How To Cease Endless Fad Diets (And The #1 Question You Must Ask Yourself About Food).

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness show, we either out of fear or out of distraction or out of maybe laziness or inconvenience, we try and ignore it. And when that calling, when that message is not answered, it gets louder and louder. And often, as it comes to our physical health, gets more and more painful. When you're on the stair climber and you're at the gym and you're, like, plugged in, watching some entertainment news or reading one of those terrible magazines, you can completely disconnect from your experience. You can completely disconnect from what's going on in your body, how you're feeling emotionally and physically and spiritually.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

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Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield here. And I have to admit to you that I get diet books mailed to me in the mail all the time. And it's not because I have some kind of an online shopping fetish for diet books. People just send them to me, like, unsolicited. It's actually a pretty well known fact in the health and nutrition industry that really one of the fastest ways to make a buck is to write and sell a diet book. Basically, it plays on the psychology that people are constantly looking for the next answer to the diet that's not currently working for them or they're bored, or they have this grass is always greener syndrome. So anyways, as you can imagine, I was actually quite pleased when the latest book that I got in the mail is actually called Undiet. It's an UN dieting book. It's called Undiet, Eat yout Way to Vibrant Health. That still didn't convince me that it was a book that I actually wanted to tell you about on the podcast until I delved in and started reading it. I got sucked in right away, and you're gonna learn why when you listen to today's podcast with the author. But it's quite, quite intriguing how she used food to heal her gut, heal Crohn's syndrome specifically, but also her refreshing perspective on diets and really not just diets, but kind of like changing your body as a whole. So if you find yourself constantly caught up in new diets or you say deal with stress constantly damaging your gut, or maybe you have Crohn's or some other kind of gut issue, or you have a loved one who does, or you look good on the outside, but you feel like crap on the inside. I would say that this episode is a must listen for you. So my guest today and the author of this book, Undiet, is named Megan Telpner. Megan Telpner, she lives in Toronto, and she's an author and a speaker and nutritionist. Like I mentioned, she used to have Crohn's disease, and you're gonna find out what she did about it, what she learned along the way, and we're gonna delve into some things we haven't talked about before in previous podcast episodes. So I'm excited. Megan, thanks for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me, Ben.

So let's just jump right into your story about Crohn's, because I think it's quite fasc. Can you tell me a little bit about how you got Crohn's?

I can tell you as much as I know about how I got Crohn's. There's always a little piece of mystery with autoimmune diseases, but I was diagnosed in 2006. I'd been sick for several years. Three years prior, I had done a very intensive bike challenge. Actually. I raised funds and rode my bike from Toronto to Montreal, which is about 500 miles, and so spent the summer putting my body under pretty extreme stress, and then got shot full of vaccinations to go backpack independently through east and West Africa. And then on top of all that was taking malaria medication and the stress of traveling alone in a very, very different culture. I started developing gastro symptoms that kept getting progressively worse and worse and worse. After 10 weeks, I returned to Canada and started the tour of doctors, which took me through to 19. I think 19 was the final count of doctors and specialists and natural healthcare practitioners until I was, in fact, diagnosed with Crohn's disease, which is the autoimmune inflammatory bowel disease.

I'm going to interrupt you real quick.

Yes.

So we love to talk about poop and nasty things on this show. So I'm just curious. You don't have to delve into really nitty, gritty details. But over those three years, as you had gotten these vaccinations and done, like, all this bike training and all this Stressful stuff. What was kind of like going on with your digestion and your bathroom habits and all that kind of stuff? Was it just like one day you woke up and stuff hurt, or was it like a gradual onset or how'd that happen?

It started the summer that I was cycling, and I'm sure you and many of your listeners have had this experience that when you're doing intensive exercise, I was also at that time, not knowing better, drinking a lot of sports drinks and power bars. And so my whole gut microbiome was already pretty messed up from just a bad. A basically bad diet. And so it was sort of dealing with intermittent constipation, diarrhea. And then when I went to Africa, it was more on the diarrhea side. And then slowly it started progressing towards, you know, by May 2006, I had full blown Crohn's symptoms, which is essentially explosive, bloody, mucusy diarrhea. Super cute.

Yeah, it's crazy. And I've talked to people with Crohn's before, and yeah, it's like this. Everybody has told me so far. It's this gradual onset where your poop just starts to change and it gets harder to push stuff out. And when it does come out, it's all mucusy and stringy, and then you get bloating and gas. But it gets worse and worse, right?

It gets worse and worse. And I think that if. When you have gradual symptoms, that's actually very fortunate because that. And I think that's sort of how I was able to not follow the conventional path all the way through, that I didn't end up having to be hospitalized. What can happen is those gradual symptoms get ignored and pushed back with, you know, over the counter symptom suppressors till they can't hold it back anymore. And so you end up getting your first flare up, being so severe that you are hospitalized and you don't really have a choice but to go a conventional medical route to treat those symptoms. So for me, it was very gradual, and I'm very grateful that that was the course my disease took for me.

What kind of treatment options did your gastroenterologist give you when you finally, like, came in and got diagnosed with Crohn's disease?

