The Fasting Expert: "The Truth About Ozempic", These 3 Foods Are Leading To Cancer! - Dr Mindy Pelz

There's some really important health tools that are not being discussed, but this is how we should be looking at health. So, the first thing is Dr. Mindy Pelz, the renowned health expert is back. And she's on a mission to empower people to take control of their health through fasting, nutrition, and lifestyle changes. We are in a crisis of health, and your health right now may not be your fault, but it is your responsibility. So, I have questions. What is the lie about the food environment? lie is that all food is safe. There are foods that are medicine, and there are foods that will build disease. How do we know the difference? Learn to read an ingredient label. So, the first thing I do is I Interesting. All the foods that are cancer feeding. Yep. So, there's processed meats. Sugar's a biggie. The toxic oils in donuts, juice boxes, horrific. How important is our liver in all of this? The most important. Is there any symptoms of an unhealthy liver? Yes. They call them checklist. First, you can look at the bottom of your feet. Do you want to put it up on the table? No, cuz people will sell pictures. How many times a day do you think we should be eating? Great question. And studies show us that the longer you spend not eating, the more your body heals itself and starts to burn belly fat. But a Zempic has a tool for achieving the same outcome. But one of the biggest consequences we've seen is This is why I'm such a fasting fan. So, what are some of the lesser known benefits of fasting? There's a whole bunch of them. But I'm going to say the biggest biggest thing is We've just hit 6 million subscribers on The Diary of a CEO. Um so, me and my team would like to do something we've never done before as a little thank you. And we're calling it The Diary of a CEO subscriber raffle, and here is how it works. Every episode this month, we're going to pick three current subscribers at random, and we'll send one of you a 1,000 lb voucher, one of you tickets to come and watch The Diary of a CEO behind the scenes live with our team, and one of you will have a 10-minute phone call with me to discuss whatever you want to talk about. If you're a subscriber, you're in the raffle. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for allowing me to do something that me and my team love doing so much. It is the greatest honor of my lifetime, and I hope it I hope it continues off into the future. Let's get to the episode. Dr. Mindy. Last time we sat here, the conversation we had reached more than 10 million people across YouTube and Spotify and iPlayer and airlines and everywhere. And I was looking through some of the feedback from that conversation, and there's two of these top comments that I pulled out, which I think kind of capture the impact it had on so many people. The first comment is from a lady called Anne, and she said, "Dr. Mindy changed my life. I started intermittent fasting 6 months ago after I watched this podcast, and I've dropped 18 lb and have never felt or looked better." The second comment I pulled out was from a 57-year-old lady who said, "Going through menopause, morbidly obese, going through a lot of stress in my personal life, and fasting because of Dr. Mindy has finally saved me. I've been doing a 36- to 48-hour test every week to fast, and it has really bolstered my confidence, and I can now do really hard things. Thank you." There's so much on that There so much on that one. That second one, I mean, that's that is empowerment. Those two got empowered, but that last woman got really empowered. She did that for herself, and she knows it. As she can do hard things, she's absolutely right. It has really bolstered my confidence, and I can now do hard things. It's not typically what you think of when you think of fasting, that it gives you confidence and the ability to um do hard things in other areas of your life. Yeah. Yeah, and you know, there I I've heard you interview guests like this, and I've heard many people talk about how easy we've made life right now. You know, you can sit on your couch, and you can you don't even have to get off the couch, and food will appear at your door, and you can control your TV your TV, and you can call a friend, and there's so much you can do without even moving. Life has gotten so easy that we are losing that ability to really learn how powerful we are. And for women it with health, it it's gotten even worse. So, what I love about that comment is that she took the information, she applied it, she got a result. It kind words to me, but she deserves all the credit. And she feels different, not just physically, but emotionally, and and what she's capable of. Like those are the comments that just blow me away because only you can close your mouth and not eat. And I guess it tells you something about yourself when you're able to do that, which is I guess resisting some kind of temptation, which is you know, you're building evidence with yourself that I am the type of person that has control and autonomy over my destiny. And it's remarkable how much that must impact your professional life, your relationships, your all these kind of things, your ability to put other boundaries in place in your life. Yeah. Um and it all starts with this simple discipline, which is, you know, fasting. Yeah. Were you Were you surprised at the impact that this book Fast Like a Girl had globally? It It has blown me away. Um I knew when I wrote the book that I had a formula that worked because I had spent 10 years in my practice using it with women. I'd seen the kind of results like you just read over and over again. Then I took those results, and I took them to my YouTube channel, and I started teaching it on YouTube, and I and I I don't know if every YouTube creator does this, but I would always ask questions, and I would say to people, "Give me answers as to how this is working for you." And then I had a team of people that went in and gathered those answers, we looked at patterns, and that's how the information of Fast Like a Girl was born is it was not just an idea, it wasn't just science, but it was when I wrote it, it was like, "Oh, we already seen this across hundreds of thousands of women that it's going to work." But you never really know until you put a book like that out into the world how it's all going to unfold and how it's going to be received. In In a year and a half worldwide, 717,000 copies of that book of on all styles, that's audio audible and ebook and hardcover. Uh the amount of reviews, positive reviews, the amount of DMs we've had, I had to double my staff to be able to answer the DMs. Like I I I have actually picked the book up more than 10 times and asked myself, "What did I put in there? Like why is this connecting so much?" Cuz there's something where women just were finally given a tool that worked, and it didn't cost money, and it didn't take time, and it didn't give her power away, and she saw that. And and that that part blew me away. Is that Is that why it connects because it's not expensive, complicated, it's not um something you need a prescription for? Yeah. Yeah, well, think about it. You go in to your doctor's office, you have a long list of symptoms. You give those symptoms over to your doc doctor. He or she gives you an official title of that symptom. You're like, "Oh, finally somebody understands it." And so, you go and maybe you take the diagnosis, the prescription, or the treatment. You go fulfill the treatment. Let's say the drug works. You're like, "The doctor was amazing, the drug was amazing." There's no empowerment in that at all. Now, if the pill doesn't work, then what ends up happening is you go back to the doctor, and you're like, "Hey, pill didn't work." And the doctor says, "Okay, well, let's try a different pill." And then you try a different pill. And you do that like three or four times, and if it still doesn't work, then what happens is now you go to a different doctor. You're like, "I got to go to a different doctor, this one's not working." And we keep outsourcing our power, looking for answers. Somebody show me, somebody show me. But with fasting, what happened is we showed this idea of metabolic switching, where there's a time to eat and there's a time not to eat. And the longer you spend not eating, the more your body heals itself. And that concept, I think women had never really had had grabbed before. And it was a a tool that was so available. They could listen to your to the podcast we did and apply it like an hour later. And all of a sudden, again, the only person to give credit to is yourself. And so, I don't I mean, maybe exercise? Exercise would be that tool. What other tools do we have that make you feel that powerful that quickly? What if someone has never come across the concept of fasting before, which I I think is probably quite um implausible now, but can you give me the sort of ever the sort of like evolutionary basis for fasting? Why does Why does it happen? Why were we told a lie? Like why did we take a wrong turn in the last thousand years, which made us, I don't know, just become really gluttonous and have five meals a day and Yeah. Well, let's start with how what fasting is, and then I'll dive into the lie the lie. I have a lot of thoughts on the lie. Um if we go back to hunter-gatherer days, you know, we one thing that blows me away is that the human body we're living in is literally the same. It's the same as the hunter-gatherers, but what we're sitting in, what we're exposed to, the physical, emotional, chemical stressors that are handed to us every single day is completely like opposite what the hunter and gatherers were doing. So, if I go back to the hunter and gatherers, they came out of the cave. They didn't have DoorDash, they didn't have a refrigerator, they didn't know how to get food, they had to go find food. Now, if blood sugar is going down and they've got to go find food and they pass out, you know, 100 yards from the from the cave, then we wouldn't be sitting here right now. But, that didn't happen. What happened is they went out to go hunt and the longer they were away trying to find food, the more they metabolically switched into this other fuel source called the ketogenic energy system. I like to call it the fat burning system because what their body did were like a hybrid car. The body was like, "Okay, blood sugar's going down. Okay, time to switch over to our other fuel source. We're going to pop in and start burning fat and make a ketone." And then that ketone went up into their brain, sharpened their focus, and made them even stronger to go find food. Mhm. Today, we don't do that. We don't ever lean into this other system that our hunter and gatherer ancestors had to lean into. We don't have There's so much oversaturation of food and ideas and stimulation coming at us that we never had to They're like biological processes in our bodies that we're not even accessing anymore. But, they exist. I I think you and I talked about this last time. Uh in the book, I talk about something called the thrifty gene hypothesis. Now, it's a hypothesis. And the idea was the humans that came out of that hunter-gatherer time had a gene that allowed them to switch over into the fat burning system and make a ketone in the absence of food. And so, all the people that survived that time period, they morphed into what we're looking at as each other right now because the ones that didn't have that genetic profile didn't live. So, they they are no longer with us. So, now we're sitting with this thrifty gene inside of us eating all day. And what they believe is happening is that because we're not accessing that gene, that the people that are suffering now is on the opposite or the ones that are not tapping in to the fat burning system. The ones that are not accessing that are actually killing themselves because they're not in alignment with their own biology. I kind of have a lot of empathy for them in some respects because of, you know, it's it's difficult, isn't it, when we're surrounded by this much free, cheap glucose sugar. You know, call to fight back against the environment you live in. It's kind of what we're asking people to do. It's like fight their natural urges. Presumably, the brain is also has a gene which says, "Listen, if you see sugar, you better grab it and put it in your mouth." Yep. And there's some microbes doing that, too. