Let's Say Hello

[00:03:03.680] – Allan

Hey, Ras.

[00:03:04.890] – Rachel

Hey, Allan. How are you today?

[00:03:06.630] – Allan

I'm doing all right.

[00:03:07.920] – Rachel

Good.

[00:03:09.310] – Allan

Been a busy week. We had that flood here in the gym, and so we've been trying to work on the roof and keep that going. So that's been pretty massive. And then, of course, they took the holiday break, took a couple of days off, and it rained for two solid days. Which was great. No, it actually ended up being great. We were like in a rainforest and a tree, like almost like a Treehouse thing. And it wasn't really technically a tree house, but it felt like it based on where it was on the Hill and then just sit there. I read two fiction book novels.

[00:03:42.650] – Rachel

How nice. What a nice change.

[00:03:46.140] – Allan

Yeah. I mean, I don't hardly ever read fiction anymore because I'm constantly reading nonfiction. In fact, I think I've got a book I've got to read today. But, yeah, it's kind of crazy. I sat down, I brought two books with me because I just wasn't sure how far I would get into the first book, and I ended up finishing both of them.

[00:04:05.070] – Rachel

That's awesome. Would you recommend either of what you read?

[00:04:09.160] – Allan

Well, one of them, yes. I suppose. I don't know if you get on Amazon and prime and the Netflix kind of stuff, but on Amazon Prime, there's a show called The Man from High Castle.

[00:04:22.730] – Rachel

Oh, I've heard of that.

[00:04:24.050] – Allan

Okay. And it was a really good series. And so this was the book that basically was the basis for that television show. And obviously when you have a television show with all the episodes and all that, there was a lot more into the plot of the show than there was in the book. But it was really interesting because particularly since I knew the characters from the show to get into their head, because now this was told from basically the Omnipotent perspective where you're in his head, each of these characters head. So that was good. But it's a good book. It's interesting. And then the other one was called Bocas del toro. But oddly enough, none of the action in the book actually happened in Bocas del toro.

[00:05:15.050] – Rachel

So I wonder what the inspiration was for that name.

[00:05:18.660] – Allan

Well, that's where the guy ended up. The main protagonist, I guess, of the book. He ended up in Bocas del toro at the end of the book, but it was kind of he said it was based on some actual facts and things that had happened to people. So you have to assume that this was a person that actually dealt with this.

[00:05:38.330] – Rachel

Cool. Very cool.

[00:05:40.260] – Allan

So how are things with you?

[00:05:41.800] – Rachel

Good. I actually just finished a book myself. I read this book probably once a year or so. I just finished reading The Old Man in the Sea by Hemingway.

[00:05:51.730] – Allan

Yeah.

[00:05:52.340] – Rachel

It's a classic tale. It's a quick read. And I've been thinking about why I was so drawn to it. And it's about endurance. It's about a man holding onto this fish for as long as he could and after several days of holding the line. But one of the things in the very beginning of the book that amuses me so much is that the old man is in Havana in the, gosh, when was that? Prior to the 1950s, I think. And he liked baseball like a lot of Cubans did. And probably still do. But his favorite player was DiMaggio and he was talking with one of his friends about baseball, and he said he needs to watch the Tigers of Detroit as well as the Indians of Cleveland, who have changed their name recently to Guardians. But it was just interesting to hear him talk about the Detroit Tigers, which is our team. So it was just really a fun little twist at the very beginning of the book, but great book. I would always recommend it.

[00:07:01.930] – Allan

Cool. Well, you ready to have a conversation with Alan Aragon?

[00:07:05.820] – Rachel

Sure.

Interview

[00:07:53.730] – Allan

Alan, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:07:56.610] – Alan Aragon

Hey, Allan, thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.

[00:08:00.210] – Allan

Now your book is called Flexible Dieting: The Science-based, Reality-tested Method for Achieving and Maintaining your Optimal Physique Performance and Health. I've read a lot of books. You're probably my I want to say close to 330th interview over the time I've been doing this podcast and I read every single book and there's at least I would say 100 citations that I earmarked or just made notes of that I want to go back and read because this was so well researched, so well organized and put together in a way that when you get through it and you would kind of admit this yourself, there's points where it feels a little trudgy because there's science and it's hard not to. But when you get done, you're like, this is what science is supposed to be, not some of the stuff we've been doing for the last few years, not what nutrition science has been doing for the last several decades. This is how you do science. And I really appreciate the way you put this book together.

[00:09:16.990] – Alan Aragon

Oh, cool. Yeah. Well, thank you. The book's title is kind of misleading. I was asked to do the book and then I said to myself, you know, this is my opportunity to leverage the powers of a large publishing house to write the ultimate evidence-based nutrition book that covers how to optimize body composition and athletic performance and just go fully science-based with that and try to make it readable for the mass audience. And so calling the book Flexible Dieting, it sounds like some almost like a pop diet book that has some sort of a hook. But then when you go through it, it's like gosh, if I wanted to learn about all the macronutrients, if I wanted to learn about different ways to enhance various sports, and if I also wanted to kind of learn what flexible dieting is that's in there, too, among a million other things? It's an interesting book, man. I commend you for getting through it. It's like an encyclopedia.

[00:10:38.330] – Allan

Well, it is and it isn't. Yes, it is. It is. From the perspective of when I have a question about when is the best time for me to take my protein? I have a chapter on that. I've took a couple of chapters. Whether I'm dealing with performance, whether I'm dealing with strength, whether I'm dealing with fat loss, whatever my goals are, I literally now have a reference book to go back and say, okay, at least from a baseline of what science was in 2022. So this is one of those books where I'm sorry, but in about five to ten years, you're going to have to I think you've tied yourself into a second and third edition or something like that. I think there's a rule. Yes, but at least what we know today. Yes. We're going to start with because it is important flexible dieting, because that's the hook, if you will. But that is a part of the fact that there is so much information out there, and there are what a lot of people call the hard and fast rules, the rigid. You must do this. You must do that. And a lot of us really struggle with that.

[00:11:51.820] – Alan Aragon

Yes.

[00:11:52.720] – Allan

And what we're talking about is the continuum of dietary control. Could you kind of go over what that is and why that's really important for us to understand because particularly weight loss or muscle gain and they're kind of on other sides of each other. But if we're really looking at changing ourselves and we want to eat the right way, common sense would say, well, find a rigid plan and just do it, grind it out, even if you don't like it. And that's going to get you the best results. But for a lot of people, that's not true.

[00:12:26.650] – Alan Aragon

Yes. Diets are all effective as long as you stick to them. And the $64 million question, well, in Elon's case, the $44 billion question would be how do you stick to a diet? And so what I feel is the magic answer to that is you have to find an approach that works for you. You have to find methods that work for you as an individual. And this is going to be different from everybody. It just varies from person to person. And there are certain immutables. Like, for example, if you wanted to lose weight, you have to impose a net caloric deficit by the end of the week, technically, not necessarily by the end of the day. If you want to gain weight, you have to sustain the opposite hyper caloric conditions or caloric surplus conditions. And as is the major public health issue of obesity, there is a problem with the general public eating too much by the end of the day, the week, the month, and you can take anybody on the planet and give them a script and say, hey, follow this 100% and they are going to lose weight as long as that script imposes a caloric deficit.

[00:14:09.650] – Alan Aragon

Now, the minute that deficit gets swallowed up or just gradually stamped out over time, then the diet will stop working. And so flexible versus rigid dietary control, that concept attempts to capture the difference between on one far end, handing somebody a specific menu with very specific foods and the timing of the foods and the exact grams and gosh, even whether the foods are organic or not, you hand them that script and you say, okay, just follow this. And on the very far end of flexible control would be telling somebody, Eat less of this stuff and maybe more of that stuff and you'll be fine. So somewhere along that continuum is the proper approach for the individual. This is the most non hookish hook ever. But flexible dieting is really the flexibility of the approach that you take to accomplishing the goals. Because honestly, some people do really well with rigid dietary restraint. You tell them, okay, this is what you need to eat. And then they're just most comfortable doing it. And they're comfortable and they actually have fun plugging numbers into a God forsaken app. You know what? That is that particular individuals psychographic, if you will, and that's perfectly fine for them.

[00:15:59.590] – Alan Aragon

Whereas if you take somebody who hates that idea and you tell them, okay, you're going to need 100 grams of protein, 200 grams of carbs, and 60 grams of fat a day. Here's your app, plug it in. Here are the allowable foods. And then just make sure you accomplish this every day. If they don't like to do that, they'll honestly, they'll last like two weeks doing that, and then they'll just throw their phone out the window and say, screw this, I'm going to try Keto or Paleo, see how that works. Flexible dieting. The approach as sort of an overarching principle is that everybody needs to establish their own personal approach to dieting. And the concept of rigid dietary control versus flexible dietary control is sort of a sub concept where rigid control involves dichotomous concepts like good and bad foods. And you have to either be precise or it's all or nothing. And flexible dietary control is the idea where it's not black and white, there's not absolute good and absolute bad foods, particularly when you think of how they fit into a diet. You can create a good or a bad diet, but the good diets can still contain a margin of in quotes, naughty foods, bad foods.

[00:17:34.630] – Alan Aragon

So, yeah, it can get a little bit intricate when I attempt to explain flexible dieting. But yeah, that's it one thing flexible dieting is not. And this is what everybody kind of gets wrong because of how the diet culture ten years ago propagated this idea. But flexible dieting, and if it fits your macros, those are not the same thing. People just kind of conflate those terms, which is false, because if it fits your macros, A IIFYM is not a diet to begin with, and B IIFYM is not what people have been led to believe it is, which it was propagated as a junk food diet or eat whatever you want as long as you hit your macronutrient target. So that's not flexible dieting. Counting macros is not necessarily flexible dieting, but everybody calls it that because a rumor got started and then it just spread across the Internet. And then that was the end of that. And I watched it happen. And I knew with the flexible dieting research and the literature what that attempted to get across. And it has nothing to do with counting macronutrients. It has everything to do with not seeing dietary approaches as an all or nothing thing with good or bad foods and flexible dieting as a protocol.

[00:19:11.170] – Alan Aragon

It really just says, look, if you're one of these people who likes to be more rigid with the type of restraint they apply to the diet, then good that's you if you're somebody who likes a more qualitative or habit based approach and you don't want to crunch numbers and you don't want to weigh stuff and measure stuff all day long, great. And that's the approach that you take. Keeping in mind, regardless of your approach, if you want to lose weight or body fat, the approach you take has to default you to eating less calories, or somebody will correct me fewer calories by the end of the week, month, year, et cetera, in order to lose weight.

[00:20:01.690] – Allan

One of the reasons why the IIFYM kind of concept really took off, I think, is one you're on a message board. So anything on the message board or Twitter, the fewer characters you use, the better. So it's quick and it answers a question like, well, here, but it doesn't answer it exactly. There's another concept that you've got into in the book that I really do. I think this will take a lot of people further down into understanding this concept of flexible dieting because I think at times we might sit there and say, I really kind of want to have a beer with my dinner or I'm going out with friends on Saturday and I know we're going to go to my favorite Italian place. And so you start looking at what your food plan is and how you're planning on going about your day. It's the concept of discretionary calorie allowance, and I like that because it keeps you aware of the goal line. It just doesn't tell you what every step you have to take is.

[00:21:09.070] – Alan Aragon

Yeah, that's true. And the concept of discretionary calories is basically it's organized moderation, I guess you call it. It's moderation with a plan. So how do we execute moderation? This is an observation. It's not, amazingly, there hasn't been any controlled research comparisons of one approach to moderation versus another approach to moderation, but it's been a long standing observation over the decades that up to about 20% of total calories can come from basically whatever you want. And as long as the other minimum 80% of the diet is from wholesome stuff, whole foods, minimally refined foods, the inquote good stuff, clean stuff, I guess you could call it. Then you will be perfectly fine, and you will get as good results as somebody who attempts to be 100% perfect with their diet all the time. And it may even be more sustainable to keep a diet going in the long term if you allow this 10-20% margin of Yolo foods or foods like desserts, alcoholic beverages, deep fried stuff, and things that would normally be taboo on a stereotypical clean diet. So as long as 80% to 90% of the diet is wholesome, then you're doing great.

[00:22:59.770] – Alan Aragon

And then that 10 to 20% discretionary calorie allotment will provide you a respite or a margin of sanity. If you want to let your hair down once in a while and eat some fun stuff or some naughty stuff, and then you can sustain the program a lot better than thinking you have to just kind of grit your teeth through the whole thing for weeks and months until you reach your goal. And it just doesn't work like that. I want to throw in a little wrinkle here for folks kind of confused about the idea that we need to add naughty foods into the diet. If you're the type of person who doesn't like those kinds of foods, if you're the type of person who just hates the idea of eating cakes, candy, cookies, ice cream, alcoholic beverages, fried foods, et cetera, then you don't have to. Eat 100% Spartan if that's what makes you happy. And that's what you want to ride into the sunset with. But we have to be aware that the vast majority of us are going to be able to sustain the diet for a lifetime more successfully if we allot discretionary calories.

[00:24:28.010] – Allan

Yeah. And the cool thing is you are paying attention to your nutrition, so you're getting the nutrition your body needs, and you're keeping your calories in line with what you need to hit your goal, whether that's to lose weight, gain weight, all of that's in line because you know what you're supposed to be doing and you're staying within kind of this flexible, okay, pivot here. I need to be a little bit more rigid. I can be more rigid because my wife's not here for the next two weeks. So I can be really rigid if I want to. Where she's going to come back and want to socialize and go out to dinner and do things. So there I know for the next two weeks I'm probably going to have a lot more of those discretionary calories hitting my palate. And as long as that doesn't trigger me and cause me to kind of say, okay, one beer becomes two and then two becomes four. As long as I'm not triggered by what's going on, then that can be a really good way to sustain this. Now I'm looking at my notes, and this is sad because this is more about me.

[00:25:28.720] – Allan

It says a lot about your book, but it just looks like a hodgepodge of things. I was having so much time reading the I'm like, I want to talk about everything. But the core of it is there were a couple of concepts that were in the book that I've never talked about here. We've talked about the importance of eating protein and getting enough protein, but I've never talked about the reason why we need enough protein. And that relates to protein turnover, muscle protein turnover, and the fact that being over 40, our ability to maintain and retain our muscle and maybe even gain muscle is that formula is changing for us as we age. And so the importance to me, the importance of protein goes up substantially over the age of 40. I think that's what was one of the thoughts that was in my head. And then in the book, you talk about the protein intake hierarchy of importance. Can you talk about those and again, one, why is protein what is this turnover thing that's happening? Why do we need protein? And then how do we get our protein? What's the hierarchy of intake? Okay, a lot of ideas.

[00:26:47.030] – Allan

I know, but it was like as I was reading, I was like, this is so good. And I kept doing it. So pardon the question not being a question, but I'm asking for an essay.

[00:26:59.390] – Alan Aragon

That's cool. It's funny, because when I answer these questions, it hits a point in my answer where I'm somewhat self aware that, oh, gosh, I've been rambling for about five minutes now for one question.

[00:27:11.210] – Allan

I'm totally cool with that. You guys need to take a potty break and come back in the middle. That's also good. It's here at the podcast. You can hit pause.

[00:27:19.910] – Alan Aragon

Great. Yes. Dear audience, you may take a break. Yeah. The concept of muscle protein turnover. You have two sides of this cycle. One side is muscle protein synthesis or the build up side, and then muscle protein breakdown, which is the catabolic side. So this cycle is a perpetual thing that goes on in the body on a 24 hours basis. And so when muscle protein synthesis is equal to muscle protein breakdown, then you're basically just maintaining your muscle, which is a good thing. And then you've got muscle protein synthesis exceeding muscle protein breakdown, and then you've got muscle growth. And then you have the loss of muscle when the breakdown side of the cycle exceeds the synthesis side. So that's kind of the idea of muscle protein, what we call turnover. And so for the older population, there is a phenomenon called sarcopenia, and there's even a related phenomenon called sarcopenic obesity, which is sort of a combination of pathology. So sarcopenia is an age related loss of lean body mass. And sarcopenia is underneath the umbrella of a larger phenomenon called frailty, which happens with advanced age, with just a general loss of function that's related to undue weight loss, specifically the loss of lean tissue mass throughout the body.

[00:29:11.450] – Alan Aragon

And under frailty, we've got the loss of muscle tissue, which is sarcopenia. And this is a major problem in the aging population. And a lot of people don't realize that getting enough protein is crucial to successful aging. And that's because as people age, there's not only a tendency to not move around as much, but there's also a tendency to not push and pull and squat as much. So non-exercise activity goes down. Exercise activity goes down as well. And this can be a gradual sort of insidious thing that sneaks up on people where they're just sitting a lot more, lying around a lot more and just not moving as much and certainly not making formal visits to the gym or the track or the field or the pickup basketball game. And what happens is a phenomenon called disuse of the muscle tissue. And there's an interesting thing that can happen where you can take young people and put them on bedrest, and their muscle structure and function will just start to resemble somebody who has aged muscle or almost sarcopenic muscle because you can create muscle that resembles muscle, that is of somebody of an advanced age if you just impose disuse on the muscle.

