Interview with Dr. Alan Christianson About The Adrenal Reset Diet And Why So Many People Struggle To Lose Weight

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish, and this is the I love marketing podcast. Hello, this is Joe Polish, and I'm here with my friend, Dr. Alan Christensen.

How are you? Hey, Joe. Doing great. Super happy to be here with you.

Yeah, it's great to be here. Well, I have a confession before I do the formal introduction. He's a friend. He's also someone that I turn to for health advice. He's an incredible doctor, so I guess I would fit into I'm a patient sort of thing. Not mental, but physical. And he really helps keep me in tip top shape as he does many, many people. So. And you got this new book. Okay. So it's called the Adrenal Reset Diet. Strategically cycle carbs and proteins to lose weight, balance hormones, and move from stress to thriving. It's got a forward by Dr. Sarah Gottfried, who I've interviewed before, and she's good, and she's the author of the Hormone Cure. So you have a much different take about food and health and exercise and all kinds of stuff that a lot of people don't. And you've done an extensive amount of research. And so what I'd like to accomplish today is just kind of jumping into a lot of what, what you've written about in the book and some other aspects of just how people can just feel better, think better, and just have more improved, awesome lives. So what's one thing about you that most people would never even imagine, though, that I didn't mention in this little bio that I had, and that sort.

Of stuff that would never even imagine when the unicycling thing came out.

Unicycle's pretty crazy.

It's not in that bio. I've written about it elsewhere, but it's about having my health be a big challenge early in life. Being an obese kid, limitations from cerebral palsy. So when people hear about that, they often do mention being surprised and not being able to imagine it.

Right. Well, you know what, that's a good point, though. So you're not. You've had a lot of health challenges yourself. So did becoming a doctor. Was that, I mean, what motivated you to take that route as not only a career, but I mean, you're not just a practicing physician. You have lots of docs at work for you and you've spent many years doing extensive research figuring out things that other people just haven't figured out.

You know, just starting out, trying to make a difference for my own health and trying not to be ostracized and trying to Fit in socially as an adolescent, and then that momentum moving forward and having a sense of just how painful it is when your body's not doing what you want it to do and. Yeah, what a distress that can be. And also realizing what a big gap there is between what's really known and what can help and what's commonly recommended. You know, the gap between knowledge and typical medical guidelines.

Well, we have a dear friend, J.J. virgin in common. We actually know a lot of the same people. And so you have a circle of who I consider very bright people that you work with and are friends with. And there are, you know, I've taken supplements and I've done tons of blood tests, and I've, you know, I've always been a guy that really has focused on trying to get myself an edge and try to figure out stuff. I've also gone through many stages with a lot of pain, with a lot of issues, digestive issues, all kinds of stuff. Unlike some people where they'll talk about everything from masturbation and pooping and everything. I'm not going to go that deep on this particular interview about stuff because I have some friends that do the craziest interviews. However, there are some things that I could never figure out. And you identified them and you treated them, and things have gone away that I struggle with. I can speak from experience of working with you, that you absolutely know your stuff. And I'm a guy who is surrounded by bright people. And fortunately, based on what I do for a living, I have access to some of the world's leading experts. So, I mean, I really want to say that before we kind of jump into stuff now, the adrenal reset diet. What does that even mean? What does adrenal mean? What is that? Because I don't think the average person understands that.

Yeah, our body has little glands that control whether we're burning or storing, you know, quite simply. And a lot of our strategies to make us lose weight are strategies that make us more apt to store weight.

Right.

So I talk about how you can go out from storing and towards burning. And so it's a big global catastrophe that we're facing. Yeah.

Okay, so I've got a whole list of questions here that I'd like. I mean, we could talk for a week, but. So the rates of obesity are growing, like, dramatically. What are some of the latest projections of kind of where we're at?

You know, it's pretty terrifying stuff. One stat that I read recently showed that in the next little over a decade, we're looking at 2/3, 67% of people on the globe being overweight, obese, or morbidly obese. So globally, the numbers of deaths we're projecting. So go Back to like 1800. All the wars all around the world since 1800. So World War I, World War II, Vietnam, Korea, and not just our wars, but all the others. So all those casualties together, we're talking about more than that in the coming decade from complications of obesity. And we're talking about roughly ten times the cost of all those wars since 1800.

Why?

That's it. So the old model is people are lazy and they eat too much. That's what we're being taught and told. And it's so disconnected from reality to see the rates go up stratospherically in the course of a decade. So one thing we see is that animals, so chimps, when their food is controlled, they're getting obese even on controlled diets. So it's not behavior and lifestyle. There's a collective number of factors that push us into the storage state. And our body is getting geared up for famine. You know, we have these mechanisms that allowed us to survive famine in the past. And now a whole lot of things push those buttons. And we're storing all of our food as fat.

Yeah, and you get right into it immediately in the beginning of your book where you talk about stress, you talk about toxins, you talk about all of these other factors that I never really quite considered had that much of an impact on people's weight. I have a friend, I won't name his name, where he. And I've known him for probably 15 years. And without changing his diet, when this guy would go through a breakup of a relationship or go through stressful situations, he would literally just gain weight. And he's like kind of a roller coaster sort of lifestyle. I mean, he would have lots of ups and downs, and it was amazing. And I'm not talking just like 5 or 10 pounds. I mean, he would literally fluctuate 30, 40 pounds. And then things, he would start meditating and he would like, lose 20 pounds. And he would swear that he could not figure it out. But then he identified a few years ago that it was totally based on stress level. And so now one of his maintenance things is keeping himself not freaking, getting completely stressed out or, you know, because if you're not sleeping, all these sort of things.