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, there there can be fungus in your gut that tells your taste buds, "Hey, I need more sugar because they got to stay alive." Our our taste buds have been completely hijacked by all the chemicals poured onto our food. So, we don't We get so much dopamine now from food that sometimes all we have to do is walk into a grocery store and look at our favorite food and see it in the aisle. We haven't even picked it up, put it in the basket. We're like, "Ooh, that potato chip. I love that potato chip." And that's creating a dopamine response in our brain because our brain our our brain knows, "When I eat that, I get dopamine." And what is the lie, then? We talked about the lie that's been told to people about the food environment, about five meals a day, etc. What is that line and why were we told the lie? The biggest lie is that all food is safe. Not all food is safe. A And a part of that lie is I can walk into my grocery store and it's already been vetted for my health. Now, I can tell you in the America, that's not the case. We have a category of food called GRAS, generally recognized as safe in our country. And basically, what the FDA can do is the F FDA can put chemicals under this category when it hasn't been scientifically proven to be safe. They can re-package them and put them in this category of generally recognized as safe. The idea is that we have a innocent until proven guilty philosophy around food. And it's even gone even even further where within their own in administration in the FDA, people are saying that the F is silent. They don't care about the food. And then, if you go even further and you think about it, how do we have food and drug together in the same administration? If we really cared about food, we would actually pull it out separate and we would have a bigger, better analysis of food. So, the lie is that all food is safe. That's not true at all. All There are foods that will are medicine and there are foods that will build disease. And just because we call them both food, doesn't mean they're safe. You have to know the difference. How do we know the difference? Well, the first thing is learn to read an ingredient label. So, which then Do you know how to read an ingredient label? I would say no. So, the first thing I do on every anything that's packaged is I go straight to the ingredients. And it This is so easy. All you've got to do is look at those ingredients and ask yourself, "Do I recognize Do I know every single one of those ingredients?" And if you don't, entertain yourself and go look them up. I I actually did this with my nephew years ago. He brought me some frozen waffles and he's like, "Hey, are they What do you think? Are these safe?" And I said, "You Read them out loud to me." And he started to read them out loud. He was like 14 years old at the time. He started to read and he couldn't get through like the third ingredient in was a chemical. And he's like, "I don't know how to pronounce this." I said, "Go look it up. I want you to Google it and look it up and tell me what it is." And he came back and he's like, "Wait a second. What I just found is that's a cancer-causing chemical." I said, "Yeah. You're right. It is. That's what the That's what's happening." Is that these chemicals are allowed in our food that promote disease. And so then, once you have that idea and you know the ingredients are the most important and you follow, is it a chemical? Is it a real food? Then the next thing you can do is really stay away from anything with an ingredient label. Like, when you go into a grocery store, walk around the outside. Don't go into those middle aisles. Go to the refrigerated sections. Go to the fresh food. If it doesn't have a label, it's it's it means it's it's authentic self. So, that it didn't They didn't denature it. They didn't change it. It came from the earth or it came from an animal, whatever your ethos is around there, but it it wasn't input into an altered state because what they do is they put these things into altered states so that they taste better and they hijack your taste buds so you'll come back for more. Or they put it into an altered state so that it can last longer on the shelf. And if it lasts longer on the shelf, that chemical's lasting longer in you. The lie around frequency of eating. Because, you know, when I grew up, I I mean, breakfast, lunch, you might have something at a couple of snacks, and then have dinner. And then you wake up the next day and go through the same routine of just basically eating every waking hour of the day if you can and snacking in between. Who told us this line and is it a lie? Because it kind of seems to be the antithesis of fasting. Yep. Well, from what I can find, and I'm sure there's lots of ways we've perpetuated this lie, but breakfast is the most important meal of the day was a ad slogan for Kellogg's Corn Flakes back in the '70s. So, back in 1970, they had a hot new cereal and the ad was, "Eat it. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day." Here we are in 2024 and people are still perpetuating that ad slogan. So, I've actually looked into the research on like, if I eat more, will it speed up my metabolism? Uh from what I can tell from the research, I can't find that. Now, it Let's say we just leave the research out of it. I I would like to meet a human that has eaten six meals a day and found that that was a metabolism stimulator. Like, I don't know very many people that say that. So, it it's like a cultural lie that just got sort of passed down. And what happened when the fasting research came out? Now, you know, people like Walter Longo, people like Sachin Panda, like big fasting researchers, what they figured out was, "Oh, wait. If we compress our eating into a certain time period like our ancestors did and we left longer for fasting, there's something magical going on here." And those were the giants that started to show us that actually time-restricted eating is the most important thing that we can be doing when it comes to food. What about calorie-restricted eating? And how does Is that the same thing? N- No. And thank you for asking that. So, let's let's let's talk about both of them in an everyday kind of scenario. So, in time restriction, you are saying, "I have a certain time in my 24 hours where I eat. I compress my eating window, and then I have a time where I'm fasting. So, I have an eating window, and I have a fasting window. Okay, and I get to decide how long how compressed that eating window is, and how long that fasting window is. The longer you go in the fasting window, what you're doing is you're turning on these different healing mechanisms. And and that is independent of calories coming in or not coming in. That is dependent on nutrients not coming in. That is dependent on glucose going down and switching over to burning fat so you make a ketone. That has nothing to do with calories. When you come over to calorie restriction, you're saying I'm going to have X amount of calories a day. I'm going to output X amount of calories, and I'm going to do that all day long. So, very different philosophies. To me, like you're you're creating a internal mechanism with time restriction that is going to stimulate a healing process. And it's nutrient deficiency along with glucose drop. It doesn't have to do with calories. As it relates to fasting, since we had the conversation, something really massive happened in culture, which was this word Ozempic became really popular. And the drug Ozempic became really popular. And there's various types of it, Wegovy or something else. There's lots of different versions of it, but fasting as a tool is now quite established, but Ozempic as a tool for achieving the same outcomes, what's your thoughts on that? Yeah, so now first I'm just going to say I'm not an Ozempic expert, so I can't tell you the mechanisms behind that. What I will tell you is that I again, I'm a supporter of the everyday person. And the first challenge we have with Ozempic is the cost. So, is everybody going to be able to afford that to be able to improve their metabolic health? I I I'm I'm a supporter of the single mom who's working two jobs and is trying to just put food on the table, and sh- Ozempic at $800,000 US dollars, she's not going there. A month, isn't it? Is it a month? Okay. So, the first thing is it's unattainable for so many people. Second thing is that we've got a challenge with some of the side effects. Now, there's been a lot of debate about that, and like, you know, the nausea and all that. Like, what is that? Um and some people have it, some people don't. So, you have to personally decide if that works for you or not. The third issue is that and this is a really interesting recent stat is that within 2 years, people 70% of Ozempic users are off Ozempic. I don't know if it's cost, I don't know if it's discomfort, I don't know what it is, but long-term, that's not a phenomenal solution. So, with that in mind, let's unpack what the what's happening from a symptomatology point of view with Ozempic. And the biggest thing is you are not hungry. Okay? So, I can tell you thousands and thousands and thousands of comments. Those two women you started this podcast off with, when people learn how to do a a fasting lifestyle, their hunger goes away. It it is very I've never taken Ozempic, so I can't tell you like per se that if it would be the same experience, but when you learn to metabolically switch, your hunger goes down. Because without food, you go into this ketogenic energy system, you get a ketone, it turns off hunger. So, the biggest the biggest one of the biggest consequences we've seen in the millions of people we've seen build these fasting lifestyles is they go I just I'm not hungry anymore. I can relate. Yeah. When I did a I did a ke- ketogenic diet for a while, my hunger levels seemed to drop as well. Is that a similar thing? Yeah, so cuz your blood sugar is stable. Okay, so you're not getting the spikes and drops and spikes and drops. Okay, that makes sense. Um and is that much of the reason why you end up losing weight? Because you just end up eating a little bit less as well as you're, you know, you're staying away from glucose and stuff, but Yeah, it's two. It's that, and then in order to make a ketone, you have to burn fat. Like, think about it. Let's put it in Ozempic terms. It would be like going to the pharmacy, and in order to pay your Ozempic bill, you had to give them a little piece of fat. And then of your fat. And then you get them home with the shot, you plug it in, and now you're not hungry. Okay, that's what fasting's doing. Is fasting is using your own fat to make this byproduct called a ketone, so you're losing weight in the process of making the ketone, and then the ketone goes up into the brain, and actually shuts off the hunger hormone, and now you're not hungry. Can't you see a world? Cuz I think with again, this is my very limited knowledge of medicine and the bio biotech pharmaceutical industry, I think what happens with patents, like medical patents, is eventually they expire. I think they expire after about 10 years or something like that. So, eventually the Ozempic patent is going to expire, which means that other people can produce that drug. Um I think the cost will eventually therefore go down, especially as other people start producing other iterations of the drug. There becomes this price war, um and you'll have all these different versions of Ozempic, but at lower cost. Can you foresee, cuz I think I can, a world where most people in the Western world are taking some form of Ozempic to suppress hunger, and it's it's casual? I don't I don't know if I want to see that. I I mean, the first thing I'd like to see is some long-term studies on this. I'd like to see Let's let's give this a little bit of time to see what how it unfolds in the culture and how people react to it. And then we have to ask how are are we studying this on women? I'm going to I'm going to be the first advocate for making sure that this gets researched on women. So, if we look at that world, I would say, okay, I'd only be willing to entertain that thought if we have some real clear data showing us long-term, 20, 30, 40 years that it's going to be safe. Second thing though that I want to say on that, and this I go back to what you started this with. Do you feel empowered? I mean, I know people are happy. They're like, "Oh my god, I finally lose weight." They feel really good in their body. Like, I don't want to dismiss that, and I'm not here to take that joy or excitement away from somebody who's losing weight with Ozempic. I think a fasting lifestyle is a a phenomenal pair to Ozempic if that's you. But what I hear when people lose that amount of weight, let's is that when you look at them, you're like, "Oh my god, you lost so much weight." They're like, "Yeah, I'm on Ozempic." The ones that are like, I'm going to own it. Okay, so Ozempic got the power. When I see somebody who lost weight from a fasting lifestyle, what they say is, "Yeah, I started to learn how to fast." And there is an internal power that I did this for myself. So, again, we we rob them of that internal experience if every cure, including weight loss, is going to be found in a pill, how are we going to believe in our own bodies? Do you know the most interesting take I've heard on why Ozempic might be a really negative thing for society is actually the point you just made about discipline. And about you know, we talked at the start of this conversation about the comfort crisis and how everything's getting easier. We can date and eat and whatever else from the comfort of our own home. And now with AI coming into the world where we're going to have AI agents where we can tell our devices to go do things for us. If you play it forward a couple of years, you're looking at a world where we really don't have to do anything. Like, we don't have to move. We've really optimized discomfort, difficulty, challenge out of our lives. And now Ozempic offers another solution in that regard. I know I know that it saves lives, and I think that's a really amazing thing. And if I was in such situation, I would take it. If my friends, family, children were, I would I'd be the first to um make sure that they were taking it to save their lives, but you know, if we look back through history, we've trade we've made this trade-off and regretted it repeatedly. We've kind of chosen comfort and um convenience at the expense of something else, which we only find out 10 or 20 years later where we go, "Oh my god, Jesus, maybe having these devices or being able to order food like this or whatever else um was a bad idea." But we won't find out for 20, 30 years. And it's it's really interesting also to see this almost counter movement in culture where people are now this sort of um counter movement of people that are choosing difficulty. The ice bath, Right. the the hydromarathon where they're running across You know what I mean? And that feels like the counter movement to this sort of comfort crisis. Um but Ozempic I actually categorize as part of the comfort crisis. Because of the comment you I read at the start from the lady who said, "It boosted my confidence, and I can now do hard things." Yeah, and and