The First Principle of Business: Your Body, with Eric Edmeades

Welcome to the Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, best selling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markell. The Conscious Pivot shares the stories and wisdom of people who have successfully reinvented some area of their business and personal life. You'll gain powerful insights into how you can fully embrace new opportunities, increase your performance, and master the art and science of innovation and resilience. So please join Adam as he guides you on your Conscious Pivot.

Welcome everybody, to another episode of Conscious Pivot Podcast. And I am thrilled today. More than thrilled. Honored to be with somebody that I think is making a huge, huge difference in the world. And frankly, at the moment I can just say he's made a huge difference in my life and in my wife Randy's life and a lot of people that I know in an area that I think is neglected more than almost anything. I think there's two areas in the personal development space that are neglected. One is our relationships. Anything to do with relationships. I think people always say, hey, I'm going to work on my relationship and work on my relationship as soon as I get my money straight.

As soon as I get my business straight.

And that's a shame. But that's not what we're here to talk about today. It's the other one, which is health, which is taking care of yourself. Quite honestly, if you don't have your health, you have nothing. Doesn't matter how much money you have, doesn't matter how much influence you have or anything else that you might value your significance, nothing will matter if you don't feel good. And I've known some folks that have had chronic issues, pain and illness and things, and there's just nothing that is tougher to deal with when your health is not the way it can be. And I learned a few things last year that have changed my life. And many of you have seen me either on stage or in zooms and things where I'm holding up a glass of green, like this green drink, and I've given the recipe that we've been using to a number of you as well. This Alka Geyser drink that we start the mornings with. And I've mentioned this gentleman's name and I mentioned a program called Wildfit. But I've never had Eric, who I'm about to introduce you to on our show, to talk exactly about why it is that he got involved in this and made a big pivot in his own life and had some health issues and has had significant success in business. So he knows that end of it. But I think he can speak to the fact that money and success don't mean a whole lot when you can't be pain free and be in a healthy place where you can have the energy and be able to show up for people, really show up. So this gentleman is somebody we absolutely love. His name is Eric Edmeads and I think best that he share a little bit about his own pivot experience and what he's up to in the world these days. So, Eric, thank you so much for being with us today.

Hey, Adam, thanks very much for having me. As you know, this message is a really important one for me to get out and I really appreciate your introducing it to your tribe and let's have some fun. Background wise. You're right. I'm really more known as an entrepreneur. I've had kind of an eclectic and interesting business background. I started my first business in England in 1997 doing data capture, barcode scanning, wireless networking, logistics. I mean, super exciting stuff. And then I sold that business and ended up just kind of accidentally getting involved in business speaking. I got invited to do a talk in London and that led immediately to an invite to do a talk in Singapore about three, four days later. And then Australia and New Zealand. And over the next two years, my wife and I would do 20 countries on these four round the world plane tickets just speaking about business and entrepreneurship. And I found it really fascinating. And what was really interesting is that people would often ask me like, what's the key principle to business? And you know, they'd always expect that I was going to say something like, manage your cash flow. And, you know, you got to, you know, cash is king or you got to hire the right people or you got to have the right advisors around, you get good mentorship. And yeah, I would say all of those things. But here's the joke, though. Get your body right. You know, like, get your body right. Like that is the first principle of business is get your body right. Your mind does not work optimally if your body isn't right and you don't have optimal amounts of energy if your body isn't right. And so get your body right. Where I've been, I guess, kind of lucky is in a strange little feedback loop where because of a major pivot in my health in my early 20s, I have had a phenomenal amount of energy and a phenomenal capacity to take on projects. And I've had really interesting business life. And, you know, after selling that business and speaking for a couple years around the World. I ended up buying a movie studio in California that was the original heart of Industrial Light and Magic. So, you know, we were doing movies like Avatar and Pirates of the Caribbean, and then we invented a new technology around doing medical simulation that completely changed that industry. Like, I've had this eclectic business background, but I'll tell you what I'm really clear about is that that would not be true if I didn't have the energy to do what I do, if I didn't have the energy to be able to, like. I don't do jet lag. I fly to a country, I'm in a meeting two hours after I get off the phone. Why? Because I have the energy. And the short version of how that happened is that in 1991, I was sick. And I wasn't so sick that, you know, I was dying. I just wasn't living. You know, I really, like. I had pervasive sinus infections. Horrible. I had throat infections so severe that if you looked in my throat, it would have horrified you because my tonsils were bleeding. And I had stomach pains that were so bad that when they happened, I couldn't think. This was just Adam. The thing is, you get to this place when you're. At least I did. And I'm not sure if you've ever had a flu or something where you've been sick for long enough that you stop thinking it as sick and just the way things are.

Exactly. Chronic.