So, you know, way back when, stress meant danger and danger meant predators, and predators would go after us when they had fewer food options. So that meant food scarcity. So stress equals famine to our bodies. And famine means we prepare, we hold onto it. So his body was not under physical danger, but the mental emotional stress, which can be part of that for sure, that triggered the same thing that danger would. And his body went into a storage mode because of it.

And I'm not even sure where I first read this, but it's like people would make the analogy, well, we're so much safer and we got all these luxuries that we never had before. The difference though is it's just non stop, you know, the interconnectivity. Whereas if you're chased by a lion hundreds of years ago, when you're done.

If you survive, you're bored for a while, you're safe.

Right, exactly. Whereas in modern society, if you have like anxiety going on, it could just be constant from the moment you wake up to your inability to sleep and all these sort of things. So let me, without going too deep into that, how much do genes control our body weight? And what is a gene? I mean, I'm going to ask you some very basic sort of things because I want people to, you know, you hear about all these things, but like, what does it actually mean?

You know, you know, many who have struggled have been told that it's genetic, that their weight is genetic. Genes to our body are what a blueprint is to a building. So a gene is a set of instructions that tells us how we're going to grow. So you see a set of identical twins, they share the same genes, they've got the same eye color and a lot of the same health habits. They've been studied. So if twins are raised separately, their body weight has no relationship whatsoever. There's like no correlation. And they've shown that the difference in weight from one twin to another is predictable based upon the adrenal hormones. So the more one twin has adrenal hormone stress, the more that twin will gain weight. So we're often told that weight gain is genetic. And it is true that there is susceptibility among certain family members we see. But now we know it's not because of the genes. And the positive side of that is that means it's not inevitable, that it can change and it can improve.

Okay, so if I see some, like, let's have, I have a lot of female friends and some like just don't eat very. And I know skinny fat. I mean, so there's some people that are not healthy, but they look good, and there's others that just exercise and work out and they still have trouble losing weight. And so the best of my layman's understanding is, oh, it's genetics. You know, this person just has sort of this thing, and this person does not. To what degree are some people just born a certain way where they can eat whatever they want and they maintain a certain level of thinness and other people do not. What is that all about?

Well, they're a vanishing species. Current stats tell us that you brought up skinny fat, which is a good concept. There are those to where their scale weight may be good, but they do not have enough muscle tissue. So they're okay weight, but just not lean enough. Not enough lean mass. So if you take them out and you take out those who are overweight or obese, the remaining percent of the population is about 11%. So about 11% of the people right now have good body composition. So there's not many. And they are dwindling very rapidly.

Wow. Okay, so now one of the things you talk about is how do you. Why do you argue that calories do not explain weight gain? Because there's been this for years. You know, calories in, calories out. Explain what is a calorie. And then how does that relate to weight gain or weight loss or whatever?

You know, it makes me nuts. And that is one of the biggest public policy statements is that it's just, you know, eat this, not that, move more. You know, change the calorie equation. So a calorie is a unit of fuel. So you've got like a gallon of gas as a unit of fuel. So a calorie is how much metabolic energy food would release if you burned it in test tube. Now, they've argued at the level of public health that weight gain is from people consuming more calories. And then the solution based on that is eat fewer calories. And I think about that. Well, let's go like, to football. So I'm not a big sports expert. I'll put that out there.

Same with you.

Okay, good. So I don't have to be embarrassed. So let's say that we're doing a post game analysis and the Cowboys just crushed it. They won the Super Bowl. And someone wants to know from the big commentator, well, why did the Cowboys win? Oh, here we go. The Cowboys won the game because they scored 30 more points than their opponents. Well, duh. You know, that's. So there's a description, but that's not an explanation. And that wouldn't be a strategy. You couldn't say, hey, guys, next year let's score more points we could win that way. So at best, that's all the calorie model is. It's just describing events.

It doesn't explain.

It doesn't explain it at all. And not only that, but it doesn't work.

So can you explain it?

Sure. It's the storage response. The body goes into a storage mode. And you mentioned about the very real, powerful mental, emotional stress, and that's big. But a lot of the other factors that are invisible do the same thing. So we could breathe in. We could breathe in plastic residues. And the same thing like your friend when he would go through a breakup or a crisis and how his health would change from that. The same stuff can happen to you from breathing in by products from plastic. The same things that would happen under a crisis. Or you can spend more time around electromagnetic fields. You know, we're carrying our devices all the time. That's just like the breakup and the crisis. Or we can have the fact that a third more people than ever before do shift work. They're not sleeping at regular times. That's just like the stress. That's just like the crisis.

Did you say a third more actually do that?

Starting in 1980, went up by about a third. Really?

In the U.S. or is this worldwide?

Globally.

Wow.

You know, the global economy. We're working on each other's schedules.

Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Because I mean, sleep. Well, let's talk about something like sleep. I mean, you know, I'll throw that in here. I guess I can zig and zag here a little bit. But, like, you know, how much does sleep affect things?

That's a factor. And somewhere around 1980, 1990, things shifted that caused radical weight gain. And we've seen that sleep can be a stronger predictor of weight than diet or exercise can. So the old model of it being behavior, habit, calories, sleep, doesn't make sense on that. If you sleep more, you're actually burning fewer calories. But the data is strong that good, deep sleep rhythms are helpful, and they help because they reset the adrenal response and move us out of that storage state.