[00:30:57.990] – Alan Aragon

And so this can happen at the macro level where you're just looking at muscle mass. And it can also happen at the micro level where you impair the so called muscle protein synthetic response, the MPS response to feeding. So in bedridden muscle muscle protein synthesis in response to protein feeding is actually lowered after a relatively short period of disuse. And in older people, this just happens more gradually. And it happens over time because of a gradual progression of disuse. And there are other factors too involved with aging muscle and the deterioration of its structure and function. So protein's role is to make sure that you minimize these age related muscle losses. But just as importantly, protein intake synergizes with resistance training to create an environment that prevents a physiological environment that is not the interior decoration of your home office, but it creates this physiological environment, the combination of protein intake or enough protein intake and resistance training. That combination will prevent muscle loss and can even oftentimes cause muscle gain in folks who really need it. The good news about preventing sarcopenia is that it is possible and it is even possible to reverse the earmarks of Sarcopenia.

[00:32:55.730] – Alan Aragon

And anybody at any age can just start performing resistance training, as long as you do it safely and gradually enough. And then you can get muscle structure and function back. And protein plus resistance training is the recipe for that. And there are other factors, too. You can't just do it on no calories. You have to be eating enough calories, because the recipe for muscle growth really is enough protein, enough calories, and then make sure your resistance training. So that is the role of protein and the importance of it. When we're talking about muscle protein turnover and how it relates to aging and with the older population, their dietary habits are really kind of crappy in terms of achieving enough total daily protein. So it usually begins at the first meal of the day where a significant amount of protein or any real amount of protein at all is basically neglected. And then lunch has a moderate ish amount of protein, and then dinner will contain a substantial hit of protein. But by the end of the day, you're really looking at sort of like one and a half meals that have enough protein to total by the end of the day in order to make sure that this particular population is getting enough protein, let alone are they resistance training.

[00:34:32.770] – Alan Aragon

So let's imagine they are resistance training. There are still challenges to getting enough protein in the older population because the total amount that you need to consume is usually about 50% to 100% more than what's typically ingested. And it's not the easiest thing to tell somebody who's in his fiftys. Sixty s, seventy s. Hey, bro, you need to double your protein intake and you need to start weight training.

[00:35:03.090] – Allan

I have that conversation all the time. So yeah, okay. That's why we're having this conversation. Now, your publisher, because you brought it up. I'm familiar with your publisher because I've had lots of their authors on they tend to be in the Keto space. They tend to be in the low carb space, from my experience. And you did start talking about Keto. So I was actually when I got this book, I was like, oh, flexible dieting. And then this being a predominantly Keto publisher, maybe they're branching out and that's good. But I was almost expecting a Keto book, to be honest with you. So I was kind of surprised we didn't get into Keto. But then you did. And then I was not surprised why we didn't get into Keto, particularly if you start looking at what the goals are here, which is to gain muscle, to increase strength, to improve endurance. As you said in the subtitle, was it optimal physique performance and health? And you pretty much did in the book talk about how Keto works within all of those realms. Could you kind of go through that with us?

[00:36:13.920] – Alan Aragon

Yeah, sure. And before I go into that, I just realized I needed to quickly answer the hierarchy of importance with protein. So with respect to protein intake, there is a hierarchy of importance that's worth touching upon. And of most importance with protein intake is total daily amount. That's tier number one. And then the next tier down is the distribution or the pattern of protein doses throughout the day. That's of secondary importance to the total amount that you have by the end of day. And of least importance, there is the timing of protein relative to the training bound. And so, Interestingly, we could go into an hour on each one of those tiers.

[00:37:07.140] – Allan

Yeah. And you do. And that's the cool thing in the book is you literally do talk about the science behind, because I get the question, should I be doing a protein shake after my workout? Do I have that 1 hour window? All those questions are actually answered in your book with citations, lots of citations, lots of evidence, lots of science. Again, you've answered the question and you answered over and over, depending on what the goals of the person training are. So the hierarchy is important, but the core of it is get enough, get enough throughout the day, and then the rest of it will take care of itself, particularly for those of us over 40, if our training volume is not professional caliber, those other two tiers actually mean a little bit less than they would otherwise, in my opinion. But the sign says get enough. That's the first tier. Get that done. And for a lot of us, that's a struggle because it's in our food. But many of people are trying to do multiple things at once, trying to lose weight, trying to eat a certain way, trying to live our lives, and having ready protein when packaged snacks are a little bit easier.

[00:38:24.030] – Allan

Sometimes not so easy. But you do dive into this deep. That's why we're scratching the surface here and get into the book, because the science is there. The advice is there. The actual grams are there. It's all in there.

[00:38:40.720] – Alan Aragon

Yes. If anybody listening to this episode wanting to know, well, then how much protein do I take? I can give you a gram number, but do you know how to translate those grams into chunks of food? Well, some of you do. And for those who do the gram amount, that kind of encompasses what most people require to optimize their total daily protein intake is somewhere between .7 to 1.0 gram/lb in quotes, ideal body weight or target body weight. And I say that because if somebody is obese and they base their protein intake on their total body weight, they will be consuming an unnecessarily high amount of protein in a lot of instances. So protein targeting would be based on target body weight or goal body weight. So that's zero, .7 grams to 1.0 target body weight. So for those of you listening who are dying to know what's the sweet spot? Total daily protein. Well, that's it.

[00:39:52.660] – Allan

Yeah.

[00:39:54.410] – Alan Aragon

Okay. So on the keto.

[00:39:55.710] – Allan

Yeah. Let's jump into keto.

[00:39:57.200] – Alan Aragon

With keto. Keto is an interesting thing because it works very well for weight loss. And the caveat to that statement is it works very well for a temporary period for most people who try it. And that's because there appears to be a general inability to sustain strict keto, which by most definitions is 50 grams or less a day of carbs. Most people cannot sustain that for the long term. And the people who try to, their carb intake ends up roughly tripling over the course of a year of attempting keto. So it ends up tripling from the original assignment of eating less than 50 grams a day. And so that is the main issue with keto is that it works really well for fat loss and weight loss. And the way that it works for those things is that it removes a lot of options, a lot of food options. And the options it removes usually are foods that are hyperpalatable carbon fat combination foods that are very easy to over consume. And so when you remove those options, you simply are defaulted to eating less total calories by the end of the day, end of the weekend of the month.

[00:41:35.570] – Alan Aragon

And so there's a lot less variety in the diet. There's a lot less opportunity to overeat in the diet. There's a lot less motivation to sit there and overeat your fatty piece of meat. So that's how keto works. Of course, the problem is most of the majority and I can't put an exact number on what that exactly means. But more than half of the subjects who get on keto end up reaching the upper limits of keto by six months, certainly by twelve months. So for those of you who are on keto and have been on it for a few years and love it, and that's the way you do it. I don't care, man. That's great. You found what works for you. That's wonderful. But my issue with keto is when people go around saying that keto is the best keto superior, keto does special things, and it's actually a double edged sword to keto. When you look at long term health and when you look at the optimization or the protection of cardiovascular health, because with keto being a high fat diet, you're looking at 65% to 85% of the diet coming from fat, then you better be pretty Dang careful about the type of fat that you're eating because that's the predominant source of calories in your diet.

[00:43:04.050] – Alan Aragon

And if all you're eating is land animal fats all day mixed with there are other crappy kind of vegetable based fats as well, then you're setting yourself up for dyslipidemia and then the development of cardiovascular disease and then potentially cardiovascular events. So it can be a double edged sword but the thing about keto and the good thing about keto is while you're on it, you're probably going to be losing weight.

[00:43:36.170] – Allan

And I kind of put this in that continuum of dietary control as keto fits in the kind of the rigid range. And it is something that you do have to manage because from a nutritional perspective, if you're not eating certain vegetables, as you mentioned, if you're eating certain foods and excess to try to make that happen because keto didn't get the nickname of being the bacon diet for no reason, people were like, oh, sure, you can eat all the bacon you want. And that's not really the right way to do keto. And keto is a way of eating. I use it. I use it as a tool. It's a temporary tool. Like I said, for a period of time I can get over into the rigid mind frame and mindset, and it works fine for me. But when it comes to wanting to put on muscle to get stronger, keto might not be the best approach for us. And surprise, endurance athletes might not do well on keto either.

[00:44:32.690] – Alan Aragon

Yeah, that's definitely true. And that definitely is what the research evidence shows. So the collective literature on keto and performance is that it's a bad bet for that. But that's not too far fetched when you consider that athletic performance is really a carbohydrate based thing. It's based on the availability either from what you ingest around training or from what you store in your muscles. So glycogen being the stored form of carbohydrate, if you are under fueled from a carbohydrate perspective, that will always compromise the potential for maximally performing. Now there are alter endurance athletes who try to lowball their carbs, and that's fine. But they are more the exception than the rule in terms of the elite in that area and even the ultra endurance athletes who have done really well and claim to be low carbing when you look at their actual programs, they're consuming carbs throughout the race, so they just happen to be consuming less than what's normally recommended by the major organizations. So keto is something that if you have a lot at stake in terms of trophies or medals or endorsements and stuff, then you're not going to be a keto athlete who is compromising or jeopardizing his or her potential for maintaining that elite status.

[00:46:22.910] – Alan Aragon

It just doesn't happen. Now, if you're a weekend warrior or a regular guy just trying to look good at the pool or the beach or at the high school reunion, then under carving is not an issue. If you want to do good at the weekend soccer game, you might be compromised a little bit by being on keto, and you might not make the score the most amount of points out of the rest of your buddies. But it's not that big of an issue. Where keto becomes an issue with athletics is at the elite level and the professional level, you're not going to see many pro athletes at all even going near Keto because it's a liability.

[00:47:07.430] – Allan

Yeah, I think where you kind of hit the road, the rubber hit the road for me when we were talking about endurance was I think a lot of us look at endurance and think of it as a, oh, I'm going to start with this pace and I'm going to run that pace for the entire part of the race. But for most people that have done any competing at all, they know there are periods of time when you're going to try to go a little bit harder, a little bit faster. For a lot of us that are just recreational athletes, that's once you see the finish line and it's right there, you're going to try to sprint to the end. And the reality of it is you may not have the kind of gas you wanted to have during some of those sprints or faster bits of work because you don't have the muscle likage and necessary to make it happen.

[00:47:52.130] – Alan Aragon

Yes, that's correct. And it's those moments that separate the top finishers from those who don't place. It's the so called race winning moves being climbing uphills either running or cycling, passing that ending sprint towards the finish line is going to be a high intensity effort. And so those who are under carb simply do not have the biochemical reserves required to power those race winning moves. And, yeah, it can make the difference between winning and losing.

[00:48:32.870] – Allan

Now, there was one other thing that you had in the book that I could not leave without talking about because to me, this solved kind of a question I had because you're trying to work with a client or someone's trying to work with themselves. And they're like, well, I'm trying to chart my calories and my macros and my food. And like you said, they've got that app. And they're like every day, every day they're in the app. And then in the end you're like, okay, well, How'd you do today, How'd you do today, How'd you do today and one bad day, then kind of can become this bad cycle, particularly for individuals who've struggled in the past. So if you've gone through something and you struggle and fail, you work and fail, and now you're trying this again. But this quick single digit adherence rating system, I think this could be the key for a lot of people that have struggled with that start and fail cycle that they go through every time. So if you get nothing else from this flexible dieting book, I think this system is key. Could you tell us about this system?

[00:49:44.290] – Alan Aragon

Sure.

[00:49:44.700] – Allan

How it works?

[00:49:46.190] – Alan Aragon

Yeah. This is something that I put together and started implementing back in 2005, 2006. And it first appeared in the self published book I did in 2007. And I used to call it the calendar method, where you just write a number down from one to ten where you're basically rating your performance or your adherence or compliance to the program, with ten being perfect. And so when the calendar is up on your wall and you're seeing a bunch of eights and nines and tens, and inevitably you see progress at the end of the month. So you are marching towards your goals. Whereas if you see just a bunch of five, six, and seven s littering up the month, then you have a sense of self accountability and a sense of awareness of why your progress is not happening. And so this real quick self grading system on a scale of one to ten, how good did you do? The fact that it takes like 1 minute to think about and write down the number was kind of a big win because people, well, clients who hated taking detailed records, they loved this method as long as they could be honest with me and honest with themselves about their performance.

[00:51:12.120] – Alan Aragon

On a scale of one to ten, it just took them 1 minute or less. It took them 10 seconds to think about how they did and write down the number and send it over. And nobody's going to be sending over nines and tens and then at the end of the month wondering what the hell happened. It just doesn't work like that. When you can establish a certain level of trust with yourself or with your clients, then they really can't. Once they're familiar with the program, they know whether they're following it or not. A lot of times with people that they're very honest about why they're failing at programs, they're like, I know what to do, I just don't do it. And you know what? That's true. So let's see if we can establish some accountability here that you can either have with yourself or with your coach or your practitioner, your dietician, your trainer, and let's just do a self grading system. I call it the accountability rubric, where it's one to ten. And over the years towards the 2010, I developed a way to make that rubric, that one to ten scale a little bit more concrete.

[00:52:36.840] – Alan Aragon

So it's more of a checklist. It evolved into being a checklist where there's ten specific points or tasks that you need to have completed throughout the day in order to grant yourself that number. And if you hit all ten of those things, which could be drink enough water, get enough sleep, get enough protein, eat two to four fruits a day, two to four servings of vegetables a day down the line, ten things, ten healthy things, then give yourself the ten if you got all ten and so on and so forth. And so that made the accountability rubric a little bit more real and a little more concrete for people to kind of think about. But at the same time, it still took about 25 seconds to look down the list and see whether you hit all those checkpoints, and then you can take a look at the month. If it's littered with eight, nines, and ten s, you're going to be reaching your goal. I'm glad that you found that system helpful, and there's a bunch of different things like that in the book that I hope that the readers will resonate with at least one of them.

[00:53:51.510] – Alan Aragon

But yeah, this is something that I've used pretty extensively in my practice.

[00:53:58.810] – Allan

Cool. Even doing it for yourself. It's just to say if I want to start implementing a new habit, a new action, I want to get better sleep, more sleep. It's a one to ten. It's a simple thing. You wake up in the morning, how is my sleep? And guess what? They still sell paper calendars. You can still buy them. You can still have one of them, and you can still sit there and look and say, okay, if I'm not doing better than a six or seven, what's going on? You can catch yourself pretty early in the month. As you start seeing that slide, it's like, okay, what am I doing here? That's not helping me do this, because I know this action gives me the result that I want. Like I said, I really appreciate that tool. And there's like you said, a lot of that just good stuff in there. I told you before the call, I could spend two, three days talking to you about this.

[00:54:55.420] – Allan

Thank you

[00:54:57.490] – Allan

Now, Alan, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:55:08.330] – Alan Aragon

The first one, this might be really cliche Allan, but get enough sleep, get enough good quality sleep. And per the scientific literature, it is a low probability that you're going to be optimizing your health if you consistently dip far below 7 hours. And I know a lot of healthy people and people who are just very vigorous getting five, 6 hours a day. But that's them. And that's how they're wired. And that's how they're built. And per the scientific evidence, they're not in the majority. So statistically, at the population level, you would want to get at least 7 hours of sleep a night or at least try to. And if you're not one of these people who can and you feel amazing with that 6 hours a day, great, fine. But just know that statistically people sleep is optimized at seven and up. And so that would be the first. The second thing would be, for God's sake, lift stuff if you can. And it doesn't have to be Olympic lifting and powerlifting and bodybuilding and flexing in the mirror between sets like you and me, people can do activities that do involve resisted joint movements that aren't necessarily at the gym.

[00:56:42.770] – Alan Aragon

They're not necessarily in the weight room where you're fighting for spots with the gym Bros. A lot of people are intimidated by the word resistance training. They're just picturing barbells and dumbbells flying around. But any kind of movement that you can just involve your joints with resisted movement. There's a million resources and ways to do it. You can go outside and do it. You can go to a park and do various things. It doesn't have to be at the gym. Get resistance training in your life. Get enough sleep. Make sure you get resistance training as a foundation, as a non negotiable part of your training. Some people think that all you need to do is go for a bunch of walks throughout the week and you're good. Well, okay, as good as walking is, that's not going to save you from sarcopenia. That's not going to save you from the ravages of aging. That's not going to allow you to age, amazingly like Allan Misner. So what people need to realize they have to do a certain amount of pushing and pulling and maybe some squatting or some at least leg extension and hip extension and things to stimulate the lower body on a resist basis, whether it's more primal and organic type of movement outside or whether it's in the gym.

[00:58:08.330] – Alan Aragon

So I'll be number two. The third one, eat the foods that you personally like most. Forget about whatever diet book is telling you are the super foods that everybody needs to eat. That's just a load of baloney, really. If you take a survey of all the centenarians in the world and super centenarians, they all eat different foods. They all have a different list of favorite foods, and almost all of them list a bunch of crap they include in their diet every day too. But yes, stick with the foods that you enjoy personally, because there's psychological and physiological signature reasons why you gravitate towards those foods. And we as humans are not completely devoid of any instinct. We have a feel for what we like, and there's good reasons for that. So you will be able to stick to your diet long term if you stick to the foods that you like within a healthy eating pattern. Right? I'm talking about foods within the food groups and you should be getting the food groups. So those would be my three if I could boil it down to three. And I guess maybe if I may add a little sub thing under the eat the foods that you like.

