HRV FOR WELLNESS | The Mother of All Biomarkers | LIVE

Hello, Facebook Land. I'm here with Jason Moore. He is the CEO of a company that I've come to know and love called Elite hrv. I'm just going to wait a few minutes for people to come on. Jason, tell us what you have for breakfast today. What does a busy CEO eat for breakfast, Especially someone that cares about HRV so much?

That's a great question. Breakfast looks pretty interesting for me because I treat it similar to other meals typically. Um, and today, though, I had a more breakfast food than usual. I actually had some pastured bacon. I don't typically eat a ton of bacon, actually. I think it tastes delicious. But I went for an extra breakfasty food today with that. I had some mashed taro and rutabaga with some herbs and some ghee as well. And then I had some leftover kale and fennel salad from yesterday with some orange slices and some different things in it.

I don't think I've ever in my life had rutabaga. If you're watching right now, if you've eaten rutabaga, can you put like a one? If you've eaten rutabaga before, what does rutabaga taste like?

It's a root. It tastes kind of like a turnip, but I think a little bit better. In my opinion, a little less bitter, but I like to blend it with other stuff. It just gives kind of an earthy feel to some mashed roots. So my wife and I, Alyssa and I like to do mashed root veggie blends. So we'll just experiment with literally anything. We'll mash together sweet potatoes or potatoes or rutabagas or turnips or celery root. Parsnips, Carrots. Yeah, plantains.

I don't know why. I'm starting to feel really hungry right now. We had people write in some questions and we had some comments on the podcast. If you're watching this on the replay, go to wellnessforce.com126. You can learn so much more depth about Jason. But, Jason, if people did not listen to the podcast, which they're clicking right now to go listen to, just tell them really quickly, man. Like, who are you? What do you do?

Why do you do it? Yeah, definitely. I mean, there's a. There's a lot to the story, but essentially my background is in information systems design. I've worked with kind of big data, so to speak, in the oil and gas industry, checking on the health of really expensive equipment out in the field, using sensors and A lot of different data tracking analysis tools. On the side of that I was really passionate, or I still am really passionate about health and wellness and fitness and started looking at different things in that arena, got into the ancestral health world. And then at some point along the way, I decided to kind of marry my background of information systems analysis and design with the health side of things that I was really passionate about and created Elite hrv, which is a heart rate variability monitoring platform about three years ago. Put it out there as kind of a side project. Lots of people started downloading, started interacting and networking with some amazing people, from Olympic athletes and coaches to sports scientists and doctors and researchers, doing everything from child psychology to chronic disease management and all this other stuff.

So, yeah, and it blew me away too when I was learning about you, because I had no idea, like, I had dabbled in HRV for a while with like different quantified self avenues and whatnot. But then when I learned about the depth and what emotionally and physically you could change just from using this mirror of mindfulness with hrv, it really kind of blew my hair back. And I have a lot of hair, so it like really blew me back. And I just, I realized that HRV is. There's some big misconceptions about hrv and we talked about them in depth on the podcast. But which one comes top of mind? I mean, what do people think that HRV is that you and the professionals in your sphere know it is not, Right?

So to the, to the person who may be not familiar with hrv, they might mistake it with heart rate, right? And so. Or being like very related to heart rate, which it is very related to heart rate, except it's way deeper. And there's a lot more to it than calculating your beats per minute, right? So there's that end of the spectrum, which we can talk about. And then the other end of the spectrum is people who may be familiar with like live biofeedback may have heard of HRV and they practice some type of breathing or meditation with some HRV biofeedback. And a lot of cases, people will say just doing that alone for two minutes a day or something will maybe cure all of your woes. And you know, we've found some, some differences in that type of recommendation. So which end of the spectrum do you want to start with?

