Head Strong with Dave Asprey

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Hey, it's JJ Virgin. And welcome to the JJ Virgin Lifestyle.

Show, where I give you the latest.

Cutting edge intel to help you look.

Feel, and think better. And today, oh, my gosh.

I have one of my best friends on the planet coming on, and we are going to be talking about how to master your energy, your mood, and get rid of your food cravings for good. In fact, he's got a plan for how you can get rid of your food cravings in two days. You heard me right.

Let me tell you a little bit.

About our special guest. I call him my brother Dave.

Brother Dave Asprey is on the show today.

He's the founder and CEO of Bulletproof, which is, yes, the bulletproof coffee and food company. He is the creator of the much copied, much imitated. But it's never the same as having the real bulletproof coffee. And you want to be using those bulletproof beans, by the way, because they are tested to be mycotoxin free, and they're amazing. They're what I use every day, and they're what we have at our conference. In fact, funny thing, at our mindshare conference, which we put on every year for health experts and health entrepreneurs, we ran out of the bulletproof coffee. That was actually the first conference where we started serving bulletproof. He was making it himself way back when.

Bulletproof coffee.

Obviously, I'm a big fan. He's the host of the Webby award winning podcast, Bulletproof Radio, New York Times best selling author of the Bulletproof Diet, and he is the most famous celebrity biohacker of all time.

And you're gonna hear a little bit.

More about that story and where he started from and how this all came to be on this podcast. So again, today's show is all about mastering your energy, mood, and food cravings. And with my gosh, one of my besties, Dave Asprey.

All right, let's do it. Dave Asprey, welcome to the show. I'm so glad you're here with me today.

I'm happy to be here, jj, and.

I'm super excited to talk about your new book coming out, Headstrong. And let's dive into that, because obviously, Headstrong talks about the brain. Why did you decide you wanted to write this book.

About 20 years ago, I weighed 300 pounds and I started getting brain fog, too. I beat myself up and ended up spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on fixing my biology. Eventually, I created bulletproof coffee and the bulletproof diet to show people, like, here's how you can lose weight. But I also turned my brain on and I have more energy now at 44 than I did when I was in my early 20s. So I wanted to figure out why all this happened and what else I could do to turn up the volume, so to speak, where I just know that I always had the energy to bring it and that I would never experience cravings or just feel like, wow, I'm not going to be able to do this today. I'm just too tired because that was my constant state when I was young.

Yeah. And you know what? Energy and cravings are like two things that I hear all the time in the community, and cravings especially. And people feel like when they give into a craving that they are just a. Like I'm a bad person.

Right.

Yeah.

So what do you say about that? I mean, it's not like there's some terrible person because they gave into a craving. So what is it and how? More importantly, because I've been around you a bunch, I never see you going off the rails with food, ever. It just isn't how you roll. So how do you turn that around? So it's not an issue anymore.

It's kind of funny. When I was really heavy, I would say, well, I've got a lot of willpower. So I did for a while, 18 months. I worked out six days a week, an hour and a half a day, and I cut my calories and I fought back on my cravings and I ate less fat. I still never lost any weight, so I was capable of deploying stupendous amounts of willpower. But as soon as I realized, sort of, I gave up in failure because while I'm still £300, I'm just stronger. In £300. I learned that cutting calories and exercising more isn't a way to reduce cravings or a way to lose weight, especially permanently.

Yeah.

Wouldn't you say that's actually a way to increase cravings? Reality. Right.

I cannot even express the level of just, like, cravings. I would feel this severe cravings and hunger, and I would just sort of almost like a masochist, like, okay, I'm just going to tell myself that's a good feeling. Even though, like, my stomach hurts and I really want that ice cream. I'm just going to look at it and I'm going to grit my teeth. You can do that for a while. But what actually happened to me as soon as I got a job and I wasn't really just as singularly focused on doing that, is that I'd sit in a conference room and some mean person would put a tray of cookies in front of me, and the voice in my head would say, eat the cookie, and I would say no. And then it would say, eat the cookie, and I'd say no. And we'd get in a little verbal fight. And eventually I'd say, maybe I'll have just half. And then I would feel like shame and guilt. I'm like, okay, I thought I was a strong person. Why did I do this? In Head Strong, I describe where that voice in my head comes from. It's actually not you. It's a quadrillion ancient bacteria spread throughout your body that decide how many cravings you have. They decide where energy will go. They decide what cells live and what die. They decide if you have enough energy in your brain or somewhere else in your body. They decide if you store fat. They decide if you're inflamed. And they don't care about you. They only care about them. And they're stupid because they're little bacteria. So they're only listening to the world around you and responding in little ways. But the cool thing is, since you're smart, you can change their inputs, you can change the world around them so that they turn off the cravings for you. And when the cravings are gone, the reason you perceive me as having high willpower and no food cravings is actually that I'm not using any energy to say no to the food. It's that my mitochondria don't want the food because they're well fed. So there is no voice to ignore.

