Doctor-Backed Hack on How to Reset Your Body Without More Supplements

It's always going to feel hard unless you choose. You're actively deciding that there's a new way of being for people who are still in the belief system of the version of themselves making the choices on their fears. As a child. How on earth would you make different choices today?

And I think for so many of us, we become the story that we tell ourselves about ourselves. There's plenty of tactics in my book. I mean, intermittent fasting and deliberate cold therapy and deliberate heat therapy and light therapy, resistance training and stress plants. And all these things that I talk about in the book are tactics. And tactics are very important because people do want to know what to do. But behind that or before that, there is a deeper, more profound biopsychosocial intake form.

Jeff Krasno. Welcome to Rooted in Wellness.

Great to meet you.

This is long overdue. I. I've wanted to connect with you for so long. I would say since COVID I found my myself going to your page for some solace in a world that seems so dogmatic or, you know, I really went quiet during COVID for fear of asking the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing. And everyone and their mother in the wellness industry all had also had a protocol at that time. I found myself going to your. Your page because you've got this beautiful way of merging spirituality and into science and also your personal beliefs, which ties in so beautifully into your book. I just got back from the ashram. I led a retreat at the ashram, and I was able to get four days in on the Caribbean Sea. And here I am sitting at the pool with a book called Stress. You're reading this on vacation, but it was the most perfect book to read on vacation. So I'm so excited to have you to talk about this. So before we dive in, this podcast is all about ancient wisdom in our modern world and really how you can become more rooted in your health and in yourself, but also this inner wisdom that we all have to heal. So to start off, what are three practices that you have that help you feel more rooted in your health and happiness?

Yeah, well, I'll go from the most anodyne to the most wacky. How's that? So I have a. A morning breathwork practice that is. It helps me a get outside. So I always do it outside. And it's. I guess you would call it a single pointedness of mind practice where I'll just get very quiet in my body and just sort of observed the natural world around me and let thoughts emerge and feelings emerge and sensations emerge and Then just always witness them non judgmentally and come back to that single pointed focus of the breath. And you know, you can use other gimmicks, if you will. It doesn't always have to be the breath, although the breath is something that you generally always have until you don't have it. Then you have another problem. But you can use a mantra or a casino or drishti gaze point, always coming back to a single point of focus. And the real opportunity there is in the return. Because meditation, these practices should not be confused with turning off the spigot of thoughts. They will arise, but the opportunity is in the return to that focus. And then that can really spill into the other parts of your life, off the cushion, if you will. Okay, so then the other protocols, I would say is I have a very, very dedicated, non negotiable contrast bathing morning.

Ritual, which we'll dive into.

Yeah, hot, cold, hot, cold.

This is daily.

Yeah. This is without negotiation, which makes it difficult to travel. I'm about to go on quite a journey and part of the fun of the logistics was figuring out where I could do this every day. But, you know, I don't also want to be, you know, trapped by my own protocols. So anyhow. But when I'm home, it is certainly part of my routine. And often in the sauna, this will get to the more wackier bits. Is that. And TMI for your audience is that I'm not clothed, you know, and I'm often doing air squats, naked, dripping sweat, reciting the mantra, which is a Nichiren Buddhist mantra. Nam myoho renge kyo. You might be familiar with it. So you can imagine me naked, squatting in the sauna, sweating. Nam myoho renge kyo. Nam yoho. And it's actually not a joke, but you really eventually begin to actually embody the vibration of it, and the world ceases to be symbolic and just becomes the thing.

I knew I would be pleasantly surprised asking you. I asked this question one. Obviously that's the first. You're the first person to give that answer. But we talk about wellness with such rigidity and we think that we need to follow these insane protocols which might be good for one person but not the other. And it's to showcase like the wisdom that you found with your body and the things that make you feel good. And I want to hover on that, that aspect of coming back with mantra without judgment. Right. So when you're catching your mind shift, I think a lot of people will quit their morning wellness Protocol or mindfulness protocol because of the judgment that comes with it. Ah, it's too hard, can't come back to it. I'm not, I'm not good at meditation or I'm not good at breath work when it's like the gap in that non judgment that we take out into the world. So thank you for sharing that.

Yeah.

So on the flip side, you and I both work with a lot of people who have practices that cause them to be uprooted. And a lot of these protocols, especially living in la, might feel like it's something that's really, you know, part of a checklist to make them feel good every day, but it's actually uprooting them, maybe causing more stress, worry or anxiety. So I'm always fascinated by people like you who, like me, have had this healing journey. Do you notice when you get uprooted or do you slowly drift to the point where you feel imbalances again that draw you back? What are the things that cause you to feel uprooted?

That's interesting. Yeah, it's interesting to conflate the uprootedness with one's over dedication to protocol. For example, I mean, there's this notion of orthorexia, right?

Yeah.

I don't like anything that has the prefix ortho, orthodontics, orthodox fundamentalism or orthorexia. But, you know, this, this over consumption with, with our dietary choices or our protocols such that we become kind of neurotic or fundamentalist about it and, and you know, can't exist without them or, you know, that we don't have the resilience to operate in the world just kind of here and now. So, I mean, I think that, you know, many of us would be so fortunate to have that problem, I suppose. But for me, you know, it's been funny going out and talking about this book because it's not something that I have typically done and I have a lot of anxiety around public speaking and, and opening my mouth to say words.

Shocking.