Yeah, so this was about 10 years ago, and the options have not changed. And they are medications, various types of steroids or immunosuppressants, and then they do gastric resectioning where they'll remove sections of the intestines, often using an ostomy bag. So a bag outside your body that will collect your poo until the resectioning is healed. And then they can sort of rejoin everything and have everything happening internally. In extreme cases, like with colitis, they'll remove the entire colon and then they do a JPro procedure where they take the lower part of the small intestine and sort of reconfigure that to function as the large intestine, which in theory sounds ingenious, but a huge component of our immune system is in that lower part of the intestinal tract, which obviously then no longer functions in that way. So a lot of people who have that procedure end up having multiple allergies, multiple chemical sensitivities, and then other types of immuno either immunodeficiency or autoimmune conditions will develop over time.

Yeah, that's something I'm actually reading. I'm a real fan of the gut microbiome and studying. I'm reading a book right now that I got for Christmas and it's up on my bedstand. Or else I would tell you the listener the name of it. I don't remember. But I'll tell you what, I'll have shownotes for this whole episode. So if you're listening in, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com/Undiet that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com--Diet and after Megan and I record, I'll go grab that book and throw it into the show notes. But the part of the book I'm in right now is all about colonic anatomy and also the specific bacteria and ways to feed your large intestine, ways to take care of your large intestine. And a lot of people, they talk about stomach acid and digestive enzymes for the stomach, and they talk about probiotics that can make it through. The acidic environment of the stomach can populate the small intestine. But the large intestine, with 15 million different species of bacteria, is actually more bacterially diverse and is the biggest part of your microbiome and the biggest part of your immune system. A lot of people, people think of it as like the poop tube, but it's pretty frigging complex and it's a pretty frigging complex thing to just cut out of your body.

Well, I kind of. That was sort of my feeling that like, I feel like every part of your body is pretty complex and is there for very good reason.

Yeah. I mean, even the appendix. Right. Like, we've got this new information that the appendix is like A. It's a storehouse. It's a snapshot of your bacterial profile from, like, when you were born. So when you cut out your appendix, your body has to, like, reboot its entire bacterial structure that you were supposed to have from the time you were a baby?

Yes. And we're sort of in a paradigm right now where we can cut out the appendix, we can cut out the tonsils, and we cut off our breasts, and we can cut out the uterus, and we can cut off testicles, and we will be fine, but we're not.

Yeah. Yeah. So you decided that you weren't gonna get your poop tube cut out. So what did you do instead?

I was just terrified. Like, I mean, I don't have my ears pierced. I don't like pain. I was terrified at that prospect. And even more terrifying than that, if they had said to me, we can do this procedure and you'll be fine the rest of your life. But they can't make that promise because that's not actually the facts around this procedure. So I was sort of willing to do absolutely anything else but that I didn't want to be on medications and I didn't want to have surgery. And so my desire was so strong that I started digging into the research and trying to figure. Figure out what actually could work and what are my chances of this being effective. For me, with a genetic predisposition and being young and all the things I had on my side and against me and waited out and decided that I would make some dietary and lifestyle shifts and see what happens, See if I could. At least if I had to go into a surgery, I didn't want to go into it. 30 pounds underweight, unable to get out of bed, which is where I was at, I at least wanted to go into it being a stronger version of myself. And so the result of taking that action, of actually making some major shifts in my diet, in my lifestyle, in my thought processes, resulted in me not needing any other intervention at all.

No. I thought it was really interesting. On page eight of your book, you talk a little bit about six things that you did every day. And not many of them involve a lot of things that we would consider to be traditional methods of improving your body. For example, like high intensity interval training or weight training or meal replacement blends, stuff like that. So can you go over the six things that you did every day and perhaps comment on why you chose those specific types of activities?

Yeah, I feel like. Because you said with, like, weight training, I'm like, I have to Start with one of my favorites, which is nap. If I was tired, I was gonna take a nap. And that's because if we need eight hours to roughly of sleep to sustain health, I knew right away that I was gonna need a lot more than that to regain my health. So napping was on my list, meditating was on my list. And I would meditate twice a day. I'm using a mantra based meditation and I would sit for 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the afternoon before I had dinner. And that was really just a time to regroup and get some space in my mind and intentionally shift my body into the parasympathetic nervous system, which is where it will actually do its healing and repairing high intensity exercise, where elevating our cortisol levels isn't going to invite the kind of healing and repair that I needed. I used to run and so I could no longer run because it's hard to run with a stomachache. And so I started walking and I had less excuses not to walk. So I would take a morning walk. And that was another way to shift into parasympathetic, get fresh air, see nature. I go to yoga. So I gave up my gym membership where I used to go to the gym at like 4:30 in the morning and work out with a trainer, often to the point where I needed to take a grave all after because I was so nauseated. So I started practicing yoga and learned how to move and stretch and actually tune into how my body felt in any given moment, which was very new. I learned to cook and it was simply preparing food in my kitchen. It was nothing fancy because I didn't know how to cook. I was learning about ingredients and learning to cook one ingredient at a time. And maybe the most important thing on that list is the permission to do absolutely nothing if that's what I felt like I needed to do. And so if I was tired or I didn't feel feel well or I just didn't want to do anything, I gave myself permission to sit and read a book or sit and I used to knit and make scarves or learn to cook. And that was just what I did in allowing myself to be a little more present with my life and really tune in to what I needed at any given moment, not to fight this disease, but to work with it and heal it.