Okay, now you keep mentioning these mitochondria, so explain for everybody listening what those are and why they matter.

About 2 billion years ago, we have the story that our cells harnessed these ancient bacteria to become our power plants. And ever since then, every life form on Earth has mitochondria, at least every moving life form.

And.

And they were sort of a curiosity 20 or 30 years ago. And the more we've studied them, the more we realize that these things, that there's a quadrillion of them in your body, many multiple times more than there are cells in your body. And they have their own operating system, they have their own things. They do so we rely on them to get our energy, but they're in charge because they control the energy. And by modifying these things that decide which cells in your body live and which cells die, whether you'll get cancer, whether you'll get diabetes, whether you'll get Alzheimer's disease, these ancient bacteria that are part of who you are, they're the ones that decide and how effectively they work controls your cravings, controls your hunger, controls your anxiety. All you have to do is change the signal they get from the environment around you. They'll behave themselves and your cravings go down. And the amount of effort it takes to say no to things goes way down. So you struggle less and you just get more life.

So you mentioned energy, and that's such a big one. Because, you know, the other thing people talk about all the time, beyond cravings, is just, you know, they're tired, they just don't have the energy. And especially as we age, it's kind of accepted that as you age, you just won't have the energy you used to. Now, I know you don't buy into that, right?

Yeah, I don't buy into that. It's because when I was young, I was actually old. I had arthritis starting from age 14 in my knees. In my mid-20s, I had basically senile cognitive dementia. I wasn't senile, but I had blood flow issues in my brain, like someone who was very old. They told me I had a high risk of stroke and heart attack, like someone who was old and I wasn't even 30. So I dealt with all of this and I dealt with the low energy and what it feels like to go there. And I said, I never want to go there. And the research in Head Strong shows that 48% of people under age 40 have early onset mitochondrial dysfunction. It means that the battery in their body is losing charge faster than it should. It's like when you tell.

How do you tell that? Like, how can you know that?

You know that by measuring how efficiently your body uses oxygen. So they put an oxygen mask on you and have you exercise and how much energy went in. And you can tell. This person's body doesn't make energy, it makes energy, but it makes it less effectively. You put X amount of energy in, but you don't get X amount of energy out. You get less than X and the extra energy gets stored as fat or it gets wasted, or even worse, it turns into inflammation. The problem is that this research shows that people over age 40, all of them have mitochondrial dysfunction, but they don't Call it early onset, they just call it aging. So what if we just fix that problem? What if we take these things and make them efficient again? It turns out mitochondrial aging is one of the biggest causes of aging and age related diseases out there.

And no one's talking about it, Dave.

Well, you are. It unites everything. Diabetes, cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Mississippi, all of those things are mitochondrial. And when you fix mitochondria, all of them get better. And it turns out the mitochondria, we understand more about them now than we ever have. And they're not that hard to modify. They might be hard to make perfect, but anyone can get more energy and head strong has like a two week program to help you turn on those batteries in your cells. It's like your cell phone loses a charge by 3pm and you have to keep recharging it. Well, what if your cell phone was good until 8pm? You can do that with the battery in your body. And it changes your life. Because when you're at full charge, you have zero cravings. You don't yell at your spouse or at your kids. Your emotional stability is very, very high. So you have more control and your willpower is higher. And for me, as a CEO of a company and a father of two young kids and a husband and an author and a blogger, and I do more than I have any business doing. And I can do it because my batteries are always charged because I manage them. And it's not much work. It's mostly just changing the environment around me. I don't have to do things. I just make a world around me that supports my biology better and then I get all the free benefits.

Well, so you just floated out there a two week program. So in the book you have this two week program. So what could someone accomplish like in two weeks? What kind of shifts could they see?

