6 Unstoppable Ways to Build Muscles and Burn Fat! Feat. Charles Poliquin

How do you. How do you describe yourself? If I didn't have like a bio, like people come up and without being a smart ass, because you can be kind of like, you know, sometimes.

Sometimes I would say most simple lines. Most successful strength coach in history.

Yeah, so what is. Okay, so strength coach, what do people come to you predominantly for? I know a lot of things, from everything from bodybuilders to winning. You know, I mean, but what. What do average people come to you for?

Well, I don't really work with the average, but the average athlete that comes to see me basically is interested in winning. So probably my biggest success in my career is Elaine Maroulis, who became the first American to an Olympic goal in wrestling.

Okay.

But when she came to see me to be politically correct, she was a bit fluffy and she could do zero chin ups. Zero. Okay. So for somebody who had been on the national team for eight years, that wasn't so good. So nine months later, she could do two chin ups with a 55 pound dumbbell, and she only weighed about 125. And then she won the world championships. And then by the time she went to Rio the Tuesday before she left, she did two chin ups with 66 pounds on the rings, which is much harder to do. So when she defeated Yoshida, who had only lost twice in 20 years, she was a big ticket in Japan.

Oh, speak up is what they're saying. Just like that.

Okay, so what happened is that she defeated a girl that only lost twice in 20 years. But I was trying to watch it online, and then I kept getting texts and WhatsApp from my students going, hey, congratulations. And in every media around the world, whether it was Sweden or the Emirates, they said Ellen Maroulis won because of strength. So it was probably the best marketing I could ever do for myself. But even Yoshida, she went on national TV in Japan. She said, my opponent was much stronger than me. I have to concede defeat. And now Ellen texted me yesterday, and she's a celebrity in Japan because she's the first person to defeat. And then when she fought Yoshida last time, Yoshida turned her into hamburger meat. So the second time she fought her, she says when she grabbed her wrist and pulled her, she goes, whoa, she's much weaker. I said, no, it's not. She's weaker. You're much stronger now. And that's what made a difference. But she goes, it was a shock to her when she made first contact in Rio.

Interesting. Very cool. Well, okay, so what does it require mentally and physically to perform at that level. Because I think it's a combination of both.

Yes. I mean, but the thing is that Ellen Maroulis is probably the poster woman for dedication. I mean, she went 18 months without having dessert. She didn't have Christmas dinner. And we have a saying in sport. What does third place taste like? Cake. Right. So the thing is that she was very, very committed. But she, for example, learned Japanese so she could understand what the coach was telling her on the mat to her opponent so she could figure out the next move.

Wow.

So, you know, Helen, of all the athletes I've coached in my life, is probably the most detail orientated athlete that did every single thing. She watched YouTube videos of her fighting. She could understand her moves, you know, and now what we see is that now everybody's copying Ellen, so they're trying to see what you're going to do next. And we have a plan for Tokyo for that.

Okay, awesome, awesome. So for people that are here in the room, which are like a bunch of driven, successful entrepreneurs, male and female, I want to talk about some different advice and recommendations for people here to get in as optimal condition as they can on all levels and things that anything you want to talk about to improve not only their physical bodies, but their sleep or anything that you think is important. I first met. Okay if I tell the story how we met? Yeah. So we both have a friend named Janet Atwood who actually invited both of us. Unbeknownst to both of us, we had heard about each other because I had been Bill Phillips marketing consultant since 1996 and Charles was writing for Muscle Media magazine. He's written for pretty much everyone. And basically I'd heard of him and he was at a big reputation in the world of fitness and bodybuilding and powerlifting and you name it, but I never met him in person. And so we go to Fairfield, Iowa, and we both go through meditation training for TM training. And that's how we met. And so we spent four days together with like five other people who were all my friends going through meditation training. And it was kind of funny because we're at a hotel where there was like nothing to eat except a bunch of carbs.

Right.

And you were like ready to kill somebody while going through meditation training.

Yes.

And we shot some funny ass videos at the grocery store and stuff. But that. So that's where me and Charles met. So you've explored a lot of different areas of the mind and the life. So what are some just fundamentals that people need to do in order to get in Great shape.

One of the biggest myths is that it takes a lot of work to get a good physique. And I mean, Tim Ferriss wrote a book called the Four Hour Body. But I think that four hours a week is plenty. Even my top level athletes, as far as strength training is concerned, it's about four hours a week. But there's no messing around when I train. And I think what people should realize, the room is full of entrepreneurs. But the difference between you and Olympic gold medalist is not that big because you're very driven. But the problem is that the way I explain to people is that you're like an oil lamp and the flame is the Yang energy. So the bigger you can burn the flame, it's great. So people spend a lot of their energy, but the problem is they don't take care of the oil. That's why we call the yen reserve. So executives should be really focused on building the highest possible yen reserve to be as Yang as they want to be. Because how many of you work 16 hour days? It's quite common, right? And then you cut back a lot of things. And I think that the modern trend is to say you have things like the one thing or Tim's philosophies, but you should try to shorten your workday and take care more of your yen reserve. And sleep is the eliminating factor. 72.8% Americans complain of sleep disorders.

Wow, 72%.

Okay. So where do we have most accidents in the US Is when we put the clocks forward and we lose an hour of sleep. So they put more cops on the road because there's going to be more accidents. Just one hour of sleep makes a huge difference in accident statistics. So I think that we have to take care of our sleep patterns. And there's also what I like to say to people is that the two biggest stressors or it's our mouth, in other words, it's the things we say, it's what we put in our bodies. And the thing that happens is that you never had somebody say, oh man, I was so stressed last night, all I could eat was Brussels sprouts. Right? So people will say, okay, I was so stressed last night I went to three boxes of Pringles, you know, two kilos of chocolate chip cookies, blah blah, blah, blah. So we tend to self medicate with carbohydrates. Why? Because we found out a long time ago that cortisol, which is a stress hormone, is lowered by insulin. Right, but the problem with insulin, it's your friend sometimes. But for most of us, it's the enemy. Because insulin is the hormone of aging. So the more insulin you make, the faster you age. And controlling the fat loss process is managing insulin. The more you can control your insulin, the better you will do. Great.

So when we were outside at lunch, I was doing a Facebook live video, and you talked. I said, what's the best piece of health advice you could give to people? That would be a total game changer. And you said, if grains were eliminated from the planet, but the caveat being that half the world's population survives because of grains and people. If there weren't grains, people would die. If you have the availability of food like most people in this room, how would you eat?

Okay. I've worked a lot with the hockey players, football players, and I gotta make it very simple for them. So I say, ask them a question. I said, ask yourself that. The food that you're gonna put in your mouth was accessible to cavemen. And I run a test. So I go, like steak? Oh, yes, A caveman could have that. And then donuts. And they go, ooh, is there a donut tree? No. Pop. Is there a pop river? So if a caveman had access to food, you can eat it. So that's a very simple rule to simplify our eating habits.

Did cavemen have. What about grains? They did have access to some grains.

Very little.

Yeah.

Grains are more linked. The grains start to get popularized in ancient Egypt. And then what we saw, though, if you look at skeletal remains, is that that's when we start to have degenerative diseases. We used to be much taller, much more muscular when we were living more off a paleolithic diet.

Yeah. So when you travel, as most people here, they travel a lot. How do you eat when you're on the road?

Well, the thing that you have to realize is that I actually do a lot of my teaching schedule based on the countries where I could find the proper food. That's why I don't go to England.

Right.

It's like a third world country when you look at food.

And all those of you in England on Facebook, Live. Hi there.

How you doing?

In all seriousness, to be productive, you have to eat properly. But, you know, one of the things, for example, with jet lag, I just did a post today in some of my pages, is that the food you eat when you land in the country will make a big difference. Your brain's going to behave. So, for example, as they land and sail, we're now going to prepare for landing. Well, you should drink about 1.5 liter of water. Why? Because have you ever noticed it's really hard to fall asleep if you got to pee? Right. So basically when you drink a lot, you activate the kidney meridian, which is the energy meridian. So you drink a lot of water. Then this thing you should pull out of your briefcase or your purse is caviar. Caviar is probably one of the best brain building foods. And you have to reset your neurotransmitters. And the Yang neurotransmitters are dopamine and that's still choline. So you could have caviar or you could have, if you don't like fish, you could have roast beef, but it has to be a meat or a fish that contains a lot of tyrosine because to make dopamine you need tyrosine. So that would be a thing. And then the second thing I would eat is macadamia nuts. Because macadamia nuts contain a lot of levels of choline. And choline will fire up your brain. And you know, and also when you look at. Sometimes I teach, I land, let's say in Estonia at seven in the morning, at nine o' clock I'm teaching and people go like, when did you get in? Last week? No. And they say, I'm coming because I have so much energy teaching. Well, a lot of it with jet lag is actually your mindset. If you keep saying, oh, for me it's three in the morning in Boston, hey, fuck, shut up. Like you're in Estonia. You're in Estonia. Live like an Estonian, shut the fuck up. So you know, that's my philosophy.

It's beautiful. It's very, very sweet. So what is your fitness routine? How do you exercise? How do you work out when you're at home and when you're on the road?

Basically, I wake up early, I do meditation first thing. Then I take my book and I write what I want to be most proud of before I go to bed. So that sets up my mind and I write what I'm grateful for. But it's not repetitive. So he talked yesterday about lowering the bar. So sometimes I say, hey, it's a really great bed at this hotel, or whatever. So I simplify it. And then I say, what am I going to do then write this down. This is the most important sentence of this interview. The first thing you put in your mouth in the morning, provided it, it's food. Okay? So the first thing you put in your mouth in the morning, provided it's food, will dictate the neurotransmitter. Cascade for the whole day. So that's why I'm a big advocate of the meats and the breakfast, because it provides you with the raw material to make the proper neurotransmitters for the whole day. And there's lots of research and from Even the early 50s on the content of your protein and the ratio between proteins and fats and the quality of the protein you ingest in the morning dictates the energy even in the later afternoon. So with children, what they found at Harvard is that if they eat, let's say oatmeal or even worse, microwavable oatmeal.