Yeah, just, there's so much, right. We, we're just going to scratch the tip of the tip of the iceberg today, man. And we only have like 20, 30 minutes here on Facebook. And I Do want to leave time for questions about can learn more? Because I think what happens with podcasts and I'm sure you can relate as a podcast host. People listen to a podcast and they're like, okay, what is one thing that I can do from listening to this podcast that will actually change my behavior for the long term? And I feel like with hrv, it's such a massively in depth subject that there's going to be no one thing you can do from today. Which is why it's really necessary to empower yourself and to get more education on this. But if people don't know anything about hrv, why do you call it the mother of all biomarkers? I mean, why is this the big one that people really get to focus on when we look at how many things can be told from the heart?

Yeah. So, I mean, it's pretty obvious to folks that the heart is integrated deeply into almost every process in the body and is integrated specifically through the autonomic nervous system and other systems. But that's the one that we like to focus on because that one really interacts with the stress response and recovery and how your blood sugar is regulated, digestion, energy levels, your ability to perform when you're exercising, all this stuff is heavily influenced by the autonomic nervous system. And so, yeah, I mean, that basically sums up the reason why we really got interested in heart rate variability is it's a non invasive, super accurate way of getting insight into your autonomic nervous system, which is tied to all these really important pieces in the body. So in just like two minutes a day, essentially in the morning, you can do a little check in, you can become way more aware of your own self and your situation for that day and just kind of make some little tweaks that really can make a big difference in your performance or your health over the long run.

And I think this is so powerful because as technology rises up and it pulls our attention everywhere, you know, attention being the new currency, people are spending their valuable time watching us because there's probably something inside of them that's like, I want to know why my heart does what it does and what I can learn about that. What would you say the number one behavior change thing is that people start to do once they monitor their hrv? Do they start changing their foods? Do they start changing their sleep habits? I mean, what have you seen from so many users? What behaviors are they changing right away?

Definitely, yeah. So a lot of people have found it because they're trying to optimize their exercise. So a lot of people turn to that first and try to figure out what the optimal rest period or, you know, how often do they need to take it easy or can they handle more. So a lot of people get into it that way. But then over the years, a lot more people have been discovering the holistic health benefits of tracking hrv. And I would say the number one thing that a lot of people realize is the impact that a night's sleep could have on their ongoing health over the long run. Without having to wear something all night, or without having to analyze a bunch of complicated data, Basically you can just wake up, take this little two minute reading and get a pretty good insight as to the quality of that sleep. And what people may find is that a little bit shorter, a little bit longer, 15 minutes more sleep or less sleep doesn't really make a big difference and that the quality of that sleep actually makes the biggest difference right out of the gate. So then they find things like, oh, well, if I drink alcohol the night before, then, you know, two glasses of wine that helps me relax or whatever actually really negatively impacts the quality of my sleep. And I pick that up versus one glass of wine. And so then they can kind of find a threshold there. And it's a different trigger for everyone. It's like everyone has their own personal.

Journey with it and everyone's unique in the way that they respond to external stimuli. Right. So for some people, they might be able to have a glass of wine. By the way, if you're watching this right now, or replay if you drink wine, just put wine. Because if you do drink wine, there is a way to monitor it so that you can see how many glasses actually affect my sleep or not. Would you say that for most people a glass of wine is not going to kill them? It's not really going to impact their sleep or across the board. I mean, do you see one glass of wine really interrupting these HRV patterns?

I typically don't see one glass having a huge impact, but there's definitely a threshold where at some point for different people, like you said, it's different spectrums, but it becomes over that 2, 3 glass threshold for a lot of people is when it really negatively impacts the sleep a lot across the board. And also may even have several days worth of impact where you will actually see that residual for two, three days.

Tequila, definitely, I would say any kind of hard alcohols, those are the ones that are going to show up in the HRV patterns, right?

Those will, yeah, more easily than something with lower alcohol content, for sure. And they're also easier to binge on. But yeah. So, interestingly, we did a. We published a little infographic about coffee. Coffee is another one that tons of people partake in. Right? And basically this study, this study looked at 15,000 people in Brazil and measured their coffee intake and a number of other features. And basically, originally, when they did the study, it looked like, okay, more coffee consumption correlates with lower hrv, which, to translate that real quick for people who are listening, would be indicative of reduced health or increased age, depending on. We can talk more about that. But essentially. But then they actually controlled for some other things. So people who typically drink more coffee also statistically are more likely to be smokers, they're more likely to be alcohol, regular alcohol consumption. And so that may or may not be the case for this audience. But when they controlled for that, the coffee consumption actually flattened out in relation to hrv. And what they found was that below three cups a day, it didn't really seem to statistically make a difference in someone's health below that, three cups of coffee a day. And that could still be individual, but it's good news for a lot of people who are moderate to low coffee drinkers. And then what they did find was that above that three cups of coffee, that it did seem to still make a pretty significant impact.