Yeah, it was chronic. I mean, I'm talking years and years. And I'd been to doctors and specialists and more doctors and more specialists. And they prescribed creams and nasal sprays and pills and liquids and injections and eventually surgery. And none of those things worked for me until one day a friend of mine sat me down and had a serious conversation with me about food. And I didn't see myself as somebody who ate particularly badly. I wasn't vastly overweight. I just needed to make some changes. And 30 days later, I'd lost 35 pounds. All of my symptoms were gone. Symptoms that no pills, no drugs had ever been able to do much about. And what that activated in me is a powerful and driving curiosity as to how it was that doctors weren't able to create that result for me one day. Idly. I'm not even sure what prompted me to ask this question, but I was talking to a doctor, and I just idly asked this question. And the question was, how long did you go to medical school? And the answer was, six years, eight years. And I said in that six, eight years, how much time was devoted to studying food? And the doctor said something that surprised me to no end, but the answer was none. Like, none. And I then started asking every doctor I could meet this question. In fact, I remember asking my uncle, who was an orthopedic surgeon and a well known, well renowned orthopedic surgeon with whatever 10 or 12 years of medical school under his belt. And I sat at the dinner table with him in Plettenberg Bay, South Africa, and I said to him, in all those years of medical school, how much time did you study food? And he cocked his head to one side, you know, like a dog does when it's confused. And he went, er. And he said to me, he goes, food.

Food isn't medicine.

No, no. You know, you might think. But instead he had a realization. His response was none. And he, in that instant, understood how bizarre that was.

Wow.

You know, we have a medical education system that does not focus at all on food, and we have a food manufacturing system that does not focus at all on health. And we wonder why we're in a lot of trouble. And so that pivot that I made in 1991 changed my life forever, but inspired me to do the same for other people. And really, the funny thing is that I've been really fortunate that by being successful in business, it's afforded me a huge amount of time and money to spend on research and travel. And really delving deep into this issue, I've gone off numerous times to go live with bushmen in East Africa to get a sense of what our ancestors lives are like on a daily basis. I've really been dug into this stuff really deep. Then I spent a huge amount of time learning about behavioral change and behavioral psychology. Because the fact is that diet programs don't work because they rely on willpower. Look, as long as the angel and the devil don't agree, you're going to eat some of the bad stuff. If you can get the angel and devil to agree, well, now everything changes. You see, diets based on willpower fail wholesale. Adam, I think you've been through all that. We have A no kidding, 80 to 90% success rate, which has never been seen before, as far as I know, in the diet world. And one of our clients that you know, did our program as a partnership with us and ran several hundred people through the program. And just this week they did a survey over a year later. Right. All of our data comes out of people as they've done the challenge. This is over a year later, and 75% of the people are still reporting on track with their results. Like that's brand new in the diet industry. And frankly, it's the thing that excites me most. After my little girl and my family, the thing that excites me most right now is that we are having a measurable, solid impact on the health of thousands of people in over 20 countries around the world. And it is spilling now into the medical industry. I am now being invited to speak at medical schools and at medical councils, and it is just super exciting stuff.

Yeah, Eric, I don't have to look that far, which is fortunate for me. I just have to literally look across my kitchen and look at Randy and see what's been going on with her. And she's always been, you know, she's been healthy, not an issue there, but she's more healthy. And, you know, as we go to get, get on. I don't even know how to put this. I don't want to say get older. I don't want to say get on in years, because it's when I don't.

Really describe through that.

But listen, our bodies change, period.

That's it.

I don't know if you're tracking this, but I'm tracking so many people these days talking about how quickly time is flying. And I say it a lot. We're. We're flying up to a college with our son today who's got his orientation and stuff. So I'm just reframing it in my own mind that the time is moving at the perfect pace and we're eternal anyway and all that kind of thing. But I'll just say, as I see changes in my own body and I see them in Randy having a ritual, because that's part of our pivot processes that we create master habits that sustain us, that create the capacity to be more resilient in a more disruptive environment, in a more, and at the same time, a more opportunistic environment. In business and in life, there's more opportunities than ever been before. We've got to be much more adept to seize those opportunities, be resilient for all the other changes that are happening constantly. I mean, look, the politics of our country, you don't live in the United States, but the politics here in North America and elsewhere in the world are daunting. There's a lot of misinformation, there's a lot of sabotage that's going on through social media where misinformation is perpetuated and there's propaganda. And you and I talked a little bit about that before we hit the record button. So we don't have to sort of digress down that road, but it's important. That's a part of. From me. What drives me to want to speak with you and share this information is the fundamental health question or the fundamental importance of us taking care of ourselves so that we actually can maximize the opportunity we have to be an influence in the world for good. And we can't do that when we're sick. We can't do that when we're distracted, when we're going, oh, my aching back. I'm carrying around weight I can't get rid of, or diabetes or any of the things that are caused by poor health and a poor understanding of our health. And my dad long ago said to me that these weren't his words. I think he was passing on the words of Michio Kushi, and he was studying with him at the time, and he was on a macrobiotic diet at the time. And he said, food is medicine. And I've never forgotten that that food is medicine. Instead of taking popping pills necessarily, or doing a number of other things that are prescribed by doctors to deal with a health. To deal with your body and deal with things that are coming up in our health, you could focus on what it is that you ingest, what do you drink and what do you eat. And that's when I heard you speak at a TLC meeting, a Transform Leadership Council meeting. And I said, this is a guy I want to get to know. And we took that program that you've been alluding to, this WildFit program, which has changed a lot of people's lives. And I was in a small group. I think we were in a group of maybe 30 folks. And we supported each other over 90 days. And I watched Randy not so much lose pounds, even though that happened as well. I saw her lose inches on her waist. I could see her skin get more just. Her eyes were clearer, her skin was more supple, she had more energy. I felt the same way. And now I've traveled all over the world with this green drink in my hand, saying, this is remarkable stuff. And it's not just that. So maybe why don't we do this, dive into a little bit about what you've been helping people with. Not so much the program, but what is the diet? What's the change that we go through in 90 days? And why is it. What does it mean to get back to spring, to go into spring? What's that all about? Is This a Paleo? Because that's where people ask me, say, is this a Paleo thing? Is it a vegan thing? What is it? And if you could put some distinctions around it, that'd be great.

