The IMPACT of Food To Heal Your Body & Mind | Lewis Howes

It's something I don't think people realize that the food you eat and not only the food you eat, your lifestyle, obesity itself causes low-grade inflammation. Changing someone's diet can also improve depressive scores, particularly the combined two is even more robust, which makes sense.

Hey guys, thank you so much for being here. A quick message before we dive in. You may be watching the show but haven't taken a moment to click the subscribe button below. So if you've ever gained value from this show, it would mean so much to me if you click the subscribe button right now. And not only will this allow you to see these messages first, all this great content we have, you're gonna get notified first when it comes out. But the bigger our subscriber base grows, the more people we can impact and the bigger the guests we can get on this show as well. So again, thank you so much as always for your support. It means the world to me. Make sure to click the subscribe button below and let's dive into this conversation.

Food is extremely important because it's directly linked to obesity and obesity itself causes low-grade inflammation. And foods that are really high, particularly when you combine a high saturated fat with a high refined sugar. So let's say you're eating your, you're drinking your glass of milk with your cookie. That's the worst because you're getting the saturated fat and the sugar.

That's my whole childhood.

And that's been shown to cause a very high what's called postprandial inflammatory response. We've been talking about postprandial glucose response, which is after you eat, so postprandial. There's a inflammatory response that also occurs after eating. And inflammation itself has been shown to inflammatory molecules cross the blood-brain barrier and they play a role in basically depressing dopamine signaling and serotonin and all sorts of, you know, affecting neurotransmitters and brain function. And there's been studies directly showing that if you inject a person with an inflammatory cytokine, it causes depressive symptoms versus if you're injected with saline.

Really? So the more inflammation we have in the body, it increases depression.

Exactly. Inflammation—we used to think, again, the brain was separate from the body and that the immune system and all that didn't affect the brain. Turns out that was all wrong. Absolutely wrong. These inflammatory mediators do get into the brain and they get into the brain and they change—they're changing the firing of certain neurotransmitters and things like that. They're also activating the resident immune cells in the brain called microglia astrocytes, microglia, a type of astrocyte. And that also is linked to depression. And so we put out a little short video on this, an animated video actually, on inflammation and depression and talk about a lot of the studies because It's something I don't think people realize that the food you eat and not only the food you eat, your lifestyle, being obese and overweight, being sedentary. Exercise is one of the best anti-inflammatory medicines you can get, period. It also happens to be one of the best lifestyle remedies for depression as well. I mean, randomized controlled trials showing that, all sorts of evidence.

Is this any type of exercise or are you a HIIT training, cardio, 30 minutes, 60 minutes? What's your opinion?

Well, there's been studies looking at.

I.

Would say the large body of evidence seems to show aerobic exercise is really important with respect to depression. And that is because aerobic exercise leads to increases in what's called brain drive neurotrophic factor. BDNF, as it's called. It's basically a growth factor that's produced. After just 20 minutes of a moderate intensity workout, you can increase your level. You can find levels increase by up to 30% in plasma. It crosses into the brain and in the brain, it does a lot of things. Not only does it do what IGF-1 does, it actually grows new neurons. It helps you grow new neurons and it helps your neurons survive. So, it plays an important role in preventing brain aging. But something else very unique that it does, it plays a role in what's called neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is like your brain's ability to adapt to stressful conditions. You know, I mean, this is what children can do pretty good. As you get older, neuroplasticity goes down, as does everything. But it plays neuroplasticity is important for being able to cope with stress, like the stress of a pandemic, for example. You know, more neuroplasticity helps with those, stressful divorce people are going through, you know, are losing your job. Lots of stressful things, but neuroplasticity helps the brain cope with that. And brain-derived neurotrophic factor helps increase neuroplasticity, which decreases with age. So again, aerobic exercise was important, but there's been studies linking strength training to lower depression rates as well.

Yeah. Any type of exercise will help.

Exactly, I do, but I really think that Aerobic, there is a place for aerobic with respect to the BDNF, the brain drive neurotropin.

I always tell people that every day I try to put myself through some type of physical pain that makes me feel discomfort, whether that's sweating for 10 minutes or a two hour workout or playing basketball, hiking, whatever. I try to put my mind and body through something where I'm like, gosh, I don't want to do this. But by putting myself through pain, controlled pain, It sets me up to be more under control when there is chaos and pain. I think that's the key we should get to is controlled pain, healthy pain, so that you're not out of control when there is chaos and pain in the world.

What you're describing, scientists often refer to as hormesis, and that is basically a little bit of stress on the body, like exercise, Basically, because our body tries to maintain what's called homeostasis, a little bit of stress will cause our body to respond to that stress with a lot of anti-stress, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, growing new brain cells, all these beneficial things. So, a little bit of stress gives you a lot of good stuff, right?

Interesting.

Whereas low-grade chronic stress all the time, It doesn't do anything. You're not getting that. You're not getting that powerful.

Yeah, this is power. This is amazing. I'm going to say something that I hope I don't offend anyone when I say it. That I am all about self-love, self-care, loving yourself for who you are, accepting yourself for where you're at in your life, physically, emotionally, environment, financially, all that. the more I hear you talk about this, the quote unquote self-love movement of accept who you are and accept where you're at with your body and what you eat and it's okay to eat whatever you want, just love yourself for who you are, is that self-love mentality, that specific type of mentality killing people and hurting them if they aren't willing to adapt a no, it's not okay. to continue to eat whatever you want all the time and just love yourself and accept yourself for who you are, you have to make sure you arm your body and your mind and your health with the nutrients, the tools, the exercise in order to decrease depression and increase happiness.

I think that there's the, you know, absolutely if you're going to just eat what you want and accept being obese, that you'll be causing yourself more harm, both physically and mentally. And that also probably affects your loved ones as well, that care about you or perhaps that you're interacting with and you're in a terrible mood. And so when your neighbor's happy, you're happy, right? So I think that there's part of this movement, I think there's a fine balance between you don't want to have your expectations so high that you can never be happy.

I'm never gonna look perfect and someone's always skinnier than me.

I'm never gonna have blue eyes. I'm never, you know, so if I'm always like, well, only people with blue eyes are the prettiest, then I'll never be happy. So that's an unreasonable expectation, right, in my mind. So, I mean, there are things where, you know, like, I'm never gonna be a billionaire. And if that's all I wanted in life to be happy, I'll never be happy. So there are things I think that you can, there's a certain balance between, I mean, you want your expectations behind it in a way. You want to always aim for what you, you know, aim for the stars in a way and try to like work hard to get there. So what I'm trying to say is I think that self-love movement came from somewhere, right? I think there was something to that, right? But I think it sort of spiraled out of control and what's happened now is you're saying, well, accept things that I don't want to change rather than you can't. Because you can change that. You can lose weight. you can eat different foods and get different results. Make different decisions. People that are eating refined sugar, people that are drinking these sugar-sweetened beverages, you know, and there's a lot of people, maybe not so many people listening to the podcast or watching it, but there.

Are people that do.

And, you know, there's been studies that have shown refined sugar acts on the reward pathway in the brain, dopamine pathway, in a very similar manner to controlled substances. drugs like nicotine, methamphetamine, not to the same degree, but they're acting on the same systems and they're increasing the feel-good.

Hormone when you take it for the moment, but then it makes you decline afterwards and crash, right?

It does. And, you know, I think the important point to realize with that is that when you take that away, when you stop, what happens is there is a withdrawal. And it's been shown at least with, for example, with nicotine studies that your dopamine's getting constantly fired, fired, fired. And so, what's called dopamine receptors, which basically a dopamine axon to make you feel good, those start to decrease because your neurons are going, oh, well, I have so much of this around. I don't need so many of the receptors. So, when you take away that thing that's causing the dopamine all the time to go away, you have fewer receptors and now you don't feel as much. I mean, it's just really bad. You're not feeling-- any amount of dopamine, right? But it's been shown that that sort of normalizes within three months. And three months is a long time, but it's actually not that long.

Of cutting out the sugar, you mean?

This has been shown with nicotine.

I'm just drawing a parallel.

Got you, got you. I'm drawing a parallel saying, look, it's not going to be easy the first month. It's going to be so hard. It's so hard. It's not going to be the first month. It may not be easy the second.

Month, but it's going to get easier. And it's not only is it going.

To get easier, you're going to be happier.

Your body's gonna regulate itself, the hormones are gonna regulate, right? Things are gonna self-regulate.

Yeah, things start to get back to normal, exactly.

It's very challenging, but it's necessary to get healthier and happier, right?

It is. I don't think people realize that depression, it's not just a genetic disorder. It's not just something that can't be fixed ever. Now, in some cases, there are definitely genetic cases of depression. I'm not saying that that's not the case.

But can you hear depression through food and nutrition and exercise?

Well, there have been studies that have shown that exercise can be a treatment for depression. And there have been studies that shown changing someone's diet can also improve depressive scores. And particularly the combined two is even more robust, which makes sense. So there's something for people to realize, people that are maybe eating not so healthy diet, people that are overweight, overweight, definitely obese. And if they do have depression, there very well could be a link between the diet, the lifestyle, the obesity, fat cells itself, they also increase, they produce inflammatory cytokines. So, independent of the whole eating the diet and the postprandial inflammatory response, just having fat, particularly visceral fat around your organs and stuff. This stuff is causing low-grade inflammation. And do you know what low-grade inflammation is? It means that you're basically activating your immune cells a little bit all the time. Activated immune cells require a ton of energy. So, you're taking energy away from your brain.

From defending itself. Yeah.

From just having a great day from, I mean, energy. It's like a sink. Exactly. Just having energy. It's a sink, low-grade inflammation. I mean, you were telling me this, we were chatting a little bit earlier about how you were eating this terrible diet back when you were doing your arena football and you were always tired.

Always tired.

Low-grade inflammation, it's an energy sink because It requires so much energy to activate your immune cells. There's only so much energy. It's like a triage, right? It's triaging there.

It's taking it somewhere else. It takes you away from your mission, from your vision of your life, from your career, from your energy with your family, your friends.

Yeah, you have to have energy. It takes motivation to want to go to the gym. It takes motivation also to want to do stuff or to talk to people.

Is there a genetic thing that Or DNA thing that holds someone back from losing that weight if they've tried for years? Or is this still, you know, they're just lacking the discipline? What is that?

There's absolutely many genes that regulate obesity. And I'll just tell you, my mother-in-law, she's also not obese. She has, in the past, had an overweight problem. and has tried, I mean, she's the kind of person that tries and goes all in and she has tried every diet, just everything, and just nothing seemed to work.

So, I mean, how does someone like that, if they've tried, tried, tried, and it's just like, you know what? I'm beating myself up, the diets I'm trying, the exercise is not working. What do they need to shift?

Well, I just, you asked about genetics and there is a really important role for genetics as well, but I think that In order to know that, you're going to have to measure biomarkers in your blood. So you're going to have to measure lipids like your LDL cholesterol, different particle sizes of those cholesterol, inflammatory biomarkers like high sensitivity reactive protein, your triglycerides, your HBA1C, which is a long-term measure of your long-term blood glucose levels. Measure those things and also you can get a genetic test. There's a variety of genetic testing services out there, 23andMe, AncestryDNA. I do have a genetic report that basically we look exclusively, we're looking at genes that are affecting basically interacting with diet. So people that are eating a high protein diet, some people with a certain SNP, which is a one change in one nucleotide of DNA in the gene, basically can gain more weight. And the opposite is true, like I mentioned, or eating the ratio of saturated fat to polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats. So saturated fats found in foods like dairy, red meat, fatty cuts of red meat, polyunsaturated fats found in fish, monounsaturated fat is found in olive oil, olives, you know, nuts. So these things, like even the ratio of those things can affect, depending on someone's genetics, their ability to gain or lose weight. And more so, like even people, there's some people have it where they eat a high carbohydrate diet and they gain more weight.