Yeah.

Or cereal or something.

Yeah. What they find is that when you give them lunch and they have to self select the food they will eat, they make worse choices if they had a carb only breakfast. Also, for example, if you give kids pancakes with that fake syrup, French, can we call that telephone pole syrup? Because telephone poles don't have SAP. So if you have, let's say, telephone pole syrup and then pancakes, kids score 20% less on IQ tests because temporarily their brain's in a fog. So it's very important to set up your day with the right food. Then typically, an hour after I've eaten breakfast, I train.

Okay.

And shower up, take a post workout shake, and go to work. Whether I'm at home or I'm on the road teaching, that routine doesn't change. And I think it's really important to have very steady habits in your life. And then this way you never have an excuse for missing out in the gym. You know, you don't miss your dentist appointment or you don't miss your appointment with your tax lawyer. Well, you shouldn't miss your appointments with your fitness because you got to take.

Care of your body.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there. So as you age, out of all the different things, say, you know, because I do a lot of yoga and I lift weights, which is why I'm, you know, bigger than you, but basically so.

Yep.

So strength training, stretching, cardio, good, bad, how to go about doing it.

The problem with cardio is most people do long, slow distance. Right? But if you look at research, the athletes Olympic athletes who've done the most long slow distance cardio have the most brain damage in later age. A lot of cardiovascular training is actually brain damaging and you can find it up in the research. So I prefer that people do interval type type of training. But the most important thing is that you show up. Okay? So if your thing is yoga, or if it's Tai chi, or if it's Taekwondo or you want to play hockey four days a week, that's great. But you got to be active, you got to sweat, right? For busy executives, you know, I've got certain types of workouts, which I call German body comp training that people can do a lot of work get. Basically it's a fat loss through weight training. And strongman training is very good. CrossFit, if it's done in a proper box, is very good. Some people need external sources of motivation. You need to be in front of a group and you got to be. You got. Here's a very simple rule about exercise. If it's not a hell yes, it's a no. Okay? So if you don't enjoy it and you're just doing because you need the discipline, that's bullshit, okay? And I don't believe in discipline. That's a myth. I wrote an article, the most popular and most plagiarized article I've ever written. It's called the Myth of Discipline. And the basic message of this article is that you make the choice and you gotta decide what you love more. Do you love your brain more than doughnuts? Then you'll exercise. Okay? Do you enjoy healthy joints? More than Kwasa and Nathalia?

More than.

Right. So I don't know anybody that's ever been mugged by a dozen donuts. It doesn't happen, okay? I mean, have you ever eaten anything by accident? Doesn't happen. So this is the type of conversation you need to have with yourself. And then when I tell people, just make a conscious choice. Is this the best thing for me now? But don't tell me you don't have discipline. What you're telling me is you love donuts more than having a great physique or healthy physique.

Right?

Does that make sense?

So when people body fat and stuff, Some of the things I've worked because I've been through several of your workshops, you know, like multi day trainings and stuff. Is people's ability to. Because so many people, it's a vanity thing. They just want to lose weight, they want to look good, you know, and it's almost like secondary or circulatory system or how your heart's going to be or how your brain's going to function. I mean, it's like we live in a culture that is so much about how they look. And what I've learned so much from you is hormone levels. And so that people can really have maybe good workout rituals and stuff, but their hormones are all jacked up. So if people are really putting forth a lot of effort and they still feel lethargic, or they cannot lose weight, or they don't feel strong, or they're mentally foggy, what should they do to discover health, how to fix it, and what is causing that? I mean, other than obvious things like the environment. If you're working your ass off and you're giving your no time to rejuvenate, I think what you've talked about a lot is stress. Human stress can cause so much of. So what should someone do if they're either in a state of like, I want to work out. This sounds good, I've always wanted to, but I can't stick with it. I can't stop carb cravings, I can't stop sugar, or I'm like tired. I have no motivation. I mean, just being in a place where they're stuck.

Where do you.

How do you get unstuck?

Okay, the first thing is I always tell people to do this. The best day to change a habit in North America is Saturday, okay? So you don't have to rush to go to work. So you say, okay, I'm going to commit. But I think people over commit. So I say, just go to the gym, 10 minutes, okay? So it's better to undersell, right? And then after that they could work it out. But the thing where people should. Where they would have the most impact is actually sleep. Do you really need to send that extra email? Do you really need to watch the news? Do you really need to watch that TV show? Okay, you could tape it. You could buy a Netflix subscription. There's a lot of research out of Germany that shows that the earlier you can go to bed, actually, the better it's going to be for your hormones. And one of the problems we have with our lifestyle is actually lights. The more we can offset lights, and there's a lot of technology out there for controlling the effect of light on your brain, but also gradually diminishing the amount of lighting in your house as you prepare to go to bed makes a huge difference. There's stuff you could put on your computer screen so that there's Less stress on the brain and your eyes. So managing the electronics in your life will do a lot for your sleep. And simple things like don't watch CNN before you go to bed. I mean, have you ever seen great news on CNN? It's usually 99% tragedy. So. And the thing that the.

Yeah, TVs and bedrooms, I think are incredible, incredibly unproductive sort of devices, especially for entrepreneurs. You know, if you have nothing going on in Your life and TVs your biggest highlight, then maybe. But, you know.

Yes. And then, you know, simple reading and book reading and journaling will do a lot for your sleep. Because one of the things with sleep is that people can't shut off their brain. One of the most common disorders I see in executives is the inability to shut off the brain. So journaling is one of the best way to get out of your system. And I like people to journal before they go to bed. But having a grateful log, in my opinion, is probably the biggest step for sound sleep. And then. And you have to have what we call a sleep routine. So, yeah, you have to have a countdown of what you're going to do and the activities you choose before going to bed. And if you go to my website, strengthsassa.com, i've got lots of sleep strategies. But for example, there's a botanical called reishi mushroom. And one of the names in Chinese means the mushroom for the professor lived too much inside his head. So reishi mushroom is actually an anxiety lower. It's an anti anxiety. And then if you consume reishi mushroom extract before you go to bed, you actually have better sleep. There's a lot of different amino acids that can make a huge difference on the quality of your sleep. Like theanine. Okay. That comes originally from green tea. How much magnesium you take before going to bed makes a difference. A lot of people have inflammation because of stress. So, for example, taking a probiotic with glutamine an hour before they go to bed lowers inflammation. They sleep better. I mean, the amount of sleep strategies that are possible for anybody are limitless.

Okay, so I have a person who is in this room that I've been trying to. I'm not going to say it is that I've been trying to encourage them to quit drinking sodas because sodas are pretty much like liquid Satan. And I don't consume hardly any sugar unless they sneak it in the foods. And I don't eat dairy and I try not to eat processed foods. I like eating foods that have a single name, like broccoli not Doritos, because that's not the same thing. So let's take soda. A lot of people just consume a ton and there's a ton of sugar, waters, juices and stuff. Good or bad?

I mean, horrendous.

Horrendous. Okay.

So horrendous is the best word. The thing is that Americans consume 50% of their calories through liquids. Okay. So I think that one thing we should do is tax the hell out of.

Tax the hell out of liquids.

Sugar, liquids. Yeah. So if it costs $97 to buy a bottle of Coke, the consumption will go down pretty quick.

Well, and that's where many of the healthcare costs are going to people that are consuming.

Exactly, exactly. And then. So basically, water, teas. I'm really big on coffee, but it's the timing of your coffee that makes a big difference. Right.

When you said first thing you eat in the morning, I was going to ask you, what about coffee?

Well, from what the research shows with MRIs, you can see which areas of the brain lit up when you consume certain foods. And I recommend that you eat solid food before you take your first sip of coffee.

Okay.

Yeah.

Because I know many people that the first thing they do is they drink coffee in the morning. Then they get to the other stuff if they get to it, and if they're too busy, the coffee becomes the way that tides them over. And these are the same people that are usually stressed out of their fucking minds.

Exactly, yeah.

Okay, so going back to soda, what does it actually do to the body?

Well, one of the things it does is changes the alkaline balance in your body. One thing that, for example, a very good orthopedic surgeon from the Valley showed is that the more the kids drank soda, the weaker the bones are. Okay. Because it contains a lot of phosphates. And if you consume too many phosphates, you actually leak calcium of your tissues. So when I was a kid, I never heard of a guy playing football who broke his patella. Right. But Nowadays, since the 2000s, kids who break the patella playing American footballers epidemic. And the main factor associated with broken bones in teenagers is actually soda consumption. So besides. And then the thing is, there's all sorts of artificial sweeteners and additives that we're not even sure if they're healthy. I mean, I would like to see the science behind it, but there's not such a thing as a. Well, one of the things we know is that one of the most common additives in soda is sodium benzoate. And it is the Chemical most associated with prostate cancer. So if you consume a lot of sodas, you're more likely to get prostate cancer. So that's enough of a reason not to drink them for males. So they're quite evil, to be fair.

Right?

Yeah.

That's good. Now, by the way, so Tim Ferriss has written about you in his latest book, which is Tools of Titans, and he basically considers you like the guy. So there's a bunch of pages of stuff which is kind of funny. And he has a quote from you. What you put in your mouth is a stressor, and what you say, what comes out of your mouth is also a stressor. And so, yeah, so it's a very good book.