Wildfit lies at this intersection between what we would call nutritional anthropology and behavioral change psychology. Nutritional anthropology, yeah. There could be some comparison to Paleo. What we're doing is we're saying that every species on Earth evolved an ideal or optimal diet. That means that they evolve the production capacity and the dependency upon certain organic materials. And so, you know, one of the things I would say is, yes, food is, let food be thy medicine. Right, Fair enough. But let it be thy preventative medicine.

Now, was that Hippocrates? I don't remember who said that, but is that.

I think it's Hippocrates. But, you know, the key thing is that it's not the one problem with that quote, which I do love. The one problem with it, though, is that it creates this idea that you can treat disease with food. Medicine is something we think of as an after the fact. One of the examples that I would use is that if we took a person and put them on the perfect human diet. The word diet's funny, right? We use the word diet as temporary alteration to fit into some outfit for a special occasion, where for every other species, diet means way of life. If we were to take humans and put a single human and put them on the perfect human diet and eliminate all toxicity and all preservatives and all garbage, they only get the perfect stuff. But we scientifically removed the vitamin C from their food, they would get sick and they would die without having eaten a single bad thing. There's so much focus in the diet world about eliminating the bad things. Frankly, the body has a huge tolerance for bad things as long as it's getting enough of the good things. When we look at nutritional anthropology, one of these things. Doctor, please repeat that.

I'm going to do that from time to time because I'm from New York, but you talk twice as fast as me, and most of the time the shit that's coming out of your mouth is so good. And I'm going, somebody captured that. Stop him right there. So can you repeat what you just said?

All right, well, what I'm really getting at is that our health is determined by getting our needs met. And if we are getting our needs met, the body has a tremendous tolerance for the bad stuff. In other words, look, we all know alcohol is not ideal. There's articles out there that Go. Red wine is good for you. It's not. Okay. It's just not.

For those of you that need to close your ears for this part, go ahead.

But look, it doesn't matter that it's. I mean, look, you can't live on this stuff. We're clear about that. But here's the beauty, though. The beauty is that if your body is well nourished and it is fit and is healthy, then it has the capacity to deal with the occasional digression. The whole diet industry is predicated on this focus on eliminating the bad stuff, when the diet industry should actually be focused on getting enough of the good stuff. And then the question becomes, what is the good stuff? Well, the good stuff is anything that we evolved a dependency upon and an ability to process. People are always giving you lists of nutrients. Oh, my gosh, this superfood here has all these antioxidants and nutrients. Well, fine, but if we didn't evolve a dependency upon it, it's not a superfood, is it? My desk is made out of wood. It's full of riboflavin and all kinds of other great stuff. But as I'm not a termite or a beaver, I can't eat it. Doesn't matter what its nutritional constituents are. What we have to do is get enough of the right stuff. And then now we come to what you're talking about around seasons. Again, one of the major flaws in the diet world right now, and I mean, we've been talking about seasons for years, and now I see it popping up in some diets where, oh, yeah, you got to eat seasonally, but they misunderstand. It's not that you need to eat seasonally relative to where you live. Look, if you're in Minnesota in December, you're not supposed to eat snow angels, right? What I mean by seasonally is recognizing that humans evolved with cyclical eating patterns. That means that there were times when one thing was abundant and another thing was scarce, and then another seasonal change would come where something else would become abundant and something else had become scarce. In other words, the idea of a recommended daily allowance is insane. The only thing, the only thing that there should be a recommended daily allowance for is air and water. Otherwise, there's no recommended. There's no daily amount of protein you need. There's no daily amount of vitamin C you need. There's no daily amount of B12, B6. There's no daily amount of anything other than air and water. Your body has the capacity to store stuff. So now we got to look at seasons. And so this. This argument around what we're supposed to be eating is extremely important and really valuable, but irrelevant if we don't. Then add the other part, which is the behavioral change. The food industry is spending quite literally billions of dollars optimizing their profitability, producing foods that are nutritionally empty so that you're still hungry after you eat them. Marketing in a way that takes away your freedom of choice. You know, look, Adam, I'm not a religious guy, but I did go to an Anglican school. And in that Anglican school, I remember the story of Jesus birth. And in the story of Jesus birth, they talked about the three wise men bringing frankincense, myrrh and gold, not ice cream and candy canes and pumpkin pie. How did those things become Christmas? And then. And then at the end of Jesus life, I remember there being discussion about bread and fish and wine, but I don't remember ever chocolate being discussed. I don't know how did chocolate and Easter, but they bought it. The chocolate industry sponsored Easter and they paid for it. And to this day, there are people who barely eat chocolate through the calendar year, but come Easter, they slam themselves with chocolate because they don't really have a choice. So what we've done is taken these two very powerful things, nutritional anthropology, behavioral change, psychology, and married them together in a way where we're facilitating lifestyle change for people, not putting them on a diet. Yeah.

So let's. Can we get into a little bit of the details of that, what that looks like? Yeah. Okay. Fantastic.