So is there, so Is there a-- so it's not as simple as what I'm hearing you say, as just eat less calories a day and you should lose weight.

Not always.

If you suppress the calorie intake, you're going to burn more and eventually you're.

Going to burn-- I think that's the one thing that's pretty tried and true is that your caloric restriction, most of the time, people will lose weight.

Lose weight. Gotcha.

Okay. But the question is, How sustainable is that? So maybe what you would need to do, the other thing is that a lot of times obesity, there's a dysregulation in hormones. Hormones like insulin, leptin is another big one. And you have to reset those hormones in order to have a normal biology. And sometimes resetting those hormones takes a reset that's kind of a strong stressor. Like a long fast, a long fast, you know, where you're basically resetting those things. And that's what did it for my mother-in-law. So that was my long story.

She did it along fast and reset.

A couple of them. So she did. Now, by the way, you know, when I say a long fast, typically intermittent fasting is anything less than 48 hours. A longer fast would be longer than 48 hours.

Three to three plus days.

Yeah, the first time she did a three-day she started out by doing sort of a caloric restriction, low calorie diet to kind of get her into it. And then she did a three day fast where she didn't eat anything, a little bit of salt. She would take a little bit of salt in and drink some water, and then she did four days and she did this like, you know, separate it by like a month and that reset her metabolism and all of a sudden she started losing weight, you know, and this has also been the case for a few few other friends of mine, particularly one that was morbidly obese and he lost like £180.

Oh my gosh. So what are some other meats that you recommend that we should be eating? Meat is, sorry, foods that you recommend we should be eating? Foods.

I think then the next best would be tubers, like roots, sweet potato, rutabaga, parsnip, turnips, et cetera, because they are, they're generally fairly low carb.

Sweet potatoes are?

Sweet potatoes are a little bit higher in carbs. They're way less than grains. But a lot of these, like the rutabaga and so forth, they're fairly low carb.

Sure, gotcha.

And they're also gluten free and they pretty much fit into any regimen. So if you're on an autoimmune diet, if you're on a lectin free diet, if you're avoiding nightshades, the tubers are still safe.

What are the top tubers? Sweet potatoes.

Sweet potatoes, potatoes, rutabaga, turnips, parsnips. What's the other one? The celery root. So those are generally pretty good. And again, if... So the sweet potato is generally more safe than the potato because the potato is a nightshade. So if you... Again, have those sensitivities and you're avoiding nightshades, then potato has to go as well.

Okay, so we got the tubers. What's the next category you really like?

So then assuming that you're not sensitive to nightshades, then I would go with all of the non-starchy vegetables. So now we got eggplants and bell peppers. I think for most people are good foods, but again, they have some lectins.

Mm-.

Then I think the broccoli and cauliflower are like staples in my house for sure. That you can- those are low, I.

Mean those are like very low calorie.

Yes.

Nutrient dense, but also low carb too, right? Yes.

Broccoli, cauliflower, they're like four or five percent net carbs. So, it's very, very low. And, of course, avocado, which is really a fruit by definition, but it has quite a bit of fat and very, very low carbs. It's like 2-3% net carbs.

Okay. And, what's the deal with the nightshades? Because I know there's a big conversation about that right now with these these foods actually are hurting you, you know, these nightshades, or it depends on your sensitivity level. Correct.

They're hurting some people.

The Plant Paradise, right?

Correct.

Think of all the amazing things in life that are expressions of just you. For instance, the song you stream over and over again while you're in your 13th hour of gaming at 4:00 a.m. in the morning with all the lights off, trying not to wake up your roommates, or the recommendations that you share with your friends on the top six comedy podcasts that are the best to listen to on your your way to the gym and back, or even your new haircut, which may or may not be an epic bowl cut from the 90s and hopefully is. Everything that makes you, you, makes all the difference. State Farm believes insurance should work the same way. Your plan, your coverage, they need to be personalized to you. And the ability to choose the plan you want by picking the options that fit you, like building your home and auto policies, is exactly what the State Farm Personal Price Plan is all about. Getting the coverage you want at an affordable price just for you. So Are you ready to make things personal? Call or go to statefarm.com today to create your State Farm Personal Price Plan. Prices vary by state. Options selected by customer, availability and eligibility may vary.

I don't know what the percentage would be, but I would not, I think gluten hurts everyone, right? But I don't think lectins hurt everyone. Not at those doses. Again, it's all about- Smaller doses. so nitrates have lectins and if you are sensitive to something, if you have inflammation, if you have some issues, then I think sort of like the carnivore, carnivore is more extreme but before that you want to try cutting out the lectins, cutting out the nightshades.

Okay.

But again, it's not, some people sort of pick their little niche and say, I'm going to be the lectin guy, I'm going to be the nightshade guy. And they promote that as the solution for everyone, but it's not. And low carb is not the solution for everyone. I have some skinny patients that need to eat carbs. They don't need to eat sugar and white bread, but they would probably do better eating 70, 80, 100 grams of carbs because they're very, very insulin sensitive. Their body has trouble putting on some weight.

Right.

Are there any other categories you think we should be eating?

The, the leafy greens are kind of in the, the non-starchy vegetables, but they're, they're sort of a little subcategory. And then I think some people kind of count the the eggs with the meat. I think it's a separate category because very few people are sensitive to meat. A lot of people are sensitive to eggs.

People are sensitive to eggs.

Yes.

Okay. Yes. And again, it's not a majority. It's not like with wheat or pasteurized milk, but I don't know, 5, 10, 15, 20%. And it's hard to tell because the people that come to my clinic, they're the ones who have the problems. So they're probably way more sensitive than the general population.

Sure. Are you a big fan of eggs yourself?

Yes, as a food group.

Absolutely. And I think quality is huge. I think a lot of problems develop because people eat really, really poor quality. So I think if the chicken or the hen had a healthy life and produces a healthy egg, I think you're much less likely to ever develop a sensitivity. But if that chicken is eating chemicals and hormones and was raised under horrendous conditions, I think your body is much more likely to develop a sensitivity to that because of whatever might be in there.

Right, right.

Any other final category you like? As a food group, the most nutrient dense foods.

Yeah, I do think even though dairy.

Is.

A very common allergen, I do think a lot of people do well with some forms of dairy. So I typically recommend yogurt and sour cream because it's very rewarding. If you're doing a low carb diet, then adding a little sour cream to something is super tasty. I think cheese is okay for a lot of people, especially if it's like a good quality cheese, not the melty singles and all that.

Not the nacho cheese dip, but the movie theater which tastes so good, but.

It'S not that Yeah, I don't even know about that.

It's not even cheese, yeah.

Yeah, I think I've trained myself into just associating chemicals with that stuff.

I know.

But yeah, I try to get things as close to nature as possible. So if I have the option, I'm gonna get pasture-raised eggs, I'm gonna get raw cheese with as few additives as possible. Because nature made things for us. We are nature.

Right?

And all the other animals on the planet, they graze off the planet. They don't process things, they don't alter things. So as soon as we change it, we increase the likelihood of screwing it up. And the more we change it, the more we screw it up. So the closer we can get to the source, the better.

Yeah. What would be three foods that you would recommend everyone eliminate? if you could eliminate or have very, very little every once in a while, but if you could almost eliminate these three foods from your diet, it would help you in a big way.

I don't know if we can call them foods, but obviously sugar. Sugar in the quantity, refined sugar in the quantities we eat is absolutely toxic to the body. Number two would be processed fats. So healthy fats are natural fats, butter, meat fat, pork, avocado, olive oil, etc. Because we don't change them, we don't mess with them. But anything that we make an oil from that doesn't come easily, like a seed or corn, corn has just a couple of percent fat in it. So it takes a lot of heat and chemicals and processing to get any oil out of it. So it tastes terrible and then you have to bleach it and deodorize it and all that's it. It's not a food anymore and and those foods are extremely toxic. So soybean oil, corn oil, canola oil, all of those processed oils and especially if they're turned into a food product like margarine or shortening or something like that.

Okay.

So I put, I'd say sugar and seed oils. And then something, again, that's not really a food, but I would put it up there. And every time I make a video on this, I get a lot of backlash. And it's artificial sweeteners. Ooh, man.

Why are artificial sweeteners? And people... Not good for us.

Because they are chemicals. They're foreign substances. They were developed by companies who made pesticides. And the latest and greatest, so aspartame got a bad rap, so then they had to hustle to come up with something else, so they came up with sucralose. And they were very careful to name it in a way that sounded- Sounded, yes, sucralose, sugar, sucralose, but the fact is and then they said that, well, you know, it's just like sugar and then it just has some chlorine, just like sea salt. Well, in nature, sodium chloride is only bonded through like an electrostatic charge. I forget exactly what it's called, but it's not like a tight bond. So yes, sodium chloride perfectly natural. But when we bind chlorine to a carbon, nature never does that. Basically every form of a chlorocarbon is a pesticide. And one of the most famous ones was DDT, which was banned as a cancer-causing agent. It almost wiped out the national bird. the eagle, and it's so toxic, it's in our environment 50 years later. So, chlorocarbons are pesticides, and that's what sucralose is. It's a chlorocarbon.

So, eliminate refined sugar, eliminate processed fats, which is mostly seed oils and artificial sweeteners. Are there any non-sugar sweeteners, natural that you like or recommend that in the right doses are okay for you.

Yes.

So I use quite a bit of Stevia.

That's an artificial sweetener or it is?

No, no. So some people bundle it together with artificial sweeteners just because it's a non-calorie sweetener. But it is a plant product. It's just a refined leaf, basically. And the thing to watch for though is that they don't mix it up with a lot of other chemicals, that it's the concentrated version.

It's one ingredient, not 10 ingredients. Correct.

And another similar one would be monk fruit that is also very similar in the way it tastes and looks and so forth. It's super, super concentrated and it's also a plant extract.

So if you're going to add something to a coffee or a drink or something.

Correct.

Astevia monk fruit, you say, is okay in the right doses.

Yes. And then in the gray zone, I would also put sugar alcohols.

Interesting. Right.

Some of them are better than others. I think the best one would be erythritol because it is very slightly metabolized by the body, so it doesn't really affect blood sugar, but it doesn't really cause any other problems. Some of the other sugar alcohols, they sort of stay in the digestive tract for a while, and then those sugar alcohols become food for your intestinal bacteria, and that's where you get a lot of bloating.

Gotcha.

So I would say sugar alcohols are okay if you eat them in moderation. So this is always the trick in recommending food. When you make a list and people want to know the best one and so forth, and you categorize and rank them, and now they say, that is a good one, I'm just going to eat that. Or Dr. Ekberg said sugar alcohols are okay, so now I'm going to eat that every day. I'm going to bake with it, I'm going to buy the ice cream with it. And that's the thing, everything in moderation. So, sugar alcohols, if you eat a teaspoon or a tablespoon here and there, I think it's totally fine. But if you start baking with it and doing the ice cream and you start getting half a cup a day, now you're definitely gonna upset the biome a little bit.

Now, what matters based on your age range? You know, if someone's in their 20s versus I'm in my late 30s, almost 40, you're in your I believe 50s you said. Yeah. Does it matter based on how old you are of what you should be eating, how much you should be eating types of foods, or is it pretty consistent throughout the decades?

