229 David Zappasodi: Brain Flip Weight Loss

Everyone that struggles with weight loss feels some kind of a conflict. And the conflict has to do with the conscious brain and the survival brain. So in the conscious brain, we want to lose weight. Here's the problem in terms of our day to day experience. We have the sensory experience of being overweight. And you know what else? We have a sensory experience of every day being alive. The sensory experience of being overweight and the sensory experience of being alive become connected with each other. They become an association. So in the survival brain, being overweight equals safe. Whereas in the conscious brain, we know that like, that can lead a heart attack, can lead to stroke, can lead to diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol. We know consciously all the things that make it unsafe. But in the survival brain, it equals safe. And that survival brain association has a whole bunch of little associations like ice cream equals enjoyment, watching TV equals de stressing. It's like all these different things that equate to that one big message of overweight equals safe.

That's bestselling author David Zapposzotti. And this is episode 229 of Wellness Force Radio. What's up, my friend? It's your host, Josh Trent. And welcome back to another episode for your weekly access to global experts in all things wellness as we discover the physical and emotional intelligence we need to live life. Well, in this podcast, we're talking about flipping the brain, literally and figuratively for weight loss. How to let go of old weight that doesn't serve us anymore. Now, so many of us have heard of Pavlov's dogs, this power of neuro association, where in the experiment, whenever a bell is rung, the dogs salivate. We're talking about this today, the association of our unhealthy habits. And a breakthrough developed by our return guest, David Zappos, founder of Empowered Health, now an exercise physiologist, an international bestseller and a transformational. That's the key word, transformational. To transform oneself. He helps clients let go of weight. Countless individuals across the world actually to break through the weight loss struggle that drastically will change their lives forever for the better. Now, today, David is going to share over two decades of his professional experience guiding clients through. Through the inner conflict of weight loss. And why is it, by the way, why is it so challenging that only 5% of people, which means 95% of people that let go of weight will regain it and then some? It's pretty bleak. Let's be real. It can be very depressing, disheartening to know that 95% of people that Lose the weight will gain it back. But this is why today is so exciting. In the past 20 years of research and practical experience, David has uncovered a brand new way of addressing this inner conflict between what he calls our conscious brain and our survival brain. And this is why this podcast, I believe, is going to be so radically transformational to the fitness industry, especially the weight loss industry, because losing weight can sometimes feel like dying. And David has found a way to make losing weight feel exciting about living to the brain. And we're talking about this in depth today for a very powerful show on associative conditioning, the vicious cycles of cravings, and the rewiring of the neural pathways to permanently forever change the way that diet and lifestyle applies to the subconscious mind. Now, David is a close friend of mine. I've gotten to know him over the past three years since our first podcast when he came on Wellness force for episode 72. And the research he's been working on over the past year was so profound that I actually went through the experience myself, which I'll be talking about in an upcoming podcast. Needless to say, I personally feel a radical shift in the way I'm approaching my own personal health and already seeing my productivity and my presence increase in my work of service to Wellness Force and in the way I see my own body, how I care for my own body. This is gonna be so powerful for you wherever you are in your weight loss journey. I cannot wait for you to listen to David where he uncovers the real truth about why the weight loss industry actually drives people to fail on purpose and the change he is creating for millions. What are the three brain flip stages and how do they permanently empower a new mindset? Why he shifted his coaching style when he started to see 20 times the results with his clients, why we're conditioned to associate foods with emotions and how to take back control of our North Star when it comes to eating food, how food and diet marketing can actually be used to train healthy aspects of our brain for better choices and how to use generosity, especially for all the parents or anyone that has a giving heart out there that listen to the show. This is why it's so important to understand generosity, why it's such an integral part of flipping the brain for weight loss. David will talk about this on the show, but for Wellness Force, he is offering a handful of breakthrough sessions. If you're serious about losing weight and you have quite a bit of weight to lose, take a stand for yourself, go to empoweredhealthnow.com talk book A Time with David. That's it. Go to empoweredhealthnow.com talk if at any point you get the feeling like this is for you. Now let's dig in and flip the script on brain flip weight loss with David Zamposzotti. This is Wellness Force. I'm Josh Trent. My guest today returns to the show as the international bestselling author of A Moveable heart, Unstoppable mind with a degree, an exercise fizz from Westchester University, and 20 years in health and wellness. You guys helping men and women with the psychology of weight loss and so much more. He's been a trainer, a metabolic typing practitioner, a boot camp instructor, a martial arts teacher, and a public speaker on healthy living. He also had a functional fitness and nutrition center right here in San Diego where he was featured everywhere, nationally and locally on news. But really, David is a friend. He's a true definition of a modern day wellness warrior. He's a dad, he's a husband, he's a health pro and someone inside all these things. He's mastered the art of sitting in silence to meditate and refuel his brain and body. Welcome back to the show, David Zapposzoti.

Thank you so much, Josh. Anytime I get a chance to talk to you, the pleasure's all mine.

We're sitting here on a sunny afternoon in Encinitas. You know, it's been great over the past three years. It's been three years we've known each other. Yeah, I think so. Met you through Sean Croxton, Underground wellness at his. Had a house party. You know, the very first time I met you, I knew that you were a very spiritual person, a very grounded person, and I could sense that from you. And I told you before we recorded, I just want to compliment you as we start the show. You have been in health and wellness for 20 plus years, but you have recently rebranded and repackaged all your knowledge to meet people truly where they are. I think as a society, David, to set the container for our conversation, we are, as a society, the most stressed, the most overwhelmed, and honestly the most victimized by our own brain. And so we're focused on brain flip for weight loss. How did you even come up with this title? What does this mean to you? Brain flip for weight loss?

It was unexpected. You know, I've been in this industry for 23 years. I've gradually progressed, but in the last year or so, I hit like a sort of a threshold where things just sort of exploded in terms of my own understanding through what I call a brain Flip for those who are listening, a brain flip. The way I'm talking about it is a rewiring of our survival brain where we define things differently. And once that happens, it's like sort of putting extra coding into a program, a computer program. It changes it forever. That's what I do. I help people with cravings, overeating. If they hate weight loss, we can reprogram that. So we're literally doing that. And I did it the first time in business. Like, I actually had a brain flip with business where I had a huge explosion in what I was doing. And it completely rocked my world. I was not expecting it. And it gave me a clarity on what brings about real change, not in the conscious brain, but in our instinctual, like sort of reptilian survival brain. And I use that knowledge now to help people, like for example, with something like cravings. Before, it took me several months to help a person who is dealing with cravings and the way that I would typically do it, I wasn't the kind of person. After about 10 years in the industry, I started realizing that trying to cut things out and restrict things and get them out of the diet, that doesn't really work because it's all discipline and willpower and those things, they don't last. People end up caving in at some point or another, going off track. And it just becomes harder and harder to do over time. So what I started to do, doing, once I realized that that wasn't the way, I started just focusing on the positive foods, like having them add in beneficial foods. And then what I would notice is that the unhealthy stuff would drop away. But the challenge is that it would take months for that to occur. Now I'm helping people to completely resolve cravings, completely resolve them in roughly average is four to six days. That's not a best case scenario. That's my average time is four to six days. And I'm doing something very differently than I was doing there. I'm focusing on the negative, not the positive.

What's fascinating to me about you is, yes, you are a health pro and you have a meditative practice and you're an author, but you also operate in the world where everyone else does. David, you're a father. You have responsibilities, just like everyday men and women. Are there a common thread that actually allows people to first identify that they need a brain flip and then what actually is the brain flip?