do people say that with Ozempic? I mean, it's a really interesting point, and you know, my general ethos on health is that we should be looking within and what we're capable of doing to heal. I am not a fan of outsourcing our health. And this can even go down to the idea of of ketones. There's a lot of exogenous ketones out there, and people ask me all the time, "Should I take exogenous ketones?" And my feeling is let's get you learning how to metabolically switch so you can make your own ketone first. And and if we have to go into an exogenous ketone, we will. But the I don't That's another outsource. Like, we just keep outsourcing it, outsourcing it, outsourcing until we do not feel powerful in our own bodies. And a 20, 30 years of that is going to be a serious human crisis. I think it's I think the principle that if we don't do anything uncomfortable today, we kind of just dis- defer the discomfort into the future is a really wonderful principle to live by. You know what I mean? Like Are you And I'm not saying that in the future you're going to necessarily have a health a physical health issue or metabolic health issue if you're choosing comfort in terms of your metabolic choices today. But you might have a relationship issue because you didn't learn you know, the to deal with discomfort, have uncomfortable conversations. You know, so it's interesting. It's just these principles for life and one of them also is that I just think a really wonderful principle that I live by is that everything has a cost. And whenever someone presents you with the idea that there's a miracle drug or a miracle cure, it's because we haven't figured out the cost yet. And the uncertainty of not knowing the cost for me is terrifying. I'd rather someone said, "Listen, this isn't this drug isn't perfect and it has all these issues with it and you're going to suffer in this way, but is the trade-off worth it for you?" than to present it as a a miracle drug. And I kind of think Ozempic right now is viewed as a bit of a miracle drug. Yeah. Which scares the hell out of me. Right. Yeah. And again, what we need we need more time with the long-term studies. And I I you know, I I think what's confusing about Ozempic is it does have some amazing upsides. And so we can't just totally villainize it. It's like, "Oh, there's some interesting things to learn here." And people who are in a massive metabolic crisis, it can be a lifeline to get them out. But again, a line that I will continue to hold is lifestyle, lifestyle, lifestyle. There is no free pass when it comes to your health. You have I mean, we can hack in from many different directions. We have some pretty fast paths to health like, you know, learning how to metabolically switch. But in the end, there you are going to have to make health your responsibility and you're going to have to work for it, especially as you age. And diet is a is um is one of those things that the consequences of a bad diet, making bad dietary choices is kind of invisible today. You might not feel great or you might get a little bit of a stomachache or whatever or feel a bit bloated, but it's almost like sewing seeds for your 100-year-old self that, you know, you you don't yet see the consequence of. And this is why I think diet has to become a bit of a religion to some degree. You don't see the internal damage. You don't see the shifting of your gut microbiome on a on a daily basis. Oh, you know, I used to say this all the time to my patients. I would say, "Everything you're doing with your lifestyle now is preventing you from diseases you never knew you were going to get." Cuz you'll never get them. Mhm. So you didn't even know that the 5:00 a.m. workout that you chose to get up and go do is going to actually save you from Alzheimer's 20 years from now. You have no idea the fasting lifestyle that you committed to is actually going to save you from some kind of hormonal cancer. Like the list it goes on and on because you're doing it today to prevent tomorrow. You don't you And so there's no like reward on that front because prevention doesn't come with like a ribbon. You used the ketones. And you used it in the context of fasting. Does that mean that you were an advocate of the ketogenic diet because the the word is the same? Yeah, thank you for asking this cuz this gets confusing a lot. Um I'm an advocate of pulsing in ketones. And my way of encouraging people to do that is through fasting. Why not the ketogenic diet? So the ketogenic diet has some upsides just like Ozempic has some upsides and it has some downsides. So moving processed carbs out of your diet is always a good idea. Bringing your carb level down so your blood sugar comes down, always a good idea. But when the ketogenic diet came out, what ended up happening is people were just eating meat or eating, you know, fat and they were eat weren't eating any fruits and vegetables. Okay, for women fruits and vegetables are really important. You got to have that fiber to feed a set of bacteria in your gut that break estrogen down. So I that's why when I talk about keto, I always say it's ketobiotic cuz I brought the carb level back up. I was like, "Yes, stay off of processed carbs. But if you want to ketone you're going to get that ketone by attaching a fasting window to every single day and learning to metabolically switch. So you get over here and you make a ketone from fasting, not from manipulating your food over and over and over again, which has a long-term challenge. How long do I have to fast for in order to metabolically switch? Yeah, so 8 hours is usually what they say where the the system starts to move from sugar burner to fat burner. It usually takes about 4 hours to get over there. So we always say 12 additional hours. Okay. So well, yeah, thank you for pointing that out. So 12 hours. And now you're pretty much over into this fasting window. Your intelligent body, what it's doing is it's saying it's been 12 hours. Glucose hasn't gone up gone up and we haven't had any nutrients. Well, we're going to switch into our other fuel source and we're going to burn fat to make a ketone. So everybody's a little different because some people don't switch as easy. Some people take a little longer to make a ketone. I mean, we we saw some incredible hurdles that people hit trying to get into the fasted state that were because what I call their metabolic switch was sluggish. They had never really practiced this before and so it didn't when they were going 12 hours, all of a sudden they weren't making a ketone and they were just hungry. And so what we started to do is teach them things like, "Okay, let's This is This is a large reason why the new book is around is because I needed to create a food manual to help them clean up their food system so they could switch over into the fasted system much easier." If I'm drinking, you know, coffee or water all these kinds of things, is that going to interrupt the process of metabolically switching? You should be fine with water. Now, I have definitely seen some really extreme cases where people even have a blood sugar spike from water, but very extreme. Uh coffee, most people will do okay with coffee. Uh it's what you put in your coffee that's a problem. If it's just black coffee? Black coffee should be fine. Okay. Now, make sure it's chemical-free. Don't don't, you know, make sure it's organic. Like there's a like make it make it clean. So those two are pretty are pretty good. Um teas can be fine to drink in the fasting window. Um What are the common mistakes people make when they're intermittent fasting? That or, you know, the common myths around the process that someone who thinks they know intermittent fasting could well be making. So if we stay in the fasting window idea, um I'll tell you a couple of that I've seen like people drinking diet diet a diet drink that has chemicals in it. And so and or or a or or a synthetic sweetener that actually stimulates hunger. So you know, some of the diet drinks that are out there, there's a whole bunch of them. So people think I can just drink If we go with the mistake, people just think I can drink whatever I want then. It's just not eating. I've even had questions of, "Can I Can I do fruit juice?" I'm like, "No, it's not not eating. You're trying to get your blood sugar down so you switch over into this ketogenic energy system." So I would say the fasting window, people can trip over themselves a little bit. Then I would say, you know, of course women specifically fasting all the time. That's why I did Fast Like a Girl was women needed to know how to fast to their cycles. Uh the other mistake that uh people make is they think, "Well, they don't have to clean up their food." And that's your that's your, you know, that's your prerogative. But if you clean up food, your food system, you're going to make fasting a lot easier. So I think those are some of some of the biggies. I would say other ones that might be helpful for people listening and I'm thinking about the conversation with your girlfriend is thinking that there's a one-size-fits-all for like to skip dinner. Other people like to skip breakfast. I have plenty of people in our community that do lunch-to-lunch fasting. You get to decide where your eating window goes. It's not a There's And you know, there's a lot of theories like I'm a big fan of eat in the light, don't eat in the dark. When you eat in the dark, melatonin's in and melatonin makes you more insulin resistant. So eat in the light and just make that your fasting window. Look at the what the light patterns are. So there's some really good evidence there, but it's all customizable to you and your lifestyle. Oh, I have I have patients and friends who are like, "Sitting down at the table for dinner with my family is the most important moment of my day." And that happens at 8:00 at night. And so I'm like, "Great. Eat then. Enjoy that experience and build that Maybe your fasting window is 2:00 to 9:00 or 10:00." You must have so many people that listen to your work, read your books, and then they still can't do it. They still can't fast. They still get beaten by the hunger craving that comes at 11:00 p.m. and then the the next day at 8:00 a.m. It just wins. It just keeps winning. And they're listening to you over and over again, but the hunger cravings, the sugar cravings just keep winning and they just keep failing at this idea of fasting. You know, I it's funny because maybe I just don't see it as much. I mean, we've get hundreds of thousands of comments across our socials, you know, every week. And I try to I try to keep a pulse on them. Um but so I may not see all the maybe the people who can't fast, maybe they don't leave comments even. So, um but there was a really interesting study called the every other day diet. And the other every other day diet, this is years ago, was a researcher who took a group of people who were in a metabolic crisis. And like their cholesterol was high, their hemoglobin A1C was high, their liver enzymes were off, blood pressure, I mean everything was bad. And they were eating the Western Standard Diet. And she said, "You can eat whatever you want, but you're going to do it every other day." So, one day eat go to town, one day you're not eating at all, you're fasting all day. And then the next day go to town, eat whatever you want, and then you're fasting. And you're going to do this for a year. And so they ended up doing it for a year. Now, I want to point out there was like a third of the people that dropped out. Of course. So, we have to like point that out. Um but everybody that stayed in it, at the end of the year all their metabolic markers improved, they lost weight, but the thing that shocked the researchers the most is that their taste buds changed. What they craved changed. So, when they hung in there and they did it over a period of time, all of the sudden they went from you know, craving a hamburger and fries to create you know, craving a salad with some protein on it. And that was very unconscious. And I've thought a lot about that study and like why did that happen? And I believe it happened because of the microbiome changes. Our taste buds are not always a brain decision. Sometimes they're micro decision. And if I have a set of bad bacteria because I've been feeding bad bacteria, you know, these toxic foods, then yeah, I'm going to keep craving it and yeah, this gets difficult. But if I stick with it long enough, if I keep fasting and trying it and experimenting with it, and I and I make enough progress that I can change my microbiome, then there's a door in because now my food cravings can start to change. How does the how does fasting change your gut microbiome in that situation? This is a great question. So, uh biggest criticism, one of the biggest criticisms of fasting is it destroys your gut. So, I want to unpack this one. So, here's the here's what the science is showing. When you are in a fasted state, the longer you're there, the most famous study was out of MIT, 24-hour fast, you start to get these stem cells into the gut that repaired the gut. But when you're in a fasted state, these bad bacteria get starved out. And when they get starved out, there's an opportunity. Now, here's what I want to want to say because the criticism is that fasting destroys your gut microbes. So, first, yes, it destroys the the ones you no longer want. Now, second thing is that first meal matters. That first door into your food matters. And if you bring in probiotic, prebiotic, polyphenol foods, uh my favorite thing to break a fast with for years was an avocado with sauerkraut and hemp seeds on top of it. If you bring all of that in, now you're actually feeding those good bacteria, and they're you're helping them grow. But do the good bacteria die as well when I starve them? Some of them can, for sure. It there can be a overall depletion, for sure. So, what