You can eliminate cravings in two weeks. Heck, you can do that in two days with some of the things depending on the source of your cravings. If you have emotional trauma around food, that's a different issue. But if it's a biological craving, the kind that most people have that are then associated with emotional cravings, you can nail those in a couple days. And by the time you're done with two weeks, you're sleeping better in less time. So deeper sleep means you need less of it. So you've freed up time, you wake up feeling more energy, you're able to focus all day long, you're less anxious and you'll lose some weight. But losing weight is totally a side effect of just, well, when you eat your food, what if it turned into energy instead of turning into fat and inflammation? We can make your body do that.

And I think that's so important for people to hear because this is, as you know, I've been saying for years, your body's not a bank account, it's a chemistry lab. We both found that whole cutting calories, cutting fat thing just makes you worse, not better. It will never work. And you've got to fix your own body's chemistry lab, which is what sounds like this two week program is all about. So I love that. So give me a couple examples of what maybe even just one, like what someone could do as part of the program today that they will see a difference from. I love the little hinges that swing the big doors.

What do you got? One of the things that keeps you craving all the time is that the neurons in your brain are craving fat. And when you use brain octane, which is a type of oil that is part of the bulletproof coffee recipe, it immediately puts you into ketosis, which is this fat burning mode. And as soon as that happens, the neurons in your brain finally relax. And people describe feeling grounded and centered and somehow relaxed, but full of energy at the same time. It's because the background craving. Where do I get my next sugar fix? It just turned off at a subcellular level and then like, oh, now what am I going to do with this extra energy? Now you have the willpower to say no to the french fries or no to the cake or the candy or whatever you would have craved before the whole system gets changed. And then you do things like add more polyphenols. These are the brightly colored compounds found in.

You mean wine, right?

Unfortunately, alcohol isn't that good for.

Sorry.

Dave. Dave.

Dave. We were getting along so well.

If it's a consolation prize, dark chocolate, tea and coffee is the richest source of polyphenols, having more of those compounds, as well as brightly colored vegetables, blueberries, things like that. Those will absolutely act as signaling molecules for your mitochondria, and they will cause your body to make more energy and less inflammation. You wouldn't think of this, but throughout history, we've created these trade routes for spices. It turns out spices are the highest polyphenol foods there are. So when you add more oregano and rosemary and turmeric and all of the other really flavorful things to your food, and you eat organic vegetables and you drink your tea and you have your bulletproof coffee, what happens is that the amount of these precious signaling molecules that affect your mitochondria goes up dramatically. You have less inflammation and more energy and thus less cravings. And literally your ability to do things shifts so that things that feel hard today, things that feel like a struggle, they feel like they don't take any energy the next day. It has totally changed my life, and I kind of felt obligated to share this, but when I was doing the research and reading hundreds of medical papers on this, just things published in the last five years. There's a revolution in our understanding of our biology. And even who you are is in some part controlled by these quadrillion ancient bacteria in your body. You set up the environment so they are happy and you are happy.

I love it. It's awesome. I'm so excited about this book. I am so, so thrilled that you're getting it out there. Now, I want to ask you one more kind of curveball question. What is the one thing you do every day, Dave, that you feel makes the biggest difference in your life?

Well, if we're talking about in my life, not in my mitochondria, I'm going to answer something that does both. Believe it or not, J.J. i'm not going to say bulletproof coffee. It's something that I do with my kids every night before bed. And I sit down and I say, all right, Alan, Anna, what are three things you're grateful for today? And usually they'll say, I'm grateful for dinner or I'm grateful for school or whatever. And every now and then, they'll say something like, I'm grateful for the big bang, because without it, there wouldn't be anything kind of cute, of course. And then I tell them three things. I'm grateful. And here's what gratitude does. Gratitude takes your body out of fight or flight mode. Fight or flight mode is a mitochondrial state. When the little ancient bacteria running your body think there's a threat, they set you up to fight the threat. And they give you cravings. They turn on your desire for sugar, and they turn down your rest and recovery. And they tell yourselves, no need to repair yourself. There might be a tiger. The second you practice real gratitude, not only does it make you happy and make you joyful and take you out of fight or flight mode, it shifts your mitochondria back into the state of rest and relax. You cannot be grateful and ready to fight a tiger at the same time. When you switch on gratitude, all of the energy systems that were turned on by weird background anxiety, they Just go away. So for me, it's a daily gratitude practice. It gives my cells a chance to relax and and it gives me a chance to relax.