I have a suggestion. You know, one of the most powerful things for people to take something away of real tangible power right now, they could actually begin to make some really interesting observations and changes is to learn about the six core hungers that drive human eating. There are six primary reasons that people eat. And when you understand those reasons, you gain some control.

Yeah, this moved me. I remember this for the first time. I thought to myself, so am I hungry or am I thirsty? Could you start there? That would be great.

Yeah, absolutely. Let's take a look at them. You can always edit this in afterward if it doesn't work perfectly.

No, no, this is perfect.

I've got the six hungers up on the screen right now. So you mentioned thirst. That's a really fascinating one. Because for most of our history, we didn't have pottery. We all walk around with our water bottles now. Right. We didn't even have pottery. So that meant that, sure, we would drink when water was around, but a lot of the hydration that we Got came from eating foods that were high in water content. In fact, to this day, there are antelopes in Africa that don't drink ever. They get all of their water from their food. Now, we did drink, but we got a lot of our water from the food we ate. And so the body sometimes gets dehydrated, and then it sends a signal, eat something. Now, this signal doesn't work anymore because, of course, most of us eat foods that have very little water in it at all. But the trouble is that that's in our instincts. Our system was built this way. So somebody gets a little dehydrated, and the body just sends up a signal, eat something. Eat something. Of course, sadly, a lot of people will turn to a bag of chips at that point, which has less than no water in it and a lot of salt, which stimulates more hunger and more thirst, and now eats more. That's why it's never just one chip. A lot of times, people can actually do a great service to themselves by just focusing on staying hydrated by drinking enough water in the day and then noticing that their hunger goes down as a result of their water intake. In fact, of all the six hungers, there's only one that's actually truly a legitimate hunger. Legitimate hunger. And that's the green one here. Nutritional hunger. Nutritional hunger is your body requiring specific nutrients. But because we didn't have grocery stores for most of our history, we simply ate what was environmentally and seasonally available to us. That meant that when we had a nutritional deficiency, it wasn't so functional for the body to go, go eat this thing, because that thing might not be available. Right? So the body instead basically just says, hey, you're low in nutrients. Go and eat something. That's it. I mean, sure, we have these sort of macro cravings where you might crave fat or crave salt or crave meat or crave, whatever the case may be, sweet. But we don't have cravings that are specific to our nutrients beyond that. So in other words, when somebody is malnourished, they just get this message, eat well. Consider that the food industry produces a phenomenal amount of food that has absolutely no nutritional value in it. We wonder why people are overeating. Adam, let me tell you something. This fat shaming thing, it's got to stop. Anybody who is morbidly obese at this point in time should be considering legal action, not shame. It is not their fault. Now, I know that there are people out there saying, yeah, it's their fault. I take care of Myself, I eat properly. Yeah. Remember that. Genetics, epigenetics and manipulation by the food industry, playing upon all those things has caused a situation now where people literally have no control and we have to do something about that. The food industry, in my opinion, is significantly more insidious than the tobacco industry ever was. And so one of the ploys they use is to make sure that we don't get enough nutrition in the food we're eating so that we need to eat more food. By the way, if you're a shareholder, if you're an investor in these companies, this is a great strategy because it's good for profitability. The other hungers, they're not real, but they feel very real. If you look at empty stomach, hunger, your stomach was designed to be empty every now and again. It's actually really good for it to be empty every now and again. Clean the system out. Your stomach is flexible. Your stomach can shrink right down to the size of your fist and expand right up to a massive balloon. Four times of plenty.

So periodic fasting, things like that?

Yeah, sure. In fact, I just started one today. I'm on day one of A. All I'm having is green smoothies for three days. Sometimes I'll go no food at all. But I do that from time to time. It makes me feel fantastic. It gives my digestive system a break and allows it to cleanse and heal and all that sort of stuff. It's fantastic. But more than that, there's also a portion control issue, and that is that. Adam, let's say you and I go hunting 200,000 years ago and we score ourselves a mammoth. We're not going to eat a tiny little bit of mammoth and move on.

No.

