App INSIDER: How Something Called "Dan's Plan" Could Save Your Sleep and Your Life.

Hey, it's Ben Greenfield. Welcome to this app Insider interview with Dan Pardee from Dan's Plan. If you deal with sleep issues or insomnia or you want to track your sleep or just your body and your life and your health in general, Dan is chock full of good information. You're going to dig this episode. So sit back or keep on running, biking, whatever it is that you're doing, and listen in.

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Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield and with me on the call today is a guy named dan pardee from dansplan.com and dan's the founder of dan splan.com and he will be able to tell you a little bit more about what they do, but basically they're an online wellness and technology company that promotes optimal health. And Dan has done a ton of stuff. Before he got involved with Dan's plan, he's performed scientific research on diet, exercise, cancer. He conducts research today still in sleep neurobiology and cognitive neuroscience. I know he's been at Stanford University and also the University of Leiden. And he's spoken all over the world to physicians, to academic audiences. He's been involved with the URSA or the iisra. And what is iisra by the way?

Dan? It's a very long winded name, but it's the Investigator Initiated Sponsored Research Association. So it's a specific type of research in the pharmaceutical industry that allows academics to submit research grant ideas to funding agencies like pharmaceutical companies and then the pharmaceutical company will review that and then can provide a unrestricted grant for people for the academics to do their own independent research. It's actually a really, it's a really good program. And pharmaceutical. Yeah, probably started about 10 years ago and a lot of pharmaceutical companies now maintain these sorts of programs. And so that organization basically talks about how do you promote best practice. So this remains super ethical. Pharmaceutical companies aren't influencing results and then you're also stimulating all this new type of research. Gotcha. Yeah.

And you're also an athlete yourself or have had some history in strength conditioning in sports, right?

Yeah. So I was Formerly a Division 1 Assistant Head Strength and conditioning coach for University of San Francisco I worked with 13 different athletic teams on a year round training program design. Loved it. It's been a while since I've done that, but it's nice to have that background. Yeah.

So, yeah, so I've surfed around a little bit on dansplan.com and it's a cool website.

Thank you.

If I were going up an elevator with you from the bottom floor up to the top, and we had 30, 60 seconds for you to tell me what Dan's plan is. What's your elevator pitch? What exactly are you doing with Dan's plan?

Yeah, sure. So the thesis that the entire company is based off of is that a broken lifestyle is at the root of modern illness. And everybody therefore needs what's what we call an effective personal health practice. So the modern default environment is going to make us sit too much, eat foods mostly out of convenience, stay up late using our iPads and watching television. And all of this will encourage these behaviors that we know will predictably lead to poor health. So therefore we all need to be healthy. And if that's the case, then what does being healthy mean? Well, it means on a daily to weekly basis, you want to engage in these certain health behaviors that are going to promote health now and in the long term. And we call that your personal health practice. And so we focus on what we feel are the fundamental aspects of being healthy. Not to say that other things don't matter, but food, movement and sleep. And then we've created this kind of general philosophy about, you know, how to be healthy and that we also define specific aims. So, you know, is our goal with helping you be physically active to help you run a faster marathon or not. And so we have actually five big aims and everything that we do is trying to is aim to get to achieve those. And those include reduce the risk of illness, maintain physical abilities throughout your life, and then optimize life performance. And you could think of that as, you know, how well you're performing at work, how well you're performing in your relationships, life quality, and then also longevity and health span. So that's what our tools, philosophies, programs are all trying to encourage.

Can we go through those five real quick? What were they again?

Yeah, reduce illness risk, maintain physical abilities, and then you could think of the next three as kind of like optimizing life performance quality and then longevity or health span. So how can you be the healthiest possible throughout the longest duration of your life? And then how maybe possibly even extend lifespan? Certainly by if you circle back to the first One, reducing risk for certain chronic illness. Then we know that you can at least maybe not extend what's possible for you, but you can certainly not die early.