Yeah. People are often surprised by it because I tend not to be awful at it. So I've had to really gird myself, sturdy myself in many ways to go out and be the reluctant public face of my company or the book or whatever. And, and that process of learning to trust myself has been a real journey, like a very recent journey, because it can throw me off the horse. You know, I will on many occasions show up for things like this, you know, like this conversation and feel as if my pants are too tight. And by that I mean by that? I mean the only time you actually really feel your pants is when they're too tight. And by the same token, the only time you actually really feel yourself is when you are too tight. And we know that kind of as the sympathetic nervous system or some degree of amygdala hijack, where your respiratory heart rate start to increase and you're just tight in your muscles and you become a little bit more self obsessed and distrustful of the world around you. Your aperture of attention becomes very narrow. That is kind of. That was a very apt description of me in these situations and I've had to become comfortable in that discomfort. But that's part of good stress, I suppose.

Yeah. I love that you share that because I would say that that is my most recent area of growth. Also, when I launched this podcast, I would have to literally look in the mirror and say, you're not going to die, it's not the day.

Right.

And how much of that, I'm curious with you two now knowing about your story from childhood, is this behavioral conditioning? Right. Because we were never taught that it was okay to be free. Or maybe we had the people in our environment. And you're going to share about your story where I became such an introvert to the point where one of the most common pieces of feedback that I get from people is my calming, soothing energy and my voice. Yeah, that was my trauma response. I had to go inward and be quiet and be calming because there's so much chaos around me. So I love that you share that because I think a lot of people think when we get to a position, especially with the caliber of businesses that you've grown, that this is effortless, easy work for you to do. But the message behind what you're sharing and to be able to overcome that in order to do so is something that I think a lot of listeners can take away with as inspiration. So that really leads into the concept of stress. When you ask how somebody is today, I'm stressed. Right. We've normalized living with these levels of stress and to the point that it's making us void of connection anymore. I don't know how you are because all I know is that you're stressed. And oof, maybe we don't want to talk about that. Right. But through the reading of your book, it's not about eliminating stress anymore. I think that's kind of a, a concept that we're trying to chase that isn't realistic. And when we look at ancient wisdom, it's not something that's practiced or preached either. It's about going through the stress in order to kind of, you know, awaken new levels of living life to its fullest. So let's talk a little bit more about your personal story and your journey into wellness because like the concept wealth and hellness is something that I know everyone's bringing up because it's so accurate. It does feel that way. Right. And you know, with your lovely wife, who I adore so much, you would think that somebody with your background, you had so much access to wealth and information. But can you take us back to how this all started?

Yeah, sure. Well, as you mentioned, my better 3/4 Skyler, and it is from birthday today, so I'd be remiss not to point that out. You know, she's. I'm really just been kind of the torch bearer for her mostly. I mean, she's the one that sort of introduced me to this whole world of wellness and healing. Sort of incongruously tied to 9 11. So I was. I'm a refugee of the music industry at that juncture. In 2001, I was operating a fledgling record label and management company down in lower Manhattan. And then that tragedy occurred and we were in that tiny little perimeter around what became ground zero, cordoned off for a number of months and you know, living in lower Manhattan, or just in Manhattan in general during that time was quite amazing moment because there was a tremendous amount of collective grief. Yeah, but that collective grief, not unlike what we just experienced here in Los Angeles in the wake of the fires, elicited really people's better angels and munificence, but also compelled people to do some madcap, crazy things. And one of those people was Skylar, my wife. So she opened a yoga studio at ground zero, literally out of the ashes in the floor above my. My office. And yeah, for that extended period of time, I got to watch these bedraggled, grief stricken, beleaguered yogis, you know, traipse up these cockeyed stairs into this really funky, funky studio. I mean, this was prior to the advent of, you know, an equinox on every corner or some, you know, Tony core power here and there. You know, this was room, studio, the radiator in the corner whistled incessantly that the bathroom was actually in the studio and it was like the width of a bread box, basically. So you'd have to go to the bathroom while everyone was practicing. But it had a lot of soul. It was called Kula, which is transliterated as intentional community. And this is where I first experienced I guess maybe witnessed from a front row seat the power of somatic and spiritual practice in combination with community to heal. And you know, I would watch these sweaty, open hearted yogis, you know, file out of, out of that little room and collapse on this little stained futon in the vestibule outside and just share, share with each other and kind of piece together their lives again. And that really bent the arc of both my personal and professional life. It really led me to found Wanderlust, which became a very large series of yoga and wellness events around the world. But kind of along the course of doing that, over a decade of wonderful and treacherous experiences, I got quite ill. And I was the product of kind of just modernity's circumstances. I was on a plane 150, 200 days a year. I was committing carbicide, sometimes I call it. I was living kind of coffee to wine o', clock, constantly negatively, chronically stressed with incoming from every angle. And that was really where I would say my forays into health and wellness took a U turn into wealth and wellness. Because there I was kind of in the wellness industry with all of these anodyne symptoms that we've normalized, but they're really absolutely abnormal. You know, chronic fatigue, inability to concentrate, insomnia, kind of dad bod, man boobs, little weird protuberances growing in my armpits like weird shit. And then I got my diabetes diagnosis and I had to wake up.

I was shocked to read about your late night binges and drive throughs.

Yeah.

Being surrounded by so many and you know, I think that there's a common thread that I hope no one has to experience. But you know, nothing matters when you don't have your health. And you know, the fact that you've now lived through 9, 11 and growing from those ashes, literally now these LA fires and growing from this on top of your own healing journey. It's really upsetting that it takes these big circumstances for us to just like, oh, pull back a little bit instead of drowning in our day to day and how hard that we think wellness is when everything that you have talked about today and so often that we do on this podcast, the greatest takeaways from wellness happen to be free. The stillness in the mornings, the finding our breath, the finding of sangha and community. Right. And I love just the resonance of you ultimately like building this ashram. You had a wife that was doing it herself and then now you're building it into your own life. And I think there's so much beauty in that.