600 pages and you got. Basically, it's the top 30 of his most downloaded podcast.

Yeah. So listen to the episodes with Charles.

Yeah, they've downloaded already over a million copies of that podcast. It's the 10th most downloaded podcast of the Tim Ferriss series. And I still get emails every day about that first podcast. I just did another one, and I think it already downloaded 700,000 copies. So it's a very good medium to deliver the information.

Totally.

If you were to get in a physical fight with Tim, you think you could take him?

Yeah.

I'm gonna say someone could tag Tim Ferriss so he could watch whatever. However far is that still going? Is it okay?

Good, Good.

Awesome. Awesome. So what we're gonna do, we're gonna take a couple of questions from the audience. Just talk really loud if you could, so that people can hear it.

So what is your drink? You said you take a shake after your workout. What is it? What do you. Well, what you consume post workout will affect how fast you recover from the workout. But what is in the drink is a function of how lean you are. Right. So if you take your shirt off and you shape it, it's like a melted candle. Well, you got to stick to proteins and some amino acids. And if you're very lean and you have a lot of muscle mass, then it would be a combination of carbohydrates, maybe five different types of carbohydrates, like pentacarb from ATP labs and a protein. But one of the things we see clinically is a lot of people are actually intolerant to whey protein. So I prefer to use straight amino acids. Or some people are allergic to dairy from cow, but not from goat. So you could have goat protein. I'm not big on plant proteins because about as nutritious as the cardboard box. So I prefer to Use straight amino acids if I'm not going to use dairy based protein.

Have you ever had a, like, it's.

Not a green shake. It's literally you're just taking mixed proteins.

It's more of a manufactured shake is what you're correct.

I mean there's also now the technology for beef protein shakes and they've actually worked on a taste and they're very good. And yeah, like that's, that's what JJ.

Virgin's latest shakes are is. It's organic beef protein shaking.

A steak. Basically. It's a steak shake. Yeah.

Okay, awesome, Jennifer. And then we'll go to Paris.

So when it comes to even some of your, like the athletes that you've worked with in. I'll show the Facebook live through the beautiful audiences. You talked a lot about like the yin and some of the mindset and.

So how have you been able to.

Get to people to be more consistent with their workouts and some of these things as far as like stopping drinking pot when for the most part it's probably like an emotional thing for them that's stopping them from working out our emotional thing, a trigger that gets them to drink that pot. I don't give much credence to that because if people don't control their food intake, then it's easier for them to make bad choices. So the emotional part somewhat, but I think that a lot of it is solvable by managing your brain nutrition to a T. Right. For example, a lot of ADD is malnutrition. So it fix the kid's diet that suddenly you can concentrate.

As are addiction.

Yeah, yeah. And addictions and so on. So I think that if you. There's a lot of papers that have been published mainly out of Toronto and Boston where they look at the composition of the breakfast and how it impacts cognition, but also food choices throughout the whole day. So it does really set you up as far as discipline. If you have a proper breakfast. I think that, you know, one of the best ways to solve America's health issues would be to have a federal breakfast program.

Right.

And then you don't have to feed your kids at home. You bring them in half an hour earlier and they have the right nutrition. Right. So if I was emperor of all galaxies, I would standardize the breakfast because that would be a way to fight things like obesity. And you know, kids don't pay attention in class. And any, ask any school teacher, you can tell if kids eat breakfast and a proper breakfast by the attention span in class. Okay. Because it sets you up for the whole day?

Yeah.

Awesome. And we'll go to. We'll go to Paris.

I want to clarify, you know, the.

Point on the post workout shake.

A lot of people say, you know, you have a shake with grape juice.

In it and it causes you to.

Get insulin, which builds muscle. Am I to understand that you're not.

A proponent to that?

I have a problem. If you deserve it, write this down. You need to deserve your carbohydrates, okay? So if you're not lean, like, you know, tell men if you don't have penis skin on your arms, you're too fat. Okay? So you pinch. It has to be really lean. If it's not, fuck. Stay away from cardboard bits. They're not your friend. Right. But I think that's really good to be vulgar because it raises dopamine levels and people actually pay attention. Right. But the thing is that we. I'm for spiking some post workout if you deserve it. Okay. So you have to be sub 10% body fat for a male and sub 16 for a female. Cool.

All right, so if you could say it real loud, Ed too.

Sure.

I wonder if Charles, if you talk.

About the difference, especially on a guy's.

Hormones, with respect to doing isolated workouts.

Versus compound workouts, you know, full body.

Movements versus isolation, is there a difference?

Yes. If you look at the research, the larger the muscle mass you recruit, the more hormones, I mean, beneficial hormones you produce. So if all your exercise are single joint, you're not going to be able to muscle mass, you're not going to lose a lot of fat. So if you center your first 70% of your workout around big compound exercise, you're on the right way. I have a friend who's set 76 world records in Parliament. He says work on a Christmas tree, not the ornaments. That's Ed Cone. So I think it's really important that you. It's what I call most bang for your buck exercises. So squats, deadlifts, chin ups, bench presses. I really like a lot of dumbbell work because it keeps you balanced. And I really like fat handle type of dumbbells. Joe has done a video on that.

Yeah. Watson's Gym in the uk.

Yeah.

Make the best dumbbells in the world for sure. Designed by Charles.

Yes. So, you know, nothing beats the basics. And the thing is, is that basics are hard work and people like to avoid hard work. Right. I mean, they do tricep kickbacks and they don't forget to push the lips. Okay. That's not going to do much for you. Right. But if you vomit a lung because you did a set of 20 in a squat, you're going to make progress. Right.

It's real great advice. Just.

Yeah.

Yep.

The goal workout is that your spleen should come out through the left eye. If it has to come out through not the right eye, but the left eye, then the workout was hard enough.

So we'll take two more. So summer and then Dan, and then we're done.

What are your thoughts on intermittent fasting?

Thoughts on intermittent fasting for people watching this.

Okay. If you look at the research, you'll find that intermittent fasting is beneficial in the very obese. But what the research on intermittent fasting is, look at the world through a straw. Okay. They don't look at other things, but in the labs where they look at things like cognition, they found and muscle performance, they found that intermittent fasting was harmful. So I think that you should take care of your brain. Right. So I'm not big on intermittent fasting. There's different conditions. It depends how you do it. There's a lot of. But one thing they found in women is that it does really mess up the endocrine system. And one of the things I find when people do intermittent fasting, they become food obsessed. Okay. It's like, I don't know, another 52 minutes, another 48. Right. And then they compensate by drinking more coffee. So I think that because I'm a big believer in a breakfast, I'm not so keen on intermittent fasting. Some people are very. But I think a lot of it with intermittent fasting, if it works for you or not, is actually genetics. Some people, for example, if I did intermittent fasting, I would be for the first time in my life on CNN because I've killed 76 persons in a parking lot. Okay. On my way to work because I get extremely irritable if you don't manage my protein intake in the morning, some people don't have an appetite at all. So I'm not 100% against intermittent fasting. It's conditional. But I'm not a big fan of it either.

Okay, Dan, so you brought up breakfast being the most important, I guess, meal of the day.

I have 11 and nine year olds. They're important.

Seems to be.

And also for me, I'm curious, what.

Are the foods that you recommend at breakfast that, you know, the best that.

We could look at either for ourselves or our kids?

I think what you have to look at is a very high quality protein. Now, I prefer to eat only wild meat. So, you know, I live in Colorado. I can get elk or yak or bison.

I'm eat some gerbil.

Definitely feeling Kentucky. But the quality of the protein is very important. And then I would like to have a type of nut. The reason why I like to have different types of nuts for breakfast is that they provide choline, which is a precursor to the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. So it helps you with paying attention and brain speed, which is important in our lives. And then if you can afford it, berries is a good source of carbohydrate. A very simple rule is the thinner the skin is of the fruit naturally, the more phytonutrients it has, because, for example, a raspberry doesn't want to be sunburned. So how do you protect yourself from the sun, which is an oxidant? You make antioxidants. So if you look at, for example, grapes, the grapes that have the highest amount of phytonutrients are the ones harvested in hills, like in Sardinia and in Spain, as compared to, let's say, German wines, which are in valleys, and they don't have that angle of the sun. So berries are a very good choice. And any thin peel fruit is good. Do you advocate green shakes? Green shakes are very good. One of the problems, though, in the industry is a lot of them are loaded with heavy metals. So there's some companies that are good, and some, you know, might as well just drink a liquefied bumper. Okay, so the quality of the product really matters, like, if you make it yourself, like spinach. Okay, that's even better if you make your own green drinks. But I thought you were asking about powdered greens. Powdered greens. There's a lot of cuttings out there, but usually if you can buy them to a regular store, you're drinking a green liquefied bumper because it's full of heavy metals.

What about juicing versus, like, blending, like, green greens in smoothies?

The problem with juicing is that you cut away the fiber, and the fiber is very important to stabilize your blood sugar. So I prefer to use a powdered green versus a juicing.

Talk about your lean body coaching program, your online program, because you've done a lot of the stuff face to face. There's all different formats. So how do you do it with people now? How do you train?

Okay, so this is my legacy, right? I wanted to leave behind my life's work. And. And so online, we replicated my clinical work online. And so everybody has their own nutritionist that's trained by me. And the first three months is devoted entirely on how to eat to get lean. And the final three months are devoted entirely to relapse prevention, how to keep the weight off. We have tons of recipes because I want to show people there is nothing you can eat if you make it. And so at the end of the day, all of my psychological work is on there. And video. Video format. Right. All the recipes are in video format. If you don't know how to cook, our coaches are there to teach you how to cook and all that kind of stuff. So all of that 40 years. Let me show you one other little thing. Because it's the little thing sometimes we don't know. I just want to show you a slide that we did here a while back. Raise your hand if water packed tuna is lower in fat than oil. Just raise your hand if it is. I'm not scamming you.

