Get Healthier with These 7 Hacks | Health Theory

I started this show because I was desperate to solve my wife's microbiome problems. And in so doing, I've been able to talk to some of the world's top health experts on a variety of topics. These people have helped both Lisa and I change our health for the better. And now I want to introduce you to some of their best insights so that 2019 can be your healthiest year yet. So lean forward, take some notes, and let these tips change your life for the better. Hack one, go to bed. Sleep. Okay, I think this is arguably the most undervalued pillar of health. Okay, because in 2018, if you're not prioritizing sleep, you're probably not getting enough. It's just infinite distractions, right? We all know that feeling where we're still sat up late watching more and more content. And again, load of great content out there, but it could be having a consequence. So I can tell you that the majority of people who are having sleep problems are doing something in their everyday lifestyle that they do not realize is impacting their ability to sleep at night. Okay. So my top two tips would be a no tech 90. Try and have 90 minutes before bed with no tech. Right? But the counterintuitive one is get outside in the morning. Right? A lot of people don't realize that these daily rhythms are set by light, right? You in order to sleep at night, okay, you need a differential between your maximum light exposure and your minimum light exposure. So a dark room, right, has something called zero lux in it. Lux is a unit of light. If you go outside on a sunny day for about 20 minutes, you get about 30,000 lux. Brilliant. So that's a really big differential. If you go outside on a cloudy day, you're getting about 10,000 15,000 looks, right? If you go into a brightly lit office, a modern brightly lit office, you're getting about 500, maybe 1,000 lux maximum, right? So, everyone's thinking about what they do before they go to bed in the evening. But a life-changing tip and this has transformed the lives of so many of my patients is get outside in the morning for half an hour. Even that will help you sleep in the evening. What are things then that people can do to actually optimize their sleep? Yeah, this is what it's really all about. You know, I I like to start with the lowhanging fruit first. Um, and something really really fascinating is just simply changing or embracing the time of day that you exercise can improve your sleep quality. And so Appalachia State University did a really cool study and they wanted to see what time of day exercising at various times a day, how does it impact your sleep quality? And so they had the study participants to exercise exclusively at 7:00 a.m. and another phase exclusively at 1:00 p.m. in the afternoon, another phase exclusively at 7:00 p.m. in the evening. They compiled all the data and at the end of the study, they found that morning exercisers spend more time in the deepest, most anabolic stages of sleep. So, they're producing more human growth hormone. They have more efficient sleep cycles, what we've been talking about. They also tend to sleep longer and and this is the one that kind of can get glanced past. On average, they had about a 25% greater drop in blood pressure at night. So, what's what's up with that? That's correlated with a deactivation of your sympathetic fight orflight nervous system, right? So you're actually able to shift gears, get to that parasympathetic rest and digest calming down by getting some exercise in in the morning. And so how do we employ this though? That's the question. Because some people just like, you know, I can't exercise in the morning. And there's also people who exercise in the morning who might have terrible sleep. And it's because this is not like the magic bullet. This is a thing to stack in your condition. If you're doing this and then messing up the one I'm going to talk about next, you're probably not going to have the best sleep. So, here's how to employ this. Just five minutes. And I tested this each morning. I do this five minutes of exercise. You know, it might be just jumping on a rebounder, you know, little mini trampoline for five minutes. Go for a quick power walk. Uh do some Tabata, which is just four minutes and a little mobility work. And I guess most people don't know what Tabata is. High-intensity interval training. Basically, it's 20 seconds of exercise followed by 10 seconds of rest repeated over and over again for four minutes. And in his clinical studies, this was found to outperform, you know, traditional cardio, like the kind of moderate intensity 45 minutes of exercise in 4 minutes. Wow. The change in your cardiovascular benefits, body composition, and also change your mitochondria as well. This is why it works. It does something called a cortisol reset. All right? And we talked about cortisol, but again, it's a good thing if it's in the right time, in the right amounts. Clinically, I would call these people tired and wired that would come in. I'm looking at the hormone panels and the cortisol would be really low in the morning and high at night. Thus, they have sleep problems. So, you naturally, if your if your cortisol is on a natural hormone rhythm, it would be elevated at its peak in the morning, right around 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m., and then gradually decline as the day goes on. Does that have to do with what time you wake up? Sort of. I mean the cortisol will kind of tend to nudge you out of sleep but also we'll tend to notice that as the day as it your sleep goes on it becomes lighter and lighter anyways right this is when you tend to remember your dreams like at the at the end of the sleep and so getting this little boost