You're going to gorge yourself as much as we can fit in. Yep, we're going to gorge ourselves. And so our stomach will stretch at that point, or conversely, in say, the sort of fall time when there's a lot of fruit bearing trees around, then we would not go over and eat one or two pieces of fruit and move on. Our body would be driven to eat as much of that fruit as possible and our stomach would expand capacity to make that possible. The trouble is now is that most people's stomachs seem permanently stretched. They're not, but they feel permanently stretched between meals. That empty stomach feeling is even more painful and more powerful. So they end up eating just to fix that. There's some other psychological issues which they're more complex to describe, but think of it another way, like Pavlov's dogs Because we feel hungry while our stomach is empty. We soon link up empty stomach to being hungry. They're not the same thing. They're not the same thing. Emotional hunger is another big one. People often are eating memories. A friend of ours, a mutual friend of ours, who I won't name here on the podcast, but we can talk later, she did our program at one point and came back to want to do it again. And she said, you know, Eric, I've done so well. I've permanently changed my lifestyle, and I feel great about it. There's just one food left that I still feel like I don't have the power over that I'd like to have. And I said, what's that? And she says, well, icing really? Do you eat refined sugar in other ways? And she goes, no, I'm done. It's just icing. I got this thing with icing. And I said, all right, tell me about your history with icing. And I immediately, I make an assumption that maybe her mom used to make homemade icing and she got to lick the bowl or there's some joy thing. No, no. She says, her mom used to buy icing in the tin. And I'm like, really? So tell me, what was that like when you were a kid? She goes, well, my mom would take the can opener and open the tin, and then she'd put the can on the counter. And she says, I would get a spoon and hide under the counter, and when my mom wasn't looking, I would reach up and scoop some out and put it in, and my mom would pretend she didn't see me, and I'd get away with it once or twice, and then she would see me, and it was this big game. And I said, so how are things with your mom right now? And she started to cry and get tears in her eyes, and she says, well, she's really ill and, you know, having some issues with dementia, and my connection with her is being broken. And she suddenly got it. Like, I've got goosebumps telling you the story right now. Like, she suddenly got it that icing was a way of relinking to the fondness and connection of her time with her mother. Yeah, it didn't matter that it was horribly bad for her pancreas and bad for her health in general at that moment. It was about the connection she was getting. And, of course, once she realized that it gave her freedom, she now realizes that it's a lie and she doesn't do it anymore. But, you know, this emotional hunger is a Big deal again, because the food industry knows that if we can get you to feel shame, say for example, somebody's overweight, if we can get them to feel shame about being overweight, then they will need to eat something to distract themselves from the shame. It's the perfect marketing loop. So emotional hunger is a big one that we need to get rid of, that we need to manage. The other low blood sugar, hunger and variety, they have their place as well. At the end of the day, most people have trained their nervous systems, their metabolism to burn sugar when really they should be metabolizing fat for a longer, more pervasive, long lasting energy than sugar provides. And then they wouldn't have low blood sugar. These five hour energy drinks, that's just amazing. I read the other day that a teenager died from drinking energy drinks. Died because he drank too many energy drinks in a short period of time. Well, how about running a metabolism that doesn't require artificial boosts of energy? I haven't had coffee, I haven't had caffeine since I was 18 years old. I don't need, I mean, Adam, you know me quite well. Can you imagine me on coffee buddy?

No. We have to construct some new pyramids or something. I mean that magnitude.

In any event, those six hungers, once our clients begin, and I'm hoping people from here will increase their consciousness so little bit here and start to take a look and go, wow, okay, why am I eating right now? What is really driving the decision? Because once you get that, what might be driving the decision is that, you.

Know, look, look, that you're dehydrated, for.

Example, or that there's an emotional void. Yeah, exactly. Well, look, think about this.

The awareness is everything.

Such a good example. I saw this viral video the other day, Adam, and it really, it was so beautiful. It was a viral video where somebody had gone out and purchased all kinds of CCTV footage of people doing random acts of kindness. Like just, you know, like a street camera caught a picture of a guy picking up person's wallet that just dropped at the bank machine and returning it. And these two young men helped this lady across the street in the Ukraine, somewhere in the middle of a blizzard. And you know, you just see these beautiful acts of kindness that at a time when with the politics being the way they are in the world right now, with the environment being, it's easy to be a little pessimistic about humanity. And then this video comes along and you start feeling love and joy and amazingness about humans and then boom. Coca Cola. They Were the sponsor. They were the sponsor. They went and did it and they got you and they know why. Feel good, feel good, feel good. See the logo, see the logo, See the logo. And pretty soon, when you're feeling bad, you shortcut the process by drinking the logo.

It's an emotional link.

Yeah, totally.

Yeah. And I remember that from when I was a kid. We're about the same age, I think. So you remember the Coke commercial? We're not singling out Coca Cola, obviously, because this is done by, you know.

They'Re just the best at it.

They're great at it. I mean, like, if we're gonna single them out, they're best in class, right? Big circle with the candles. And what was the name of the. What was the song that they would sing?

Oh, shit. Oh, I'd like to buy the world.

Of Coke I'd like to buy the world of Coke and sprinkle it with love or something. I don't know, whatever it was, but it was Kumbaya thing.

Kumbaya. And then they basically invented Santa Claus and that gorgeous polar bear. I'll tell you. You know, it's funny, in the Coke and Pepsi battle, this is really interesting when you think of food psychology, because people, there's this impression that Pepsi is number two to Coke, which it is. But the impression is that they're quite close. They're not. As I understand it, Coke outsells Pepsi 4 or 5 to 1. Number two is so far away from being number one, it's not funny. But consider, what did Pepsi do? Pepsi tried more traditional, like, oh, we're going to link up a celebrity to this and taste of a new generation. All Coke has ever done is sought to make you feel good while you see their logo. It's all they've ever done. And guess what? To this day, and I. Let me be clear, I hate the product. Unless for cleaning toilets and blood off sidewalks, it can't be very good for those things. But when I'm traveling around Africa and I'm, you know. Because, as you know, I spend a lot of time in, like, quite remote Africa. The weirdest thing is you see the Coke sign everywhere. And I have this bizarre reaction where I look at it. I have fondness, no matter how. Like, they've hypnotized me. So we have to recognize that the food industry is spending. They've hired incredible people. You know, the tobacco industry did the same thing. They went out and hired a guy whose work was used by the Nazis to create crowd manipulation. And then the tobacco industry Hired this guy to get women to smoke because they wouldn't smoke. And it was fascinating. How did they do it? The same way the food industry does it today. They did market research. They found out that women didn't smoke because it was dirty and smelly. And as a rule, women don't really like dirty and smelly. And so then what they did is they said, okay, but what's going. What's important to women right now? And they said, oh, the suffrage movement, independence, the vote, all that stuff's really important to women right now. And this guy just said, well, no problem. If you can tie cigarettes to that movement, if you can tie cigarettes to their hope for independence and their hope for equality, they will start smoking. Next thing you know, you've come a long way, baby. And women start smoking. I mean, they know how to manipulate us, and we have to learn how to un. Manipulate.