Yeah. Okay, so one of the questions I have here is that experts say that weight gain is a result of poor habits. How does habits relate to this? Because I'm of the mindset that much of any sort of indulgence is addiction and the brain gets hijacked. And I know a lot about behavioral addictions. Sex addiction, gambling addiction, food addiction. And when I say a lot, I mean, I've done quite a few interviews with people on behavioral addictions. Versus chemical and drug addictions. And I used to be a drug addict. I won't go into my whole story here, but I've talked about that. When I was was 18 years old, just free based cocaine, I was a drug addict. And I'm a big admirer of 12 step groups and recovery and all that. That being said, there's a difference between habits and just flat out addiction habits. I think everyone has good habits even if the consequences of their habits are very poor. If someone wakes up every day and eats an egg McMuffin and doesn't exercise and smokes a cigarette, they've developed really good habits of waking up and eating poorly and doing that. But that's used to shame people and guilt people. And what's your take on it?

Well, yeah, it shames, it guilts, it raises the stress load and it's not a rational solution. So habits imply willpower and they imply intent. They imply that we've got a choice to eat this or that or move or not move. There's some conscious intent behind that. This model, this idea totally breaks down when we look at the fact that infants and toddlers are getting obese and morbidly obese at unprecedented rates.

And you even talk about animals and animals.

So from 1990 to 2000, about 20,000 separate animals were tracked, representing dozens of different species and many different habitats. Every single animal tracked was found to have unprecedented weight gain over that time frame. Now some people say, oh well, people feed their pets too much. Well, okay, we'll dismiss that. And some could say, well, wild animals eat scraps from humans. We could dismiss that too. But many examples were animals on controlled diets. So their food was measured, their food was unchanged, their activity was monitored, their activity was controlled. Chimps, between that time frame, our second closest genetic relative, they gained roughly 30% body weight per decade. Two decades back to back on controlled environments. So once you see that, the whole idea about willpower, habit indulgence, no, it just doesn't fit anymore.

Right, so what is causing that?

There's a collective higher number of factors that push our bodies to the storage state and make us hold onto things. There's actually a clock. So this is crazy, but belly fat, the stuff around our organs, is very different than the subcutaneous fat below our skin. And every part of your body has a clock. There's rhythms, there's timing to it, like you're asleep versus awake. It's obviously very different. So you can pull out someone's belly fat and you can keep it alive in A dish, provided you've got the right ingredients, it'll survive for a little while.

That's exciting.

And you can watch its clock. You can measure the activity of its biological rhythm. The more visceral fat someone's carrying, the greater degree that their clock is out of rhythm with their body's central clock, which the adrenal glands control. So when this regulation is off, the body is storing and holding onto things. And it's not a matter of starving it, it's a matter of resetting it and recalibrating its timing.

Well, so since we live in such a culture and I have a friend, Dave Keckich, he's in a wheelchair. He's very, you know, he's very involved in health, and he's in incredible shape. He's in his 70s, and in spite of being paralyzed from the chest down, he works out, he eats very well. He's studied health and nutrition his whole life. And he's told me about when he would go and do talks. He would talk about the benefits for your circulatory system by doing cardio, exercise and vitality, just things of how exercise and nutrition create longevity and allow you to feel better. He's like. And the audience would be interested. But then he would talk about how to, you know, tightened, saggy skin or anything related to vanity. They would light up. It's one of these things to where I've always, as a marketer, know that sell people what they want, give them what they need, because people want to look better. And so guys, typically, from just a physical standpoint, will say, I'm generalizing here. We'll gain weight around their bellies, and they would have love handles, whereas women would, you know, their butts or their thighs. And if they start exercising, their boobs disappear and their butts are the last thing to go. And guys like to say, what is going on in the physical. How does the body, when it comes to weight loss, respond to it that way? Like, for instance, why does a guy have, like, love handles? Why does some women have, you know, it's thighs and butt. Because we could talk all day long about all these wonderful benefits, but it's like, if we can make my butt awesome, or if we could make ripped abs, life would be perfect. Right? But I'd love to just get your explanation from understanding what does the body do? How does it process this and the different types of fats.

I love the marketing analogy. And so with an economic analogy, so we could have a real estate investment. We could have stocks and bonds. We could have gold coins hidden in the backyard. So the body works that way too. And whenever we have adequate resources to survive, we want to put the surplus somewhere. And if times are secure, if we're stable and steady, we might buy a rental property, we might make a long term real estate investment. So that's muscle mass, that's for guys, the chest and the biceps for women, that's healthy toned legs. Now, on the other hand, if someone says, hey, your business might go under, you're going to lose your job next week and you've got some cash, that's not time for the rental property. That's maybe cash under the mattress. That's like gold coins buried in the backyard. So that's like security. It's like quick access. It's liquid cash. So that's belly fat.

Got you.

That's stuff around the butt and the thighs and around the waist. That's the cash under the mattress.

So your body's just simply trying to.

Survive, just trying to get by.

So all of the. Take a vanity out of the picture, the way your body's responding to stuff is it's simply trying to survive. So this is really a conversation about how to perform, how to thrive, not just survive and reset it. So when you say reset, it sounds like with all of the toxins and all of the weird things that are going on out there, how much of this can we truly control versus, if you could even explain that, I don't know, in percentages or whatever, how much of this is controllable versus how much of this is like we have to pick the right place to live. We have to be lucky we're not under electrical lines, we don't carry our. Commit our computers and electronic devices. I mean, how would you respond to that? Sort of.

Yeah, sort of living in the wilderness in a cave or something. Right. So the cool thing is that all these things affect a rhythm, they throw it off. But by and large, our bodies are gravitated towards thriving. We're really meant to not stay in that mode for long. It's meant to be like you're talking about the tiger thing to where you survive and then you're back on track again. So we want to thrive, we want to go back to homeostasis. And in terms of time frames, the measurable disruption of our bodies and the storage process, it can fix in a month or two. And when it's fixed, when it's back on track, and it's easier to keep it there than it was to get it there because it's really the natural state. So it's very recoverable in the short term.