[00:59:35.220] – Alan Aragon

Eat them in the pattern that fits your personal preference and schedule. There's a lot of color blue going around about when you should eat your foods. How much should time restrict the eating window? Can we only eat from 08:00 a.m. to 04:00 p.m. in order to maximize? That's all majoring in the minors. That's not going to make somebody freaking awesome at 70 compared to maintaining their exercise program and a decent overall food selection of the foods that they love. When you eat your foods in the day, that should be determined by how you prefer it. Do you like to eat dinner at 08:00 P.m. Instead of 06:00 P.m.? Cool. Eat it now. Do you like to have a pre bed snack? Great. Have that. Do you like to skip breakfast? Is that how you function best?

[01:00:31.400] – Alan Aragon

Cool. Skip the hell out of breakfast. It's not going to make or break you. There are very silly books going around saying that breakfast is the most important meal of the day and you have to stop eating, x foods or stop eating carbs that you have to make sure you don't eat like 3 hours before bed. That's a load of crap, Allan. And I can't emphasize that enough how trivial that advice is in the big picture.

[01:00:59.390] – Allan

Thank you.

[01:01:00.100] – Alan Aragon

My advice is do what you can stick to within the context of an overall healthy selection of foods.

[01:01:09.800] – Allan

Great. Thank you for that. If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about your book Flexible Dieting, where would you like for me to send them?

[01:01:18.410] – Alan Aragon

AlanAragon.com. And then we've got the various links to my stuff. So I have a research review as well, a monthly research review for the nerdy types who like to really dig into the details. And then I've got my book Flexible Dieting, that's going to come out on June 7, but it's available for preorder, as you and I are speaking.

[01:01:46.430] – Allan

But this episode is going to drop on June 7th. So, yeah, the book is available now wherever you want to get books. You can also go to his website alanaragon.com, if you go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/541 I'll be sure to have links there. So, Alan, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[01:02:05.030] – Alan Aragon

You got it, Allan. And you as well. Thank you so much.

Post Show/Recap

[01:02:15.930] – Allan

Hi, Rachel. How was that interview?

[01:02:18.070] – Rachel

Oh, my gosh, it was great. It was really interesting because right at the very beginning you drew me in with the title of the book Being Flexible Dieting. But the $64,000 question, how do you stick to a diet? Isn't that the question of the year?

[01:02:34.560] – Allan

Yeah. Well, he went to a publisher and sometimes publishers want to change the name of a book. You might think this is the name of the book. So there was discussion about flexible dieting in the book. In all fairness, it was a part of it part of the conversation, which is an important part of, like you said, sticking to a diet. But really, what this book is about is about nutrition for performance or physique.

[01:02:59.760] – Rachel

Okay.

[01:03:00.760] – Allan

And health. So it was science based, meaning he went to the science, the studies that were out there. He didn't pick a side of a conversation and say this is what it is based on his beliefs. He literally went through and said, okay, what is out there? Everything that's out there. And then based on what's there, can we draw a conclusion? And in some cases, he didn't really feel like we could. But for a lot of it, he literally would go through and say, okay, based on all these studies, this is what it says. And this is the bet if you want to perform well at strength training, this is what you eat, literally giving you the calories, giving you the macro breakdowns, all of it. The flexible dieting comes around and, okay, that's all good and fine if I know what I'm supposed to eat, but can I stick to it long enough to see that performance improvement? And that's where the flexible dieting comes in of saying, okay, if you're getting the nutrition you need and you've got a little bit of buffer calories in there that you have maybe 90, ten, you say, so 10% of my calories.

[01:04:13.530] – Allan

So I'm going to eat 2000 calories as I'm trying to cut weight of that. Or 200 calories can be, for lack of a better word, crap. It could be chips. It can be a candy bar or maybe half a candy bar, depending on how many calories are in it. But you see where you can go and say, okay, I don't have to eat perfect all the time to see these things. If I go in and I at least know that I'm getting the nutrition that I need, that's the first one. And then second, I'm not just overeating because of these lack of a better word, empty calories. And then the way I would say it is, enjoy the heck out of it. So don't make it just any old candy bar. Make it your favorite candy bar, or make it something higher class, higher end stuff. Don't just drink just any beer. Make it a beer that you're really going to enjoy. That kind of mindset makes it a lot more sustainable.

[01:05:15.120] – Rachel

Well, the other thing that really attracted me was that he said that your calorie deficit doesn't have to be a daily thing as long as you have a calorie deficit over the week or the month or the year that it takes for you to get to your goal weight, if that was the main goal. But yeah, you don't have to be really rigid with your eating rules day by day. So I like that approach.

[01:05:39.610] – Allan

Yeah. Even though there's a lot of things about the human body that are built into the rhythms of a day or a month or a year, the reality of it is there's nothing magic from the calories in a day. You can gain weight in a day. You can lose weight in a day, but you're not going to lose a whole lot, and you're not going to gain a whole lot. If you do notice the scale move any at all really much on a day to day basis, that's mostly just water shifting around. You went pee one more time than you did the day before, you weigh less simple. And so I think the key of what he's talking about there is just know that there's sort of a target of what you're burning doing the work that you're doing. And you don't have to create an accounting system like it's General Electric. You can go through and say, I know these foods. I know this is how my body reacts to it. I know what a serving size looks like. I know about how much. And for many of us, we do eat the same foods as staples on a fairly regular basis.

[01:06:53.050] – Allan

So if you know, okay, this is my dinner. I have it probably once a week. You don't have to look it up every time. You don't have to say, okay, what are my macros? What are my calories? You just know. I'm getting a third of my protein in this meal. I'm getting half of my carbs in this meal, and I'm getting 35% of my calories in this meal. And if you just know those kinds of things, it's just plug and play and enjoy your food and then occasionally flexible. If something happens and you need to be flexible, then just let it go. You're not destroying yourself in a day.

[01:07:27.830] – Rachel

Yeah, right.

[01:07:29.160] – Rachel

The other thing I really enjoyed was the part about protein and how usually people 40 and over or maybe even 50 and over or even 60 and over have a strange relationship with protein in their diet. It seems like they skip it for the morning and maybe have a tiny bit at lunch and then throw it all at dinner hour when it seems more appropriate to spread it throughout the day.

[01:07:51.510] – Allan

It's easier to get if you spread it. That's absolute truth and unfortunate. Food guidelines, foods that's available, they're highly dense in carbs and not the nutritionally dense carbs, but bread. So there's pizza, there's hamburgers, all those foods. And you say, okay, what's the protein? And they have some protein. But you look at the protein in the cheese and the pepperoni, assuming you even got that on there. How much protein is in a pizza? And I'd say, probably not a lot. I haven't looked it up, but I would say less than 20% of the total calories is coming from protein breakfast cereal. Maybe there's some in your milk if you're even drinking regular milk, because maybe you're doing the soy milk or maybe you're doing the oat milk and you start looking at the protein of that and the protein that was in the cereal. And you're kind of like, okay, 75% of my calories are coming from carbs, 20% from fat, and now 5% protein. So it's almost devoid of protein.

[01:09:06.690] – Rachel

Right.

[01:09:07.490] – Allan

And most of us should be eating more protein than we are. It's hard to shift over until you actually make a concerted effort to get protein into every meal.

[01:09:20.170] – Rachel

Well, yeah, exactly. I don't think we don't pay that close attention to how we eat, our habits of our eating. And if you're in a habit of having cereal for breakfast or a sandwich or something at lunch, you just don't notice that you're not getting the adequate amount of protein probably. The other thing he mentioned, too, was the ratio for how many grams of protein per body weight. He mentioned that it's not the body weight that you're at, it's at your goal body weight for the purpose of weight loss, which that is something I don't know that I paid attention to. I don't know that I've heard it like that before.

[01:09:59.850] – Allan

Well, yeah, because what they would typically base it on is they would say your lean mass. So what you're thinking in terms of this, let's say you're at 30% body fat and you want to get down closer to say 20 or 15. Okay. Then you're going to want to lose the body fat. And if you were to do that, you lose that amount of body fat to get down to, you're going to be closer to your lean body mass weight. So realizing now you're carrying less fat. So the way you are is closer to lean body mass weight, particularly if you're like a bodybuilder and you're trying to get down into the single digits, you're carrying very little fat and most of the mass that you have is your lean body. So that's where that number comes from is really just a function of saying rather than think about it from lean body mass. Because for a lot of us, that's hard. Unless you go get a DEXA scan and they tell you your body mass is this amount of fat, you don't know. So it's easier to just base it on where your goal weight would be and just use that.

[01:11:08.140] – Allan

Now that's going to overstate it a little bit from the numbers, but it's not significant. Again, if you're just thinking unless you're trying to go from 50% body fat to 40%, then if 40% is your target, you're going to probably be overeating some protein because that's not really a lean body mass. But you see, for most of us, it's like we want to get down to that 20 to 15 range. So that's where that number is coming in.

[01:11:35.080] – Rachel

Yeah, that was great. It was a great discussion. Really interesting.

[01:11:37.930] – Allan

Yeah. This goes down is so far my favorite book in 2022.

[01:11:43.270] – Rachel

Wow.

[01:11:44.020] – Allan

If anyone is really looking at improving their performance, I would strongly encourage them to read this book because it's going to give you a formula for how you can eat to optimize your performance. And whatever you're trying to do, get stronger, run further, faster and just look better.

[01:12:02.260] – Rachel

Awesome. Great discussion.

[01:12:04.400] – Allan

All right. Well, I'll talk to you next week.

[01:12:06.330] – Rachel

Great. Take care.

[01:12:07.510] – Allan

You too.

Patreons

The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:

– Anne Lynch	– Eric More	– Leigh Tanner
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Thank you!

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Let's Say Hello

[00:02:36.910] – Allan

Hey, Ras. How are things going?

[00:02:38.870] – Rachel

Good. How are you today, Allan?

[00:02:41.010] – Allan

I'm a little frustrated. Just a little.

[00:02:43.300] – Rachel

oh dear. Oh, gosh. How come?

[00:02:45.880] – Allan

Okay. Now, you know, not long ago, I guess it's been a little while now. We went through that pick the music for this podcast, right?

[00:02:54.270] – Rachel

Oh, yeah.

[00:02:54.860] – Allan

And I went on a site where you were supposed to be able to get royalty free license, free music to play and use.

[00:03:05.170] – Allan

Okay. And what I did, to be fair, I didn't have to because this site offers these things for free is I went in and I donated on PayPal a little bit of money, not a lot to all three of them. I said, if I'm considering your song, then I'll pay all three of you because I downloaded your song. And now because I'm posting my podcast on YouTube, I'm getting Copyright infringement letters from a company that works for the guy I bought the songs from or got the songs from.

[00:03:40.340] – Rachel

Oh, my gosh.

[00:03:41.000] – Allan

I've emailed him. I've tried to refute it. And the risk I have is if I keep trying to refute it, then YouTube will just take my channel now.

[00:03:52.570] – Rachel

Yeah.

[00:03:53.260] – Allan

And so it's one of those things where they're giving him the benefit of the doubt. And my only opportunity to really fight it is to go in with the death deal. I'm either going to win or I'm going to die.

[00:04:08.200] – Rachel

Right.

[00:04:08.810] – Allan

And he's doing it, pinging every show now as it comes out. And they're going through and finding these obviously on YouTube, there's billions of videos. So they're scrolling through those videos. They're finding that song in my show. And I got a nasty email once a week now, and I can go and refute it, but they almost immediately are just sitting there ready to say false. And they're not looking at the evidence I'm sending them because I show them that it's on a particular site. I can show them the licensing from that site, and I can show them the YouTubers. I mean, I'm sorry, the PayPal receipt where I sent these guys money. This guy money. So I'm really frustrated. So here's what I want to ask. If anyone in the audience I usually don't try to talk in the plural, but I know there's a lot of you out there. If any of you are musically inclined, maybe in a band or something, and you want to come up with something that I can use for a new theme song for the show, please get in contact with me. Okay, allan@40plusfitnesspodcast.com, it needs to be uplifting.

[00:05:16.240] – Allan

It needs to be cool and vibey. You know me and you don't know where I'm at. You've listened to maybe some of the songs that I've used in the past and what got voted up this time, which I'd love to keep because it's what you wanted to listen to as an intro and an outro for the show. But I just don't want to keep putting up with this guy hitting him, because if at some point the podcast on YouTube could ever or would ever monetize, he's going to be the one monetizing it. So the whole other rest of the podcast gets nothing because he's claimed to this 30 seconds or so or even two minutes or so of music that I got legitimately off of a share site. He put it out there, I got his email, he got paid, and now he's trying to come after my revenue. Whether it's not if I were making revenue or ever do ever to monetize that site, he is going to be the one that gets all of that. So I'm like it's frustrating.

[00:06:15.950] – Rachel

That's crazy.

[00:06:17.310] – Allan

Well, it is the fact that the guy is not responding in a fair way. I have his email because I paid him on PayPal. I have his email, so I emailed him directly. He's not responding to me. So I'm going to send him a couple more emails. But if you are musically inclined to play the different instruments, maybe put something together for me, then I would love to feature a listener's music on the show, give you full credit for doing that for me. So if you can just get in touch with me, allan@40Plusfitnesspodcast.com and let's connect and let's make this a project. Let's have some fun with it.

[00:06:55.550] – Rachel

Yeah, that would be awesome. It'd be great to have our own listeners music. How cool is that?

[00:07:00.050] – Allan

Yeah. So hopefully we can work that out. I mean, there's a lot of you out there. The podcast gets about 5000-6000 downloads per episode. I know some of you are really in the music and good at music. So if you've got something for me, I want to hear from you.

[00:07:13.410] – Rachel

Awesome. That sounds great.

[00:07:15.380] – Allan

How are things up there?

[00:07:16.970] – Rachel

Great. Beautiful weather, beautiful time to be outside, enjoying the trail and getting ready to plant our garden. Just having a good time this spring.

[00:07:26.230] – Allan

So the ground is not frozen anymore.

[00:07:28.480] – Rachel

Not right now. No. It's actually pretty good. We're getting a lot of Sunshine. The weather is warming up. We're just getting the soil ready because it is still definitely too early to plant. But yeah, we're just planning out our garden and getting ready to get moving.

[00:07:45.010] – Allan

What does the Almanac say?

[00:07:47.170] – Rachel

Yeah, don't plant anything until the beginning of June.

[00:07:49.870] – Allan

Okay. All right.

[00:07:53.150] – Rachel

Better safe than sorry.

[00:07:54.580] – Allan

All right. Well, are you ready to have a conversation with Dr. Hoss?

[00:07:57.680] – Rachel

Yes.

Interview

[00:08:29.770] – Allan

Dr. Hoss, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:08:32.570] – Dr. Hoss

Thanks for having me.

[00:08:34.210] – Allan

You know, in over six years of doing this podcast and this being episode 539 of the podcast, I've never had a dentist Orthodontist. We've never talked about oral health. And I'm like so to see your book, I was really excited to get an opportunity to have a conversation with you because we hear a lot about, well, if you have mouth disease or periodontal disease, then there's a higher probability you're going to have heart disease and there's a connection there. So today we're going to kind of get into some of that.

[00:09:05.030] – Dr. Hoss

Let's get into it.

[00:09:06.140] – Allan

Yeah. And then I'm really excited about it because again, I think it's just one aspect of our health. That's really important. And, of course, when was the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. When was the best time the second best time is right now. When was the best time for us to take care of our oral health was when we were babies. But when is the second best time is What We Can do right now?

[00:09:29.280] – Dr. Hoss

You got it.

[00:09:30.030] – Allan

That's where I want to go. The book is really good, though, if you've got grandchildren or children and you want to make sure you're giving them the best opportunity for a healthy mouth, a healthy life. The book is really good about giving you that guidance and giving you the things you need. So I really appreciate this opportunity to have this conversation with you.

[00:09:49.220] – Dr. Hoss

Likewise. Thank you so much for having me.

[00:09:51.910] – Allan

Now, the name of your book is If Your Mouth Could Talk, an In-Depth Guide to Oral Health and the Impact on Your Entire Life. And as I mentioned earlier, this is about what our mouth is doing for us or to us. And some of those things are there's going to be a little bit of water into the road onto the bridge? We're going to have to deal with that. But we are in a place where we can start taking control of our oral health. And this book gives you a lot of that. So thank you. You went through a lot of this in the book, and there were studies about all these chronic diseases that we're dealing with, heart disease, Alzheimer's, cancers, on and on, diabetes, on and on. There's a link to our mouth and not just what we're eating, because I think that might be part of it, too. But there's a link to our mouth health and these other chronic diseases. Can you kind of go through a little bit of that and that connection and why that might be so?

[00:10:49.110] – Dr. Hoss

Yes, of course. Again, thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited to be talking about this. So like you said, you've been doing this for so many years, and I'm the first dentist really talking about oral health connection to the physical health and chronic diseases and longevity. And that's not surprising because unfortunately, because how our teaching institutions were established 200 years ago, that dental schools and medical schools have always been separate over the last two centuries, we used to know it. The early Egyptians and the Greeks, they were aware of the connection between oral health and physical health. In fact, they wanted to check someone if they were healthy, they would ask them to open their mouth. They would look at the mouth. They kind of had a good feeling for what was going on beyond the mouth. But over the last two centuries, unfortunately, we've forgotten this because of the education process and then insurances. They don't cover dentistry. And then we've been taught as a dentist, I'm a dentist. I'm an orthodontist and then to facial orthopedics. As you know, my wife is a pediatric dentist. We have a very large group practice with oral surgeons and with general dentists and with hygienists and with all sorts of other specialties.