We all create these links or these associations or these relationships in the same way, but most of us aren't aware of it. And most of it happens in childhood for all of us. For some people, it impacts the body. Other people, it impacts, like, having limiting beliefs around money. Other people with having dysfunctional relationships. You know, like when a woman gets into a relationship with a man and he beats her, and then she gets out of the relationship, gets into another one, and that guy beats her and keeps going. Like, we've heard about this kind of thing. It's not that she consciously wants that. It's that there's a survival brain relationship in there that links that to being safe. As crazy as that sounds, same thing with a craving for ice cream. You know, we might consciously know that we don't want to have that in our life, that we're addicted, we feel powerless against it. But there's another part in our reptilian brain that feels that ice cream is safe. That's where the inner conflict comes about. And we all have inner conflicts. Every single one of us has inner conflicts. We're all. If we're aware, if we're conscious, then we're aware that we have these conflicts. And our journey is a journey of ever improving alignment in some form or another, where we're becoming more and more aligned with where we were. So, like, I believe that we're perfect where we are. Like, what, what the challenges we're dealing with, the things that we have going on in our life, the ups and the downs, they're all great. But if you're on a path of awareness and growth, if you're in the exact same place a year from now, there's something wrong at that point. So I feel that you're perfect where you are. But if you're growing, if you're focused on that, then you should be in a different place. You might even feel like you're in a worse place in a year because you're dealing with bigger challenges. But ultimately, if your intention is to grow, sometimes that happens. Sometimes we get bigger and bigger challenges. And it seems like it can feel like we're taking steps back when really, ultimately we're not.

We're moving forward in some way. And what's interesting is I can raise my hand right now. You know, this is the most, I guess you could say, lipid storage weight I've ever had since 2003, 2004. Okay. And so I'm actually currently experiencing my work on my brain flip. So this is perfect timing for this show. Let's actually just describe this, though. There's the reptilian brain. There's this brain that's tied into our amygdala, to our nervous system, to our bendula. Then there's the other side that's more conscious. That's like, oh, I recognize that we're sitting here on the floor, we're drinking water out of a cup. But explore these two worlds for us because this is where the brain flip actually lives, okay?

And to be honest with you, I don't talk about it too much in terms of technical terms like in the brain or anything. I just talk about it. And I don't know that even the way that I talk about it is scientifically accurate in terms of it's the correct terms or not. All that I care about, the only thing that I care about is the bottom line result is making sure, like if I can explain it in a way and my clients get the results, then that explanation is the right way.

The science doesn't matter.

That literally doesn't matter to me, okay? All that I care about is the results. So here's the way that I look at it, okay? There's sort of like two aspects to our brain. There's a conscious brain and a survival brain. The conscious brain we're all aware of and it's very easy to understand. I'm overweight and I don't consciously like it. I want to lose weight. I want to get this weight off. I want to eat healthy. I want to do all these things that create a healthy lifestyle so I can lose the weight. So my goal is to lose the weight, okay? Very simple, very straightforward. Now, the survival brain is quite a bit different because it doesn't have to do with our conscious thinking. It just has to do with our sensory experience of the world. And the only time we experience something sensory wise is in the present moment. Okay? What that means is that time doesn't exist for the sensory brain. So let's say, for example. Let me give you an example. Okay? Let's say that I have a woman recently who started with me about a month ago and we did a brain flip with diet soda. So she's been drinking. She was drinking Diet Cokes, she was drinking eight to ten Diet Cokes every single day. And for 30 years, since 1988, okay? It took us five years to brain flip that. And since that time, she has never had a soda since then. And I was actually talking with her last night. She called me last night, she's like, she's working on a brain flip now with bread. And she's like, you know, I know we're working on bread, but I Just wanted to say, like, this feels so weird to me that I'm not. I have no interest in soda anymore. And I was, like, tempting. I was trying to tempt her to drink soda. So after we had the brain flip, she was like, oh, great, I can throw the soda away. I know I'm free of it. And I'm like, no, no, keep it in the fridge. And then, like, when I would talk to her, I'd be like, hey, it's such a hot day out. Doesn't it. Doesn't this a cold, nice, cold soda just taste. Doesn't that seem like it'll be so good?

Oh, wow. You're like the devil.

Yeah. I'm, like, really trying to tempt her. And, like, not. None of it. She's not having any of it. She's like. She's not amused. She doesn't think it's funny. She's like, dave. I was like. She's like, I really like. Just the thought of doing. It's just not interesting whatsoever. So after about a week, I was like, all right, you can throw the soda out now. And I stopped trying to tempt her. Then we're working on bread. So here's what happened in the middle of her brain flip, right? We're on day three of working on soda. I'll describe the brain flip a little bit later so we can see what's going on there. But on day three, she had a memory of something from her past, which is very common for my clients when they're going through this process. They start having memories pop up that they don't remember. She was saying, I thought I had a great childhood, but now I'm realizing there were some really messed up things that happened. So she remembered this one time that she scraped her knee, and she went inside and saw her mom, and her mom comforted her, kissed her, hugged her, started helping her with the knee, and at the same time, she gave her ice cream. Okay? So she remembers this specific memory. And what she realized is that her mom didn't teach her that ice cream is, like. Helps her to feel better, you know? But what happened is that she had the sensory experience of her knee feeling better, and she also had this sensory experience of eating ice cream. And they were happening at the same time, so they became associated with each other. This is a. This is called associative conditioning. Almost everyone on here has probably heard of Pavlov's experiments.

You ring the bell, the dog salivates, right?

And so there's two things about that that are really Important to understand. The first is that the food is an intense experience for a do. You've heard like when things fire together, they wire together. Well, the more intense the firing, the more strong the wiring. So when a dog gets food, that's an intense experience. If he rang the bell with like a teddy bear that they didn't care about, if he did it repetitively enough, it could have an impact where it was linked. But because it was an intense experience, he probably didn't have to do it for that long. So that's. The first part is it was an intense experience. The second part is that they're happening at the exact same time. If he rang the bell and then a minute later gave them the food, the dog's not going to make the connection. Because it's the survival brain that has to happen. It's sensory, it's not time related. So it's the same thing with us. We have our part of our brain, obviously that's conscious and more developed than what a dog can do. We have different types of choices, different ways of perceiving the world. We're self aware in a lot of ways that other animals are not. But we also have those lower forms. I don't even want to call them lower, but they're lower in the sense that they don't need the consciousness as much. It's just a sensory experience. We've all. We may have heard like a song at some point and then we feel sad and it reminds us of someone we dated before where like maybe that wasn't our song, but maybe we had an intense experience with that person and we were hearing that song at the same time. Yeah. And then later on when we've broken up, we hear the song and we're sad because we associated with them. We didn't consciously do that. We didn't consciously say, hey, this song is connected to this person at that time, but it becomes connected in our sensory survival brain.

It's almost as if when there's an input during some kind of shocking input to the nervous system, we associate that sense of the nervous system to the input from the external environment. Food, the smell of grass. For me, if I smell certain grass, then it reminds me of football in high school. This is what you're talking about. This is the associative conditioning. Right in this space though, how does that apply to the brain flip?

