Ep #40 | Hydration Revolution: Water Can Transform Your Health and Metabolism with Shawn Stevenson

Foreign. This is a glass of water. And it seems simple enough, but our bodies are 70% water. And when you think about it, you realize that our relationship with what we drink is probably going to be playing a truly important aspect in our lives, from our biology to the way we think, to the way we sleep, to the way we function in the world. Yet how many of us are truly educated on the science of how to drink, what to drink, what type of water to consume? So in this particular episode, we want to go deep in the science of drinking. With me is one of the most brilliant minds I've encountered in health. I'm a big fan of his podcast, Model Health show, and get this, it has been featured as the number one health podcast on itunes. It gets millions of listener downloads each year. He's been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine, Men's Health Magazine, espn, Fox News. He is an incredible soul. I have such incredibly beautiful conversations with him. He has such a good heart, and he is brilliant in so many ways. Now, his book is one of the most highlighted books I've ever. And I'd like to show this picture to Sean. These are all the highlights I made in this book. Truly one of the most highlighted books I've read, because Sean has a funny way of writing that just hooks you, but then he delivers so many insights that you change your perspective on practically every aspect of your body, from how you sleep to how you drink, to how you jog, to how you exercise, to the foods you eat. So I love the way this man thinks because he's able to connect so many dots and make it entertaining. If you've not listened yet to the Model Health show, you definitely should. So welcome to the set. Shawn Stevenson.

I'm so grateful to be here. That is the greatest introduction I've ever had in my life. Thank you so much.

Thank you. I'm happy I did you justice, Sean, because I love your podcast and I love the way you introduce your guest.

Yeah. Thank you so much.

So we're talking about water.

Yeah. Yes. Such an important topic. You know, Leonardo da Vinci called water the driver of all in nature, and it's one of those substances. You know, we're so. I think we become jaded by it because we're around it so much, especially if we're in a developed place and we really don't understand the value that it has. And so I always like to start with something that is super visceral for people. And the reality is that, you know, a lot of us are. We want to look good. You Know, we want to look good, we want to feel good. And one of the most fascinating things I came across recently was this instance. It's something called water induced thermogenesis. Alright. So when a lot of people were thinking about modulating our nutrition, we're thinking about changing things with our exercise to try to burn fat, burn calories. But simply, according to the latest research, drinking 17 ounces of water in one go, just within a minute, can boost your metabolism upwards of about 30%.

What? Yeah, 17 ounces of water. So this is a glass of water, pretty standard regular glass. We're filming here in Portugal. How much is, how many ounces is this?

That's around five ounces.

Okay, so 17 ounces of water in one go. So about three of these glasses. Yeah, three and a half.

That'll get you there.

That's. That seems very doable.

And it happens within about 10 minutes. And it's actually what they found was that 30%. 30%, yeah.

Wow. So I've heard that when you are dehydrated, your metabolism goes down by about 4%. But you're saying that there's an alternate hack, three of these glasses, 30% boost in metabolic rate.

That's correct.

How long does that boost last?

So it's going to last upwards of about 40 minutes. So you're going to burn somewhere around 30 to 40 additional calories just from drinking water.

I see.

Now, of course we know that calories are not the whole story, but I just wanted to share that to get started, to get people thinking a little bit differently about. Because my question is always, how, how is that even possible? And so if we start to understand some of the basics of what water does in our system, water is known as a universal solvent because it is the most interactive substance that we know. Like things, the most things that are possible dissolve in water versus any other liquid. And so understand that we're mostly water, which you mentioned at the top of the show, but what does this actually mean? Number one, our blood is about 90% water. This is how our body is transporting nutrients and oxygen throughout our system. If we're dehydrated, this. According to the US military, even 1% of this can start to damage our blood and also damage our cognitive function. Just 1% drop in our normal hydration level. So we've got our blood, we've got our synovial fluid, we've got our cerebral spinal fluid, we've got our brain, obviously. Well, maybe not so obvious. So let's talk about that. So the physical matter of Our brain is mostly fat, protein, a little bit of carbohydrate, but the majority of our brains, it's over 70% water. And so again, a drop in around 1% to upwards of 5% literally causes shrinkage to your brain. And so if we're trying to be sharp, we're trying to be focused, we're trying to be our very best cognitively, and we're simply not drinking water, we're putting ourselves at a disadvantage. It's something so simple, but we overlook it. And so yesterday in my talk, I talked a little bit about my experience of having the so called incurable spinal condition. And I had something called degenerative disc disease. So my discs were just kind of rapidly deteriorating. So much so that they were so compressed that I had two ruptures in my lower back. And the number one thing that makes up our disc is actually water. But it's actually one of the last places that get hydration. Because your body really works on a hierarchy. Your brain is a top priority of getting the hydration you consume. And it's delivered to all of your cells through these little protein channels called aquaporins, which we'll get to maybe a little bit later. And then your blood is obviously important and your body's going to get the hydration to your disc whenever it can. And just a little fun fact, everybody gets shorter as the day goes on. And so you might start the day at five foot ten, but by the end of the day you could be down to 5 foot 9. Just because of gravity. Half an inch. I didn't mean to say five foot nine. Five foot nine and a half, three quarters.