you're saying is you're like killing a lot of bacteria in the the gut potentially, but then you're feeding the good ones. That's right. Okay. That's right. So, we can't this is again why Eat Like a Girl came about because of these kind of questions. Was what happened was that so many people were just, you know, doing six meals a day, calorie counting, trying to manipulate their food, and then when they discovered, "Wait a second, I need to think about the timing of my food, not necessarily the quality of you know, what I'm eating." And they switched over, all of the sudden they started to drop weight. But the thing you broke your fast with, the sauerkraut etc., if I just started eating that, wouldn't the bad bacteria die anyway? But because you would so you would change the balance, hopefully where good bacteria would grow and bad bacteria would be out outnumbered at that point. Yeah. Yeah. I it's possible, yeah. I think that's the slower way, I'm going to be really honest. I guess the other the counterpoint would be then that it's hard to do that because I'd still be getting the cravings from the bad bacteria. I those bad bacteria would still be sending me signals through my gut microbiome to eat the hamburgers. We see microbiome change within weeks. Food cravings change within weeks. If you just stick with this, and then you look at that first meal matters, and you make sure you're getting those sauerkraut, you're getting hemp seeds was another one I put on my that avocado all the time, great prebiotic. So, if you make that first meal really good quality, and you feed those microbes, then this is a this is a much faster way. The every other day diet, I want to say it was about 6 months Okay. that they started to see food changes happening. Cuz it wasn't until the full year was completed that they started to actually see the food changes that happened. anecdotally in my life, when I when I changed my diet, so when I when I did tried the keto diet for a while, and when I've done other things, I lose the cravings for for bad foods, for the sort of like the hamburger or whatever, or the cookie, fairly quickly. It usually takes for me it usually takes about a week. If I don't have the bad foods for about a week, I lose my cravings for them. And I've always wondered why that is. And if there's a way to get to that point quicker. Um but it's it's fascinating cuz once I'm in that in that stage where I've lost those cravings, the next 3-4 months my diet is impeccable. But then something might happen, you someone offers me a brownie or something, I don't know, whatever. And then I and then I'm back in that struggle again of fighting the craving. So, Yeah, and it it you know, so the the microbes have a a piece of that. Um your glucose system, insulin system has has a piece of that, too. Um do you know what your hemoglobin A1C is? I don't. You should know that number. Really? Bloody hell, I should check. That that tells you what your metabolic system is doing over 90 days. So, you can see the patterns of glucose and insulin. And you want it to be around five. Hemoglobin A1C. What if it's what I want it to be around five? it to be around five. And what does that mean? So, that tells you that you are insulin sensitive, that your metabolic system is actually working efficiently. Meaning, you can eat even, you know, if somebody's got a hemoglobin A1C around five, they go eat a brownie, and we've seen this on continuous glucose monitors. Though people like this will go eat a brownie, it'll spike up crazy high, but then boom, within 60 to 90 minutes it returns back to normal. Somebody with a hemoglobin A1C of 5.5, 5.7, 5.8, that same brownie, what will happen because those cells aren't as insulin sensitive, is that you'll get this spike, and then 2-3 hours later it takes that long for the glucose to come down because that insulin system is not working at its best. So, I personally love that as a target, what is hemoglobin A1C? The other piece about hemoglobin A1C that's really important for people to understand is that the higher that number is, there's a process called glycation going on in the body, where the red blood cells that deliver oxygen to tissue are gummed up with the glu extra glucose the body doesn't know how to get into the cells. So, now the red blood cell can't carry oxygen, cuz that's its a big part of what it does, to tissues to oxygenate oxygenate those tissues. So, close off on this point of fasting then, what are some of the lesser known benefits of fasting that people don't typically think about? Cuz we think about weight loss, you know, I think that's tip that's probably the number one reason why people start fasting because they want to burn belly fat. Is that accurate? From what you've seen? Yeah, well, I mean the research is really interesting that 36 hours into a fast the body goes and starts to burn specifically belly fat. Um now, that research was done on just so we're clear, 36 hours followed by 12 hours of eating and then 36 hours of of fasting followed by 12 for 30 days, and they started to see waist circumference go down. I'm not telling people to fast that way, but I think it is surprising when you go into these longer fasts how you can unstick weight. But to answer your question, I'm going to say the biggest biggest thing is mental health. Biggest like aha, mental clarity, um happiness, uh and and I believe that's because ketones do several things. They can start to when a ketone comes on inflammation is coming down, hunger is coming down, and it supercharges the brain, so now there's this intense brain clarity that's like kicking in because a ketone let's go back to our hunter-gatherers. The ketone, when it shows up, you're finding food. And you better go find food immediately. So, your focus has to completely sharpen so you can be the best hunter possible. So, now when we're doing that in a day-to-day kind of bit life, that ketone we don't we're not hunting, but we might be working, we might be in an interview, and so with that sharpened focus is so amazing. And then the other piece I really like about the ketone is with it it brings GABA. And so GABA calms you. What's GABA? So, GABA is a neurotransmitter, and when ketones go up, GABA follows. So again, let's go back to our hunter and gatherer friends. When GABA when ketones are up, I'm focused. I have clarity. I'm hunting for food and I better stay calm because I need to go find food. On on the point of um women and fasting. I think you said to me last time that women shouldn't be fasting when they're on their periods. The week before their period. before their period, okay. Yeah. So, in the lead up to their period, they should be avoiding fasting. Why is that again? Yeah. So, let's go through the the hormones because I think this is one this you asked me what has surprised me on on the book coming out. I'll tell you the other thing that surprised me. How many women don't understand their hormones? Like you're controlled by it. Your behaviors, your sleep, your interactions with human and we don't have a system that's teaching women hormones. This is appalling. So, when we look at the three sex hormones, when it comes through the lens of fasting, estrogen, which comes in the front half of a woman's cycle, does really well with fasting because she likes you to be insulin sensitive. A great example of this is the growing number of cases of polycystic ovarian syndrome where we are seeing insulin resistance leading to infertility because of an imbalance in the estrogen system and we're seeing an increase in testosterone because of this insulin system being off. So, we need uh when estrogen comes in a tool to help women to be insulin sensitive. Progesterone's her twin sister. They look the same, we call them the same, but she acts exactly opposite. She wants glucose to be higher. She doesn't do well with cortisol. Cortisol comes in, she's she's she's gone away. I always say when progesterone goes high, cortisol is shy. And cortisol is this like stress hormone? Yeah. So, in a woman's 30-day period, you have moments where estrogen is making her peak and you have moments where progesterone is making her peak. So, if she's on the keto diet, if she is in calorie restriction, if she is fasting all the time, she's not honoring the rhythms of these two hormones. And that is a major problem. So, we say don't fast the week before your period because you need glucose to be higher and you don't want cortisol to be high. And just like exercise increases cortisol, so does fasting. So, what's going to happen if you if you if you fast the week before your period, what's the consequence? Yeah. So, what we've typically seen is women lose their cycles. Okay. You need progesterone. So, so let's go through let's put it through the lens of a woman's brain. Around day 20, like progesterone's building, building, building, building. She has to peak. And then the when she hits a peak, the uterine lining sheds and you have a period. Okay, if you are fasting during that time and you didn't bring your gluco- glucose up high enough, she progesterone may not peak and then you don't have that shed of blood. When you shed every single month that menstrual blood that comes out, there are four major chemicals in them. There are phthalates, there are uh parabens, there are forever chemicals, and there are plastics. They can actually measure that in a woman's menstrual blood. So, if she's not bleeding, then she's not detoxing. Cuz those four chemicals are toxic. They're toxic. Yes. What do you what do you say to those peop- people um that are don't have menstrual cycles and they're you know, cuz listen, I obviously I've never been through that myself, but um I have a partner who's been very open. I think she did a post last week on her Instagram describing the journey that she went on to try and get her menstrual cycle back and she successfully has now. Amazing. Um she's 31. She's the same age as me now. And she had, you know, many years where she had an inconsistent or non-existent menstrual cycle. Um and I got to observe firsthand how frustrating, saddening, confusing that is and how you feel like you're broken in some way if you're not having a menstrual cycle as a woman. So, what do you what what can what do we offer those women? Well, for I I applaud your girlfriend for doing that. I I first want to say that. Like getting your cycle back not only just for pregnancy, but for general health is it's brilliant. Like so smart to do that. Um you know, I think a lot of women think it's great they don't have a menstrual cycle. That's that's a little bit in the culture right now. Um so, for the to those women who feel like this is a blessing they don't have a cycle, I'd ask them to rethink that. Um even if they don't want to have kids, let's rethink it cuz your body needs to shed every single month. So, there's that. For the other women that are struggling to get their periods, the first thing that and I'd be curious if your if your girlfriend discovered this is that we have to realize that a woman's body is rhythmic. It has times where we can be outgoing and we can conquer the world and there's times we're going to sit on the couch and do nothing. And there's times that we're really happy and there's times don't look at us that way because we're going to our hormonal system is agitated. So, we are constantly in a state of rhythm. And when you're not shedding, you're missing a major part of your rhythm that is makes you a woman. We talked about this last time and it was the first time as a employer I started to reconsider how we run our business because if women do need certain accommodations based on their cycle, um what might be an optimal way for an employer to set up a working schedule for a woman which would be accommodating of her cycle. So, this is what I came up with is I we we talked about this idea of like 3 days off every single month. What if every employee had 3 days off every single month, no questions asked, you take it when you want to take it? And then there's an educational process for the women that we recommend you take it the week before your period because that's going to absolutely help you in supporting your hormonal health. And what we know is if you take it off the week before your period that when you come back, you're going to be an even better version of yourself. So, it's again not a weakness. So, I would think you would take some chunk of time and and you let your employee use their prerogative because you can't tell them, you know, when to take time you know, when to use it with their period. I think that's the most fair because then the men can do it, too. Yeah. I don't know how you feel about that as an employer or we're doing that already then because we do offer what we call unlimited holiday. I guess it's more like a responsible holiday policy where people can take as much time as they like. So, someone like Jack in the team, who also applies for me, can decide to take as much holiday as he wants when he wants. And I have no idea uh but sat here now how much holiday Jack has taken this year, for example, or why he's taken it and when he's taken it. Yeah. I guess therefore with that in place, people can decide to do that without having to broadcast why they're off to the company. Exactly. And and to the women in the company, what they need to know is that that day that like everything is crashing down on you and your your stress is coming from all different angles and you have to get up and push through on that day and it's day 25 of your menstrual cycle, if it is appropriate on that day for you to stay home and you work in a company like this that is no questions asked, then stay home. And nurture yourself. And and be aware that every moment a woman is pushing through that week before her period, she is destroying her hormonal system. Now, there are little pushes