Okay, so once again with that Lynn that I was talking about. Okay, so she realized that when she was younger, when she would get hurt or if she was like bullied at school and came home. Like, her mom would help her feel better, like in some way, talk with her, cuddle her, whatever. And she'd also give her some kind of junk food that was her reinforcement. Junk food. So on a survival level, junk food equals feeling better or relaxing or entertainment or joy or something along those lines, like getting better. Okay? Now, consciously, that's not what she's thinking, all right? Especially as she gets older, she's thinking, junk food is the devil. I need to get away from it, and all this kind of stuff. But on a survival level, it's only known as a good thing because it's the sensory part. It's not the thoughts about what we're sensing. The thoughts about what we're sensing. Think of it as negative. So let's take the example of ice cream. Let's say that we have ice cream as a craving, and we have a vicious cycle around it, okay? So we keep going back to it over and over again. Well, our conscious brain registers suffering all around the cycle. So before we indulge, we feel conflicted, we feel torn. We're trying to use discipline and willpower, which creates stress. All this suffering beforehand, there's also suffering after we indulge. We feel guilty, we feel ashamed, we feel beat, oursel up. We have negative self talk. But in the moment of indulging, there's a split, like, little glimpse of a moment where we're like, all right, I'm just going to eat it. We relax. We, like, sort of decompress. Maybe we watch a movie, we do something to relax. That indulgence is where the actual problem is. So if we try to cut the food out, we're never actually able to get to the root of the problem with that. So that's what I do. I help people to get to. So I take that glimpse of relaxation or that glimpse of joy. And when my clients start working with me, I take it away from them. I make it stressful. So what we'll do is we'll create like, a negative, what I call a negative or a pain tool, where basically we're looking at like, okay, they want. Most of my clients have 100, 200 pounds to lose. I only work with pretty much the most difficult cases in weight loss. People that are have extreme emotional pain about where they are. They have strong cravings, they're compulsively overeating, and they hate exercise. All of those things, like, everything is going against them. The more pain they have, the easier it is for me to help them. If they Come to me and they're like, yeah, I'm feeling good. Things are good. I just want to lose a few pounds. I can't help that person. Like, I can. The person that's really, really overweight and really, really in emotional pain about it. So I use that pain. Like so many people, health professionals, the person comes in and they're immediately trying to get them to feel better. They want to put them on a program getting them on track, like, help them to see that they're losing weight. I don't even talk with my clients about weight loss. That's like the last thing we talk about when they first start with me. I talk about what is the challenges that you're dealing with. And then we amplify them. So I might ask them, okay, if you were to never lose this weight, and maybe you keep going up like you've been going up, what's going to happen? Like, maybe when they're older, maybe when their kid is older, he's standing there in the aisle about to get married, and he looks over and sees his father, but his mother's not there. And he feels a moment of sadness because she died, because she never lost the weight. Or maybe the overweight person that I'm working with had a stroke. She imagines she had a stroke. And her daughter, who is about to go to college to some Ivy League school, has to now stay home and take care of her, which, like, her dreams are now shattered, which is extremely painful for people to think about. We make it as painful as it can possibly be. We record an audio recording with it, and then they listen to that while they're eating the ice cream or drinking soda or whatever, junk food.

While they're in that little moment of relief, which is actually the core root of the problem, you give them a cue that they help create with you that'll get them out of giving themselves the relief. This vicious cycle.

The biggest challenge for me is the creating the tool. The actually taking them through the brain flip is easy. It's the tool, like, really getting into. Deep into the pain. Because most people, even though they're in pain, they're like. When I talk about, like, let's go further into it. It's really hard to do that for them. So I get more. I actually. I know this is going to sound really funny, but my ability to help people to create a pain tool as effectively as I do is through studying marketing. Through studying. Because when you study marketing, like, really effective beneficial marketing, where you have something really good, like, of service to Provide. It's good to, like, really know how to empathize with your. With your ideal client. Like, really know where they are. Like, I know that my normal client, they're not looking at the ceiling when they go to bed. They're typically looking at the wall. Because if they're laying on their back, it's hard for them to breathe. So, like, there's little things like that that I know that from, like, just years of working with these people, really being interested in their life. What are your challenges? What are your struggles? What are your strengths and weaknesses and finding out what those things are. And then I use those things, those pain points, to alleviate the pain through using it with their indulgence. So when they come to me, a lot of times they're like, yeah, I've been really good lately. I haven't been eating ice cream. I haven't been. I'm like, okay, great. You know you hate exercise. Okay, I want you to stop exercising. Stop all your exercising right now, and I want you to go out and buy ice cream.

So counterintuitive.

I know. It's like. And they're, like, completely shocked.

Yeah.

So they just joined my program and I tell them the exact opposite of what I think they're gonna do. Right. But what happens is that I have them eat the ice cream in such a radically different way. Just listening to an audio like that, just creating the audio is, like, completely shocking for them because it's like, it brings at home the levity, the gravity of their situation. Then they're listening to it while they're eating ice cream, which is literally the exact opposite. Basically, we're disrupting brainwave frequencies is what we're doing. Their normal frequency is like, they get the thing. They take a. Take a bite. It's sweet. They're watching a movie that, like, it's all these things for a moment of escape from all the pain. And what I'm doing is I'm taking all the pain that surrounds that and I'm putting it into it. And it takes a moment of faith for them to do this, because their normal reaction is like, oh, I don't want to do that. Like, that's my one place of escape. It's my one moment of enjoyment. Like, why are you going to take that from me? And I tell my. I'm like, listen, this is going to take a moment of faith from you because I'm going to tell you what's going to happen. Okay? It happens this way exactly the same every time. All the pain that we Put in to that one indulgence is going to free you from the indulgence, and it's going to get rid of all the pain that surrounds the indulgence. You will not have that emotional pain anymore. That'll be it. And that's what happens. And so that's what I do. And. And it's really interesting as I take people through this process, because usually on, like, day two or day three, they're like, dave, please, I'm done. Like, let me stop. And I'm like, no, you haven't had a brain flip yet. I asked them a series of questions. After each time they indulge, they basically, they indulge. And then I talk with them and I find out where they are, and I can tell how close they are to a brain flip, which I'm not gonna. That's one thing I won't discuss in the interview. Because if anyone listening to this eventually works with me, I don't want them to have preconceived ideas of, like, how close a brain flip is.

Well, you don't want them to actually understand the experience, so they think before they actually go through the challenge of the experience. Yeah, and I totally get that.

The good thing is that, like, regardless of what their conscious mind thinks, they'll be able to have a brain flip regardless. But if their conscious mind starts to create expectations around it, it can just prolong it unnecessarily. Because I have people that, like, everyone that comes in, they're doubt, they're doubtful, they think I'm crazy. Actually, they don't as much now because now they see clients that are in my coachings, and they're like, yeah, like. And they're celebrating their wins with being free of these things that they've been stuck with for decades. So now it doesn't seem as crazy because more people are doing it. But, yeah, they're like, please, let me stop. Like, I don't want to eat this anymore. I'm grossed out. I'm like, no, you got to keep going. And then once they have the brain flip and they know it and I know it, they're done. Sometimes I'll need to tempt them a little bit, like, test them to see to make sure it sticks. But once it's there, it's done.

This is so fascinating because we know from scientific research, willpower is so finite. You know, I almost sometimes feel like with the demands of our modern world, David, willpower doesn't even need to be in the conversation anymore. What we're really Talking about with you and with this system, this is a rewiring. This is where you're literally unplugging one connection and plugging in on the other. I want to go back to the woman with soda because you had mentioned five years. I know you meant five days. Right? It was five days for her brain flip.

Oh, yeah. I'm sorry. Five years. Five, five.

Five days is less than five years. I'm thinking about, you know, for 30 years. Think about this. Thirty years of having a sugary substance every single day. That your nervous system, that your brain is dependent on 8 to 10 cans of it, slog through life to slog through this life. I can only imagine that really the cause for most of us is the flinch, David. It's when we go through this brain flip, we approach the threshold with someone like yourself, a health pro, or even when we try to do it ourselves. And this is why most people fail. It's so painful. There's so much pain at that threshold of the flip that people will feel the flinch and not ever want to take another step forward because they will literally have to shift chemically, neurologically, the fabric of who they are. This is what you talk about when you say we have to have a gardening aspect to our thoughts. You actually said we need to become like a gardener for our thoughts and our feelings. How does that apply to the brain flip?