I would say it's pretty consistent throughout. And one analogy would be that, I mean, there's so many people, they say that women should fast this way and teenagers should fast this way and women over 40 or under 47. It's like we love to complicate things, right? But are there different foods on the savanna for one giraffe versus another?

An older giraffe and a younger giraffe?

Yeah.

Does the male and the female giraffe eat from different trees? It's like, not really.

What would you shy away from? What would you say, you know what, that's probably the worst thing for your brain, to have functionality and to to function longer and live longer with your brain health, what are the main foods you would absolutely never touch? You never give your family or your kids because you just feel like it's very harmful.

Processed foods.

Any processed foods?

Any processed foods.

No, we don't eat processed foods. I don't eat processed foods. I really try to stick to whole foods.

So does that include like, that's a cooking, pastries.

I was just thinking, oh my goodness, this is maybe not true. I do eat crackers occasionally. normally. But we really. I really don't eat a lot of processed foods, and they're mostly minimally processed. And my doctor really loves this peanut butter called banana bites. So I bought those, but I wouldn't call it a processed food. I mean, it's not fresh from the plant, but it's certainly not burgers or hot dogs or popcorn, and then it just. Frozen Pizza. I don't, don't eat that. I just never.

So what is the, what does processed foods do to brain health?

There is a lot of research showing that the standard American diet or the sad diet is really, really. Yeah, it's really, really bad news for, for your brain. And we have seen this many times using brain scans. We published this time and time again then. This may sound biased, but we were using a Mediterranean style pattern as an example of a healthy diet, which is what scientists would tell you. Most scientists really endorse a Mediterranean style diet as a brain healthy diet. We were comparing the brain scans of people on the Mediterranean diet to those of people of the same exact age education level on a Western diet or in a standard American diet, you could see the difference just by looking at the brains. So if you are, if you.

What do the brains look like on the Mediterranean diet versus the sad American processed diet? What is it? Just like it light up, it's lit up more, it's more rich looking. Uh, it's just fuller. What is the difference?

Yeah, the difference is that The brains of people on the Western diet look older. Just picture that in your mind if you can. The brain of a 50-year-old person on a Mediterranean-style diet looks very full. The brain is composed of three different parts, but mostly just two parts. There's brain and then there's fluid inside your head. You want to have as much brain as you can and as little fluid as you can. I mean, you want to have some fluid because it's protective, but not too much. you have more fluid and less brain. It means your brain is shrinking. Like you're losing neuron and fluid is taking over the space.

Oh my gosh.

If you compare the brain scans, you can tell that people on Western diets show brain shrinkage already in midlife. And that continues over time and worse than that. And we have published this. The Western diet is associated with the emergence of Alzheimer's plaques already in midlife. So people on Mediterranean diets are basically zero plaques, at least in our hands.

What do you mean by plaques? What does that mean?

Alzheimer's plaques. So Alzheimer's disease, which is the most common form of dementia in the population, is characterized by presence of these plaques inside the brain.

So it's plaque on your teeth, there'd be plaque in your brain.

Yeah, there are lesions inside the brain. that are considered the hallmark or the signature of Alzheimer's diseases. For a really, really long time, scientists, everybody thought that Alzheimer's was a disease of old age. And that's because the symptoms become evident when people are in their 70s.

But now people are getting them in their 50s, the plaque buildup.

That's right. So Alzheimer's disease starts with negative changes in the brain decades prior to anyone forgetting keys or forgetting names. That happens in midlife. And the very first signs that we can detect using brain scans are these plaques, these lesions that you can see building up inside your brain. And there's a very clear difference in the timeline for people in Western diet who developed the plaques earlier than people who follow healthier.

Wow.

So that's a really, that's a big flag.

Is there a way when, if you notice someone's brain scan is shrinking their brain, they're building some of these early stage plaques around their brain, they've got more fluid, less brain matter, is there a way to reverse that so your brain can actually grow and expand and become healthier and reverse Alzheimer's plaque? Is that possible?

So, well, that's the hope with the vaccinations that we're working on. So scientists have been working on developing vaccines for Alzheimer's disease for a really, really long time. The idea is that if you remove the plaques, your brain will stop deteriorating. But so far, all the clinical trials failed, which is- In removing the plaques? No, they've removed the plaques. But they do not reverse dementia or cognitive impairment or the atrophy. So that's disappointing in so many ways. I can't even begin to tell you. But that's another reason why the entire scientific community is now moving towards prevention. People say we're starting too late. We should start treating this when people are younger.

Right.

Not when they need it. It's like when you're.

It's preventative, you know, we want to, we want people not to get those plaques. I think that would be ideal.

So when you get, when you start to build up these plaques, what I'm hearing you say is you can remove the plaque potentially.

Yeah.

But you'll, you'll still cannot reverse dementia or Alzheimer. Are you able to reverse Alzheimer's? In some way, is that possible?

Depends on what you mean by reversing Alzheimer's. So there's Alzheimer's disease, which is the actual pathology, the lesions and plaques and tangles and a bunch of other things. And then there's dementia, which is the clinical syndrome with the symptoms. We can reverse Alzheimer's by removing the plaques. But the problem is that the symptoms don't go away.

Really? Before the interview continues, if you feel like you're not living your most authentic life, not leaning into your purpose and not living the life that your future self would be extremely proud of. I've written a new book called the Greatness Mindset and I think you're gonna love this. Through powerful stories, science-backed strategies and step-by-step guidance, the Greatness Mindset will help you overcome all the different challenges in your life to design the life of your dreams and then turn it into your reality. Make sure to click the link below in the description to get your copy today. Okay, let's get back to this video. So we were unable to reverse the symptoms of dementia currently. Is that right? Certainly. No one's had dementia and then reversed it.

Not in clinical trials.

Not in real life. Has someone done this that you're aware of?

I don't think so. I think it would know about it.

Is there a way to slow it down? Is there a way to slow this process down so it doesn't get worse? And it's kind of like a manageable symptoms where it's like, okay, I'm, you know, I'm forgetting or I'm losing memory, but it's not worse and worse and worse every day. Have we seen that?

Yeah.

So there are some medicines that we have. There are Alzheimer's drugs that slow down progression, like donepezil or Aricept, like the most common. Well, we only have four. Medications approved for Alzheimer's disease. We have acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, which are the most common. We have memantine for some cases. They do slow down progression, but they do not fix the problem.

Where is Alzheimer's the most prevalent in the world? Is it in the USA? Is it in Europe? Is it in what countries or regions of the world?

Yeah, the United States are quite on top. And then there are other countries as well, in Europe, some places in Asia. I think industrialized countries in general.

Experience.

Higher rates of dementia. And one thing that I would like to point out that is, again, it's my work, that Alzheimer's disease affects women more than men, or affects more women than men, to say more correctly.

Why is that?

One thing that people don't realize is that almost two-thirds of all Alzheimer's patients are women. So for every man suffering from Alzheimer's, there are two women. And that's one of the reasons that I started looking into Alzheimer's disease is that I have a family history of Alzheimer's disease that really affects the women in my family. So if you can't believe it, my grandmother was one of four siblings, three sisters and one brother. All three sisters developed Alzheimer's disease and died of it, whereas the brother was spared. So for me, that was terrifying for my mom as well. And I started asking questions. I was like, why does it matter? Is it just my family, number one, my screw?

Is it a gene that your parents have that then you're gonna have no matter what? Because I think that's a fear for a lot of people, like my grandfather had it, my dad's gonna have it, you know.

Yes, for a really long time, most people understood Alzheimer's disease as some kind of inevitable consequence of aging or bad genes in your DNA. But we now understand that no more than 2% of all Alzheimer's cases are genetically inherited. 2% at most have genetic- so you.

Could have five people in your family have it. and you are still have a 2% chance of getting it from them, the gene, is that right?

Well, this is in the whole population. I think if five people in your family have Alzheimer's disease, you want to get tested for genetic disease.

Now, is it because of the diets they've been eating? Is the reason why they're getting it? Or is it because they're going to get it no matter what?

Well, so for 2% of the population is genetically determined. For 98% of the population is multifactorial. So there are a number of factors that really matter, including your genetic background, not in a causative way, but more there are genes that give you blue eyes and genes that give you brown eyes, and there are some genes that negatively impact brain health and genes that are protective. So it's a combination of things. But then medical history is supremely important. Lifestyle is huge and environment, they really all matter. and what we have found is that hormonal aging, your hormones, are also incredibly important, especially for women. So it's what I was telling you. So for a really long time, people would say to me, women live longer than men. And Alzheimer's disease is a disease of old age. So obviously more women than men have Alzheimer's disease. But what we have shown is that, yes, women live a little bit longer than men, four and a half years. on average, four and a half years. But we tend to develop Alzheimer's disease at a younger age than men. And this is.

Why is that? Is you think that's more important?

It's menopause. Well, it's one of the reasons, at least the reasons that we are looking into much all the time at this point is menopause. And it's literally that during menopause, we lose the superpowers. of estrogen and the brain goes through quite a transition. You can see how brain energy levels literally change in women's brains. Connectivity changes, the white matter volume changes, blood flow changes, everything kind of changes. And for some women, it's just a phase. It's just a transition. The brain adjusts. There's a new baseline, there's a new normal. We move on.

It's a what a some women, we don't. How long does that transition take? Is it months? Is it years?

I don't know.

It's years. It's years.

So you might feel this brain fogginess for a couple of years and then it should balance out.

Yes. For some women, however, the symptoms of menopause don't go away. It may turn into something more serious, including a higher risk of Alzheimer's disease. So basically we start developing these Alzheimer's plaques, not all women, this is not universal. But some women, women with a predisposition to Alzheimer's disease, start developing these red flags for Alzheimer's disease in their 40s and 50s. So much earlier than we have thought before. And then, of course, think about this. So you're going through menopause, your brain is changing, and it really needs support. And you're eating poorly, you're not exercising, you're not sleeping, you have a ton of stress. those factors all really work together against you in a way. So I think it's really important for men and for women. I would say women really need to start thinking about that in midlife that our brain is like a muscle. There are things that we can do to make it stronger and more resilient. We can exercise it properly, we can feed it properly, we can take care of it properly, and your brain will perform so much better for you at any age. And men and women need to do slightly different things.

What are the two?

But not so slightly. So for example, for some women, we have a lot of patients who come to us, they learn so much more about their brains and the risk factors. And then some women will start taking hormones, hormonal replacement therapy. Is that good or bad? It's really case by case. Some women swear by it. Some women swear at it. They really hate it. It does not work. It doesn't help at all. For some women, it's a godsend. I think it's really important to have a conversation with a doctor, not just your menopause specialist, but I think also brain doctor. We're not there yet. We're not there yet. I now work at the intersection between neurology, neuroscience, and women's health, which is a very unusual space, a very interesting space, but it's also very challenging space. And I think my hope for the future is that we'll start looking at women as organisms, as a person, right? Not like you go to the endocrinologist to look at your thyroid, you know, you go to the OBGYN to look at your ovaries, then you have to go to a brain person to look at your brain. I believe in integrative medicine. I think that we're moving in that direction.

It's all connected. It's yeah. Yeah. Might be a problem here, but it's affecting something else, you know, it's all connected.