through and there are big pushes through. So, I'm talking about the big pushes through. I'm not talking about the moment you wake up and you're like, "Yeah, it's going to be a boring day." Or there's some difficult conversations I have to have today. I'm talking about the moment when your energy's down, you're brain fog, you might be having some cramps, you might be really irritable, and you're like, "I can't take one more thing. How about I have this really cool company I work for. What if I just nurture and myself today and take care of myself so I can show up tomorrow a better person?" One of the other things that I wanted to talk to you about cuz I I noticed it popped into my fridge after our conversation. Um and I know my partner listened to the conversation. As I said to you, it was translated into a bunch of languages, so her her family got to listen to it in Spanish as well. Um was this this apple cider vinegar thing. In the door of my fridge, there's apple cider vinegar and I wasn't sure what it was the other day, so I drank a bit and it's disgusting. But I I thought it looked kind of like apple juice or something. Um and I tried it and it was really disgusting. But apple cider vinegar is currently in the door of my fridge. My my partner, she's so smart. She she's ahead of me on all of these things. Why is it in the door of my fridge? Have you tried Have you tried it? I tried it, it was disgusting. It's totally disgusting. little bit too strong. But I tried it straight from the bottle and then I put it back and left it. Well, so I'll tell I'll give you the reason why I had it here in a second, but I have the same experience. I do not like apple cider vinegar, although they've come out with some really good modifications and drinks with it, which is amazing. And um we you know, we're always trying to look at how we can support people on our YouTube channel. And um one of our consultants was like, "Oh, you need to do a video on apple cider vinegar." Mhm. And I was like, "Really?" Because I don't really like apple cider vinegar. It's hard to advocate something I don't like. And so, I finally did one and it it went viral. Like everybody wanted to know about apple cider vinegar. So, here's why it works is it stabilizes blood sugar. So, let's unpack this though because this is really interesting. So, apple cider vinegar can be taken before a meal or after a meal to have a different glucose response. So you a less of a glucose response. So that's why people use it. I don't know when she's drinking it, but typically people would do it before a meal or after a meal to make sure that the glucose spike wasn't high. So the second question then to ask yourself is why does that work? So apple cider vinegar is incredibly nurturing to the gut microbes. And your gut microbes actually control your blood sugar levels. They have a They send a bacterial signal to the liver cuz the liver is a major fat burning organ. It's a major participant in balancing blood sugar. And the two of them coordinate a blood sugar response of a meal. So let's use a woman on birth control for decades. There's new studies showing that that actually upregulates some bad bacteria. That bad bacteria when food hits it has a heyday and it has this really exaggerated glucose response. Okay, she takes some some apple cider vinegar. And now we've got her glucose her bacteria favoring a better glucose response. And how many how many times a day do you think men and women should be eating? Because there's this one meal a day thing that some people subscribe subscribe to where you just have one meal every single day. But is that I'm not I'm unsure whether that's healthy for both men and women at all stages in their cycle. I If we bring both men and women into that conversation, I like to look at feast famine cycling is what you're is best. Let's go back to our hunter and gatherer people. What sometimes they would make a big kill and they would feast for days. They didn't fast. They were like, "Oh, we have food. We don't have refrigeration." They would feast for days. And then they would all of a sudden go into a famine state. And now they're in a famine state and now they got to go out and they're fasting for days. So this is how our human body was created. So now when we're doing one meal a day, we're not we're not really mimicking that. We're mimicking pieces of that. When we're eating all day, we're only mimicking the kill. We're not mimicking the hunt. So I think variation is really great and um it gives freedom and flexibility. Like it allows you to have one meal one day and three the next and two the next. And it gives you that ability to just be in flow with with food and not be so rigid. So I'm not a one meal a day fan. I'm definitely not a one meal a day fan for women. Why? Uh this is how this whole concept started was all the one meal a day women um were doing it for 90 days or longer, never cycling it, showed up on my YouTube channel. And they had lost their periods, their hair was falling out, um they were agitated because they weren't minding the week before their cycle. So you know, one meal a day maybe for the first 10 days of your cycle. Okay, that would work. But then let's switch out when we go into ovulation. I need more meals a day. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Are there any drinks that you would um recommend for specifically for weight loss and repair? Well, we started with apple cider vinegar. So I think we've we've addressed that. That you could drink that in your fasting window. Um especially with people who have really high blood sugar and they can't seem to get it down. Try drinking that in your fasting window. I think that that's a really interesting insight. Um the the second one in the in the morning is coffee. Um there are signs that coffee and studies showing that it can speed up our metabolism. Now if you don't drink coffee, I'm I'm not telling you to go drink it, but there is some really interesting indications that that people who drink coffee have a faster metabolism. Okay. So you could do that. Um uh capsicum, something spicy. So cayenne pepper, which is a spice, has a heat to it. And that heat is actually been proven to speed up metabolism. Honey. Honey. What do I think of honey? Yeah, what do you think of honey? Raw would be best because it Anytime we get anything raw, it's got the enzymes in them. Anytime we pasteurize it, now we've killed it cuz we had to heat it up. So I like honey. I think it's a great sweetener. Um it's a little higher on the glycemic index than like, you know, things like stevia that people seem to love. I hate the taste of stevia, so I would I would slant towards honey. Um but I I have a problem with honey. I I think I think we got a little crazy on sweeteners. Mhm. Like we got to we got Like let's go back to real food, people. And honey is a real food. Are there foods that you consider to be cancer feeding? Yeah. Well, sugar. Sugar I can see. Yeah, sugar's a biggie. But but are there are there certain foods that we all assume are healthy? Like what are the what are the the foods that you know, your kid I, anybody that's not spending a lot of time doing the research, think they are consuming that are beneficial to them that are in fact cancer feeding? So one of them that was years ago was the um processed meats. Yeah. And hot dogs specifically. I don't know if you remember the study, but it showed like kids that ate processed meats, you know, a couple of times and I and I don't know the exact, so I don't want to misquote the study, but the general theme was when you had processed meats consistently throughout a week, you had a higher case of leukemia. That's the the correlation they were looking for. So processed meats have chemicals in them. So that would be that would definitely be one. Um I mean the sugar cereals are are are packed with chemicals. The the toxic oils in like donuts, like horrific for children. Um juice boxes, the Go-GURTs. Oh my gosh, my kids would like What's that? It's like yogurt that has been packed with sugar and artificial colorings that make it blue and then put into a tube. I I I hope they've changed this. Put into a plastic tube and kids would just like slurp it out of this plastic tube. And there every single ingredient in there was toxic. And it was in a toxic container. And what And And to to continue this thought, I know you've done stuff you've had guests on here about obesogens. Mhm. So let's go back to the Go-GURT. All those things I just mentioned are obesogens. And what are obesogens doing to children? They're And they're doing this to pregnant women. They are turning their stem cells into fat cells. They're telling their They're reprogramming their stem cells, specifically the stem cells that make bone cells, and they're telling those stem cells to make fat cells. And one of the things we're seeing right now is the height of children is less than it's ever been and the weight of children is greater than it's ever been. When we have a world of obese children, we have a chronic health problem coming down the line. And those are the kind of things where I just get irate with the food industry. We have to change that because well-intending parents don't know this. And so they go in and they're like, "Oh, my kids are so happy with the Go-GURT. I just want to make them happy." And it says it's got fruit in it. And it says it And it says all natural. Which is a buzzword that has no regulations on it. What is an obesogen? So obesogens were are chemicals that are allowed in our food that turn Well, they do two things, but the big thing that I'm really focused on right now is they turn our stem cells into fat cells. And what is a stem cell? Great question. So a stem cell is a cell that can go anywhere in the body and it can it can repair anything. It can make anything. So it's like a universal cell. It can do anything. It can make an eyeball. It can make an an ankle. And you have a ton of them when you're little. And you lose them after about 30. You don't lose them completely, but they start You start to get less of them. And they're a good thing. Production of stem cells is a good thing. Yeah. Yeah, they're they're a stem cell is a great thing. So one of my fav or you know, favorite is a tough word to say. One of the most interesting reviews that I've seen on obesogens was put out by um Science for Public Interest. Citizen Science for Public Interest. It's a beautiful PDF. And basically it has list after list and study after study of these obesogens and all the ways that they are altering our stem cells and turning them into reprogramming them into these fat cells. And all the different ways that the obesity crisis we are seeing right now in our children comes from these chemicals that are allowed in our food. And then it lists list after list after list of everything that we are putting into food that we are lathering our body that are is in our chemical environment and how these massive influx of chemicals is contributing to obesity. And specifically in a younger generation. Now, let's zoom out. Let's zoom out big picture. What's happening in our culture right now? Our culture is like obesity is a problem. It you know, we went from an immune system problem to really understand we have an obesity problem. And this across many countries. And it's not just in adults, it's in kids. Does that mean that every single person that is obese right now is undisciplined? I argue no. It's because what we are eating is reprogramming our cells to make fat cells. And now we've come up with a drug to be able to solve that problem. That's a huge beef for me. That's a that that is at the core of that that is wrong. Why? We haven't gotten to the root cause. Let's fix the food system. We have to fix the food system. If we don't fix the food system, we are going to have problems beyond obesity. We're going to have cancer problems. We're going to have anxiety problems. We're going to have you know all the brain challenges that come with that. They're excitotoxins toxins that rev up the nervous system. And just ask any parent who's ever gave their child a Go-Gurt. What was their mood? They might have been happy eating it, but how were they within the next couple hours afterwards? Bouncing off the walls is an excitotoxin. It's an interesting point that okay, we might be skinny, but we might still be suffering with the cancers and the Yep. I don't know the ADHDs and stuff like that. Things that are linked to um uh diets. Yep. So we might be skinny, but we might appear to be healthy in this episode. We might not have the I don't know the type 2 diabetes or whatever. Yep. But it doesn't mean we're going to be any better. It's 73% of Americans right now are overweight or or obese. So the skinny population is is move is going away very quickly. I did a research for England here recently cuz I'm speaking at a conference this weekend. It's like 64% of um people in England are either overweight or obese. All right, you know, we've got 30% of our children like not teenagers like children that are under 13 and under are obese. And we have 50% of teenagers that are obese. We have a chemical problem. We have an obesogen problem that needs to be addressed. So my biggest beef is that we I'm not is that we came up with Ozempic. Okay. Phenomenal temporary solution. Can we please get to the root cause? And that's what's not being addressed. And and the and and the the media, the the way the information gets put out there is we don't understand why. Yes, we do. We understand why. And we have play we just don't want to address the why. And there's too much money in the food industry to change that. And that is criminal and as a parent, I am not okay with that. Even though my kids have you know are are beyond that point, but it it it is something that every parent should be irate about. And the only way