So that doesn't just make you increase your metabolic rate, it makes you taller.

It does lead a miracle drug. You gotta think about gravity. You know, we just talked about John Carter the other day and I mentioned this and you mentioned how terrible of a movie it was. But when you think about it, we're constantly experiencing this force of gravity. And so when he went to Mars, he was like this superhuman because he didn't have that gravitational force and his body was able to really express itself in a different way. And so, yeah, it's one of those things that compresses water. And so one of the number of people ask me, what did you do to reverse the condition? I'm not going to say it's the number one thing, but it's right up there was I began to do this process called getting super hydrated each day. And I started to, you know, digging into the research I saw that your disc are one of the last places to get hydrated is through a process called remote diffusion, which we're going to talk a little bit about diffusion in a minute. Super important. But you have to have so much water available in your body that it will get fed to your disc. Alright. So again, just a small drop in that normal hydration level can cause dehydration to your disc and your back and increased risk of injury.

So are you saying that if we super hydrate, it actually increases our height?

Potentially. Potentially. You need that, you need that substance in order to hydrate your disc.

I see.

And really every tissue in your body.

Right.

And so if you're lacking in that, you are putting yourself at a metabolic disadvantage, at a cognitive disadvantage, and also I guess at a height disadvantage too.

Right.

So, you know, what was so fascinating is I was, you know, we came here to Portugal and I was on the plane and I shared this little fun fact with my wife, which she got mad at me later about. She actually yelled at me today in the, in the room. With love. With love. But I told her that. And this is again, super fascinating stuff, but we don't think about this. When you're on a flight, the air is, it's really, it's kind of like a processed air in a sense, you know, and the depending on the pilot, they can actually modulate this, but it's going to be some recycled air. And it's also. They're bringing in some air from the outside too, but the air is so dry, it's actually upwards of three times more dry than the Sahara desert in an aircraft. And we don't think about it because we're not sweating. We don't have like the sun beaming on us. But this diffusion, and what diffusion basically means is that water is moving from a place of higher concentration to lesser concentration. So it's literally pulling that water out of your body. It's sort of like. Did you see the movie Aquaman?

Yeah.

Well, there's a scene when they go to the desert and they're trying to unlock this key to find, you know, this map to find this trident. And they're in the desert and this key is not working because they needed hydration. There was a time when the desert was an ocean. And so she basically, Mira, she's like a princess underwater princess. And she pulls a little bit of water off of him and drops it on there.

She puts off his sweat. That's it with telekinesis.

And he was like, I could have just peed on it. But yeah, that's kind of what's happening, but we don't see it. And so one of the things that we experience when we travel, you know, especially if you're flying, is, you know, reduced, reduced reductions in your mood. You know, your mood can go down a little bit. Also your energy, experiencing fatigue, some people experience more pain, headaches, things like that. Just simply getting hydrated and being more proactive about it. Especially when you're flying, drink more because water is getting pulled from your body.

And you're saying that actually influences our moods as well?

Absolutely, absolutely. And here's why. So we know that our mood is really influenced by what's happening with our hormones and our neurotransmitters. That's really when we're talking about feelings. These are the hormone, these are the chemicals in our body that are sending messages throughout our cells that are telling all of your cells how you're feeling and your neurotransmitters and your hormones are moving throughout your body in a water superhighway. And so again, dehydration causes those nice four lane highways to become like one lane Portugal back roads. Right? And so, and no, no, no offense, you know, it's beautiful, but just understanding that those pathways begin to get compressed and that communication starts to go down. And that's really what it is as far as our mood. Well, one of the big aspects of that, but even building the hormones themselves, guess what they're made of? Primarily water. Same thing with our mitochondria and our energy. The mitochondria themselves, which are really the energy power plants in our cells, which a lot of people have heard this statement before, but they're operating in a water medium as well. And so that dehydration is really affecting you at a cellular level, damaging your mitochondria and literally can damage your DNA.