like helping your body to propel and get your cortisol up via exercise helps to reset that rhythm and get you back on track so that's why it works. Why is it that you think sleep is important? It's so important. I mean there's a newly discovered system in our brains called the glimpmphatic system which when we're sleeping actually swooshes cerebral spinal fluid all throughout essentially cleansing it of these proteins that aggregate over the course of the day. Um they've shown that on one night of bad sleep there's an increased level of amaloid um measurable in in CSF cerebral spinal fluid. Um, but then also, you know, I think dietary change for most people is one of the most difficult things to do and it's particularly difficult when we have our hormones working against us. So, sleep, I think, is so profoundly important because it acts like a master regulator of our hormones. Um it helps to you know make sure that uh we don't need to use our willpower very often because you know willpower is sort of like this muscle that we need to use in order to fight off cravings and things like that. But with good sleep our cravings diminish. I mean they've shown that even on one night of poor sleep you consume an an excess of calories the following day. Anywhere between 3 and 500 calories. I've actually noticed, it's a little off topic, but I once, one of the um major breakups I had in my life, I uh I noticed that I would feel way more sensitive to it. Um when I was underslept, you know, you become less able to contextualize emotions when when you're underslept. On just one night of bad sleep, a metabolically healthy person will be essentially pre-diabetic the next day temporarily. Wow. Yeah. You become more insulin resistant. Um, so yeah, sleep, sleep, I think, is one of those things that today we romanticize being busy. Um, but it's sort of like the one thing that lifts all the boats in your harbor, you know, and yet we tend to undervalue it. Hack two, eat more fat. So keto is a a low carb, highfat, moderate protein lifestyle. I kind of feel like there is not a one-sizefits-all with diets, but for me, the thing that I hear over and over is it's like the thing that really helps people who feel like they have tried everything else and nothing else has worked. Um, but ultimately, I feel like that's the way that we were really meant to be eating to begin with. I don't think that all these processed foods and all the things that are so high in sugar was what we were supposed to be eating. So, now switching to this way of eating, I feel so much better. Um, I actually grew up thinking that I had really bad stomach issues and had to get all kinds of testing because I was always feeling sick all the time. And then when I switched to keto, I was like it was totally gone. Um, so and then on top of that, in just one year, I had lost 100 lbs. So it's like obviously the only thing that I changed with what I was what I was eating. So to me that was kind of like all right like this we're going in the right direction. The first step would be to just give the brain an alternative form of energy and reduce glucose and insulin spikes as much as possible because that can contribute to insulin resistance. Cut out sugar as much as possible or processed carbohydrates. If they're eating two 300 grams a day, you want to bring that down to under 100 grams a day of lower glycemic carbohydrates, essentially vegetables, and and go from there. But if you abruptly take out glucose from the diet of someone who's, you know, drinking lots of sugary drinks and things like that, that may initially cause even a a greater deficit in cognitive function because your brain is being fueled off glucose and may take a while to uh to induce the adaptations associated with transporting the ketones, utilizing the ketones, and switching your brain to an alternative form of energy. Most people who have been keto for any length of time will report back, dude, I first of all, three meals a day, can't even handle it. It's like, I I couldn't eat three meals a day. It's way too much food. Number two, um I probably get by on 30% fewer calories now doing all the same activities than I did before I was keto. What's that about? And what that it's about, it's about metabolic efficiency. It's about um you know less um thermic effect of food. You know sometimes we we eat a a large meal more than we should have and the body raises its temperature just to kind of burn off some of that fuel, right? Because it doesn't want that much fuel at one time. Yes, it tries to stash the the glucose into the glycogen reserves in the muscles. If there's not enough room, goes to the fat cells. um you know yes there is some uh uh protein but excess protein goes to the liver gluconioenesis gets converted to sugar same same issue with that so all these all of these um elements of of efficiency now you don't need as much protein because you're sparing protein instead of daminating it and then peeing it out all the time. Uh you don't need as much carbohydrate because you've learned how to make ketones from your own stored body fuel. those ketones really reduce the amount of uh glucose that you need to make or you need to to take in from the outside. Um you know there's a a statement that many people make in the keto world that there is no requirement in human nutrition for carbohydrate at all u because the body can make enough glucose through gluconneogenesis and then offset the rest of the requirements with ketones. Hack three, reset your diet. So, I describe Whole 30 like pushing the reset button with your health, your habits, and your relationship with food. So, we're not a diet. We're not a quick fix. We're not a weight loss program. We're not even prescriptive. The basis