It's curious something that you say there, why we have to reach this crisis point, this rock bottom, in order to wake up. And when the nature of these diseases that we're dealing with at an epidemic level are so progressive and insidious, they're not just like a fall off the precipice. It's like, I think there's a Hemingway quote about going bankrupt. It happens very, very slowly and then suddenly.

And then suddenly.

And that's the same deal with heart disease, chronic disease of all sorts, diabetes, stroke, Alzheimer's, et cetera. So yeah, and you know, for me, it was hard for me to grok that I was part of this bigger nightmare, given all the arrows in my quiver. But there I was, you know, 50 years old with a total hip replacement with 210 pounds diabetes, which essentially just makes me average, which is just the.

Sad component, essentially what makes you average in today's world. That's exactly it. So let's talk about that then. This chronic imbalance, chronic dis ease that leads to disease today. And a lot of the symptoms that you've mentioned, again, it's something else that we've normalized. Right? Whether it's the stress, the overworking, the gaining of weight, the brain fog, I call it carbitarian, also carboterian diets, or these symptoms that we're experiencing, but we're not attributing them to the suffering of our body. So you talk about this in your book?

Yeah, I mean, I think we're living at this strange moment where we've engineered our life for convenience and comfort at every turn. So that has created a situation where we have kind of endless availability to this self stable, nutrient deficient calories. Right. Just kind of in the palm of our hand at doordash. Just like Arby's, Chick Fil, a, whatever. Wendy's, McDonald's, Burger King, whatever. Sometimes I was wondering, I was driving over here. There's so many of these places, every corner, like, how do they get wound up? Like. And Bob, I've got a line on chickens. Okay, let's fillet them. Okay. Chick fil a. How did all these things get wound up anyways? I don't really know, but I think this elixir, this combination between always available cheap calories and emotional dysregulation is so caustic. So we live within this attention economy, let's say, where everyone and everything is vying for our conscious attentions moment to moment. And they're essentially leveraging our own human negativity bias to capture that attention commodify our, our own focus to sell it. And the product of that is feeling a sense of not enoughness, of deficiency of, and living within comparison all the time. And so, and then just over there in the pantry, there are engineered foods to hit your bliss point. That magical combination of fat and salt and sweet to give you that spritz of ephemeral dopamine to satisfy those feelings of perceived deficiencies and discontents. And they're so easy. And oh boy, you just grab for those chips and you grab for those cookies because they're right there, there and they just are going to make you feel better, but only for a very, very short period of time. And then of course, the long term impacts of that are so maladaptive. So we live in this moment where we've created a surfeit of calories and then we've created a lot of emotional dysregulation and those things together really create an expected and normal result, which is a 44% obesity rate.

Yeah, what a great perspective too, right? Because now more than ever before in history, we have access to so much discomfort in the world, whether it's through media, news, politics, our environment. Look at the mental health crisis that's happening here in Los Angeles. Right. Like that, every layer. And we're experiencing it firsthand. And it's kind of like oscillating between the scarcity and the fear to the dopamine and the hit of something that makes us good on the next, the next slide over, the next swipe. So despite people's best efforts and the knowing of the rise of disease and the constant drug commercials and commercials for prescription drugs, you're feeling down on yourself. You're driving by and let's call it Chick Fil A or wherever you hear that or smell that wafting, God knows what's in the oil that they fry everything in.

Right. It puts you under a spell and you just drift in. Yeah.

And you have to have it all. And it gives you bliss just for a moment, only to have fueled inflammation within your body.

Yeah, well that's sort of the metaphor that you could pull on, which is that that short term comfort leads to long term discomfort, but the other way around is true too, that short term discomfort can actually lead to the long term real ease that we're looking for.

Yeah, good point. In your book you share also about like you didn't just arrive at 50 becoming pre diabetic. Right. It was the culmination or you know, in ayurvedic terms, we Call it accumulation.

Right.

The accumulation of all these things. So if you're trying to pinpoint or this hardcore mentality, well, I'm just going to cut this out. I'm going to do this hardcore in order to heal again. It's not even about that. Like, we've got to go back all the way to childhood to kind of clean up the pipes of what's. What's been going on.

Yeah, I think this is really the great lesson that I wish to communicate to most people because there's plenty of tactics out there. There's plenty of tactics in my book. I mean, intermittent fasting and deliberate cold therapy and deliberate heat therapy and light therapy, resistance training and stress plants. And all these things that I talk about in the book are tactics. And tactics are very important because people do want to know what to do. But behind that or before that, there is a deeper, more profound biopsychosocial intake form that one must conduct on oneself. And I think for so many of us, we become the story that we tell ourselves about ourself. And I'll raise my hand, guilty as charged. So I grew up, you know, a chubby kid moving around from country to country, always trying to fit in, essentially willing to sacrifice every and any authentic aspect of myself or a sense of belonging. And that was a rucksack that I pulled into adulthood. This feeling that I would always people, please. I was just a consummate pleaser, perpetual pleaser. But at the same time, I'd never be quite good enough. And I'd always be that chubby kid whose fate was written in his genetic stars. And that change was simply not possible for me. And I believe that that is resonant for a lot of people that you become that story. But as I began to delve into Eastern mysticism and into human physiology, I learned a great lesson. And this is a lesson, of course, that, you know, the Buddha had under the Bodhi tree 2,500 years ago, without the luxury of an electron microscope or knowing what germ theory was or anything like that, this notion that we are impermanent, that the universe is impermanent, subject to construction and deconstruction at all times. So clinging to anything or craving anything is totally futile because all we are is transient. We're constantly in flu. Now, this is a great spiritual lesson that was echoed in other traditions as well. But when you open the hood on the human organism, what you learn is something quite similar, is that the physical actually patterns the metaphysical, that we are these seven octillion atoms, 70 trillion cells experiencing 37 billion billion chemical reactions per second. In the last minute, I've lost 40,000 skin cells. We have 39 trillion prokaryotes in our guts, on our skin and our various organs, these single celled bacteria that are turning over every four minutes to 24 hours, literally. Mona and Jeff are not the same people that started this podcast. And there is a great lesson in that, that change is not only possible, it's all that's on offer for people. And to really, truly embrace that possibility of change, that is probably the deepest work that you can do, to retell that story about yourself and know that, yes, change is not only available, that's all there is. And so moment to moment, I can make decisions about protocols that I'm going to adopt, tactics, the environment that I want to shape to essentially make sure that that change is operating on a trajectory on the spectrum towards healing, towards wholeness, and away from disconnection and disease. And if there's any message that I want to impart, it's that, it's that change is there waiting for you.