we're going to change that is we vote with our dollars. And we start to buy our kids natural healthy real food that doesn't have these obesogens in them. What does that world look like? If I gave you a magic wand and I said, "Okay, you're going to be the president of the entire world and you can implement any rule as it relates to food, you know, that you want. What do you do day one?" Uh day one we implement an education system. Okay. A a body and a food education system. So we empower the individual and we teach them metabolic switching. Now, for kids we can we can put that one aside because I'm not advocating for kids to fast, but I am advocating for kids to understand their blood sugar. Why not kids fasting? Well, we have the the tricky part of eating disorders. So I you know, I'm a fan of a child who's under 13 teaching them their own natural rhythm with food. So what happens is we say kitchen closes at 7:00, breakfast is the most important meal. You only have a lunch break from 12:00 to 1:00 at school, so you got to eat that then. So we take that intuitive sense that kids should get around when I'm hungry and when I'm not hungry and we completely like make that go away. So I would start to bring in a more intuitive sense and allow help educate I mean kids were if we're talking about kids right now, help educate them on what it means to be hungry when and and find their own internal guidance system there. With adults, I here's what I would do day one. I would put continuous glucose monitors on every person on the planet. And I would say, "Okay, eat." Just eat. And let's see what your response is. That would change every single person's relationship to food. Eat your favorite foods, eat the foods you don't like, eat them all and look at the glucose response. And now you have you see the logical consequence of that. That would be so powerful if we could if we could do that. And then the the next thing I would do is I would outlaw chemicals in our food. Completely outlaw them. Like no more. Let's go back to real food. All chemicals? All chemicals. If I go into a supermarket, what do I see? Oh, thank you. You see uh fruits and vegetables. And and when you look at them, they're not shiny. They're not all the same size. They're all different sizes. Some are a little bit less ripe. They're all not all unripe. They're all some of them are more ripe. They look like something that came out of your backyard garden. Ugly. Like very different. I would have for people who want to eat meat and I'm a I'm a fan of people eating meat. I would have healthy meat that hasn't been pumped with antibiotics, hasn't been pumped with growth hormone. Healthy meat. I would have eggs from not just chickens, but ducks that have we get a variety of eggs in there. I if we could have breads. I'm not opposed to breads. Maybe there's sourdough breads and fermented foods. But this grocery store that we would create in the future, all of these foods would actually spoil within a week. 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So I'm giving you the Diary of a CEO community a $100 credit on your next LinkedIn ad campaign. Head to linkedin.com/doac24 to get started now. The link is in the description below. We talked about cell stem cell production. Does stem cell production increase if I fast? The longer in the in the longer fast, yeah. 3 days is in the the research was 24 hours um for gut repair. For so you get intestinal stem cells. But for systemic stem cells, 3 days, 72 hours. And those systemic stem cells can do what for me? They can go anywhere in your body and repair anything. So if I have a toe injury, I had toe injury recently. I played this football match called Soccerade. Um I was thinking in the lead up to it I really need to make sure that my toe is healed cuz it had some like inflammation. The joint had like I think I like almost dislocated it. I was think it did cross my mind. I did did cross my mind. Maybe I should fast for a couple of days Yes. to um help accelerate the repair so that I can play in this big football match which was in London almost 50,000 people there on this particular day which was about a about 2 weeks away. So would fasting help me in that situation? The story I always use is that I had an Achilles tendon uh injury and I tried everything and it was like not healing. I couldn't work out. It was really bumming me out. And so my last resort I was like, "Okay, let me throw a 3-day water fast at it." Um on the third day, I just started to notice that the pain was a little less. And a lot of that is just cuz the inflammation's coming down. The stem cells were starting to kick in. By the end of the third day, I'm like, "I think the pain's like 50% gone." So I thought, "Let me stick with this and how long can I go until the pain's completely gone?" So I ended up going five full days in a fasted state. On the fifth day, the pain was completely gone and to this day it has never come back. What happened? That has to be stem cells being active in my body going in there and repairing that Achilles tendon. I didn't do anything that week. I didn't take supplements. I didn't do any fancy treatments. I literally went into a 5-day water fast and my body figured out how to get the stem cells to where they needed to go. Is there any scientific support for this idea that fasting can accelerate repair and um heal injury? Musculoskeletal-wise, I have not seen that correlation. Stem cell-wise, we we have several studies. Walter Longo was the researcher who showed that the whole immune system gets rebooted with when a 3-day water fast. He went on to try different types of fasting. Uh one of them is the fast mimicking diet he created which is like a calorie restriction. So there's a little bit lower calorie restriction diet and he did it with people who were type 1 diabetics. And he had 5 days once a month for 3 months. He had them do this extreme calorie restriction and he had some some um requirements around protein. He wanted to keep them in a state of autophagy. So he kept protein under 20 g. And what he found after 3 months is that the pancreatic cells were actually starting to regrow themselves from that style of fasting. It's called the fast-mimicking diet. Which is just calorie restriction. Just calorie, less than 800. 800 calories, less than um 20 g of protein. It must be pretty easy to test this because you could theoretically bring in a group of I don't know 100 people and I don't know give them a little cut or a little pin prick or something Yeah. and then put them on different diets and see how quickly they healed from that cut or whatever. You would think, yeah. I think you could probably do it and and really look at it that way. Um yeah, I mean I'm sure and and I I haven't done a specific PubMed search just on musculoskeletal repair and fasting. You have me thinking so I'm going to put my research researchers on it and then I'll send you what I find. Great cuz I'd love to know. I was throwing everything at my bloody toe. I was like icing it and putting it up in the air to try and get the people told me that that helped inflammation and I was and eventually in the lead-up to the game I I took um ibuprofen and some like anti-inflammatories which I absolutely never take. I never take any medication because I was just trying to throw everything at it. So it would have been good to know in future that if I have some kind of injury that fasting might be long stage fasting might be useful. I mean we see people we get so many like comments of people like joints move better when they're like a couple days into a fast. Um so you know, you have to remember the whole inflammatory system starts to come down and so there's there's a body that just is in more ease. But I'd I'd be curious for you to try it. What about you mentioned protein there? Mhm. This is time I saw which was protein cycling. I I I don't really know what that means but I was hoping maybe you could enlighten me. Where'd you see that? I I saw that that protein cycling is a useful part of your waist weight loss regime. I was reading an article about So so let's talk about protein in general. Um definitely protein is the hero macronutrient of the day. Like there's no doubt protein we need more protein. And I really like this idea of and I the research supports it. There's experts out there that are talking about it that I think is phenomenal and I like this idea of making sure you have at least 30 g of protein especially at your first meal. It opens up uh amino acid sensor system that now makes your muscles very grabby and receptive to all other protein that you eat the rest of the day. So I really like that. I also think it's very interesting to figure out how to get 1 g of protein for or 1 and 1/2 g of protein for every every kilogram of body weight or 1 1 to 2 g of protein for every pound of body weight you want to be. So your ideal weight. Okay. Okay. Let's say you're 130 lb. So you would need 130 g of protein. So how you going to get that in in a day? Now some people are like I'll just eat a big steak and I'll get it in all in one go. But what I have seen is that for some people when they eat a lot of protein their body can't take the influx in one meal and so it turns to excess glucose which then turns to extra fat. So I'm a fan of dosing it in. You do 30 g here, 50 g there, 70 g there. There was old research. This is now been updated but there were old there was old research showing that the pulsing in they call it protein cycling actually was the best way to get protein into your system that way. How do you dose it in? Just biting? Well, let's put it in applicable terms. So you have a smoothie. Um maybe it's got 30 g and then a couple hours later I'm going to go with the meat world like you have a you know, a bunch of hard-boiled eggs. Maybe have like a scrambled eggs. Maybe then 2 hours later you have a chicken breast on top of some uh bed of lettuce. I heard that I don't know this was years ago I heard this that we can only like process 20 g of protein a day anyway. So we're all like having too much protein anyway in our diets. I think that's changed. Um I'm not up to speed on like 2024 what what we're saying but I can tell you from the protein experts that are out there there's a huge push right now to eat more protein because and and it's not 20 g a day. I I remember someone telling me cuz I was back in the day when I was having a lot of protein shakes they were telling me it doesn't really matter if you drink more protein because your body can only process like 20 g a day so it's just going to poop it out or convert it to glucose and You know, I can I again I'm going to go back to what I've seen clinically um that some people eat protein and and they all of a sudden this is women again I should probably be more you know, women is really my specialty. So when I look at women eating more protein a lot of them especially the younger women um all of a sudden like their workouts are better. They grow muscle better. Like they really love that extra protein. I've also seen women who are going through the perimenopausal years that are really metabolically unhealthy and they jump on this pro protein idea and they start eating too much protein and they minimize carbs and they just start gaining weight. And so it's because there's just too much glucose in the system and that they're not insulin sensitive yet and so that's just turning that extra protein is just turning back into more glucose and when you have extra glucose the body stores it as fat. So I I think we're back at this personalized idea. There's some concepts that are really great. Now you experiment with them and see what works best for you. How important is our liver in all of this? Oh, it's the most important. Yeah, outside the brain. Brain, gut, liver. Keep those healthy. Like keep those really healthy. So liver breaks down hormones. So you need it to break down hormones like thyroid hormone. Let's use thyroid for example. The brain sends a signal to the thyroid to make TSH goes to thyroid tells the thyroid to make T4. What's that? So T4 is a thyroid version of a thyroid hormone. The four stands stands stands for how many iodine sites it has. T4 is unusable to the cell. So what T4 has to do is has to go on the liver and the gut where those those two organs conjugate it, convert it, change it into something called T3. T3 is now usable to your cells and T3 goes into the cell and activates the metabolism and everything the thyroid's supposed to do. If I have poor thyroid health, if my gut is off because I've been on too many antibiotics or birth control, what may end up happening is my thyroid's working fine, my brain's working fine, but it's not converting into a usable format for my cells. Mhm. So there's an example of where a stagnant liver, a liver that's that's struggling, not healthy can actually affect hormones how a hormone manifests in your body. Mhm. So how do I know if my liver is healthy? Is there any symptoms of an unhealthy or toxic liver? Well, let's go through possibilities. I call them checklists. Okay. Okay? And the reason I call them checklists is because they may not apply to everybody. The first question to ask if your liver is healthy is when you go without food do you make a ketone? Okay. If you don't make a ketone and you're like I've had we've had people that are like 20 hours in, 36 hours in, 48 hours in. They're like I'm still not making a ketone. How do they know? Because we have them testing. Okay. So a little little ketone uh you the the continuous No, that's so interesting. I didn't know those were even a thing. Oh yeah, you should get one. So you get a little monitor and you prick your finger and then you put your blood on this little strip and you put the strip into this little monitor and it tells you how many ketones you have. Okay, so more ketones the better, right? Yeah. Okay, interesting. So