Yes. So I think that is really, really important. But however, hormonal replacement therapy really doesn't work for all women and there is no recommendation to use it for Alzheimer's prevention. Yet we're working on it. We're hoping that we'll find a good way to help integrate these therapies in a safe way. But, yeah, sorry, I just made this point. I would say that, you know, the point of hormonal replacement therapy is that you want to get women the estrogens that the body is no longer making. But where are these estrogens coming from? Because plants make estrogens. So estrogen is the most ancient of hormones. And that means that it can go across species. Plants make estrogens, animals make estrogens, women make estrogens. And estrogens from a plant, phytoestrogens, enter a woman's body. And if you consume these plant-based foods often enough, that's effectively a very gentle hormonal replacement therapy over time, which is one of the reasons that people think that a Mediterranean style diet that is more plant-centered is beneficial for women's health because women on this kind of diet have a much lower risk of a number of things from cardiovascular disease and stroke to depression, to Alzheimer's disease, dementia, and also they have fewer heart flashes that they don't suffer from menopause the way that so many American women do.

Now, I've heard from different scientists and nutritionists about meat being a complete protein and having like these nutrients, nutrient dense within the meat.

Yeah.

But I'm hearing you say that plant-based has just as many nutrients and proteins and antioxidants and all these other things. What are the benefits or the cons against eating quality meat, let's say, for brain function and brain health. Are there other things we should look out for if we do have a lot of meat or some meat in our diet?

It's a really interesting point. I think so many people right now are eating a lot of meat. There are a lot of diets out there that really support and encourage eating good quality meat, but quite a lot of meat. I would say the research points to plant-based diets as being healthier overall and more protective. I would say, yes, for the brain. But I think also in general, there aren't that many diet type recommendations that include a lot of meat. I think every person is different, but to your point, there's no need to eat meat to obtain complete protein. It's an easy way. It's definitely convenient for you if you're not an animal. It's a good way to obtain complete protein just in one small amount in a small portion of food. To obtain the same amount of protein from plant-based foods, you need to eat more of those. But there are some plant-based foods that are actually quite rich in protein, which are interesting like hemp seeds, complete protein, tempeh, complete protein, nutritional yeast, complete protein, and also a good source of vitamin B12. So I think it's a bit that fish is a good source of complete protein that's actually been linked time and time again with a lower risk of dementia by almost 70%.

If you could only eat five foods every single day for the rest of your life.

Oh my gosh.

To optimize brain health, brain functionality, longevity, support memory, all those things.

Yes.

What would those five foods be on a daily basis?

I would say you don't like berries, but they would definitely go for berries. because they're rich in fiber, they're low in sugars, and they provide really an enormous amount of antioxidants for a small serving size. And there's evidence that consuming two to three servings of berries per week really slows down cognitive decline in both men and women, and especially in women. So you might want to try some.

I got to start.

Which berries? Which two or three? the best.

Blackberries actually have more antioxidants than even blueberries. That's an interesting type of berry. They're not as easy to find as blueberries, but you can get them frozen and they're still quite intense.

If it's a modified blackberry where it's frozen, it's put in a smoothie and blended, in, you know, liquid form. Does that all still matter or do you need it?

No, I don't think.

Or is it doesn't matter? No.

I cooking. So cooking destroys vitamin C. Vitamin C, all the antioxidants are really easily damaged by heat. So freezing shouldn't reduce the entire capacity by too much. Obviously, I don't want them to be frozen for 10 years. I mean.

You know?

So we got blackberries, blueberries.

Blackberries are great. Goji berries. Goji berries are one of the most concentrated sources of vitamin C. There's a kind of plum that I. I haven't been able to find. It's a kakadu plum, which seems to be this. The most powerful concentrated source of vitamin C on the planet. I know they have been in Australia and Pacific Islands. I've never seen it here, but I would like to try it.

Okay, so we got berries. Number one.

What would be the second? Mulberries are really good. Anyway, berries.

Sorry. I'm still. I actually had mulberry tree in my backyard in Ohio growing up, and I would eat some mulberries every now and then.

So maybe I'll get back into mulberries. That could be nice.

You can also find them dry. Okay.

I'll dry. Dried mulberries work, too.

Yeah, they're very good.

They're very tasty.

You still.

You still have the nutrients when they're dried. Yes. yes, a little bit less than the fresh ones, but they're sweeter.

They're dry.

Okay. I grow them in the garden.

Yeah.

And those are high in antioxidants.

Those are high in antioxidants. Yeah, they're high in antioxidants.

Okay, great.

Awesome.

Okay, so we got berries is what you get.

The berries. Then I would go for dark leafy greens.

Okay.

Because they're really important. They contain a ton. phytonutrients, which are really good. You know, they have antioxidant, anti-inflammatory properties and a lot of fiber. And fiber is really important for a number of reasons. The most obvious being that it supports gut health, obviously, and 70% of the immune system is in the gut. So eating fiber also supports immunity, which especially now is a huge concern for everyone. But also fiber has a really important modulatory function on sex hormone binding globulin, which is what regulates flow of hormones inside the body. And so it really helps support hormonal health as well. So I would say two reasons to eat fiber and go for your leafy greens. And there's a ton of greens and we don't have to eat kale all the time. there are so many other varieties that are just spinach and arugula, all those.

Yeah.

All the lettuces, all the different microgreens. They're colored greens, if you like them, but also cruciferous vegetables like cauliflower. Now is the season. So cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, Romanesco. They're yummy. I'm sure you eat veggies.

I eat a lot of veggies. Yeah.

There you go.

Okay, so we got.

Those are the first two. Well, I, I would throw some polyunsaturated fatty acids there, that the omega-3s whether from fish. Do you fish?

Yeah.

Right.

So in that case, for those who do eat fish, then the smash fish. So salmon, mackerel, anchovies, sardines, herring, smash.

Smash fish. Yeah. All right.

So there's a really good source, very concentrated sources of DHA.

And if you didn't, and if you didn't get that from fish, what would be the substitute you would do plant-based?

Well, for me plant-based so omega-3 is from hemp seeds for sure. Flax seeds and flax oil, walnuts, almonds, chia seeds, and also seaweed. I don't know if you like seaweed.

I actually- I love seaweed.

I eat those little- the nori sheets.

Yeah, the little sheets. I can eat those for days.

I know. So good.

Yeah.

That's good for you then, huh?

Yes.

What was the things that you saw when you went to these blue zones that they did that maybe you weren't even thinking they would do? Like what were the surprising things they did? Or the unsurprising things?

Yeah, I mean, when I saw they were kind of striking to me. It made sense. But one was that in Korea, which was one of the Greek blue zones, they eat so much wild food. So they had wild greens, summer greens, winter greens, they had wild mushrooms, they had wild sage tea. They had wild fish, they had so much wild food in their diet. And we know that wild foods are much more nutrient dense. Why? Because they're stressed. And stressed plants make more protective compounds. Those protective compounds are called phytochemicals. They give the color and the richness and the flavor. What people don't understand is the more flavorful a food is naturally, the more phytochemicals it has.

Interesting.

You know, if you go to your garden at the end of August, and pick a cherry tomato that's ripe into the hot sun that explodes in your mouth like the most incredible flavor. But if you go to a store-bought tomato and you cut it, it's like cardboard tasteless. What's the difference? It's the phytochemicals. So flavor always follows the phytochemical richness of a food. So not the stuff you put on it, or sauces, or salt, or fat, or sugar to make it taste better, which food industry does, but just the natural flavor. So, you know, the more flavorful a food is, the better it is. It's wild, they eat a lot of wild food and it's so flavorful. The other thing that was interesting was that shepherds had this culture of going and knowing exactly which plants to feed their animals at which time of year to graze them. So it would shepherd them, they'd eat all these wild plants, but they knew if this herb was coming in at this time of year, they'd go eat this herb. And if this plant was coming in at this time of year, they'd go eat that thing. I'm like, why are you doing that? Because we know that because the meat and the milk tastes better when we, yeah. And so it kind of, you know, they were not doing it because it was better for them or because it was for longevity or because it tastes better. Right, the cheese, yeah, it tastes better. So it turns out that we know now that phytochemicals are not just in plants. And phyto means plant, right? They're not just in plants, they're also in animals. So the work of Fred Provenza and Stephen Ben Boulet from Duke have clearly shown that when animals are eating a wide array of wild plants or a wild array of, you know, planted grasses and flowers and different things, they will seek out medicine in the food. So they will literally go and eat major, like, you know, calorie crops, let's say, but then they'll go and sample from like a hundred different plants to get their medicines. And so these wild animals, these wild plants are being eaten and the phytochemicals are accumulating in the meat and the milk of these animals. So studies have shown, for example, that you can have as high levels of the catechins in green tea in goat milk that's from goats eating certain wild plants.

Yeah.

So it's mild, mind blowing. And there may be ways that even these get transmuted. So eating we're generally raised meat. I went to a restaurant here in LA last night called Matu, where they have regenerately raised meat.

Was it amazing?

It was amazing. Now it wasn't as like fatty and like kind of like marble like corn-fed meat, but it was delicious and it was tasty and yummy and amazing. What was this place called? Matu, M-A-T-U. I'll have to check it out. Really good, Beverly Hills. And it's, you'd love it. It's so good. And, you know, you can eat that and know you're eating from an animal that's been well taken care of, that's living out in its natural habitat. that's regenerating the environment, that's storing the ecosystems, increasing biodiversity, conserving water in the soils, that's reducing climate change, that's producing more nutrient dense food, rich in phytochemicals, good fats, and more antioxidants, and more minerals, and just pretty much everything. So it's incredible. So that was sort of a, I think a key part of their longevity was they lived on this stuff.

They basically were shepherds and goats and sheep were their livelihood. what was about their relationships? How did that play in? Did they have certain types of relationships with family members? Did they have intimate relationships? Were they married for long periods of time? Did they have.

Yeah.

Ten wives. You know, what was the whole.

One couple I saw had a, I had a collective age of 210.

It's crazy.

So I don't know. I think, you know, being married is, is definitely key to longevity for men. For women, not always, depends on if they're happy or not.

Oh man.

So I think having a happy, healthy relationship is such a key part of longevity. And they were very much in the realm of community. It wasn't just like this isolated relationship. They were embedded in a context of a community that was totally supportive, that celebrated together, that played together, that worked together, that harvested together, that shared sheep together, you know, made cheese together. They were just doing stuff together as part of the way of life. And so, and they would just stop and talk and hang out and like chill. And it was like, nobody was like starting a company or, you know, nobody was like, you know, getting ahead in social media for likes and followers. I mean, they were just, they were just living life. They weren't striving or trying to get anywhere. They were just being.

Interesting.

And so they, they're, culture was all about the power of these incredible moments where you share with people you love and care about and celebrate life and enjoy life and talk. We were driving out of this one town in Sardinia that had these two guides that were really great and they were local Sardinians. And this car stops in front of us and blocks us. And this old guy gets out, he walks over this stone wall and he waves us to come over and I'm like, what's going on here? and he just, the way it was over, he wanted to talk. He saw us in the car behind, he's like, he just wanted to talk. So we sat in the stone wall for like an hour or so and chit chatted about life and about his life. He was Carmen, he was 85 years old and super vibrant fit guy. And he started telling us about his life and how, you know, there was a mudslide that destroyed the village he grew up in, which they moved the town a little bit higher on the mountain. But he still had his farm on that old area. so he took us down, he had like six sheep and he had a pig and he had some chickens and he had orchards and he had a whole garden where he grew eggplants and peppers and tomatoes and zucchini and herbs and spices. It was amazing. He literally took care of this entire property by himself at 85 years old. I mean, I wouldn't- Crazy. I don't think I could do it. And I'm chasing this guy up this hill after his sheep and I'm like, I can't keep up with this guy. He's 85 years old. And so he was super vibrant. mentally sharp. You know, he's, he, you know, he lived with his, his family, and, and they just, they just had this incredibly deep culture. There wasn't nursing homes. I met Julia, who was a 103 months. You know, like, oh, my God, you say, I'm 100 and I'm five and three quarters. She's like, I'm 103 months. And she was like, you know, didn't have kids and lived with her niece and nephew who loved her and took care of her. And she was still working. She was still working, making all this stuff for weddings, all the little tablecloths and doilies and embroidery stuff. I don't know how to do that. She was making all this stuff and she was so bright and still was walking around every day and taking her walks and hanging out with everybody and her friends. And it was really amazing to see this culture where, you know, people were not ostracized or excluded, but, you know, they were included in life.