So that's incredible. So that, that, that is so much in terms of how water influences our lives. I was not aware of a lot of these things, but let's go a little bit deeper. So you spoke about super hydration. You spoke about how drinking 17 ounces of water can increase our metabolic rate for the next 40 minutes by around 30%. What is a framework that we can think about from the time we wake up to the time we go to bed in terms of how we're consuming water.

Perfect. You know, when I ask people who come into my clinic for years, you know, just basic things about drinking water and they nine times out of ten they're like, I know I should be drinking more, you know, and what I did was develop this tactic and lots of my awesome friends have employed this tactic and have even put in books like Aubrey Marcus put in his book Win the Day. And it's called getting super hydrated, as I mentioned. And what I do is I take what's called an inner bath to start the day. And so the first thing I do when I wake up, you know, I might go to the bathroom first, but then I'll have about a liter of water to start my day. And this is because as a liter.

A liter would be about, I think.

Somewhere around 32 ounces. Well, it depends on the day. 24 to 32 ounces.

Okay.

And I do this to get a jump start because once the day starts going.

So that'll be around four glasses like this.

Yeah, maybe a little bit more.

Five, six.

Yeah, around five of those.

Around five of these glasses.

Okay. Now I'm not saying everybody needs to do this, but it's a great opportunity, even if it's 16 ounces, to get a jumpstart on your hydration demands of your body. Right. To start your day. Plus you're going to get that boost, the water induced thermogenesis you're setting your metabolism on and you're giving. When you wake up in the morning, it's probably the most dehydrated that you are without exercising because you've gone for six, seven, eight hours without drinking. And when you're sleeping, your body is going through a tremendous amount of metabolic processes and, and there's a lot of metabolic wastes that are left over. And this is why your urine is usually so concentrated when you wake up in the morning. It's trying to flush that stuff out and you need to replenish those fluids. And so especially when you're sleeping, it's the activity of something called your glymphatic system. Right. So I mentioned earlier, you have the lymphatic system, which is a water based system. It's really your cellular waste management system of your body, which is super important. It's where your, a lot of your immune system is located, doing this work. The glymphatic system detoxifies your brain and there's essentially this break with the blood brain barrier. And so the lymphatic system doesn't go there. And so your brain has its own waste management system and it's 10 times more active when you're sleeping. And so now we have data that's affirming that Alzheimer's is really Related to an inability of the brain to detoxify itself. And so if you're dehydrated, it's one of those underlying things. Are we providing the base material for your body to do its job? Right. And so the glymphatic system is 10 times more active when you're sleeping and getting those wastes out of your body. You need water to assist in that. And so it's just, you're getting so many benefits by getting up, taking an inner bath. We take an outer bath, you know, but taking that inner bath, 16, I'll say 16 to 32 ounces can be an absolute game changer. I'm not saying you can't have coffee. Have some water first. Get that in, get the body.

That's really interesting. I'm not doing that. I realize when I wake up, I meditate, I exercise, I. I might make myself a smoothie, but I'm not taking water. And I now realize that that is putting me at a disadvantage. So literally, you should be taking anywhere from three to six of these classes, depending on what you're comfortable with. And I guess it depends on your body size as well.

Absolutely.

Perfect. In the morning when you wake up. Fantastic.

And another little tip with the body size, because that's important as well, because there's this cookie cutter statement of you need eight, eight ounce glasses of water each day.

Huh.

If somebody's in the NBA and they're seven feet tall and you know, 280 pounds versus, you know, somebody who's five foot one and 100 pounds. And so just a general metric for people is taking your body weight, which, you know, if you're 150 pounds, divide that number in half, that'll give you 75. That's the number of ounces to target. Okay. As a baseline.

So 75 days or for the morning?

For the day.

For the day.

For the day, yeah. And that just gives us a little bit of a barometer to use as a marker for folks.

Wow. So that's a brilliant strategy. So £150, you take your body weight in pounds. So let's say you weigh 200 pounds. You divide that by half, that's 100 pounds. And that means 100 ounces of water. And a single glass like that is how many ounces roughly.

So this is somewhere. The glass itself is about 8 ounces.

8 ounces. Okay, so you're looking at around 12 of these glasses of water a day if you weigh 200 pounds.

Yeah, exactly.