Right? And that's something that I really want to make sure that our listeners are aware of, is that when you activate your sympathetic nervous system, it does divert blood flow away from your gut and into your extremities, where your muscles can contract. And based off of what's called the vagus nerve, which is going to innervate many of or much of your gut tissue, your parasympathetic nervous system. This rest and digest nervous system Megan is talking about, that is it's primarily associated with the vagus nerve. That's the primary nerve of your parasympathetic nervous system. And when you shut down your parasympathetic nervous system or create an autonomic nervous system imbalance by doing lots of hard and heavy and intense workouts, if you also, at the same time have gut stress or stomach issues, you vastly inhibit your body's ability to heal. And for you, Megan, with something like Crohn's, one of the things that it sounds like you were doing was improving your blood flow to your gut and also decreasing the. The deactivation of a lot of those important gut functions. That happens when we say skip the nap to squeeze in the workout. And also, for example, in the morning, do say, a crossfit wad instead of a yoga session. So it's really important. I want to make sure that listener understands that this isn't just like, woo, woo. And it's not just your mind, it's actually your blood flow and your autonomic nervous system. It is.

And, you know, you mentioned the vagus nerve, which is interesting because a lot of people who are into heavy fitness think of yoga. And I used to be one of this. I used to be like that. Be like, come on, let's go for a real workout. But what's interesting is that what I've come to learn, at the time, I was experimenting and I was willing to try anything, and I didn't have any nutrition knowledge. I didn't have much science knowledge even at the time. But just the simple. When you start a yoga class and they do the om chant, any kind of humming or chanting or singing stimulates the vagus nerve. And so there is, though it may not be presented in that way, there is the science and the evidence and the physiological evidence that can support a lot of what we think of as more spiritual practices.

Yeah, and this is kind of a rabbit hole, but on one of the books that I've read about gut health, two highly recommended activities for people who struggle with digestive enzyme production and constipation and gut issues, is a singing, like singing in the shower and. And do it. Getting kind of that. That same vagal nerve activation you get from the. In yoga.

Yeah.

But also gargling like gargling water in the morning. Those are two highly recommended activities for people who have like a sluggish gut.

Yeah.

So what happened to your Crohn's?

It went away. I healed it.

So gut inflammation went away, bowel function restored. And. And how long did that take for. Over the course of doing these things?

I'm reluctant to say this. It was roughly four weeks before all major Crohn's symptoms went away. It was about three months before my digestion didn't just restore to how it was before I got sick, but it was actually functioning. And I don't know that it ever had. I don't think I'd ever had effective digestion for, you know, at least in my adult memory from when I was 16. Went on birth control. It kind of threw everything off from there. So for the first time, everything was actually working and working. Not just that I could eat and have regular bowel movements and I wasn't super gaseous and all those attractive things, but it was that I had a regular appetite. I woke up hungry, and then I ate, and then I wasn't hungry again for a couple hours, and then I'd be hungry again and feel satiated. And all those things that are all part of the digestive process and also the function of learning to eat at a table and pay attention to my food was all part of healing my digestive system.

That's crazy. Four weeks. So let's say the crossfitter or the Ironman triathlete or the obstacle racer who's been hard charging for the past few years with workouts, has a lot of gut issues. What you're saying is something as simple as having a month long staycation or, you know, stepping away from the hard and heavy workouts and just basically doing yoga, napping, sleeping, meditation, et cetera, could potentially. And again, we're not like, you're obviously in n equals 1, right? This isn't like a clinical scientific study, but it could potentially be all you need in the absence of like fancy supplements and pharmaceuticals and acupuncture and everything else to fix your gut.

It would be. I mean, I also. I was doing acupuncture, okay. I was doing acupuncture and I wasn't really taking supplements and I had herbal teas. But yeah, in theory, absolutely. And if we.

Why were you doing acupuncture?

Because the 19th doctor I went to was a doctor of Chinese medicine who told me he could help me. And the 18 before said they couldn't do anything for me. So I was willing to try everything, and he said he could help. And he's based in Santa Monica, California, and he basically said that he could help help with acute healing of the lesions in my intestines and remodulate my immune system to work better.

Yeah, which all sounds like woo, woo. But we actually just talked about this on a podcast about how you have these different meridians in your body, like areas of energy flow that can be blocked and that it can be cross tissue and fascia related, but it can also be related to the flow of energy. And you can actually change some of that up. With acupuncture.

It's the flow of energy, and if we want to get into the quantum physics of it, molecules of energy are smaller than the cells in our body. So when you're getting needles and electricity attached to them and that's going through your body, that's stimulating your cells in a capacity that, you know, pharmaceutical molecules are larger than the cells of your body. They don't get in the same way. They don't have that same influence and effect. So, you know, there is a lot of scientific evidence. There's also evidence that sham acupuncture also works, like mock acupuncture. I don't know how they actually do that, but I know when there's needles in my body, when you're pinned to the table like a pincushion. But I sort of was also at the point, and at some point we have to. I wasn't open to questioning it. I didn't need to question it. I trusted it. And whether you believe in something or not, it can be all you need if you believe it will work. You know, placebo's powerful and has no negative side effects, so go for it.

Yeah, it is. I still think there's more to acupuncture than placebo. And yes, for those of you who haven't done acupuncture before, as Megan just alluded to, yes, they do indeed, in some situations, attach electricity to the needles so you can get both punctured and.