And it doesn't sound like they're hustling for something. They're working hard to maintain their life, like their home, their farm, their land, whatever they have, maybe their small business, but they're not hustling for something greater, is that right?

Yeah.

No.

Why can you live long and still hustle? Or just want more? Want to build something greater in your life?

I think you can. I think it's really about what happens on the inside. Because one of the biggest things that regulates your epigenome is your mind. So your biggest pharmacy in your body is between your ears. It's the most powerful pharmacy in the world. and you can activate it for good or bad. So when we are having thoughts that are, you know, stressful thoughts, when we're in toxic relationships, when we're worried or anxious, when we aren't in harmony with ourselves, it activates all these really nasty pathways that drive inflammation and harm your mitochondria. I mean, your microbiome is the listening in on your thoughts is eavesdropping. So, those bugs don't like it when you are not happy.

Really?

Yeah. What is the process of that from an idea, a thought into the mitochondria? How does that transfer into a healthy information, into a physical manifestation versus unhealthy information, data and a thought into physical unhealthy?

So, what's the biochemistry of it? Well, for example, If you're stressed, you're producing cortisol and adrenaline and all these other hormones and proteins that then will trigger a whole cascade of downstream effects that activate transcription factors, that transcription factors that turn on genes that cause inflammation and all these other problems. So you're basically creating inflammatory thoughts or creating inflammation in your body, literally. Isn't that crazy? And you have receptors on your immune cells. for example, for neurotransmitters. So if you're stressed, your immune system is eavesdropping on your thoughts. That's why if you're stressed, you are more likely to have an infection or get sick or have other bad health consequences.

Why do you think it is that our body is built this way that a thought can either make us feel and physically transform into joy and health or feel sick and then become sick? why do you think our body... Why.

From an evolutionary point of view?

Why do you think that is? Isn't that crazy? It's a crazy thing. You think something, it's not actually, it's in your mind.

Right? Where it, you know, it's like, and then it transfers into your body. Well, I think, I don't know, Louis, but I think, you know, we have a built-in stress response system, which we need it. Like if we're getting chased by a saber-toothed tiger, well, you know, we need to get on the move. And we need to like, Jack up our cortisol and pump our blood sugar up and get our blood pressure up and our heart rate up and flood our body with glucose and just all this stuff that needs to survive. It's like the story of how someone sees their kid under a car and can lift up a car. Why can that happen? Because we have a system built in to deal with acute stress. That's a good thing. The problem is we have a society and a life that drives chronic, unmitigated, unrelenting stress. Unless you are very clear about how to discharge that stress, because we can't avoid it, but how do you discharge it? How do you not react? And how do you have a different perception of relationship and what's happening to you? It's all about perception, right? So I always say stress is the perception of a real or imagined threat to your body. So it could be a real threat to your body, like a tiger chasing you, or it could be an imagined threat to your ego, like you think your wife's cheating on you, but she's not. And you get the same physiology. or you can have the same input. Let's say you're James Bond and I put a gun to your head versus Woody Allen. It's going to be a very different set of responses, right? Same input, very different response. So that's the beauty of our minds is we have the power over our thoughts. You remember Viktor Frankl who wrote Man's Search for Meaning? He said, Between stimulus and response, there's a pause. And in that pause lies a choice. And in that choice lies our freedom. For those of you who don't know about Viktor Frankl, he was an Auschwitz and he was a psychiatrist in Auschwitz and he chose not to let even the most horrific thing that's almost ever happened to human beings affect his own well-being and happiness and inner life. That just blows my mind. Unbelievable. So when you think, oh my life, this and that, we always have a choice, you know, and whether you have stuff or don't have stuff, it's all about our perception. so mindset and your thoughts are a key part of longevity and health and having meaning and purpose. That was the other thing in these cultures. They had so much meaning and purpose. Like Carmine had such purpose. He had to go and take care of his sheep and he had to feed his family and he wanted to support the other members of the community by giving them food and he fed his animals the extra and so he had a meaningful life and he also had a very active mind, was reading books and learning all the time. So, you know, that extends your life by up to seven years.

Wow. having meaning and purpose. Because you hear the story sometimes of like, you know, someone in their older years, their husband or their wife dies, and then within six months or a year later, they. They die.

Or a week later. Yeah. Or a week later.

Right.

You hear that story often.

All the time.

And is that because their meaning has lost or just more. They have a broken heart and they don't know how to.

Both. I mean, I mean, there actually is a phenomena of. of a broken heart. I had a patient with this once who had this incredible wife. They were deeply in love. They were married for decades and decades. She got breast cancer and died. And he was relatively healthy and all of a sudden he went into heart failure. Come on. Like boom. And it's in the medical literature. It's literally a broken heart and it causes actual clinical heart failure where your.

Heart muscle can't pump the blood around. Now, that's from, what is that from? Is that from thinking and then feeling the heart, the pain in your heart.

It's the physiological phenomena that happen when you have a stress response, the flood of all these stress molecules in your body that damages the heart. And we were able to get him better, but it was through energy healing, which sounds kind of wacky and weird, but it was really through his own getting back in his body, being touched, being held, being energetically reset.

Wow.

He was able to reverse the heart failure. It wasn't by taking some fancy drug.

Or getting a heart transplant. So, he didn't pass away from that. No, he didn't. But some people do. We fixed it. Yeah. But some people do.

They might isolate themselves even more and then their body just starts to shut down. Loneliness is the biggest killer.

Really?

Loneliness seems to be a bigger risk.

Factor than smoking or bad food or almost anything else.

What happens when we're lonely? Again, it's a stress. We're social creatures, Louis. are meant to belong. We have a longing to belong. And if you look at it from an evolutionary point of view, you stick a human out in the desert or a forest by himself, they're not going to last long. Forget it. And so this is not true just of humans, but it's all of creation. And E.O. Wilson, who was a Harvard professor, wrote many, many books. He just died, but he was a very, very thoughtful guy. And he wrote a book called the Social Conquest of the Earth. And it's about how from ants to humans, We all work together, like ant colonies, right? They're all working together. And so we have to work together to survive. And that's why altruism is actually a medicine. Altruism and serving and helping others actually activates healing mechanisms in our body. It activates dopamine in the same way that cocaine or heroin does.

How many calories should we be eating a day?

What's like a healthy range? You know what's funny about this? Your body is actually pretty good at telling you how much to eat. The problem is, we eat, I know your people watching right now are probably like, what are you talking about? That's not true. It is. The problem is we eat foods, about 70% of our diets are made up of foods that have been engineered, carefully engineered to make us overeat. And there's a lot of money and science that goes into doing this. Ultra processed foods are very powerful at.

Making us overeat snack foods with salt.

And sugar and yeah, Just a combination of things that, I mean, everything from the texture to the mouth feel.

Tastes so good.

Yes. Just how it affects your body. So they've done some really good studies on this. They've done studies where they'll take groups of people in, in not too many controlled studies in, in diet. So these are really good. They actually put them in a lab and they say, you guys over here, eat as much as you want. You guys over here, eat as much as you want. This group over here has whole natural foods. This group over here has ultra processed foods and they even control for the macro. So proteins, fats, and carbs are pretty similar. then they take the groups and they switch them. On average, and now we have multiple studies to show this, people will eat about 600 more calories a day from eating ultra processed foods. So to give another example, if I were to put five or six plain boiled potatoes, no salt, no butter, nothing, just plain boiled potatoes in front of you, and I told you to eat them in 30 minutes, it'd be really hard for you. After the second or third potato, you'd be gagging. You'd hit palate- Potatoes? Yes, just plain.

Right?

But if they gave you a family-sized bag of potato chips, which has, of.

Course, the whole bag with like 2,000.

Calories or something, which has similar amounts of food in it, actually more calories because of the oil, you'd be able to eat them. That's the power of ultra-processed foods and how palatable they are. So, I used to do this with my clients, simply telling people the following, eat as much as you want, just avoid ultra-processed foods. You would typically see a 10 to 15 pound weight loss.

Just from that. If you're eating whole foods, there's only.

So much you can eat.

You hit palate fatigue faster. It's far more satiating. You just eat more appropriately. Our bodies, there's this myth that we're wired to overeat. We're just wired to just eat like crazy and just become obese. That's not true. We're not wired to do that. Overeating was just as bad for us thousands of years ago as it was today. I mean, you could have digestive issues.

You could have died from that.

Our bodies are pretty good at regulating. This is more complex than what I'm saying, but these particular foods make you overeat. Simply avoiding them and even telling yourself, I'll eat as much as I want fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, meats, foods that have one or two ingredients, right? You'll find that your average calorie intake will probably decrease by about 5 to 600, some people even more.

A day.

A day.

Wow.

On average.

And that's where you lose weight. That's it.

And then if you want to take it even a step further, if you add to that, here's a couple behavioral things that you could do that make that even more effective. Whole natural foods, I'm not going to limit myself. And I like saying this because when we're in the mindset of limiting ourselves, it plays a lot of tricks on us and it's really hard. So don't limit yourself to see all natural foods. And then here's the second one. Don't eat while distracted. In other words, when you eat, don't be on your phone. don't watch TV, just sit down and eat your meal. Why? That results in about 10% reduction in caloric intake just from doing that alone. Why is that? We're not in tune with our body's signals of satiety.

We're not focused and present on the food. Correct. So we're distracted and we just keep.

Eating and eating and eating. Yes, we actually eat faster doing it that way as well. So what happens is the signal of satiety doesn't get registered quite as quickly when we're distracted. Also, Being distracted could cause emotional changes, stress, anxiety, whatever, which also can create bad relationships with nutrition. One of the worst things you could do is eat while watching stressful news or something like that.

You're going to eat more, you'll be stressed out.

Absolutely, right? So that's the second one. And they sound so simple, but they make such a huge impact on people. A third one you could do even, and this is another really easy one, is when you eat your meals, eat the protein first.

Over the vegetables? Everything.

Just eat the protein first, then eat everything else.

Why is that?

Protein is in comparison to carbohydrates and fats, very satiating. So it produces a lot of satiety, right? It satisfies you. And the second reason is, and we now have what are called CGMs, right? Continual glucose monitors. The data on them is coming back and it's pretty clear that if you eat protein first, the spike in blood sugar. Yeah, it's blunted. Now, why is that important? A spike and then subsequent drop in blood sugar tends to promote cravings. It tends to make us want to eat more to get that blood sugar back up. So, eating the protein first tends to result in through satiety and through the blunting effects of blood sugar tends to produce better satiety and make us eat less. So, those are three things right there, Louis, that if people just did those three things, and didn't say to themselves, I gotta restrict, I gotta cut, I gotta whatever, they would find over time that they would just start to lose weight and they would eat more appropriately.

Wow.

That's not working out more, that's not moving your body more, that's just through nutritional eating.