Okay, interesting. And so each of those five variables, what you do is you basically help someone to optimize each of them through tracking.

It's kind of our guiding principle. We sat down and we said, how do we define success? If you're going to help somebody maintain this health practice, what is the big picture goal? But then long term objectives like reducing risk, isn't necessarily that motivating people all the time, but increasing life performance? I mean, it might be in some sort of intangible way, but you know, things like how do I perform well today actually has a little bit more power enabled to, you know, to kind of get you to do the things that you may already want to do. So yeah, so we, that's what we kind of as a company focus on as our big picture objective. But then yes, we use tracking tools and then try to define. So the way that the philosophy works is like a long while ago I asked myself this question. If I want to help somebody be healthy, you know, what do you do? Right? How do you actually facilitate health in somebody else? And so I came up with this model. And the model is based off of these four different parts. So you want to inspire belief in somebody, right? You want to get them to believe that a certain concept has merit. And so what you do then is you lay out a persuasive argument about why this dietary style or physical activity style is going to serve you well. And that's basically just kind of like doing some scientific writing and referencing it and just earning somebody's trust. And then the next part though is even a lot of, I think health guidance ends there. Let's just give people a lot of information and then hope that they will act rationally once you convince them. But the next part, I think is really important for behavior change. It's then taking this big philosophy and then translating it down into actionable steps. So you've got 24 hour period or a 168 hour period of one day or one week. What are the things you actually do that turn to turn that philosophy into action? And then the third part is then tracking. So it's very easy for us to think we're doing something and actually to be doing something different. And you know, I'm actually a perfect example of that. I study sleep, I'm an advocate of healthy sleep. I talk about it a lot. When I started using our Own tracking tools. If you had asked me how much sleep I was getting, I would have sworn that I was getting eight hours per night or more. And when I tracked, I was actually getting just over seven. So I was getting about an hour less than what I know is probably optimal for me, but I didn't have an awareness of that. And it wasn't for a lack of appreciation of the importance of sleep. It's just easy to have a mismatch between what you think you're doing and what you're actually doing. And so this new tracking era with quantified self, we can talk about that a little bit later. Which makes it very easy to actually capture aspects of your lifestyle and then give you objective feedback so that you have mindfulness like, hey, what am I actually doing? And that's really powerful. And so I'm very excited about that movement.

Yeah, gotcha. Yeah, let's jump into some of the nitty gritty here. You've got an infographic on your website and I'll be sure that I link to that infographic for people in the show notes. But you talk about optimizing your health and you use kind of three different categories. You talk about being an intelligent eater, an enduring mover and a restorative. Restorative sleeper. Starting with that first aspect of living healthy, being an intelligent eater. What do you mean exactly by that?