of the Whole 30 is that there are foods that are in your diet, maybe even the healthy stuff that could be having a negative effect on how you look and how you feel in your quality of life. And the best way to know how these foods work for you is to pull them out of your diet for 30 days and then reintroduce them one at a time very carefully and systematically like an experiment. So, you know, all the dietitians say there is no perfect one-sizefits-all diet, and I agree, but everybody then says, "Okay, cool. Like, how do I figure out what works for me?" Whole 30 is how you figure out what works for you. You do this 30-day experiment where you eliminate really commonly problematic foods, things like added sugar, alcohol, grains, beans, peas, soy, and most forms of dairy. You pull them out, reintroduce them one at a time after the 30 days is up. And then you compare your experience, and that's what lets you figure out how those foods are working for you. Okay, that makes sense. So, you've talked about like making sure that you prepare and that you're really committed and don't go into it like half. What what is the process of making grand change in your life? Habit I mean from my perspective at least in the research I've done habit research actually shows that black and white rules are easier for the brain to follow. The idea of moderation is very difficult for many of us especially when you're talking about foods that are designed to be over consumed like sugar. It's really hard to moderate the thing that is constantly making you kind of crave more. So the rules are very black and white and there's a lot of practical advice we give to people going into it. So, it's, you know, announce your commitment to someone. I'm doing the Whole 30 and I'm starting on this date because that accountability and support is going to be huge for you seeing the commitment through. Do some planning and preparation. So, clean out your pantry. Even though right now you feel super jazzed about the program and you're like, I'm not even going to want the chocolate. Future you is going to be so happy that you got rid of it when the cravings hit. So, you know, do some of this basic prep, do some meal prep. But I'm also talking about things like how to talk to friends and family about your intentions here. Because you might be surprised to find that the people who should be supporting you the most get really defensive or really critical of you trying to make these changes. And if you're not prepared for that, it can really throw you off your game. And I'm talking about thinking about potentially stressful or difficult situations and creating a plan for how you're going to handle them. and thinking about what will I do in the absence of these foods that I used to use to comfort or reward or self soothe like what else could I do and making a list and kind of in the beginning literally going through your list of things when you feel like you're tempted and and don't want to give in to that craving. So there's a lot of psychological stuff that you should do to prepare for something like this too because it's it's about food but it's not really about food. And so my my sort of mental model for nutrition is everybody is starting out on one side eating the standard American diet abbreviated as SAD, which is an appropriate abbreviation. [laughter] And the thing I always tell patients on day one is like look, the good news is you can't get any worse than this. The only thing if you're starting at the SAD, the only thing you can do to make it worse is eat more of the SAD, right? But it's like the standard American diet. And I don't believe this was deliberate, right? I don't think there's a conspiracy theory here, but just through a lot of bad luck, uh, has arrived at the absolute worst combination of macronutrients you could possibly imagine. Like, you couldn't come up with a way to confuse someone's metabolism than to combine fats and carbohydrates in the ratios that they are combined in most of the foods that we would eat by default if we were left to our brothers. So from there I say look there's kind of two introductory moves which are not mutually exclusive but you can pick one or the other. The first is timerestricted feeding where now you don't limit what you eat. You just limit when you eat it. And then the second is dietary restriction. You don't restrict when you eat. You don't restrict how much you eat but you also don't restrict the times you're feeding but you restrict certain elements of what you eat. So for those three years that I was on a ketogenic diet, which is I mean probably one of the most demanding subsets of dietary restriction, um you know, I'd pulled that lever as hard as it could be pulled. Then you move into diets that sort of mimic fasting. Um which is basically just another way of saying hypocaloric diets for transient uh periods of time. And then ultimately even beyond that is fasting just you know water only also for limited periods of time. Nowhere in there do I include constant caloric restriction. So you know reducing by 20 30% your energy intake indefinitely. I I think the data are pretty clear that that is not a winning strategy. There's something about the cycling into and out of catabolic versus anabolic state. You're basically clearing house right? you're sort of getting the cells that are themselves defective and hopefully the ones with the most effective mitochondria. We'd love to target those the most for other reasons. Um what you want to see is the regrowth. You want to when you refeed, you want to see the selective repopulation of the better cells. The most robust experiments done on this in primates did not really suggest that as the diet got better, the benefits of caloric