Shocked at the same time.

But it's not as bad as it sounds. Everybody needs to try it at least once. Kind of like a. Like cryotherapy in a float tank. It's just one of those things to add to your bucket list. Anyways, though, let's jump into some of the tips that you give in this book, Megan. So, first of all, one of the tips that you give, you have these ten keys to undieting. I love this section of the book. And one of the first keys, or the first key is to learn how to cook. I tell this to my clients and the folks who listen quite a bit. But there are also a lot of organizations now. For example, I just got a bunch of meals sent to me by this paleo on the go, like a meal delivery service. And they were good meals like elk stuffed acorn squash and wild caught salmon. They were really good. And they're obviously pretty chemical free and nourishing. And with the advent of a lot of these organizations, now there's even bone broth restaurants popping up in major cities like New York City. A lot of this healthy cooking can be outsourced. So why in that case would the person who can afford to or can have the convenience of having someone else do the healthy cooking for them, why would they even need to learn how to cook?

Great question, Ben. So the first, I wanted to address the name of my book because it does relate to this of Undiet. Because I didn't want to write a diet book. I wanted to write a lifestyle book which would have the same interior as it does with the title Undiet. It was my publisher who wanted the Undiet because diets sell. And so as it relates to cooking, there's a lot of ways to go about eating healthier. And you can outsource your meal prep and you can outsource pretty much everything these days. But there's something to be said for knowing what you're eating, at least when you're starting out, when you're starting to figure out your health and what feels good to you and what doesn't. It's important to know exactly what you're eating and what goes into preparing that food. There's an energy to it that can be incredibly powerful and incredibly empowering. That you know that like, you can go to the store, you can buy these things that you know your body is needing, and you know how to prepare them. You know exactly what's going into it. And then you can sit with that and be like, okay, this is how this made me feel. We now, you know, my husband and I, when we're really busy, we use our. We have a fabulous meal delivery service that we love and that we trust. And it's all organic and locally sourced, but I still don't know exactly what kind of oil is being used. I don't know exactly what the spices are, I don't know exactly what I'm eating. And when you're looking, as I was in the case of trying to heal a disease, I was really mindful about avoiding certain things, not just gluten and dairy and a lot of things we hear a lot about. But there was specific. I can't have egg whites and I couldn't have pineapple. And there were certain things that I needed to ensure sure I was not getting trace amounts of or byproducts of because I didn't want anything to impair my body's ability to do what it needed to do. And so I think that if you are transitioning to a lifestyle, whether it's an undiet type lifestyle or whatever suits you, that you are tuned in enough to know how to create the food you want to create, what's in it and how it makes you feel. And at the end of the day, you can, of course, always, you can hire a personal chef, you can provide the recipes, there's everything you can do. And at the end the day, it's either going to cost you in time or cost you in money. And whatever you have to spare, that'll be the path you choose.

Yeah. And for me, it's like, even if you have 100% confidence that whatever food some organization or person is creating for you, if you're outsourcing all your cooking, there are some things that you pick up when you cook that I think are extremely beneficial for your biology. So, for example, Tim Ferriss has his book, the Four Hour Chef. One of the things I did when I purchased that book was I went through the whole book and I cooked the. It's like 16 or 19 recipes or something like that. They get progressively more difficult as you go through the book. And I learned quite a bit about everything from knife skills to the actual anatomy of different fruits and vegetables, how to take apart a chicken, all these little life skills that I think for me helped me to become that much more of a Renaissance man, or perhaps if you're listening in, that much more of a Renaissance woman. And there are similar to music or chess or learning a new language, there are different neural connections that spark when you cook, when you do everything from the heating to the cooling to the packaging to the processing to the actual assembling of the meal on the plate, that I think if you outsource all your cooking, you miss out on a major part of life, on part of being human. And yeah, it might be convenient, but at the same time, making your bed, having that outsourced is convenient, but making your bed in the morning also makes you a better person, mentally and physically. And so I think that even if you are Outsourcing your meals. If you can find one meal, like one new meal to cook each week, it makes your body and your brain better.

Yeah. And it's one of the few things. The way many of us work today, we're not doing three dimensional creation. We're doing a lot of two dimensional on computers, or we're writing, or we're doing things that don't have a tangible product at the end. And cooking is one of the few that we all have all the equipment we need in our home to do it and to create these things. And it is because you talk about the neural pathways, it's a fully sensual experience in that you're using all of your senses, your sight and your smell and your taste and your touch and your vision. And that's powerful into and of itself, even as a meditative practice, to put on music and create in your kitchen the other thing it allows you to do. And I'm sure your listeners listen to your podcast and probably many others, and we pick up these life strategies from what we learn. And you can start to incorporate little things you learn into your cooking. Yesterday I made an apple cider because it's cold and there's not a lot of fresh produce. And into the apple cider, I also added some chaga mushroom that we'd harvested up north, which is a very powerful immune tonic. And I put in some ginseng and some goji berries and a little bit of maca, and then simmered all of this together to make more than just an apple cider. But it's like a healing tonic, and there's ways you can start to incorporate it and it actually becomes a little bit of fun and creation.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So if you're not yet convinced to learn how to cook, you've actually got some recipes in your book, too. I know it's not a diet recipe, but you've got a good handful of recipes in here in the back half of the book. So there's a good place to start if you want to learn. Or you can contact me and I will send you one of the 8 billion cookbooks I have again, because I get these in the mail all the time. Okay, let's go ahead and talk about something else that you discuss in the book. You have kind of like this, this cryptic phrase. This is rule number three or thing number three that you'll learn through undieting. You say the writing is always on the wall. What do you mean when you say that?