When I, when I start working with someone on a brain flip, I tell them, like, listen, you don't need to have any kind of discipline or willpower whatsoever. All that you need to be willing to do is to do something different from what you've done before that's out of your comfort zone. That literally, that's all that you need to do. So that, that is a practice that, like, they just need to be willing to be consistent for that for a few days. And they're good. Like, it literally. And here's the thing. As they get close to the edge of a brain flip, they're not, no one is ever aware of when they're about to have a brain flip. It comes on unexpectedly and then they are suddenly, instantly free. And they know it. Like, they know it without a shadow of a doubt. Like they know the back of their hand. So literally, like, the only thing that they need to be willing to do is to get out of their comfort zone. And, you know, going back to. Because you were asking about Lyn, my client, who for five days we did this practice and it basically completely abolished a 30 year habit of 8 to 10 sodas every single day, in an instant. She called me last night, and like I said, we're working on the bread brain flip. And she's like, why does this work? Why is it able to happen so fast? And I don't fall back because of the habit. I'm like, well, listen, think of it this way, okay? Imagine we have a computer program, and it's been running for 30 years, all right? The exact same code, everything is exactly the same on it, just running like clockwork. And then one day we decide to go in and we change some of the coding in the program. Well, that program, it doesn't matter how long the program's been running. It could be 30 days, 30 years. It could be a trillion years. Once we change the coding, it's never going back to the way it was before. That's what happens. And that's the benefit of a survival brain brain flip is that it doesn't matter how long the habit's there once we give it a new message. Because once again, it's sensory. It's in the moment, which isn't in time. Time doesn't exist in the sensory moment. It's just the message we're getting in that instant. It's the conceptual conscious mind that's aware of time. We're not having a brain flip in the conscious mind. We're having it in the survival brain. So that's why the difficult part is that these associations can form if we're not conscious of it very easily. If we're stressed out and we're talking to someone on the phone, we're yelling and we're angry and we're like. And then it's also dinner time. We could be eating, and then we could be eating healthy food and creating a negative association. If it's an intense enough experience where it's some food that we like, and then later on, maybe we start to not like that food, because we've built a negative association so it can happen all over the place. Just like the example of the song we heard that made us feel sad. These things happen all the time. The more conscious we are of what our state is in our everyday activities, mindfulness, the more we'll be aware of doing that. So my daughter's 3 years old, and my wife and I, we always make sure before we're going to eat, if we're going to. When she has a healthy meal, we make sure that we're, like, in a really, really good state, and then we're eating. So it's like, you know, it's just little things like that. Or like if you, if you get off a call and you're really stressed out, like maybe take a few deep breaths, relax, and then go and eat. It's such a short thing, but it can help you to not form negative associations that create an uphill battle later on.

Sometimes just a deep breath at the right moment can shift our state. I mean, that's why it's tattooed on my arm in Italian. It's like if I can remember, remind myself to breathe in a situation, then I'm not a victim in that situation. It's like breathing unlocks a deeper choice. And you talk about this in your program where you say that this unsafe feeling, we get to actually make that unsafe feeling more safe. This is one of the components of the brain flip. Talk about the unsafe versus the safe. This is fascinating.

Well, everyone that like struggles with weight loss feels in some way or another, they all know that they feel some kind of like an inner struggle where like they might feel like their body is fighting them or like a common phrase is like my body is stubbornly holding on to body fat. There's like some kind of a conflict. And the conflict has to do with the conscious brain and the survival brain. So in the conscious brain, we want to lose weight like we talked about. Very simple, very straightforward. In the survival brain, in terms of our day to day experience. Here's the problem. In terms of our day to day experience, we have the sensory experience of being overweight. And you know what else? We have a sensory experience of every day being alive, right? So we have a sensory experience of being alive and we have a sensory experience of being overweight day after day after day. And so it's just like Pavlov's dogs. The sensory experience of being overweight and the sensory experience of being alive become connected with each other. They become an association. So in the survival brain, being overweight equals safe, whereas in the conscious brain, being overweight. We know that like, that can lead a heart attack, can lead to stroke, can lead to diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol. We know consciously all the things that make it unsafe. But in the survival brain, it equals safe. And that survival brain association has a whole bunch of little associations like ice cream equals enjoyment, watching TV equals de stressing. It's like all these different things that equate to that one big great message of overweight equals safe.

So let's pause right there because that's a huge component literally to our nervous system, the subconscious, which 90% of everything is subconscious. Or more that becomes safe. The very thing that we're most scared of, most fearful of, the thing that gives us the most pain. I mean, I'm laughing because it's so crazy. It's so crazy to even consciously. Consciously, we know, like, look, there's a reason why there's millions and millions of diet books out there, right? And there's also a reason why just knowing the information is not the same as doing this is really the component of which you speak. So this point where we know, like, oh, my God, the thing that's causing me the most pain, it's actually the thing that feels safe, which is crazy to even consider.

And, you know, this is. This, in terms of the. The wellness industry is really the one big culminating problem. The big problem is that when a person joins a weight loss program, what the program is trying to do, they're trying to help them to lose the weight right away so that they can transform their life later. Okay? That is a big, big problem, because in the act of trying to lose weight, you're not doing anything to resolve the inner conflict. And so even if you start losing the weight, that struggle becomes stronger because the survival brain, with all the weight that's going off, the survival brain is like, red alarm, red alarm, red alert. Like, it's really scared. And so it finds ways to make it more challenging to stay on that diet. Inserts cravings into you, disrupts your hormones, slows down your metabolism. It'll do all kinds of different stuff to stop the action, like try to get you to hit a plateau and then gain the weight back. So if we don't do something to do that, what's going to happen is there's always going to be an inner conflict. And less than 3% of people that try to lose weight are able to lose it and keep it off for the long term. So obviously, that approach isn't working. I don't try to help people lose weight so they can transform their life later. I help them to drastically and intensely transform their life right away, and then I help them lose weight. Once we have the transformation, once we brain flip the survival brain, where ice cream doesn't equal enjoyment anymore, now it equals pain. Or this kind of thing that we're procrastinating with before equaled relaxation, now it equals stress. When we. And I've helped people with all. I've helped people with porn addictions, alcohol, food. I mean, it's usually food, but, like, there's different things that I'll work on.

It's a very Similar mechanism with any addiction.

It's the same mechanism with all of them. So I'm doing the same thing. But we're having a transformation like that brain flip switches the survival brain's messaging so that overweight doesn't equal safe anymore, that it equals unsafe. And once the conscious brain and the survival brain have one and the same intention, it's easy. Everyone that I work with, they lose weight easily, but they had to go through the pain of the brain flip first before we could get to that point.

If you're having low energy throughout the day, transformation is really almost impossible. Part of caring for yourself, part of self care and self love practices is eating the right foods. Now we're talking about this with David today, why we're flipping the brain, why it's so important to choose the right things that'll give us the best fuel. But what's challenging is that sometimes we forget we are in control of stacking our environment in our favor. This is why Wellness Force partnered with Organifi. So we can get adaptogens and micronutrients like Reishi and Ashwagandha and Acai and cordyceps into our system without buying it, letting it go bad in the fridge, or just forgetting about it and then not stacking the environment in our favor. You can do this. You can stack the environment for getting your healthy superfoods from this slow dried powder all throughout your day, multiple times per day. You can get the red juice, which is my favorite, and the green and gold in the Wellness Force bundle. Organifi gave us 20% off because you listen to the show, you're part of this community. Just head over to Organifi.com WellnessForce use code WellnessForce to get 20% off your superfood bundle. Now let's get back to David Zapposzotti. In a way, in a weird way, this is incredibly scientific and spiritual. I know you say you don't focus on the science, but I mean, I think it's both these things.

Yeah, yeah. You know, it's definitely scientific. And I study a lot of psychology and like neuroscience. I study a lot of that stuff. I just don't verbalize it in that way. I like to. I read a book recently, Bruce Lipton's the Biology of Belief Love, which I love, love that book. And I love him. I've seen some interviews that he's a genuinely awesome guy.

Yeah.

But there's parts in that book I didn't understand what he's talking about.

Well, because he's a big scientist.

Right.

He's been a biologist neuropathways. It just goes way down.

Yeah. Cellular biologists for decades. And, like, he's just at that level where he. It's so in and out for him that maybe. Dumbing it down. He tried to dumb it down. That book. Like, even with me, I consider myself a pretty intelligent guy. And there was parts in there that were confusing for me.