And we're talking about the physical components of this hrv, why it's important. So we know that caffeine, alcohol, even blue lights from like an iPad, you know, that gets in your retina, you have this photoreceptors in your skin. This can really harm sleep patterns. So once someone knows, and I think this is the big question a lot of people challenge, especially Mark Sisson in the paleo world, right? Well, why do I need technology to tell me why I should do something different? It's because it's not that world anymore. The world of cavemen 10,000 years ago, we don't live in that world anymore. We live in a world now where our attention is harvested from all these different devices and whatnot. So I think it's really cool to have you on because we're talking again, like we did in the podcast, about how the same tech that's robbed us of our activity and of our connection is now giving it back to us in a totally different way. We talked on the podcast about the children, the special needs children who were getting this impact about emotional health. And the parents were seeing, like, what was going on with the kids with the hrv values. Can you share that story? And we'll definitely link the podcast here as well. But it just blew me away because I thought, wow, technology is actually helping people become more emotionally smart, which is really at the core ethos of, like, why we're here talking.

Yeah, that's powerful. Indeed. And you know, you mentioned earlier that we have a lot of noise in our lives. Essentially we're inundated with not only like advertising and TV and all this stuff, but, you know, stimulation from our phones and different inputs. And when we're inundated with all this stuff, it's hard to really be internally aware of what's going on in the body. You know, it's hard to know what the physiological impact of emotional situations is. And the story that you talked about is people are using. There's a hospital that works with children who've been taken out of their homes from abusive situations. And they're measuring HRV now to try with our platform to try to show the parents the physiological impact on the children when you have the confrontation in the home that way. So everybody knows that that's a stressful situation when you arguing with someone that you care for. But it's kind of hard to understand the real physiological, physical impact that that could have. And it's tremendous. So HRV values can kind of help bring awareness to the translation from that emotional, kind of stressful situation to what real impact is this having inside? And by inside, I don't even mean like, you know, like spiritual inside. I mean literally inside of your body from your heart.

Right. And I think people can relate. If you've ever been in a relationship and broken up, can you put a one in the comments? I mean, we've all had relationship stress. And so when we go through these seasons, as Craig Valentine calls it, how do we use HRV when we're in these stressful seasons? As a mirror so that we can then change our behavior for the long term. I mean, what does that look like for somebody that's just tuning in right now and just watching? How do they start to use HRV so that they can become this emotionally intelligent person? Start changing their behaviors?

Yeah. So it kind of comes back to self awareness. When you can become more aware of your state at any given moment, you can start to recognize when stressful situations happen. Then what's going on in my body and can I manipulate it or change it? Right. So like you said, you could be going into a season, and a season is actually an interesting way of putting it. A season of stress. So to speak. Because a lot of people who popularized HRV were athletes. Athletes go into a season of stress because they're elevating their training and they're competing and they're doing all this stuff. But we all go through these same types of seasons in our lives where we have periods of kind of normalcy, where things are just kind of in maintenance mode and then we have other in a while.

I'm just saying.