Yes. And to speak about moving more, the burning calories approach to weight loss is a losing total losing strategy. Oh yeah, the data on that's very clear. burning calories manually, our bodies do a terrific job of adapting and of storing fat, you're saying, and slowing down its calorie burn. We have a range within our current lean body mass, okay? We have a range of calories our bodies can burn. So there's like more efficient, less efficient. And burning calories manually, at first your body's burning more calories, but eventually your body knows how to make up for that and make you burn less calories. So the studies on Tons of exercise for weight loss are pretty clear. It's a terrible approach. Really? Now, it's not to say you don't get health benefits from moving more. You still get health benefits, but from a weight loss perspective, it's a terrible strategy. Now, there are some forms of exercise, one in particular, that can boost metabolic rate.

What's that?

Strength training. Lifting, yeah. Strength training is very effective. There was a study done with modern hunter-gatherers, the Hadza tribe of northern Tanzania. So, they live the way that humans lived thousands of years ago, right? So they don't have electronics, they hunt, they gather, in comparison to the average Westerner, they're very active. Scientists went and studied them and through some pretty sophisticated testing, tested their metabolic rates. How many calories are they burning every single day? And what they found was they were burning generally the same amount of calories as the average Western couch potato. Really? Yeah. And now you think at first, oh, that's crazy. They're moving so much. But actually it makes sense. Our bodies would not have, if we burned 6,000 calories a day as Hunter-Gatherers, we wouldn't be here. 6,000 calories in a Hunter-Gatherer society is hard to come by. So our bodies learn to adapt. Now strength training, on the other hand, tends to have a different effect. The main adaptation with strength training is to build muscle, the side effect of which is, and if you feel it, you have to also feed your body appropriately to do this. but if you feed your body properly and strength train, the tendency is for the metabolism to boost or to go up. So, you can see through this process, and I've done this many, many times with people, where they'll come and hire me, we'll lose 30 pounds and we can eat more at the end of this process than we did before the process.

More calories or just more food?

All of it.

Yeah.

Which...

They lose fat.

Oh, yeah, they're leaner. They're leaner, they have a little bit more lean body mass, five to 10 pounds, depending on male or female, but they're burning more calories than they went into. Now, why is this important? Well, it's a great buffer. If you have a fast metabolism today, this is a wonderful buffer against the challenges of modern living, which is sedentary and food everywhere, super accessible. So fast metabolism today is an asset, whereas 10,000 years ago it might have been a liability. So, strength training does that. Now, strength training doesn't burn as many calories as running, but remember I said that really doesn't make a big difference because your body learns to adapt to that anyway. But the strength training does contribute to a faster metabolism over time or at the very least help prevent or mitigate the metabolic adaptation or slow down that tends to happen when we reduce calories to lose weight. And then there's more to that. because of the muscle building process, you see the balancing of hormones that we're all kind of looking for. Like in men, you see more testosterone, higher androgen receptor density. This is what testosterone attaches to. You see more appropriate levels of cortisol, a balancing of estrogen and progesterone. In women, growth hormone tends to be more youthful because when I tell my body to build muscle, my body organizes its hormones. in a way to do so. And the hormone profile that contributes to muscle building just so happens to be the youthful hormone profile that we're looking for.

Interesting.

So I tend to, when I recommend exercise to people, average person who I know, like, okay, maybe we'll get them to do this two days a week, you know, if we do a good job, I tell them, if you're gonna pick just one form, do strength training. That's gonna be the most effective one. And then if you add something else, then it'd be great if you added.

Some cardiovascular and some mobility or flexibility training. Wow. So if you can only choose one, strength training or cardio, you're saying strength training all day.

100%. 100%.

Building muscle. Yeah.

It's far more protective. It's going to boost your metabolism, which will make being obese harder. It balances out your hormones better. Muscle sticks around longer than the calorie burning effects of whatever you're getting from the form of exercise. Once you stop your workout, there's the calorie burn, which like I said earlier, your body adapts to anyway. but when you build muscle, it sticks around for a little while before you start to lose it and you develop something called muscle memory, which I know you understand as an athlete, right? If you have you ever broken a bone or anything like that? Okay. You know, you take the cast off, muscle super or your arms. But very quickly it bounces back. There's something called muscle memory. So if you build muscle and let's say you stop for whatever reason exercising and then you go back to working out, you'll gain that muscle back in a small fraction of the time. So it's a more, for lack of a better term, because there's no permanence when it comes to this, but it's a more permanent form of results or fitness, which just so happens to fit perfectly with the challenges of modern life. When you look at the average person and you're saying, okay, what are the challenges that are preventing them from being healthier? It's, okay, I'm surrounded by tons of food. I'm inactive. Is there something that can protect me against inactivity, which muscle does very well? Hormone imbalance is now a rampant. And, there's gonna be times when even the most consistent average person, not fitness fanatic, is gonna not work out for a month or two. Is there something that'll help them bounce back faster? Strength training just tends to do that.

What about training where it's half strength training and half cardio? It's like an orange theory or Something like this where you're doing like 20-30 minutes of lifting, kind of like in between different sets, maybe not to failure or fatigue, but intense, you know, lifting and then some 2-3 miles of running with intervals. What does that do for the body, for weight loss, for metabolism?

Yeah, so I want to be clear, all forms of exercise so long as they're applied appropriately are going to benefit you. So all forms of exercise have benefit so long as they're not overdone or inappropriate. for the individual. So that being said, strength training needs to be, in order to reap the real benefits of strength training, it has to be applied in a particular way. Otherwise it ends up becoming cardio with weights. So if I did it like a bunch of circuits, even though I'm doing curls and presses and rows, really what I'm doing is just a lot of cardio. I'm just using weights. Okay. So if you really want to reap the benefits of strength training, you want to train in the way that builds strength and muscle. Now, I do want to be careful because I'm probably invoking images of bodybuilders with veins coming out of their neck and they're, you mentioned it, right? Intensity, failure, lifting, whatever. That's not what most people need to do, okay? Most people would derive tremendous benefits if they went to the gym and strength trained and they did traditional, do a set, rest for a minute, do a set, rest for a minute. But the way that they did their set was practice. So the exercise as a skill, that's what we're going to look at. So rather than I'm going to go in here to beat up my legs, I'm gonna go practice squats rather than I'm gonna go hammer my shoulders, I'm gonna practice overhead presses. This tends to lead to more appropriate applications of exercise and you see a more consistent, you know, strength gains, more consistent muscle gains and far less, far less risk injury. So intensity, although it's an important factor to manipulate, people over apply it. They think that you got a failure on everything. Yeah, no, no, no, no. That's not the case. Like I said earlier, you need to have more energy at the end of your workout and you probably shouldn't feel sore or if you do feel a little sore the day after. And so for most people, that's just like go in and get really good and practice these exercises that we know to be very effective. squatting, you're deadlifting, you're rowing, you're pressing, you know, maybe some kind of a split stance exercise, like a lunge, some kind of rotation, and just practice them and get good at them. And naturally over time, people will apply more intensity, add more load, and they'll see the results that come from that. But that's a very, very, it's a much more effective long-term approach versus the.

Go to the gym, beat myself up attitude. Yeah. What about, I'm sure you've answered this. I don't know, a thousand times, but you know, belly fat seems to be the thing a lot of people want to eliminate, right? Is there a formula for eliminating belly fat?

Yeah, so.

Or can you do it lots of different ways or what's the best approach to doing it?

Yeah, so for the most part, where we store or lose body fat is determined by our genetics. So a good rule of thumb is the first place that I store it is probably going to be the last place that I lose it. Now that being said, Hormonal changes can change the distribution of body fat on your body. So if you see like women with very, very high cortisol, estrogen, progesterone imbalances, they'll start to notice more belly fat than they normally would. Men who's let's say testosterone is low, estrogen levels may be too high, they'll see more body fat level, more body fat storage and maybe the upper body, back of the arms, maybe in the lower body. so you'll start to see different patterns. But that's really a small percentage of where we tend to store body fat. It's largely determined by genetics. So the question is, how do I get rid of body fat? It's the same way that you get rid of any body fat. You have to create an energy imbalance, which to put it simply, and again, it's more complex than this, but to put it simply, you have to be able to burn more calories than you take in. And there's, and we already talked about some of the effective ways of that, but if you can burn more than you take in, then you'll see body fat loss as a result. And building muscle is a great way to make that formula work for you. Because if you don't, what ends up happening is you cut calories, you do tons and tons of cardio, you cut calories, you lose 15 pounds, you're stuck. Okay, I guess I cut calories more. And you lose muscle too.

Well, that's what happens, right?

Your body's adapting. so you end up losing some muscle. So now you got to cut even more to lose that next 10 pounds. And then at the end of it, it's like, okay, I'm eating 1300 calories a day to maintain this 25 pound weight loss. This is unsustainable, and then you gain it back. So what you want to do is you want to say, okay, I definitely want to eat healthier, but not so little that I can't fuel muscle growth. And I want to strength train so that I can get my metabolism to learn how to burn more calories on its own. And then the process looks more like a snowball effect rather than this. quick plat, you know, weight loss with Plateau. So you start to see the scale move a little bit, and then it happens faster and faster and faster, and then you feel better. And, you know, I like to communicate this as well, which is especially to women. Muscle is a lot more dense than body fat, so don't get too obsessed with the scale. You know, if I could have everybody watching this lose 10 pounds of body fat and gain 10 pounds of muscle, their weight on the scale wouldn't change. But everybody would be smaller.

And their body composition would look a lot better too.

Oh, you're gonna look different, but you're gonna be smaller 'cause body fat just takes up more space. I used to have this trainer that worked for me. I used to love this. This was a great sales technique when I was a general manager. I'd have, if I had a new member, especially a woman who was apprehensive to lifting weights, I would invite this trainer that worked for me and I'd say, if you could guess her body weight within 10 pounds, I'll give you a free membership for a month.

Wow.

And they would look, and she was very petite. She was like 5'1 or whatever. And they would always guess, like, oh, she's 100 pounds. She's 110 pounds. And I'd get her on the scale, and she was 130 pounds. And I, it would prove my point. Like, she has a lot of muscle, but she's small because muscle is very dense. And then I'd have her explain to the potential member, tell them what you ate for breakfast. And they'd be, oh, my God, you eat so much.

Like, she's burning it off because she's got that muscle. But for people that don't have that type of discipline, how can they be consistent on the nutritional intake over a lifetime and make it their lifestyle and not just a diet?

Yeah, I mean, it's such a basic, good question that people always want to bring it back to, like, tracking and things like that. And I think that that doesn't, that that works. Tracking works. But you're talking about it at deeper level, right? Because I experienced the same thing. I can have the most steadfast meditator monk that I'm talking to and they will still battle with this, right?

Really?

And it's some to the point where we have so much things, so many things that are just available at our fingertips that are just...

Temptations.

Not in alignment with how we've continued to evolve as, you know, it's like we just, Technology and food production and the food industry is growing at an exponentially faster rate than how we are changing. So we have these things that are available that just simply shouldn't and outside of putting yourself in a locker and away from these foods, total echo chamber, you are fighting temptation all the time. And we have to recognize that there's only so much power in your prefrontal cortex. There's only so much willpower. It's a fire finite resource. So with that, you have to kind of change your way of thinking. And the way that, like, this occurred to me, like, three years ago or so, when I had, I had a really, really bad, like, situs infection. And I've always had them kind of recurring situs infections ever since I was little. But I had one that was really bad, and I couldn't taste or smell for, like, two months.

Right.

And that was something where I realized, like, why am I still craving these certain Foods? I can't even taste them.