Amazing. Thanks. That's. That's really cool. Okay, so we start the day with super hydration. Now, as we go throughout the day, what is our relationship with water?

This is another little simple tactic. If you have it with you, it's much easier to drink, just like anything, you know, if you've got cookies and chips in your house, they're much easier to eat, you know? And so I found that in people that are in my camp, that are on my team or that associate with me, I'm always checking, like, where's your bottle? You know, where's your water bottle? I want to see it with you. Because if it's with you, you have a greater proclivity to actually drinking it. Something super simple. But get yourself a nice bottle that becomes like your travel buddy. And, you know, even for me, I've got that bottle that was taken away from me for the filming, but I've got a bottle that I carry around with me that, you know, it just enables me that it's easy access. Right? And so that's a simple, very simple tactic. And if you really are starting to understand how powerful water can be for so many different factors of your life, just making it a mandate that you just keep a bottle with you and so you have easy access to keep sipping throughout the day.

Right? And a really cool hack for that is to get a good designer bottle. They now sell these designer glass bottles with beautiful cork, and they look so good. And I've seen some people in my office put that on their desk. Not only does it remind them to drink water, but it almost serves as a vase. And it looks so beautiful, it lightens up the desk. And so you kind of kill two birds in one stone. It beautifies your environment. And it also has water for you, readily available.

Beautifies you.

It beautifies you. Right? I love that. And some of these bottles now also come with filters based on coconut fibre or charcoal, where it actually filters the water. It gives an additional layering of filtering to the water as you pour it in. And there are some incredible brands out there. What would be a recommended Google search to find such.

This is such a great topic. And you just mentioned bottling it in glass. And so now a lot of people are aware of this, but I always like to go a little bit deeper and drill in. But. And I've been talking about this for a decade and a half, and it's so beautiful that now people are really understanding this. But what plastic is, it has its benefits. But because water is the universal solvent, it absorbs compounds from whatever it's Exposed to. And plastic doesn't biodegrade, it photodegrades. And so literally light breaks plastic down. And so water being a solvent, it's absorbing those compounds from the plastic. And one of the ones that people are aware of now is bpa, bisphenol A. And this is a known xenoestrogen. It's in these camps of these kind of external estrogens that when you consume them, they can fit into estrogen receptor sites in your body and. And turn on programs related to estrogen. And so that doesn't sound very good, because it's not. And so now we're understanding that plastic might not be the best thing to keep our water stored in. Now, with that said, if you're on a flight, again, don't be neurotic like I used to be because I went through phases. Like I literally would. I'm not going to say I would drink my pee first before I drink bottled water, but I would definitely postpone my drinking of water because I didn't want to drink out of plastic.

Wow.

It's more important to get hydrated. And your body will always choose preferentially the higher quality water.

Right. So plastic water bottles. So the water bottle that you carry with you, is that plastic or is that glass?

So that one's glass and I got that from here, but I generally carry a stainless steel bottle. They're super nice and they're very durable also.

Great.

Yeah, yeah.

Fantastic. And a phenomenon that's happening right now, especially in American airports, and I'm so proud of the US for adopting this, is in many American airports. They are water refill machines. So. So you can take your metal or your glass bottle and refill it so, you know, you don't have to buy plastic bottled water. Not only is the plastic bottled water not so good for you, but it poses a huge environmental risk because only 5% of plastic water bottles in the United States actually get recycled.

Yeah, it's terrible. It's terrible.

So a lot of it is ending up in landfills or worse, the ocean.

Yeah, yeah. It's a. Definitely a big issue. And again, this just stacks conditions for us to realize how important it is and to take a little bit of a different approach. And something else I want to share with that is when we're filling up water at these different water stations, it might be spring water, it might be. Oftentimes it's reverse osmosis water. And this is one of the ideal ways to treat water that is not under the best conditions because again, I started this by. With Leonardo da Vinci's quote, water is the driver of all nature.

This is.

That's a smart guy. And for him to say that. So I want to dig a little bit deeper and understand water being the universal solvent, it carries memory. Water is sort of like a liquid crystal, and it's conductive as well. Pure water, H2O is not anything you find in nature, but pure water itself is actually an insulator because it doesn't have the conductivity because of the minerals.

Right?