I mean, these days too, actually a lot more people are feeling like they don't have periods of normalcy. But regardless if you get the normal downtime or not, everyone can kind of relate to you do get periods of where you're working more hours than you'd like to, or you're not getting to exercise as much as you'd like to, or eat as well as you'd like to, or different things like that. And those are all physiological. Those all have a physiological impact on the body. And it's a stress, it's accumulation of stress. And that registers an HRV the same way that it does for athletes who are going into season of training and competing. Right? So you can't avoid having those periods of elevated stress levels. But there are things that you can do to mitigate the damage and you become. The first step is becoming more aware of the extent of the damage and which events or which triggers are the ones that have the biggest impact on you. So stress, people. People say stress is. Stress is stress is stress. So it all is kind of drawing from the same bucket. Whether you're having emotional stress or physical stress from exercise or from inflammatory foods or the environment. Like you said, bright lights from your iPad in the middle of the night or whatever it is, it's all kind of drawing from your same resource pool. So you know, whether you are working extra hours or dealing with children or financial stress or any of those other types of things, HRV will pick that up and over time show you that, okay, maybe when I try to decompress on Friday night and I drink five drinks, you know, it feels good in the moment because I'm coming off this stressful week. But then what I see is that I'm shot for two or three days and by the time Monday rolls around, I haven't recovered at all over the weekend. And then I have to go back into the office or go back real life and start dealing with these things. And I didn't get the recovery I needed over the weekend. So it might help then to say, okay, I'm going to save my drinking for Saturday night. And then I have at least one night to kind of just totally decompress. And then maybe I'll be also less tempted to drink extra drinks on Saturday if I, if I had the chance to recover already on Friday night.

What's coming up for me too is like these behaviors that we have. I think on one level we know that if our life is out of balance and we do these hard course corrects through alcohol, and for some people it's drugs, right? Some people might be Internet porn, some people might be like scrolling too much on Facebook. But every once in a while we just kind of wake the fuck up, pardon my French. We wake the fuck up and we start to realize this is what's actually going to help me for the long term. And it's this self awareness that you talked about, Jason. In the course, there's multiple blocks, I think there's five major blocks where it dives deeper into self awareness, how to use the data sets so that we can wake up. The challenge, I believe, and you tell me if I'm wrong here, is that the society is stacked against us, the odds are stacked against us to be self aware because of all these responsibilities that we have. So if we transcend the victim mentality and we become the victor, there's no way to do it. In my opinion, right now, in this age of technology, without technology, unless you're born into resources and you have everything you need from birth, and most of us aren't like that, most of us have had to, you know, build and crawl and scratch and get to where we, we are now. So when you look at the course, how much would you say self awareness is built in there? And what does that look like for people that are just diving in?

Yeah, for sure. So we created a course on heart rate variability because it is such a powerful metric, but it's very systemic. So, like, what that means is it looks at the big picture of your mental physical condition. And that's both a pro and a conversation. The pro is that it really indicates when you make changes in your life, whether you're doing the right thing or sort of the wrong thing, so to speak. If you're moving the needle in a positive direction or a negative direction. The cons are, is that there's a lot of variables at play. Sometimes, sometimes you don't know exactly what the worst actor is and you have to do a little bit of troubleshooting. So we made a course around what is the science of hrv, how do I measure it, get an understanding of what I'm looking at. And then we kind of dive into the specific areas that a lot of people could use for improvement, including sleep, nutrition, environmental factors, emotional and mental well being factors. And we have a checklist in there that starts people down the path of figuring out what are the things in my life that have the biggest impact on my health or my training or, or my recovery or whatever it is the situation is. And then how do you relate that back to those HRV values that you're seeing?

Yeah, and this is powerful because I'll never forget most of the conversations I would have when I was working in fitness gyms, specifically here in San Diego. It'd be like, how are you doing, Jane? How was your diet? How's your sleep? They don't know. They're overwhelmed, they're inundated. There's no way for them to actually quantify how they're feeling, how they're doing, and then track that progress over time. I am wearing the OURA ring right here. And I know at some point you guys are going to integrate with OURA ring because I'm just feeling like these wearables, this mirrors of mindfulness, it has to be seamless, it has to be easy for people to use if there's going to be sustainable change. So when I look at the education that's needed, the education is one thing, like the knowing is one thing. Then there's the bridge of doing. And in your life you've created that bridge in a really specific way. We did talk about this on the podcast, but I want people watching if you're on the replay, if you've had trouble, like you gain all this knowledge, you get all the books, you might even become a specialist. Have you ever had trouble creating the bridge between getting the knowledge and executing on it? If so, please write a comment because I think that's the human experience. And I believe that it would be so powerful you, Jason, to share what you've done to actually get the knowledge about HRV and then walk people through that bridge to execute it. Is it more of an emotional or a scientific mindset? I mean, what's really made the difference for you to get the knowledge and then to actually use it?

