3 POWERFUL QUESTIONS FOR BETTER WELLNESS | Dan Pardi

Welcome to Wellness Force Friday, a special edition bite sized podcast that fuels the start of your weekend with actionable steps for your wellness journey through an inspiring message or story from a trusted influencer who's a positive force for the physical and emotional wellness of our global collective. If it's your first time listening to the show, be sure to hit subscribe for access to our more in depth and full length featured episodes with over 100 expert guests where you'll learn the best tools and ways of being to understand those connections between our emotions and healthy habits to live life well and enjoy the process. All right, let's drop in together for this week's message. This episode is perfect timing for your weekend or whenever you're listening to this really, because as you'll learn about in this short three question series from Dan Pardi, we sourced from episode 88, you have more control over your health than anyone else. And of course the knowing without doing is the same as not knowing. Just because we have a bunch of health information does not mean we're going to walk that bridge between knowing and execution. So I think you're gonna love this episode. It was from number 88 with Dan. These are three of my favorite questions from the hour we spent going back and forth with one of the most brilliant minds in wellness. I know you're gonna enjoy what Dan has to say about finding the health you're looking for. And if you have any questions, go to the website search Dan Pardi in the search bar on Wellness Force. You can also look at the show notes or download the entire episode for number 88 with Daniel. With all the health information out there, this ocean of articles and links and experts, it can be incredibly frustrating to try to find the health you're looking for. Well, today we are bringing on Dan Pardee for his return to Wellness Force Radio. To understand this truth versus fiction in health research. Dan has almost 20 years facilitating health behaviors and others. He is the developer of the Loop model to sustain health behaviors to help people live a healthy lifestyle in this crazy, hectic and sometimes insane modern world. Dan, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks for having me back, Josh. I'm really happy to be here.

Thanks for coming on sharing your knowledge with us. Dan. Clarifying the problem is the first step, right? I mean, anybody that has a health concern, they want to let go of weight, they want to improve their stress response, whatever it is, Dan, they first have to clarify the problem, right? So if someone's interested in health, how do they do this, man? How do they cut through the ocean of information out there so that it's applicable to them in their life.

A lot of what our culture supports is health is askew from what's really needed. Unfortunately, the scientific discourse oftentimes can become polarized. Camps form, they battle each other, and then it's more about winning than being right. We love new and new ideas burst onto the scene. They get a lot of attention, and there's just a lot of remaining questions that need to be answered. I think clarifying the problem is one of the best techniques that one can use to solve any problem, because you have an idea of what the problem is in your mind. But thinking it through from beginning to really completion is critical because then it frames the problem sometimes a little bit differently. So, for example, even talking about weight loss, there's a lot of techniques out there, for example, where that will help you go from one body fat level to the next. But that's where a lot of people will stop thinking like, okay, hey, I lost £20. But that's not really what people want. People want to lose 20 pounds or more or whatever, and then they want to sustain it. So if you think about what that problem is, you know, you want to be able to actually lose weight, and then six months later, you want to be the new weight still. Yeah, that's the full picture of the problem. And not that this is a talk about weight loss, but it's something that I've been thinking about a lot. There are certain techniques, there's a lot of ways to lose that 20 pounds, but not all of them will put you in the same position to sustain it long term. And so you have to think about, okay, as simple as that is, what is it that I want? And it means that, you know, in this case, which is a very real scenario, you want to be able to have something that is efficacious at helping you reduce body fat, and one that helps put you in a position where, again, you know, a while after that, a year or two, forever really, that's what you really want. You want to be at that lowered body fat level so that you can, you know, live life with less body fat on yourself. So similarly, if we think about health, what is the challenge overall with health? Well, we have to fight the modern lifestyle, which we talked about last time. All of these different forces that get us to live in a manner that is actually not that healthy for us, which if we do not resist, they will lead predictably to chronic disease. And, you know, none of us want that. Yeah, but the other Problem that we also face is that it'll impair daily performance. And what I mean by that is that how well you show up for the things that you care about, including your relationships with your family, including how well you are attacking and achieving your goals, performing at work, social relationships, all of these are influenced by the health of. Of you and in a very legitimate way. And I think that's an interesting behavioral technique also, because the intangibility of downstream potential health consequences, while scary, is less powerful than, say, and then a tighter feedback loop of, you know, once you start doing the right things, you can benefit immediately.

Yeah.