Right.

And it was like this aha moment where I'm this is clearly a mental thing because something sweet hits your taste buds. It's not just the taste of it, it's what it's doing in the brain. So changing your relationship with food, changing your relationship with struggle has been a very big thing, right? So for me, I always had this kinesthetic awareness thing with my workouts, right? With those workouts, it was like if I inflicted pain upon myself and it was positive pain for a workout, I could flip this kinesthetic switch that was like, I called it my pain switch and I would flip that pain switch and you know as an athlete, that's sometimes just what you do and it happens inadvertently. Sometimes you visualize it, but visualization is huge. So for me, I visualize flipping the pain switch. The switch is off, I can now push it harder and push it past my normal aerobic capacity, anaerobic, whatever. I realized why can't I apply that same thing to nutrition without becoming robotic but becoming very, very aware. And so I've changed my relationship with how food makes me feel. And that's taken a lot of work.

What do you say to yourself? What's the conversation, the inner dialogue, the mental strategy you use to do that?

As simple as it sounds, whenever I would eat something for about two or three months, I would simply say, food is fuel. Food is fuel. And that sounds very, because you don't want to take the fun out of it. I still love food, right? So when you do that, but you have to train yourself to believe that, okay, if I'm eating this sugar, that's okay, but remember it's fuel and I should use it. Or if I'm, and that's the thing here.

So if I want to eat it.

Make sure I move my body, go.

For a 10-minute walk, walk up the.

Stairs, move it a little bit, just get it out. When you change the relationship with food, you're not abstaining, you're changing the reaction.

And I should never have a bucket of ice cream and then just sit around.

It's just the thing, right? It's like, if you're gonna do it, Eat it in the morning, eat it for breakfast, whatever.

And then go move all day.

Exactly. So that relationship, I mean, it gets much bigger than that, right? But that relationship with food is everything and so many of us have a distorted relationship with food. And for me being, I've been on opposite ends of sort of the spectrum, right? Like when I was younger, I was practically, you know, as a runner, I was practically eating disorder category the other direction. Like I have to be as light as oh, I don't want to eat that. I don't want to get fat. And then it kind of went the other way where it was almost like masochistic where I'm just like, I don't care. I'm fat already. Let's just go all in. Go all in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, now it's kind of like fine a little bit of that middle ground, but the pendulum is probably swings much more towards how I was when I was younger. Gotta stay lean, gotta say this. But I also have recognized that my food, food is still reward. And we are constantly told that food shouldn't be treated as a reward. Don't reward your kids with food.

Food.

I call on that. The reason is, is because food has always been a reward, right? It's always been a reward for you.

You get the hunt and you get the food. Yeah. You go gather, you get the food.

It's simple, right? It's what you have to do is you just have to once again change the relationship with the feelings attached to food. Recognize that those feelings are there, but do something with them rather than just let them be and consume you. if I am going to go and eat that ice cream, then I'm aware of what that's doing in my body and I'm not going to let that turn me the other direction and get depressed and go eat more. I'm going to say, you know what? This is an opportunity, an opportunity to move more, an opportunity to move tomorrow. And that's not having this transactional relationship again, because what you don't want to do is say, I'm going to eat some pie and now I'm going to punish myself by going on the treadmill. That's the exact wrong thing to do, right? But you do say, okay, I'm gonna eat this pie. Great, I've got full glycogen tanks. I'm gonna go work out. I'm gonna get the best workout of my life. Having kids has really made this apparent because kids are constantly, I want a snack. I want a snack. It's like they have five stomachs. I don't understand it. And how do you, if they're reaching for a LaraBar or something that I would still consider healthy but has a decent amount of sugar from dates and stuff, right? Kids just crave these things. how do I teach them that you, yeah, you can eat that, but we should really get out and move. And it's kind of like how I translate it to them is, hey, it's fun to feel good. It's fun to feel good, right? Like you've got this energy from that bar. Doesn't that feel good? Like, let's get out and let's use that energy. Let's go have fun. And now it's to the point where my kids are like, can I have a larabar? I want to go outside and play. I'm like, this is awesome.

Let's go.

Without actually like molding them in any weird way. I've helped them light a spark to understand that when they eat this and at a young subconscious level in their brain, it's probably forming something that's beyond what we even know in research where maybe they taste something sweet and now they naturally want to move versus saying like, oh, shame, guilt, I shouldn't have eaten this, it's terrible. No, we're gonna go have fun, we're gonna play. But I teach them that with not just sugar, I teach them that with fats too, because I think it's also fundamental to learn that all food is fuel. But be in touch with how it makes you feel. So how I retain that discipline, it's the exact same way. It's like, how do I feel? What do I feel after I eat this? Did I feel crappy? Okay, well then that's probably a pretty good articulation of what that's doing in my body. And with that, it's really turned into this intuitive eating. I guess, I mean, it's a great segue to talk about how fasting has worked, right? Because fasting has allowed me to have more flexibility with my diet in the confines of still like appropriate discipline because I can flip that switch on and.

Off a lot easier.

Fasting. Not fasting, fasting, not fasting.

And you're one of the, there's a few things I want to talk about here before I get into fasting. One is the mantra, it sounds like you had the mental switch, the mantra, of food is fuel. So is that something you would think about right before you're making a decision of what to eat?

No.

Usually while eating it.

While eating it.

So it wasn't helping you make a.

Decision of like, okay, here's a candy bar. Am I gonna decide this is, is this gonna help me and fuel me in a positive way or a negative fuel?

That's too willpower-y. That takes too much energy.

So you would still eat the candy bar if you needed or if you did?

While I, while, yes. Granted, this was happening three, three and a half years ago, so candy bars weren't really in the equation anymore. But that being said... Because of an apple or whatever. Or something. Yeah, or something. Because I would still crave fruit or whatever. But yes, exactly. It's like while I'm consuming it, it's like really trying to teach my body and understand this visualization. You know the power of visualization, obviously, just yourself and the guests you've had on. It's like that visualization with eating something.

Can be just as powerful. So you would say this as you're having a bite of the apple or whatever it might be, you'd be having an internal conversation, food is fuel, and then having a positive relationship with something that might be looked at as negative before. Is that what I'm hearing you say? Precisely. Yep. And training your body to appreciate the food and to say, okay, I'm going to go act and move my body after I eat this and it's going to help me, it's not going to hurt me, and I don't need to be ashamed about eating this? Is that kind of the process? Because a lot of people that eat something and they feel good because it tastes good and then they feel shameful. And that doesn't help them because then they have more of that to have the good feeling and then feel shame again. And the cycle continues.

Because what is happening here is much different than what's happening here. And in our world, we get this instant gratification from food, especially the translation of I see a direct correlation with my time scrolling social media and my addiction to my phone, direct line item correlation to how much I crave snacking and things like that. It's the same firing, you know, right? It's like that same dopamine itch that needs to be scratched. And just in the same way I get addicted to looking at my phone or checking my email, that usually correlates with how much my addiction to food is at that point in time. But like you don't just say like, I am going to resist the urge to check my email. I'm going to resist the urge to check my email. Sometimes it takes, what is the response? A lot of times you'll check your email first thing in the morning, you'll get a negative email and it hits you then. You're like, this is how I'm starting my day? This is what I'm going to do? Screw that and that's your catalyst. But with food, you eat a Snickers bar and it feels so good up here. You feel like you're doing the right thing. It's amazing. Everything is telling you in that immediate moment that this was a good decision, Louis. Like, you did the right thing.

And your belly afterwards is like, oh, why is it digesting weird?

And now I feel like lethargic and yeah. And you go out and you move and you try to do something with it and yeah, you're gonna have some fuel but you're gonna be like, you know what? It's crazy enough that didn't feel as good as when I had that apple.

And you start creating this internal like checks and balances. How important is fruit in this factor? Or does fruit have too much sugar spiking, which I've heard from some nutritionists over the last couple years that I've interviewed, where you take a handful of grapes and the glucose monitor spikes through the roof. Is that really healthy for metabolism and living longer? Or how do we manage our fruit intake so that it's not too much?

All right. There's a kind of a myth out there that the sweet fruits, the sugar in fruits actually are just as bad as sugar in candy. All right? And that's not necessarily the case. First, candy is just sugar and other stuff. Fruits are nutrient dense, which means that not only does it have sugar, but it's got all these other polyphenols and dietary fiber and other aspects, small molecules and other things, other natural chemicals are actually good for our body. Most of those net-net actually benefit us. For the average person who eats reasonable amounts of fruit, even a sweet fruit like a mango, which is one of the sweetest fruits that I know of, totally fine. When you eat it, it'll taste really sweet. or pomegranates, for example, your blood sugar will spike, but I want to come back to that in a second. But you're also getting all these other polyphenols that actually will work on different parts of your body, including your metabolism, to benefit you. And by the way, our body needs sugar. Our brain consumes sugar like crazy, even outside of the diet, outside of candy. And so we actually need actual sugar. If we don't have it, our body will make it. Alright, so this is the whole thing. You know, in the wellness space and health and wellness space, there's sort of two categories that people veer towards. They tend to make something a hero or a demon. Alright? And I think that's really the goddess in the details. We need to know these details and that actually allows us to be more reasonable. And so for me, eating fruit Food is perfectly reasonable if you don't have diabetes and okay, spiking sugar, sugar spikes. All right? If you're an average normal person, no problem. Your body is fully capable, you know, spiking sugar is kind of like character assassination of the food. It actually doesn't matter. Your body is supposed to have a sugar spike and then it'll actually take it down. It's just drawing energy into your cells. What I tell people is like, a spiking sugar is basically like what happens in your car when you're filling it with gas. Gas tank's gonna go up, all right? But then you're gonna burn it down and your body actually stores it. So I wouldn't get wigged out about, you know, people that are monitoring like moment to moment their sugar spikes. That's interesting, but it's less important than overall what actually happens. If your body's unable to take down.

That sugar, that's a problem.

That's a problem. The spike isn't the problem. It's the long tail of your body's not, if your insulin's not working, you're not sensitive to insulin, or if your metabolism is not working, you can't take that energy in. Now you got a problem. Yeah.

How do we maximize our metabolism to take in the sugar spikes of life?

That's a good question. The way to actually do it, honestly.

Is.

Not only what we eat, which matters a lot, but how we eat and when we eat. So you know that, okay, let me give you the analogy. And this will actually get a little bit into the topic of intermittent fasting, which we'll talk a lot about. I like to explain metabolism in a very, very simple way. Our body is just like a car. When you're driving your car, you got an engine. You check out the fuel tank. When the fuel tank is running low, pull over to the filling station, take out the nozzle, fill up the tank. All right? When the tank is full, click, nozzle stops putting gas in, put it back, get back in the car, and drive off. And your gas tank is full. Our body is the same way. Our body is an engine. It runs, okay? And when we're low on fuel, all right? And fuel for us comes from our food. What we got to do is pull over, to the dinner table or to the restaurant or to the refrigerator in order to load up on fuel. Now, our fuel comes from food and we call it calories. But I tell people, don't get fixated on the word calories. You don't need to count every calorie you actually have. The quality of the fuel matters. For sure. We talked about that a little bit. So you do want the highest quality of fuel that you can put in your body. Just like if you actually put crappy fuel in your gas tank. You know, your car's gonna run, but eventually over 10 years, five years, 10 years, you're gonna be screwing that engine. Your car's not gonna run as well as if you took care of it. That's kind of like the analogy for our body. All right, so how do you actually maximize your metabolism? Our metabolism is how our body takes the fuel, the food, energy from food, moves it in ourselves, and then allows our engine to powered up to do whatever it is we're doing. Blinking, speaking, jogging, running, lifting, whatever it is you're doing, all right? That's what our metabolism actually is. Now, we put food in your mouth, that's fuel. Your body senses the fuel, produces the hormone insulin. Insulin actually takes that fuel in, right? If you put it into your fuel tank, your fuel tank, your body's going to run on it, but then any extra goes into your little fat cells, your fuel tank, your gas tank, no big deal. And the little gas tank gets a little bit bigger because it's filled with fuel, all right? And then when you stop eating and the fuel gets loaded up, the insulin levels will go down, all right? And then you're off. You're driving away from the filling station. That's simple. All right? Now, our body is rigged so that when we are putting fuel into our system, eating, all right? It's like putting gas into our tank of our car. You can't burn the fuel. It doesn't want to burn the fuel.