[00:11:55.930] – Dr. Hoss

And so I've had the pleasure, but also the experience of working with all these different specialties, seeing kids and adults and young and elderly go through oral health issues. And I think it was time that I put this together. So a few years ago, I actually first wanted to write this book about the oral connection to the physical health of the chronic diseases that you're mentioning, because I thought the biggest disconnection that people have. Right. They really don't connect it together. As you mentioned, more and more studies are coming out. If you ask me what chronic disease is connected to our health.

[00:12:29.240] – Dr. Hoss

Let me just tell you the one that I don't know yet.

[00:12:31.490] – Dr. Hoss

Because almost everything else is right. It's easier just to more and more are found. Over the last 20,30 years, we've had just a flood of information and clinical studies correlating oral health to almost everything. Like you mentioned, many types of cancers and heart disease and pregnancy complications and diabetes and Alzheimer's and dementia and all sorts of things. So there are two really main connection. There was a long answer to your question, but there are two primary connections. I want your listeners to think about this. Your mouth is the opening to your body. Think about this. If you had an infection on your arm, a big infection the size of your mouth or on your leg.

[00:13:10.210] – Dr. Hoss

That connection would be very easy to know that, oh, my God.

[00:13:12.660] – Dr. Hoss

If I don't take care of this infection on my arm or leg, I may lose my arm or leg or I may have chronic problems, right? I may have organ failures, I may die. That connection is very easy. But when you have an infection in the mouth, I. E. Dental infection, cavities or gum infection, periodontal disease, people don't connect those two things, which is really incredible. And again, my profession is to blame really as much for that because we don't go around and educating people because we don't get that education in schools. We all get to learn how to fill cavities and straighten crooked teeth. So there are two ways primarily that your oral health impacts chronic disease. These two ways are your mouth is filled with microbes. In fact, we have more microbes in our bodies than we have human cells. We have about 30 trillion human cells and somewhere around 100 trillion microbes. And our mouth is filled with billions of microbes, somewhere between 5 billion to 100 billion. So if you have an infection in the mouth, those bacteria or the toxins can enter the bloodstream. And where does the blood go?

[00:14:15.420] – Dr. Hoss

Everywhere. So it can go to the heart and cause a local infection or cause systemic inflammation, go to the brain, the joints, anywhere in the brain, and then cause problems or the inflammation in the mouth in response to the bacteria can cause chronic inflammation that can cause also systemic health issues.

[00:14:36.250] – Allan

Now in the mouth, one of the things that kind of came out of my reading your book was kind of an understanding that we all kind of knew well, we all know there's a gut microbiome. It's getting more and more pressed that's the hot kid on the block right now, take care of your gut, take care of your health. But our mouth actually has its own microbiome.

[00:14:55.840] – Dr. Hoss

In fact. What do you think the gut microbiome comes from? The mouth. Right. This is such a wonderful question, by the way. So when a baby is born, when the baby is in the womb, there's no microbes involved, right. The baby gets the first dose of its microbiome traveling through the birth canal. And that's why when babies have had the moms have had natural vaginal birth, they just have a better mix of microbiome to begin with. Right. And then they get more additional microbes through breastfeeding and obviously passing between the parents and the siblings and all the caregivers and all that. The first place that these microbes get seated is in the mouth. And every time we swallow all those microbes, we're swallowing millions of microbes. Every time we're swallowing to our gut. And that's where the gut microbes come in. So you're 100% right. People have at least started talking about the gut microbiome and how important that is to our overall health. But I think the disconnection, again, is where the gut microbes come from. It's the oral microbiome, which is the collection of all the buildings of microbes in your mouth. And so if you don't have a healthy oral microbiome, that whole ecosystem is out of balance.

[00:16:06.260] – Dr. Hoss

And then you get unhealthy gut microbiome and all of these, everything the body is connected to everything else. But unfortunately, because dentists and physicians, we have different worlds and we have our own specialties we all forget this connection. And so you're 100% right. The microbiome, our microbes has evolved alongside us for millions of years, and it's key to our survival and it's key to our health, to our immunity, to our digestive system, all sorts of things.

[00:16:35.390] – Allan

Now, for most of us, when we think about oral health, Besides coming to visit someone like you on a regular basis, we're thinking about brushing our teeth, flossing, mouthwash, that type of thing.

[00:16:48.010] – Dr. Hoss

Exactly.

[00:16:49.070] – Allan

But in many cases, what we're doing is actually causing more harm than good.

[00:16:54.220] – Dr. Hoss

In many cases, in fact, you would think in the last 30 years, with all the advancements in science, technology and medicine, our mouths would be healthiest ever. Right. But actually, they're the unhealthiest ever. More than 50% of adults over age 30, by the way, these are CDC numbers. And more than 70% of people age 65 have gum disease. I think if we didn't do anything, we would be in a better position than using anything oral health that we currently use. So I actually started my book with the first sentence of this is not a book about brushing and flossing because I really wanted to make sure that people because I think that's all we are educated about. When we go to the dentist, just brush your teeth for your teeth and you should be good to go. Right? But I just told you that's just not the case. We're very unhealthy as a society. As you know, unfortunately, as Americans, we do many things right. But our health is not one of them. That's why I love being on podcasts like yours, because I feel like this is our passion, yours and mine to get this message out to everybody, we want to make sure that we look at your oral health more than brushing and flossing.

[00:18:01.550] – Dr. Hoss

And like you said, let's take the mouthwash, which was an example that you said. Let me just give you this very simple, the most common mouthwashes that people use, first of all, they use it because they want to mask their bad breath. And where is this bad breath coming from? Is because you have terrible, poor oral health, gum disease, right? Again, if you had that infection on your arm that was starting to produce this terrible odor, you wouldn't just pour like something that smells good over it, right? You would go take care of the infection. But what we do with our mouth, we use these very strong, potent antibacterial antiseptic mouthwashes that literally on the bottle sells, kills 99.9% of germs twice a day. So let me ask you a question, if I told you, hey, I found the best cure for all the diseases, take this antibiotics twice a day indefinitely to prevent disease.

[00:18:53.780] – Dr. Hoss

This is going to kill 99.99% of the germs in your body. You would tell me, call me, you're crazy. I just told you, gut microbiome is so critical to our but we do that in our mouth and we don't even think about it. I literally met a person three weeks ago. That when I asked him, what do you use for oral health? Because he has this terrible oral health and he said, I use this mouthwash that kills 99.99% of germs. I won't say the name. And then on the other hand, he uses probiotics. So he tried to put billions of microbes back in his mouth. When I told him one of them is just killing all the microbes and the other one is just full of microbes. You never really thought it through just because he just saw the ad for one and then the other. And just like, hey, I'm going to try to do everything I can. So our oral health is at worst it's ever been. And it's partially due to diet. It's partially because our diet has just changed so much since the agricultural revolution and then the Industrial Revolution.

[00:19:47.820] – Dr. Hoss

Everything is processed foods and nothing close to what it was intended to do, but partially is because of the oral care products that we're using. It's just a terrible marketplace right now.

[00:19:56.950] – Allan

Yeah. And they do a really good job of marketing. I had read a story one time about why our toothpaste foams and it foams because that showed people it was working.

[00:20:09.610] – Dr. Hoss

Exactly.

[00:20:10.320] – Allan

And so it wasn't that it was valuable. It was just that became the famous tagline for that product.

[00:20:17.210] – Dr. Hoss

In fact, the two things that companies do manufacture So-called oral care products, companies with toothpaste and mouthwash to make you think it's doing something. There are two things. One, they make a foam, like you said, because more foam, you feel like you must be cleaning doing something. Right. In fact, too much foam is terrible because you can't even see what you're doing anymore. A very little bit of foam using a very natural foaming, like Tiago or something not like SLS or something that's really damaging or soft tissue that could be toxic when you swallow all those things, which most manufacturers use. But that's on the phone because they just trying to tell you that they're working, which is actually doing the exact opposite. The other trick they use is they put a very strong Mint flavor, like something like peppermint oil. Essential oil, which is terrible. Essential oil is another thing that they may have other properties, but they don't belong in your mouth. And so a very common one is peppermint oil, which is really very dangerous for children, in addition to being terrible to the microbiome because it's a very important antibiotic bacterial essential oil.

[00:21:19.430] – Dr. Hoss

But what it does is you feel like you have the foam and now your mouth smells like this minty for at least 30 minutes. So it makes you feel like it's doing something. So those are the two things that I think you should just put aside when you're thinking about what oral care products you want to use for yourself and your children.

[00:21:37.130] – Allan

Now one place where I think it kind of surprised me, I guess, for a lack of better word was seeing how much the mouth can interrupt our sleep. So sleep disordered breathing. And I think many of us would know that because if we're over 40, I would say a large percentage of us probably snore. Some people even have sleep apnea or something you actually introduced me to now is upper airway resistance syndrome. Can we talk about those? Because for a lot of folks, they're going to go to the doctor and they may have a sleep issue, they may get diagnosed, go to a sleep clinic, and the doctor is going to say lose weight. But some of this is already kind of a little bit dawn because our mouth is already where it's going to be. Can you talk about how the mouth, the teeth, and then how that all relaxed our sleep.

[00:22:30.500] – Dr. Hoss

Yeah, great question. In fact, if you notice, the longest chapter in my book is about the breathing and the sleeping chapter, because I think you're right. People don't like why is a dentist talking about sleep? I don't understand. So here's what it is. So when I talk about oral health, I'm talking about two different areas. One is the microbial health. And my goal is to educate the public. Let's move from killing the microbes and disinfecting our mouths and sterilizing our mouths to cleaning, protecting and supplementing our mouth. Right. That's really what I want to be. From the microbial perspective, we want to protect and nurture our microbial community. That's in your mouth called the oral microbiome, which leads to our gut microbiome, all of that. So we can talk about that at some point later again. But the other side of it is the growth and development of the mouth. Now, contrary to what most people think, your mouth is not just this little area where you have your teeth, right? Your upper jaw, called the maxilla, goes all the way under your eyes. The bones under your eyes is still part of the maxilla, part of your cheekbones.

[00:23:38.770] – Dr. Hoss

It forms the bones of the nasal cavity. And then the lower jaw, of course, houses the tongue. And it's the rest of your face. So other than your forehead, your eyes, everything else in your face is your mouth. And so your mouth impacts your airway. Of course, it's the upper jaw with the nose and the lower jaw with the tongue. And so it has a dramatic impact on your breathing. Right. And during the day, of course, breathing, I don't have to tell you, oxygen is critical for everything, right? It's the number one nutrient that we need. It's even more critical in a child, especially the first five years, because their brain is exploding goes from 2020 5%, the maximum size at birth to 90% of its size by age five. So during those five years, the growth of the mouth is critical for their airway, breathing, oxygen intake and sleep. What happens during sleep is if you don't have good Airways, if you're not breathing incorrectly, that gets even worse at night because your muscles relax. So the tongue goes and blocks the airway. And as you mentioned, half of the people snore, which means really, we're all affected because either snore yourself or your partner snores, which keeps you up at night and many other problems.

[00:24:50.080] – Dr. Hoss

And snoring, even though we always joke about it when I meet my friends, that's the number one thing that they joke about with their partner. They always blame the other partner. Of course, it's never done that. They snore. But snoring is the first step of this downhill thing. First of all, it could be a sign that you already have something, like you said, UARS or sleep apnea, which they're all at the range between when you say sleep disorder breathing, which is really all the breathing issues that cause you not to have a good night's sleep. It really starts with snoring, which basically is a vibration of your soft tissues with your nose and your mouth because you're supposed to breathe with your nose. Now, why am I talking about the nose even though I'm a dentist, is because your palate, which is the roof of your mouth, is also the floor of your nose. It's the same bone. So when your mouth is small, your airway is small, you can't breathe your nose right. When your mouth is small, your tongue doesn't sit against the palate. So it goes and blocks your airway and you can't breathe at night.

[00:25:44.920] – Dr. Hoss

So really we should be the dentist community should be the leading the charge against sleep apnea and sleep disorders. And we should work hand in hand with sleep physicians. Right. They can make the diagnosis. We can make the dental appliances that help with breathing. And as you very well said, it the best time to do this is when you have a child and they have airway breathing issues. And that's why you should see a pediatric dentist when your baby is born immediately, because it literally starts from even health of pregnancy impacts these things. But really the latest you should see a pediatric dentist is right at birth before the baby is coming in because let's just say your baby has a tongue tie. Now, the tongue doesn't move around. That means it doesn't sit against the palate, which means the baby can't swallow, they can't breastfeed. Then they're going to start breathing through their mouth, cause mouth breathing. When you start breathing through your mouth, the nasal airway doesn't get stimulated. So the mouth and the nose don't grow correctly. And so as you can see, these little things start becoming really big problems over time during childhood because your mouth, the bones have not formed and they're still growing and the sutures have not used as orthodontists as pediatric dentists, we can actually fix problems, right?

[00:27:00.990] – Dr. Hoss

We can actually permanently fix it. We expand the upper jaw, we bring the lower jaw forward and we permanently fix airway issues. In adults like me and you, we can still fix it, but it usually involves wearing something up to bed, right? Yes, you can do some surgical treatments, but I'm not a big fan of it for majority cases. But some of the common things is obviously we can lose weight or become more healthier in general. But if those things are not working, then you need to wear an oral device that kind of keeps your jaw and your mouth open during night time so you can sleep better or you can wear a CPAP, those devices and some of those things, of course, it's different for everybody. They're like 100 devices that are out there that could work differently for different people. And so really, people need to visit their dentist and or sleep position and find something because it doesn't matter what you do. You need to breathe. I need to breathe. As we said, you can't really joke around with oxygen and take every single cell in your body will suffocate if you're not breathing correctly, which again, it gets exaggerated when we're sleeping.

[00:28:02.280] – Allan

Yes. And the reason I brought this up is sleep is so fundamental to our overall well-being and health. If you're not sleeping well, you can eat well, you can exercise, you can do pretty much everything else you want. Still not going to be optimized now. So if you are struggling with snoring or sleep apnea, go see your dentist and your sleep specialist and have some conversations because I think that's something we'll all want to look at because like I said, like you said, it's happening. There's so many of us exploring very common.

[00:28:34.730] – Dr. Hoss

And because of the obesity epidemic, this has gotten worse and worse right in the last 20 years. By the way, I just did want to say that not every dentist, unfortunately, and every physician is airway focused or sleep trained. It's just a small fraction of them, unfortunately, are it is not a requirement. But in 2017, the American Dental Association recommended that every dentist does a sleep screening or airway screening during every dental exam. But we just don't because there's one thing for them to recommend. It's one thing for the dentist to go back to school and actually get trained and educated about this. So when you do go to your dentist, make sure that they're trained and they know bad sleep and airway.

[00:29:14.150] – Allan

Now, I'll admit I'm like everybody else and so I'm out there and I'm like I want to do better for my health. I'm going into this health food store and they've got all this different stuff, toothpaste, mouthwash.

[00:29:32.460] – Dr. Hoss

I know about it.

[00:29:34.610] – Allan

But this is a health store. So they have this clay. It's basically dirt is what it was. And they flavored it cinnamon, which I don't know if that was good or bad. But in your book, you go through and talk about some of the ingredients that we're going to see in our dental care products, like you called one of them the mouth Rageous ingredients. And then the mouthstanding ingredients kind of plays on building words. So some of these are really bad for us and we probably shouldn't have them in our health care or oral care. And some are probably really good for us. Can you kind of go through and talk about some of the good ones and some of the bad ones?

[00:30:14.910] – Dr. Hoss

I'm happy to do it. Like you said, I know when I go to the grocery store and I see that toothpaste aisle, I'm like, how does a person supposed to make that decision? We as dentists, I'm on the board of UCLA Dental School, and we get little to no education, almost none in dental school about oral care products. You would think your dentist knows what's in a toothpaste. Our education and knowledge of it is just as much as you'd be surprised. We just know, like, okay, maybe Fluoride. I've asked 20 dentists, what's in a toothpick fluoride. What else is there? I don't know. How does the fluoride work? I don't know. If you don't want to use Fluoride, what else do you use? I don't know. Like you go to a natural health store and you're like, I don't know, maybe this is just good and that people will make it. They have no idea because they're not oral health experts. And so, of course, people don't know what to use. Dentists don't know what to use. So the manufacturers just kind of do their own thing, and then people end up buying something that has the boldest claim or has the nicest packaging or for the kids has the best flavoring.

[00:31:17.070] – Dr. Hoss

Nothing based on science and fact and clinical research and something that's safe and effective. Those two things are critical. For kids, playfulness is even important because we want to make sure they build positive associations. But safe and effective and effective. These are the two things that are always like anything we put in our bodies. We want to make sure it's safe and effective food. Like you said, I think many of us are educated about reading what's in our food or educating about what's healthy food, what's organic, what's natural, what's whole food, what's fermented, all of those things. But when it comes to oral care products, because nobody has this information, I thought I got to put this in the book. So people have a reference. So what's mouth sounding good? What's mouth rage is terrible and you should never put it. By the way, what other food do you put in your mouth twice a day, every single day, other than your toothpaste and mouthwash? Nothing. Right. So this is such an important thing. Right. Let me just tell you, with the toothpaste and the mouthwash, all our products that you put in your mouth, they get absorbed through your mouth, through the mucosa, through the mucosa membranes.