Oh, God, I love this so much. I can feel my, my heart like beating faster because you're talking my language. And you know, the frustrating thing about this is when we talk about this wisdom, like this insane intelligence of the body, you know, there's a lot of people in our world who say, well, there's no clickbait to that, right? Ancient wisdom, there's no clickbait. But it's this fundamental understanding of if you want to drive change, getting to know how you want to feel again. Because as you said, and thank you for sharing your story. Even when I do my initial calls with new clients, you know the first thing, Mona, just tell me how to eat. What's the supplement protocol? How am I working out? All right, let's do this right. And nine times out of 10, we are talking about their childhood and I'm often met by tears. And for people who are still in the belief system of the version of themselves making the choices on their fears as a child, how on earth would you make different choices today? It's always going to feel hard unless you choose. You're actively deciding that there's a new way of being. Right. And I think that that story and your story also is just so powerful in understand that. So thank you for sharing the picture of change.

Well, thank. Yeah. I mean, I think this is where mysticism and medicine share a bridge, you know, and it really violates our sense of self identity because we feel day to day that there is a stable, reliable Mona or a stable, reliable Jeff. This is often underwritten by kind of a sense of physical continuity or even psychological continuity. I wake up in the morning, I take off my shirt, I get in front of the mirror, I look, there's Jeff. He essentially appears more or less as he did yesterday and the day before. And he has more or less the same beliefs that he did yesterday and the day before. So we're essentially fooled into this illusion of self, often also underwritten by that tightness that we were talking about earlier, that I'm here, I'm separate. But of course, all you need to do is pick up a family photo album and open the pages. And there's Mona as this angelic, trubic little baby, and then as this hot teenager or whatever, and this distinguished woman as she is now. And to know that of course, impermanence is all there is.

Absolutely.

And then the other, the other, the other piece of that equation is that if we are impermanent and changing all the time, what is the mitigator of that change? Well, we're always changing in relationship to our environment. And this was of course, the other great central tenet of Buddhism, this notion of interdependence that of course, the Buddha had the wonderful image of Indra's net, right? That the entire universe exists as a massive cobweb. And at every juncture of that cobweb is a crystalline diamond reflecting every other juncture. I mean, it's just an absolutely sublime image. But that gave birth to this notion of. I think it's pratitiya samadpada, but it's like dependent origination, that everything is dependent upon everything else. And if you bring that back to the human body, that what you learn quite quickly is that you cannot separate the function and behavior of your organism from the function and behavior of its environment. They are actually one thing. They are an environism or an organ or something one way or the other that you. That you can't pull them apart. And again, that does also violate our sense of self because we often associate ourselves with a locus of consciousness kind of crouching behind the eyes somewhere, you know, in this ever sagging bag of skin that we sort of have that breaks down from time to time and we'll take it in to get fixed, like the car. But that this locus of consciousness is separate from everything else in the foreground and background of our attention. But of course, any even remotely rigorous study of ecology, I mean, we don't make our own oxygen, Right? So we're not autotrophs or heterotrophs. We're reliant always on the world around us, but even in our relationships that seem to impact how our genes express and our food, that. That expresses that. That changes the expression of our genes. So it's this interdependent net. It's everywhere.

I love that I'm. I'm so turned on by this concept of quantum healing. I'm studying it right now, and even you and I right now, you know, I cannot wait for the day until we can actively see kind of our shared energy and biome that were created on our own, but outside in the world. And I know probably like most of the people listening, you've had a moment in your life where you're in a different environment or the stage, and when the stage is set for you to feel your best, maybe to relax a little bit more, maybe the food's a little healthier, you're practicing your yoga, all of a sudden your physiology changes despite the rigidity behind it. So I think it's so important to dry, to kind of own in on the choices behind that. So I want to go back. You know, when we talked about chronic imbalances, you mentioned so many in your book, so many that you were experiencing. What are some things that listeners should really kind of like, okay, we've talked about this one vessel that we've got, and it's sending me signals all the time. I've never really been taught how to listen to it. What do they need to be looking out for in order to not go down the same path as you?