Yeah, that's a, that's a powerful question. And just like you said, depending on the situation, it really helps to have some clear, objective data that shows you what's going on. Right. And so if we want to rewind a little bit back to when I was in oil and gas, part of what I was doing was collecting massive amounts of data from out in the field on all this equipment. And what I quickly found was that people who worked on that equipment would be sometimes considered rough around the edges. And then people who, all the way up at the top, these really high up executives and stuff, were trying to make decisions off of this data. And so you had to really distill it down to what is the most meaningful bit of data that I can make a decision off of and, and only give that to the person. Right. And that is, that is kind of like the job of the systems designer. And that's what I did. And so then I carried that into the health coaching world when I was working with clients and trying to figure out how to present heart rate variability, which I'd found to be this really powerful metric. And I tried to distill it down to basically presenting a really easy to follow morning kind of ritual that's like, okay, take this two minute reading. I get a gauge that shows me how my condition is on a high, kind of like a good, bad, medium point of view. And then where do I go from here and help you kind of drill in on what is the biggest impact item for you. So to come back to your question of bridging between knowing and doing, kind.

Of a big question. It needs a pre frame. It's not an easy question. It's a really challenging one for I think most humans it is.

And a lot of it comes from, like you said, how do I even integrate change at all into my life? Right. And so whether like a lot of people know they need to exercise more or sleep more or you know, eat better or meditate more or work less or stress less or watch less TV or sit less. Yeah. Here's all these things that I know.

I'm not supposed to get stressed out. Yeah, yeah.

And it's, it stresses me out just listing all those things because it's like, okay, if I sit down and I want to change all of that today, I'm just going to fail. Right. And so to me, bridging between knowing and doing is just becoming more aware of what's this, what's the one thing that I can change today that will have an impact? Right. And so it could be small. Something as small as going on a five minute walk may have a measurable impact. And now here I have this little two minute reading that I can do that will help me understand if that walk is worth that five minutes. And again, that a five minute walk maybe have diminishing returns really quickly for People, but at least if you're going from never walking anywhere to going to five minute walk, then you probably see a little bit of a difference and that should register in the numbers. But quickly, then you might find that a few more minutes might be more helpful.

Ellie Rutherford says hi, I use elite hrv. Ellie, if you're still here, tell us what you've garnered. Like, what have you gotten the most out of either your physical training or your emotional presence? Also, Mark, I saw that you put a one. Mark, if you're still listening, let us know. Are you interested in hrv? What fascinates you? If you're as utterly fascinated as I am by this science of just checking your phone after a small measurement, definitely check the comments for the link. You can get 10% off. Jason was generous enough to give us 10% off for the entire Wellness Force Radio audience, so make sure you click on that. Jason, we've talked a lot about the emotional side and how much that's affecting kids and their relationships with parents. With hrv, you talked about pro athletes where that really kind of stemmed from high performance. How would you say the future of HRV is shaping? Like, what does this look like for the busy CEO, for the busy mom, for the busy dad? These are the real people that are out there that can really benefit from the science of heart rate variability. What do you think the future of HRV looks like?

So kind of where we're evolving is heart rate variability is like your check engine light. Right. Where there's a lot of other metrics and markers out there that you could be measuring, you know, step count or just basic heart rate. And those are kind of more like tire pressure. Whereas HRV is that overall big picture but similar to a check engine light when there's a flag on. So if folks are familiar with the check engine light in their car, basically it tells you something important is wrong.

The one that stays on and people ignore it.

Yeah, yeah. It kind of gives you an idea. Okay, I need to drill into something here because something really bad could happen if I don't. Right. And how you figure out what it is is you go through those checklists, you go through those basic items, but you can also track few other little basic things. So once you kind of identify something like, you know, maybe my sleep needs better quality improvement or something like that. Ellie's got her husband on it too. That's great. That's awesome. Oh, sweet.