So these ions that are in the water, you find it in nature, it's going to have. Then when we talk about acids and alkalines or acids and bases, it's really talking about the mineral composition. And so it has an electric charge. This is why, you know, the scary movie, like, you're in the bathtub, you know, trying to exfoliate or whatever, and Jason comes in and drops a, you know, a radio in the bathtub and shocks the shit out of you. You know, it's because it's conductive and you're conductive. Guess what? You're made of water. And it's water that has a lot of dissolved solids in it. Right? So understanding that, and also that water has this memory, water is able to pick up a lot of the things that we're putting into the water supply. So in the US There was a study that was published by the Associated Press, and this was 10 years ago. And again, I've been talking about this literally since it came out. But now more people are aware of this. They tested the water of 41 million households in the year from California to New York City, and they found trace amounts of chemotherapy medications in the water supply. Antidepressants, blood pressure medications, muscle relaxants. The list goes on and on.

And how is this getting in the water?

There's two ways. There are water treatment facilities that are using recycled water, and they're doing a great job cleaning it, filtering out all the crap that comes in through our toilets and our sinks and things like that. I don't think a lot of people are aware of that. We just think that our water comes from somewhere, but sometimes it's actually recycled water. And so this is why they're adding.

And so people who are taking these medications, the medications are passing, they're pissing it into the water, and the water is recycling. Because these molecules are so tiny, it's near impossible to filter. So we are creating water that's more and more highly concentrated in these medications.

And the thing is, you know, it's not super alarming, because the experts would say, well, these are such small micro amounts that it doesn't matter. It kind of matters, especially when we understand that things kind of bioaccumulate in our tissues. And so understanding that, you know, because it can be a little bit scary and a little bit gross, that the water is getting recycled. And this is not 100% of the cases, but in some cases. And so they're using very strong antibiotics, very strong chemicals to destroy every kind of pathogen that could be in the water. The main one is chlorine in the US and this is what we use in swimming pools and things like that. Again, you want that if you're having recycled water, but here's the problem. It's used to destroy bacteria, pathogens, but you're mostly bacteria in your body. Right. Your gut. And the research kind of changes a little bit. But we have upwards of somewhere around 50 trillion human cells, and you have 10 times more bacteria than you have human cells.

Yeah, we have more bacterial cells than human cells, and roughly 3 to 4% of your body weight is made up of bacterial cells. We live, we coexist. Not just. We're not just human. We are human. Plus our gut bacteria and the bacteria all across our body, they actually cause us to function.

Exactly, exactly. And so when we're taking a nice tall glass of chlorinated water, you're gonna be taking out some of the good guys, you know, And I've seen this just clinically, you know, gut dysbiosis, and somebody's like, well, I drink plenty of water and this, and just drilling down and kind of doing a survey of what's happening in their life, the things they're consuming. And we have a very antimicrobial, antibacterial culture now. Like, we're trying to destroy everything. We thought that that was the root of problems, but it's actually one of the things that supports our health is supporting the friendly flora, because pathogenic bacteria are very crafty at sticking around, you know, and so I just want people to understand that that.

So if tap water, recycled tap water is bad, are there any situations where we could be drinking tap water? Or are you saying absolutely not?

Again, if it comes down to it, I'm going to drink tap water rather than chronically dehydrate myself. But if you are aware enough to choose and to create strategy, there are better options. And for anybody who has tap water, even getting a simple filter, I recommend reverse osmosis. Because when I say a simple filter, that's. You can remove Some things, you know, like, we'll take an example of a popular one. Can I name drop here, because.

Yes, absolutely.

Brita is a really popular one in the US but if you read the package, it literally just says, removes the smell and taste of chlorine. It doesn't actually remove the chlorine. And it's made by Clorox, who makes bleach, you know.

Right. And.

And so that's not gonna be. There are gonna be some impurities that get filtered out. But what we want is reverse osmosis would be a good choice. And what that does is it's pushing the water through a very, very, very tight, very small microscopic membrane, and it removes, like, chlorine can't fit through there.

I see.

And so, but the problem with it is it's creating a really a blank slate of water, H2O, which, again, that doesn't exist in nature. It's more of like a supplement. And so what we want to do is bring back the conductivity, the electrical charge to the water. We can literally light a light bulb with this water having minerals in it.

I see.

And so, again, it's lighting you up and giving your cells that energy. But if it's just blank H2O diffusion, it's going to be pulling minerals from you to try to process the water. Not saying it's the worst thing. I'd probably see somebody drink pure H2O, then chlorinated water. But so something simple, if you have a reverse osmosis system, is to simply add some minerals back to your water. This could be some liquid minerals.

So give us a power plan how to do that. Firstly, what reverse osmosis systems do you recommend and what mineral?