Yeah, well, I think you. You point to this notion of imbalance wisely because really, imbalance is the signature of disease, if you will. And to the degree that we can refine that sort of interoception to recognize it, to see and hear this, the signals of it. So it appears in a whole variety of different ways. So you could have blood sugar imbalances, right? So you have a blood sugar imbalance that will likely lead eventually to insulin resistance. Your cells will stop making energy as efficiently. They'll instead, they'll store glucose and other substrate fat as fat. So then you will experience degrees of brain fog and lack of energy. And those are, you know, very, very common, common symptoms. And of course, I think there's some outrageous number, like 93% of Americans are metabolically dysfunctional, right? So. So there's blood sugar imbalances, there's neurotransmitter imbalances. For example, so we have excitatory neurotransmitters and inhibitory neurotransmitters like glutamate on one side and GABA on the other side. You know, too much gaba, right? You're going to start to feel sort of like maybe numb and disassociative. Too much glutamate, too much excitatory activity. You're going to start to feel what is known as ADHD or something so overactive. So this is, again, a place where, you know, health is really about the body's ability to foster dynamic homeostasis, really. You know, I call it the. The place on the teeter totter where no one's feet is touching the ground, right? And because it's not a stable place, we're never perfectly imbalanced. We kind of find it and flirt with it and glimpse it and. But. But the amazing thing is, like, the body is very engineered for homeostasis. You know, this is why we shiver or sweat when we get very cold or very hot. You know, the body is remarkable at maintaining a PH balance, right? You really, really have to knock your body off its course to become too alkaline or too acidic. You can actually hold your breath. We won't do that right at this moment. But that hypercapnia, that concentration of carbon dioxide, will make you slightly more alkaline, but that's actually adaptive because when you have a little bit more alkalinity in your body, there is less affinity between oxygen and hemoglobin. So, I mean, this is the amazing thing. So I know I'm taking a little bit off course here, but things like holding your breath, for example, inducing a mild state of hypoxia, like stress in the right dose, is so adaptive because what I just described. So let's say you hold your breath for a little while, your oxygen concentration goes down a tiny bit, your carbon dioxide concentration goes up a little bit. So mild hypoxia, mild hypercapnia, kind of have these chemoreceptors around here in your carotid arteries. They're going to sense that phenomenon and they're going to springboard your body into this production of additional red blood cells. Because the red blood cells are the couriers for oxygen, the hemoglobin in them, the couriers to your cells and your mitochondria for energy production. So your body knows when it has a little bit of stress and it immediately adapts. And this is why, of course, Olympian athletes often train at high altitudes because the air is less dense and the partial pressure of oxygen is lower, so the oxygen diffusion is lower. So they're going to create more red blood cells, are going to also just create greater efficiency at the mitochondrial level. So that is a great example of the body's adaptive response to stress. And when you start to actually unpack the body, it is riddled with these adaptive mechanisms. Just it's everywhere to be found.

Yeah, yeah. So when people are ignoring this kind of chronic stress every day, long term, then, you know, leading to disease. Would you say that stress is the instigator of all disease?

I think it's stress in the wrong doses for sure. I mean, stress, the way we consume it now in a modern context when it's chronic and in the wrong dosage can lead to a panoply of disease. I mean, certainly there's the most obvious ones associated with kind of hormone dysregulation or hormone imbalance. So you start to have too many stress hormones and not enough, like melatonin for example. So what's going to happen in that particular case when you're constantly have this sort of IV drip of cortisol? You're going to undermine immune function. You're going to stop producing monocytes and neutrophils and cells associated with the innate immune system. It's going to begin to erode the balance of bacteria in your gut, going to lead to this condition of dysbiosis or potentially leaky gut intestinal permeability. It's going to dysregulate blood sugar. And again, that is a really great example of the body is actually programming. It's actually just doing what it's programmed to do.

Absolutely.

So you have a strep, you have a stressful incident or some sort of, some sort of perceived threat. Your body then reacts to produce cortisol. Cortisol's gonna then signal the liver to actually release additional glucose. Because you want that glucose to go to your extremities so you can fight or fly. You want that in short little bursts. But when it never, ever goes away, then you've got a problem. But you have to remember that the body is just doing what it's supposed to do. And in this way, chronic diseases are in many ways could be considered the normal expected byproducts of the body. Just doing what it is programmed to do.

Exactly. And digestive symptoms are no different. You don't just wake up with leaky gut one day. It's the accumulation of stressors over time. Right. And it's the same with autoimmune it's the same with cancer. The body's functioning at its best to heal in those moments due to the stressor, it's doing its job. But it's almost like a retraining that needs to happen in order for your body to come back on track to. To heal.

Yeah. And, but then again, you, when you basic, when you begin to untangle the, the origins of the stress response in the body, you actually find that it's generally very adaptive.

Yeah.

So, you know, calorie paucity, for example, you know, we evolved to have some scarcity and it would be totally normal and adaptive for Mona's loincloth to get a little tight in the late summer, early fall, because that fat accumulation was really just warehoused energy for a winter that was around the corner. Right. And then during that winter there would be more of a paucity of calories and that would keep you lean. But now we're learning that it does a bunch of other things too. You know, it stimulates this process of autophagy and ketosis and metabolic flexibility and stimulates the sirtumin pathways and all that kind of stuff. But now we essentially live from a calorie perspective in a world where winter never comes.

Exactly.

So the body again, is just doing what it is supposed to do. Store fat for a rainy day. But then it never rains.

It never rains. Absolutely. In your book you also talk about invisible stressors. You know, I would say mindset probably ties into that, but some stressors are so normalized today that we don't even recognize them as being harmful. So what are some of the hidden stressors that you address?

I can't remember. No, I think that the stress that we actually don't. We can't put our thumb on is the day in and day out stress. I mean, for me, I often associate this kind of stress with being a product of what one might call the persuasion economy. You know, where our focus and attention is being so vied for that we actually don't. We're not even totally aware of how it is being leveraged. And most of the time, the incentives on social media, for example, are so perverse that it's the loudest, most salacious, most hyperbolistic voices that get the most airtime. And it's those voices that keep us in a constant state of fear and outrage. And oftentimes we don't even know it. And so we end up just kind of doom scrolling our way into a very, into sort of a negativity mindset.