Yeah.

Water packed tunas. So this is water packed tuna and spring water. And I bought these two cans at the same store at the same time. And the first can you can see 1 times 9 is 9 divided by 70 means that's about 13% fat. Okay. Now the exact same food, how many grams of fat are in the same food? 5.5times 9 is 45 divided by 195 is 47% fat. But oil packed tuna is only 33. If I, if I weren't eating an oil to get lean, why am I eating water when it's actually higher than that, which is an oil? Expecting a different outcome. This represents the different times of year they catch the fish. It's been going on your whole life. So what we're doing in lean body coaching is we're giving you access to information you just won't find anywhere else. Because they won't put that on tv. They'd lose their advertising dollars. Right. They don't want to know that stuff. But it's these little things that start to. I just want my clients not to give up anything. Right. But just be more aware so that it can lead him down a path of just making better choices. They are both spring water. Yeah. Do you know every November through March, water pat tuna becomes higher in fat than oil right now, this time of year because of their migratory season.

Look at the ingredients.

So one use vegetable broth and salt.

The other one uses hydrolyzed casein. Yeah.

You know, it's a protein. That's not a fact.

I mean, it's so obvious. There's so many experts that just know the Food labeling is such a bunch of propaganda horseshit. Why is it so hard to get it?

Because of lobbyists, right? Lobbyists are in Washington to protect the interest of the companies they represent over your health. Now listen to this. Are not labels the guidelines by which we have to choose to use to get healthy foods. If the very labels themselves are deceitful and misleading, how can you ever choose healthy foods? So if you put me in that position, I'd wipe out all the loopholes. I know them all. Check out this. You know, and this is not. These are just little things, right? It's not a big deal, okay? Zero calories. Fat says zero. How many calories and grams of fat are in that container?

Zero.

Well, if I see zero, why wouldn't I just uncap it and pour it on my baked potato? This has 900 calories in 90 grams of fat. It is perfectly okay in America to tell you that a food is fat free when it's 100% fat. That's the law. Now, the law states that if in your serving size it has a half a gram of fat, you can just say it has none. Let me read a serving size. I'd have to have Parkinson's disease to be able to do this. It's one and a quarter spray, right? Just a quarter spray, right. So I'm supposed to get 905 servings out of this little thing, right? I don't mind that you use it. I mind that you use it thinking it's one thing when it's really not. That's all we're there for, is an educational resource to help you find your way to a healthier body without deprivation and giving up.

And honestly, that's why so many marketers get lumped in. Because there are some really deceptive people that use marketing to just manipulate and lie. And it's unfortunate. And grab a mic if there's anything you guys want to. I want to.

Grab that water.

I just want to say a couple things. First of all, what you said, I actually eat exactly like you do. So it's interesting you said that because I went to plant based with pescatarian, a little bit of eggs for all the same reasons. Because we, my wife and I did a lot of research over a number of years. So we went four years ago to change our entire diet around. It's a pain in the ass. I mean, it's total change. But here's the thing that's not talked about and I want maybe you can answer. This is what I Learned about maybe 25 years ago through. I can't remember where it was exactly, but this is basically the thing about habits. And this behavioral change in this area is very, very difficult in all areas. It's very difficult when it's substantial behavioral change. And behavioral change is based on changing habits, you know, little things at a time. So when you make a major change, this is a major change on diet. Most people think, well, a habit is formed in 14 to 21 days. There's different stuff out there. Again, that's misleading because it's formed a habit is not known. This is scientifically proven for two full years. So anytime I've made a major change in my life, my wife and I did this four years ago. I said, honey, we have to do this for 730 days. We have to do this straight for 730 days. And then it'll be a permanent change in our life if we want to get our, our health to where it's going to be. We on this diet completely changed everything. Went off to a place for three weeks to do that. So we got all the right education besides what we already knew to do it. But we came up with the exact same diet that you came up with. And my wife was on diabetic medicine. She was also on, what do you call it, Statin. Thank you. And she went off both of those and still off both of those because of those dietary changes. And then our weight went down to our normal weight. And every time we do a deca stand or anything else, we come out exactly perfectly in the middle of what we're supposed to be for our body type and everything else.

So you had the power of food.

Right. So I wanted to support you. But I also want to make sure everybody know in this room, if you're going to make a change, any major change in your life, it's two years. It's not 14 days. It's not 21 days.

Actually, it's not. It's lifetime. Right.

I meant to get it so it's going to stick.

But I don't see that that it takes, takes that long. Right. Because here's what I'd like to see.

Well, this is statistic through the insurance industry on driving and everything else. When you see the rates, they've, they've learned this over time that your, your kid doesn't know to step on the long skinny one or the fat horizontal one. When they're trying to make a decision on driving and they make mistakes and they found it after two years, all the rates come down because they've done millions of these and that's when they know how to drive versus they have been taught how to drive. Two different, entirely different.

Disputing that. But I got to tell you, it's not looking at how you teach somebody to make a simple change, right? So if I, if you leave my office and I just say, listen, do you think, do you want to make those two little changes? Yeah, go do it. And then once those two changes are in place, let's make the next ones, right? So it's a process. And you know, when I watch how people change, no two people change at the same rate at the same time. Right. But I did notice that successful people go through a series of steps. The first one is awareness. Right? They become acutely aware that what they're doing is no longer working for them. But that's not enough to change because how many people are aware they have a problem? They're still not changing. Right. We heard your drug stories. Right. The second step though is contemplation.

Hell, we haven't even got into the hookers yet.

That's all.

The second step I watch successful people go is to contemplation. What you have to do is you have to think about how this change is going to affect you. Is this going to be more fun or less fun? Is this something you really think you can do in the face of socializing? The next step is knowledge. And this is where I see a lot of people fail because they take in the wrong knowledge. Every step they take going forward fails them. So if you can give people straightforward, accurate information, their success rate is going to be higher just based on that. The next step, then they move into action. They start making the changes. But this is where most people are deluded. You don't go into the final step. On average, most people go into from action back to contemplation three or four or five times depending on how long it's going to take them to get what they didn't learn to go on to the final step, which is self accountability. So I watch what successful people do. There's no mystery to me as to why they're successful. I watch what unsuccessful people do. There's no mystery as to why they aren't. I'm not disputing that research at all. But what I'm saying at the end of the day is I think we have to look at how we're educating people to make the appropriate changes that they're willing to make at the time. Thanks.

What I'm finding is people are coming to me after a month or two months at the gym, trying to work out all the time or do any of these things, thinking that after a certain short period of time it's going to set in when they don't recognize there's a lot of other elements. And I love your whole step process in that. But it's a long term process.

It's, it's a lifetime.

It's not short. And I think a lot of us are under this misguided, you know that this is just going to happen after a month or two.

Fast, easy. But wait, that's not long.

Yeah, it's at least two years for most people, if not long.

Yeah. You know, the thing is that it's really weird because we live in such an instant gratification world. See, it's a lot easier to get a hit by eating a pepperoni pizza than it is to go to the gym and drink water and work out, cook your food. Yeah. I mean, so the more that we become a culture of instantaneous, just the more difficult it becomes psychologically. And here's the whole reason that I bring you here and talk like this and that sort of stuff is that you mentioned. It is coping. How you eat has everything to do with how you cope with life. And you may be doing a lot of wonderful things in your life. You may be reading the best books, you may be highly educated, you may even be doing your best to sleep and you have rituals. But if you insert shitty food, infrequent eating, if you don't nurture yourself well, your ability to cope physically, psychologically, emotionally, so much of it is affected by exercise and eating. What I'd love to do is have you give some suggestions, some things that would deliver relatively quickly so that they can. And I don't mean quickly like, oh, these are quick fixes. What I mean. So I'd love for people to be able to leave here having a paradigm shift on how they think about food and about exercise, that they could start seeing results. So it literally becomes a lifetime improvement in how they operate.

I think one good way to do that is to call this the method of simplicity. What I do is take notes in the original interview and I would like you to write down the top five things you think are holding you back from getting what you say you want. What are some of them? I eat out too much. I don't cook. I eat too much red meat. I eat too much fried food. I drink too much alcohol. Right. I mean, whatever that list is for you, if you make that list out and you list five things. I would encourage you to look at that list and ask yourself which one you're ready to work on right now. Spend two or three weeks or a month just fixing that one thing before you move on to the other. I will share with you this. What the most successful clients learn is that there's one thing on that list that if you focused on the list I just gave you, there's one thing if you focused on, it changes almost all of them. If you cook your own food and carry it, you, you will have massive results. I watch people fight and defend their position to remain overweight. At the very same time they tell me they want to lose weight. Let me show you that conversation will go. It could be even with drug addiction, because this is so parallel. So much, right?

Yeah.

Honestly, I think so much of people's obesity is literally rooted in addiction.

Yeah, but unfortunately with food you can't give it up. Right. With drugs, you can get it out of your life. You can make new associations with relationships. So that's why it can be a difficult change. But I will tell you this. I will watch people fight and defend their position to remain overweight even when they say they don't want it. I will say to somebody, listen, if you just cook and carry your own food, your problem will go away. Oh, I can't cook. I don't have time for that. That point of resistance, trust me, is the area you should focus the most attention on. Wherever your points of resistance are, that's where you need the most work. And that's what we do as clinicians. We really listen to what you're saying, how you're saying it, and then try to get in there and figure out how we could help you overcome that particular resistant point.