[00:32:19.550] – Dr. Hoss

And then, of course, it goes through the blood, goes everywhere in your brain. Of course, we swallow some of it. There's no way that you're not going to swallow. So that's why these ingredients in your oral care products are so important, not just for the health of your mouth, but for the health of your body. So let's go over a couple of the very important ones. One is Fluoride, can we just start with the most controversial toothpaste ingredient or mouthwash ingredient on Fluoride? Okay. So Fluoride is a drug is a medication. It's FDA regulated one. It's currently in the United States, the only compound that is approved for anti-cavity. By the way, in other countries there's another ingredient, which is my favorite, and I'll tell you about it in just a second. So fluoride. Fluoride, how does it work? You're enamel your teeth are made out of this, by the way, your teeth are alive. And that's another thing that I want everybody to remember because I think we treat the mouth like we have to just have these 20 or 30 dead objects in our mouth and we need to sterilize them and Polish them from the outside twice a day and get it to the dentist so they can really Polish it good twice a year.

[00:33:18.480] – Dr. Hoss

But our mouth is alive. Our teeth are alive. They have internal cells and nervous system and all of that. And so we want to give it nutrients and everything. So fluoride is a drug. In fact, anything that comes with fluoride, any toothpaste or mouthwash FDA has a warning sign on it. You are mandated by putting that that says warning, keep it away from children under age six, something like this. By the way, if you swallow it over what we need to use it for, toothpaste, you need to call the nearest poison control center. This is an FDA regulation. So of course that means that if you fluoride at high levels is toxic to your body, right? It's not me saying it. Now, fluoride does work the way you get cavities. When you eat something acidic or sugary, your PH of the mouth, which is the acidity of the mouth, which is really something important everybody should learn about. It's usually a neutral round seven, but then it drops when you eat something. When it reaches around 5.5, those enamel crystals called hydroxyapatite, 97% of your enamel is made of this mineral phosphate mineral called hydroxyapatite.

[00:34:29.300] – Dr. Hoss

It a little bit of a dissolved away in that acidic environment into the saliva. When then the saliva Bates the teeth after 30 minutes or so, then these minerals get deposited back into the teeth called demineralization of the teeth. So when there's a balance between this demineralization and rhymeralization, you don't get a cavity. But if you eat too much bad food or feed it too frequently, there is too much demineralization, not enough rhymeralization to get a cavity. Okay. And so what fluoride does? Fluoride mixes with hydroxyapatite forms this new mineral called fluorapatite. And that fluorapatite is stronger to acidic attacks because it doesn't get dissolved until the acid reaches 4.5. And then 4.5 to 5.5 difference is a big difference. And that's why fluoride works. So there's definitely fluoride works, but because it has all these potential toxicities, I don't recommend it for majority patients, especially with younger children, because dental fluorosis, which is one of the side effects of too much fluoride, usually happens in kids and because it's such a common thing in our society now. So if you have young children and they're not prone to getting cavities and they're not a high risk child, which means they don't have genetic problems, again, genetic things are just 10% of the situation so for majority of the kids, you can replace that fluoride.

[00:35:46.980] – Dr. Hoss

Don't just remove the fluoride and don't put anything. But you can replace it with something else called hydroxyapatite, which is the synthetic version of what's already naturally in your teeth. And that is around since 1970s. It's been tested and tested and tested and tested. It's completely safe. And it reminisces. It just as good or better than fluoride. In fact, it's been already approved in Canada since 2015 for Anticavity. In Japan, they've been using it for about 30 years. And so in US, I'm hoping FDA is going to catch up with some of these other countries. We're going to hopefully approve it. But right now, it's already available in some products. And so don't just remove fluoride. Replace it with this. Now, if you're a high risk person, which means you get cavities, you have a dry mouth, your PH is low. Whatever. I go through this more in detail in my book. You should use some fluoride. And so you can also even mix it with hydroxyapatite, because also for older people, you don't swallow as much. You're swallowing reflexes that develop. So, again, for the average of fluoride, for maybe 20% of the population, older people and higher risk people, and for younger people and lower risk people, I would use hydroxyapatite, specifically Nano hydroxyapatite, which mimics the natural enamel which naturally wipes the teeth.

[00:37:02.550] – Dr. Hoss

It reminds the teeth, it reduces sensitivity. It even buffers the teeth against cavities and acidic attacks. That's one another ingredient you asked me for. Like, but as you can.

[00:37:13.280] – Allan

That's good. No, it is. It's great. There was another one that was kind of surprising to me was when you got into some of the sugar alcohols that we're trying to obviously brush your teeth with sugar. But we like that we like that bubblegum flavor, right?

[00:37:29.560] – Dr. Hoss

Yeah.

[00:37:30.190] – Allan

So we want something a little sweeter, something a little bit more of a taste. And so it's going to be sweetened. Yes. But not all of the sugar alcohols are the same.

[00:37:38.140] – Dr. Hoss

Exactly. Not all sugars are the same. Right. By the way, I hate this name. Sugar alcohol. I wish somebody would. It because, by the way, it has no sugar and no alcohol. That's just what I repeat this. No sugar and no alcohol in this sugar alcohol. So I don't know, whoever came up with his name is like just terrible, terrible naming. So just like everything else, if I ask you, hey, is food good or bad? You say, well, tell me what food. There are foods that are fantastic or foods that are terrible. Is mouthwash good or bad? There are mouthwashes that are fantastic. They're alkalizing mouthwashes. They use really great ingredients. But most the ones that you see, there are these fluorescent colors or neon colors, and you can't keep them terrible. It's the same thing with sugar alcohols. They're like cheaper ones, like sorbitol, which is very common. And the only reason they are used because they're very cheap. They're not as good because the bacteria causes cavity. They can still ferment and use that as food and then they can excrete acid and cause cavity. So my two favorite sugar alcohols, again, I hate that name.

[00:38:38.830] – Dr. Hoss

That are naturally present in fruits are xylitol and erythritol. And those both have been really especially xylitol. Xylitol has been extensively studied. There was a study that just came out that looked at over 200 studies on xylitol and concluded that it acts like a prebiotics. And just quickly, the difference between probiotics and prebiotics and probiotics is bacteria. Prebiotics is food for the microbes. So prebiotics are compounds that naturally produce, like, for example, in breast milk, the third most common ingredients is prebiotics already. So nature already does this, right? And so we want to mimic nature. And so prebiotics inulin is another great probiotics that it doesn't kill the Microbes your mouth, it feeds the good bacteria and stores the bad ones, but also xylitol and erythritol, like you mentioned, they have great taste because at the end of the day, we want to make sure that we encourage people to use it. And that way it gives them a great flavor. At the same time, it provides the food for the good microbes. It also raises the PH because it stimulates salivary glands to produce saliva. So it works in different ways to make sure that we keep our mouths healthy.

[00:39:54.660] – Allan

Right. And there's a lot in the book on how to go about doing this. You have a product don't use a product line with super mouth or yeah.

[00:40:03.390] – Dr. Hoss

So we're launching this company called Super mouth. And this is why, again, like you said, we go to the grocery store and we have no idea where to buy, what to buy for ourselves, what to buy for our kids. We go to the dentist. The dentist doesn't know what to do. So how do we do this? What's the solution? The solution is this. You would go on this website, Supermouth.com in July 31st and you would just say, hey, my name is this is my age and these are some of my risk factors. We ask just five or six questions per house family member and then we become your Proactive oral care advisors. So every three months, every six months, every family member will get a box customize oral care products for that individual. That's based on super acronym, Super. Everything will be super. They're completely safe for us. They're unified. They work together as a system. So you don't get like this person that I met three weeks ago that uses antibiotics and then uses probiotics at the same time, right. The P is playful. Again, we want to build positive associations with your aura character.

[00:41:00.350] – Dr. Hoss

They're based on superheroes and villains in movies and augmented reality and storytelling. They're effective e super, because at the end of the day, if they're not working right, I just talked to a good friend of mine, were having breakfast this morning and his wife, when she was pregnant, she got seven cavities after pregnancy because she avoided, quote unquote, conventional aura care products. But they weren't effective. So it was terrible. If we're going to remove something like fluoride, let's just do a pregnancy. What are you going to replace it with? So our oil care products are completely safe and effective during pregnancy and early childhood and beyond. And at the end of the R stands for Reputable because we want you to come to us dental experts, oral health experts, for your information, not Google or social media and random people that you have zero to a little knowledge about oral health. Yeah.

[00:41:51.920] – Allan

Or the tagline kills 99.9%.

[00:41:55.000] – Dr. Hoss

Exactly.

[00:41:57.050] – Allan

Dr. Hoss, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:42:05.400] – Dr. Hoss

I love it. I love it. I would just say I think the three things is because people know about eating healthy. Like if I asked average person, I'm sure you would agree. How do you stay healthy? I think the average person would say, well, eat healthy and exercise. Those are the two messages that we've always heard. But my job and my passion and my goal is to add a third one to that. And the third one is to take care of your mouth, take care of your mouth from the microbial perspective, and take care of your mouth from the protein development perspective, from airway perspective. So that would be my passion. Eat healthy, exercise daily and take care of your mouth.

[00:42:39.050] – Allan

Awesome. Well, they say the smile is a gateway to the soul. So I agree with you there. If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about your book. If Your Mouth Could Talk, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:42:51.560] – Dr. Hoss

So you can buy my book from your favorite bookstore in barnes & Noble, Amazon. But you can also go to our specific website about the book themouthbook.com. My dental practice is also thesuperdentists.com, so those are a few places that you can get information about me, my practice and the book.

[00:43:09.210] – Allan

Cool. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/539 and I'll be sure to have links there. Dr. Hoss, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:43:20.000] – Dr. Hoss

Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.

Post Show/Recap

[00:43:29.250] – Allan

Welcome back, Ras.

[00:43:30.750] – Rachel

Hey, Allan. Well, wait a minute. I just got to say what an interesting conversation this was. When you first said you were going to have a dentist on, I was like, what we're going to learn about that? But we learned a lot. And I actually learned that the bacteria in our mouth is very important and I'm killing it with my mouthwash. I had no idea.

[00:43:50.920] – Allan

Yeah. Well, most of the products that we use consumer products, they have a really good marketing company that's going to tell you what you need to know. And what you need to know is that you need a sterile mouth. And it sounds reasonable. When someone tells you that you have a microbiome on your skin, that there's billions, trillions maybe of bacteria crawling all over your skin, it gives you the heebejeebes.

[00:44:21.030] – Rachel

It really does.

[00:44:22.250] – Allan

You're sitting there looking at your arm. It's like, where are those critters? Yeah, I don't want to touch anybody because they got the heebejeebes. The point being is that, yes, we have these microbiomes, a lot of this stuff. We're still figuring out how do these interact with each other, how do they survive together? And what are we doing that's harming them? Because antibiotics, don't get me wrong, they are one of the best medical inventions ever. But they are like a nuclear bomb.

[00:44:54.160] – Rachel

Exactly.

[00:44:55.470] – Allan

Taking out everything. And we're making better nukes, better and better antibiotics as we get more bodies get resistant to the easy ones, and then those bugs are now resistant. We have to go harder and we have to go heavier. And it's a bigger bomb and a bigger bomb. And then your ability to regrow, that is extremely limited because these bugs, in many cases, don't even exist anymore. Everybody has killed them and there's none. So it's not like you get in the soil. We don't do that. Don't let your kid get their hands dirty. Oh, my God. Don't put your hand in your mouth. We were eating mud pies.

[00:45:38.790] – Rachel

Yes. And drinking out of the garden hose.

[00:45:41.940] – Allan

Yeah, sure. But no, it made us healthier. Who knew? And so, yeah, there are microbiomes throughout the body, and they're there as a part of our immune system. They're there to help us stay healthy. And mouthwash, it's a good marketing term. It sounds like you're doing the right thing. I want good, fresh, clean mouth. And you're over cleaning it is effectively the answer.

[00:46:10.680] – Rachel

That was a big surprise. Although I'm not surprised about fluoride. I think a lot of people know that a lot of times our city water is fluorinated. Then you've got the fluorine and the toothpaste. And if you're over time taking in too much fluoride, that can become a problem. So it was interesting that he had an alternative for that.

[00:46:29.860] – Allan

Yes, there are some alternatives and some things. Xylitol is one. It's a sugar alcohol. Again, you don't have to swallow it. You just need it on your teeth. And the other was this I had not heard of before, but Nano hydroxyapatite, and they call it Nano HAP for short. You can look it up. It's available. It's going to be in his product. So realize he's going to be selling dental products, too. So probably toothpaste and things like that, because these toxins, like fluoride and whatnot, they're a cumulative thing. And so if you're having your kid brush their teeth twice a day and they're swallowing too much fluoride, and getting it in their water, there's this build up at a potential. So it's his opinion that children should not be using fluoride in their water, in their toothpaste. But that said, if they are prone to cavities, then they need something to protect enamel. So the two things you look for are how do we reduce the acidity and how do we help the teeth build back stronger the way fluoride would? And so there are these alternatives, and it's worth looking into to help your child not have that much fluoride.

[00:47:52.720] – Allan

There's probably too much maybe drinking having your kid drink filtered water, because I think some of these filters can remove the fluoride from the water and then you can look at the toothpaste and maybe take some there. But if you're going to do that and they need something to help with the hardening of the teeth, then you're going to look at it. And the other thing that we didn't talk about is we're an adult show, not an adult, but we're talking about it and being healthy over 40. But with children, grandchildren, things like that, if they're not taking care of their baby teeth, they're going to have problems with their adult teeth. And I know I always thought, well, they're going to lose it, so who cares? It does matter. The mouth affects your health, but the mouth, as you're growing up, affects what your mouth is going to be when you get older.

[00:48:43.710] – Rachel

Sure.

[00:48:44.970] – Allan

There's zero reason for anyone to have to have teeth extraction, except for the fact that it was a kid. We didn't take care of little problems that later became big problems. So your mouth is not big enough to handle your wisdom teeth. I'm not much of a talker other than being on a podcast, but I have my wisdom teeth because I have a big enough mouth that it was never a problem. Yeah, but it's part of that is genetic. But the other part of it is just taking care of your teeth when you're young. Sure. I never did anything silly other than smash my face and kill one of my teeth. So I have my issues, but not to the point where I didn't have enough mouth for the teeth that were going to come in.

[00:49:35.100] – Rachel

Well, healthy habits need to start at a young age. And if we can teach our children and grandchildren how to care for their teeth and they'll have healthier habits as adolescents and as young adults.

[00:49:46.360] – Allan

But then on our side, yes, the best time for us to have taken care of our teeth for children, the best time you can take care of your teeth right now. That's what we've got. So if you're having some issues with periodontist. Right. But if you're having some issues, it's worth getting it looked into because there is a correlation there there is a heart disease and some of these other lifestyle diseases, there's a correlation. The reason I wanted to have this on was predominantly for the heart disease, So some of this was also eye opening to me Because I was thinking, wow, they've tied this to diabetes, to cancers, To Alzheimer's disease, all these different lifestyle. We're now starting to realize our lifestyle diseases. So while the cause might not be the dental issues, there's an association. And so if we're not taking care of our mouth, we're probably not taking care of our health. So it's a red flag, at the very least, for you to say, okay, why am I having these dental problems? What can I do about it? And is this a lifestyle thing that's causing this versus there's people that brush their teeth Twice a day, Three times a day, they still have issues with this.

[00:51:04.430] – Allan

And so there is a care regimen, there is a hygiene. And that's in his book. He's really good about walking you Through The proper dental hygiene thing, and it includes getting the acidity of your mouth down, which can be the choice of foods. It can be a mouth spray or something like that, but it's getting that acidity down. And then the second aspect of it Is just making sure that you have strong, healthy enamel in your teeth. Your teeth are living things, and they need to be cared for. You can think of them like plants. You have to take care of them or they're going to go away. So that's really why I wanted to have someone on like him, Because it's really the first what I'd say good book or book out, though, I was like we could talk about health in relation to dental health and overall health and what that relationship is. But this is a care manual. I mean, literally, this will teach you how to take care of your teeth, your children's teeth, if they listen to you and your grandchildren's teeth. It's a really good manual for you to go through, get an understanding of the relationships and the things that are good for you.

[00:52:10.440] – Allan

Build a good hygiene and you'll have a better mouth.

[00:52:14.000] – Rachel

That sounds great. I think I need to take a look at that hygiene Because my mind is blown about the whole 99% of killing all the bacteria in your mouth as being a problem. So, yeah, I'd like to see what he's got for us to take better care of our mouths and therefore better care of our health. That sounds really interesting.

[00:52:32.700] – Allan

Well, the name of the book Is Dr. Kami Hoss, and the name of the book is if your mouth could talk.

[00:52:38.830] – Rachel

Perfect.

[00:52:40.750] – Allan

All right Rachel, I'll talk to you next week.

[00:52:43.180] – Rachel

Sounds great. Take care, Allan.