Yeah.

You know, so. And I'm a health expert for 30, 23 years. So, you know, I try to, like, talk about it in a way that like, a teenager could understand.

This is what's most powerful, too. If we're trying to change something that's very deep, it probably formed in our childhood, then we need some type of a program that'll actually speak to the inner child.

Right.

Not to the adult. Linear, analytical mind where we want to know all the scientific concepts. That's not what's going to change our life. That's not what's going to actually allow us to achieve this brain flip you describe. One other thing is that you said in the actual moment where the association is formed, two things are happening, though. There's that conscious, and then there's the deeper one where it's completely unconscious. What's actually occurring in that specific moment when the recording is playing, they're eating the ice cream. They're feeling the pain of it all. What actually is happening in that exact moment.

The first time they do it, like, the first time they do the practice, they're usually confused and bewildered and, like, sort of discombobulated. Like, they're sort of like. It's sort of like they fell down and banged their head on the ground. They're, like, disoriented in a way, because what's happening is we are literally disrupting a brainwave frequency. We're creating interference with it. So the normal frequency is like, that ice cream has a frequency. The watching the movie has a, like, all that stuff has a certain relaxing frequency. And we're inserting an intense stress into that frequency which completely shatters it and disrupts it. So at first they're, like, really, you know, confused, you know, like, discombobulated and stuff. And then after that, like, the next few times, they're going to start feeling different emotions. They might feel some sadness, then they might feel some anger. I've had people feel rage. I've had people tell me they hate me.

I was going to say, do they ever get angry at you?

Oh, my God.

How dare you take away my ice cream.

Yeah, fortunately, like, I'm a rock with this. I know what. I know what they're going through because I've gone through it myself. So I know that anything that they go through, it's their conscious brain trying to. Because when we're flipping the survival brain now the conscious brain is scared. The conscious brain is going to be like, oh, this is pointless. This doesn't make any sense. But, like, they've. They've paid me a significant investment to work with me, and I'm working with them every day on it. So they're committed. Like, they're going to do it. That's why I say, like, all you got to be willing to do is get out of your comfort zone, even though your conscious mind doesn't want you to do that. So, like, the conscious brain is now afraid like the survival brain was before. But they keep going. And what ends up happening is that they go through all these emotions. Usually they have some childhood memories pop up that happens. We don't do any counseling or therapy. We just keep doing the practice. And what ends up happening is that all that stuff just works itself out. Like, we don't need to do a bunch of, like. Because one of the things with therapy, I think therapy is great in circum. Certain circumstances, but. But in another case, the more that we focus on our past and the problems we've had, the more we create an identity where we bring that into the future. We keep perpetuating it. So I don't have people focus on their faults at all. I haven't listened to the audio about all the painful things, but when they have thoughts come up, like memories of things, we don't try to deal with it or forgive anybody or any of that kind of stuff. We just keep going with the practice and. And all that stuff irons itself out. One of my. My first client, I took through an ice cream brain flip. She was like, I just can't believe. Like, I just went through. I tried for years with therapy and all kinds of stuff to deal with this. And she was like, I just can't believe how fast we were able to do all that and like, how much development I just went through in, like a few days. That I was not expecting that at all. I was like, yeah, well, the reason why is because we're actually getting to the root of the problem. The root of the problem isn't in your mind. The root of the problem isn't that there's something wrong with the way you're thinking. The root of the problem is that you formed an association when you were younger that you weren't aware of. And you're trying to solve that survival association with your conscious mind, which doesn't pair up. That's the only issue. That's the only problem you have, is you're just trying to use a tool that can't fix the solution. You're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. That's all you're doing.

I want to go back a little bit here because your previous book, Immovable Heart, Unstoppable Mind, it inspired me so deeply. There was these principles, six principles in there. One of them was generosity. That was my favorite principle you talked about, by the way. You've been on the show before. We're going to link your other episode, but pay attention to this question because it totally relates to brain flip. Now that you're kind of on the edge of your seat. I understand that generosity for ourselves, having a generous heart for other people, but also being generous to us is part of reprogramming this deeper subconscious, this part of ourselves that's like, you know what? But I want to give myself the ice cream, or I want to give myself these things. How does the brain flip still allow us to have generosity for ourselves and for other people when we go through taking away the very thing that gave us that tertiary kind of pain relief?

Okay, so this all has to do with how I define generosity. And the way I define generosity isn't like the technical definition. I look at generosity as more of a force of nature. That's a separation. Okay? So, like, if you give a gift to someone, that's a separation. You're literally giving a gift to that person. You can see how that you're separating yourself from a gift that you're given to somebody else. Right? Well, internally, if we're saying, like, I'm going to treat myself to ice cream, that's not really generosity, because that's an unhealthy pattern we know we have, and we're stuck to the pattern. It's not generosity. It's the opposite. It's lack of generosity. Generosity is when we're willing to get out of our comfort zone and do something different, which will allow us to let go of the past, to generously give it away. That ice cream habit is a pattern from the past. Okay? And the only way that we can generously let that go is to be willing to get out of our comfort zone, to be willing to do something different than we've done before. One of my favorite sayings is if you keep doing what you've always done, you'll keep getting what you've always gotten. That is the opposite of generosity. Generosity is doing something different so that you get a different result. And in the process of getting a different result, you're letting go. You're generously giving away what's no longer needed.

So it is generosity by actually recognizing where the most pain lives and going there. It's so funny. It's such a dichotomy by saying, if I face the pain, if I turn towards the pain and actually allow myself to feel all of its kind of ickiness and grossness. That's a generous act.

Yeah. And, you know, the most visceral evidence for me that the whole brain flip process I take people through is a whole process of generosity, is that they love themselves more afterwards. They all are like, wow, you know what? Like, all these challenges I've had, I've been beating myself up about them. I felt like I'm weak. And the truth is that it's not because I'm weak. Like, I actually. They now realize that they haven't been stuck because there's something wrong with them, that they're imperfect, that they're weak or any of that kind of stuff. It's just a misunderstanding of what the problem actually was.

That's it. This has got to be. Every client's different. I'm sure some people may come with very intense addictions. How would you say that this really differs from traditional talk therapy or Alcoholics Anonymous or Overeaters Anonymous? Like, do you really think that this type of brain flip is for everyone? Like, who exactly is this for?

Well, I've been doing it for not too long. I've been doing it for, I don't know, eight months to a year at this point. And I've had 100% success rate since starting it. Okay. Everyone I'm working with has had brain flips, usually very quickly. When I first started doing it, and I was consciously guiding people through it, it took me several weeks. That has narrowed down to four to six days. And it's pretty constant.

There's.

With the level of development I have myself, because I'm. I'm not. I'm not saying I'm a master of anything. Like, this is all my own journey and transformation. So I've just been doing it for a year. I believe in five years, I'll be light years ahead. Like, if you and I talk in five years, I feel like we'll be having a very different.

You'll just be floating the cup of water in front of you.

I don't know what I'll be having.

I'll be like Han Solo.

I'll probably be like, I want to branch this out. Once I have the weight loss, my weight loss organization, like, running, where it's growing on autopilot, like leveraged, and things are working smoothly and like a finely tuned machine, I want to move into other sectors, like maybe alcohol. Like, I would need to get other experts that can help me with those to. For liability reasons, obviously. But I see this branching into all different stuff. And when I told. When I said, like, I've helped people with porn addiction, I've helped them with alcohol. I've done that in the context of weight loss. Like, these people are not alcoholic. They're not like, it's not like they're coming to me for that specifically. They're coming to me for weight loss. I'm just dealing with. I don't, I don't like, try to have them, have them have a brain flip with just food. I have them have brain flips. Whatever their deepest, darkest attachments are, whatever they are. That's what we're working on. Because when they brain flip those things, that's going to be the thing that like, completely switches stuff. And then. And by the way, the. All the brain flip stuff we've been talking about right now is what I call a stage one brain flip. I take people through, through two other types of brain flips. After the first one. The first one is a purely negative, like listening to a negative audio with a negative habit to eradicate it and.