restriction got better. In other words, the worse the diet, the better the benefit of caloric restriction. Which points us to this idea that dietary restriction should still always be some component of a healthy nutrition strategy. Meaning like if you're eating like stop eating like stop eating. If you really really if if you're if you're committed to never eating anywhere but McDonald's, caloric restriction will have a much bigger effect on you positively than you know if your baseline intake is you know the way you would eat for example. Hack four, test your gut. And let's remember something. This is the immune system. This what do you mean this? The gut, right? It is the immune system. I mean, we now know that that uh uh Parkinson's disease starts in the stomach. We now know that that uh intraocular pressure uh glaucoma starts in the stomach. It's an autoimmune disease. Everybody's got autoimmune diseases today. We can all agree that uh inflammation is the root of all disease today, right? We've been saying that for what, a decade now? Well, inflammation is what the immune system does. That's how it mounts an attack on something. That's how if there's a foreign something in your body, it sends out macrofagages. It sends out inflammatory responses to go and and to to destroy that and kill it. If you work out, that's your immune system making you recover. You have inflammation and it goes and it resolves the inflammation. That all that's all coming from here. When when when your gut is bad, your body is bad and you you are more prone to developing a widespread group of diseases. First number one thing is to make sure you don't have a toxic microbiome. That means your microbiome is uh is producing the healthy stuff that your body needs not the toxins u that is going into your body. So just really think of you and saying is your microbiome healthy is your microbiome toxic. Right? So that's first part. The second thing is can I want to put a fine point on that because I this is what made me think of it a second ago. That notion of a quorum. Yeah. So the fact that any one of them is looking to see if they're the bully if they get to call the shots. And what happened with Lisa was bad bacteria became the lead bacteria and that's that tipping point. Yeah. Yeah. So tipping point happens when your ecosystem goes out of balance. So it's not the individuals think they're good or bad. So it's really not about as much of good bacteria, bad bacteria. We all have the good and bad. But what happens is they stay in check, right? And each other they all keep each other in check. It is when you start to eat certain foods and these guys start to grow and they say aha now we're going to control everything else right and that's really when you start to have trouble. Other thing is when your epithelial cells the barrier the mucous lining gets thinner you start to get a leaky gut and then you have a chronic inflammation all the time. So the way you do that is you need to change the balance of ecosystem of the microorganism and you need to start repairing the lining of the gut and you repair the lining by sometime giving the right set of supplements and enzymes to repair the gut lining. At the same time you start to give the prebiotic to feed the some of the guys so they can start to grow and probiotic to add some of the new stuff right and then you start to change the diet. So you're starving the bad guys and you're starting to prop the good guys, right? You're feeding the things that need to be fed and you're adjusting to see not just the organisms, you're starting to adjust their functions. So you're starting to see how much of the butyrate you're producing. And if you're not producing enough butrate, which is really good thing, then you have to take some of the butrate supplement until we can start to grow these guys who who have a potential to promote uh to produce butrate. We need to cut down all the organisms and the food that are feeding the guys who produce these toxin environments. So if lectins are one of the major ways that we get leaky gut, then if we get lectins out of our diet, that's how we plug the holes. Unfortunately for us, the lining of the gut is only one cell thick. And so imagine one cell thickness keeping everything you eat or everything living in you like bacteria separated from you. and they're all held together locked arm in- arm with tight junctions. So what Dr. Fisano showed with gluten which is a lectin is that gluten makes its trouble by causing leaky gut. So once those spaces are open, not only do lectins get through, which are foreign proteins, they're splinters, but also pieces of bacteria called or living bacteria also get through the wall. Now on the other side of the wall is your border patrol, your immune system. And 65% of all the white cells in our body are up against this wall. [snorts] Why are they there? Because that's where the problem is going to happen if it's going to happen. So when these foreign proteins get across the wall, the immune system basically sounds the alarm, sounds the air raid sirens, we go to threat level five, we scramble the fighter jets, and we actually go to war status. And as I talk about in the book, that war status is manifested in multiple ways. Whether it's brain fog, whether it's arthritis, whether it's depression or anxiety, whether it's coronary artery disease, which is how I got interested in it in the first place. And all of these things come right back to what Hypocrates said 2500 years ago, that if you want to cure the disease, head to the gut. Hack five, build healthy relationships. I was seeing people come in, they were so afraid of gluten and they and they were so afraid of some other foods that they were withdrawing from social