#1: Eating Sunsets + Food Rules (+ Watch me dropping my heart rate for fun...) (#21)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time.

Hey, guys, what's up? This is Bry, happiest of Monday mornings to you. I got up bright and early this morning and I also broke my oura ring. Big gaps, big gaps. This data is pretty much useless, but it was funny. Hit my 38 resting heart rate, which I do on occasion. I mean, I kind of knew I would too, because every night before we go to sleep, every time I meditate in the morning, I start actually with this oximeter. There we go. You want to be over 95%. I'll take 100%. So my, my resting heart rate, when I'm truly resting, you know, I can get down to 40, right, and then blink into the 30s once in a while. Right now I just crushed an hour and a half of deep work. Bunch of burpees, etc. I'm excited to be chatting with you. So there we go. If we wanted to, we could take a few deep breaths and see if we can lower that. Why don't we do that? Let's see if we can get it down a little bit. Breathe in through your nose, down into your belly, and then back out through your nose. Notice the top number is oxygen saturation and the bottom number is your resting heart rate or my resting heart. So that's one breath. So we can drop it down just with one breath like that. Now, if we kept on doing it, we can get it even lower. Now what's cool is that I like doing this. But then Emerson, our 7 year old, almost 8, started using this. And at night he's kind of like meditating while using this. It's amazing. He's learning breath control and that he can actually control his resting heart rate. So for him, he'll put it on after running around chasing his little sister, and he'll be at 90. But then he knows how to take deep, calm, relaxing breaths. In through his nose, down into his belly, then back out through his nose. And he can get his resting heart rate down to like 67. You know, it was 90 and get it down to 75. He was really excited. And then he got it down a little bit lower, then a little bit lower. And then I had him go do burpees and it blew up to 140something and he came down and he recovered. So again, we want to constantly make connections, teach agency, et cetera, but that's just kind of a fun thing. I didn't think I'd go that long on it, but interesting so what I want to talk about today is I'm playing around with more of the eating sunset idea. So we talk a lot about digital sunsets, right? And I've mentioned it a number of times in our chats together. That light a little shadowy, isn't it? But the fastest way to reduce your heart rate overnight is to eat within a certain window of time. So you want to make sure. We've talked about it before, but this is important. You want a good night of sleep. Well, you need to have a digital sunset when you turn off your electronics. And yes, this is a. This is an ipod. People think it's an old phone. It's. It's an ipod that I use exclusively for Aura. So I'm not turning on my phone first thing in the morning. But you want to turn off your electronics at least an hour. So digital sunset at least an hour before you go to bed, turn off your electronics. That's how you're going to get into deep sleep. Reduce the cortisol, let the melatonin get to work. Blue light only existed from the sun for millions and millions of years. And you've got a lot of. Your brain is wired to. And your entire body is wired to circadian rhythms, which is cued by the sun's light. So we've warped that over the last 10, 25, 50, 100 years. Light was invented light bulbs, publicly, 150 years ago. Before that, you had candlelight, gaslight. It was just a totally different frequency. So anyway, digital sunsets is huge, are huge for good sleep. And so are eating sunsets. So at least two hours before you go to bed, stop eating. The recommendation, which, again, I've said this so many times, but I thought it was absurd when I first heard it. At least four hours before you go to bed eating sunset. I barely did this back in the day. And if I showed you my trends and heart rates, you'd see it used to be really high at night. Used to be like 48, 50. I had a difficult time getting it to a point that I knew I could get it to overnight. And it wasn't until I actually experimented with this that I saw. Oh, my gosh. Digestion takes so much energy. Your heart is working hard to do that. And guess what? Your glymphatic system, which is your lymphatic system in your brain, which is basically like your garbage collectors and recycling collectors, can't do its job if all the energy is going down into your gut to process the food you just ate. So again, at least Two hours before target for the professionals among us, the professional optimizers, four hours. Go test it and if you have any data at all, see what happens. My hunch is you're going to be shocked like I was. And then again, remember, you want to have a fasting window, which means the period of time during which you don't eat. You want to be 14 hours. So you eat your last meal right, at whatever PM and then when do you eat your first meal? And this is something that we talk to our coaches about. We actually have a bunch of worksheets. Let's track it. What you measure improves, right? And this is how our coaches improve the way that they do. One of the little details that helps them improve. But systematically doing all these little things and seeing that the aggregation and compounding of these little things matter. So you want to have a window between your last meal and your first meal of at least 14 hours. That's how you get there is by eating sunsets, taking the night off is what I playfully say, right? Count how many hours between your last meal and your first meal and know that if you aren't getting that window, you are increasing your risk for cancer and everything else you don't want. And if you have a tough time going that long, that's a sign that you're metabolically inflexible. You, you're probably eating too much sugar. You're probably eating too many ultra processed carbs. We need to work on that. Right? Which leads us to the second part of today's chat, Eating sunsets, which is actually our third food rule. So in our eating session for our mastery series for our coaches, right, we