Yeah, well, you know, I think that it's important for anybody who's interested in kind of understanding what Dan's plan is or any company to kind of put out what you think is like, instead of saying somewhat banal, undefined terms of like, you got to eat healthy, you know, what does that mean? And so again for. We came up with these three terms about just say, hey, listen, we want you to get good sleep, eat right, and get enough physical activity. These terms specifically is intelligent eater, enduring during move or restorative sleeper. So an intelligent eater is to eat whole seasonal foods, eat kind of a diverse diet, a simple diet, which we can actually talk a little bit later when we talk about weight loss. Organic if you can, but it's not. And then also low in toxins. So you want to have a very nutrient rich diet. You want to have the food actually be as close to nature as possible. But then there's other reasons why we eat too. So we eat to be. To align with our values. And you care a lot about animal rights. Does the food come from a farm where animals are treated well? How do you then kind of put in effort to understand certain brands and what their philosophical philosophies are and their treatment of animals so that it aligns with yours. And I think that actually putting that effort in can go a long way to helping you eat better because it's an additional motivational source to, okay, I want to eat healthy for me, but I also care about these other things in the world, like how the fair treatment of workers, appropriate treatment of animals in our environment. So those are basically additional motivational sources. And so an intelligent eater will take all of that into consideration and, and then try to again identify certain brands, have a philosophy about what they're trying to eat and why. And then I think eat foods that are kind of again, close to nature. And there's a variety of different philosophies around this, like the Paleo diet, which is obviously very popular. There's lots of different takes on it. What the Paleo diet actually is. Paul Geminet has a really interesting book, the Perfect Health Diet, which articulates his philosophy about how to again reduce toxins, what things really matter, maintaining a system, efficiency of nutrients. So yeah, so that's kind of the general approach to being an intelligent eater. And then also we eat for a variety of reasons that are not, that are basically just environmental, like the propensity of somebody to drink a Coca Cola is much higher if that Coca Cola is sitting in front of them, open in a glass, than it is even if it is just a. The table. And so we tend to be, you know, part of the infographic describes us as being, you know, creatures of habit and products of our environment. And our environment dictates what we do, including what we eat more than we realize. And so we really encourage people to construct a healthy health, basically a health environment. And that includes a healthy food environment. So decreasing, you know, making foods that you may like but know you don't want to eat too much of, making them somewhat inconvenient. Don't keep ice cream in your fridge, don't keep cookies out on the counter. And then conversely, making the foods that you really do like that you do want to be, to eat as accessible and convenient as possible, whether that means having a variety of vegetables that are prepared in your fridge so they're easy to reheat, good sources of meat, etc. So all of that will go. And that actually might be one of the biggest things to long term success is just maintaining that health environment. Yeah, gotcha.

Now, in terms of how this fleshes out, you take a guy like you, for example, what's a typical day of Eating look like for you, Dan? Not to put you on the spot, but I'm just curious.

Sure, yeah. So I often have eggs and veggies in the morning and then at lunch I'll usually have some fish and some more veggies and starch. I eat a fair amount of potatoes. I eat them mostly. I don't put a lot on them, I just heat them up and I actually like the taste. I've grown to like the taste of plain potatoes and sweet potatoes more than I thought I ever would. And then in the evening, it's a variety of different styles of diets. I eat a good amount of Thai food. I eat a lot of, a lot of veggies, some good grass fed meats and chicken and fish. So I keep it kind of just basically to staple ingredients, but then I try to seek out different preparation methods that keep the diet interesting and fresh.

Okay, I see. Gotcha.

Yeah.

All right. So when we're looking at kind of being a good food citizen and being an intelligent eater, I like the idea of not just eating healthy, but also considering how food choices reflect the environment and supporting the local economy and reducing waste and that type of thing. So the next thing you talk about on your infographic here is being an enduring mover. And when you use a word like enduring or a phrase like enduring mover, what exactly do you mean by that?