activities. So, I'm not going to go to the restaurant with, you know, the girls on our monthly girls night because there might be gluten in the sauce and I've heard that because I have a thyroid condition, if I have any gluten, that will upregulate inflammation in my thyroid gland for for up to six months. So, I can't have any and if there's any in the sauce, I don't want to go out to dinner. And so now they become a bit recluse and they spend more time on the internet researching which by the way time on the internet has is correlated with the with scores of depression and anxiety. As as time internet goes up sense of well-being goes down. So they're trying to make themselves healthier but in doing so they're kind of sabotaging their lifestyle. It's it's a good quote. Don't make yourself sick in attempts to be healthy. Um, but how this ties into to purpose and meaning is, you know, part of our part of our purpose is to have social connectivity. But one of the things that can make it more difficult to have the purpose of social connection or can distract you from what you're doing with your life is getting sucked into this black hole of dietary restrictions that can make your life much more difficult to live. And uh just as a final point here, there is some evidence showing that coming back to the smoking analogy, another parallel has been drawn that loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking. Um so purpose and connectivity are are very important and if your diet is unnecessarily restrictive, it makes all those components of your of your life more difficult. So what I do is called transformational nutrition and there's three pillars to that. So transformational nutrition is the study of human health and wellness on multiple levels including the biological, the psychological and the spiritual areas of life. And when I say spirituality, I don't mean um religion [clears throat] even though it could certainly be religion for youth. But what I'm talking about is connection. And there's really three pillars that we study at the institute. And that is you know your personal spirituality, communal spirituality and environmental spirituality. So personal spirituality is about you. It's about your connection to yourself. It's about understanding who you are, where you came from, the truth of that, telling your story, accepting your story, right? Not trying to change it, not trying to numb out. But then there is, you know, communal spirituality and that's our relationships with others. This is huge. I always say if you want to understand or just get a a quick snapshot of someone's health, ask them about their relationships. It's interesting. It's a direct correlation every single time. So, how how healthy your relationships are is how healthy you are as a person, right? It's all just an outer reflection of what's going on on the inside. So, you know, creating spiritual partnerships with people. Uh Gary Zukov uh coined the term spiritual partners and you know he says friends uh don't want to rock the boat and spiritual partners turn the boat over to help you learn how to swim. Get your relationships right. You could devote yourself to work where you work yourself to death, right? But you have to allocate creative downtime uh you know with your significant other, with your family to really get the most out of life because otherwise it just goes by in a flash and that creative downtime uh is probably the most important thing for your mental health, mental hygiene, which really uh can I can look at my sleep and my heart rate variability and see major changes in that and even my glucose levels come down when I remove myself from stress environments and get out into nature things. So, I think that's the most important thing. It's not being in ketosis, it's not intermittent fasting, [laughter] it's not that. So, it's it's really focusing on relationships and and giving back. I think um especially in today's age of social media and where so much is done online, we feel more connected than ever. I'm on three different accounts. I'm, you know, messaging people I haven't seen since high school. I maintain entire relationships, including with the people I'm closest to, like my, you know, partner and parents and sister via text message. I rarely get on the phone. I'm rarely facetiming unless it's with my child. I think we feel really connected, but we're less connected than ever. There's no proxy for this in-person social connection, the stress medi mediating effects, the oxytocin boosting effects, just how good it feels to actually connect. And you know, we learn skills like empathy through this connection, through mimicry and through reading body language and facial expression. And the less we do of that, I think the more disconnected we feel. And the more disconnected we feel, the more likely we are to turn to some of these other behaviors as a way to like self soothe or cope or fill a hole. So I encourage people to connect for a couple reasons. One, shame and guilt like live in the dark. Secrets live in the dark. for me to show up to somebody in my life and say like, "I'm really in debt. Let me tell you about what's going on with my finances." Or, "Gosh, I made a huge mistake at work." Or whatever it is we're feeling ashamed about or uncomfortable about. That's incredibly powerful for us to move through them. I think we're denying ourselves the stress mediating impact of being one-on-one, especially when we're trying to make really big changes like changing our diet, which is hard and emotional and and really intimidating for a lot of people. Why wouldn't you want to share your experience with that with someone else and ask for their support and allow them to support you? Hack six, try