Let's do some questions.

First of all, thank you so much for this incredible information.

Well, thank you.

A couple of questions.

Artificial sweeteners. We know that artificial sweeteners are bad.

For you, so I've completely cut out splendid sucralose.

What about stevia, which is considered the all natural artificial sweetener? Most people who are buying stevia aren't buying stevia at all. So if you go into the grocery store and you see the store brand of something that says stevia, and this is what I think really needs to change. Most of those products that are in your supermarket labeled as stevia are 90% erythritol, which is a sugar alcohol, and it can cause tremendous gas and bloating. And, and it's only 10% stevia. So I buy my stevia at Whole Foods. I like the one with the vanilla extract in it. It's a liquid bottle and I prefer to use that. Okay. But be aware that most of those things today on the supermarket shelves labeled stevia are mostly erythritol. And you can even go look up that brand of Truvia. Right. That's 90% erythritol. And you can go on their website and look it up and you'll find way dark in the dig abyss of their website. You'll see they tell you that. My second question, cooking oils that you cook food in, they talk about smoking point.

And so coconut oil versus olive oil.

I don't like the taste of coconut oil, but I've heard it's bad to.

Cook foods in olive oil because it.

Doesn'T have a high smoking point.

Yeah, look, I'm not going to go down too much of that path because I think one, this is an individual thing. What do you like, taste wise and things like that? We've been cooking with oils for centuries. I don't think it's a primary point that it would damage my health if I used olive oil versus another oil. I don't like the saturated ones very much, so I like the more unsaturated oils in my own cooking.

Yeah.

But I don't want people to get down off tanning tangents of little things when they have much bigger things they should focus on that could create a bigger change for health and longevity. Okay, thank you.

Yes, whoever had the mic.

Okay.

Just like, thank you so much for coming.

Oh, thanks. I really want to say thanks, Joe, for letting me be here, man. I love this.

Thank you for inviting you. So, a couple quick questions. I count my macros, so I don't know if that's really a diet or not. To me, it's kind of the same. We're talking about the same thing here. What am I putting in my body and understanding it by reading labels. So I heard you say a moment ago that you usually recommend under 20% fat if I break. And so I wanted to ask you, what do you recommend for.

The mixture of fuels you require are based on the type of activity you do and what you tell me you want to have happen. So I work with nine pro bodybuilders. They're eating radically different than my pro boxers. They're eating radically different than the dancers. So the mixture of fuel is based on the type of activity you do and what you say you want to have happen. So let's say you want to get leaner. All right. The mixture of fuels would be completely different for that goal than if you said, keith, I want greater endurance and stamina. Right. Because I'm going to put more fats in the diet for that person that is a long distance runner than I would for somebody who's more sedentary.

So. So then how often do you recommend adjusting that? Let me give you my numbers. Carbs, 100. Fat, protein or fat is 55 and protein is 90, and I use that just as my baseline.

So you have almost equal protein to carbs. Pretty close. A little bit higher carbs. Yeah, I don't think I would. I think my question to you would be, is that working for you?

It does work for me, but I want to.

Then you got your answer.

So then. So really it's just a feeling like, hey, how am I? Am I looking the way I want to look? Am I feeling the way that I want to look? What I'm concerned with is, as I age, how does the way that we eat affect our hormones as women? Because we already have so many, you know, peaks and valleys every month. So it's trying to find out how does our food affect that? And by the way, Icon Meals is awesome. Their business is right next to me. And so if you guys do need something fast.

Are you from Dallas?

I am from Dallas, yeah.

Great company. Yeah. So listen, I really can't, in this environment, answer what your requirement requirements are because I haven't really analyzed all the things you do in a day. Right. But I think the question is answered by saying, is what I'm doing creating the outcome? I want it to. And so long as it is, I think you're good to go.

Interesting. Perfect. Thank you.

Okay, Gordy, within the next hour, you're gonna bring out these paleo cookies here. It's actually the real reason why I come to you.

Me too.

And.

And they're like my crack. But what I've done is I've started working on my emotional attachment to. Not much shame when I have them, but what can I do to mitigate the physical aspect? Because I know I'm gonna attack those as soon as they come.

See, your mindset already told me what you're gonna do. Right. So you're already set to attack them. Right. So that's where we'd have to start working is at the root of that language that you use. Just like those other examples I used. How you speak also determines what you get. Remember that you cannot have a craving without a Thought first, it's impossible, right? So you see the ice cream truck, you think of ice cream, you salivate. You hear the ice cream truck, you think of ice cream, you salivate. Why Pavlov's dog was so important was the first time we realized that there was that an external stimuli could alter internal physiological. Right. The dog salivated with. With just hearing about. So all cravings begin with a thought. I assume you're in charge of your thoughts. So you see if you push that thought out of your head and quit thinking of the cookies, the craving can't exist. So one, we engage in thought stopping. Two, the second thing that happens. I call this the anatomy of a binge.

Right?

Starts with a thought, then we move to the decision. We decide we're going to eat something we. Which is then followed by the action where you eat it. Which is then followed by the hangover. Either physical or emotional, you feel bad about it. Which is then followed by the vow, I'll do better tomorrow. There's only two places I can help you. It's in stopping the thoughts and getting you focused on something else or showing you how to make better bad choices in such a way that you can still have those things that it doesn't interfere with your other goals. So that's where better bad choices come in. There's three ways to make one. Just don't do it as often. I have never told a client they can't have hamburger and fries. What I simply say is what could you, you know, if you're eating three days a week, well, what's the number? You could. I could do it once a week.

Great.

Do it. Because once a week is far better than three. That's how I'm invoking changes. I'm not getting rid of all their favorite things ever and they still get to have them. And that's the. I think that's the reason there's so much more long term success in what we do. We're not getting rid of their favorite things so we can make a better bad choice by making a more positive food selection. We could do it not as often or we don't eat as much of them. So if you really want to have a steak and you Normally eat a 16 ounce steak, can you do an eight or six? Because I'm telling you, if you did that, you'd find you're just dissatisfied. It must have looked pretty strange when I was a 240 pound bodybuilder walking into Beck's and ordering a kitty burger. It was enough burger for me. So when I was done with it, I had a 400 calorie burger. I still have six pack of abs. It gave me what I wanted and I could still keep what I had, you know, I didn't have to get rid of it.

Yeah, that's what you know. Well, let's go to Joel and then I've got a couple of other questions. Well, I love everything you're saying and I think I eat healthy.

I only drink water, I don't eat sweets.

38 years ago, had an epiphany and.

Stopped everything in one day.

Completely changed everything I eat. The one thing about food that I like is crunchy.

So I have.

And I just carry my food with me. So tell. These are dried vegetable chips.

Are those any good? If so, why or if not, why not?

Well, here's the thing. We take a really good healthy food and just destroy it by frying it. Right. I think the key word is dry.

It's dried, not fried.

Okay, so this is what's four times now divided by 130. So it's about 50% fat. Right. So T bone steak is 45, right? Yeah. So now I'm not saying it's not healthy. Right. There's a huge difference between eating for health, which is one style, versus eating be healthy, but also leaner, which is a completely different style.

Right.

There are things that are healthy. Look, one cup of almonds is 800 calories, right? At 80% fat, are they good? Sure. But if you're trying to lean down and you're munching on too many nuts, are you going to lean down doing that to yourself? Probably not. So we're not saying don't eat nuts. I'm not saying nuts are bad. I'm just saying be aware of what you're putting in your body and your caloric allotment and stay within your boundaries. Well, if those are zucchini, beets, green beans, how do you get that kind of.

It's a canola oil in here. It's the vast majority of the canola oil. So if you actually like. So he said, prepare your food.

I did buy a dehydrator, but it.

Took so long I found these.

No, but seriously, you honestly should just hire someone to dehydrate food for you. I mean, you're so good at the way you eat and exercise. I mean, why the hell not? Or you can find alternatives too. Oh, yeah, but he likes crunchy, though. So if he likes crunchy, if someone really likes crunchy. Because I think that would apply.

All right. There's so many options, right? But let me give you one. What's one food that most dieters have to give up that you can't eat when you're going to lose weight? Ranch dressing, right? It's got to go. If you took a packet of that ranch dressing by Hidden Valley and you put it in and you didn't use the sour cream, you put it in Greek yogurt, it's now pure protein, no fat, very low in sugar. And now you dip your vegetables in that, you'd really enjoy it. But all you had was vegetables and yogur. See, I just showed you how to eat an identical. Nobody can tell it's not full fat. But see, you feel like you're eating the full fat food. You got the crunchy, but now you enjoy it, right? So I would never. It's always about showing you all the options that exist, you know? So if I like crunchy, I air pop popcorn and I spray it with a little bit of butter flavor cooking spray and I put low salt on it and Mrs. Dash, so it all sticks, but it feels like it's covered in butter. But I just use a little bit of the spray and that's crunchy, you know, But I'm getting just the goodness of corn, you know, I just air popped it, you know, So I get the fiber and the goodness of corn.

Now he looks so distraught. I think he's gonna go smoke a bong and then eat tacos. You're gonna see. You're gonna see Joel just completely lit at Jack in the box at 2 in the morning. I mean, this is gonna be.

Goes off the deep end.

No, but, yeah, but here's the thing now, well, let me go to exercise because Joel water skis quite a bit, works out. I mean, so let's. Where does exercise and fitness fit into this? Like, it's huge. If you eat, if you eat well, healthy, but you do not exercise. If you then insert exercise into it, how does it affect it? So it's because I know it's not one plus one equals two. When you combine both of them, something happens to the body.