I mean that we always know what we need to do. And too often we either drowned out the messages and the signals and the signs, much like we do with the symptoms in our body when it's not doing what we want it to do, we bang out that engine light. But. But we always inherently know what needs to happen next in our life for our own evolution. But too often we either out of fear or out of distraction or out of maybe it's laziness or inconvenience, we try and ignore it. And when that calling, when that message is not answered, it gets louder and louder. And often, as it comes to our physical health, gets more and more painful. So, for example, in my life, I was very lost for a long time. And my undergraduate degree was in fashion, and then I went to Africa, and then I ended up working in advertising. And while I was working advertising, dealing with all these health issues, I started making meal plans for people because they were always asking for them. And I'm like, this is super fun. I'm learning new recipes, I'm creating things. I'm learning a lot about food and nutrition. This is interesting. And I just kept ignoring it and ignoring it. And then my health challenges came and I still didn't know what I was going to do and I couldn't go to work. And one day it was like this light went off. I was in a health food store and someone's telling me about some protein powder. I was just like, wait a second, I want to know that. And it was like the lights came on and the angels were singing. And it's like sometimes what we need to do is just right there and it's so obvious. But we get so caught up in our routines and in our day to day and not wanting to rock the boat or ruffle any feathers or step out of the box we've built around ourselves that we fail to achieve our incredible potential. But when we can take those moments and tune in and be quiet and listen, and whether you consider it a gut instinct or someone says something to you and this conversation sticks in your head, there's always these things that can stand out. And then you look back and you're like, like, oh, now I get it. That made perfect sense to how I ended up where I am today.

Yeah, I mean, a big part of that is, for example, your decision to do all these restful activities that you just intuitively knew would activate your parasympathetic nervous system that helped you to heal your Crohn's. Another example for me is when I wake up in the morning, I take A measurement. It's called the heart rate variability measurement. And it gives me like a score for my sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. And when I quantify that, it helps me choose whether I'm going to do something stressful or unstressful for that day. However, even if I don't do that measurement and I get out of bed, if I try and push my body to do something that it simply something nagging inside of me tells me this isn't what my body needs to be doing right now. Like, let's say I just, I decide I'm going to go out in my driveway and do one of my favorite workouts. Sprints up my driveway, burpees at the top, jog back down, sprint up again and do 10 repeats of that. A great fitness training session. But if I try to push through that on a day where my body is just basically telling me no and I don't follow my instinct, I inevitably wind up with an injury or some kind of sickness settling into my body. And it's really interesting how we have these intuitions and this is, this can even get down into some of the woo woo, like this whole idea of muscle testing and kinesiology, wherefor example, you'll pull a food out of your fridge and it just doesn't feel right to be eating that for lunch and something is nagging you in the back of your mind. And I thought of that. When you say the writing is on the wall. In many cases I'll want to make myself an enormous salad that day for lunch and I'll take out all the ingredients and my body will just all of a sudden look at everything and not want it. And instead I might turn around and have a piece of chicken with some rice or something like that. And it's very, very interesting. I know this sounds woo woo to a lot of you engineer technical minded folks out there, but basically the reason I liked this part of the book, Megan, was it is important sometimes to get just slightly woo woo and just think, okay, what is my body telling me versus what is my written program telling me for the day? Or what's my meal plan telling me for the day?

Exactly. And what's interesting is that I live my life based on instinct and gut instinct. And my husband is a scientist through and through. He's evidence based. We met in nutrition school and I always say that I dated him for two years before he started dating me because I knew, I knew that he was the one. I felt it, I knew from the second I Met him and he needed to do his research and be really thorough about it. And so I live my life on instinct, and I've built my health based on instinct. But I'm now a teacher and I run a school. And so what I've had to learn how to do was say, like, okay, I feel like this is the right thing to do, but I need to now go do the research, which is why I went back to nutrition school to study this, to figure out what I did, learn the science behind it, learn the physiology, learn the mechanics of it, so that I can break it down and share that knowledge with other people so they can start to build that up in their life and bring in their own life experiences, their own the writing they've had on their wall to do some calling and do something that allows them to reach their great potential. But how do we break that down and effectively share it? And that's what this section of my first book was really aimed at, is how do I break down what I was able to do and encourage other people to be able to achieve whatever it is, whether it's health related or professional or physical fitness. But how do we achieve that? And what do we know? How do we know what to follow? And some of it's instinct and some of it's just listening and looking for those signs, the unicorn to fly by. However you want that unicorn to come.

Yeah. Now, another thing that you talk about in the book, and again, not to push past the writing on the wall part too much, but I want to touch on a couple other things. You talk about how hard yoga is, and I think you even say that yoga is harder than a stair climber or a high intensity workout. Now, a lot of people who see the skinny, frail person pushing their giant shopping cart kale through the aisle of Whole Foods would beg to differ with you when you compare that person pushing the grocery shopping cart full of kale with a guy like rich Froning, a CrossFit champion or something like that who looks like they stepped out of a Thor movie. So why is it that you say that yoga would be harder than weight training or high intensity interval training?