Think about tomorrow. Think about tomorrow. Do you want to show up and perform well tomorrow at life? And I use that a lot to actually help me do the right things. Nobody goes for a run to say, hey, I'm going to. I'm going to go out for a run so that I don't get peripheral arterial disease.

Yeah, that's probably not the first thing on their mind, too. That's interesting, too, because there's so much novelty out there, right? I mean, our attention spans are shorter than ever, and there's so much information. There is literally an ocean that people swim through. So this novelty piece, I mean, on one hand, we have people that are maybe just starting a journey of better health and they're seeking different things. They can actually start ticking the boxes and not really do the work. You know, they'll collect all the articles, they'll seek new stimulus and new novelty. But how do they transition, Dan, to taking that deeper dive into what the academic literature says to be helpful and also what the research shows to be helpful? How do they transition from novelty to application?

As you say, there's a lot of information out there, and if somebody's really interested, then what is a common problem that we face? Well, people will oftentimes trend hop. What do I mean by that? Well, their health practice right now, and what I mean by health practice is the sequence of activities that somebody is actually engaging in to try to be healthy is determined by the last thing that they read or something that they read recently. We know that the journalistic incentives are oftentimes more about clicks than clarity. Right. And it's not trying to, you know, blame some, you know, somebody else for your health issues, but it's true. Right. So oftentimes a result of somebody who's interested is that, gosh, this stuff is just so confusing because I read one thing one day that said this, and then the next day I read something else that said that, and the Fact of the matter is that if you were to plot on a graph, you know, let's say research in one area, you would see there would be a scatter plot, there'd be information all over the graph. What you really want to do is try to figure out what is that trend line that goes right through all of the range of data. Because you know, the trend line is what is, is what you actually care about is like, hey, is this thing going in the good direction or the bad direction? Because you can paint a very interesting picture by looking at the three studies out of 25 that say the opposite than the rest of the 22. Right. And hey, gosh, if you only heard about those three studies, it would seem really convincing. So that is really the issue that is placed on people's shoulders when they're trying to figure out something around for their health on a certain topic.

In a recent interview with Dr. David Katz from Yale, you were quoted here. This is unique. You said, as well intentioned as someone might be. I frequently find myself getting frustrated. Not when somebody's passionate and wrong about an issue, but when people can be overly confident and dismissive of mainstream medicine's consensus in favor of their own opinion, which leads to their own financial reward. There's a lot of people that are searching in the ocean of information. And guess what? There's a lot of people in the ocean that are saying, my way is the only way. How do you cut through that noise? Why did you say that quote? I mean, it was really powerful.

Yeah. And I am going to unapologetically weave in human os, which is the company I'm launching.

Yes, we are stoked, man. I'm going to link that in the show notes today as well. So that'll be at the show notes today as well. Because we are stoked about that, man. Definitely.

Okay, cool. And the reason I want to bring it up is because very, you know, very directly, we're trying to solve some of these problems. So I'm going to, you know, describe our approach and how to do it. So as you say, there's a lot of information out there and if somebody's really interested now, I come along. And why should you believe me? Well, don't, you know, what are we doing with our, with our health courses? Well, we have, first of all, we have a method and so we're going to educate on what that method is to arrive at the answer. It's kind of like show your work, you know, back in math class, you know, you could have the right answer but how did you get there? And then we're having all of our courses peer reviewed, so don't trust us. But then we're going to send it to academics who are published in the, on this subject and they're going to critique it. And then after that, once they're published and they're live and people are viewing them, if somebody offers a criticism of, let's say one of the courses that we happen to agree with, we're going to be open minded to say, okay, hey, our community just offered a way for us to improve this and we're going to then version the courses. So course could be version one, you know, 1.1, 1.2. And so my goal is not to be. I'm right, you're wrong. The goal is to say how do we communicate the best possible information on this subject matter in order to help people be healthy? And we're going to continue to evolve it as long as we continue to find opportunities or see ways to do that to make it better. So we're of service to this idea. And that's how I view it. You know, and if people, I think people will probably like, okay, yeah, so they're very transparent about their method and I like the fact that they're peer reviewed. I mean that's what we do in, in scientific journals, right. We, you know, we write the best possible paper that we can, then we send it out to a group of reviewers that do their best to find faults in, in order to make it better. That's how science works.

Yeah. And I think a lot of people do cherry picking where they might go and just scour the research, but they only pull out the studies that are shown on the NIH or PubMed that actually benefit their thesis.