It's all about circulation, right? So as we age, our circulatory system kind of slows down. As you become more sedentary, the circulatory system slows down. And what you get out of exercise is increased circulation, which is incredibly healthy and good for the body. So again, as you become more sedentary, your muscle erodes, right? And as you lose muscle, we just don't lose the big muscles, you see, you also lose the stabilizing muscles that hold the skeletal system in place. One of the reasons why 70 year old people fall over in the shower and break their hip is because these stabilizing muscles have also been lost. And so you see these older people that develop this feeble gait, you know, and then when they start weight training, you see them walking like this. And so you can actually see the impact of, you know, the right kind of exercise. And I think it's incredibly important for longevity factors.

Yeah. Like Geeta, is Julie back there?

Yeah.

So Geeta, you know, her 81 year old father does cross CrossFit three days a week, you know, and. Yeah, and he's strong as hell. Yeah.

I think it keeps the brain function well because again, circulation everywhere really matters as you're aging. And you can really. What you saw in all the before and after pictures, all of them took up some form of exercise they enjoyed. It wasn't killing themselves in the gym, but they all took up one form or another. I really don't care what form of exercise somebody chooses to use. I just want to make sure it's one they're enjoying that's the sustainable because they're likely to keep doing it.

Commonly you will see me in gatherings wearing a hat and a scarf. Why is that? I think you can clearly see that I have a white beard and I did not dye this beard white. I am a little old man and little old men have trouble generating heat. Which is when I ran across the Iceman, the Wim Hof method, I thought, oh boy. For those of us who scuba dive and and have gone scuba diving for the last 60 years, the idea of getting over being cold is a swell idea. So what exactly is the WIM Hof method? Now when your nickname is the Iceman, you think that it's just jumping in a bunch of cold water with ice in it and somehow miraculously surviving. Nothing could be further from the truth. In real life, he gives you some breathing techniques to heat up your ribs before you go in the water. In addition to that, he tells you to be sure and not just do that inadvertently. In other words, take your shower, turn it to a little bit cooler water, get used to it for 15 seconds and go from there. So he may look like a wild man and he is kind of a wild man, but he's not illogical. There are ages and stages and phases in life which makes us all so very curious. And you got to say, why would a financial advisor be talking to me about the Wim Hof method. I've already told you that I would like to be warmer rather than colder. Let's give you the three steps just to make it simple. The last time I looked, everyone in this audience is breathing. Is that correct?

Yes.

However, we've learned from Jason Campbell that there's special kinds of breathing in Wim Hof's method. And there are people in this audience who've just taken a course in the Wim Hof method. He suggests you take 30 or 40 deep breaths and then after the 30 or 40th deep breath, you blow out and they'll breathe for a while. Now, the thought of that is surrealistic to most of us. And sadly, there's an application on my telephone that times how long I held my breath. And I'm sure you're not nearly as competitive as most of the people in this room, unless you actually are. And eventually you'll start to compete with yourself and go, I did two minutes. I did three minutes. And in his case, he's done five minutes. But he's also swum under ice 100ft and has all kinds of world records in terms of that. Why bother doing that? Great question. It's not to set world records, it's not to set Guinness records. It's actually to work out your vascular system. And what does that mean in everyday language? First of all, vascular system are your veins and arteries. And since we wear lots of clothes and stay in environmentally restrictive environments, we need to have our cardiovascular and our veins worked out on a regular basis. That's the whole purpose of the cold water theory. And thank you, Joel, for letting me know. I need to speak up. I really do appreciate that. No kidding.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

Let's talk about breathing for just a second. There's another fellow in this room had did the breathing with the jolt with the HOF method and discovered you get a little dizzy, get a little loopy. So when you do that, you want to do it in a very safe environment, sitting in a chair or cross legged position, not in water, not while you're driving or laying down. And that sounds idiotic, but you get, if you're ever giving a speech where people in a car, you have to say, do not do that in your car, because people would do almost anything. Now I'm a dive master and I'm going to go scuba diving in La Jolla Cove in a couple of weeks. And it's cold in La Jolla Cove and I'm looking forward to not being cold again. This is not about me, it's about you. But it's gonna be a book report on the Wim Hof method. Let me give you a backstory. There was almost not a Wim Hof. He has an older brother named Andre. Andre was a truck driver. Andre and Wim both had paper wraps from the time they were 12 to 17. I don't know if you've ever been to the Netherlands, but the Netherlands has lots of hills. If you've ever ridden a bicycle with newspapers loaded in it, and I have in New Jersey, it will build up your legs in endurance. Well, they did that for the five years. Then they thought being adventurous boys, let's see France, let's see Spain. So they hopped on their bicycles and they went south. And they met all kinds of people who were not like the Netherland people, Dutch. They found out all kinds of philosophical things that Wim Hof went on to become, of all things, a guy who lived in other people's houses. He was a squatter for a number of years, studied philosophy, yoga and the like. His. His brother was much more practical and became a truck driver instead. You're also going to get a call to action in this. I'm going to suggest you buy the book. More importantly, read the book and follow the principles in the book. And with all due respect, let us know how that actually worked for you. I have worked out my whole life since I was 12 being a competitive basketball player and know I was no taller in high school than I am now. So my attitude was almost as ridiculous as Bo Eason's attitude was when he went to high school. He was 5ft tall and weighed 100 pounds. Let's talk about the cold part for just a second again. Literally, it's no more complicated than turning down the shower to cool it for about 15 seconds. And let me tell you from a personal point of view, I used to hate doing. Now I tell myself this is the best part of the shower and no, I do not have brain damage. And eventually you get better and better at it. And once you can do that for a period of time, it changes your whole system. Let's talk about mindset for a period of time, it's of some consequence to have control of your brain in terms of when you get deeper into this, you get further into the recesses of your brain. And what he has managed to do, along with some of his devotees, is resist disease. And literally he's done experiments where someone injected him with disease and he convinced his body to reject it. In addition to that, he's helped train some Navy SEALs in terms of adjusting their stress. In addition to that, after a study at a particular university, they asked, could you train someone else to do this? He said, I think it'll take 12 days. In three days, he trained 12 people to be able to maintain their body temperature despite being in freezing cold water. Let that sink in for just a second. If you can totally control your body temperature the outside of your skin, that would be of some news. That would mean you could do what his folks do, climb Mount Kilimanjaro just wearing a pair of shorts and athletic shoes and no shirt. He commonly takes folks up the tallest mountain in Africa and does that. It draws attention. More importantly than that, what he's done more recently is whether it was Wayne State or University in the Netherlands has studied how he did this. Again, why I mentioned he is one of a twin is his brother didn't do that stuff. Therefore they have another lab rat to go test the two different bodies. But the thing I was supposed to say at the very beginning was let's say you drank a little bit too much last night and you got here and you had a hangover. The Wim Hof method can actually help you with your hangover. More importantly than that and why I tell this story finally is his daughter Laura was doing graduate work laser focused on what she was doing. She was 23, didn't listen to her dad like most 23 year old daughters, but she had a hangover. Therefore, the hangover became a bigger authority than her or her father. So she called dad and said, dad, can you help me? He said, you know, I have this breathing technique which you've never done. Let's try it today. They did it together and in 20 minutes it cleared the hangover. Much more importantly for this audience, she decided to go work with her dad. So for those of you with staffing problems and have kids, this might be a way to help your kids with their hangovers and with your staffing problems. It's just a thought. So again, call to action.

Get the book.

Also, I'm listening to the audio on this and it's actually being narrated by the most decorated skater in the United States, speed skater. His name is Ocho or something like that. And it's really fun to listen to. And the expletives, which I skip over when I'm reading this book get really emphasized in terms of that. So buy the book, listen to the audio, do the work, see how it works for you, and let us know.

What are two or three of the most important discoveries that you've learned about your own body and your ability to perform with doing this because you do some crazy shit in our country.

I have to tell them what I did in our country. Okay, so.

And then we can show the video later.

Okay. So it's actually a Csikszentmihalyi story, so I'll tell it. It was the last phone call I had with Mihaly. Csikszentmihai passed away during COVID and we talked probably six months before he died.

How old was he when he was.

I want to say he was 82, 83. Somewhere. Somewhere in his mid to mid-80s. I heard he had a stroke. So I really just called to sort of check in on him and see how he was doing. Little known fact about flow and Csikszentmihalyi is everybody talks about flow and performance. Csikszentmihalyi spent most of his life working on flow and adult development. Turns out, for reasons that we can talk about later, he argued that flow on the other side of a flow state, learning increases or skills. Skills increase were more adaptive, more complex. Wisdom and empathy also get increase in flow. He argued that this is the engine of adult development, that it was through flow states that we actually mature as adults. Now, he argued it was the only. It was the primary driver of adult development. I think that was overstating the case a little bit. But he spent most of his career working on adult development and flow. So I was talking to him and I'm a life skier, and my plan for my later years was to ski as much as possible. And I'm a big mountain skier, which means I like to take big, big risks. And I like, you know, really gnarly, really scary, hard lines. And I was talking to Mike and he. A bunch of his early essays had been translated out of Italian, and I read them. And he was always a outdoorsman. He was a rock climber and lived in Montana, hiked a lot. Bless you. But I started to realize that this guy was a much more serious mountaineer and rock climber than he ever told anybody. Like he was in these articles that got Translated out of Italian. He was like Talking about early 60s Yosemite Valley rock climbers by name. And I was like, there's no way you would know those names if you weren't in that community. And so I called him up to talk to him about this, and I was like, you know, we were talking about it, and he just. I don't know, he's like, stephen, you got to be careful. And I was like, what do you. What do you mean? Have you lost the plot? What the fuck are you talking about, Mike? And he's like, you know, you do something climbing mountains, rock climbing your whole life for flow, and then you get to be my age, and some days you can't even get out of bed. Forget about climbing mountains. You need a backup plan. You got to be careful. And he was just telling me, one flow junkie to another, have a backup plan for how you get into flow as you age. Otherwise you could find yourself locked out of this state. And that's a real issue. And it really landed with me. And so, other side of the story is I've been continuing to study peak performance aging. And there's a whole bunch of new theories that said, you know, that I basically looked at in flow science and body cognition and network neuroscience a couple other places that said you not only can you teach an old dog new tricks, old dogs should be better than younger dogs at learning certain new tricks. And if this stuff that was worked in the lab theoretically was accurate, anybody over 40, over 50, over 60, over 70, should be able to onboard really difficult, challenging physical skills, supposedly impossible skills. So I decided at 53, I was going to teach myself how to park, ski park. Skiing is the discipline in skiing that involves doing tricks off jumps and rails and boxes and wall rides. It's incredibly acrobatic, it's very dangerous, and for about 11 different biological reasons, it's considered almost just really hard to learn. If you're over 30, 35, and by the time you get to 40, 50, it's downright impossible. It's crazy. Most people. I have nothing funny to say.