Now, speaking of that, and I don't want to go down this rabbit hole too far, but just a little bit before we hit the record, we were talking about some of the movies that are out there, some of the things that people find on Netflix and elsewhere. And the two that we talked about was cowspiracy and what was the other one we had?

What the health.

What the health. Exactly. And I think there's a problem when there's misinformation that's being perpetuated and goes viral and in the interest of arming the consumer or taking care of the consumer, and yet embedded in that information that's supposed to be consumer oriented and that there's misinformation for other agendas. Can you speak to that in a sort of a neutral way? Is that possible? Because I know you're pretty passionate in.

A neutral way, but I'll do my best. You know, I think that. Look, in my business life, I'm extremely well known as a communications expert. I've trained some of the top speakers in the world to be able to get on stage and do what I do on stage. And I'm very good at the psychology aspect of it. And so I understand marketing and I understand this communication thing. And one of the things that we have to get. One of the features that we have to understand is that when you're making an argument, what you want to do is make an argument that can be built on a position of strength. And so what we saw, for example, in Brexit in the United Kingdom, was that both sides of the campaign were lying constantly. They were both using fear and lies to manipulate the audience, to Manipulate the potential voters. The problem is that once you start lying, you lose credibility for even the things you're saying that are true. And so there are very serious issues with the way the EU is governed. But. But there are also really serious advantages to the world, to the region, and to the United Kingdom for staying in. But the problem is once everybody started lying, nobody could hear those things anymore. And so without naming any particular movies that you may have named earlier that, you know, sometimes branch out into the realm of propaganda, what they're doing is they're often taking some things that are very true. The way we produce meat in the western world, frankly, in the world is depleted, deplorable. If aliens ever come down here, we're going to get convicted for the way we treat animals. You know, it is disgusting. And so these movies, they show some of those things and they're very good arguments, but then they use dishonesty in many of the other messages they share. There was another movie which I won't name, but there was a movie which I frankly very much liked. It was vegan propaganda, but I very much liked it, except for one problem is they then tried to create a relationship between meat and cancer development. Now remember, the word meat means all meat, which means that you're now talking about badly produced, hormone injected grain fed, disgustingly unethically raised meat and free range meat as though they're the same thing. Well, they're not. Now when you vilify meat as a topic, you create a problem. The second part of this is that in that movie they showed this slide and it showed that as the population of a given country was eating more meat, they tested for higher levels of cancer cells. Then they flick off the screen. Well, if you watch that movie and rewound it and put that slide back up, what you'll see is that the graph also showed that as people's meat intake went down, their cancer cell production went down. Oh, wait a second, Adam. Do you really think that 200,000 years ago you and I as hunters would have been lucky enough every single day to get meat? Of course not. First of all, we would never have been that lucky. Secondly, we wouldn't have desired it every day. If you've had the same meal three days in a row, aren't you looking for some variety? There's going to come a point where like, Adam, I've had quite enough mammoth, thanks very much. I really want something else. There would have been natural seasonal ebbs and flows in our protein intake, which would have caused natural ebbs and flows in our cancer cell production just the same. Like with bone density, our bones are designed as banks for calcium. When we eat a diet that's very acidic, our bodies borrow calcium from the bones to deal with that acidity. And when we eat a diet that's extremely basic, or I should say alkaline, then what happens is we repay the loan to the bones. These movies unfortunately take half of the argument to make a particular manipulative statement. It would be very much like this. Adam, you and I could go out and produce a very convincing movie right now on why eating poop is a bad idea. Because it is. Unless you're a dung beetle. We could go out and convince dung beetles all over the world that they shouldn't eat poop because it's gross and it's smelly and it's full of bacteria. And frankly, it's an invasion of privacy. I mean, you don't want somebody eating your poop. Don't eat poop anymore. We could produce a very convincing movie about how bad poop is, but the problem is, is that dung beetles evolved the requirement for it. And then if they chose to stop it because of our propaganda movie, they would end up with malnutrition and then their species would come to an end.

Yeah. So is moderation what we're talking about? Is that the one thing that we can go back to consistently. I mean, we were talking about the Dow, the whey center, we just talking about moderation here, where when you remove some of these headlines that are grabbing people's attention, that really what we're saying is that meat in moderation. Well, you know, proper, you know, like if you're getting grass fed, good meat, something that's been ethically raised, as you said, where there's a lack of hormones and things like that, that in moderation is okay.

Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about that. We have an expression in wildfit that everything in moderation includes moderate health. Everything in moderation.

I remember when you said that.

Yeah, right. So as a rule, the everything in moderation rule is one of the biggest myths of the diet industry. Everything in moderation is a path to cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and a plethora of other diseases. Used in the context that you've just said, yes, you're right.