Right, Absolutely. And you know, Dr. Katz actually mentioned that in the study that some people can make very convincing arguments and you have to know so much in order to know that they're wrong. There's a lot of that that's going out there, that's going on out there. And so, you know, do I think that we're going to ever be communicating perfection? I'm not promising that at all because science is always changing. But let's say we put out something where we make a recommendation to do, you know, let's say, you know, all right, here's our education and this is what we think you should do now based off of the research. And then something comes along that actually changed our, you know, position. Will I defend it at all cost and try to create these you know, awkward explanations that, you know, justify our previous position. No, you know, we're going to actually say, great, okay, we're going to be the first to help you understand how the science has changed and modify, you know, accordingly. Now, of course, you should be able to defend how you feel. That's, you know, that that's good. But unfortunately, the scientific discourse oftentimes can become polarized. Camps form, they battle each other, and then it's more about winning than being right. And I just. I'm not interested in taking part in that. I want to help, you know, to be as kind of what we're doing. But the information that we're putting out there, to be informed, as informed as possible, to then help, you know, help as much as possible.

Who do we trust in the ocean of information? How does someone formulate trust? You know, someone's listening, they're feeling inspired, they want to take action. How do they know that, A, they can trust a source of information, and B, what does that look like in the early stages of them taking inspired action?

I think that without having a, you know, a very clear answer, look at the people that associate with them. Do they declare what their method is? Do they offer all the promises in the world, or are they. Do they have a realistic perspective about health and how to help? Is it comprehensive? Does their perspective about how to be healthy kind of fit into, like, a bigger overall framework? Which is one thing I love about ancestral health, which is part of the Paleo Diet is a part of that, but it is a overall framework about how to live more naturally in the modern world. And that, to me, I think, is actually the best part about that movement, not necessarily the diet itself, although diet's gotten a lot of popularity. So, you know, is there a framework there that is being offered where, you know, there's a lot of answers that can be provided? Those are some things that come to mind when I think about how do. How do we know? Or is it a quick fix? And if it's a quick fix, just be wary, you know, does it mean that it couldn't actually be helpful? It might be, but just be cautious. I think it's really a good idea to try to clarify the problem you're trying to solve. There's several problems out there, so. But one of them is this idea that somebody who is interested in their health and wants to basically learn things so that they can be a good steward of their own health. We're always bombarded with tons of information, and if you're not an expert and even if you are, it's hard to know what's legit, what's not. Then we have there's novelty seeking versus kind of taking more of a deep dive, right? And so it's easy with, with today to constantly be searching for what's new versus actually taking a deeper dive into what we know to be helpful. So this idea of learning for efficacy versus learning for recognition is. Let's use a bike, you know, a bike riding analogy. If I see somebody riding a bike, I can recognize what that is. That person's riding a bike. But that doesn't necessarily mean that I know how to do it myself. In order for me to do it myself, I have to get on that bike and I have to then learn how to learn how to pedal. I have to learn it in a different way. I have to have deeper engagement to develop a level of fluency with the idea and also how I relate to the idea so that I can benefit from riding the bike and getting places faster than walking if I need to. You can use that analogy for really a lot of things in health, you know, we're not protected or vaccinated from information. Even if we have a lot of the right information in our head, you still have to make that leap to go from adequate understanding. So how do you get to first of all, deeper understanding, and then you have to make that leap to actually putting it into practice. It's kind of going from finding the right ideas, understanding them deeply, turning that into skills, and then maintaining it long term in the face of competing information.

What do you think is next for you as far as your excitement for yourself and human os? Like, what's coming down the pipe? This operating system for healthy living?

Yeah. Well, we are testing it now. We're launching with about 16 different courses. One on fasting, one on the Mediterranean diet, of a variety related to weight loss, one about exercise foundations. I look to have maybe 50 more courses by within a year, within 18 months. The way that I work with these is I find somebody whose work I really like published. We work on them together. I offer my framework about how to kind of communicate. We find peer reviews and advisors. So the goal is just to make it as absolutely as good as we can and then communicate it in a manner that's really fun. Interesting.

Dan, thank you so much for coming on the show. Man. Round two was just as fun as round one. And you know what? I have this feeling that round three is coming in 2017, because I know that people are feeling inspired from this episode. Man so, so thank you so much for your work.

Well, thank you so much for having me on. I'd love to come back. I love chatting with you, Josh. Anytime.

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