Brain flip and be with your specific guidance. It's not like they can just record themselves saying, don't do this, and then play it on their own. It doesn't work like that.

Right, Right. Yeah. Well, they, they are listening to it on their own. But then they talk with me after and I'm assessing where they are, and then I'm giving them, like, progression things to do for the next time. Because it's different each time and it's different for each person too. After they've had that first brain flip, what ends up happening is that they start to get excited because they're like, oh my God, I just became free of something I've been struggling with for decades. And they're excited, like, they haven't lost weight yet, but now they're like, now they've got real true belief, like hope.

It's almost like they've lost it already in their mind.

Right.

They've already made the decision that it's gone. Regardless of their current experience, they all.

Lose it in their mind before they lose it in their body. So once they've lost it in that way and they're excited, then we create a positive audio. And now we're going to do a brain flip with overeating. All right, now that's different. With a craving, it's a negative food that they don't want to eat anymore. So it's a negative, purely negative brain flip. With overeating, they could be overeating healthy food. So we're gonna create a positive and a negative. It's a two part brain flip. So I'll have them create the same amount of food that they normally eat. I'll have them split it in half. On one plate, they'll have half of it. Another plate, they'll have half. They're purposely putting on two different plates. The first plate, they're gonna do a positive audio and really enjoy it. And then the second plate, they're gonna do a negative audio. So now. And it's the same food on each plate. That's the key because now we're keeping both sides of the equation the same. So they're not gonna have a brain flip around specific foods because there's a negative and a positive to both of them. Now it's around the quantity of food. And what I tell them is the first portion, you have to make it as pleasurable as it can possibly be. So that means that if you get near the end and you start to feel stuffed, you need to put the rest on the second plate. So what ends up happening is that we start half and half, but then they're sort of moving it around over a series of days. And they're doing it usually three. I'm usually talking with them at this point three times a day for this one. But in four to six days, once again, same amount of time, they're eating usually a third of what they were eating before. And they can't understand how they could possibly eat the amount of food that they were eating previously. And they were just doing it a few days before. They literally, they're like, the portion brain flip is the most powerful one that I see because it's like, it's a visual. See, like a visual seeing of what? Like the one before their brain flip, they're always like, I'm looking at the food and it's like. Or it's usually a few times before the brain flip. But they're like, I look like I'm. I'm looking at three people's food. Like, I can't understand how I was possibly able to do this. It was just a few days ago. It was no problem. It was automatic pilot. So, like, then they're there. Then they have that. Then I have them do a purely positive one with exercise. They hate exercise. We're doing the same thing. We're creating a positive audio, listening to it with exercise, and we're starting slow. Most of my clients, I have them start exercising for three minutes a day. Three minutes three times a day, usually. Okay, so three minutes, three times a day. They're using the audio while they do it. And then we'll move up to like, okay, now listen to the audio twice. So now maybe they'll do six minutes three times a day. So at that point, they're already losing weight because they're eating a third of what they were eating before. They have no cravings to cave into. And now they're starting to get to a point where they're gonna start enjoying exerc.

You know what's really, really fascinating and really, for me, kind of like hitting me in the chest in this moment, is I'm thinking about where most people change is when they lose a loved one. They get in a big car wreck. They have some kind of immediate input, immediate jolt to their nervous system. And for some people, that's when a brain flip might occur, because the world will give them a reason why they should have a brain flip. But what's so utterly fascinating to me is this methodology can take someone instead of them having to lose a daughter, lose a son, lose a mother for.

Go to the doctor, and the doctor says, you're about to die unless you lose the weight.

Yes.

That's a very common one.

This same methodology can take people to that point of inflection, the flash point where they'll actually change. How is that even possible?

When I talk with potential clients that is exact. I tell them, I'm like, listen. What I'm doing is imagine you go to the doctor, and the doctor says, you're about to die. Or that you got diabetes, and it's like, bam. Something goes on in your head. You start losing weight. The cravings aren't there anymore. At that point, it's such a visceral reaction that your survival brain's like, we need to lose the weight. The conscious brain's like, we need to lose the weight. And then guess what? You're gonna lose the weight no matter what.

At that point, they're teaming up together.

Yeah.

Instead of fighting one so the doctors.

Give them the brain flip. I'm just helping them to do that before they get to the point where they're on their deathbed. That's it. Yeah, I'm getting them there in their mind. Because what the mind experiences and has a visceral reaction to it doesn't register whether it's actually happening or whether it's in the imagination. If there's a visceral reaction, if there's an emotional feeling to it, it's gonna have an impact one way or the other. The brain thinks it's real.

This is why the breath going back to the breath is so important, because these patterns can run on negative feedback loops for so long, forever. Someone could look back and be like, Whoa, 15 years just passed, and I'm sitting here with Haagen Dazs trying to find the chocolate again. And it's like, there's another way, but it involves a lot of pain. And I think this is really, like, the deepest value of your service is it's a guided experience to explore the unique pain of yourself that can actually unlock the person who you get to become.

Absolutely. I did my.

This is really about.

I did my own brain flip with ice cream a few weeks ago.

Oh, what was that like?

So it was interesting.

You used your own program on yourself?

I use my own program on myself, yeah. So it was interesting because my brain flips were with business, and they were intense. Like, really intense. And one. You know, we all have our strengths and weaknesses. And I'll just be honest and say one of my greatest strengths is that I can recognize patterns. I'm very pattern oriented. I. I could. I used to be able to play a chess game. Like I used to play tournament chess, and I could show you the whole game from memory. Two weeks later, I just noticed patterns. So when I had this brain flip, it took me a few weeks, but I was able to start seeing what actually happened. And then I could see how I could apply it. I'm like, oh, my God. I don't have to focus on the positive, the healthy foods, and have the unhealthy stuff drop away. I can have them eating that unhealthy food over and over and over again and switching the pattern right in that indulgence moment, and that'll do it way faster. And so the first time I did it was three and a half weeks. That's a lot better than months that it took me before with just focusing on positive foods. And then, like I said, I've gotten it down to days now. But, yeah, when I went through my own. So it was interesting because I took several clients through ice cream, and I've always been someone who's had a sweet tooth. Because when I was a kid, you know, like, that was like, you know, I didn't really like school. I wasn't the kind of kid that likes school too much. So it wasn't really pleasurable for me. I'd come home, and my escape was hanging out with my family, watching a movie, and having ice cream. That's what we did at night. So I associated ice cream with pleasure. So I developed a sweet tooth over my life. I've had a sweet tooth my whole life. So I was like, all right. But I don't have it all the time. I'm very health conscious, so it's not something that I'll have regularly. But if I'm out and my wife's like, hey, you want to get ice cream? I'm always like, yeah, yeah, let's do it. So the other day, she was like, hey, let's get some ice cream. I'm like, yeah, I don't want it. I just don't even. So it took me four days to take myself through a brain flip. And it was really interesting because I wanted to be able to come on shows like yours and talk to other people and clients about it from a firsthand experience.

From being in their shoes.

Yeah, from being there. So what happened? It was really interesting. The taste never changed over the course of those days, or the flavor never changed, but the way it tasted changed. I don't know how else I can explain it than that, but, like, it. It changed its taste even though the flavor was exactly the same. Like, it doesn't taste the same. It doesn't taste as good to me now. So it was very unappealing. And it took me four days, and I was like, I'm done. Like, I realized at that point that I'm done.

Wow.

And I just had to stay. I just had to. I was tempted on the third day to be like, I'm done. I was like, no, I can feel like I need to do. I'm able to be honest with myself and see, like, I really need to go further. So I did, and I did it on the fourth day. And since that time, I haven't done it. And here's the interesting thing. I'm talking to my wife two nights ago, right? And she was like, you know, because that day we had. We were out, and she's like, you want to get ice cream? Like, no, I don't. And she's like, wow. She's like, yes, that, like, your brain flip worked. Right?