[00:52:44.960] – Allan

Bye

[00:52:45.630] – Rachel

bye bye.

Patreons

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Another episode you may enjoy

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Less...

Let's Say Hello

[00:02:35.410] – Allan

Hey, Ras.

[00:02:36.530] – Rachel

Hey, Allan. How are you today?

[00:02:38.070] – Allan

I'm doing okay. How are things up there?

[00:02:40.600] – Rachel

Really good. Really proud to announce my son just graduated from College. He's got a job lined up with General Motors, which we're very proud and excited for him. And so this month we're working on finding him an apartment to live in and he'll be about fledged in another month or so. We're pretty excited to be one step closer to that empty nesters part of our lives.

[00:03:03.900] – Allan

Congratulations for him and you because I know as a parent these days you're engaged.

[00:03:10.280] – Rachel

Yes, I am.

[00:03:11.510] – Allan

When they're going through the College years.

[00:03:14.530] – Rachel

Yeah. I'm pretty happy to be done with that Bill. I'll tell you that right now. And he is, too. Yeah. He's very excited to be done with College and starting this next chapter of his life, and we're very proud.

[00:03:25.990] – Allan

That's cool.

[00:03:27.020] – Rachel

So how are things with you?

[00:03:28.520] – Allan

Well, we had a new house guest come in. A holler monkey.

[00:03:35.650] – Rachel

Oh, my goodness.

[00:03:37.400] – Allan

And so this holler monkey, we're about 2 miles away from where any of the holler monkeys would hang out. I've never heard or seen a holler monkey this far into town. Heard stories. Now, of course, once it happens, like, oh, well, this happened a few years ago kind of thing. But, no, this dude was literally coming across the wires, and, of course, Buster has to fend the habitat. So he's barking like crazy trying to get to this monkey. I'm trying to keep him away from the monkey and just try to figure out, okay, how do I get the monkey to shoo or go away? But I don't want to also don't want them to get hurt. I don't want to get hit by a car and so many things going through my head, and then all of a sudden, the monkey zap, touched a wire they weren't supposed to touch and just fell. This is from the second story, probably, I would say a good 25ft drop and just lands on pavement. I hear speck when he hit the ground. I ran over there. He's stunned. I take a picture, and I go online. I message Tag, the guy that does our local humane society kind of stuff, Papa Gato.

[00:04:53.050] – Allan

And so he brings a woman over. But before he gets over there and really before I get my post all the way down and go back out, this monkey's woke up, goes across the street and climbs up an almond tree. And so he's up in the tree. So Papa Gato goes and gets his trap. We put a couple of bananas in there, and we set the trap up. Well, the monkey stayed in that tree for almost two whole days.

[00:05:20.310] – Rachel

Oh, my gosh.

[00:05:21.690] – Allan

Stayed overnight. And then it was late the next afternoon that he finally, I guess, get climbed down and just took off because I didn't see him slip out. I would go out there every couple of hours and check on him just to see if he was in the tree. He would move from side to side. So I knew he was generally okay. Somehow, another he came down. He just ignored the bananas we had out there for him, and they just took off. And so hopefully he's going to be okay. He'll find his way back to where he needs to be. I hear these male monkeys will get kicked out of their troop, and then they just have to go find a place to be that's not where their troops at because they're not welcome there anymore. So I think he just strayed and got himself on the wrong side of town.

[00:06:06.490] – Rachel

Oh, my goodness. What an adventure.

[00:06:09.980] – Allan

Then he got shocked and it was so interesting because we had a guest up there on the balcony when this is all happening, he's just looking around like, oh, my God, what's going on here? And then all of a sudden the monkey gets electrocuted and he's messaging his wife and his daughter said, don't come back yet. Don't come back yet. You don't want to see this. I thought the monkey was done when he hit that concrete and electrocuted, I thought, oh, that poor monkey. But he was able to climb up the tree and spend a day up there, I guess heal a little and then decided it was time for him to move on because there was no water on that land where he was. So he was going to need to go somewhere just to get water. But interesting weekend.

[00:06:54.680] – Rachel

Yeah, for sure. Holy cow.

[00:06:57.650] – Allan

All right. Well, are you ready to talk to Dr. Segar?

[00:07:02.300] – Rachel

Sure.

Interview

[00:07:52.090] – Allan

Dr. Segar, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:07:55.150] – Dr. Segar

It's great to be here.

[00:07:57.170] – Allan

Now I'm going to say joy is one of my favorite words. And I have a question that's going to come up later about wellness, and it includes happiness. But after I wrote the book and after I've asked this question hundreds of times, I kind of wish I'd use the word joy instead of happiness because I think that's really the word I was after. So your book is called, The Joy Choice: How to Finally Achieve Lasting Changes in Eating and Exercise. And, you know, I think anybody that's tried to change one or both of those knows it might be the most challenging thing they've ever done. I know for me it was. And while I didn't call it the Joy Choice at the time, most of what you're talking about here, it just resonates with me very well because it was effectively what took me over eight years of trial and error to figure out. And they can get this book and get a lot of the details of how to do it in a much shorter time.

[00:08:59.750] – Dr. Segar

The reason why so many people haven't figured it out yet and that it might have taken you eight years is because we've been taught an opposite approach that really gets in our way. It clouds and contaminates our thinkings and our emotions about eating and exercise and really derails what we're hoping to achieve. So that's why it's so hard. And I think the biggest thing is for people to really understand it's not their fault. It's because the whole formula that we've been taught, not the whole the majority of what we've been taught over the last three to four decades has been based on science, but it hasn't necessarily been based on how we can best sustain a behavior within our complicated lives.

[00:09:52.790] – Allan

Yeah. And you got into some of the science on that, which was fascinating. And we've seen it in other areas I have in Health and Fitness, where they'll take one study and they'll say, okay, this is the study, and then we're going to drive everything else off of this one study. And the one I'm talking about in particular that was in your book was you were talking about how long it takes to build a habit. And granted, we can say based on that study, 66 days potentially, but the standard deviations, for someone it was two weeks, and for someone else, it was almost a whole year on average. Okay, 66 days. And we drive a lot of the way we approach this on a study like that. So it's no wonder that you're not one of the people that happens to be on the right end of the 66 days. It might take you longer. It might take you a different approach, which is what you get into with the Joy choice.

[00:10:57.290] – Dr. Segar

I'm not sure that's even the most strategic question that we could be asking to focus on how long is it going to take me to form an automatic habit? As you know, in the book, there's a lot of concerns I have about telling people that they should be forming habits for healthy eating, exercise, and I'm sure we're going to get into that in a little bit. But the idea is that focusing on the process instead of the outcome, what do I need to do consistently to actually be able to stick with this long term? That's focusing on the process. That's the goal. That's what's going to get us where we want to go. So that's really the best of the question we should be asking is what do I need to do? What is most likely to get in my way, and what can I do to overcome or prevent those things?

[00:11:49.940] – Allan

Yeah. And we definitely will get into that. There was a concept you had in the book that I thought was brilliant, and it's called the motivation bubble. And the reason I think that it's great is because I think when someone actually understands this concept, it's like that happens to me every single day. It's not just every single time I try to lose weight or every time I try to start an exercise program, I build this motivation bubble. That bubble pops as soon as something gets around it. And we've got these. Can you talk about the motivation bubble because we go in with the best of intentions and we're excited.

[00:12:35.810] – Dr. Segar

Right? Well, we usually decide we're going to change our eating or start exercising more for a very specific reason. Either we're excited for a trip we're going to take or that magazine cover or our doctor gave us really scary news and we start and we're in this and we're full of motivation because we've decided we're going to do it. But the motivation is like a bubble. And as we know, bubbles are very fragile and we might blow a really big bubble, but it doesn't take much for that to bump up into anything else. Anything that bumps into it is going to burst it. This is how we've been taught to initiate behavior change in this fragile bubble of motivation without a lot of strategy, without understanding the types of things that are really going to get in our way. And bubbles burst. And that's why I use it. And that analogy came organically out of an interview, and I've just been using it ever since.

[00:13:40.670] – Allan

Yeah. Now there are some of us, like your husband, who is able to create habits, and you can call him a habitor, is what you call them in the book. And then there's people that are not habitors, and we call them you call them unhabitors. Can you talk about those two people? And why is it difficult for certain individuals to be able to form habits? And other individuals might just say, okay, naturally, here's my habit, and I start doing it three weeks later. I'm just doing it every day. What's the difference?

[00:14:12.890] – Dr. Segar

Well, before I answer the question, I think we need to create the context. And what people care about is they have some North Star they want to achieve. They want to be healthier, they want to have a better sense of well being. And in order to achieve those north stars, we need sustainable behavior change, because if you make a change and don't stick with it, you're not going to be able to achieve those goals. So sustainability is this fundamental thing we need. But sustainability is really the symptom of something else, and that is consistent decisions day in and day out. Now, I don't mean identical decisions. I just mean a sense of consistency in our choices that favor doing the behavior. There's a couple of ways to create consistent decisions. One is through our unconscious automatic thinking, which would be via habit formation, and the other is through our conscious thinking. So let's pause on our conscious thinking and focus now on habit formation, which is offloading our choices to exercise or eat in certain ways to our unconscious and automatic decision making. And let me just say, habits are great. I'm thankful for my flossing habit.

[00:15:33.690] – Dr. Segar

I'm thankful that I have a habit to feed my dog in the morning because it will starve otherwise. So I'm thankful I don't have to think about those things, but those are very simple things, and there are personality differences that I'll get into in a minute. But if we think about different behaviors like exercise, flossing happens in the bathroom. There's not a lot that's going to get in the way or disrupt it. But when it comes to physical activity, we've got places to get to. We've got transportation, we've got potentially changes. We've got other people whose logistics were in charge of there are so many different things that can get in the way and make it very complicated. Habit formation happens via what's called the habit loop, which is a queue for behavior like I brush my teeth and the cue is brushing, and I automatically think reach for the floss. I floss, and then there's some type of reward, and that fuels a process in our brain that automates it as soon as we get that queue. And again, for flossing, it's pretty simple in the bathroom. But step outside of the bathroom into the chaotic, crazy life of hubbub that many of us live, and that cue is going to get disrupted.

[00:16:50.760] – Dr. Segar

Now, getting back to your question about habitors versus unhabitors. Habitors are people like my husband, and God bless him, he lets me use him as an example. There's nothing wrong. Habitors are awesome, and I love them dearly. But what's most important is that we understand which we tend to be. And a habitor tends to be someone who is very disciplined, who has a very organized schedule that doesn't lend itself to a lot of disruption, and that makes it easier to form habits even for complex behaviors like exercise. But unhabitors and I happen to be one of those, one of the lucky many millions. I think more people are unhabitors because unhabitants tend to be less organized. We tend to have more hubbub and unexpected in our lives. We may manage many people's lives and pets, whether at home or at work. And so there's a lot of room for the unanticipated to just fly in and disrupt any habit loop that we might be trying to create. So that's the big difference. Does that make sense?

[00:18:05.740] – Allan

Yeah. The way I like to talk to people about it, a lot of it's going to depend on how you do your self awareness, and as you sit down with your self awareness understanding. Okay, am I the kind of person who can get into a Porsche and get this done? And I've got no disruptions. I got nothing in the road in front of me. It's a straight road, and I can just haul versus someone who's now got kids and other things. So now I'm driving in a minivan and I can't go as fast, and the road is curved, and maybe there's a whole lot of road construction in school zones and everything else going on in our lives. It's going to keep us from getting as far as fast and understanding that then allows you to take the approach one with patience, understanding that your life is not completely 100% of your control, which is what the joy choice really, when it comes down to it, is where the real value comes in is I don't have to Super manage my life. I don't have to worry about that I'm in a sports car. I can be in my minivan and be very happy with the progress that I'm making.

[00:19:06.890] – Allan

That's kind of the way I put where I'm at. The way I like to approach this with what you're talking about is once we know who we are, it's a lot easier to make some decisions. And then once we know how to approach it, we make better decisions.

[00:19:21.470] – Dr. Segar

You know what it's about fit and match. And let's step outside of exercise and healthy eating just for a minute, and let's think about what other areas in our lives we know that where we learn that we're fit is so important. We might, when we're younger, want to date and pick the raciest coolest person. But when it comes down to who we want to spend the rest of our life with, that person might have very different characteristics to fit us. Or if we think about schools, the fit with who we are and what kind of learning context teaching we need will determine whether we have a successful and a positive experience. So it's the same when it comes to changing our behavior. Are the strategies we're trying to use a fit with who we are in personality and our life context, or are they not? But we haven't been taught to ask that question.

[00:20:24.470] – Allan

Yeah. Now in the book, you talk about the decision disruptors and you use the acronym Trap. I love acronyms, too, because they help us remember some things. And these are really important because if you can recognize these traps, then you're in a much better place because so many times these traps get us. And by the time we recognize that, we've gone off the trail, our motivation bubble has popped and that day is effectively, in our minds, ruined before we ruin our day. If we catch ourselves in that moment, which is we'll get into the pop in a minute. But we start with understanding where the traps are. Can you talk about what Trap stands for and what these potential disruptors are?

[00:21:10.920] – Dr. Segar

Yes, and I call them decision disruptors, because what this book is about is what we really haven't been taught for the most part and what to do when our healthy eating or exercise plan bumps up with an unexpected conflict because the societal dogma has been all or nothing thinking, which really, if your plan is disrupted, the only alternative in that paradigm or that binary is nothing. And so people do nothing. And so the goal of the book is to help people at those challenges, those choice points, those momentary decisions about what to do and so things that disrupt those decisions, that tend to be internal in our heads that we might not be aware of are temptation, rebellion, accommodation, and perfection. And while these traps are active and often they're often unconscious. So one of my favorite quotes of all time it has to do with this is from Dan Siegel, and he says, name it to tame it. So if we can name the trap that is staring us in the face, we can really remove a great deal of its power to control our decisions, which is what we're focused on in the book.

[00:22:30.330] – Dr. Segar

So the first one is temptation. And temptation is just this visceral feeling. We have to we want that chocolate cake. It is in front staring us down. It's seducing us or, wow, the couch and that beer is calling us to watch more something on Netflix. Right now we're watching The Good Place, which is really funny. So temptation, when we hear that word, we know what it means. But what we might not know is what new theories based on how our brain works proposed. And that is that it's our past experiences with the chocolate cake and the couch and the beer that is really exerting pullovers. It's not what's in front of us. It's our history of past memories of participating these activities and what it felt like and what it sounded like and the emotions we had and the people we were with. And when we understand that, then we can name it. Oh, that isn't just that chocolate frosting listening in the light. It's how I felt when my mom made it for my birthday every year. And when we can notice that. I mean, I already know you started off this conversation with self awareness.

[00:23:54.370] – Dr. Segar

Self awareness is what people need to be able to notice those things. And so when we understand how the brain works when it comes to these temptation choice points, then we are much more empowered to take charge and not succumb to something that we might not want to succumb to. So do you want me to go to the second one?

[00:24:17.440] – Allan

Yes, please.

[00:24:18.090] – Dr. Segar

Okay. So the second very common disruptor that I've seen in my coaching clients is rebellion. And in my last interview, the podcaster asked me, why would people rebel against something that they themselves have planned to do? Well, there's a really great reason why. And the reason is because we have been socialized to initiate an eating plan or to start a new exercise regimen out of shoulds because we think we should do it because our doctor told us to, because our company told us to, because we think we're overweight, whatever the reason. And when we initiate a behavior change out of that mentality, which is the most common way actually to initiate a change in this area, it makes us feel like we're not free to choose the things we want to choose. And it's human nature. And theory support us that human beings are motivated to reclaim their freedom when they feel like it's been taken away. So if you think you can't have pizza because it's not on your eating plan, well, guess what we're motivated to do? We're motivated to say screw you plan. I'm going to have it anyway. So that's rebellion.

[00:25:38.780] – Dr. Segar

I bet you've seen that a lot in your work.

[00:25:40.780] – Allan

Is that I do. My very first client was doing great, seeing results. Everything was wonderful. I was excited. She was telling me these wonderful stories or interactions with her granddaughter. And I was thinking, okay, she's on a really great track. So she's experiencing the benefits of what's going on and things she had told me before. She hates exercise and everything. And I'm like, well, you know, we're going to do some and we're going to do. And so we were going along. And I think similar to what you'd said in the book, it's like when she started rebelling and then disappeared, it was my fault. It really wasn't her fault. I should have recognized early on that she was starting to struggle with the shoulds, even though she was seeing the benefits. I was focused on the benefits and thinking this has to motivate her when the reality was she was having an internal conflict with the shoulds and eventually just realized I was the bad guy, if you will, of the should. And every time she thought of me or thought about being on the phone with me, there was a should that kept coming out and that was too much pressure on her.

[00:26:56.700] – Allan

And so she just decided to rebel and disappear, ghost me. And because we weren't, again, not a family member or friend or somebody I was close to, when she decided to ghost me, she's gone. I think the one that you talked about was more on the perfection side, but I think as a coach, I should have recognized the warning signs. And now, having read your book, seeing this trap, listening to what my clients are telling me and understanding, hey, you don't have to do this. There's no shoulds here. Let's talk about it. And let's see how we can get past this trap because I missed it.