Okay, so now you were talking about the animals and you're talking about children and then the current state of where we're at. Well, and you've already been talking about it, but what are the causes of weight gain? I mean, how much of it is food? How much of it is other stuff?

Well, the big things would be fructose as far as a type of sugar that's in processed food. That's one part of it. Another big thing are a category of chemicals called obesogens. There's actually a category of chemicals that we know make us gain weight. So that's another big part of it. The next big leg is things that throw off our daily rhythms. So our lack of sleep, artificial light exposure. And then the last one would really be the very real mental, emotional stress. And you mentioned how, yeah, times are smoother now, but in reality we've gotten more. More things nagging us. We're adapted to have that tiger almost kill us and then we survive. We're bored. Life is pretty simple, but it's not that major. But it's more continual. So collectively, those are the factors that shift us. And we go into storage mode when we're storing. Our fuel is being made into a physical deposit. It's not burning, so that leaves us hungrier. It's kind of like you're feeding a parasite. There's something that's taking your fuel away from you.

That's very interesting. I can only see the world through my own lens, through my own perspective. My opinion and my experience is that the world is more stressed out and angst ridden with all of the wonderful benefits than I've ever seen it, than I've ever experienced. And, and that being said, I live in a great country and I have a pretty awesome life. And, you know, so I'm not complaining. I'm just saying from the standpoint of the sheer volume of decision making and technology, I just think it's stressing people the hell out. And people aren't disconnected. Now, you mentioned artificial light. Like how does that affect weight?

The biggest single factor is the lack, actually the lack of sunlight. And especially early in the day. Our day's rhythm has many cues that can bump it back into alignment. And the biggest one is just morning sunlight. So we're used to waking up when the sun comes up.

We should be videotaping this outside. So if someone wakes up. So let's talk about that morning ritual. What would be like your Morning ritual.

The most important one is to get some really bright light. You know, the sunlight, the measured intensity of it is so much greater than anything indoors that's not even imaginable. You know, bright areas with very, very bright lights could be maybe 1000, 2000 lux lux unit of light intensity. Outdoors on a Cloudy day, it's 50,000 lux. So our brains wait for that. And it's not a matter of like bronzing or even like the vitamin D on your skin. It's just that light intensity to register in your brain to know that now is morning.

Well, I've been working on improving my vision without glasses. And one of the things that I've been learning about is that a lot of poor vision has nothing to do with the eyes, it has to do with the brain, it has to do with your stress level, it has to do with how you take in light. So there's so much to be said that I'm starting to learn about just light and how we seclude ourselves in modern life in ways that we never have been ever before in history, which is pretty fascinating. So is there a common thread among all of the causes of weight gain? Like how does it all tie together.

To be very specific? So the adrenal glands make different hormones that govern our stress response. Cortisol is the big one. And we make it and we have a rhythm with it. So all those factors, they goof up the rhythm. And that rhythm affects the adrenals, but it also affects how the visceral fat responds to those hormones. So they all push that rhythm off and the body goes into this mode of storing away fuel. So the double whammy is you're gaining more easily. But then also that's fuel you were deprived of burning. So that's fatigue symptoms, that's more fatigue, physically, mentally. At the same time, that weight's being more of a struggle.

So go back to corsol because I've heard that a million times. What is it? What does it mean? Like when your body produces cortisol and what's the other one?

There's two of them, Cortisol, cortisone, the.

Two that are related, what is the difference? Like what are they, what do they do? And to whatever degree, it would be useful for anyone to know and understand this. Please explain it that way.

You know, super easy thing, you got a built in coffee machine, you've got a thing inside of you that come about an hour before your wake up time, you release a batch of cortisol and that circulates and you're like, oh, I'm kind of bored of being in bed. I'm going to get up.

What releases it? Where does it come from?

Primarily from the adrenal glands. They put it into your bloodstream, it gets into your brain. You become alert, awake, and engaged. And then throughout the day, you gradually shut it off. So when that rhythm's bad, though, you store things. Your adrenals also make cortisone. So cortisol is the strong hormone. Cortisone is the weaker cousin of it. Now, the thing about the fat and the clock, and the fat clock, to be precise, what's happening is the fat is juggling cortisol, cortisone, back and forth. So your fat's actually making weak stress hormones into strong stress hormones. And when you're healthy, that goes on for a little bit and stops. But when these things are not working right, it keeps going and going. So independent of your life experience, this stuff actually creates more stress hormones.

So these are a balance. It's not good or bad, Correct?

Totally.

Okay. It's all how your body produces it and when it produces it. And you can gauge and control this, or how hard is it to do that?

Not too hard. Simple quizzes. We made Adrenalquiz.com, you can know what level of control you've got for that and if it's off, to which degree. But there's medical measurements for that, too, that have varying degrees of usefulness, but it's quite measurable. And there are diseases, There are disease states in which what you ask these glands to do just doesn't happen. They're just not working right. Those are rather rare, and they're quite exceptional. But apart from those rare disease states, your body cycles can come back rather promptly.

Since your book is about resetting and you call it the adrenal reset diet, which I know is more of a. This is like a way to live. I mean, the way I've had dinner over your house, I kind of know how you eat. Right. And so why would our bodies be programmed to gain weight? So if someone's out there and it's really not their fault, it's not their habits. There's something in the programming. Why would their bodies be programmed that way? I mean, is there a difference between people living in Africa versus New York versus Phoenix, Arizona? What causes the programming and how? Because I want people to understand that this can be changed.