Think of smoking cigarettes in moderation is not a good idea.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Getting drunk in moderation.

Yeah. But again, there's this issue of what is moderation? Right. For some people, moderation is one or two glasses of wine every Day. Your liver doesn't think so. Your liver does not see that as moderation. It sees that as extreme behavior. We think of extreme behavior as, like, getting really, really drunk. No. Having a glass of wine every day. That's extreme behavior. And so I think the issue is what is moderation? But in the case of meat, for example. Yeah. I mean, the human requirement for meat is very much open to debate. What is not open to debate is that humans have been meat eaters forever. I mean, our closest cousins on Earth are meat eaters as well. Now, this doesn't mean that somebody has to go and eat meat every day or even every month. There are significant markers that suggest that some of the nutrients that we get from meat stay in our system for months after we eat meat. So you and I, we go get ourselves a mammoth, we bring some meat back. Elise, Randy, and the kids get to have some meat. But then we're not so lucky hunting for the next several weeks. That's fine. That's okay. I was completely vegan for four months 18 months ago. Completely vegan for four months. I just felt like it. I just wanted to. Felt great. By the way, when I'm in full workout mode, I go out kiteboarding out here for four hours. Tell you something, I come back and I'm looking for a piece of meat, I get the best thing that I can.

Yep. In the little bit of time we have left. Could you share a little bit about the WildFit program? And from my understanding of it, it's bringing. It brought us back to a place you call spring. It brought us back. It put us into ketosis. It brought our bodies back to a more alkaline state. Could you sum that up and why.

Sure. So it's funny that you mentioned ketosis. We've been running this program for years, and we never even told our clients about ketosis. We just ran them through the program. But then as ketosis became like this buzzword, our clients go, are we in ketosis now? Okay, yes. But there's a couple things to think about. Tim Ferriss talks quite a lot about ketogenic living and that sort of stuff. And I remember hearing in his podcast once, he said that less than 10% of people who attempt a ketogenic diet will actually succeed because it's really difficult. Well, what I would remind you of, as you know, is that we do move people into a season that we metaphorically call spring in the wildfit program, which is a ketogenic season, and we run with a 90% success rate. Now let's talk about why that is. Because there's some things that we do that people can apply right here without ever doing our program, or they certainly can come and do it one day and experience it with us. But one of the things that we do is a very staged process where we work on the food psychology, then we work on adding the right nutrition, and then we work on subtracting some of the things that would take us out of a ketogenic state. By doing that in a staged way, we make the whole process more gentle. And so people then enter into a ketogenic state without pain. They get there feeling good about it. They might find a little bit of boredom because it's a new eating pattern and they haven't quite learned how to do it yet, but they get there and they get the benefit of it. Now, I think an important thing to remember here is we talked a little bit before about seasons. Ketosis is not a lifestyle. We were not designed to live permanently in ketosis any more than we were designed to live permanently in sugar metabolism. These are seasons. This is a very core principle of Wildfit, and I suspect that you'll begin to see it as a core principle of any successful diet program in the the world, because it's just correct that our species evolved to go through cyclical dietary change. It is healthy for the body to go into a ketogenic state for a period of time and then to come out of that ketogenic state for another period of time. That's a normal process in WildFit. We do that so beautifully and so gently that people learn how to do it for themselves.

Beautiful. If folks wanted to find out more about the program, see. See if it's a good fit for them at this point. Because it's a commitment. I mean, I'll say that right up front. And I think it's a more than worthwhile commitment. In fact, I think it's. It's a freaking life changing commitment. But you got to make a commitment to it. And that commitment is in essence, 90 days. Is that right? You don't do it for shorter periods. And. And so it's three months. And it's remarkable and not easy necessarily. And I think in being in the group, some people had a harder time with it and others had an easier time with it. And I think it hit people in different places. The psychology was probably the biggest thing for a number of folks I know I learned a great deal and I paid a lot of attention to why I was eating and that's one of those things that I hadn't thought about before. Why am I eating this? Why am I putting this in my mouth? How do I feel after I eat it, actually? Right? All that kind of stuff. And then it's, as you said, adding some things that I had never added, had added to my diet on purpose, and then subtracting things again in a purposeful way, in a conscious way. So I thought this was great to have you on as part of the conscious pivot, because it's not just about changing things. It's about making a conscious decision to change things and hopefully with good information and not changing based on being, you know, the subject of someone else's propaganda or based on scarcity or fear or, or worse yet, that it's in response to illness that's shown up because you've neglected yourself or been misinformed for too many years. So hopefully this will hit people land well with folks and they'll be curious enough to want to go seek it out from you. So let's not make it too difficult for them. Eric, to find you or find information about the WildFit program. Okay?

Yeah, it's super easy. If you go to getwildfit.com the information is there. There's a variety of different options for how people do the program, whether they would like, prefer to do it with a coach or in a class or on their own, you know, different economic levels that people can do the program through. It's we make it as easy as possible. But to your point, you know, I really. And again, that's getwildfit.com to your point, since you've done the program. Another obviously, many people have done the program, but one of the people that's done the program since you finished it is a guy who is one of the owners of Zumba. Now, I mean, Zumba is probably the biggest brand in the fitness world. And he did the program and he made a couple of comments. The one is that he said he was so amazed by the program. He said that what Zumba did to the fitness industry is what we are now doing to the diet industry. They figured out how to get people to stick with their fitness, and we have figured out how to get people in. Actually, this is exactly what he said. He goes, you know, all these people out there are looking for a diet they can stick to when what you've done is created a diet that sticks to them. Ooh, nice.