Yeah. Really wanting to spend time here because I'm convinced that people are living with such degrees of stress that if I were to step into the body, a lot of men especially that I work with, they might say that their stress is a four or five out of ten, but if I were to step into their body, it would probably feel like an 8 or 9 because of this adaptability. So recognizing the differences between the good stressors and the bad stressors, which from our conversation, it's this consistent daily persistent stress.

Yeah, I mean, financial hardship, overwork, neglect, abuse, racism. I also just think in this moment of political vitriol, whether you agree or disagree with any political platform is not the point. It's actually that it is designed for maximum stress and you know, flooding the zone or whatever, which is the going line here from this particular administration, you know, whatever. I get it as a political strategy, but where I'm coming from, I'm thinking of it more as like, what is this non consensual psychological experiment on our citizenry? What are the impacts there? I think we're all in a state. Not all, but many of us are in a state of, you know, constant amygdala hijack.

Absolutely.

And we just don't operate well in that state. I mean, we talked about some of the physical downstream impacts, but psychologically that state basically bypasses our prefrontal neo mammalian cortex where we stop being able to make rational, reasoned, compassionate decisions and we become a society of knee jerk reactions.

That compassion is lost. And it's funny, we both talked about the sense of community for healing and connection to other people, but we've gotten to a point where we can't even ask questions anymore. Right. We can't share personal concerns just for the sake of conversation anymore. I have a hard time with it. You're certainly doing much better at it because you lead with compassion. That's the biggest difference. And we've lost that. And I think that people now like the fear, the anger, the outrage, the upset feels really good because it's this perceived notion of action when there's inaction.

Yeah, this was a. Something that I was trying to untangle a little bit because you know, people often, you know, there's a famous Martin Luther King quote that silences complicity. Right. And that gets levied to people quite a bit. So you're not speaking out on the Ukraine or on Palestine or on, you know, immigration or what? You know, and so you're vilified for not speaking out.

Exactly.

But then at the same time, then when you do speak out there's just as much invective there where if people are part of your tribe, well, they're heart, heart, heart, watermelon, whatever it is. And if you're not on your tribe, then it's vitriolic barbs and ad hominems coming your way. And one of my points, I think I made it at some juncture along the path was that silence is actually the place in which we contemplate matters. We actually study them and learn. It's also where we tend to find compassion and beneficence. And not everybody is an expert in every single topic under the sun. So not having an opinion on social media does not mean that you're some sheep or that you're some shill for pharma or whatever it happens to be. It's like perhaps you're just actually taking a moment in silence for some degree of psychological self preservation. But also you might be actually learning or studying or contemplating or doing something that's not in the public spotlight that is helping bend the arc of the world. Maybe you're actually, you know, maybe you're volunteering at your local soup kitchen, you know.

Absolutely.

So the amount of judgment that is levied as every single person seems to be a part of the public square now is tricky.

Oh, yeah? Yeah. And even with the Maha movement, I've been a little bit quiet about it. I'm so grateful for the recent changes on red dyes and stuff like that. But let's pull back the curtain on everything else that's happening also. And the contemplation, it's actually a yogic practice called mauna. Are you familiar with mauna?

No.

Yeah. Where you sit in contemplation. And I think that the benefit of that silence, which I've often taken, is it also lessens the grip of the intensity of reactionary. Right. Of being reactive to everything that we're seeing and witnessing right now. And when that grip is loosened a little bit, all of a sudden opens up perspective in order for you to kind of align with your views and everything that you just mentioned.

Your pants are less tight.

Your pants are less tight. So thank you for sharing.

Yeah. I think a lot of that space can actually ironically come from, from physiological practices as well.

Yeah.

You know, like even a cold water, you know, therapy approach is like, you know, what happens when you get into a body of cold water or into an ice bath? Well, you gasp and then you have that involuntary bottom up response, which is a totally adaptive stress response. Right. Your heart rate and respiratory rate increase. You Feel that epinephrine coursing through your veins, you're going to have a panic attack. And then, no, you don't have the panic attack, because right there you're offered a space to place conscious top down pressure, often through leveraging the breath on top of that bottom up involuntary stress response. And that can become a invaluable skill, not just in the ice bath, but more so when you get out of the ice bath. Because that ability to actually find space and then put conscious top down pressure on top of bottom up response is so useful when you're in a political argument or when you're in a vitriolic, febrile discussion with your spouse or in traffic or at the dentist or wherever. So these are why some of these practices are so important. It's not for what they provide within the practice themselves, it's what they provide outside of the practice.

You describe the dojo, emotional sovereignty, and it's kind of a training ground where we build this emotional sovereignty, which kind of ties into what we're talking about. What does emotional sovereignty mean to you and how would it help us navigate stress?

That's interesting. Yeah, I mean, I've never really thought about that term that way, but the way I would consider it would be the ability to always move back to some degree of psychological homeostasis, to have that arrow in your quiver such that within stressful situations that you always have some ability to find centeredness and equilibrium and equipoise, you know. And again, yes, there are the more tried and true practices that we know about breath, work and meditation that can help us do that. I also found that a fasting protocol can have unbelievable psychological benefits as well as physical benefits, obviously, but, you know, because you get hungry outside your fasting window, but what do you do? You don't just succumb and meander over to the larder for some chips. You actually have to witness the nature of that hunger and untangle whether that's a biological need or an emotional desire. And 99.99% of the time, it's not a biological need. We've got plenty of warehoused energy here to live for a while. Generally, it's an emotional desire, and I think that that practice helps you find that space between stimulus and response. This is the great Viktor Frankl concept, right? Between stimulus and response, there is a space, and that space is a choice. And in that choice lies our freedom and liberation. So this is where a practice that is ancient and spiritual in many respects, like fasting, actually can have A very, very potent psychological impact. Because if you can find that space between the stimulus, the hunger and the response that's mindlessly going to the refrigerator, can you not also find that space when you might have that extra glass of wine or you might need to do that retail therapy on Amazon, or when your children are annoying or your spouse says something dumb or fill in the blank and then you're equipped with that capacity and that gives you a degree of emotional sovereignty, that ability to always cultivate space, to psychologically center.