fasting. I read a book by Dr. Jason Fun called the complete guide to fasting and I learned about more about the science behind it, but I think fasting has a there's a physical component, there's a mental component, and a spiritual component, right? Uh physically, we know that it's great for anti-aging, longevity, um anti-cancer, um better digestion, uh cell regeneration in your body. That's the physical component. Yeah. Some people do it for weight loss, which I do not do it for. Uh there's a mental component, too. Knowing that you can go a day, two, three, however long without food and live and actually thrive. Just realizing that you don't have to be a slave to food. Um you can be in control of your body is is um it's it's amazing for your body and your mind to realize that you're okay without food. Like you'll be okay, you know, you're not going to die. And then a spiritual component like there's a reason almost every major religion has some type of fasting in it. You know in the Mormon religion uh we grew up fasting uh one 24 hours uh uh a month like one day a month you fast for 24 hours and I hated it as a kid. So you know my perception of what fasting was was like uh this sucks. But there's a spiritual component like being able to be more in tune with your body and spirit uh without having food to distract you um is really powerful. And I feel like it can uh be spiritually uplifting, you know, whether you're religious or not, just being more in tune with your body and and your spirit as well. Like you you you are a soul. Uh I do really believe that. Um and I think fasting is a way to tap into that. Now, I find that a lot of people don't really understand what a fast is. Walk people through the difference between intermittent fasting and then a full fasting. Yeah. Here's the easiest way to intermittent fast. It's going to make it so easy for everybody watching right now. So, you eat your last meal of the day at 6:00, right? 6:00 p.m. Wake up the next morning, eh, I'm not really hungry. You just skip breakfast. And keep in mind, that term breakfast literally means break the fast. Doesn't mean you have to eat at 8:00 in the morning. It just means you're breaking the fast. So, why don't we push that break fast to noon? So, if you do that, you go from 6:00 the night before to noon the next day. You just intermittent fasted for 18 hours and all you missed was one meal. [snorts] Are you really going to miss that one meal? Most people not. Once you're keto adapted very easily, you will not. So, so just eat a sensible meal on on that intermittent fast or a couple of sensible meals cuz you get noon and six you can eat. So, you eat twice that day and then you do it all over again, 18 hours. M um and I'm a big fan of mixing it up, not having the exact same every single day. I think the body will become used to an 18-hour fast that would be 6:00 to noon every single day. So maybe one day do 6:00 to noon, maybe the next day don't eat at all and then the day after that 6:00 to noon. But the extended fasting, this is where it gets really interesting. So let's say you've intermittent fasted. Let's say you're very keto. Let's say you're ready to push it to the next level. First day should be easy. You're used to intermittent fasting. It's day two where it starts to get a little bit more difficult and people go, "Okay, they're going to like ring their their their hands and just cuz their body is so used to eating that at that day is when everything kind of goes a little berserko in their body and they they start people start to freak out. Oh, this is not working. I need to eat it." No, no, no. Push through that. So, how do you push through it? Stay very well hydrated. So drink, drink, drink and drink some more salt. Pink Himalayan sea salt. You can buy big old buckets of it now at Costco and I get a pinch of it and I stick it under the tongue. And when you do that, you feel like you had a meal. And so you're telling your body everything's okay. Usually the withdrawal symptoms that people have where they think they need to eat, it's really just electrolyte imbalance. And so the pink Himalayan sea salt, some people also do a little bit of potassium, maybe the what is it? The no salt that has potassium. Some people take a magnesium supplement. So you get all the electrolytes in there. And you push through day two, you get to day three and you start to feel a little better. Maybe some people are still a little symptomatic, but get through 3 days and guess what happens? That a word rears its ugly head in a good way. And that's autopagy. [snorts] Because after 3 days of not eating food, and I mean no food, you can have water, you can have salt, but no food. Your body rewards you by giving you cleaning up, a cleaning up of all those proteins. There's always going to be an adaptation period for anyone who's getting into fasting. So, expect the first month of it to be challenging. And then it gets easier because now you're psychologically and physiologically more adapted to doing this to your body. What I have found is that the more you fast, the more your heart rate variability improves and the more actually you function better under stress. So like when I was traveling um and I I always fast when I travel, I have found that I actually travel with less stress because I'm fasting rather than fasting is causing me to be stressed and that comes from being adapted to it. So things that can improve your ability to fast more effectively are getting more fat adapted. um getting on a whole food diet, getting like I always tell people try to do whole 30 for at least a month before you start doing fasting regularly. Um just because it gets people off of refined sugar and flour like you got to get off of those