Yeah, well, it's the way that we construct our physical activity lifestyle to suit our big aims. Right. So we want to help people nurture the ability to meet physical challenges for a lifetime. Right. And we think that to do that you want to cultivate the sustainable mixed intensity daily, weekly movement practice. And so we look at both low intensity and higher intensity physical activity as basically the range that we can work within to kind of induce this effect. And we also look at the different types of physical abilities that you can work on, you know, like balance or strength, cardiovascular fitness, what are the things that actually matter? And we try to operationalize this enduring, moving concept by helping people maintain mobility, strength, and then cardiovascular fitness as a part of their, again, kind of daily to weekly health practice. So the big aspect of physical activity that's getting a lot of attention these days is low intensity physical activity. So things like standing and walking. So if you go to any one of the kind of exercise physiology conferences these days, that's where there's a lot of excitement. There's been a. There's a saying by a researcher, Mark Hamilton, that exercise is not the perfect anecdote for sitting too much. And so we've been, in some ways, even people that are physically active, they create what's potentially an unhealthy pattern of, you know, trying to then think about all of their physical activity in a half an hour period or an hour period, and then being somewhat sedentary for the rest of the day, sitting at their desk, you know, then kind of otherwise maintaining a sedentary lifestyle. And there are specific consequences to sitting too much that cannot be over, kind of, you know, be wiped. Wiped clean by getting in a good workout. And so what we do is we look back at ancestral models, traditional farmers, hunter gatherers, and look at their physical activity levels or pals. How much activity did they do? It's just a reference point. It's not necessarily like we have to do, you know, as Rob Wolf might say, a reenactment of what we find from these ancestral models. But it is actually really interesting to see what did people move like prior to the Industrial revolution, where our lifestyle has changed so drastically. And right now, the average for modern humans is to move about 30% less than these traditional models. But then you also have athletes that will be moving 30% more, so competitive cyclists, et cetera. So are the people that move more healthier? Do we see that it confers greater health the more you move? And there's actually some suggestion that you can actually do too much exercise. But I think what we have meaning that when you start to endure a certain degree of stress from physical activity, it overwhelms the body. It starts to make, you know, that person becomes sick with much greater frequency. They have myocardial scarring, there's other damage to the heart. So there's potentially increased risk of cancers. So you start to see, okay, people that maintain very high levels of physical activity might not be doing themselves justice either. But I do think we still have a wide range that we can work within and construct a interesting, durable physical activity life that's going to then kind of suit our bigger goals.

If someone were going to kind of strike the ideal chord between, like, health and performance, what do you think, you know, would be like, a typical workout day or, you know, I asked you what you eat for your meals throughout the day, but do you think you're a model for that in terms of exercise? Or can you kind of paint a picture of what someone's day might look like if they were engaged in the type of enduring movement that you think is ideal?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that, you know, when I talk about our enduring mover philosophy, talk about a daily to weekly movement practice. Because I don't think that we have a daily exercise objective. Right. But I do think that we have an objective or there's some research that would support standing and walking. You can have goals on a daily basis to do that. So there's not great evidence that suggests that if you stand for this amount of your day, then you're going to be healthy. But there is evidence that suggests if you sit too much, then you're going to endure some significant problems. Even just sitting for three, four, five hour period without moving, you start to see some significant metabolic change where certain enzyme activity will diminish. You also have kind of unique. And you also see insulin resistance begin to occur. So people start to mimic a kind of metabolic state that's similar to diabetes just by sitting too much. And that's even if somebody is physically active. And an example to support that is there's a research study that took people that walk 13,000 steps per day, which is actually highly physically active in terms of step categorization, and then they made them, over the next three days walk less than 5,000 steps per day. And that's actually, sadly, a level that is average in the United States. So if you're not familiar with step counts, the goal that is currently being promoted by a lot of step devices and organizations is to try to get 10,000 steps per day. It's about four and a half miles, depending on stride length. And you actually accumulate a lot of those steps just simply by standing more at work and pacing. And so the idea is that it actually helps you be less sedentary. And so there's probably two dual benefits. Less sedentary behavior and then actually more low intensity physical activity. And they might actually kind of do. It's kind of weird to think of that as doing that. They're different, but they actually might do different things. But yeah, anyway, going back to that anecdote, take people that are highly physically active in terms of steps, you then make them get less than 5,000 for three days. And you start to see that they have spikes in both insulin and glucose after a standard meal that increase 25% day after day. And so it seems to have an immediate impact on your health. So you want to maintain a lot of low intensity physical activity. If you look at models of these traditional cultures, like I was mentioning earlier, GPS technology has been used to track these individuals and they're physically active, but not that much. They'll walk on average maybe six miles a day and then run an additional mile and then they do this intermittent activity throughout the day. So they'll run, jump, climb, throw, carry periodically. And if you look at even a physically active person today, they might do all of their, cluster their physical activity into a workout and then be sedentary. And so what we're trying to also do is help people decouple that or at least consider the option that maybe I can just do short bursts here and there throughout the day. And that's actually a model that's more similar to a natural movement pattern. And so we created something called intune training. And it's basically this concept of it's not necessarily in replace of a workout, it's just another alternative for somebody. And the intune stands for integrative. So you're trying to integrate movement into your day and then opportunistic. So you are looking for opportunities. If you have two minutes, you can do a set of like lunges or push ups or something, you know, and so it's a very low barrier for hey, can I, can I do something right now that's healthy? And I've been using this, this technique for maybe 18 months now. And it is incredibly sustainable. And so we have a tool that we've developed that gives you a daily workout that is in line with this training. And it's basically try to make it as simple as possible. It's like Here is your 1 body weight, strength, strength move of the day, like push ups. And then we have a conditioning move too. And that conditioning move is basically there's two different types, type and type B and type A. Jog in place for a minute and then, you know, do some fast feed, some sort of sprinting type of movement where you really high intensity. And then type B would be just three minutes of continuous activity like jump rope or burpees. The mode, what you do doesn't really matter, it's just that you're getting your body moving.