They're all really comparable. I don't want to.

No, I get that. But tell us at least a Google search we could put in to get started. Reverse osmosis filters. Would that be something we can search? I would.

Google Best reverse osmosis system. Got it.

Best reverse osmosis system.

Do your homework, because something might be appropriate for you that's not for somebody. Got it.

I understand.

Some people get a whole house system. Some people get little desktop countertops.

Osmosis system. And then what are some of the additional supplements and nutrients we can put back in the water?

Yeah. So there's liquid minerals. There are, like, ionic minerals that you can buy.

Is that a brand that we search for liquid minerals?

There's one is called. I believe it's trace minerals, but I get mine from a company called Activation Products. Do you know Ian Clark, by chance?

No.

Okay, so activation products has a great liquid mineral.

So we can search for activation products and find. And what is that particular thing that we're looking for under activation products? Liquid minerals.

Yeah, liquid minerals.

Now we put that back in the water.

Yeah, just put some mineral drops in there or something.

Simple as a real useful tip. Now, should we ever be buying water in plastic bottles?

If you can avoid it, avoid it.

If not, not just because it's bad for the environment, but because the plastic is bad for you.

Yeah, you're definitely drinking plastic tea, right? Yeah.

Estrogen water. Plastic tea. Estrogen water. Now explain that for a moment. Why do you call it estrogen water?

Because of the xenoestrogens from the plastics.

Wow. Okay, so this actually, like, messes up your biochemistry.

Yeah, definitely.

Amazing.

Potentially do that.

Okay, so to summarize, tap water, in many cases you can drink it, but over the long term, it's not the best option. Find a reverse osmosis filter. But the problem with reverse osmosis systems is that it turns water into a clean slate. We want to add back the nutrients to water. And the thing that we're going to.

Search for is best reverse osmosis system and liquid mineral drops. Activation products is my favorite or high quality salt.

Okay, High quality salt. Now, there are a couple of other things that you speak about in terms of things to add to water, from lemon to crystal energy to MSM to veggies to sea salt. Let's talk about that. How do we optimize our water?

Sure. So again, water being this universal solvent and being a liquid crystal, water has structure. It's like Bruce Lee, you know, and him really understanding the power of water that it's able to flow, but it's also able to have structure at the same time and to strike very hard. Right. It has this really amazing quality to it. And creating structure with the water, it's not just the minerals, but providing electrons to the water as well. And that's what fruits and vegetables can do. You know this. We have a natural proclativity. I hope I said that. Right. To add lemon and to add lime to our water. And it makes the water more hydrating.

And it's so much more tasty.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I just did that last night with dinner, you know, so had some lime.

So a simple hack is I always keep a bowl of sliced lime in my refrigerator. So I have my water filter. As soon as I get my water, I squeeze lime into it. And another hack which I want to add is, is A sparkling water machine. So just like you, I know you had a soda addiction, right?

Oh, yeah.

So I used to feel that I needed while in the early days when I was a college kid in Michigan, right. I would watch a movie with Coke. Then as I grew older, I'm like, okay, Coke is really bad. I'm gonna watch a movie with red wine. But what happens is I'm watching a full two hour movie. I'm consuming two glasses of red wine. But I realized it wasn't the wine or the Coke. It was the sensation of something, you know, tasty going through my mouth. Regular water just didn't cut it because we are so used to the taste. It's a blank taste. But what I found is that a, you could add lemon to the water and it actually became a pretty good substitute for red wine. But an even better way is a sparkling water machine. I couldn't understand how Europeans were so into sparkling water. But when I started really enjoying sparkling water, and the machines are really, really, really affordable, sparkling water actually helped me cut down on my alcohol consumption by 70% because no longer did I need that red glass of wine for taste. As I was watching a movie, I was drinking sparkling water with lemon. So that's just a bonus tip for those of you who might want to use water to replace some of the more unhealthy products you must be putting in your body. And by the way, Coca Cola. Absolutely not. That stuff is poison.

And it also dehydrates you.

Yes.

You know, so it's literally pulling out a lot of your water to try to process. It's a very, you know, it's not about this. You know, there's a lot of talk about acids and alkalis and eating an alkaline diet. Your body is always modulating and keeping your. Your ph where it needs to be. And different organs require different pHs. But it is such a strong, acidic compound coming into your system. It won't make your body acidic necessarily. It will leach and pull minerals to try to process it. So alkaline minerals. Like, for me, I was experiencing this degenerative disc disease and degenerative bone disease. And what was happening was my body was literally siphoning and pulling the calcium from my bones to try to aid in clotting my blood, you know, because that was. My diet was very high in soda.