You know, it's distant stuff. So much of how we work makes no sense in the context of the world in which you and I live, I drove my car across town to come and see you. And that is not the world that we adapted to. Our genes, our brains, our cycles, they're adapted to a very different world. One in which there was a lot of time spent negotiating three dimensional terrain, identifying food sources, identifying dangers to stay clear from. So the whole idea was that our body's gain is a protective mechanism. They hold onto fat to protect themselves physically from just falls and fractures, like on the hips for women, and then also like the cash under the mattress to prepare for times of famine. Our ancestors who weren't innately able to do this, they did not survive as well, and they had fewer offspring. But our ancestors, who did store things very easily and held onto it, you know, when a famine did come, they had something to get by on and they survived and they had babies, they put more genes out.

So how do we turn off the survival mode?

So that was the thing. You know, I went through this whole evolution of seeing what this crisis was, seeing how the current model just really was not doing it justice, seeing how there's a lot of causative factors that we can't all control, we can't steal you from all of it. So that was the big question, was how can you efficiently do this? And I also thought it was important to get some clarity on food. You know, I think that it's a double whammy. You know, we need to eat something and at the same time we can stress about our eating. You know, food can be a direct source of stress from all the confusion. Do we have to do zero carbs or low fat or what about the gluten? So what I realized was that you could use the way that cortisol, the adrenal hormone, the way that it interfaces with your blood sugar, that we could use that to strategically time foods to fix that rhythm back again.

So the way that I currently eat is more. Now I'm not super religious, hell bent on any particular method of eating. And I've interviewed people on every type from raw foods to vegans to, I mean, you name it, to Paleo people to whatever. And my current diet is close to like a Paleo sort of diet with very healthy food in the sources of where they come from. And so what is, is gluten the devil? Is dairy the devil? I mean, like, how do you now certainly. And I don't eat processed foods. I mean, it's very rare that I will eat something out of a can or a bag unless I'm Stuck in the airport. And if I do, I'll probably get nuts or something like that. Right. And so how do you recommend people eat? And what are the things that you. 100% no to be healthy, or is that even too much of a stretch? I mean, because it seems like every decade. I mean, look what happened to coconut. I mean, I remember going and seeing Tim Allen, the comedian. We had a backstage pass and he did this whole skit. He's like, kale, everyone's eating kale. He's like, when did kale get an effing publicist? But there's so many things about foods, so what do you know are just, this is the way to eat or does it depend? I mean, how does one answer this? Because there's so many different opinions about this. And I've interviewed very smart people that.

Look very divergent ideas.

Yeah, they're intelligent and they are healthy. It appears completely different opinions.

Isn't that wild?

Yeah.

So there's really two questions that you had in there. I would like to tease those apart, one of which is, is this the devil? And the other one is, what's the solution?

Right.

They're actually separate. So I don't argue that any one simple food caused the crisis that we're in. I don't find that evidence compelling. You know, I don't see the time frame of 1990 to 2000. I don't see evidence saying that we suddenly consumed too much animal protein and that was the culprit, or that that's when we first discovered wheat. It's probably not when we first discovered wheat, nor was that when we first discovered dairy foods, nor was that when we stopped eating animal protein. It's not starting or stopping it. So I don't think any of the things are clear single causes, but I think food can be a solution and we've got to eat something anyway. So I would argue probably the simplest step is to really avoid processed foods. You know, things that have weird chemicals. And I think few would debate about that. Another thing I think everyone would agree upon is that we're served by getting a variety of produce, lots of colors, fresh leafy greens, the paleo and the vegans, they're in alignment on that. The part where I really kind of forge off on my own really comes down to carbohydrates. So people tend to be in the nutrition world either all for or all against. Back in the 80s, I was a runner and this was like the low fat craze. And I remember being at a friend's House.

Lots of sugar, but low fat.

Lots of sugar, but low fat.

Yeah.

So I was at a friend's house, totally fit gal, and she served us these snacks and it was jelly beans and pretzels because they were fat free. So this is like all good food and you have all you want, you don't worry about it. So now we've kind of gone the opposite way to where bacon and coconut are the new health foods. And chocolate.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And I would argue that carbs are a tool. It's not carbs. Fat, protein, neither good or bad, they're all tools. And carbs have a unique effect upon our daily rhythms. There's so much data showing that. And intuitively imagine if you have pancakes, syrup, some waffles, some fruit juice for your breakfast and then you want to go be productive, you're going to crash, you're going to feel tired. So when you have a lot of carbs, what happens is your body makes a lot of insulin. No mystery, no debate. So that insulin causes you to lower your cortisol output. Cortisol raises your blood sugar, insulin lowers your blood sugar. So if you eat carbs, insulin comes out to lower your blood sugar. Well, that makes you have to not make as much cortisol, otherwise your sugar would go back up again. They fight each other. So in the morning, when you shut down your cortisol, you're not mentally alert, you're not energized, and you're going to want to take a nap after a little bit. On the other hand, in the evening, you really need to have a good suppression of your cortisol. That's how you sleep. Everyone knows that because you write about.

In your book, like if you're not getting enough carbs, some people, they can't sleep, right?

There have been studies on that. If you drop your carbs in even just a couple of days, the quality of your sleep suffers. And there's really well known chemical pathways by which our neurotransmitters that allow us to sleep, our serotonin and our melatonin, they depend upon healthy carbs. We need some carbs to drive them to be made and to get into our brains.