Right.

And yeah, so that's kind of how we see things, how we've created some tools that we think can kind of facilitate this sort of pattern of activity. Yeah, so that's our enduring movement philosophy. And then some ways that we. I mentioned one other thing too. So our tracking tools we've looked at. So the Department of Health and Human Services come out with these exercise guidelines. And these are basically the standard that most health organizations in the United States will use to create their guidelines, like American Heart Association, Diabetic association, nih. They all basically work reference this and this HHS exercise guidelines were developed by a task force of academics that are kind of top in their field, that look at the literature and say, how much actually how much physical activity do we need to endure significant benefit. Right. To achieve significant benefit from physical activity? And the levels, you know, they give a range, but those lower levels are actually kind of, you know, they're low, you know. But so what our exercise, what our tool does, our tracking tool is we help you enter whatever sort of physical activity that you've done in your day into the system just by translating it into minutes. So last night I did a yoga class and it was, I think I would say 45 minutes of it was actually qualified as physical activity. I put that into the system and then it translates it into this kind of point system so that you know where you stand relative to what HHS recommends on a weekly basis. So you, as an athlete you might maintain a level that's 200% or 250%. But the idea is you always want to be over 100% in this tool. And that way you're basically meeting, you know, you're meeting those goals and you can always go above that if you'd like.

Got it? Yeah. I think what you hit on there is one of the more important things that I've made a change in my training routine with. And that is not just like working all day and getting to the end of the day and smashing myself with a workout to make up for all the time that I've spent sitting around. So now I have like a pull up in the door of my office.

Awesome.

I've got different goals, basically benchmarks that I do throughout the day. I never let myself go for more than two hours without doing 100 jumping jacks. That's my rule. And I've got an inversion table that I go hang on for five minutes at the beginning and the end of the day. And I do a few cold showers here and there, just little things throughout the day. By the time I get to the end of the day. This may seem like a lot of workout, but for an Ironman triathlete it's not a bunch. But I can do an hour long workout, good to go, and I stay very fit with that approach for something like Ironman Triathlon. Whereas before I would have to sit around all day, then go out and do two hours of training to be ready for Ironman and just a different approach. And I think that enduring movement philosophy is awesome for that kind of stuff.

Yeah, cool. We're very like minded there. Yeah.

You talk about being a restorative sleeper and we've certainly geeked out, so to speak on this podcast in previous episodes about why sleep is important and that type of thing. But towards the end of your infographic, you talk about tracking sleep and you actually brought up yourself how you track your sleep. Can you talk about tracking sleep and some of the best ways to do that?