And so here's a. So There's a famous YouTuber who recently did an experiment. He decided to take just three cans of Coke a day. That's it. Three cans of Coke for 30 days. Now, at the end of 30 days, this is basically what happened. He said that firstly he put on ten pounds, so that was kind of unattractive. But the worst part was this. He worked from home and he started needing to take five naps a day because his energy level plummeted. But not only did his energy level plummet, he found that his motivation to exercise disappeared. He stopped working out. And so it created this whole disruptive cycle. And that's three cans of Coke as far as I'm concerned. And I've spoken about, spoken up about this. Coca Cola should be banned. It is a substance that should not exist on planet earth. Now I'm using Cocos. It's by and far the largest brand. But diet soda is horrible and companies get us hooked on it through really powerful marketing. But they say spreading positivity, no, they are spreading diabetes and other bad things. But it's brilliant how these companies, Coke, Pepsi, associate their poison with positive emotion and get billions of people hooked on it. One of the first things I do for people who come and join Mindvalley, I bring in people from all across the world, 54 countries, is we get them off Coke. We do not serve soda in our office at all. It's just water, sparkling water, coffee. And even by a coffee machine, we avoid putting sugar. We used to have these morning Italian syrups. Just got rid of it. Not a single person complained. But as a result of these changes, the average person joins mindvalley and they stop drinking Coca Cola. They get rid of their sugar. In coffee addiction, Average man now loses 10kg, which is about 22lbs in year one upon joining our company.

Amazing, amazing.

And the thing is, they don't go through any pain or suffering doing that. They just. Because there's no availability of these things, they just reorient. I'm sure it's, it's inconvenient for the first few days, but then your brain gets retrained. So let's actually go into that. We spoke about what to drink, let's talk about what not to drink, let's talk about real quickly about soda. And I want you to also speak about diet soda because that's a big misconception. People think it's actually healthy. And let's talk about alcohol.

Absolutely. So the interesting thing, and I love that you share that experiment that he did and it's just a real testament to how powerful liquid sugar is, you know, because your body is just able to absorb that and get it into your bloodstream very, very quickly. And what's happening is you're getting this associated spike in your insulin levels, which that feeling of tiredness and fatigue is really a result of what's happening with their blood sugar, because the blood sugar is getting this huge spike. And insulin's out doing its job to get that blood sugar back down. And then you go hypoglycemic. Like, you don't just go back to baseline, you go lower. And going through that process is just going to make you feel terrible. This is why people have to keep on going to the next soda, to the next cup of coffee, and just to try to make it through the day or just keep passing out or napping. And so that's one of the big things with soda. And I already mentioned that it literally dehydrates you. It's the opposite of what your brain and your cells are wanting and looking for. And again, but I'm not the police with this stuff. You know, I understand there's situations, and if it's a consistent part of your daily ritual that you're consuming these things, you're really, really setting yourself up for failure.

And the funny thing is, it's very easy to get off the addiction. It's really simple to get off sugar, it takes about seven days. I went through that. I couldn't drink coffee without sugar, right? So here's an experiment that happened to me. I was at a fest right here at this festival, this was 2014. And there was this guy from the military, from the South African military there, and he observed me adding sugar, a satchel of sugar to my coffee every morning. Because I love starting my day with coffee, right? And I would also add some look. And he said, vishen, as a leader in personal growth, why are you doing that? And I was offended. I'm like, Anton. That was his name, Anton Koning. I'm like, anton, I'm gonna. I love my coffee. I'm gonna get on stage. I wanna make myself feel good. He goes, yes, but you're adding sugar to your coffee. You have no idea what that's going to be doing to your body. And I'm going to help you get off it. So I'm like, okay. I wanted to see what this guy could do, what magic this South African military dude could do. And he said, vishen, it's really simple. Tomorrow, don't add a full satchel, Add half a satchel the day after that, add a quarter satchel the day after that. Just don't add sugar. Watch what happens. So I thought, okay, I'll Play along. Second day, I added half coffee. Didn't taste as good, but, you know, it was still drinkable. There were no, it wasn't a big pain at all. The day after that, added a quarter satchel. And the day after that, I really didn't need sugar anymore. And four days later. So it took me four days. And now it's been five years. I can't take coffee with sugar. And that is how fast it takes to retrain your brain. Literally, if you're willing to just go through four days of slowly desensitizing yourself to sugar, you can get off it. It's that easy. But I want you to touch on one quick thing. Diet cola. Is that safe?