Well, yoga, first of all, isn't just going to a yoga studio with your mala beads and your crystals and your scented yoga mats and getting into all these poses. That's not yoga.

Lululemon.

Yeah, that's exercise. And that's a different type of exercise. And one of my favorite yoga teachers, his name is Brian Kest and he's based in la and he says that People bring their to yoga and turn their yoga to. And I think that that's happened to a lot of yoga, that it's just movements on a mat. But if you really want to get into it, and it's not the hour long class at studios are now spitting out at your lunch hour, but you're slowing down and you're tuning into your body and you're breathing and you're paying attention and you're not picking your toenails and dusting things off your mat and you're actually in your body and connecting your mind and your breath and your body. You have to be so present. And when I used to teach yoga on my retreats and I watch in Shavasana, there'd be these few people that I, they'd be lying in Shavasana, lying on their back and their eyes would be open and blinking and looking around. I'm like, man, they need this so badly. And so when you're on the stair climber and you're at the gym and you're like plugged in, watching some entertainment news or watching one of those, or reading one of those terrible magazines, you can completely disconnect from your experience. You can completely disconnect from what's going on in your body, how you're feeling emotionally and physically and spiritually and completely check out when you're really doing yoga, when you're really in your body and your most important focus is on your breath, not on how high you're lifting your leg, it's really hard. And it raises that mirror to yourself that we all have stuff that we need to address and deal with. And most of us just push it further and further and further down till we implode, which usually comes in some form of a physical condition or disease. So when you hold that mirror up, you're forced to actually address the stuff that's going on in your life and the stuff you're creating and the stuff you don't want to have to think about.

Right? It's the same concept as like taking out your audiobook or your podcast and going for a walk while you just listen to your breath and think about what it is that the world is bringing to you, what it is that, you know, if you're religious, like, you know, what maybe God is telling you or what it is that you're truly feeling both mentally and physically and spiritually. And sometimes our life is so full of distractions. I'll bring up another really excellent book that I'm reading right now called Reclaiming Conversation. Reclaiming conversation. It's about our infatuation with technology and how much that strips away from our understanding of ourselves and also our understanding and our empathy for other people. But that's what I've found. When I remove all distractions and do something like yoga, my head freaking wants to explode because I'm not able to bounce around like a Muppet in the gym. I'm not able to let my breath go wherever it wants. I'm not able to get distracted by something up inside my head talking voices from the latest podcast or audiobook. It's just me and my thoughts. And that is. I agree it's a different heart than doing a heavy squat or running a 400, but it is very difficult. And I think that it's a skill, kind of like cooking, that a lot of people scoff at. But I think if you can introduce that habit of just being with yourself, it's a huge skill. And it is tough.

It's tough. And I mean, it's a practice. And you talked about measuring your heart rate variability. And I have one of those, like, the heart math, you know, things that clips to your ear and it measures your coherence. And I use it. But I almost feel like when I'm doing that, that it's taking me out of what I want my meditation to be. I'm, like, competing with myself for yesterday to try and be more coherent than I was the day before that. There's so many apps now that are supposed to invite us to tune in, and what they're actually doing is just giving us one more distraction. And people who say, like, oh, I can't meditate, or I can't practice yoga, or like, like, I'm afraid of my shadow. I can't sit for five minutes without something to go on, are really the people who need to start that practice the most. I mean, we all need it the most. But, you know, to say you can't do it is like saying you can't breathe. Yeah, it's just we forget how. We've forgotten how to breathe, too, in that regard. We're not breathing fully either, which is all part of that sympathetic nervous system issue. But, you know, if you can take just five deep breaths, breath through your full lung capacity, that could change your day if you start with that.

It can. And it's. Again, I don't want to get all religious on people, but there's this Bible verse and it says something like, and I'll totally misquote it, any pastors listening in are probably going to jump through and throttle me. Except pastors don't do that. It's like God is in the silence or something like that. But it's this idea that you in some cases find your most deep and intimate spiritual connections when you just sit and do nothing. Or in the case of yoga, when you're just there with you, your body and your breath. So I love that part of the book. Now, another thing that you say is something that, again, run close to me because I preach this message of being healthy on the inside and healthy on the outside. You say a cute outfit doesn't mean much if you feel like total crapola. What inspired you to write that and what do you mean by it?