Every other week from the UK and she was trying to get him to work out whether run at 6am or sleep instead. Oh, managing jet lag. That is such a great point. We talked about Retimer on the show, which, you know, gets us back into that natural circadian loop. But when we look at. Thank you so much for this point, Ellie. It's like when we look at people that travel, these busy moms and parents and just humans that get on planes, by the way, it's so incredible that we can, like, fly through the air in a metal tube. How. How do we use HRV to get back into our circadian rhythm? That's a really interesting point.

Yeah. So heart rate variability tracks pretty well with your cortisol and circadian rhythm. So, you know, you could measure heart rate variability first thing in the morning and then in the evening before bed and kind of get an idea of the changes between morning and evening and how you're setting yourself up for a good night's sleep. And a good night's sleep is heavily dependent upon a healthy circadian rhythm. You can exhaust yourself and go to sleep, or you can drink yourself to sleep, but the quality of that sleep will be a lot less than a natural circadian rhythm induced sleep. So keeping your circadian rhythm on point or managing jet lag and all that stuff is super important. And actually, that is one of the biggest benefits that some of our competitive National Olympic athletes have found from tracking HRV is they're often flying to another continent for a competition and. And they have to be able to, you know, wake up and perform, basically. And they've been able to kind of optimize both the tapered for that performance and also the getting their sleep and everything back on schedule by measuring HRV in that situation.

That's powerful because then it can actually bring us back to what's normally a baseline instead of trying to operate in different time zones and trying to just be frenetically figuring out what's going to work best. Mark Coroto. I hope I'm saying your last name, Mark. Let me know. He is a competitive endurance athlete, and he's living with CLL leukemia. He uses HRV to tell him when he can go to an intense workout and when he has to rest. It's difficult to dial it in when he can go deeper and not spike his cytokines. Have you had any experience with this, with people like Mark using HRV and intense workouts?

Yeah, definitely. So typically, a more intense workout will register, like the next day and your HRV reading, and you'll be able to see the stress of that workout. And then over the course of the couple days following that when you're kind of fully recovered or when you're back to normal. Kind of similar to when you're flying to another continent or dealing with jet.

Lag or heavy deadlifts. Right? I mean cardio, anaerobic or aerobic training, it's not going to matter. It'll show the next day.

So then there's some, especially for the aerobic training, once somebody gets into the endurance training or lots of aerobic training, it can actually take several days of accumulation of that before you start to see changes in the values. Because if you picture it as each session is not as stressful as the accumulation of several sessions when you start to adapt. So there's a lot of adaptation involved with stress. A good example, I like to say is run as fast as you can across a field. The first time you do that, it's going to knock you out, right? I mean you're going to be super wiped. But if you keep doing that regularly and recovering, then you can run across the field full out several times. And that will probably be even less fatiguing than the very first time you did it once. And so similar, as you participate in some type of stressful activity, you do adapt to it. And so the impact of one instance of that may be less, but the accumulation overall is what really shows up. And so that's good for athletes, that's good for that high performing CEO. So a CEO, a high performing CEO or business person or, or a high performing mom or anybody like that, missing a couple hours of a night's sleep one time may be just a normal occurrence. It's not, it's like no problem, I can do that three, five nights a week, no problem.

But it's cumulative. It stacks up almost like water in a bathtub and eventually it's gonna pour out.

That's exactly right. It's cumulative. That cumulative effect will start to show up in the weekly trends and the monthly trends of heart rate variability. And that's where it kind of becomes powerful to track those over time. So you get capture one or two minutes a morning and then over time you start to build your own individual personalized trend. And then you can see because you naturally change things over time, right? We talked about seasons of stress or whatever it is, go on vacation, people may have heard of you get sick when you go on vacation after you've.