things if you want to fast effectively because if you're eating those things you're on the glycemic roller coaster and if you're on that roller coaster you're going to feel like garbage when you try to fast. So getting on whole foods is the first step and then doing things like 16 and eight fasting and then you can start challenging your body with more fasts. So I say try a 24-hour fast. How often do you guys fast? Sal's every month. Three for 72 hours. I do a 48 to 72 hour fast every month. Yeah. I noticed a lot of health benefits from it initially. Anti-inflammatory gut health. Um you know, just felt better. But now the reason why I fast isn't for the physical health benefits. Now it's the I don't know what you want to call it, spiritual effects or whatever. It's the breaking the chain from food. because I I started to realize how often I ate because I was bored or because I was supposed to eat. Like, oh, it's noon. I'm supposed to grab some food and I all of a sudden I had all this time on my hands and like what do I do now? And when I'm stressed out, I feel like I want to grab something to eat, but I'm supposed to be fasting today. And so, it really changed my relationship with food. Now, of course, fasting could also create a negative association with food. So, it's not like a a cure all, but for somebody who came from the side of fitness where I was force-feeding myself every two or three hours, which by the way is a myth that doesn't build more muscle. Um, fasting was like, I mean, it was it was a game changer cuz all muscle didn't fall off my body, you know, I'm feeling better and then when I refeed, I actually get stronger and feel better and I'm assimilating food better. Well, this is fantastic. So, I do it now more for those effects than anything else. Hack seven, meditate often. So, vapasa is sort of a a meditation technique that's that's thought to be taught through the line of the Buddha himself. And it's a simple style of meditation that teaches you to be in the present moment without attachment. So, it's not there's no mantras involved. There's no visualization involved. There's no sending love or gratitude anywhere. It's simply being in the moment and recognizing what is and whatever pains or discomforts or thoughts or feelings or whatever is coming through to detach yourself from that. So, it's almost like removing emotion from the external world so that you master your inner self and your inner uh peace and balance. Just going through that improved my knee pain in a 10day retreat. So, what is that? Well, I would argue that there was emotions that I was holding on to that manifested in the body and when I was able to detach from those and let those go, the pain lets go. there are these energies I think that we store in our body. Um, and this practice of apostasa meditation taught me that that's likely the case. So, it's really that you know your state of mind impacts how you digest things. It impacts uh you know you can you can increase your your inflammatory markers by a thought or by a stress or whatever. You can change how your c your your central nervous system uh is reacting. You can change your hormone levels. You So, and this is all verified, right? I don't even this is not even controversial to say anymore. So, it only makes sense that if you want to be able to utilize that your the food that you're eating, create a good also create a better relationship with your food. I mean, if I'm constantly eating in a stressed state, I am creating a an association or a connection to that food that may not may not be serving me. So, stop, slow down. If you're religious, pray. If you're not, take a breath, you know, ask yourself or just become aware of what you're about to do and what you're about to eat. And then you'll notice that your food choices will start to change and you'll start to feel better as you're eating. And I've been trying to get into a meditation practice but could never make it stick. It's this four-part meditation guided and I just do it in my head. I find the guided aspect of it or having something to think about helps me stay in it a little bit longer instead of just sitting and like thinking about being zen. In the first part, I think about people. I think of all the things I'm grateful for and it just turns into this rolling list of gratitude. The second part, you [snorts] think about lifting someone up. Maybe I'm lifting them up. Maybe I'm grounding them. Maybe I'm connecting them to me through my energy and through my light. In the third part, you are thinking about what success looks like for you today. And that's kind of where I find my like maxim for the day. um whether it's to stay connected or stay open or stay grounded or sometimes these things float into my head and I have no idea what they mean but like it just feels right and in the fourth part you're just sitting listening to the sounds around you and I do this meditation in the middle of my gym when I'm done working out so there are people with there are barbells and sleds being dragged and pull-ups and crossfit classes and two different music's going on and I'm just like sitting in the middle of the turf with my eyes closed like listening to everything and it's been one of the most life-changing, gamechanging experiences to adopt this meditation practice. I'm not kidding. All right, there it is. I hope you guys were really paying attention to everybody's advice and that you implement these strategies into your life immediately. With that, I hope you guys have a happy and healthy 2019. And remember, until next time, be legendary. Take care. Hey everybody, thank you 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 [music] mindset, cultivating grit, and unlocking your full potential.