Hey, that's a sticky quote right there, brother.

Yeah, we wrote back and said, excuse me can we use that in. I was just thinking that, yeah, I suspect that'll be on the COVID of the book. But I think that for everybody here, there's a couple of. I mean, like I said, getwildfit.com there's a video only version. That's the lowest cost way to do it. You just can do it anytime you.

Want, do it on your own.

Then you can do it in small classes where you've got, like you did Adam, where there's a small group of people that go through it together as a challenge. We occasionally have these big class challenges that might have several hundred people all going through together. And then there's also private one on one with our coaches as well. So there's a number of ways people can do it depending on their lifestyle and their learning model. Basically, the way the program works is as you said, it's 90 days and there are prerecorded videos that they consume. So in the first week there's daily videos and then after that there's videos twice a week and then a bunch of bonus content on specific types of food or specific behavioral change. Then if they're in a coaching environment, there's live coaching sessions with their coach and their team. And the entire process runs through this very gentle 90 day cycle. And there's some things that are new to it. Since you went through, there's now a 13th week. So it actually goes beyond the three months. And the 13th week is called Living While Fit. And it's all about how to take WildFit off into your future. So it's back to daily videos and it's really immersive. And we also give them, as a graduate of the program, a free copy of the book Living Wild Fit again as a guide for maintaining the lifestyle. So we've really, since you did the program, we did something really cool and that is that we collected all the questions we'd had for three or four years and tagged them based on the question, based on the week that the person asked them. So we now know all of the questions from week one, all the questions from week two, and then we recreated the entire program and added in all the extra information that needed to be there. So the 2.0 version of the program is as successful as we were the first time. It's even better now.

Yeah, much better to meet them where they are. And that's the best way to know, as you said, be in that feedback, constant feedback loop. So kudos to you, brother.

And you know, we can talk about this also Offline. But I'd be interested, for example, in, you know, if you've got a handful of, you know, kind of key people that would love to do this, I'd love to do maybe a private, you know, class for pivot, where we can take a handful of people running through it. Because if you think about it, what a great way to introduce it to your, you know, to your. You know, to your whole tribe. You know, let's get some initial. Whatever you want to do.

I gotta tell you, people who are pivoting, and they know who they are, they're listening to this podcast, but they're also, you know, out there, out there working their life. Pivoting is not an easy thing, seriously, to change career, change job, or to be an entrepreneur, which I think is the most exciting thing you could be doing these days. But it is like waking up in the morning getting your daily. Your daily abuse and loving it so much you get up in the morning that the next day loving your life and still ready to get up and take a sock in the head.

In.

Furtherance of the freedom that you're looking for and the way to serve the world. And you got to be strong for that. You got to have energy physically be strong, mentally be capable and strong and agile and resilient. And resilience is the key. And so to me, this is a resilience tool. It's part of that ritual. You take care of yourself better.

Adam, you said something that really. I think it's really important to mention, and that is that one of my highest values as a human being is freedom. I really like personal liberty and freedom. And often people give up. There's so many people have never done a diet or given up on diets because they value freedom so much and the concept of calorie restriction or being hungry or frightening to them. And of course, we don't do any of that stuff. Nobody's ever hungry on the program. Nobody does calorie counting. But the neatest example of this for me was when a client of mine, one day, a business client of mine came to me, and he goes, I'm thinking about doing Wildfit, but I don't think I can because. Because I really value freedom. And I said, what do you mean? He goes, well, I just. I love being able to eat what I want, when I want, whenever I want. And I said, yeah, but can you not? And he's like, what do you mean? And I go, can you not eat what you don't want? And he goes, I don't understand. I go, well, look, you have a thing with pizza. If there's a pizza here, would you eat it? And he goes, yeah. And I go, but we just had lunch. And he goes, yeah, but it's pizza. So I said, in other words, you have no freedom not to eat the pizza. And he went, oh. He realized he actually didn't have any freedom at all. He had the illusion of freedom bought and paid for by the food industry. And what we gave him back is his freedom. He has since lost about 30 kg or 50 pounds and completely turned his life around. So, you know that. That point you made about, like, you know, it is about freedom. It's about living the way you really want to live and not living the way the food makes manufacturers want you to live.

Exactly. This is a lifestyle choice. And so in any event, Eric, I love you, brother. Thank you for making the time. And where are you? In Costa Rica? Where are you today?

No, I'm home in Cabarrate, Dominican Republic, and the wind is starting, so I will be kite surfing shortly.

All right, brother. You'll be kite surfing. I'm going to be surfing in different actually. I'm going up to Santa Cruz and there's incredible surf up there, so we might both be surfing today Anyhow. What a lovely day. Great to see you. Great to hear you. And I'm most, most happy that our pivot community get to learn from you, experience what you're doing.

So thanks. Thanks very much for having me.

Yeah, well done. Awesome.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have the tools and greater insights to navigate your own pivot. Help help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over@adammarkel.com podcasts for more tips, strategies, and support as you consciously pivot into a new business and lifestyle you love. Join our Pivot community on facebook@pivotfb.com.