if you can't make ketones or you're you're starving would be another or you're you know, after a long period you're not feeling the benefits of fasting, that could be because of your liver. So we now have okay, that's liver liver issue number one. Okay. Then we can go to things like how do you process alcohol? Like you know how there's certain people who like you go out to drink with them and after a couple drinks they're dancing on the table and then there's other people that like can drink the whole bar and they seem like they're completely normal compared to when they walked in. Yeah. So that's liver function. Like what how well how quickly is that liver metabolizing that alcohol? Which one is healthy, sorry? Um well, I actually think metabolizing it quickly is better than the stagnant person. So the person that's hammered Yeah. is going to be Yeah. Okay. So I mean there's a lot of there's a lot of nuance in that in that comment. So just so just so we don't get the whole world coming after you or I on that. So Um so it's how quickly are you able to metabolize a toxin in your system and and get it out of you. So that would be another one. Then we have some really really good ones. Really like applicable ones. Like this is based off some old ancient strategies like corner of your eye. If the inside of your eye is yellow according to iridology which is the study of the eye as it relates to health, when the corner of the eye is yellow, that can be a sign of liver stagnation. Okay, another one. I just the inside corner? Yeah. So, next to your nose? Mhm. Okay. Another one, you can look at the bottom of your feet. So, bottom of your feet when they're dry and cracking is showing that you're not getting proper circulation down to your feet. And so, it can be a possibility that the liver is not doing a good job of detoxing and getting toxins out so your your circulatory system has more sludge in it. So, the circulation isn't freely getting down to the bottom of your feet. Have you ever asked someone to show you you their feet? Oh, yeah. Really? Yeah. Yeah, feet, eyes, I want to know everything cuz it it tell feet, eyes, I want to know what your menstrual blood. I don't want need to see it, but I want to know is it is it clumpy? How quickly does the flow come out? These kind of things are so important. How quickly your hair grows, how quickly your nails grow. What it's What's on your nails? Are nails on ridge ridges on your nails? Cuz that could be minerals. Like, our body gives us a full analysis of what's going on. So, I have looked at a lot of feet. And And if I look at my feet now, um Never It's when I can take a quick look cuz I never I can't remember really looking at the bottom of my feet. What is What is a sign that my liver is not healthy looking at the bottom of my feet? It's the real dry cracks. Oh, no, mine is mine is soft like a baby's bottom. There you go. Do you want to put it up on the table so I can see it? No, cuz people will sell pictures. Oh, that's right. OH MY GOD. I WOULD TRY THE REVENUE IF THAT HAPPENED. YES. OH MY GOD. You're so accurate. Um Okay, interesting. So, So, here's a couple Let's give people a daily routine of what to look at to be able to see like how your body's functioning. So, when I get up in the morning, that's one thing I do. I always look in the I'm periodically, you know, throughout the day looking in the corner of my eyes. Like, where it What Is there a yellow tinge in there? So, I look at that. I also look at my tongue every morning when I wake up. Do you look at your tongue? Not really. Okay. So, when you look at your tongue, is it have a white coat on it? If it has a white coat on it, that can be a sign of candida, of you too much yeast in your system, and your body's detoxing. You can also look at your tongue when you fast. Sometimes it'll go black. And that's like candida coming out. That's yeast coming out. So, make sure you're looking at your tongue. I every morning I look at my tongue. So, cuz at night it you kind of see what's detoxing out of you. So, if it's white, what do I do? If it's black, what do I do? So, if it's white and black, you have candida. That's a sign of too much yeast in the system. So, I mean, fasting can help. Uh getting off sugar, alcohol, fruits can help. Uh we just find people who fast, especially if you go into longer fasts, it'll start to change. We've even done some some interesting community fasts where we have people watch their fast, and they decide to break their fast based off what their tongue is doing. So, if it's white and it's black and it's getting worse, keep going. If you can keep going until it starts to turn pink. And then the outside of the tongue will actually start to turn pink. And then we know, okay, the yeast is starting to die off. Go ahead and break your fast. Mhm. So, that's That's one way that you can look at the tongue. Um We talked already talked about the bottom of the feet, periodically looking at that. Your hair and and your nails. So, do you ever look at like the ridges of your nails? No. Okay. So, when there's a lot of ridges in your nails or how quickly your nails are growing, that can be a sign of mineral deficiency. Okay. If your hair is falling out So, on the nails then, what what am I What am I looking for? I'm looking There's no ridges in my nails. Perfect. So, you you probably have a good mineral load. Okay. But, if you ever look down and you see mineral you know, those ridges, that can be a sign that there is is you have too many low minerals. And what kind of minerals would you then supplement with or focus on? Yeah, you know, I'm I'm a huge fan right now of organic minerals that come from the earth like fulvic and humic acid type minerals that are coming from like volcanic ash cuz they're very very rich in in minerals that we're not getting in your typical mineral supplement or your food. You know, you know the whole thing about uh conventional farming and how it's depleting the minerals in our soils, No. I feel like this is going to get really depressing really quick. That's fine. Do you want me to tell you the truth? know the truth. Okay. So, the soils that are being monocropped, where they're being tilled over and over again, um not from regenerative farms, uh what we are know now is that they are deficient in minerals. So, the way that it's being expressed to people is the broccoli you have now has less vitamin and mineral content than the broccoli you had 10, 20, 30 years ago because of how the farmers are taking care of the soil. Mhm. Now, you go to a regenerative farm where there's bugs, there's weeds, they don't spray, when a crop grows, they let it die, they don't till, that has more minerals. So, when you are actually eating food from regenerative farms, you're getting the minerals that you need into your system. So, when like you people look at their nails not growing, they look at the ridges, a good question if you let's just at least start with fruits and vegetables coming from regenerative farms if you don't want to spend money on supplements. If you If you have the resources to spend money on supplements, go ahead and and do that. And is there anything else that I should be looking for as a sort of marker of my or as a signal of my overall health? You said the eyes, you said the feet, we said the nails. The hair. The hair, how quickly your hair grows. Okay. The quality of your hair. Like, is it you know, is it always have the same moisture and texture? What's your view on alcohol? Ooh, this is a good one. Um There's never a moment where alcohol is a health food. Let's just be clear on that. Um So, I think there are the research on alcohol and brain health is is needs to be honored. Dr. Amen, I know he's been on your podcast, and um he has been very clear on that stance. A lot of people have. Not great for brain health. Not great for liver health because when there's alcohol in your liver, then you're now shutting down your liver's ability to burn fat and to detox and do the all the other things. All it's doing is taking care of of the uh the alcohol toxin. So, not great for both of those. Hormones? Not great for hormones because you need your liver to break down estrogen. It's a real and and all the other ones, but specifically so hot flashes, very common to see hot flashes go up when women have a glass of wine or not. So, that is That's the downside. What's the upside? Is there an upside? Well, I'm going to I'm going to throw it out as a an and I I'm going to be Be how I say this cuz I know people are going to take my words and try to to make them absolutes. When you're drinking a lower alcohol that is clean alcohol, like a wine that hasn't been sprayed with pesticides, that doesn't have a lot of toxins, that doesn't have a ton of added sugars in it, um then you are now putting somebody into a temporary temporary lower cortisol state. So, you're you're bringing down their glucose, you're bringing down you're calming them down if they've been wound up from the day. And so they're a little more in a relaxed state, and they might be a little more social. Every once in a while, I'm not talking every day. Every once in a while you splash a glass of wine in an in an into your life, you have a connection, a glass. I'm not talking a lot. You have a a deeper connection cuz you're more relaxed. What happens when we're connecting with others? Um oxytocin? That's right. You're bringing oxytocin up. Now, I want I want I really want people to hear me through on this one, because I know my words will get very twisted on this one. I want to be really clear. In this scenario, you've taken somebody who might have been very stressed out, had a really horrible day. They were not looking to connect with their spouse. They couldn't connect cuz their brain is like looping. You give them a glass of wine on that one part of the day, at the end of the day, and all of a sudden they're in a little more relaxed state, and they're more in a place where they want to connect. And so oxytocin now goes up. And then the problem I guess is the next day they go to work, they have another [ __ ] day, they come home, they drink the wine again, and the is that. Yeah. If you could isolate it and not cause this addiction cycle, then in isolation Yeah. It could Yeah. I mean, I I really the nuance on that is so important, because people will literally come after me and say I said alcohol is a health food. I'm not saying that. In the example that I just gave, where do we leave room for human connection? How do we get out of this drive drive drive over production stressed out so stressed out I can't connect with people? Where is health in that? Breathwork. Yeah, if they'll do breath Yeah, there's a lot of other things. You're right, there's a lot of other things. So, I I want to Let but let's let's let's put it in this context, cuz it it needs to live in a in a scenario that we do. You go out with friends, you eat good food, you have a glass of wine, you're enjoying each other, you're enjoying life. Is that dangerous? Would the world be a better place if alcohol didn't exist? Well, I think a lot of people would say yes. I mean, people who have dealt with alcoholics would definitely say yes. Um Cuz I feel like we would have just found a different way to connect. And you know, can this idea that alcohol helps us to connect is probably cuz of the way we've designed the world. Like bars, restaurants, pubs, all those kinds of things. And I feel like if we'd never discovered the invention, we would have just found another way. You go to other parts of the world where they don't really drink, they do kind of have another way. Like I was in Bali, and they do these like ecstatic dances. Yeah, but it's like Have you ever seen one of these things? It's daytime, they have the music blaring, and everyone is just going absolutely crazy. They're like dancing as if they're all absolutely hammered. And they're doing it in daytime, and then they're uh For when I look at it, I go absolutely never, I'm never doing it. But my my partner does all the time. And I go But it's just And I look at these people and I go, do you not realize that you look weird? And I'm saying that through the lens of this social construct I have that that behavior is not normal or acceptable. Right. You know what I mean? But it's actually like people are going wild in daytime to music together in a room. And they have to be feeling amazing. They must feel amazing. Yeah. So connected, so free. Right. But it's just weird over here. No I mean, ecstatic dancing is a thing over here. In fact, it's happens upstairs in the studio. Okay. Um but it's not something that that's oxytocin. Of course, yeah. So maybe we should frame all of this under the what's going to give you oxytocin. We need to do more oxytocin rich activities so that we can make sure we keep human connection up, because human connection is so incredibly important. And so if ecstatic dance is your thing, great. You know, again to your point, like the glass of wine every once in a while might put you in that mood to be able to connect in all of these ways. So that might might might be a tool, but not every day. So, um but we have to bring back this idea oxytocin is the most powerful hormone on the planet. So, when we're sitting at home, and we're isolating ourselves, and we are in disconnection, and we're pointing fingers, and we're yelling at each other, like we are we're raising cortisol, we're not raising oxytocin. But if you bring oxytocin up, as soon as oxytocin comes in, cortisol goes down. One of my recommendations to menopausal women that aren't sleeping is start petting your dog. Like just pet your dog before you go to bed, cuz that's going to give you oxytocin. It's going to bring the cortisol down from the day, and it's going to put you in a more relaxed state so you can get yourself into bed. If you don't have a dog, you know, hug hug somebody. But if we have to look at oxytocin as a healing hormone. And what we're talking about is this end of the day, and what I think happens is we go produce produce produce, and then okay, now now I'm done. And then we go and maybe pop on social media. And then we're like, oh my god, that person doesn't think like I think, or this person's saying something wrong, and we just keep amping up our cortisol. If we go back to you asked me about my daily routine, I feel like the morning should be oxytocin filled. You can let your day be cortisol filled if that feels right to you. And then and then you're as when you end the day, bring oxytocin back in. How are you going to do that is personal to you. Is there a link between oxytocin and diet? I if I'm in an oxytocin state, am I more likely to choose a certain food? I And I was thinking here about like, you know, oxytocin rises when I hug my partner, for example. So I was also thinking, does that mean that people that don't have a dog, don't have a partner, don't have friends, people that are lonely, uh have less oxytocin, maybe more cortisol, and are therefore more likely to eat poorly? I don't know. Oh yeah, because cortisol's high. Cortisol's going to spike appetite and going to make you It's going to make you want to eat more. So, yeah. Um but for that person, so, you know, there there's a thing called havening, where you just like rub your own arms. And that releases oxytocin? Yeah, and it calms you. It It releases oxytocin. You're literally loving on yourself. And it upregulates the parasympathetic nervous system. It takes you out of the amygdala, and you're just you're just rubbing yourself and on your arms. It's It's a bit of a stretch, but this is how my brain works. So, theoretically, hugging myself can help me lose weight. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, you you you can make the reel on that one. Yeah. But you see what I'm saying? So, higher oxytocin, lower cortisol, I'm going to make better food choices, therefore I'm going to be um more likely to lose weight and make better dietary choices across the board. Super interesting. I call the hormonal hierarchy. So, at the top Let's start with the bottom. At the bottom of the hormonal hierarchy is sex hormones, progesterone, estrogen, and testosterone. Above that is insulin. So, if you're insulin resistant, you're going to throw those sex hormones off. Okay. Above insulin is cortisol. If you're stressed out, I This is another thing we saw in our community. If you're so stressed out all the time, it's going to be very difficult for you to get into these deep states of ketosis. It may be very difficult for you to lose weight. So, we got to handle something to help you handle stress. And the behavioral point there, which is what I know so well, is the choices I make in that state. That's right. That's right. So, but what do you do? I'm I'm going to go with What if you do if you're 48 years old, you're a menopausal woman, your hormones are all over the place, you're just agitated and irritable, and you can't get yourself out of that loop, and cortisol's surging, you go eat because that feels that you're like, give me some dopamine is what you're looking for there. If we could just take that moment and get that woman to think about connection, can think about laughter, can think about gratitude, things like that. Think about petting your dog. Think about going for a walk out in nature. These kind of things start to raise oxytocin, and they start to decrease cortisol. And it and it's it seems like we put toss that aside. We're like, oh, that's so frivolous. Like, no, actually it's not. Like, there you know, there was a I had a guy on my podcast recently that was saying that they had just done a study on smokers, and they had found that smokers that had positive relationships in their life, compared to smokers that were lonely and didn't have as many positive relationships, the lonely smokers had a higher incidence of lung cancer than ones that had positive relationships in their life. That is the power of human connection. And that is oxytocin bringing down all the other hormones and regulating them. And it kind of insulates us, doesn't it, from the stresses of life? It's like insulation. That's right. Human connection is insulates us against disease, against I guess even poor dietary choices in that regard. Isn't that in part why I have a toolbox in the corner of the room? Because we talked about there's a toolbox over here. This is why you have a toolbox. So there's a Oh, there's a It's a Diary of a CEO toolbox. This is cool. This is really [ __ ] cool. It's your special toolbox. So I have this toolbox in the corner of the room. Sometimes my team they they do these little experiments. So they'll bring something to the podcast from doing research and the guest I'm speaking to and then they'll put it there. And I have to be honest, I haven't opened this toolbox. It's a Diary of a CEO toolbox, which is quite cool. We will sell these online. That's a good way to make a quick buck. But who should open this toolbox? Because I know you don't know what you know what's in this. Yes. And I swear on my I swear on everything that I haven't opened it. Okay, you want me to open it? you should open it and explain why we bought a toolbox. So the first thing that I want to say is whenever you're looking at your health, you need to think about what's your toolbox. How many tools do you need in here? Which ones do you need? Which ones are appropriate to you? Okay? So we talked about this in the beginning. If I was going to remodel a room, which would I wouldn't be doing cuz I don't know how to do that. But let's say I wanted to change something the construction of a room, I would bring my toolbox in. I wouldn't pull out the hammer and say and the and the screwdriver and be like the hammer's better than the screwdriver. Ah, I don't need the screwdriver. The hammer's better than the screwdriver. I would look around the room and I'd be like okay, there's going to be a moment I need the hammer. There's going to be a moment I need the screwdriver. I might and I don't know what size screwdriver. I live in an old house and you know, sometimes you need a Phillips head, sometimes you don't. Like I would have different tools. This is how we should be looking at health. And what's happening is we're looking for the one-offs. So I want everybody to create a toolbox. So here's how we look at it. So okay, some days I get up and I'm like, you know what? Today there's fun tools in here that I have been eating so bad and I haven't been getting my minerals or my vitamins. So I better I better load up on my supplements. Mhm. So today I I just haven't been eating well. I need to load up on my supplements. I'm going to use my supplements. Okay. Do you use supplements every day? Not every day. How come? Um because sometimes I don't feel like I need them because I've had them through my I feel like I've had those supplements through my diet. So for example, if I've if I've been in my house in Cape Town, I probably don't need my vitamin D. But when I've been in a studio every day for days on end, I think probably my vitamin D is probably low. That's right. So you you use this as it's supposed to be used as a supplement to a lifestyle. So when your lifestyle all of a sudden now goes in a new direction, you don't need that supplement. Mhm. Okay? So it's a tool. Okay. Now I always tell people if you're on the same supplement over and over and over again, like it's may not be working for you anymore. So okay, so there's supplement. Then some days, let's say you've been working too much. This is heavy. And you're going to go work out. Yeah. This is heavy. And so today like you've decided, you know what? I've been traveling a lot. I haven't been prioritizing strength training. Today my tool is strength training. So I'm going to make sure that I power up on weights today. Mhm. And we we could have had a shoe in here and been like on another day, I might decide that I need to do more cardio. What's better, strength training or cardio? This is a trick question. It is. Neither. Right. Neither are better. Context dependent. That's right. But we have a lot of discussions in in the health world right now about which one's better. Yeah, people are fighting over which one's more important. You got it. Okay? Yeah. Then what if I want to fast? Here's my empty plate. What if I decide, you know what? Today I need to get to autophagy. I need to shed some of those cells that are dysfunctional. So I'm going to make sure that I fast longer today because I need to access that internal part of me. Okay, there's my little clock. So today I'm just going to set my timer and I'm going to fast for 17 hours because I need autophagy. Okay, one day I wake up and I don't I don't feel like fasting. So is fasting right or or not fasting? Which tool is right? They're both the same. Is when are you going to use them? When you need to. Got it. Okay, then all of a sudden I realize I haven't really been prioritizing protein. I like eggs. They've got lots of choline in them. I better power up on eggs today so that I can cuz we know choline helps with brain health. So eggs are phenomenal. Are they phenomenal every day? Some days more than others. Right. Mhm. I I have a more brain power I need today. Maybe I'll do so So we'll go ahead and power up on an egg. But it doesn't mean we have eggs every day. Okay, what about if my hunger's been off the chart. I can't stabilize my blood sugar. I'm going to add more fats in. I'm going to have an avocado. So I pull out my avocado one day and now I eat it and all of a sudden I'm like wow, that's so much better. Like I can fast longer the next day. I'm I I feel like my blood sugar is more stable. I'm more mentally clear. Is the avocado the hero? Not always. Not always. It was just your body needed more fat that day. Okay? What about you know, for my menopausal friends, all of a sudden I'm getting hot flashes. And I realize I haven't really been prioritizing fiber. I haven't really been giving cruciferous vegetables to my liver. Maybe maybe I've been drinking a little too much. So I'm going to need to power up on my my cruciferous fibrous vegetables to help support my liver. For anyone that's on audio, she's pulled out some broccoli from the toolbox. Broccoli. Yeah. So now all of a sudden I eat more broccoli. I'm all of a sudden noticing that my hot flashes are going away. Did the broccoli Is the broccoli the reason my hot flashes went away? That day it was, right? If that day it was because your liver needed more support and your gut needed more fiber to be able to break Remember we have a whole set of bacteria in our gut called the estrobolome that to be able to break down estrogen so it's usable for your cells. Mhm. Same thing with the thyroid like we talked about. Maybe all of a sudden your metabolism speeds up because you gave your liver and gut a better better choices and so now your thyroid starts working better for you. All of these go on and on and on. They're all just tools. The last one is the one we've been talking about. Oh wow, look at that. An amazing product. What if I haven't prioritized oxytocin. I've been working too much. I haven't been really like my friends, I haven't really been prioritizing friends or family. I know I got to get together with them, but they don't really want to hear about my workload. So let me figure out another way to connect to them. So I'm going to grab this really cool Diary of a CEO conversation cards. I'm going to take that over and I'm going to tell my friend I just want to hang out with them and we're going to have a good conversation. These are all tools. The goal of health is for us all to create a unique toolbox. One that works for us that becomes effortless over time. If we stick with rigidity, if we're like prot animal protein is the best. No, plant protein is the best. Fasting is good. No, fasting's not good. Oh, we should be strength training. No, we should be doing cardio. All of these things in isolation are not health. When we put them together and we customize them for our own specific needs, now we are on our own health path. But we can't isolate them anymore. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that's been left for you is Dear guest, first person to ever say that. Dear guest, are you in love with life and is life loving you back? Um I'm absolutely in love with life. I Um and I'll tell you why. I I love what I'm doing. I love the how we started this. Like that one woman who now believes in herself and to have that over and over again fuels me and gets me out of bed every morning and makes me show up in London and have conversations with you. I have amazing friends and amazing family. Like I have connections. I love my life. And at 54, I love my life now more than I've ever loved it. And I have to say of all the people that I meet, you're one of the people that I'm convinced is loving life and it I'm convinced it's also loving you back on and off camera. You really are a wonderful human being. Thank you. And you're doing work that is so critical to so many. I'd recommend everybody goes and reads the book Fast Like a Girl even if you're not a girl, I have to say because I learned a ton about my partner, about my wife, about myself from reading this book, but also your your book Eat Like a Girl is equally critical for anyone that's looking for really practical ways to upgrade and think about their nutrition through the lens of everything we've discussed today. I'll link both of those below. They must reads. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to see you again. And the the feeling's mutual. I just keep doing what you're doing cuz it's profound. So I I feel honored to have been here twice. So thank you for everything you're doing. Oh, oh, oh, oh.