So.

So then we're talking.

Brain flip is working. Yeah.

Yeah. So we're talking that night, and I'm like, you know what? Like, we were talking and I was like, you know what I just realized I haven't watched a movie since that brain flip. And when I would watch, I don't really watch movies often, but when I would do it, it would be like, I had a long day of working. I'm really active in my business. It's growing. Things are going well. So I'm working all day, and then, yeah, I'll go and enjoy a movie at the end of the night for a little bit or something like that. I haven't done that since that time. And the reason why I realized that two nights ago. And I tell my clients this all the time, but I wasn't thinking about it for myself. But anything that you have that's associated with what you're brain flipping will get brain flipped as well. So if I normally eat ice cream and I watch movies and I have the ice cream association from my childhood, and then I watch TV with ice cream now that's associated with it later on in life. Well, once I brain flipped ice cream, I brain flip that. So now what I'll do is, like, if I want to take a break, I'll watch a YouTube video of, like, some successful business person that I, you know, admire and like, see what their mindset is, their habits and practices, things like that. Like, that's my movie now. Yeah, like that. And I didn't even think about it until two nights ago. I was like, I didn't realize I even made that change, but it happened naturally, because when I brain flipped ice cream, the TV just went with it. The movie. The movie just went with it.

This is so good, because I'm thinking about my own. Like, I was raised in an Italian family, and food meant love, right? So when you got pasta. Pasta specifically, actually pasta. Like, big bowls of spaghetti. So if anybody's listening and, like, they're from an Italian family, you know what I'm talking about. You get a bunch of pasta, you get a bunch of carbs, and then there's the table filled with people you love, and you're all talking to one another. That is actually the wiring, the enforcement of the positive stimulus of the carbohydrates and the people around us. Like, I'm kind of having, like, the beginning of my own brain flip, you know? You want to hear podcast right now?

You want to hear something really funny? Yeah. I brought a client in, I guess, about two months ago, and pasta was her thing. Like, she wanted to have a brain flip with pasta. Well, she had a brain flip while we were creating the tool. Before we even got to the first day of using it, she had a brain flip with it, and she never even had to do it.

Wow.

Now, like, if she's out with her husband, they go to an Italian restaurant, she'll get spaghetti squash, like. Like squash that kind of pasta, you know, like spaghetti squash pasta. She actually likes that better now because she had a brain flip while just through the Creating the tool.

Let's talk about this. We've explored a lot about, like, you know, facing the pain and the nuances of the brain flip. But what happens after the brain flip? So we've had the brain flip. How do we actually reinforce the positive stimuli to the things that we want that are in alignment with our best self? Is it the same methodology as approaching the fear and the pain, or is it different after the brain flip has occurred?

Well, after they're, like, excited, I use that for a positive brain flip. So, like, the. It's a purely negative brain flip for cravings. I start with cravings. Well, anything that they're addicted to or craving, we have a brain flip with that. And that's just a negative tool. Okay, A pain tool. Then they're starting to get excited. They haven't lost weight, but they're like, I'm free of this now. They've become free of something. So then we use that excitement to create a positive tool. Then we use the positive and the negative for the quantity of food. Now they're eating a half or usually a third of what they were eating before. So now they're starting to lose weight just because they're eating less food. All right, Then we take that and we move into a purely positive exercise brain flip so that they're enjoying exercise. Now with the exercise. Here's the thing. All right, now, you might have heard this question before. Which would you rather have? Would you rather that I gave you $10,000 a day for 30 days, or would you rather I gave you a penny on the first day, but I doubled the amount every single day after for 30 days?

I'll take the double the amount for every day after.

So, yeah, most. Now, most people would take the 10,000 a day because it's linear. They can see it. Like, they can see how it goes. It's like if, you know, you're losing two pounds a week. You feel like you're in control, like you're doing good, like you know what's going on. Right? My people don't lose weight linearly. They don't lose it gradually in that way. They lose very little in the beginning. But then what happens is that they'll reach a threshold where bam, they start losing it pretty quickly. So like, like an example is a woman I'm working with now. Her name's Becky. All right? So she didn't have any cravings coming into me. So we just did a portion brain flip where she's now eating a third to a half of what she was eating before. Like maybe 3.5, something like that, 0.35 or something like that. 35%. So that was big. And then we moved right into an exercise brain flip. So now she started with six minutes, three times a day. Now she's up to nine. But she's getting smaller every week. Like, every time I talk with her, she's like, I'm feeling smaller. It's easier going in and out of the house. She doesn't weigh herself because she's not sort of interesting. And my people, like, after they become free of these things, they lose interest in weighing themselves, Even if they were obsessed with it before, because now they know it's working. Now they know. It's like once you see the path, you don't need the map anymore. Like, you know exactly where you're going. So I do have people that do weigh themselves, but they don't have the attachment to it. But a lot of them just stop doing it. But. So she's getting smaller and smaller, and she's like, increasing it. She's wanting to increase her exercise because she enjoys it, or if she goes a day or two without it, she's like, I really, really miss it. She had family in town, and they went out for two days. She wasn't exercising. She's like, I couldn't believe how much I missed. I needed to exercise. And she was not like that at all before she was working with me. So what's happening is that she's losing weight sort of slowly right now, but she's feeling more and more. The conditioning starting to improve, and she's getting smaller. What's going to happen? I just know this from helping many, many people lose over a hundred pounds. Once she reached a certain threshold where her conditioning is. Is elevated and her. Her body weight has decreased enough, she's going to blow through the roof where she's going to Be like exercising. Her intensity is going to increase, her distance, it's going to all increase. And she's going to start. She's. Because she's going to be really excited.

Why is that? Why do you think there's a point where when there's been some mediocre success or maybe big success, that it then catapults to exponential. Like, what is that?

The excitement? I think that the excitement builds, but also just that they have less physical weight on them, that they are actually capable of doing more. And so there's an increase in excitement and an increase in capability that's gradually happening where it reaches a threshold where is enough that they. And they're like, they're not concerned about safety anymore. Like, you know, they've lost enough weight at that point that they're like, I know it's working. I have people in my program start like, because most of them, they're really, really overweight. It's usually like on a recumbent bike or an elliptical, like something kind of controlled. I don't have them.

Doesn't hurt their joints as much.

Yeah, I don't have them doing weightlifting. Things like that in the beginning. Like, as they get further along, I can give them guidance on that. But in the beginning, it's just that stuff because that's all they need. All that I care about, I don't care what the exercise is as long as it's safe and as long as we're building a positive association to it. That's why I tell people in the beginning, oh, you hate exercise. Stop doing it, because I don't want you to do it. I don't want you to associate in your survival brain. Exercise equals pain. That's a problem when that's the problem. You should only be exercising in a way that you love it. And you can believe it or not, even if you hate exercise. You can train yourself to love exercise just like you can train yourself to get rid of a craving.

This is such a metaphor for freaking everything. Whether it's business or wealth or health or relationships even. I think all of us want to get to that point that you talked about with your client where when they've achieved some success, there's a little inflection point where then it goes exponential and they achieve tons of more success. But I think the paradox that we've explored today is in order to get to that point where there's going to be exponential change, you have to face the pain. It's like this gift of pain is a great teacher and I just interviewed with Paul. Check. So he talked about pain. Being a really good teacher, I know you followed his work for some time.

I've done his programs.

So people right now are feeling in their body. I know. I guarantee it. I know I'm talking to you. You're listening. You are feeling excitement. From what David has said about when you get to that point, there can be exponential change. For people that are feeling that excitement, what do you have as far as words for them? Like, they're noticing in their deep, deep subconscious that it's pretty exciting to be able to jump into this kind of a change. What do they do?