I mean, my degree was in fashion, for one. And so I was sort of trained in the importance of a physical appearance, in how you showed up and what you were wearing and all those things. And to the point where I could actually no longer leave the house. I had a great huge closet full of beautiful clothes and I was too sick to leave my bathroom. And it kind of clicked on me that, you know, so much of what I was doing was so superficial and superficial, not in like necessarily like a flaky way, but superficial in that it was to make me feel good from the outside in. And that was never going to serve fully. That was never going to achieve the kind of not just optimal health but optimal potential that I felt I had. And so it's so easy to. We channel our anxieties and we channel our insecurities and challenges in so many different ways. And one of the most common is shopping. When you ask teenage girls, like, what's your favorite pastime? It's I like shopping, I want to go to the mall. It's such a strange thing because at the end of the day, if we don't have our health and we're not fueling our health and our happiness and our emotional spiritual well being on a daily basis, you can buy and buy and buy and buy, and it's not going to do the job that you need to do for yourself ever. It just doesn't work that way. And what I found in my personal journey to where I am now is that in starting my business eight years ago, where I was seriously struggling and making no money and had no clothes to wear, I wasn't running around naked, but I sold a lot of my belongings because one, my body had changed so much when I got sick, they didn't fit anymore. But I'd gotten rid of so much stuff and had such a Feeling of fulfillment and contentment. That probably sounds obnoxious, but I just didn't need anything else. I didn't need that much stuff. And I still, to this day, my circumstances have changed, but I just don't want to want stuff. I don't need it. It doesn't do it for me. I'd rather take an incredible vacation. I'd rather go have an experience. I'd rather read a book. You know, it just. It doesn't. It doesn't have that same sense because, you know, the more you have inside and the more fulfilled you are and the work you do every day and the more, well, you feel, the less external stuff you need to mask it all.

Yeah, it's. It's like, so. So there's two things that come to mind. The first is the actual quote from your book, which I think says it perfectly. It says, no Fendi handbag or Hermes scarf will make your day. When you are bawling your eyes out with pms, bedridden with migraine, or trapped in the loo with an irritable bowel. That's a great way to sum that up. The other thing that comes to mind is I used to go to these health and fitness conferences where you'd have people who were just, like, jacked to the gills or women who looked just amazing in their spandex. And you got up close and you could see there was some redness in the face and puffiness, and the skin would be kind of dry and wrinkled, and you'd see all these signs of inflammation and hormonal imbalances. Once you got up close and you realize, wow, these people are walking around as shells. Right. They look great on the outside, but. But literally, they're dying on the inside. And I do think there's something to be said for perhaps operating at a higher percentage body fat, Perhaps allowing your VO2 max to drop a few points. If it means that you're going to have glorious morning bowel movements and awesome sex at night, there's something to be said for those other components, too.

What was insane to me is I'm five feet tall. I weigh about 120 pounds. When. When I got Crohn's and had dropped, you know, £25 in a month, and people would say to me how fantastic I looked. It's like, this is twisted. Like, this is horrible.

Yeah. A few weeks ago, we did a podcast on Orthorexia. And also this concept of, like, how you really look versus how you think you look in the mirror, and sometimes it is, it is a lot different. So there are many people in our lives who, who will scoff at our, our journey to becoming healthy, or the foods that we eat or the exercises that we choose, or yoga or meditation. How do you personally get around the awkwardness of being somebody who questions paradigms? How do you get around being like the, you know, the outcast at the party who makes everybody else awkward? Because whatever, maybe you've given up coffee or you don't use a microwave or.

Something like that, right? Well, at this point, I'm pretty fortunate because of the success I've had with my business, right?

You just hold up your book and you're like, here.

I'm like, here's this one, here's my cookbook and cook for a minute and we'll all be happy. No, part of it is that in my own journey, which is now going into its 10th year, my community has changed dramatically. Who we hang out with, who we have dinner with, how we handle it. But I know it's hard and I know I see with my students all the time and they go through this intense transition through the run of our program where suddenly they have their mother in law coming to visit who's microwaving their coffee and all these things that they used to do and think were okay, and suddenly they recognize as maybe not the best thing in the world and all we can do is take care of ourselves. My choices that I make for my own health, you know, they affect me, they probably affect my husband, but we make the same one, so that's helpful. They've had an influence on my family, but ultimately what I choose for myself is nobody else's business at all. And I mean, I've made my choices, other people's business if they choose to seek my guidance. But for the most part, we have to understand for ourselves why we're making the choices we're making. When we start to recognize that the paradigms that are out there, you know, the coffee to get going and the microwaved meals and the pharmaceutical medications and the chemicals and everything, once we open our eyes and we're like, you know, maybe that's not working for me, maybe that's why my kids have asthma and I've got this spare tire belly that no matter how many crunches I can't get rid of, and my husband's got chronic pain and we start to be like, maybe there's something that's not right about how we're living. We need to change this up. And often what happens is the People around us, they get scared. They were like, oh, no, they're changing. Am I gonna have to change? They're gonna make me change. How are they? Are they judging me now? And that's usually what we end up hearing about when they're like, oh, yeah, I can't believe you're doing that. You're torturing yourself. It has nothing to do with us. It's their own fear. And I think we need to recognize that our own initiatives are our own business. And other people criticizing it, that's their stuff. It has nothing to do with us. And it's also our responsibility not to be judgmental and not to preach to other people who maybe don't want to listen. If you live your life, you have your practices, you do things consistently, you reap the benefits. Ultimately, those that want your guidance, that want to know about it, they'll ask, and that's your invitation to do.

That's the biggest thing. Yep, I agree. Like, if what you're doing is working and you're just living your life life and doing what it is that you do and letting your actions speak, rather than being that preachy person at the dinner party or at Christmas or the family reunion or anything. But you just do what you do, right? You get up and you walk out in the backyard at the family reunion at Aunt Matilda's house, and you're that person at 7am in the backyard doing yoga for a half hour. You don't have to come in and tell everyone how great yoga is. Right. They could see perhaps your energy during the day, or they could see how your skin is to going glowing from that morning, bathe in the sunshine that you just had, and then they can make the decision for themselves. But yeah, I'm a big fan of that. You just do what you do. You don't get all preachy and you let people come to their own conclusions based off of the way that your body and mind is operating. Hopefully, if you're doing the right things, if you're listening to the writing on the wall like you talked about earlier, hopefully you're making the right impression.