I love it. We included you in the miracle mindset because that is one of the things we bonded on was our daily gratitude just saves you. So I love that. Now I know you're giving everyone who's listening the first chapter of Headstrong free. So everyone, you can go on over to JJvirgin.com headstrong and honestly, I'd say just go on over to the bookstore and grab the book because you know you want it, you've got to have it. Got to have great mitochondria. So, Dave, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you, jj.

Super appreciate you. Now after the break, I'll be answering a listener's questions. So stay with me.

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Welcome back.

This is my favorite time of the show. Although today, gosh, I don't know.

I'm loving every minute of the show.

Now is when I answer a listener's.

Question and today's question.

You know, I always try to match.

The question with what we've got going on. And I think I did a good job today with Carol from Springfield who says, jj, I'm tired. How do I get more energy? All right, so I'm going to pull one thing out. Obviously I'm going to say, oh, buy head strong. All right. But one thing I want to just give you as a good starting point, obviously make sure you're sleeping well. And Dave talked about how you can sleep deeper because it's all about the quality of your sleep. So make sure you're sleeping well because you're not sleeping well, you won't have great energy. So that's number one. But Carol, I want to give you another thing to think about, and that's having great blood sugar balance. Because when you have great blood sugar balance, when you're eating correctly, that's Going to help your body create steady, sustained energy. So that means eating by what I call the virgin diet or sugar impact diet plate. It's the trifecta of healthy fats, clean, lean protein and fiber.

Okay.

Because healthy fats actually tell the brain besides reducing inflammation, which is so key and giving you a great fuel source to run on. And Dave talked about MCT oil that comes from coconut oil. It's a great easy to burn fuel. It also triggers the brain into thinking that you are into knowing that you're full. So it helps you be satiated. Then protein and fiber work together to slow down stomach emptying and give you better blood sugar control. Fiber really helps with blood sugar control so that you can have steady sustained energy. That's what I meant. So you steady sustained energy so that you can go four to six hours between meals. You're not feeling like your blood sugar is crashing. You need to race to another to have some kind of a snack. And that's what's key. You want to have great steady, sustained energy throughout the day. You shouldn't feel like in the afternoon that you got to go lie down, there's something wrong there. And a lot of that has to do with making sure then that you're eating by that trifecta. Also that your gut's working well so you can actually absorb your nutrients and, and you're getting a good night's sleep. All those things are key.

But I'm going to focus on today.

Eating by that plate of healthy fats, anti inflammatory fats, clean lean protein and low sugar impact, high fiber types of carbs.

Alrighty.

If you've got a question you want answered, head on over to my Facebook page @jjvirginofficial. Look for that little blue check mark because that is where I check out all the questions and I pick the cool ones that fit in well so that I can answer them when they flow into the show. I always like it when everything kind of just comes together. Well now the next thing I am working on launching a new part of the show and it includes you and I need your help. I want to. And you heard Dave talk about gratitude. He's in my miracle mindset book talking about this by the way, and he also did an interview about it and gratitude is so huge and I want to do it on the show. So every week I want to highlight like someone who leaves a review and appreciate the heck out of them and read their review. Which means I need you to go over there and leave a review and then I will pull up your name, read your review and tell you how grateful I am for you and how much I appreciate it.

So thank you so much in advance for doing that.

Head over to itunes, leave a review.

And for all of you, we've had.

A ton of five star reviews. I super, super appreciate that. Thank you so much. And thank you so much for joining me today. And I want to remind you to take courageous, inspired action.

You know, every time you do that.

Every time you do something that scares you a bit and you take that action, it's imperfect. You're just moving. You build resilience. You show your body that you can do it. And when you do that, it lets you show up bigger in your life. And I'm going to leave you with this thing just to open you up this question to open you up to, to possibility. What do you want to show up for in your life?

Alrighty.

Until next time, this is JJ Virgin signing off. Make it a great week.

Hello listeners, this is Anne Bogle, author, blogger and creator of the podcast what Should I Read next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week I tag all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment. Whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change or a froth page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything, you'll learn something about yourself as a reader and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and Visit our website whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more.