Well, what I've noticed, like when I go and lift weights, if I will eat some brown rice or even white rice, the strength I have when I'm working out, is this greater?

Sure.

And I'm a pretty clean eater and I'm always trying to test things again. I mean, as much as I've interviewed people and I've read A lot. And I think I know a lot more than the average bear. I'm always trying to fine tune it and try to see what works with me for me. And there's obviously what you very much describe in your book, there's other factors than just the food you're putting in your mouth. It's also timing, too, because one of the things that I've learned from you about eating carbs, it's not even eating carbs when you do it. Whereas some people be like, don't eat any carbs, eat them in the morning. And you say the exact opposite. Right. Do it. Explain that.

Yeah. So in the morning. The logic behind that idea is that, well, if you eat them in the morning, you can burn them throughout the day. And the reality is we burn fuel in different ways. And our very best fuel source is stuff called glycogen. That's a stored type of carbohydrate in our liver and our muscles. Now that's our best fuel. So when you're training hard and you have the rice, you generate more glycogen. It's our greatest, most powerful fuel source. It takes us a long time to form it. It doesn't go from our mouth to our leg in a matter of minutes. It's more like about eight to 14 hours at the quickest, maybe a lot longer. So the meal you have in the morning is actually a super important thing for your brain chemistry, for your energy, for your blood sugar, but it's not your fuel for that day. You're not really burning it for fuel that day that you ate it. But the stuff you have in the evening, the night prior, that can form glycogen, that can form this good muscle energy that you can get the most power from.

Okay, so across the board advice that you would give for anyone listening to this on the podcast or watching the video, because we're obviously recording this on video also. What advice would you give them about, starting today, how to look at eating food? I mean, obviously read your book if they want a deep understanding of all of this. But what are some basics that people would be well served to hear?

You know, simple foods, unprocessed foods, solid breakfast protein for breakfast, and have some healthy carbs. They can be from vegetables such as squash or sweet potatoes or turnips or parsnips. I actually really like beans and legumes, and I love intact whole grains. They've really got a place in the intestinal flora and they work better in the body in the evening as opposed to earlier in the day?

Well, you know, I can't remember who I asked this to, but gluten. There's a whole attack on gluten and stuff and lots of books with a lot of evidence. It appears that wheat and gluten is a bad thing. And I'm pretty much wheat and gluten, gluten free. What is gluten? I mean, people hear it, but I also see how a lot of packaged food companies are using it to produce really crappy food that is gluten free. So what is gluten and what does it do to the body and who does this apply? How do you find out if gluten. If you're gluten intolerant? I say this playing devil's advocate here because I've done a lot of tests and I know certain things in my body responds to what it doesn't. But I'm asking this question more for the listeners.

So gluten comes into a category that I call the sticky proteins. So you make dough and you need flour and eggs and milk. They will make it all stick together and bind up with it. So some proteins are just really hard to pull apart. And yeah, gluten is a very sticky, almost like snot, so to speak. It's very tenacious and holds onto things.

That's very exciting, I like to say.

Discussion. The downside is that if we're not all the way digesting it, it can hurt our immune system. It can activate our immune system and trigger inflammation. And you're right, it's hard to really divorce the effects of it from processed foods. And I would also agree that many could focus on just that one issue and still not be on a healthy diet. There's a lot of gluten free crap nowadays. I talked to someone earlier that I diagnosed for the first time, but having very advanced celiac disease. And I told her, I said, you know, this gluten free thing, it is very popular right now. The good part about that is for those to whom this is a real condition, there are more resources, more options, and they're not all healthy. So you always want to think big picture. And I'm really a fan of just simple foods, you know, intact whole grains, vegetables and fruits as they come, you know, fresh meats, you know, nuts and seeds. And really building your diet around those. Not even the packaged things you get from the health food supermarket, Just not even packaged things in general?

Yeah, well, certainly, I mean, one of the best pieces of advice, I don't know if I heard it from Michael Pollan or whatever is just eat foods that have one name, like broccoli. Doritos is not one name. Doritos is like a bunch of chemicals with just not eating processed foods. That alone will change your life. Do you have to have money and be rich in order to eat really well and to do all this stuff strategically?

You do not. And that's the thing is that the unprocessed foods, many people have done analysis on this, that if you're doing some simple shopping and some batch cooking, no, it can actually be more cost effective and more time effective, believe it or not.

Yeah. At my Genius network meeting, the last one that I did here at my office, we had Dr. Joel Cotton, who's a big heart specialist, writes for Readers Digest and his specialty is the heart. He was given a 10 minute talk. One of the things he talked about is eat vegetables. Eat your vegetables. I know people are going to complain, I don't like the taste of vegetables. He's like, well, I wonder if you'll like the taste of cancer. I wonder if you'll like the taste of chemotherapy. I wonder if you'll like the taste of diabetes. And it was a really interesting analogy because a lot of people are like, well, I don't have the money. I mean, if you don't take time out for your health now, you're going to take time out for it later and it's going to be painful and it's going to be costly and your life may not be long. And so, you know, it's really, you'd be really well served to learn about eating and about something that every human being needs to do day in, day out and understand how it affects your body. So I mean that's of course, that's.

My perspective, that same thing from the opposite angle. I had a long term patient who has a yard maintenance company and he was in early diabetes and some dietary change completely cured him of that. He had seen a general doctor and was put on medications. They weren't helping, they were causing him side effects. And he went on a program like I've outlined and he was non diabetic after about a month and a half. And I know he had some favorite foods and his name was Joe, also coincidence. But I was talking to him and I said, well, how are you doing on staying away from the big swigs and this and that and. And he said, are you kidding? He said nothing tastes better than being healthy. Feeling good and being energy was more pleasurable. It was more positive than what it was. He was giving up. And that was his discovery.