Yeah, sure. So there's. This is a topic near and dear to my heart. So this is what I currently do research on. I look at how chronic sleep deficiency will influence the decision making process, particularly around food choice. Fascinating subject. Sleep is one of those. It's less complex than diet and physical activity. The guidance can actually be rather mundane. You can't necessarily change the nature of your sleep by squinting harder. There are things that you can do during the day that can actually facilitate good sleep. There are things you can do in the evening that will encourage good sleep as well. And then there are things that you can do to your environment and where you're sleeping that can actually facilitate good sleep as well. But there's basically there's timing, intensity and duration that really matter. So timing is the period within a 24 hour block of time that you're actually getting your sleep. So let's say, Ben, you go to bed at 10 and wake up at 6 every day now for one night, if you shift that and you go to bed at, you know, let's say 1, 2 to 9, right. Even though you're getting the same duration of sleep, the quality or the recuperative abilities of that sleep phase will be different because you're sleeping in basically a different hormonal milieu. Right? Your body has these circadian or 24 hour processes and those processes are dependent on each other and they're also dependent on the light dark cycle of the day. So that's how you can go travel from San Francisco to Italy. It takes 10 days for your body to adjust. Of course your sleep wake cycle is off. You recognize that right away because you're up at night and you're sleepy during the day. But as you start to get more light exposure during the day, you start to eat at appropriate times for that time zone. Your body starts to make adaptations. And we recognize that really readily with how sleepy we are and when we're awake. But there's other processes in the body as well. Cortisol levels, growth hormone levels, gene activity, all of these things are actually adapting. And so sleep is healthiest when you actually maintain a fairly consistent sleep time. So that's the timing, then there's the duration. And you want to have basically enough sleep to basically achieve. There's a lot of things that take place during sleep. In fact, one question that's been is, well, what is the purpose of sleep? And that's actually been elusive. But I think we might even be asking that question incorrectly. It's like, is there one solitary purpose? Probably not. There might be hundreds of purposes that are basically helping the body restore and prepare for next day activity again, gene repair, memory formation, lots of cognitive processing that's taking place, lots of hormones that release that make you recover from physical activity. So getting an adequate duration is very key as well. And then the intensity is basically the depth of sleep. And you can't. That you encourage more through behavior that you either do or don't do during the day. So getting a lot of bright light exposure first thing in the morning and throughout the day, if you can, stepping outside of your office and just the intensity of light is much, much greater outside than it is inside. Right? It's not an obvious difference about how much more intense light is outside. It's an order of magnitude more. So outside, bright daylight, it's going to be over 100,000 lux. When you're inside in a bright lit office, it's maybe 5000 lux. Right. And the intensity of light is going to really help to track our circadian rhythms. And it's also going to. When you get a lot of bright light exposure during the day, it makes your nighttime melatonin rhythms more robust. Right. And then also doing physical activity and doing a lot of thinking. It's kind of like when, when you use it, then you're, it'll encourage that depth of sleep at night. If they're a friend of mine does what's called monocular deprivation studies where they'll blind one eye of an animal so that one eye cannot see during the day. And then they'll look at brain activity at night and they'll notice that the eye that was open, the part of the brain that corresponds to that open eye, is much greater in activity during sleep. It's having deeper sleep essentially than the eye that didn't have much activity. And that's reflective of this concept. If you go out and use your body and use your mind during the day, it's going to facilitate deeper sleep at night. Now, we could go on, I could talk a lot, a lot about that. But for the tracking tool, it comes down to very, very simple. What time did you go to bed? So setting an intention that says, okay, well, I know a lot of people have fixed wake up Times I know I need to be up by 6:30 to get to work, therefore. And I also think that I perform best if I'm in bed for eight hours per night. So let me backtrack and then choose a time. Right. 10:30 is when I'm going to go to bed. And you set that as an intention and that's really powerful because we have all of these competing influences in our world today, like television, iPads, things that entertain us, things that mask how sleepy we are or how sleepy we might be if they were not present. And so just being able to form an intention is very powerful because it gives you a little bit of a goal. Right. Where otherwise you don't have one. It's easy to just watch one more episode or read one more chapter. Yeah. And then there's duration. So it's timing and duration is what we track. And there are other sleep tools that do track more, but I feel like every time you take the attention away from the thing that's actually actionable, you potentially distract somebody from actually doing what they should be, what they can actually do. You can say, well, these are all the different sleep stages you got that could potentially be useful over time as you might learn things that influence that. But it's more kind of intellectual and interesting than it is useful and practical. So we're. Our tracking is very simple, actually. It's not super complex. It's just trying to get you to say, okay, be mindful of these things that you can do that are important, sometimes mundane. Yeah, that's our sleeping tracking.