So let's deep dive on some of those protocols then and what your protocol is for good stress. I love that a lot of them are founded in ancient wisdom. But let's start off with fasting. Fasting has been a hot topic. You call out some of our great teachers and friends in your book. Fasting was an incremental piece to your recovery and switching around a lot of the biological markers that you found. So first of all, was fasting easier for you because you had the biological evidence running your labs, understanding your poop, your stool and all that stuff?

Yeah, I mean I tend to be an empirical.

Yeah, same fellow.

So I like to understand mechanisms.

Yeah.

Because I think the more that you understand mechanism, the more likely you are to actually do the protocol.

And what a gift of modern medicine now. Right?

Yeah, well that so much information is available and then you can also tweak the protocol to best fit your bio individuality if you actually understand what's happening under the hood.

Yeah, yeah.

And, and so yeah, you know, devices and CGMs and things like that were pretty instrumental because you can have some transparency, a dashboard and what you can measure you can improve. Right. So I dug the empirical component of it and that helped me along my way for sure. I would also say that just. And there's many, many different kinds of fasting protocols from multi day water fasts, omad one meal a day and some people are doing five, two or they're fasting twice a week, et cetera. And I think that that's in the fasting mimicking diets. And I encourage people to experiment with different protocols and find what's right for them. I mean for me, I was never that into sort of a neurotic fundamentalist approach to fasting though the 16A protocol, which is where I started and where I could find the most data, was really, really impactful for me mostly because when I was honest I was actually had flipped it. I was eating 16 hours a day. And I think that's where most people honestly are at least in our society, if you go to any of these fast food chains, you'll find four meals a day, breakfast all day. Great. So just the consolidation of food into an eight hour window, you know, was a, was a big switch for me and I got hungry outside the window all the time. But of course that arms me with that kind of psychological aspect that we talked about already. But yeah, I mean, the ability to burn fat instead of glucose for creation of energy, this idea of going into ketosis or getting into autophagy and cleaning up your dysfunctional proteins and upcycling your amino acids and whatnot, all of these for me actually the metabolic flexibility that was offered by fasting was really useful. This ability to sort of seamlessly switch between burning fat and glucose for energy production, that really upregulated my metabolism. So I think that for women, I think there's different protocols. I think the conventional wisdom is that it's better administered during the follicular phase and moving into ovulation and not so much in the luteal phase. And it's different for menopausal women. I think there are many, many women that speak incredibly eloquently about this. My approach to fasting is slightly more broad in general, which is like, let's just stop stuffing our face all the time.

Yeah. Notice how often you're snack in fasting. I'm so grateful is one of those trends that has roots. I'll keep going back to roots. It has longevity. And look at your ethnicity, look at your culture, look at your background to see how fasting protocols were used. Instead of maybe diving in, I know a lot of people will jump in and say, I'm going to do a three day water fast. And sure enough, they burn out and they never want to look at fasting ever again.

Right? Yeah. The breast protocol is the one you'll actually do.

Exactly.

And I think this is the. One of the other components of good stress is I would never advise anyone to jump into a 34 degree ice bath if they'd never gotten into a cold plunge. I would never advise anyone to run a marathon if they had never jogged before. I'd never advise anyone to go on a three day water fast if they've never experimented with fasting before. I think the key here is that you just lean into the edge of your discomfort. There's always the opportunity to increase duration or lower temperature or lower caloric intake, or switch around your macronutrient mix. There's endless opportunity for that. But just lean into the edge of your discomfort.

You share so beautifully about that in your book, what happens with your mindset during those times. Right. And often that ends up being the greatest gift. Noticing how often you're in your mind or the path your thoughts will really dictate your choices. Right. If you feel hungry, you see food, you automatically eat based on instinct instead of as you've done. What you describe is just you stopped. Can you share a bit more about that with the beauty that you found in understanding your mind, the connection to your mind throughout the journey?

Yeah. I mean, every experience of reality is through the prism of your mind. Right. So to overlook the mind is at your own peril. So I think this is a place where we probably need to start, even prior to all the more kind of bespoke practices and modalities and mushrooms and pills and praxis and everything else. And, you know, one aspect that I found to be very interesting as I was getting into this work was that the happiest people seemed to be the people that were actually thinking about the thing that they were doing. So if you really examine what's happening in your mind across the course of the day, so much of the time you're sort of off somewhere else, not thinking about the thing that you're doing, or you're ruminating on some traumatic past event and then projecting that event into the future, creating. I think this is a Daniel Kahneman term, but creating negative anticipated memories. Right. It hasn't even happened yet, and it's already negative. You've already created a negative memory about something that hasn't even happened yet. But when we're honest, we really take an inventory. We're doing that all the time. We're actually not anxious about the thing, we're anxious about the anxiety. And then we become anxious about the anxiousness about the anxiety. And we're like Masons building a brick house of anxiety. We're just layering one brick on top of another. And this is where creative immersion or collective enterprise and athletics and other things can really be very useful, because it is in these activities that we actually yoke our thoughts with our actions.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, I watch my daughters dance. They're wonderful dancers, and this is what they're doing. They're not dancing to do, to finish the dance or to get anywhere on the floor. They're just dancing purely for the sake of dancing. And when I'm kind of in my best mode, I'm writing purely for the sake of writing. And we all have a sense for that where, you know, Linear time begins to dissipate and we come totally immersed in what we're doing. This often happens in collective enterprise too, when we're part of a group doing something that could be just even at a dinner table, having an animated conversation or in some sort of philanthropic endeavor. Certainly for me on the tennis court, every once in a while, every thousand days, I'll channel some Roger Federer and I'll have absolute awareness of my body and space and time. Like, I'll completely intuit where the opponent's going to hit the ball before they even. That's right. It's flow state. It's something kind of beyond what we can truly understand, beyond what our, you know, the, the, the capability of what is normally available at the mind level. You know, we're just completely in, you know, we're in and present and all here. And, and the more that we can find those moments, it appears the more happy we can be.