No, someone just spilled.

That's this.

I got the floor flow.

Yeah.

By the way, every time I hear somebody talk about it, I think I'm at a plumbing convention.

Yeah, exactly.

Thank you.

See, that's group flow right there.

Well done.

Well done. Problem solved. What the hell was I saying?

Part scheme, part scheme.

We. To test it, I made a list of 20 tricks that would cover zero to intermediate. And once you get to intermediate in any sport, you can See, sort of take the random falls out of the equation and you can be a little more intentional. It's a little safer. There are a bunch of reasons why I wanted to do this, but I had zero experience. I could ski big mountains, but that's like the difference between, you know, speed skating, where you're in contact with the surface of the earth and moving in a single direction, and figure skating, where it's above the surface of the earth and you're twirling and flipping and all that stuff. It's a radically different sport. And I figured if it took me five years, cool. It took me five, five years.

It.

I accomplished all 20 tricks on that trick list in under a season, which was wild. Ryan Wix, my ski partner, Wave, who works with me, the Flair Research Collective. Ryan has, was a former sponsored athlete, a park skier who had gotten injured, had a family, walked away, came back when I came back, and he made more progress in a single season than he's ever seen. And at that point we were like, okay, this is cool and it's working, but we've got like, the sexiest pilot study in the history. Pilot studies, but that's all we've done. So the following year we came back, and this is the video Joe was going to talk about. And we took 17 older adults, ages 29 to 68, used the exact same protocol we were using, and in four days on the mountain taught them how to park ski or how to park snowboard. We then stripped out the action sports because maybe not for everyone, I don't understand that, but apparently not for everyone. And we turned it into a training called Enter the Gnar. That the whole goal of. We'll talk about this in a little bit. But mindset is crucial for peak performance aging. Having a positive mindset towards aging, meaning, I think the second half of my life is filled with thrilling possibilities. I'm sure my best years are ahead of at me for a lot of neuroimmunological reasons, translates to an additional seven and a half years of health and longevity. So where to start with peak performance aging? You start with mindset. You start by working on your mindset. And when we stripped out the action sports, we just wanted to see if we could explode people's mindsets towards aging and, you know, maybe give them a. It worked beautifully in five. I think it was 340 people. 500 is exaggeration. I think that 340 was the number. Worked really, really beautifully there. So now we're kind of confident that it works. And onto Something. But that's the story of those experiments are what at the heart of our country. And you asked what I did?

Yeah. What did you learn about your body? Your ability to perform? Like what?

So for this anything to make sense, I have to tell you one thing about flow. Flow states have triggers. You want more flow in your life, There are preconditions that lead to more flow. First thing to know, flow follows focus. It only shows up when all our attention is in the here and now. That's what all the triggers do. They drive our attention into the present moment. The most famous of these triggers, which I think somebody mentioned yesterday, is the challenge Skills balance. We pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of the task slightly exceeds our skill set. So you want to stretch but not snap. Put it emotionally. There's a sweet spot between anxiety. Too much stimulation and boredom. Not enough stimulation. What's known as the flow channel. If you speak physiology, it's the er, Dobson curve. Years ago, Sheikh sent me how I sat down with a Google mathematician and tried to figure out what's the difference between challenge and skills in average folks. And they came up with 4% as the difference. But it was a back of the envelope calculation. It wasn't real science. It was just a thing they did. Chip Conley actually told me about it. Mike didn't. Chip Conley told me about it. But we took it into the flow Research collective and ran a couple years of studies on it. We found out it was pretty close to accurate. It's really hard to test, really hard to figure it out, but we thought it was really close to accurate. But, and this is the first thing that we did in older adults and older here means anybody over 30 actually, for reasons that we can get to. But once you sort of cross that threshold, all your trauma stays with you. Right? And we call it allostatic load. It's trauma. The impact of trauma over time on our physiology and our psychology is known as allostatic load. Allostatic overload is one of the number one causes of burnout. But what we started to figure out is that because of allostatic load in especially when you're going after difficult physical challenges, sweet spot is no longer 4 to 5%. It's down to 1%. So. So it's way shrunk down and you don't even notice it because a lot of it's subconscious. But there are subconscious breaks and governors on performance that tend to be there. So the idea was we're going to start with an Established motor pattern, something that you can do 100% of the time with perfect success, no fear, and build on it one micro emotion at a time because of this. So we're trying to go like one inch at a time, was the motto. And for myself, for Ryan, for most of the people we trained, we actually had to hold people back, slowed them way, way, way down in how they'd normally want to progress. Even when they were. Everything was going well, even when everything was working. We slowed everybody down immensely, and it worked. You got. You got to go slow to go fast and a lot of peak performance. And this was definitely, definitely the case here. So that was one of the main things we did.

So. And what we're going to do, too, we're just going to go for a few more minutes, then we'll take a break, we'll do lunch, and then we'll come back with Stephen a little bit later. What are the biggest obstacles as people age that get in their way of. I mean, because the slow rot.

Right.

I think they do the wrong thing. I mean, really, the biggest obstacles is people do the wrong, wrong things. They reach for the wrong levers. So if you want a peak performance aging in a sentence, everything you need to know about peak performance aging, if you want a rock till you drop, you have to engage on a regular, regular basis in challenging social and creative activities that demand. And all these words mean something. So we can talk about what they mean. Dynamic, deliberate play and take place in novel outdoor environments. That's the biggest lever we have at our disposal.

Proposal.

I'll say it again. We want to engage in novel, creative and social activities. Novel, challenging, creative and social activities that demand Dynamic, deliberate play and take place in novel outdoor environments.

What about shaming your younger friends like Joel when he goes, we'll repeat it. And then I'll say.

Challenging, creative and social activities that demand dynamic, deliberate play and take place in novel outdoor environments. And we can define what those terms mean in a second and why they're important. But I'll let you ask this question.

Yeah. Well, what I was going to say. So I've been on Joel's houseboat with him. He skis probably every weekend. He has a house.

But look at Genius Network. This is a challenging social and creative activity. Right?

Yeah, that.

I mean, dynamic just means all five categories of functional fitness. So I said we have to train all our skills. What are those skills? Strength, stamina, agility, balance and flexibility. Those are the five skills we have to train. And there are very precise numbers for this the WHO, World Health Organization, we need 150 to 300 minutes of moderate to vigor. This is for peak performance aging, not for healthy aging or successful aging. For peak performance aging, meaning you really want to perform at your best. It's 150 to 300, 300 minutes of stamina training a week. So aerobic training a week. Two strength days a week. Three, balance, flexibility and agility days a week. So if he's skiing, if he's coming to Genius Network, like he's hitting all the boxes, I would guess.

Oh, yeah. And I mean, I went water skiing with him and the fricking guy is amazing. And he's been. You started water skiing after like at 50, right? Yeah. And he does it.

My friend Rebecca Rush, who has most of the endurance mountain biking, they call her the queen of pain.

Yeah.

She didn't start mountain biking professionally till her 30s, and she didn't really start winning her awards till her 40s, and she just won the human powered Iditarod at 54.

Wow.

Awesome.

Awesome.

So there you go. And I mean, look, to me, this is very inspiring. I turned 55 years old to my. So, you know, we're both the same age. I think you're.

I'm a little older. Yeah, yeah. Like eight months. Yeah, yeah. So which would explain our overlapping taste in music.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Because we're both in the punk rock and stuff. I sent him a picture. I texted him a couple days ago. Me with Henry Rollins from Black Flag when I was in my. I was in my 20s when I took that picture. So you touch on some of these. If you took all of the things you know and gave someone one technique to immediately better their health, what would that one technique be?

Depends on the person. But the. So for a peak performance aging perspective, you start with mindset and the next two things to focus on social activities around really crucial. So like it is from peak performance aging perspective, you could be morbidly obese and you're going to go farther by having regular social contact than by losing weight. Social contact is rough equivalent of quitting smoking. Right. In terms, in terms of longevity and health. So social contact really, really matters. Change your mindset. And then this is a weird one. The single greatest correlate for preserving physical health and mental health is leg strength. You know, it, it's leg strength. And which is odd, but they've done all these studies on cognitive. On cognitive reserve and preserving brain function and leg strength. They think it's because if you lose your legs, you lose your ability to like, move around and talk to people, basically. And social stuff stimulates our brain so much that we fall off a cliff without it. So that's one of the reasons. But they think there's other stuff that they just haven't found yet.