What do you think is the best method to track sleep as far as the apps and the systems that are out there? If someone wanted to not spend a ton of money and just start to experiment with tracking their sleep, what do you think is the best way to do it?

Well, if someone wanted to spend very little money, you could. I mean, so the dance plan tools are free. We have some paid programs, but anybody can go there, use those tools. And what we simply. You can for free. You can say, I went to bed at this time and I woke up at this time, and it's going to.

Then capture, I mean like apps or something you could use in your phone. Because there's like the Zeo sleep system. I know, but you know, like as far as, like a phone app that someone could install on their phone to try sleep, that kind of thing like that will detect movement while you're sleeping.

Sure, sure. Yeah. So that was just kind of like, I think the lowest cost, easiest way. But then I don't actually love sleep tracking apps. I don't think that. I think that the consequence of having the phone in bed with you is potentially more disturbing than. And I just don't really know how validated they are, you know, but what I do know is that, well, I know that they're not. In fact, what I do like is the Fitbit. And the Fitbit has dual function. It's a step counter, so it can track your steps during the day. We talked about the importance of that. How else would you know how many steps you've taken? Unless you kind of basically have a step counter? And then at night you can wear it in a little sleeve on your wrist and it acts as what's called an actograph. Actograph is a well validated technique to measure sleep. It's been used for a very long time. It's imperfect, like many sleep measures, but it's looking at movement and then it's using algorithms to predict, okay, what's your sleep efficiency? What time did you go to bed? What time did you wake up? And so it's a very, you know, I think that we really promote everybody to get a bit, because I think it's just a great health tool. It does what you need it to do for steps and for sleep. It makes it easy. And then there's the Zeo. The Zio actually collects more information. There's another, there's another device that I really like called the Renew Sleep Clock. What I like about it is that it's very low touch. It sits on your bedside table, and it uses a dual signal of both sound and then RF to detect movement, to then predict stages of sleep that you're in. And I found it to be very accurate. Like, you know, if you wake up in the morning sometimes, but you don't want to admit you're up. So you're, you know, let's say it's like 6:45 and then you kind of roll around for like, you know, 20 minutes and then you finally open your eyes. When I use the Renew Sleep Clock, it's like you Woke up at 6:45. I'm like, you know what, that's probably right. And it always seems just to nail it. So that's a really great device if you want to get a little bit more information than what the Fitbit can do. I would say check that one out. Those are my two favorite Fitbit. And then Renu.

Okay, gotcha. Cool. The Renew Sleep Clock. You are a wealth of information when it comes to sleep. And this other stuff as well. I could probably talk to you forever and all day. And I think I'm probably gonna. I'm hopefully gonna meet you down at Paleo fx. You'll be down there, right?

Yeah, I am, I am, yeah. I'm glad to hear you're going.

Fantastic. Yeah, I decided I was gonna go last month, so I signed up for that. Folks, Dan is a wealth of information. I would highly encourage that you Visit his website, dansplan.com if you're into this stuff like tracking your movement, tracking your sleep, learning how to eat and be a little bit more aware about what you're eating. Be an intelligent eater. I will link to this infographic that we talked a little bit about today and we really just scratched the surface in terms of some of the things that Dan has going on over on his website. But I know that you also.

Recently.

Kind of launched, I believe it's called Ideal Weight Dan on that site. What's that all about?