[00:27:37.550] – Dr. Segar

Until we recognize it, we all miss it because we haven't been taught to name it and categorize it. And I want to say something that people that coaches and personal trainers are doing is having their clients take the trap quiz on my website and then going over it with them to see, oh, is rebellion one of your traps? Yes or no? Is it temptation? And it can be a diagnostic for a coach to use with their clients. I personally found it really helpful. But let's move on to the next trap, which is accommodation. And this one is a little counterintuitive. People don't think about this as intuitively as they would think about rebellion or temptation. And it basically refers to whenever we come up against the needs of someone else or work needs, we just instinctively unconsciously drop what we had planned to do for our physical activity or our healthy eating because we say to ourselves, and again, most of this stuff has to do with self talk or unconscious processes that we're not aware of. We just said, oh, I have to join the celebration. I'm going to forget about my plan. I don't even want to eat that cupcake.

[00:28:53.820] – Dr. Segar

But if I don't eat it, it's going to hurt their feelings. And so that's accommodation for eating, where you just kind of decide what I've been doing doesn't matter. I just need to be in the celebration with everyone. Now the reality is there's a ton of ways you can participate in the celebration if you don't have all or nothing thinking. But if you do, then the only option is eat the cupcake. And from an exercise perspective, we see this a lot. And I'm sure you see this all the time. When people have some kind of planned exercise and our work needs, our email inbox, those urgent things are non urgent, but mounting things never go away. And so if we always feel that what our work is more important than our own walk or selfcare, then we're letting accommodation get in the way. And I want to say, people assume that people like you and me, who might be proponents of active lifestyles and self care, that we don't struggle at all with these issues. But I know I do all the time. And this has been a hugely busy time with the book launch.

[00:30:12.430] – Dr. Segar

And I have had to consciously make joy choices day in and day out about my walking because I have a lot more to do right now. And so I'm sure you experienced that too.

[00:30:25.690] – Allan

Yes, that was kind of the interesting thing. As we went through the traps, I was like, okay, well, yeah, that happened. So temptation got me. And then accommodation perfection. I had a hard time finding examples of rebellion for myself. I just kind of looked through, I said, okay, I haven't taken your quiz. So I'm interested. As soon as we get off this call, I'm probably logging in and taking a quiz. But the accommodation was a big one, because what I found was I wanted to work out every afternoon during my lunch hour. And so I would just have it in my mind that as soon as I took my lunch, that was when I was going to go to the gym. Invariably, a meeting would get scheduled. My boss would call, something would be going on, a report. I have to get out today, something I've got to get done. And so I would say, okay, well, I'll just do this instead. And then that day I get my workout. And what I finally found was, okay, what I have to do if I want this to happen is I literally have to block out my calendar as if that's the most important meeting of my day.

[00:31:25.640] – Allan

It's with my boss, myself, but it's with my boss, my real boss, me. And it's not something I can cancel. And so when I made that non negotiable meeting on my calendar, no one else could book a meeting coming up about a half an hour before that meeting, I actually turned my email off, so I wasn't hearing the Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding leading up to that hour. And then when my hours was up, I put my clothes on and I go and maybe my work boss would call. And so I'd say, okay, what do you need? Come on up to my office. I was walking up to his office in my workout closed. He's like, what's going on? He's like, well, I was on my way to the gym. Here I am. What do you need? He said, well, I need this. I'm like, okay, well, I need an hour to get my workout done, and then I'll have it over to you. Cool. And now, would I have done that before? No, because I didn't have the awareness, self awareness that I was letting that accommodation trap happen until I realized, okay, I keep missing workouts because I'm accommodating these other things.

[00:32:26.480] – Allan

And again, I didn't have a label for it exactly. But I just understood that if I didn't take that time back, I would always lose it.

[00:32:35.450] – Dr. Segar

What the book would address in that scenario is, let's say you walked upstairs to talk to your work boss, and what he needed you to do was going to take 25 minutes, and you had another meeting on the hour that you had to take. So the alternative is that instead of saying, oh, I didn't get that hour, what else can I do? In the 35 minutes that I have left, I can't go to the gym like I plan to because I'm not going to get all sweaty. So that's what we're trying to help people learn is how do you navigate in flexible ways? That unexpected thing that did cut into your hour, despite your great strategies of blocking off that time in your calendar, right?

[00:33:24.010] – Allan

Yeah. Now, the last one you had was perfection. And I actually think I know for myself this one's, the one. If I could have solved this one, it probably wouldn't have taken me eight years to figure this all out, because a lot of us suffer from this. And in many cases, it's the perfection trap that then really almost sets off everything else. I mean, all the other traps happen because we're already caught in the perfection trap.

[00:33:52.020] – Dr. Segar

Yeah, I'm smiling really big right now because you couldn't have said it more perfectly. Perfection is the most common one. It's what our society has taught us, socialized indoctrinated, us to do, and it does set the stage, because if perfection is the bar, then of course you're going to rebel and eat the whole piece of cake because there's no in between. You're going to succumb to temptation because you can't have it. You can't have it, and then you're going to rebel against that darn diet anyway. So perfection, you are right. I call it it's so big, I call it a Dragon. It's the all or nothing Dragon. And we have literally been so it's not our fault we have all or nothing thinking or perfectionistic approaches because our society has evolved in a way to teach us. But that is the old behavior change story. It's outdated and misguided many of us. And the great news is the new science offers us a whole new story of behavior change. And it will have a happy ending because it's based on what a body of science shows work. And I don't want to leap into the solution because you're guiding me along.

[00:35:12.140] – Dr. Segar

But perfection is the old story of behavior change and it is outdated.

[00:35:19.550] – Allan

Now with perfection and I think this is really where the breakdown of all this comes together is everybody believes that the reason they're failing is because they lack self control. And regardless, it's almost as if, okay, well, if I had more self control, I wouldn't fall for these traps. But that's not really the case because we don't have a lack of self control. It's not a failure, as you mentioned earlier, it's like we're not broken. We're wired the way we're wired. And it's not that we need more self control, we just need to go into what you call the choice points with our head up and being aware.

[00:36:04.970] – Dr. Segar

That's exactly right. We need to understand that the choice points right now and right now is the place of power because they accumulate over time. And that's why the perfect, imperfect choice or option is the solution, because right now we might make a choice that's imperfect, but it keeps us on the path. And the next now we might hit the Bull's eye, but the next five, we might make another perfectly imperfect choice, but we're still staying consistent. And that reinforces himself and keeps us getting the benefits over time. That continuously reinforced why we're doing it in the first place.

[00:36:51.770] – Allan

So the approach that you take to do the joy choice is called Pop. Again, another acronym. Again, they'll remember this, okay, trap is Temptation, Rebellion, Accommodation, Perfection. And then Pop is the approach that you take to get out of these traps. You recognize the trap. To do that, we've got to do a few things. And that's what the Pop is about. The story you told in the book about one of your clients using this technique I think was really good and I'd like to use that here. And that was the woman who decided, okay, I'm going to do a pool workout five days a week. It's going to be my bridge between my work day and my evening. And in theory, when you say that to a personal trainer, it's like, that sounds brilliant. That should work great until Alex got involved. Yeah, go ahead.

[00:37:51.210] – Dr. Segar

She comes home from work, her in laws are visiting, and she's thrilled to enact this perfect plan. And she hears screaming up in the window and looks up and sees her young son crying because she is in his happy place without him. And he's distraught. And she's like, oh, no, I've been gone all day. But I really want this, my time, this movement, listening to my music in the pool and helping me transition from brain heavy day to heart full evening with my family. And her old way of thinking would have been either I have to choose between meeting Alex's needs, which is not being in the pool and going and getting him or going out of the pool to comfort him, or fully meeting his needs and dropping my pool workout. But we had had a session, and she remembered that instead of letting this is what I say. Instead of letting the circumstances or life burst your bubble, you can pop your plan. And when we say we're going to pop our plan, we are taking ownership of our thinking and the situation. And again, we are not aiming for perfection here. So what did she do?

[00:39:16.660] – Dr. Segar

She popped her plan and pop stands for pause. This is where she said, oh, my gosh, accommodation is staring me in the face. Alex needs me. I'm yearning to go to him, but I know that I can name it and I can say, oh, this is what's happening. I have some control over it. Now, let me get my attention back on the pop process. Then she opened up her options and played with the options. Well, what could she do? She could take a walk after work with her family. She came up with another option that I can't think of off the top of my head. Or she could bring Alex into the pool and play around, walk with him, and basically do a modified pool workout with him. Still getting her physical activity and meeting Alex's needs. And of course, that was like the Ding, Ding, Ding. And she P, she picked the joy choice, which was staying in the pool, worked out to give her the transition she wanted. But instead of doing it alone, Mommy time with music, she decided she would do it and be active with Alex so that she could fulfill these two different what had been conflicting but had a mutuality that she could choose.

[00:40:38.180] – Dr. Segar

So she picked the joy choice, which is what we do at the end of the pop process.

[00:40:43.410] – Allan

Right. And the advantage was this. And this is the kind of added benefit that really wasn't built into her original model. But it worked was she had the in laws get Alex ready for the pool, which gave her, like, five to ten minutes to do the kind of the unwinding thing that she intended to do while she was in the pool. She got her head straight, got herself that transition from work to heart. And then Alex is in the pool with her. It wasn't the workout she intended, but she still got movement in, as you said, the perfect imperfect. And she got it done. And as a result, she was in control. But she had to get that pause. She had to recognize the trap, and then she had to make the decision that was the right decision in the moment for her. The joy choice.

[00:41:31.490] – Dr. Segar

That's right. That's the beauty of it is the joy choice lets us meet the many roles and responsibilities that give our life meaning and still take care of ourselves. And there's a new definition of success. And that's another reason why it's the joy choice, because we are successful when we do something instead of nothing. And she was so proud of herself, and that was the beginning. Once we do it one or two times, it really does become intuitive. And the beauty of it is that once we start doing it with exercise and eating, we actually can do it. I do it in all areas of my life because it's a way for me to regroup and be flexible and pick the most optimal choice for that particular challenge.

[00:42:23.980] – Allan

Yeah. Now, the way this would apply for, like, one with temptation. You talked about in the book, how if you walk by the cafe and you see that croissant, chocolate filled croissant, and it's glistening and it's calling your name and it's a loud voice and you're really struggling to walk away from this cafe and you find yourself in line magically. And then you realize, okay, again, pause. Why am I in this line? And you realize, it's not the chocolate croissant. It's the last time you were at that cafe with your friend, you guys had a wonderful conversation. You had that chocolate croissant. And the blend of the moment is now in your memory. So one of your executive functions has tied into this and said, this croissant is kind of a reminder of kind of a reliving of a great moment in your life. You talk about the chocolate cake your mother made. This is kind of another one of those things. Now, you can recognize that this is temptation.

[00:43:25.810] – Dr. Segar

Absolutely. And when we recognize that it puts it in perspective, it takes away. It's not the dark force that's drawing us in. I mean, if we think about eating the cake as the dark force, then we've already succumbed to it right before we ate it. So once we recognize, oh, Geez, this is what's going on. This is what's going on in my brain. It's not that when we remove the tension that it's this evil thing that we shouldn't have that's off the plan or that we feel that we should do and want to rebel against. We really put ourselves in control. Again, it's a decision. And it doesn't mean that people will decide not to have the croissant, but they're going to do it understanding the meaning it has for them without tension. But they're going to make a conscious choice instead of an unconscious reaction. Or they might say, you know what? I really want that chocolate croissant for all the reasons above, but I don't need to eat the whole thing. I actually would be really satisfied and proud of myself to eat half of it, wrap the other half up, and maybe I'll have it for dessert, or split it with my family after dinner, or I'll save it for the next day.

[00:44:41.410] – Dr. Segar

Learning how to be flexible is the key to sustainability. I mean, the research clearly shows this.

[00:44:48.170] – Allan

Yeah. Especially if you find that you're an unhabitor and you can't sit down and just say, I'm going to do this and stick with it. If you've struggled in the past with that, it's very likely you are an unhabitor. It's likely that you fall into these traps. And if you really go back and think about it, you'll start to see the patterns, and you just have to stop and recognize that pause and recognize when you're repeating that pattern and make another choice.

[00:45:17.530] – Dr. Segar

Absolutely. And it is, again, it's really important for people to recognize am I more like Michelle's husband Job, who's a habitor in all areas of his life, or am I more like Michelle and a little disorganized and a little comfortable keeping dishes in the sink and sometimes feel like, oh my gosh, how am I going to do all these things? So self awareness and fit is really the structure we need to set us up for success long term.

[00:45:49.930] – Allan

And so in the book, you give us a lot of tools as we start going through this process, because we can say it pop and go through it and we can talk about examples. But the reality is that you get good at this or get better at this by practice.

[00:46:08.290] – Dr. Segar

Like anything, like anything. Like any new things, we need to give ourselves Grace when we don't do it, quote, unquote as well as we hoped we would or thought we should anytime we learn something new, it's a learning process. And giving ourselves Grace is like we should give other people Grace when they're learning how to do something. That's a really important part of this, too. And that's part of why it's the joy choice, because it's all about being forgiven forgiving. It's about being imperfect like we are honoring that and making sure that our strategies for physical activity and healthy eating match with the imperfect lives that many of us live.

[00:46:59.470] – Allan

Dr. Siegar, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:47:08.770] – Dr. Segar

I think understanding that we need self-awareness is the fundamental element. Without self awareness, we can't know what we need, we can't know what we want. So first and foremost, we have to have the intention of becoming more self aware. Then when we decide that we want to do something toward our happiness or wellness, we want to make sure that what we're choosing to embark on is the right thing at the right time. So, for example, if someone now, this is different for different people. And this is why self awareness is really key to understand this. So for example, if someone just has a baby, they have a brand new newborn baby and they're like, I've got to get fit right now. They have a newborn that's a week old, that doesn't sleep through the night, and that person decides they're going to start working out every day or whatever. I would say that is probably the wrong thing at the wrong time. And the workout has to be perfect. Now, exercise is a great way to facilitate your sleep. But if you add something to grandiose onto an already overwhelming situation. So that's where fit of what we're doing when is really important.

[00:48:26.610] – Dr. Segar

So I just want to take a step back and say physical activity is great for new moms. It's the overarching plan that they create that would be important. And of course, walking with your newborn is a great way to be active. But that's just an example. You said, how do you do it? You want to make sure that what you're doing is the right thing for the right time. And then the third thing is, I think considering whatever you're doing as a process of learning, where one day you're going to have a couple of steps forward, you're going to hit the bullseye, and the other days you might have to make joy choices. And that the goal isn't perfection, it's staying on the path through doing something instead of nothing.

[00:49:10.510] – Allan

Great. Thank you. If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book, The Joy Choice, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:49:19.150] – Dr. Segar

Well, the book should be everywhere. So they can go to their local bookstore. They can get it online through booksellers online. If they want to take the quiz and learn more about the book, they can go to my website, which is michellesegar.com

[00:49:35.590] – Allan

awesome. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/538 and I'll be sure to have links there. Dr. Segar, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:49:45.910] – Dr. Segar

Thanks for having me. It was really fun to talk with you.

[00:49:48.950] – Allan

Me, too. Thank you.

Post Show/Recap

[00:49:57.470] – Allan

Welcome back, Ras.

[00:49:59.090] – Rachel

Hey, Allan. With an interesting conversation you had. There's a couple of things I'd like to talk about. But first, I'd like to talk about setting or creating habits. It sounds like it's still a good thing to do, but not everybody is able to create habits quite as easily as everyone else.

[00:50:14.010] – Allan

Yeah, there are people that they decide they want to do something, they're going to start taking a multivitamin or they're going to change something the way they do something. And then pretty easily after that, they're just doing it. They're not even thinking about it anymore. For most people, for a lot of people, works fairly well. If you do it long enough, it's different for everybody. You may have heard numbers out there, like 21 days or 66 days or whatever. And the reality is that the science that's out there, while there was an average of 66 days to make an action automatic or feel automatic where you weren't thinking about doing it, you just did it. 66 was the average. But the spread on that was really wide. Some people less than two weeks, other people almost a year. And so you can't just say 66 days. But for a lot of people, if you get to doing a simple thing over and over, eventually it just becomes a habit. You get up in the morning, you brush your teeth, you put the coffee on, you walk the dog. There's simple things that become like a ritual when you do them.

[00:51:31.890] – Allan

But big caveat, it really only works for simple things. When you want to do something like food prep or something like that, that's a whole series of actions. Then you have to go deeper than a habit because habits not going to get you there like that. There are habitors, like she said, like her husband, that once they start doing something, it does. So if you're doing Sunday meal prep, Saturday grocery shop, maybe Sunday morning grocery shop, and then Sunday meal prep, yes, that can become like a normal thing on your schedule that you get to doing and feel like a habit. But most of us are not going to feel comfortable that that's an automatic thing. And then anything that gets in the way pop, we're out of it. And we may not even go back the next Sunday and do it because we stopped doing it this Sunday before.

[00:52:27.630] – Rachel

That's a good point. Which brings me to the other thing that I think is more useful is that Traps acronym that she had for the decision disruptors. And the reason why that was such a light bulb moment, I love the phrase decision disruptors because we are all trying to make good decisions. We're trying to eat healthy and be active and stuff. But just things tend to get in the way. And her acronym of Traps kind of outline some of those things, some of those reasons why it's hard for us to stick or make these better choices.

