'm fasting, the every other day, again, it goes back to that rhythm. And um when you eat your macronutrients, like, a big part of this is fat first, because it's activating your ketones. And if you're going to eat carbs, carbs last. That's so counterintuitive. I know. I know. most people would just say, "Oh, if you eat carbs late, you're going to get fat." Right. Yeah. And I'm not a propo- I'm not a big believer in in lots of carbs, obviously, because most of us just can't tolerate them. Okay, so why carbs late? Why do that last? you're going to have carbs, have them late because for someone who likes to exercise a lot, it can help with the rest and also um recovery for the for you know, your for building of your muscles. And recovery is such a huge part of movement and exercise. So, recovery is like the secret sauce. I I see it. And if you eat your carbs late, it helps you with recovery. It helps you to sleep. Again, not a big believer in carbs. Right. That's an interesting statement though to say that it helps you with the recovery, but I'm not a big believer. So, um one, do you take in any carbs? I'm assuming you do cuz you have vegetables and in some of the things that are giving you polyphenols, I'm guessing we're also getting some amount of even though it's probably fiber-rich, but you're getting some carbohydrate there. Absolutely. So, I'm so I guess how I would communicate that is there is that small percentage of the population that can thrive on a high-carb diet. I mean, think about the Japanese. How much rice do they eat? They're processing it differently. So, that's why I'm couching what I'm saying. You know, for the individuals that do benefit from carbohydrates, then fat first, carbs last. For people like me, I'm going to get small quantities of carbs in the vegetables I eat, but the small amount that I get is throughout the day. So, I don't believe I've never believed in a one-size-fits-all. Talk to me about protein cycling. What is that? How do you do it? So, you protein cycle in order to again, just sort of activate the youth inside of your cells. So, which is activating it? The restriction or the giving? It's it's a little bit like muscle confusion. You know how you can do different movements, different exercises. It it's sort of confusing the metabolism a little bit, which I love to do. It keeps it on its toes and you get a lot of benefit that way. Um so, on the days when you have low protein, so a low day is a day where you're intermittent fasting and you have low protein, you take about 5% of your calories from protein. And then, the day that's a high day, so every other day in Glow 15, you're going back and forth. Um a high day, you'll have the regular amount of protein that you would normally consume. that. So, for me, it's like 45 to 50 g of protein on a high day. Okay. And I'll reduce that to about 5% of my calories on a low day. Um and and you I believe, you know, you can get accustomed to this sort of like confusion that your body goes through and it's all for more youth, more energy, more focus, more joy. Give me a couple meals that you eat on a day where your protein is 5%. Yeah. Like, what does that look like? So, that's the day where I don't consume like any specific protein. So, I'm going to get my protein from the vegetables that I'm eating. So, I'll eat primarily vegetarian and we have like a whole slew of of the different recipes. So, walk me through um we're on a low day. We're basically vegetarian, but I'm racking my brain to think how you um what you end up eating there that doesn't just become carb central. So, uh we're going to have a lot of oil. Yep. But have lots of oil, lots of nuts. I love pili nuts. Pili nuts? Yeah, pili nuts are super delicious. They're filled with tons of good fat. Um I eat lots of avocados. So, like even we have these egg dishes um called our egg 15s and or avocado glows. Do you leave the egg white in one of those? No, so like on on on a low day we'll use just the egg yolk. Really interesting. Yeah. Um now talk to me about skin care on the outside. Okay. What can I slather on that's going to give me skin as amazing as yours? No, but that's for real. Now, I'm not even trying to pay you a compliment. That is um pure jealousy driving that comment. Like, how does one get to that point? So, we've talked about the ingesting and now let's lather things on. So, our body is consuming 60% of what we put on it. And um I have been so humbled and so privileged to literally travel all over the globe and learn from some of the most brilliant minds. I I brought collagen as an ingestible beauty supplement into the US market because 15 years ago I was in Singapore and Indonesia and Malaysia and I'm like, "My god, these women are like beyond." And I know genetically that they have great skin, but there's something else that's going on. And they were eating donkey hide burgers and soup and bone broths and ingesting all of these collagen supplements. So, for me what's going on on the outside because I have suffered with so much inflammatory eczema on the inside, I kind of had to become my own expert. And I couldn't slather too much stuff on because it just like screwed me up. So, I looked at how do I get the most beauty I can on the outside by putting things inside my body or using a dry brush to activate my lymphatic system. I mean, it's exactly what it sounds like. I wish I had one. It's a brush that that has sort of like um harder bristles and you put it on your skin and you brush towards your heart. I do it every day. Like if you were in my hotel room, you'd see I have my dry brush there. You'd also see I have Epsom salts. So, I take baths non-stop and I know it's a European thing and I know it's an Asian thing, but beauty, outer beauty, is built in many parts of the world in the bathtub. So, getting your magnesium which impacts 600 reactions in your body, getting your magnesium in the bath is a really great way to have beautiful skin. So, we're absorbing 60% of what we put on our body. The key in my mind is reducing the amount of chemicals that we're putting on. So, most women just by accident, just through regular products, put on over 500 chemicals a day. Like 500 plus into their bodies. So, if we can just reduce that number, just like we can reduce our negative thoughts, our skin wants to be luminous. Do you wear any masks or anything? Oh, all the time. All the time. what are they? So, um all I love love love hyaluronic acid. It's a hydrating, moisture-grabbing um oil that I put on my face all the time. I just came out with my