Yeah, so a good way to think of what Danceplan provides is these free tracking tools. The tracking tools are meant to encourage mindfulness. Anybody can benefit from them. And the ways to now kind of collect that information is becoming really, really easy. So you just get a lot of the benefit if you commit to doing it. I encourage everybody to consider it or at least give it a try, see if it works for them. The second part of what Danceplan does is we provide these programs. And the programs are goal oriented ways in which you can construct aspects of your lifestyle to meet a particular goal. And so, like in the first one that we've released is Ideal Weight. So we've taken a very kind of authentic and deep dive into what do we think are the factors that control weight loss. This is, it's been created mostly by myself and Stephane Guillennet, who is at the blog Whole Health Source. We've been working on this for months. We met at the Ancestral Health Source society meeting in 2011 and had been corresponding for a while and then started to collaborate. He has a very popular blog and he's a really excellent scientist. He's an obesity researcher at University of Washington. And so we said, hey, we think that there's some real opportunity to highlight aspects of body weight regulation that have not seeped into kind of mainstream programs. And so we cover, you know, we've created two different diets that emphasize certain concepts around satiety and palatability, which is the kind of enjoyment of food. And it's well supported in the literature. And then we Also talk about how to then kind of construct that food environment more specifically for weight loss, which we mentioned a little bit earlier. And then we also talk about again physical activity and sleep. So we try to create very clear objectives for people and then let them have some choice about what diet is going to suit me best. And then we encourage them also to use the tracking tools just to maintain that awareness. Okay, now that you're on this path, you know what diet you're on, you've got these kind of certain goals on a daily basis. How do you, you know, am I doing what I should be? And so we've had a great response. We were, we launched last Tuesday, you know, getting just really good. I'm getting a lot of questions every email, which is that's how I'm spending most of my days now since the launch, which I think is a great problem to have. And yeah, so we're really encouraged by it. And it comes with what it looks like is there's a 50 page ebook, it's got about 175 different references in it. And it goes through. It's the scientific rationale behind the program. Some people will be very interested in that and it talks about, very specifically about some of the things that I was just mentioning. But then there's also the program and the program is more walking somebody through. Okay, how do I then just implement this in my life? And some people will want to skip the ebook altogether and just say, okay, show me what to do. Some people will want to then also understand the science. And for those that don't want to read the ebook, we also have created five videos that are about less than 10 minutes in length and they're right on the site. They're a part of the program. And then if they're. The program is a cost, it's $39. But once you would pay that, then you can actually see all these different resources like the videos that we've created, recipes. So there's some really nice good pictures of food and then they show you how to prepare the food in a manner that's actually going to comply with the program. There's specific cooking instructions that we have that are really unique. And so anyway, we try to make it as simple as possible to achieve success. And you know, we're very excited about it.

And people can grab that stuff over@dansplan.com Absolutely.

Yeah. So you can look for the ideal weight program. It'll show you where it is. What people need to do is just sign in for an account first and then if they can buy it. And you know our philosophy, we have a 30 day money back guarantee. I would never want someone to feel like they bought something and it just wasn't right for them and to feel like, oh, they kind of got, well, you know, they're out of that money. So we're very sincere about that. If people want to just get in there, if you're curious, get in there, try it, see if it's right for you, see if you're compelled by it, and if not, you can email us back, we'll give you a refund. So we're here to help people, not try to necessarily just get money from anybody. Obviously we need to do this to continue to support our development. We're all interested in continuing to work on this. And so that's a win. Win, hopefully.

Yeah. Cool. Well, what I'm going to do is link over to that in the show notes for this episode for any of you listening who want to check it out. I'll also link to or embed this infographic if you want to kind of review some of the stuff that we talked about. And yeah, I'd really encourage you to go check out the dance plan website. There's some great information on there. And Dan, you're a wealth of information and I want to thank you for coming on the call today, Ben.

I really enjoyed chatting and I'm excited to meet you in person in Paleo fx. And yeah, I appreciate letting me come and chat to your audience for sure.

All right, folks, this is Ben and Dan pardee from dan splan.com signing out.

Visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition and performance advice.

It. Sam.