Well, I guess it would depend on the person, like, how much pain they have, because even though they might be excited right now listening to this, it's not like they've become free of it. So I actually would rather that they don't get excited and focus on the pain. I know that that sounds absolutely crazy, because the pain is what they're dealing with right now. So if they're excited, I'm cool. That's awesome. Like, I'm excited about that. But I want them. If they're excited about it, what I want them to use that excitement to do is to feel the pain more. Because the more that they can feel that pain and create a tool with it, the more intense the pain is in the tool, the more intense the freeing of their challenges. On the other end of it, if they don't put a lot of pain into it, they won't have a big brain flip, and they won't be as free of it as they'd like to be. So I know that's like the opposite of what you were saying.

Totally the opposite. Yeah. But that's why I love being your friend. And honestly, kind of like walking this road of health and wellness with you. Because, man, I'm still a student. I'm learning, and you just did your own brain flip on yourself, and now you're gonna be helping thousands more people. Do you think that if you could wave a wand in the next couple years, what would you want this system to look like? Because it's very different. I mean, I've never heard or seen anything like this in our entire industry. Like, what would you want this to be in the next couple years?

Well, here's the thing. Like, in the same way that I see my people losing weight, like, at first it's really slow, and then it exponentially grows as they reach a certain threshold. I see the exact same thing happening with my business. I'll Just tell you right now, like, my vision for my business, I want to brain flip the weight loss epidemic. The weight loss epidemic. I want to bring.

The industry will flip as well.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, it will for sure. So if I can help. Right now it's just me. I'm working with people one on one. And what I'm. What I'm doing is like, the people that are going through my program now, because remember, it's only been for a year that I've been doing this. I have people in my program, they're like, I want to work for you. And the interesting thing is, like, I can't hire anybody else because the people that have gone through at least to. At least to work with clients, they need to have gone through brain flips themselves to be able to guide other people through brain flips. You can't do it unless you've had that experience. Like, you just won't be able to tell how close they are. Like, what you need to do to guide them. These clients, there's. I have clients that will be able to do that. They're not there yet. Most of them haven't lost all the weight yet, but they're getting close. So these people, like, they're in a place where they're like, once I'm through this, I want to do this with you. So what I'm looking at first is I'm looking at starting as like a mentorship program at first, where they're not working for me, but they're like a mentor, sort of like an Alcoholics Anonymous. How they have sponsors. I have people that are already like, sort of wanting to sponsor other people.

Like help people based on how excited they are from their own results.

Yeah. Just as a place of service. I only market to people that want to change, help people in their life that are service oriented people. That's not a problem to want to lose weight just for yourself, but I just don't market to those people. My market is people that are overweight, a lot of pain, and they're excited about the idea of losing the weight and helping other people doesn't mean they have to work for me. I'm not saying that, but that they're excited about being inspiring for other people in some way. Because if those people are inspired by that, then I can also create pain around how they're not helping people. So there's two parts to why I market to people that are service oriented. I can create more pain on the pain tool and they can have more excitement on the other end. Of it with inspiring other people. So whenever other people are involved, it always magnifies it in some way is what I find. So I'm going to start with mentors and then as they become proficient in mentoring, I'm going to hire them and then as they become proficient at working for me, I will give them the ability to hire. You know, I was in network marketing, like multi level marketing a few years ago and it was not my passion. Like what I was doing was not at all my passion. But I built a team of over 400 people in two years. So I know what it feels like to grow a team. And I only brought eight people in myself, but then they were bringing people and it just snowballed down. I'm not crazy about that. Like in terms of that business model for what I'm doing, I'm not building a network marketing business in any form. But I. But I know how to the duplication process can work and how it can grow exponentially. And I'm planning on doing that with what I'm doing.

And what's most exciting, man, is to see your evolution, you know, as a friend and just watching you grow. Coming from, you know, almost three years ago, Dave, we interviewed on the podcast Immovable Heart, Unstoppable Mind. And how many messages I got from that. I am so blown away from where we've gone in this conversation. I know you're listening and you either feel like, oh, I get to turn towards my pain, or oh my gosh, I'm excited. Listen to Dave, listen to what he's saying. If you want to book a call with Dave, actually just do it. If you're feeling any intuition or any hit from higher power, just do it. Empowered health now.com talk. That's where you can actually Dave has been generous enough to offer us time with him. Dave, why are you doing this for people? I mean, are you going to get overwhelmed? You've been on other shows, like, why are you still doing these conversations?

All right, well, first of all, I love you. All right, Josh Trent. And I love Wellness Force Community. I'm in the community myself. I'm a big fan of what you do. So anything I can do to help, just in the way that I market people that are of service, it's because I'm a very much a service oriented person. That's why you and I get along, because I know you're service oriented too. So I want to help people. That is my purpose. I am more aligned in my own life by working with people right now. Than I have ever been. It's interesting because, like I said, I've been in this industry for 20 years. After about 23 years, after about eight or nine years, I started getting burned out on working with people. And one of the reasons for that was because I knew I had more potential, but, like, I wasn't. I wasn't, like, breaking through. I didn't know what to do to, like, help people more than I was. And so I felt stifled in certain ways, and I. I lost a passion for a number of years in the middle of my career. I'm more passionate now than when I first started. First started. Like, when I first started and I started as a personal trainer and I was in school, and I'm just, like, laughing my head off. I'm like, oh, my God. I felt like I was cheating everyone. Like, I can't believe that I actually get to help people to work out, and I get paid to do that. Like, I was so excited about that. That's how I felt. I mean, it was like a. It was like a brain flip in that moment of that, like, I can't believe I get to do this after eight or nine years. It started, you know, because it started to become monotonous, and, you know, it was a little different of a situation at that point. I'm more excited now than when I first started. Like, I feel like a little kid in. I know this really sound. Sound really bad, but in a candy shop where I can have anything I want. Like, I love working with people and helping them. Like, and here's the interesting thing. When I have help, people have brain flips, it helps me have brain flips in my own life, with my family, with my wife. Like, I'll talk with my wife and be like, all right, we have a client who's dealing with this. Like, let's see what we're gonna. And I don't talk with them about the specifics for client confidentiality, but I talk about the. The major problems, like, what they're dealing with. And then, like, once they have the brain flip, it always teaches me something in my own life. So, yeah, I'm happy to. I'm excited to. To have people that are listening to this schedule calls with me. One thing I do want to say about it is that if you want to schedule a call with me, if what I heard talked about resonates for you, I just want to make sure, like, it's not for everyone. You've got to have pain around this. If you're looking to, like, lose 20 pounds to go to the beach. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that goal. I don't have any judgment about it. It's just that what I do isn't really applicable to that kind of a goal. You've got to be someone who has a lot of weight to lose, has a lot of pain around it, emotional pain, has cravings, overeating, hates exercise, like all that stuff, you name it. The more pain you have around it, the easier it is for me to help you. And once again, Josh said you can schedule the call to empoweredhealthnow.com talk. It will be with me. One thing I ask is that after you schedule the call, there will be a form that pops up afterwards. Please fill that form out so that I can get an idea of what I'm dealing with with you, what we're looking at, so that I can be prepared for the call and give you the most out of the call that I possibly can.

It's so exciting that this technology even exists now, this really understanding of a deeper aspect of ourselves. But like you said, we get to face the pain part of it and we need guidance. We get to have somebody to walk us through that bridge between the knowing and the doing, which is this recurring theme that comes up on Wellness four. So much. Dave, thanks so much for coming on the show man. Over to my house. This has been an incredible conversation and and if people want to message you, they can obviously go to empoweredhealthnow.com talk. They can also hit you up on social or Facebook or Guys, we're talking about this in the wellnessforce group, so we'll be posting David's information there as well. Dave, thanks so much man for being my friend and my colleague and just being an awesome human being. We'll talk to you soon.

My honor, my pleasure. Thank you.

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