my skin care that I've been working on forever, like too long to mention. It's called OMI, outside meets inside. So, it's about activating the autophagy in our skin. I worked with the world's like leading um He's a dermatologist, uh Dr. Richard Wang, who's also an autophagy expert. And we gave him like 300 different ingredients. Well, like, what activates autophagy the best in the skin? And he said it was um ceramides, which is a good essential fat. Um he said it was green tea, you know, caffeine, uh he said it was a special asparagus, citrus bergamot fruit, resveratrol. So, I made a complex and it's in my entire line. And it's like a cream or it's cleansers, it's moisturizers, it's all sorts of different things. All right, so now I'm really going to make you give us some detail. It's bedtime and walk me through all the things you put on your face. What whether it's washing, taking the makeup off, like every last bit of it. So, I'm very aware of the quality of the water that we put on our face. Like I've spoken with a lot of um brilliant uh toxicologists, dermatologists, cell biologists that um teach us, you know, what the water is and how many pollutants are in that water. You have to be really aware of. So, I start with using the cleanest water that I can get my hands on. So, I'll use all different types of water. Sometimes I'll use spring water. Sometimes I'll use sparkling waters. Uh like online on Amazon, there's all different types of waters that you can buy and you can spray your face with them. Everyone waters, things like that. Yes, with water. And then just depends on the type of cleanser. I'll use oil cleansers because at my age, my skin is leaking moisture, right? So, it's there's so much moisture coming out of it. I want to really support it and nourish it and I want to activate the autophagy. So, it depends on what the day is, but basically I look in the mirror and I pay and I'm aware. Like I know if I need to be focusing more on like a lymphatic drainage for my skin. looking puffy? Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. So, I'm always fighting that. So, I do um like little facial massages and I'll use the MCT oil. I'll use a clean I'll use my cleansers to do that. Um all sorts of different fun things. let's talk about you said caffeine at one point in passing. I've always been told that caffeine is terrible for your skin. And I'm talking drink caffeine. Well, you have to drink a lot of caffeine. You have to drink several three to four cups for it to have an effect on your hydration, which is what everybody worries about. But it is a vasodilator, and so it can add, you know, some of the benefits of the tightening and um energizing effect of the caffeine. From drinking it? From drinking it, but also from putting it on your skin. So, that's why, you know, I love the scrubs that use um the coffee grounds in it. Yeah. Very very interesting. Okay. Um so, if you had to say what has the bigger impact, I'm going to make you choose between three things. You're not going to want to choose between diet, mindset, or external products that we cleanse and rub on. What's the the most sort of youth invigorating? Mindset, hands down. Interesting. Wow. That's That's really interesting. Especially because it's the the part of all this that you don't sell, which I really respect, by the way. Yeah. Yeah, and and for me, you know, there's so many contrarian perspectives in in my book. I mean, even writing a book on autophagy that no one could even pronounce. I mean, I started this several years before the Nobel Prize in Medicine was won. I mean, it was won in 2016. I just had the privilege this past December of interviewing the Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Yoshinori Ohsumi, when I was in Tokyo. Um I was brought to tears from what he shared, but it is about the mind. Everything comes back to that and So he was drawing a correlation between autophagy and mindset. Yeah. Absolutely. You're activating autophagy through so many different things. It's not just about the food. It's not just about sleeping and sleeping with your own rhythms. I mean there's the mind is so powerful on the activation of autophagy and and different things and he's really talking about um intercellular communications, right? So he's been he spent his entire career studying yeast, but he's a powerful entrepreneur. Like what brought him to this discovery that can change millions and millions and millions of people's lives is being the mind of a man who recognized that he had to go in his own unique direction in order to survive really. He had um he was malnourished as a child. His mother had tuberculosis and he dreamt of being a scientist and everybody was in the world of chemistry and he was like, "Oh, maybe I'll go into this new field called cellular biology." And then everyone was studying these areas and he decided, "I'm going to study autophagy." And there were like no studies out there. 30 years ago he did the study. Took him 3 years. Today, since he won the Nobel Prize 10,000 studies are done on an annual basis. He's changed the world by being an entrepreneur who who paid attention to his mindset. Mhm. Wow, that's incredible. Where can people find you online? Where can they find the book? So um the book's all over. It's on Amazon. This is our our brand new soft cover, so it's just been a year and I'm very excited that it's out in soft cover. The book can be found on Amazon, my website naomiwhittle.com. We're just starting to get really active on YouTube. So, going all over the world sharing recipes, functional foods, nutrients, different types of movement, beauty, you know, hacks, and just the things that make us feel good and have a better life. I love that. All right. If people could only make one change and it would have the biggest impact on their health, what one change would you ask them to make? Ooh, so hard. What one change? Um it would be to focus on gratitude and finding that on a daily basis. Nice. That's amazing. Guys, we could have gone into a hundred topics. It is really extraordinary the number of things that she can speak very powerfully about. I highly encourage you to check out the book, to dive into her world. It really is extraordinary. Naomi, thank you so much for coming on the show. That was absolutely wonderful. Guys, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. [applause] Thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. You're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset, cultivating grit, and unlocking your full potential.