Been stressed out, is finally going to rest. Right. It's the same methodology where people there, there's science out there that shows when people have this career for like 50 years. That just high tension, high stress, they die within three years. They literally die because their body has what Hans Selye calls general adaptation syndrome. And they finally get to relax and their body's like, okay, we can die now. And I'm laughing. It's not funny. What's, what's really unique about this is that with HRV we can finally like take away the ambiguity. So whether you're doing strength training in the gym, whether you're an endurance athlete, whether you're just somebody that wants to have better introspection, better self awareness about their athletic readiness in the world, this is the whole power that I'm feeling and seeing. And I'm looking forward to more conversations around this too. I want to leave like one more minute for anybody to ask questions. What's up, Casey? My good friend Casey Callum is on. I see Jeff Koga. What's up, Jeff? Hello, Jason. There's all these great people on that love and care about their body, especially Casey. Casey Kellum, if you're linking, check out his profile. He had like one of the most physical, powerful transformations I've ever seen coming back from a liver issue. So anybody that has any more questions, let me know. Post your questions right here. Jason, you can pick his brain, his scientific brain, from decades in the oil and gas, now serving the wellness community. We did have a question that was pinged to me from a good friend of mine and maybe we can wrap with this, depending on who else asks questions. When we look at hiv for letting go of weight, when we look at HRV for weight loss, how does this tie into a practical program for fat burning and for letting go of weight?

Right. So there's a couple of things there. Weight loss, a lot of cases, is very tied to inflammation and so you can get short term gains on weight loss just by not eating. Right. And so, but that, that is not sustainable. And so I just say that jokingly, half jokingly, because there's a lot of diets out there that will get you short term, but may sacrifice your long term health and your long term results too. So hrv, that's kind of where HRV ties in. If you're stressing your body out by doing an extreme weight loss program, you know, in the short term maybe that you can get away with that, but over the long term you can't usually. And hrv tb. Right.

I wonder what biggest losers HRV values are.

Maybe someday we'll.

I can only imagine.

Yeah, but yeah, basically also being very overweight is also Highly inflammatory and it's a big stress on the body. And so what we see typically is that as people lose weight in a healthy and sustainable way, their HRV values tend to increase. And so that's kind of showing a restoration of a more youthful, full biological age, which I kind of hinted at earlier. HRV ties very closely to your biological age, which is sort of your true age. You're independent of your chronological age. But similarly, you know, it's. So here's an example. Somebody went on an ultra low carb diet to try to lose weight. They were getting pretty good results. But what they found is that after like 10 days of being ultra low carb, their HRV would start to tank and they really were getting lower energy levels as well. It kind of helped bring awareness to some issues that were coming at the end of that 10 day stint. And they would always have like a natural urge to binge or cheat after about a week to 10 days. And they would eventually they got on kind of like a carb cycling type protocol. But anyways, what they found is after they ate a good bolus of carbohydrates, the next morning their HRV was back up to normal. And so it was kind of, it was basically helping indicate to them that, you know, they might have been able to make adjustments to nutrient density or fat intake or whatever it was to make it more sustainable. But whatever they were doing was not sustainable and they had to cycle back in some more carbohydrates to continue that.

This is the fascinating thing. It's like we're taking, we're finally peeling back the veil of. I kind of think I know how I feel, but I don't really know. That shit's just not going to serve us anymore. I believe what's really going to serve us is tracking our progress along the way. I mean, look, you wouldn't go to work unless your boss paid you, right? You wouldn't be able to know how you're doing in sales unless you tracked it. So truly, what gets measured gets managed. And this has been such a great conversation, man. There's a bunch more questions, let's go. One more question. It's from my friend Jason Bailey. What's up, Jason? Any, any opinion on Orange Theory fitness model? I'm curious if you meant that for hrv maybe. How do you plug in HRV measurements with high intensity high intensity interval training? That might be what he's asking.

Sure. So the nice thing about kind of high intensity interval training or Orange Theory fitness kind of heart rate Zone training. I'm not an Orange Theory fitness trainer or anything, so I, you know, forgive me if I get any of the details wrong, but essentially is the nice thing is it's very quantified, it's very measurable. One of the downsides is it's kind of can be repetitive. So in the long term, you know, maybe results might be harder to continue getting, but you can kind of, since it's very measurable and quantified, you can tweak it more easily based on what you see with your HRV values. So you would still track HRV in the morning and then basically you would. Yeah, I like that. Let me show the question right there.