have what we call the optimized food rules. Three plus one number one rule inspired by Mark Hyman. Great functional medicine, doctor, don't drink sugar. That's the fastest way to boost your well being. Sugar is a toxin. Insulin's rushing it out of your cells into fat cells because it's toxic in your bloodstream. So this is actually an unbelievably fast way to improve your life and a lever you can pull to get better. If you drink sugar, cokes, whatever, sodas, etc. Stop doing that. And by the way, know that fruit juice not good. And we can look at the sugar content in your whatever drink, look at it, your health drink, if it has sugar in it, quit drinking it. Don't drink your sugar. And again, parents know that fruit juice is not a health food. You can get all those, quote, antioxidants and other little vitamins and Sources that do not have pure sugar. So don't drink your sugar. Two food rule is eat real food. Kind of a play on Michael Pollan's food rules, right? Eat real food. I say throw out the factory food. We have three different parameters that we talk about, right? First, throw out the factory food that literally didn't exist 50 years ago, right. 100 years ago. Pre industrial revolution. Get rid of the ultra processed foods, get rid of the factory farmed animal products, and get rid of the factory produced fats. Olive oil has been around since before Socrates, he hammered it. Vegetable oils, canola oil, safflower oil, soybean oil, which creates, which is a significant part of our current diet. Didn't exist 100 plus years ago. Did not exist. You tell me millions of years, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, less than 100 years. You think that belongs in our body? No, it doesn't. Throw out factory food. Then the third thing is, and again, you can follow whatever approach you want. You can be low fat, high fat, vegan, paleo, whatever, but follow these three rules, you're going to do really, really well. Eating sunset, take the night off. We already talked about that. Then the plus one rule is, I like to playfully say, what would your favorite philosopher who lived over 300 years ago do? Many people summarize nutrition philosophy and say, just do what your great great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandparents did. If you did that pre industrial revolution, you'd be doing pretty good. 80, 20 wise, you're on. I playfully extend that and say, yeah, what would your favorite philosopher do? And again, that could be, you know, Jesus, it could be Moses, it could be Mohammed, it could be Lao Tzu. For me, it's Epictetus. What would your favorite philosopher do? It's always a good question. We actually, in our fundamentals, as we systematically walk through with our coaches, we say, eating wise, what would they do? Moving wise, what would they do? Sleeping wise, what would they do? Because if you just rewind the clock a few hundred years ago while keeping the benefits of modern society, I'm sitting here filming this on an iPhone. I've got this, I've got that, I've got a ring that somehow miraculously calculates crazy data. Technology is amazing, modern society is amazing. Yet it doesn't help us crush our fundamentals. So we've got to selectively use technology and not be used by it, and then architect our ideal lives so we can realize Eudaimonia. Which actually brings us back to this, the sheet, right? The scientific study we talked about the other day that we're so excited about, you know, the whole point of life and why I'm sharing these number ones and why I do every single thing I do is to help us integrate ancient wisdom in modern science. And if you go to ancient wisdom and modern science and you ask Aristotle or you ask Martin Seligman, what's the point of life? They're going to tell you basically connect to the best version of yourself, right? Aristotle called that your yudaimon. He said you get there by living with virtue. Martin Seligman says you need to flourish. You need to express the best version of yourself. You do that also by putting your virtues in action and some other things. But again, at the beginning of our program, only 29% felt connected to the best version of themselves. Afterwards, 93% did. And whether the program is right for you or not, frankly, don't care in one sense. Obviously I'm excited to welcome you if it feels great. But that's the game. We got to know the game we're playing and then go out and play it well. There you go. That's today's number one. And then back to the coaches. Optimize coach class three. We pushed the start date to September 1st and we also dropped the price to $1,000. We've got nearly 2,000 optimizers from over 70 countries around the world who are now part of our optimized coach program as of class three. We're really excited about that, really inspired by it. Check it out at Optimize Me Coach to learn more, etc. And then obviously, if you just want the general optimize stuff and you don't want to go all in yet, go to Optimize Me for the basic kind of core wisdom stuff which is just 10 bucks a month. All right, there you go. Make today an awesome day. And most importantly, what was the number one thing you got out of our chat today? What was it? How can you operationalize this wisdom move from theory to practice to mastery, that ultimately is what it's all about. Let's write ourselves a prescription. What is it?

What are you going to do today.

To get a little better? Get on that. See you tomorrow.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optymyze with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me Foreign.

Hi, this is Brian. Hope you enjoyed that number one quick note. If you want to go deeper into optimize, check us out at Optimize Me. The team has set up a free two week trial where you can get instant access to all 600 plus philosopher's notes, all the PDFs, the MP3s, get it on the app, etc. And 50 optimal living 101 classes on a range of subjects and of course the thousand plus optimize ones. And then if you want to go all in, check out Optimize Coach Optimize Me for the free trial for the core wisdom Optimize Me Coach if you want to go all in and master yourself, serve heroically and empower others to do the same.

Have a great day. See you tomorrow.