Yeah, well, I had this. I used to have it on my refrigerator where it was a saying, nothing tastes as great as being lean. Feels. Now, certainly there's things that taste really damn good. There are certain behaviors that are very indulgent but are very destructive. And it's really about building in the rituals because there's a period of time where I think it's like you have to work through the burn. I mean, if you're addicted to sugar, you're going to go through withdrawals. I mean, you're going to make a shift. But that's why we don't have everyone walking around looking awesome, being super wealthy and having great relationships, because all of those things require a certain level of work and commitment. And. And the challenge, though, in what you identify here is the road to get there is those not guilting yourself into saying, oh, I'm just a bad person and I've got bad habits. It's really understanding that we're a walking biochemical machine. We're a pharmacy, our brain's a pharmacy. And a lot of these things are affected. And your goal here with the adrenal reset is to reset that. So it gives people, okay, shut this thing off and start a new sort of thing. Well, not quite in that way, but it's really about just giving people a new lease on life if you want to take it to that level.

One of the most beautiful things I learned was from very hardcore science. Our body is a mass of tissues made up of organs, made up of cells, made up of molecules made up of atoms. And it's all totally transitory, you know, it's all in a state of dynamic flux. So right now you know who you are, you know what your physical body is on the very most material level. If we went back a year prior, none of the same stuff was there. You know, the same identity that you identified as being Joe Polish that didn't physically exist. You know, less than 1% of those actual atoms have carried through and stayed with you to today. So we're constantly in this process.

Why do I have the same looking nose, though?

The structural parts come back in the same place, but the building blocks and the actual chemistry of us, it's in a state of dynamic flux. So the cool thing is that if we can identify things that are disrupting us and just change the big blocks, the big barriers and supply the needed pieces, then transformation is normal. It's not mystical. It's just the normal state of affairs.

Yeah, no, that's awesome. Well, you know, you're a real expert on thyroid and hormones. So how do our adrenal hormones relate to body weight? Let's talk about that.

So the adrenal glands are the biggest single factor for the largest number of people for body weight. They control just that, burning and storing stuff. The thyroid gland, it's a big deal for a certain number of people and it may be a quarter or so of the population. So the adrenal glands are affected by just life and by stressors. The thyroid gland can be affected by a disease and that disease makes it not able to generate enough hormones. And these hormones control how much we warm our bodies, how much energy we generate, warming our bodies. So when they're lacking, we burn less fuel. And for many, that can be a source of weight struggle as well.

Can diet help correct adrenal rhythm?

It can.

And so what does that mean?

So we did a clinical trial on this. You know, I've always been my own guinea pig, and I checked my cortisol via saliva, hair, blood, urine, all these things, and I checked my blood sugar all throughout the day and I saw that I could change it by shifting the carbohydrate intake. Then I had some patient friends who were early diabetic or had weight struggles. They saw the same things. Then we did a formal clinical trial and we had people that all of whom had had at least three diets just not work for them the last few years. They were all struggling with their weight and none of them had had an easy time managing it. We measured their adrenal cycle and there was not a healthy rhythm amongst the bunch of them. They all had very poor circadian rhythms. So only by doing diet, there's a lot of things that can help the rhythm that I talk about in the book that are not diet. But I only wanted to see what the diet did. So we just did the diet with them. And a month later, the average rhythm was more than 50% healthier than it was before by just the food thing. So we saw that diet can correct that. And I'm not aware of data apart from that study showing that that can actually happen.

So when you say circadian, what does that mean?

Thank you. That means things that change throughout the course of the day. So we're awake and we've got one mode of functioning, we're asleep and there's a different one. And we are daylight creatures and there's this bigger rhythm, properly called a diurnal rhythm. And being daylight creatures, we have a circadian cycle. So we wake up with the sunlight, we go to sleep with the darkness. And all these orchestrated events of our digestion, our immunity, our metabolism, are all linked to that sunlight cycle.

So if I'm gathering this right, it's our rhythm, our adrenal rhythm that will dictate how we weight gain, how we respond, how we think, how we sleep, how we feel. Is that correct?

Yep.

Okay, so what ways other than diet? Because you describe the diet and give recipes and everything in the book, what are other things that people can do to regain or put themselves on the best rhythm?

I mentioned the sunlight is one trick that morning sunlight. And in many parts of the country or the world, that's not an option. It's not bright sunlight when you wake up. They've got really good light boxes. Nowadays you want ones that generate 10,000 lux or greater.

You mean like the Philip Blue Lightbox or things like that, or are you talking something else?

They're not blue, the ones that are best researched, but they generate high amounts of bright light. And the better ones have stands that allow them to be above the height of your head, like on a table.

Like this video camera behind you that's blinding me, just so we get the proper lighting here and hopefully I look less attractive or something, I don't know, pretty much.

So you get something like that, and in the morning, you have your breakfast or you have your tea, you read the paper and you've got a light going like that. Or when you can, you do those same things outside. And of course, bonus points to go for a walk or be active. But just the light exposure passively by itself is huge towards that. Another thing along those same lines is temperature changes. So some researchers have argued that another big change that's caused weight gain is the fact that we don't get cold anymore, that we're the same temperature all day and all night. And that was not true for our ancestors. So part of our daily rhythm was burning calories in ways to warm us at night. So when we're not getting cold, that does not get engaged. So a simple habit is to cool your environment by at least 5, preferably 10 degrees greater than your daytime environment for nighttime.

Okay, gotcha. So what is a question that I could or should have asked you that.