Yeah, that's. That's one of the greatest marketing ploys of all time. You know, this concept that, you know, even throwing the word diet in front of it is incredibly brilliant, but it's very evil, you know, because here's the thing, and I shared this with you, I think, in a conversation we had not too long ago, that some of the latest studies are finding that, number one, consuming these artificial sweeteners are related to, you know, we already know there's data linking it to cancer. It'll even say it on the package of some of these things, you know, like aspartame and things like that. But it'll say like, you know, warning, laboratory animals cause cancer, it causes cancer. But now we're finding that it's also linked to dementia. Right. And so there's a double blind, placebo controlled study that was done recently. And so looking at what's happening with our brain, we understand these artificial sweeteners are actually interacting with our brain cells. And that's really the thing to be aware of because it's kind of. There's this category of compounds that's being referred to as these excitotoxins, and they're exciting our brain cells to the point that they can actually die. Now, that category, in and of itself, again, a lot of this stuff is still debatable in my opinion, but it's also something to be cautious of because something's going on. Because we now we know that drinking more diet soda is linked with dementia, we know that it's linked with diabetes as well, which is funny because you're not, you're not consuming any sugar. What's going on here and what it's doing is it's increasing your desire for more calories and more sugar because your cells are not actually getting the sugar that it thinks it's getting there's this gustatory. There's this interaction with your palate, and your brain is thinking it's associated with this sweetness. It thinks that it's getting these calories. Now, there are high quality sweeteners, and they're under this category of, like natural sweeteners that are low glycemic or non glycemic, like stevia and things like that. I'm gonna go out there and say I would even be cautious about that. We don't have the facts yet. But right now, stevia itself, if you get the actual stevia leaf, which I've done years and years ago, it's kind of. It tastes a little bit sweet, but it's a little bit medicinal flavor to it as well, if that makes sense. But I'm a fan of, like, these little liquid stevia drops. And just especially if you are somebody who, like, I don't like water, and there's a lot of people. And I understand for my wife, she's, she doesn't like drinking water in the morning. She found if she heats the water up and drinks it with lemon, she enjoys it. She just did that in the room. And so you can use some liquid stevia drops, especially if it's sparkling water, too. It can make it really nice, you know, but I wouldn't lean too hard on those things either. You know, just go batshit crazy with dropping stevia into your water, you know, five drop. I mean, five dropper fulls, you know, but just having a little bit to make it attractive for you, and it's gonna be safer according to the data that we have right now.

Right, that's, that's really, really, really cool. So diet, diet colas, diet sodas, an absolute no. And I want to touch on one thing, right, you said about your wife not liking the taste of water. Let me just say this. You don't have to like the taste of water to drink water. You can drink water for enjoyment, but you can also drink water for fuel. For, as a, as a health practice, I don't like shaving, but I shave anyway. And likewise, you don't have to like the taste of water. My son doesn't like porridge in the morning, but I tell him, hayden, you're not eating this for entertainment. You're eating this for fuel. So eat the damn porridge. Right? And he understands that. So he understands the difference between breakfast as entertainment with his dad, where we are enjoying what we eat, typically like a good brunch place, or breakfast as fuel, when he has to do it in 15 minutes because he has to get on the school bus. So, again, keep that in mind when you're consuming your water in the morning. Any closing words?

Well, first of all, I haven't heard anybody eat porridge outside of, like, fairy tale books. Personally, that's like a total us thing. Like, I didn't even know people ate porridge.

I think it happens in Europe.

That's super cute, man. You know, I think that the resounding takeaway is that this is such a simple thing that we overlook because I think we're a little bit jaded by water. Like, we've got these beautiful swimming pools out here, we got fountains, and we have overlooked the value of something so simple. This is literally the number one nutrient that we require is water. It's beyond, you know, the omega 3s and the, you know, the biotin and the, you know, all the different, you know, vitamins and minerals that we can conceive of. Enzymes, phytonutrients, water. Something so simple. Get some high quality structured water, whether it's through reverse osmosis system, whether it's through drinking my favorite, which is spring water, which we have access here at this event. Spring water, well water, you know, those are coming from aquaporans. Just do the best you can, but make sure above all is get yourself hydrated.

Amazing. Let's give a cheers to water.

Cheers.

Thanks, everyone.