When you eat, it doesn't want to burn it.

Right, right. Because it makes sense. You want to actually load up, not deplete. You're storing up, all right? And that's like your car in the filling station. You turn off your engine when you're filling up your tank, all right?

Rest.

Rest. And then when you're filling up, Filled up, then you can drive off again.

So we shouldn't be moving while we're fueling.

Shouldn't be. Shouldn't be. You can, but you shouldn't be. It's an override, right? So we can override that stuff, but you shouldn't be. So you're asking about how to optimize it.

Yes.

How do you take advantage of what your body's hardwired to do? Now, think about it. When you're at the gas station, you're filling gas in your tank. When the tank is full, there's a click, no more fuel comes out. Imagine what would happen if There was no click. The tank would fill up, it would come out of the tank, overflow down the side of the car, around the wheels, pool around your feet, and you were standing in a dangerous, flammable mess, right?

Yes.

Now, when we eat food, we don't have a clicker to stop us from putting food in our mouth. Okay?

We should.

We should, but we don't, all right? And so what happens is when we actually overeat, Eat too much. So this is the how. Eat too much, what winds up happening is we're putting a ton of fuel into our system. Now there's no leaking of the food out. It won't pull down around our feet. Our body quickly stuffs it. So it has all the energy it needs. It stuffs some excess into the existing fat cells. Existing fat cells get bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger. All right. Oops, now you fill them up. They're like tight water balloons about as big as they'll get. Now the body still got fuel to store, what does it do? It makes more fat cells. Ah. And now it fills those up and then makes more, fills those up. Now you can see why when you overeat, you have too much fuel, you gain weight and you develop too much body fat. Now what happens that fat grows bigger and bigger and bigger over time. It's a big, it goes from a little bit to a bigger mass, it needs a blood supply.

Mmm.

Okay. So it actually reaches out to try to grab more blood vessels to feed it. But if you're overeating and the fat is expanding so fast because you're just storing fuel and it's not able to get blood vessels faster or blood supply faster, guess what? The middle of it starts to die. It's called hypoxia. And that middle of the fat behaves like a tumor. It starts to die and when it dies, it becomes inflammatory. This is why when you have too much body fat, it becomes an inflammant, dangerous inflammatory situation, just like if you were standing in that filling station with the gas over bloating spilling out over on your feet.

And what happens when the body stores too much body fat and we have that much inflammation in the body fat?

Yeah, well, first is it derails your metabolism. All the hormone, natural hormones, we should talk about what fat normally does. because that's another big myth that has been, you know, that science has actually started to help us rethink what body fat actually is. But basically our body fat normally protects us, it's a cushion, it's a space heater, it will burn extra energy, but it also is an organ in the body. I don't know if people don't realize that.

Fat is an organ.

Fat is an organ. Like your pancreas, like your liver, like your kidneys, your fat is now really truly it's an endocrine organ, which means that it secretes hormones. The three hormones, it secretes 13 hormones that we know of, but the three that are most important. One is leptin, which basically is a volume switch to your brain for your appetite. When your fat makes leptin, it tells you, you know what? Slow down there. Hey, buddy, you're not that hungry. All right, so it turns it down. So the volume goes down.

So you need that. I got more of that. I need more of that to turn.

It down for me. The other hormone it makes is called adiponectin. Now, many people won't have heard of, some people might have heard leptin. They may not know adiponectin. Adiponectin is the hormone that if I were to take a vial of blood from you and measure it in a lab is 1,000 times higher in level than any other hormone in your body, 24/7. And the reason is adiponectin allows insulin to pull energy into your cells. So you need that. And your fat, healthy fat, makes adiponectin. And so these three leptin, adiponectin resistant, they're made by normal healthy fat. So what happens when fat overgrows and it becomes inflammatory? All of those hormones go haywire. They're not behaving the way they should be having. You're not pulling in an energy, all right? You're not actually absorbing it, you're not absorbing energy. your hunger mechanisms are not working right. You're overeating, all right? And then you can't stop your ability.

To.

Sort of trigger your metabolism, what it needs to start and stop, that gas break thing, completely messed up. On top of that, you've got inflammation that spills out from your fat, all right? And when it spills out from your fat, that's kind of like the gas gasoline leaking out around your shoes at the gas station. In the gas station, it's flammable in your body. It's inflammatory. It screws up your immune system. It sets you up for diabetes, sets you up for cancer, sets your blood vessels up to narrow. So you want to are set up for stroke and heart attack. It's all bad.

Excess fat is all bad.

Excess body fat. But. But don't forget. one of the things that I started saying is that some fat is absolutely critical. In fact, we need normal fat. Fat is good until it's bad. So we don't want to fear it, we want to tame it.

If someone has got, I mean, if someone's listening or watching this right now and they're thinking to themselves, man, I've just struggled my whole life with my body weight and life happened and you know, kids and or divorce or just career changes and just life just happened and just, it got away from me. And they're 50, 70, 80 pounds overweight. They've gained that, gained that excess body fat that they know they don't want to have, but they don't want to beat themselves up because that doesn't help them either. You know, they've beating themselves up for too long, and that almost makes them want to eat more bad foods because they don't feel good about themselves? How can they emotionally, psychologically break free while also changing their habits and know that this is a journey? It's not going to happen in two weeks and lose 50 pounds and stick, but it's like it's going to take time and it's going to be a journey. What can someone in that position start to think and do to start seeing consistent results, do you think?

-Yeah. Well, there's two main things I talk about in my new book. One is actually Time your food. Figure out what time you eat and donate. And secondly is choose foods that actually can help your body fight fat. That's a little bit of a surprise that you can eat foods to lose weight, to fight extra body fat. But it turns out science tells us that's actually true. And it's studied in people as well. Let's talk first about the timing of food. All right? Remember I told you when your insulin level is high, because when you're eating, you can't burn fat. So when your insulin level is low, when you're not eating, your body switches into fat burning mode. What does that actually naturally happen when you're sleeping? Most people, when they're sleeping, are not eating. Right.

Right?

And then what happens when they get up in the morning, they eat breakfast, they're breaking their fast. So sleeping is fasting. It's very normal. It's not necessarily invented as a new fad or a trend. It's actually how our bodies wired. And so if you follow the wiring, the hard wiring of our body, the operating system of our body, when you're sleeping and not eating, your body is burning down fat. You've got extra weight, extra body fat, take advantage of what your body naturally wants to do. Now, how do you actually give your body the most chance to burn down extra body fat? Sleep. Let me just set out some hypotheticals. Let's say you sleep eight hours, you go to bed at 11, wake up at 7, all right, during that time, your body is actually burning fat, okay? Which is good. That's gonna get you over time to get to your fighting weight, so to speak.

How much fat do we burn with eight hours of sleep, do you know?

It actually depends on how good your sleep is. It also depends on when you ate before you went to bed. It also matters who you are, right? And lots of other stress factors.

The way you think about yourself. your identity, your totally.

So what the things that you talk about sort of like this really harnessing your knowing yourself and harnessing your strengths and healing from the inside out, that is critical for getting good quality, using those eight hours. Now, let's talk a little bit about when you're actually eating last because if you're sleeping eight hours, 11 to 7, okay, because you're not eating and you're burning fat. Let's say that you-- When should your.

Last bite be and buy?

Exactly. So I'm trying to give you analogies that people can understand very easily. Let's say you eat dinner at 7 o'clock, all right, and you finish dinner at 8, all right? You put your dishes away at 8, all right? That seems pretty reasonable for most people. After 8 o'clock and you go to bed at 11, do not snack.

No midnight snack.

No nibbling.

No cookies.

No waiting for chips, no waiting for the dessert at the end. All right, now you've gained three extra hours from eight o'clock when your dishes get put away all the way till you go to bed. Don't eat. I don't eat, it's fine. You know, in the beginning you might have some habits like, oh man, I should don't. That's the habit you want to break. And here's the why. Because if you don't eat, your insulin levels will go down quickly. All right, from dinner. And then what will happen is you get those three extra hours added on to the eight hours that you have that your body's doing what it's doing.

So does that mean you can still have tea or like a carbonated water or like a sparkling water? Just nothing with zero calories.

No calories, right? No food, okay? Especially no desserts. No noshing on those little sweet things nibbles at night. What if there's a little lemon in the water? Lemon's okay. That's okay. Yeah, yeah. Okay. No sugar. Gotcha. And like, so then what happens, now you've actually built yourself eight hours of sleep, three hours of extra time. That's a bonus, okay? Get up in the morning, let's say you get up at seven, right? Don't do what your mommy told you to do when you were a kid, which is roll out of bed, eat breakfast, get on the school bus to get to school. Uh-huh, right?

That's how we're all conditioned.

Here's what you want to do. Get up. Brush your teeth, take a shower, get dressed, take your time to get oriented to the day. I usually don't eat anything for about an hour after I get up, and I'm perfectly fine. You know, it's really habit that makes you want to sit down and pull a poor bowl of cereal. All right? Now you've gained an extra hour.

Mm-.

So that's 12 hours now, right? Now you got 12 clean hours. That's half the day.

With no food.

With no food, your body's burning. It's different than 16 and 8, but it's the same principle. 16-8 intermittent fasting. Now you gotta really push it so you're squeezing all your foods in eight hours. May not work for everybody, but what I'm trying to empower people, to be great, you don't need to go to 16. 12 gets you into great zone.

-Wow, really?

-Think about it. How many people do you know say, I get eight hours of sleep, but then when you really talk to to them, they're actually eating late at night.

Right, before they fall asleep.

Now you're cutting into your burn time.

Interesting.

So that's one thing is really sort of the timing of your meals. Oh, by the way, I'm sure this has happened to you as well. Busy people sometimes skip breakfast for whatever reason.

Skip breakfast.

Or sometimes skip lunch. Totally fine. You can think about that when it happens, that you're buying yourself extra fat burn time. And so for people who, in that scenario you gave, somebody who's overweight and has been struggling with it and say, this is what happened to me, here's a really simple way just to get a little bit disciplined. Diary out, journal out when you normally eat, when you stop eating, when you go to bed. And what I say in my book is that try to create a 12-hour food window that you that you're going to open up in the morning. What time do you open the window that you're going to eat? And what time are you going to close the window that you're not going to eat anymore? You know, believe me, you'll be fine if you don't eat after dinner when you put your dishes away. And you'll be fine if you take a little extra time before you sit at the breakfast table. Guarantee you, you're going to be just fine and you're going to be healthier for it.

It is got the principal responsibility ability of defending us from that, not just viruses or bacteria. So where does this start?

Well, most people eat their food orally.

And that means it starts in the mouth.

You consume, digest into the gut, and.

Now you feed the remnants of.