I have not could or should have asked or have not? I think the big thing is really just letting people know what is possible. And that transformation does happen. So short periods of time, and I've seen so many to where maybe it's been decades of frustration and people really Think that it's their genes working against them or that it's their lack of willpower like they've been taught. And they get into this cycle of greater emotional trauma and more turmoil. And the reality is that can change. You know, in the study, we had some people that actually lost six inches around their waist in the course of the 30 days. So it can happen in radical, powerful ways. And it's possible there was a time in the past to where we looked at people who were struggling with their health and we told them, hey, it's your diet. You're not trying hard enough. You've got to eat alkaline foods. Sugar is your culprit. You've got to be more active. That's why you're tired. So check it out. That was tuberculosis. That's exactly the advice we gave for tuberculosis. In the 1840s in our area in the Southwest, there was no shortage of sanitariums. You'd go there and you were dying. They called it a consumptive personality. We thought it was a personality disorder. And you were dying of what they called consumption. And you would go to something kind of like a modern fat farm. They would make you do physical work. They would be very stringent on your diet. And the degree to which you failed is the degree to which it was your fault for not trying it all hard enough. And we didn't know how wrong that was. And that's exactly what's going on now about all the very real struggles with weight. We're telling people that if it doesn't work, it's your fault. And here's our model. Here's the idea. Do your best. Make it, make it work. And it's no different than it was for tuberculosis. We said the same stuff for leprosy and for smallpox, too. We said, this is your personality, this is your temperament, and you've got to overcome those things if you want to get better. Yep.

There's always modern day witch hunts. You know, there's always. It's pretty crazy. I mean, we are improving in a lot of areas, but we are still in the dark ages in so many others, too. So pain. There's a lot of people that experience pain for timing. We won't go deep into this, but will this sort of adrenal reset help people that are in chronic pain?

Well, it will not cure structural problems, of course, if someone has a broken leg or a bad back. But there is this process of repair that goes on. You know, pain always has two sides. There's the structural component and the chemical component and that adrenal rhythm, that morning cortisol spike and that nighttime cortisol shutoff, I think of it just like a wave kind of washing through your body. And the whole process of tissue regeneration depends upon that wave. You need to have a good spike to build nutrients and a good shut off to repair the damaged tissues. So if you don't have both them of of those happening, whatever is hurting won't have a good chance of getting better. So yeah, deep restorative sleep can make a big difference on that. And on the other side too. Pain is also one of the stressors. So pain worsens how you're feeling and it worsens your body's whole stress response. So any steps that improve it can certainly benefit the pain.

So if you only had a couple of minutes to impart advice to your children on how to live and start and maintain a healthy life, if they will listen, I guess we have to.

Give them, they may listen to you better than to me.

That's how those things work, the ones in the teenage state. What sort of advice would you give them?

This hit me when I was working on the book. I've always, like you put thought into what I'm eating, how I'm living, and probably in the past, a lot more thought into the mechanics of what I physically put inside of myself. And there's been a lot of times where I thought, you know, I'm a healthy guy, I can push it a little bit, I can do extra here for a while. So I was staying up late working on the book, and I saw a study showing that they tracked British civil servants for four years in the early 2000s, and they looked at a lot of health measurements and they just saw who died and which health measurements predicted death more than others. This study came under my radar because they measured the cortisol rhythms. Apart from that, they measured like, do you smoke or not? Was someone too heavy? Did they have heart disease, high blood pressure, Were they diabetic? A lot of common stuff. So all said and done, someone that had poor stress resilience, they had a poor cortisol rhythm, they had a greater chance of mortality than someone with good stress resilience who happened to smoke and have a bad heart and have high cholesterol.

Wow. Wow, interesting.

So what I would encourage my children, anyone else, put the biggest focus into what is really sustaining your spirit and your happiness. Be conscious of food. Eat good food, but don't eat good food in a state of misery. Don't beat yourself up and Live a horribly painful, difficult life and overextend yourself and then thinking that eating good is going to make a difference.

No, that's actually. That's really great insight. Yeah. And that makes a lot of sense. I mean, I really think about that, too. Stages where I'm even studies where they would feed. I know Tony Robbins, who's a friend of mine, would tell the story from years ago about rabbits that were being fed toxic food in some laboratory, and they found one that was in a healthier state than others, and they tracked it back to one of the students there at the university would take that one rabbit out and pet it and just give it affection. And that somehow created a way for that rabbit to overcome the toxic effects of the food relative to the other rabbits that were dying from it. And I was like, you know, yeah, taking care of yourself. And there are many aspects of just personal happiness and fulfillment that have everything to do with, I think, how you respond to the food you eat, the environment you live in. Awesome. How do people find out more information about you? Obviously your book, the Adrenal Reset Diet. Everyone, if this made sense to you, go ahead and pick up a copy of this book, the adrenal reset diet. Dr. Alan Christensen. How do they get more information about you or if they ever want to see you? I know you're a very busy doctor.

Dr. D R Christiansen. C H R I S T I A N s o n Dr. Christiansen.com is the easiest place for all things me.

And what will they get out of reading this book? What would be the biggest benefits? Other than.

I think there's some tactical stuff, but I think one of the biggest benefits, honestly, is just a complete vindication of the struggle. Really hard data showing that this never was your fault. This was factors around you that were invisible. And the cool thing is that doesn't mean that you're stuck. It means that there's easy strategies you can take to thumb your nose at all the stressors of modernity and put yourself back on track again.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. You wrote a great book and I know it's going to help a tremendous amount of people. So I appreciate it. Thank you.

Thanks so much for having me. Jim.

Sam.