Yeah, and that's important too, that it's easy to, especially if you don't have the support of those around you to become a little bit dogmatic and even more stuck to these habits you're taking on that you believe are for your health. You have nothing to prove to other people either. And I think it's also important that when you start doing this, you start questioning these paradigms, and it's A process you go through. You can't learn everything from one book or one podcast. It's a process you go through as you start taking things on and again, tuning into that, writing, recognizing, is this, this working for me now? Is it still working for me now? You know, diets always evolve. That's what Undiet is about. The idea that our diet is the labels are for tin cans. Let our diet be what we need it to be today to support our best optimal health. And so being open to letting that evolve over time is really important. And not thinking you need to stick to something because you've given a label to it or you've joined a group that eats in a certain way, if it's no longer serving you, it's not serving you. There's no point in keeping it up.

Right. Right. Now, you also, in the book you list, what you say is a very important question, like the top question that we need to ask ourselves as we live healthy and as we follow this concept of undieting or doing yoga or any of the other things that we just got done talking about. What is that one question?

I don't know if I need a hint.

You wrote the book.

I know I wrote the book. In 2011.

I can tell you what you write on page 23. It is a pretty big book. I understand it is a big book. You write this, you say, and I'll just quote you. What we all have to ask ourselves as we move into the uncharted territory of the UN Diet is simple. Is what I am currently doing working for me?

Yes. I found it.

What do you mean by that?

It's this idea that, you know, I truly believe that we are all inherently our own best health expert. We are all our own guru. We don't need to give that power to anyone else. And if you can ask yourself that question and answer it honestly, you will know exactly what you need to do. Not just around your diet and your health and your fitness and all of that, but in any given moment, we inherently know. And if you can say, is this working for me? And it doesn't mean that things aren't going to be hard work, I think hard work is excellent. I think we should all work very hard. But, you know, when that hard work is a struggle and that it seems like barriers keep getting put in your way versus hard work that you are gaining benefit from, that you are seeing results from, you know, it's two different things. And so if you can continue asking yourself, is this working for me? You invite yourself and your practices and your lifestyle habits and your relationships to continually evolve. And if we can continually evolve, the way we live, we're living not just in harmony with, you know, our planet and the world and each other, but we can live in harmony with ourselves on a cellular level and what our body needs. And like you said with gauging in the morning, what kind of workout you need to do, you want to do that to avoid injury to yourself. And that injury can come in any number of ways, not just physical.

Got it. So basically, we ask ourselves this question when we're looking at all the things that have been recommended to us or that might be the most popular. We have all these new diet books that come out. We have all these different workouts that come out. And ultimately, what I got from this is what my neighbor is doing, what my workout partner at the gym is doing, what the group that I'm trying to follow on Facebook and trying to fit in a piece in the puzzle is doing, just might not be the thing that's going to work for me. And sometimes you have to step back and tweak and change things accordingly.

If there was one diet that worked for everybody and was like the magic, then we'd all be in perfect health, and we're not. So, yeah, that's exactly it. And it's important to recognize that what does work for one person isn't going to work for everybody. And recognizing that, it's very easy, though, because, I don't know, let's take the vegan diet, for example. Someone can choose to be on a vegan diet because they've read all these benefits, they've seen all these documentaries, and. And it seems to make the most sense for them. And so they start researching it. And when you start researching benefits of a vegan diet, you'll only find resources that serve that information. And then because you've searched it, that's what you're gonna see on Facebook. That's. Google's gonna give you more of it. So you've essentially curated your entire research experience to deliver the information that you already believe. Whereas, you know, what I often educate people on is find the information that contradicts what you believe. Research the other st. Research the pitfalls of that dietary plan. You know, research both sides of the story and figure out what resonates for you and what makes sense for you. Because it's really easy to get trapped in these sort of funnels of communities where everyone is just cheerleading each other on, and you're suddenly like, wait a second, I don't know if this is even working for me. And you're suddenly lost because you've tied so much belief and identity to one way of living and it can cause a lot of harm for a lot of people.

Yeah, well, we went through like four pages of your book in the past hour long podcast, but there's plenty more. And so I'd recommend, folks, if you want to go delve into this stuff a little bit more and check out Megan's Undiet book, some of her recipes or cookbooks, stuff like that, and also learn more about her pretty amazing story of Crohn's recovery. I will put everything in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com undiet I will also, as I promised, mention that or I'll grab that book that's up on my bed stand and I will find out the name of that and put that one in the show notes for you. And also that book I mentioned at one point called Reclaiming Conversation about kind of unplugging and the power of conversation and learning how to empathize with other people and perhaps be silent sometimes. I'll put a link to that one in the show notes as well over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com undiet and then finally, when you go to that URL, if you have a comment or question for Megan or I about anything that we've talked about today, just leave it there in the comments section and one of us will pop in and reply to you. So Megan, thanks so much for coming on the show today and sharing this stuff with us. It was really fun.

Thank you so much for having me.

Well folks, this is Ben Greenfield and Megan Telpner, author of Undiet, signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.