Well, you just painted a picture of the difference of living in a body that has a regulated nervous system. When you're in that flow state, when you're having those fitter moments, when you're seeing your waters dance, they're in flow, their body feels safe, they're in the present moment. There's no dysregulation. And then it's the, oh, no, I've got to be busy. I've got to be worried about the future. I've got to live in anxiety. And then we get snapped out of it. Right?

Yeah. Again, it's that tightness versus that openness. We often can get that in nature too, right?

Yeah.

We're literally. The aperture of our attention quite literally just goes super, super wide. And that feeling of a separate self begins to dissipate. Absolutely right. That you are become. You do actually become one with the external world. You're walking through the woods and you're just super aware. You're listening to all the sounds. You stop hearing it like a big monophonic wave. But you can actually place them on a stereo field where there's some birds over here and some rustling over there and there's a squirrel up there. And it's almost like you're the engineer in this massive natural symphony.

Yeah.

Oh, you're just wide, wide open. What's the other characteristic of that? You really trust the world.

Yeah, knowingness.

And you become less self obsessed. In fact, you become. There is no self.

Right.

And this is why, you know. And this is the nervous system at play. And again, the nervous system, the sympathetic nervous system, is adaptive in the Right. Doses.

You got it. Yeah.

But really where we want to be is in that open space.

Well, let's talk about then the benefit that you speak to of hormetic stressors then. Do you have a morning that you wake up and you're excited about the cold plunge? Have you gotten to that point?

You know, it's funny, I always look at it with a degree of animosity. I look at it over there, it stares back at me and I say, oh, not today, I'm not gonna do it. The moment I say that is my cue to get in. Yeah, it's pretty much like clockwork. Yeah. It's now become, you know, a adaptive habit and I don't love it. Who would love it? Yeah, and, but it's, it's, it's part of, you know, who I've become. And it is really helpful for actually learning and doing things that require some degree of alertness. And when you get out of the cold punch, it's equivalent to eight shots of espresso, basically. Right. You're ready to go, but at the same time, you're not jittery. That's the amazing thing about getting into the cold. You have that alertness without the cortisol, without the jitteriness. And so it's really quite a wonderful way to move into what is sometimes known as an ultradian cycle, these 90 minute periods, which seems to be about the right amount of time for optimal learning. So if you're having. Learning a new language or an instrument, even in later age, or jumping into a podcast or whatever, a cold water therapy protocol can help you be on your game.

Well, I think it's a commitment to a version of yourself. I think you wrote about, one, your fasting protocol, two, the magic of your mornings and the things that you did in the morning. But the combination of you using that as a protocol for Jeff was actually a part of your transformation that happened pretty quickly.

Yeah.

Can you share about that transformation?

Yeah. So, you know, I was quite a bit heavier than I, than I am now. And so weight management was a big issue for me. And the stacking of various protocols together had an incredibly accelerated impact on my weight. So one was the intermittent fasting protocol of essentially consolidating my consumption of food into an eight hour window. This was giving my body an ability to repair and restore. It was also giving my much maligned pancreas a much needed break from producing its insulin product. So that was a big deal. I mean, of course you can still eat 10 pints of Chubby Hubby in an eight hour window. But generally when you're making some conscious decisions about your food consumption, you're making other conscious decisions. So for me, that was more or less ketotarian approach. In the early days it was focused on fiber and healthy fats and a couple bolus boli, bonuses of protein and minimal carbohydrates. So that ketotarian combination with intermittent fasting kept my glucose levels much, much lower then before I would break fast. So before I would put a single bite of food in my mouth, I would get into the cold plunge. And if you think about then what's happening, so get in, your core body temperature plummets, right? And then your body jumps into action because it wants to get your core body temperature back into that Goldilocks zone, the warm porridge of 98.6. In order to do that, it needs to make heat. In order to make heat, it needs an energy substrate. But because I was on this keto diet and intermittent fasted, there was not a lot of glucose around, so it could only opt for one other substrate and that was fat. And so it would essentially break down triglycerides, free up those free fatty acids and ketones for the production of heat energy to heat my body back up. And that was that little combination, that little tetris was astounding to see the results. I lost 60 pounds in probably three or four months.

Cold water therapy, heat as well. In terms of our mitochondrial function, I think that the mitochondria, they need to have like just their own spotlight on stage in terms of disease prevention, weight loss, proper mental function and performance. And it was probably such a big part for you. Like you're probably awakening mitochondria within your body that were dormant or kind of.

Poke at them a little bit, wake up a little bit. There's also, yeah, I mean many of these practices actually activate mitobiogenesis, creation of new mitochondria. There's also just what's happening at the subcellular mitochondrial level with, you know, providing obviously the right macronutrient combination there, but also with infrared light. So this.