That's pretty cool. I just found that out. This is my second time using the Belive platform. This is, I love it.

It's great. It is. So you can track HRV in the morning and then basically if you're regularly doing heart rate based training like through OrangeTheory for example, what you may find is that you might want to adjust your target heart rate zones or the amount of time you spend in those zones based on what your HRV is telling you. And you could do some self experimentation. So you say like, oh, okay, HIV dropped today. Maybe I'll do half volume of my heart rate zone training or whatever, see if that's better. Right. It's kind of a really nice tool for testing and retesting because everybody, like I said, you and everyone else in that Orange Theory fitness class have a different life, have a different background, you eat differently, you sleep different, differently, you have a different job and all this stuff. So I can't say everybody in that class needs to cut their volume in half and they'll get the best results ever. That's why the testing and retesting and self awareness concept is so important.

Last question here. This is from Jeff. What up Jeff? Koga HRV to stop smoking or to stop cravings. I'm curious about that because I believe that, you know, there's a neurological pathway that's been created when we look at the same addiction source for nicotine or a lot of other drugs. So how might somebody use self awareness practices or these mirrors of mindfulness through HRV to be able to circumvent these cravings? I don't know if there's an easy answer for that, but he brings up a really challenging question.

Yeah, so here's what we find. We find. So research has kind of correlated reductions in HRV to reductions in willpower. Right. And so basically what you could do is if you think about it this way, let's. Let's talk about donuts in the office, right? If you get them out of the.

Office, first of all, just get them out of the office, damn it.

Okay, well, if you know they're gonna be there, that's something you know that's gonna be there, right? And you know there's gonna be some type of temptation in your life that you're trying to avoid, whether it's smoking or donuts or cravings, some sort of that. When you wake up, you take this two minutes to check in with yourself and say, where am I at today, right? Am I in a position of strength or am I in a position where I might be tempted a little bit weaker willed? And it's not a flaw because everybody has this ups and downs, right? So it's nothing to get on yourself about. But when you're in that position where you know you could be compromised and more likely to get smoke or the donut or whatever it is, you can try to prevent yourself from being in that situation to begin with. So you know there's going to be donuts there, then you know, before the donuts arrive, because you know when they're going to be there, you know that you go kind of make an excuse to go to the restroom and walk by the donut thing to see if it's there. You know, try to get yourself out of that situation completely. Because if you're already in a reduced state where you're recovering from a bad night's sleep or an accumulation of stress or whatever it is, you're going to be more likely to cave on that craving and you can just remove yourself from the situation because you're aware right when you wake up. And that's another reason why we have folks measure first thing in the morning is it's before you had a chance to walk by the donut stand. It's before you had a chance to go have a smoke or whatever it is. And it helps you check in with yourself and become aware of what you're working with.

And we talked a lot about this on the podcast too, so we linked that in the comments. Jason, this has been so fun, man. I want to have another one of these with you specifically around the mindfulness piece. Because knowing is one thing, doing is another. With the course, they can get that accountability. So definitely click that 10% discount link in the comments. I will see you in the elite HRV Facebook group as well. So I'm going to be there posting with my thoughts. You guys come join us over there. And for people watching on the replay, please post your questions. I mean, Jason's more than happy to answer you, and we had some really unique ones. There was actually another one here that is completely out of my expertise. So I will let you take that from Mark when he talked about HRV with rmssd. I don't even know what that is. So thanks so much for coming on, man, and just being a part of this intersection with us here so we can discover this physical, this emotional intelligence, because this is what the world needs right now. So we really appreciate you, bro.

Yeah, no, my appreciation for you and all the listeners and folks who came and participated. I love this. I love interacting and helping, and we couldn't do it without all of your participation. So much appreciated. And as Josh mentioned, you know, we've got the course out there that dives really deep into all this stuff. The podcast that we had was, you know, this similar breakneck pace where we covered tons and lots of detailed information. So have a listen at Wellness Force. Yeah, happy to be here so much, man.

All right, we'll see you soon.

All right, take care, everyone.