Yeah, yeah. How many of you in Akshay knows Westcrest Freaking guy. Every day this dude is like, he's a doctor of Chinese medicine. He sits in the sauna at Optimized, like, let me not fall off the bench here. And he literally sits like this for 30 minutes every day in a sauna.

Sauna.

And I'm like, you try doing it for like three minutes. Your knees are like, what the hell? And just sits there in the fricking dude's leg. And the guy's in one of the most incredibly physically fit people because he focuses on the leg strength.

Yeah.

Which is awesome. I just wanted to show my socks too.

My.

What's in it for them? Sort of.

Yeah, yeah.

Like that high product placement. Again with the socks.

Yeah.

I should get you a pair.

I've got Wu Tang Clan socks.

Ok.

But you know, it's pretty cool.

That's pretty cool. So let me get one more question. What's a step by step method or way to get more easily into flow that everyone here can utilize going forward? And when we come back, we'll do Q and A and stuff with everyone. But.

So I don't know if there's a step by step. There's no one size fits all. There are 26 known flow triggers. And there stuff we all know. Novelty is a flow trigger. Risk is a flow trigger. And that doesn't just mean physical risk, emotional risk, social risk, intellectual risk, pattern recognition. So let me tell you why my backup plan was interesting. When we link ideas together in a novel way, that's pattern recognition. It's fundamental to survival. It's what most neurons do at a basic level. And it produces dopamine. We get a little bit of dopamine and we all know this. We've ever done a sudoku crossword puzzle getting an answer right, that little rush of pleasure you feel, that's dopamine. And it's coming to you from pattern recognition. So creativity is a flow trigger. So when I say challenging creative activities, by the way, both of those are flow triggers. But the interesting thing about park skiing and why the plan was interesting to me is you can stack. You want to stack sort of creative experience on top of creative experience on top of creative. When you look at a terrain feature like, oh, that's a mound of Snow, I can throw a 180 off of it, or I could grind across it, or whatever it is that I was going to do. That's pattern recognition. So you can stack creative decision on top of creative decision. We were talking about this last night at dinner. Or you can stack creative decision, creative decision on top of creative decision as you're skiing or snowboarding down a mountain. By the way, I got hired a bunch of years ago. I can't talk about the program or the coach, but for major college football program, and the idea was, if we can get our players into flow before practice, would injuries go down? And the answer is yes, that actually worked. What did we do? It was a football team. And they all started practice. They always ran two laps around the football field. That was what everybody did to warm up and. And we just put them in nature. We said, take it off the football field. Go run the trails and interpret the terrain. So if you've got a hill, go up an angle and come down with your body just like you were surfing or skiing or whatever, you're just running. And for the linemen who can't run that far, it was roll and do sort of the things you're going to be doing on the field, through the forest, in novel outdoor environments. And it worked. Tremendous amount of flow during practice, a lot less injury on the field. So it's not just skiing, snowboarding, that sort of thing that works here. But the other thing I want to say, one of the reasons novel outdoor environments are really crucial to this. So most of us work out. Most of us probably don't work out outside. And really, if we do work out outside, we're not seeking out novel outdoors environments. Here's why it matters so much. One, Especially from peak performance aging standpoint, we said earlier there are nine known causes of aging. If you've read Futures faster than you think, any of my work with Peter Diamandis, we talk a lot about it. All of them link back to inflammation when we are in nature. Most people know that 20 minutes in nature flushes stress hormones out of your system and will actually outperform most SSRIs.

For.

For mild to moderate depression. It sort of equals out once you get to extreme depression. And there are reasons for this. If anybody's curious, come see me offline and I'll tell you why it works. But one outdoor environments are calming us down. Novelty is a flow trigger. When we encounter novelty, it produces dopamine. And dopamine drives focus into the present moment. But the big deal from a Peak performance aging standpoint. If you want to hang on to your mental function, three things are important. One is novel experiences in outdoor environments. Why? If you want to hang on to your cognitive function, you want neurogenesis, you want the birth of new neurons, and you want new neural networks. Most of the neurogenesis in the adult brain takes place in a spot known as the hippocampus, which is a fancy Latin word for seahorse, because it looks like a seahorse. It's a deep brain structure. It does long term memory. It also does location. So from a hunter gatherer perspective, right? Remembering where you were when, like an emotionally charged thing, like I got attacked by a bear or there was ripe fruit on this fruit tree happens is really crucial to survival. So the brain is specifically designed to remember where you are when you have emotionally charged experiences. That's what we birthed 700 new neurons every day in the hippocampus until basically we die.

But they.

That's what they're for. And so I always say peak performance is nothing more than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. Peak performance aging is getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. When faced with the challenges and opportunities of aging. This is what I'm talking about when I say something like that. Novel outdoor environments use the brain the way the brain is designed to be used. And as a result, we get to hang on to brain function for a lot longer. So that's the sort of the novel challenge portion of that.

So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to give you 10 things that you want to use have as an effective sleeper, or these are ten things. I'm sorry. That effective sleepers do. And this is my last slide, and I'll open it up for questions. Number one. Stick to a schedule.

Okay?

Get up at the same time, go to bed at the same time. Your body loves regularity. Okay? It loves consistency. All right, don't worry. We're going to send this out in an email to everybody. Don't worry. I mean, you can take pictures if you want. That's fine. Stop working at the same time every day. You've got to take a mental break before you take that physical break. Sleep is not an on, off switch, okay? Sleep is like slowly pulling your foot off the gas and slowly putting your foot on the brake. There's a process that must occur. And I was actually talking with Robin yesterday, and he talked to me about a wake process, and I agree with his theory on this. I believe that when you wake up, there are stages to waking up and there are ways to do that appropriately that can actually help you with your day. Same holds true with sleep. There's a process that I call the power down hour. And I'll teach everybody about that in a minute. Get ready for your next day. Get the stuff done that you need to get done so you're not running around in the morning trying to figure it all out. Have an electronic curfew, turn off the iPad, turn off the cell phone, things like that. There's a caveat, you don't have to turn off the tv. Okay, so let me tell you about my bedroom. In my bedroom, I have a king size bed. Sitting next to me is my 4 pound Chihuahua, my 24 pound French Bulldog, my 6 pound Cat, and my wife. There's a big screen TV right there. I didn't say what she weighed. My wife's about a buck eight soaking wet. She's pretty small. Sometimes my daughter wanders in. Okay, so I live in a household of reality. I'm not the guy that's going to say go to bed at 8 o' clock in a pitch dark room with nobody else in there because it doesn't really work. Okay? Nobody has that scenario. And we sleep with the TV on almost all night. My wife cannot turn off her brain at night without the television on. So you know what? Almost every television now has an electronic timer. So I set the timer, she falls asleep, the timer keeps going, it clicks off, I'm asleep, and we're done. I've been a six and a half hour sleeper almost my entire life. My wife needs between eight and a half and nine hours. Okay? Everybody has a different sleep need. I can teach people how to figure out what that sleep need is. Eight hours is a myth. I'm telling you that right now. Meditation, prayer and exercise are awesome for sleep, especially for right before going to sleep. It helps calm the brain down, it helps elicit serotonin, it helps you get there. Remember, it's not an on off switch. Daily exercise has been shown in multiple studies to improve the overall quality of your sleep. If you want to get better quality sleep, you need to exercise daily. No question about it.

Is there an ideal time to do it right before bed?

So it depends. Some people when they exercise, they actually get energy from it. Some people when they exercise, mellow out from it. What I found is people who are high anxious or who are type A personalities, not like anybody in this room, might be that it's better to exercise in the Evenings because it actually helps calm you down because of the endorphins and the enkephalins that you can produce. Whereas people who have more of a down or blue type of personality, they're better to exercise in the morning because exercise has a tendency to give them energy. Great to get sunlight every morning. 15 minutes of sunlight resets that circadian clock every single morning. Go outside with your cup of coffee, get 15 minutes of sunlight, hopefully be clothed. God, my jokes are just dead.

This is unbelievable.

Journaling. Journal what's good in your life. Journal what's bad in your life. Get it off your brain at night before you go to bed. Don't do it as the last thing before bed. Do it about an hour and a half to two hours before you're going to power down. Get it, get it out of your head. Because that's a problem for most of us in this room is keeping our brain going. Hydration. I can't say enough good things about hydration. By the way, you don't need eight glasses of water a day. There's no data to support that. But you do need to maintain hydration because it helps you get into different stages of sleep. And the best thing you can do is read one of my books or listen to one of my speeches.

The people that are really stressed out. Let's talk about how to have a foundation to get great, great exercise and nutrition and to minimize massive craving states. So that has to do with sleep? That has to do with not overworking yourself. So what, like, what are some of your rituals? Morning rituals, evening rituals, Talk about how much you sleep. Any recommendations you have for people in those areas?

You know, again, for amount of sleep. I'm a mother, so once I had kids, my amount of sleep every night went from here. You know, before kids it was like, oh, I'm going to sleep till noon. That was a long time ago. But you know, now you function off of what you're used to, but you still need adequate sleep. I mean, five to six hours is kind of the bare minimum that people need in order to recover, if possible. I always say you have to have those moments in the morning to yourself. So again, I, I have a long day every day. I've got to get my kids up, get them ready for school. I get up sometimes at 3:45 in the morning because I need at least 15, 20 minutes to myself where I'm not on my phone and replying to texts and emails and already at it. That to me has always set my days off on the wrong path.

I agree.

But just having some moments to breathe. Deep breathing. Some people will meditate. Some people will go for a walk around the neighborhood. Whatever it is that you like, sometimes it's just sitting there, kind of stretching on your ground.