[00:52:59.730] – Allan

Yeah. The temptation one is fairly common. And you'll see, so you go to work and a vendor brings Donuts.

[00:53:08.500] – Rachel

Right.

[00:53:09.410] – Allan

And you had no intention of eating the Donuts. You're even doing intermittent fasting. So you haven't eaten since dinner and you weren't going to eat until lunch. And you walk in the break room and there's those doughnuts, and you find yourself grabbing one of the doughnuts without really even thinking about it. And there you are. The rebellion is one that I don't see as often, but I see it from time to time. Accommodation is probably one of the most important ones because it's something that particularly women who are caregivers to their children, they take priority. Taking them to soccer practice, picking them up from dance, and just shuttling your kids around Burns up so much of your time that it's really hard to take time for yourself. And then Unfortunately, I think a lot of women will feel guilty taking that time away. I want to go for a run, but that's 45 minutes that I'm not here with my child.

[00:54:15.870] – Rachel

My guilt is strong, and it's definitely a driver in a lot of our decisions. But what I tell people is I tell people you can't fill from an empty cup. You need to take the time for yourself and take care of yourself before you can care for others adequately. But yes, I can definitely see that one. And the last one she had being perfection. That's a big one, too.

[00:54:40.090] – Allan

Yeah. She's absolutely right there, because so many of us are all or none.

[00:54:47.680] – Rachel

Yes.

[00:54:48.930] – Allan

And I'll admit when I learn about myself, when I think about myself and I've done that self awareness thing that I had to do, I recognize, though, that I do pretty much have to be all on or I'm off. I need to push towards that. But it also creates those other problems. And I've worked with people like this. I have a client right now that's going through some of this, and he wants to eat keto, but this is going on. This child graduated from this that one's going here and there's this party that he has to go to. And so he finds himself off keto, and it just creates this cycle of and unfortunately, guilt, which he shouldn't feel. We villainize food, and so we feel like we've let ourselves down if we are not perfect. And the reality is if we know that perfect isn't possible.

[00:55:55.390] – Rachel

Right.

[00:55:57.610] – Allan

Particularly for us, it's like something's going to come up. I can't think of a year that I've gone through that there wasn't a holiday or birthday, right?

[00:56:05.520] – Rachel

Yeah, there's always something, isn't there?

[00:56:09.370] – Allan

So at some point you're going to go to a party or go to dinner. At some point, somebody's going to bring Donuts to the break room and you're going to end up eating one. That's fine. The point that she was getting at was don't let that be what beats you, right. The joy choice in her book. It's about finding your path where you feel good about your decisions. And so if you can get rid of that concept that these are bad foods and good foods and bad food, then you kind of get to where this is all at and we're going to have another guest on in a few weeks. And his name is Alan Aragon and he's got an excellent book as well. And it goes really deep into some of these same concepts of ways that you can look at just doing better than you're doing now. And then he talks about this concept of discretionary calories. The way he puts it together is if you're eating your calorie level, Then it's okay if up to 20% of your total calories is coming from stuff that you would put in a bad food list.

[00:57:35.850] – Rachel

Sure.

[00:57:36.360] – Allan

So if you decide, okay, I want to have a Coca Cola And you're like, okay, that's sugar. I don't need that sugar. But I can fit that in my calories for the day. And because I know I'm getting good nutrition otherwise, that 80%. Then I know, okay, I can have the Coke and still stay under my calories, then that's fine. And so it's just trying to get away from the perfect is really important. So looking for tools, looking for things that are going to help you just kind of go through this and then it's hard, don't get me wrong, it's probably the hardest thing to do Because it's the mindset of change. So different things we talked about in this interview. There's even more in the book those tools and things that you can do. So I encourage anyone that's struggling with mindset, struggling with this willpower motivation, habits stuff. This is a good book Because it's just down to Earth stuff. It's science based. So she did go back into the science, looked it up. But at the same time, it kind of gives you a way to get through this without feeling like you've failed every single time you're not on plan.

[00:58:54.980] – Rachel

That's wonderful. That sounds like a really useful book and I love that it offers tools to help people get through these really tough traps like she had mentioned and these other tough situations. I think that's fantastic.

[00:59:07.490] – Allan

All right. Well, Rachel, I'll talk to you next week.

[00:59:10.100] – Rachel

Great. Take care.

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How to customize yourself for better health with Chuck Rose

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Let's Say Hello

[00:02:34.450] – Allan

Hey, Ras, how are things?

[00:02:36.260] – Rachel

Good, Allan. How are you today?

[00:02:38.260] – Allan

I'm doing all right. Tammy got on an airplane about 15 minutes before we started recording this to fly out for a vacation trip that she's taking with her friend. It was one of those pre-covid trips that got canceled. And so now it's like she's now on the list and got to go. So she's going to be enjoying herself for two weeks, and then I'm going to be responsible for Lula's, which will be interesting. No, I've done it before for her to go back to the States for things. It's just going to stick for two weeks and it's a slower period right now, but just some additional moving parts in my life, but otherwise everything's going well.

[00:03:18.560] – Rachel

Good. Glad to hear it.

[00:03:20.650] – Allan

All right. Well, are you ready to talk to Clint Emerson?

[00:03:23.960] – Rachel

Sure. Sounds great.

Interview

[00:03:51.790] – Allan

Clint, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:03:54.460] – Clint

Hi. How are you doing, buddy? Nice to be here.

[00:03:56.700] – Allan

So your book is called The Rugged Life: the Modern Guide to Self Reliance. And I think a lot of folks will sit there and probably wonder, well, why on Earth would Allan have somebody talking about self-reliance and homesteading and all of those types of things on a health and fitness podcast? But in my mind, self-reliance and health and fitness are like intertwined. They're like hand in glove. You can't really have one without the other in a grand sense of things. I guess you can be healthy and fit without having some of these things. But I think some of the things that you get and we'll get into that in a few minutes from living a little bit more of a rugged life actually enhances your health and fitness.

[00:04:43.750] – Clint

Yeah, exactly. You just nailed it. Like I always say, on the crisis side or with 100 Deadly Skill book series, first and foremost, your human performance is everything. To be able to get yourself out of trouble, to get your family out of trouble, you've got to have at least the heart, the lungs and the strength to get yourself away from whatever that threat is. And it could be natural disasters, man made events, you name it. It's out there. And rugged life really is stretching out. It's what you do as a lifestyle, the things you do everyday that can one give you far more fulfillment. And you get a Huger sense of satisfaction when you're doing it yourself. And most of the things that whether it's hunting, building, fishing or farming or whatever it is, those are physical activities. You're going to probably get in better shape than just visiting the gym for an hour to each day. So I think you hit it dead on is that living a more rugged life will exponentially increase your health, both mentally, physically and emotionally.

[00:06:02.830] – Allan

Now, in our world where, yeah, I've got a gem half a mile away from my home, we can call Uber Eats and they'll deliver just about anything you want. Netflix is on, Hulu or whatever your streaming service, or maybe you got more than one of them. We have everything pretty much at our fingertips. We don't have to lift a finger to do anything. And I think it probably might have been even about 20 years ago when the Internet was really just getting started someone wanted to do the experiment to see if they could stay in their house for an entire year and never leave. And way back then, back in the late 90s or so, this guy was able to do it early 2000s, late 90s, was able to literally stay at home for an entire year and not get out. Now, for many of us, we are in a situation with COVID where we weren't permitted if we lived in the city, particularly to get out. Now, I kind of kicked myself when we came down here at Panama, I didn't choose the rugged life. We chose something a little bit easier, an apartment in town, which meant we were pretty much trapped in our apartment in town with the lockdowns they did here, which were a lot more stringent than the United States.

[00:07:15.610] – Allan

Our friends who lived out and about on different Islands, generating their own electricity, catching their own water, living a little bit more of a rugged life than we were. They had a lot more autonomy, a lot more freedom. So that's kind of one of the reasons why I think the rugged life now appeals to me a little bit more than it might have before is seeing it firsthand. My friends were actually able to get out in the sun for more than 2 hours twice a week and walk around and do things. But for the normal person, what is this rugged life that we're talking about? And why would it be something that someone would want to do when there are so many easy ways to live our lives today?

[00:07:55.750] – Clint

Yeah, man, you had a bunch of great stuff. I think. First I'll start by answering the question with the pandemic certainly taught us all that being a little more self reliant can be very valuable. It can be important. It can just allow a certain level of independence and freedom that you can't get if you are reliant on all these other things that you mentioned. So I would say first and foremost, you don't have to dive 100% into the rugged life. I've built the book so that you can just dip your toe if you want. You living in an apartment in an urban environment can do a lot, even with limited space, to increase your self reliance and actually fend for yourself, whether it's these vertical gardens now, I mean, you can grow just about anything inside your apartment in the corner with very little maintenance. It's just time, right? Just wait for things to grow and then, you know, you've got it. Or if you decide you dip your toe a couple of times and you like all these different little projects that you're doing and you're realizing, Holy, Holy crap. This is actually not just is it giving me something in return, but the hard work that goes into it just feels so much better than using an app, right?

[00:09:14.610] – Clint

I mean, you don't get any satisfaction except the fat pill that shows up to your doorstep by using all the different Uber eats and whatever else is out there, having your groceries delivered to your door. Yeah, that's pretty cool. But what if you could just grow some of those things yourself and that's just a piece of it, right. If you're not into the farming aspect, then maybe it's the hunting. If you're not in the hunting, and maybe it's just being your own handyman, being your own power grid, be your own homemaker. I mean, I was surprised at how many household products, especially in the hygiene and the hygiene and grooming side of the house, that if you just got beeswax and some coconut oil, you can make shampoos, pomades and conditioners. Right. So the other piece to this whole thing with the rugged life is it's more like a family experiment if you get the whole family involved. I feel like it brings everybody together because we are so stuck on technology these days. You have an entire family sitting in a living room. It's on Netflix, like you mentioned, but everybody is still on their own personal devices and there's no solid family time.

[00:10:29.480] – Clint

So rugged life, at whatever level you want to kind of live it. You will find out that whether it's one project or a dozen projects, when the whole family is involved, you're just going to all be so much more healthier. You're going to get that camaraderie going again. And you're not just a bunch of individuals living in the house together.

[00:10:54.430] – Allan

Yeah. It's interesting being down here. I run into a lot of people that they do this thing. They say, okay, look, this is so cool. There's this island, I'm going to go out there. It's just land. It's just raw land. It's jungle. We're going to clear a little bit of it. We're going to build a house. We're going to use solar, we're going to use water catchment. We're going to do these different things like composting, and we're going to have a garden. And this just goes on and on. And what happens, though, invariably, is that they move down here, they make that happen. They build their dream house. And then as a couple, one or both of them kind of decide after a period of time that this was not what they signed up for. They miss some of the creature comforts that they had because they kind of went a little too far into the woods. The jungle, if you will, before really going through and analyzing. Okay. Is this really me? Is this really me long term? Is this a project that I'm going to do and then get bored with? In your book, you had what you call the top ten are you sure about this thing? Could you go through some of those to help someone kind of see because it sounds so cool off the grid, doing this thing, growing my own food, chickens, you know, the whole bit. It's a lot of work.

[00:12:25.270] – Clint

You are correct. It is, yeah. Some of the top ten is basic questions like, do you like vacations? Because guess what? As soon as you bring in animals, you're not leaving because you got to take care of them 24/7. Right. You are going to live to take care of animals that in rich parent are going to take care of you. So going on a vacation becomes very difficult. You really have to like the people that you and your family. Right. You all love each other, of course, but you have to like each other because you're going to be working as a team like you never have before. And you're really going to see people's strengths and weaknesses, and everyone's going to have to adapt. But ultimately, you just hit it again. It's very romantic to think that, hey, yeah, we're going to go buy a chunk of land in the mountains, and we're going to build a cabin. We're going to have this awesome fireplace every night. And I'm going to be butchering these big steaks. And it sounds all great. It really does. And everybody should aspire to do it. But there is nothing easy about it. And that's why it's the rugged life. It can be very hard work at times, but the return on that hard work is far better than what you get from going to the grocery store, though. That is convenient. And so there's a balance. If convenience is at one end of the spectrum and then the rugged life is at the other. Right. Anything rugged isn't going to be convenient. Anything convenient isn't really going to be all that rugged. So you just got to find that happy medium for you and your family.

[00:14:10.500] – Clint

And that's why I do not suggest just jumping in 100% because you might find out that you hate it. I definitely push the hey, take some of the projects in the book and see if it's something that appeals to you. And the other biggest piece to all of it is that you're going to fail and you're going to fail over and over again. You may spend a lot of time getting the perfect soil, mix it with the compost going, then everything to make the perfect vegetables. And then those things never grow or they die or a predator comes along and eats them for you before you even get a chance.

[00:14:50.470] – Clint

Right. So there's a lot of frustration, a lot of fail. So you have to be prepared for that and be the kind of person that's going to go you know what? I'm not giving up. I'm going to keep going. I want to keep going until I get this right. And so if you're that kind of person and you enjoy learning, then you should give it a shot for sure.

[00:15:10.550] – Allan

Now, the cool thing about this and that's what I like is while you talk about that continuum of convenience to the rugged life is you can pick and choose your battles. You don't have to be in a cabin in the middle of the woods. Like you said, it can be something as simple as saying I'm going to do a few of these things for myself. And I like that concept of saying, okay, I can pick and choose now, one that I like to pick where I would pick. If you're really thinking about your health and fitness so that, you know the food you're putting in your mouth is there's nothing better than you being responsible for growing that food, particularly with vegetables. Vegetables. It can be simple as a vertical garden. It can be herb garden, it can be tomatoes. And I like your idea of upside down tomato growing right there. Can you go through some of the considerations of why we would want to grow our own food? And then if we're going to grow our own food, what do we want to think about as far as the approach and what we do?

[00:16:12.030] – Allan

Because it sounds simple. Put a seed in the ground. And having been in a family where we did a garden, we had three acres for basically, I think it was six of us, it was a lot of work. What are some considerations and things to think about if you're going to start growing your own food and where are some lines, like if I'm going to try to grow food for my whole family versus just have some additional good quality food for me on my plate each night?

[00:16:38.720] – Clint

Yeah. I think a good starting point is always what climate zone do you live in? Right. So if you have this dream of avocados. Right. And you're going to grow them and you're going to have as many avocados per day because it's a superfood and it's awesome and you can heat it 24/7, which I can you really have to start with climate zone. Right. And this is old school Farmers Almanac type stuff. Where you go, all right, where do I live and what am I going to have the highest success rate of growing that actually benefits my health. And so that's going to narrow the list really quick. So that's where I would start is the research and also talking to local farmers, going to some of your farmer markets and talking to everybody, selling any of the vegetables and fruits they have going there. And getting educated is like the biggest number one step so that you increase your success. Next, once you figure out what that is, it's a good idea to start indoors. Right. You can set up a basic lighting bank and get the seeds, the kick start they need with a little bit of soil.

[00:17:57.090] – Clint

And once they actually start to grow, you actually see them break the surface of the little pods that you put them in. Then you can basically put them outside using just common language. You're taking something that started growing and you're going to transplant it to outdoors. And it's a very fragile moment, but it'll be fine making sure the soil outside matches the soil that they're in. And then now they're outside in sunlight and on their own. And you're going to have to obviously give some care and maintenance. You're going to have to do research on pest control, any of the other predators that might want to nibble on whatever it is you're growing and basically put up whatever fortifications you need, which a lot of times just chicken wire over your garden will keep out the birds and any of those little ground animals like rabbits that want to come in and get a free meal. But I think the biggest piece is really doing the research in terms of what's going to give you that highest level of success in the area in which you live. And you really got to pinpoint it, especially like where I'm at Texas.

[00:19:07.730] – Clint

North Texas is far different than South Texas. And what you can grow in one, you can't grow in the other, even though you're in the same state.

[00:19:16.430] – Allan

Yeah. You have a really cool map in the book that kind of breaks it down into zones. Obviously, I'm a lot further south than any of your zones, and we can do avocados here. One of the interesting things is when you plant that, you have to set your expectations. You won't have avocados for ten years and then you won't have avocados at all if your dog digs up the plant.

[00:19:39.590] – Clint

Exactly. And that's a great point, because people do on that same point. They think about like Apple tree or an Orange tree or a peach tree. But you're still talking several years before you really get to the good fruit that tree produces. And like here in Texas, the pecan industry is huge. Right. And monetizing acreage, let's say you've got a couple of acres and you can put 50 to 100 trees, but a pecan tree is going to start producing pecans for ten years. Right. Like I said, it's still that you have to do that amount of research and put it in and then also regulate expectation. Right. Expectation management is a big part of all this, like you just pointed out.

[00:20:29.690] – Allan

But the advantages are this. You know what's in your food, if you use pesticides, you know it, if you use something in it, you know it, you know the seeds, whether they're heirloom or there's some of something else. But you know the food because you were in hand. And I can tell you when you grow your own food, it actually tastes better because you have a pride of ownership while you're eating that food that you just don't get when you walk into a restaurant or have Uber Eats deliver it to you.

[00:21:01.190] – Clint

Yeah, no doubt.

[00:21:03.470] – Allan

Okay, again, you can do all of this if you live in the right climate. You can do all your food. It can be plant based and it can be awesome if you can grow enough and you need to, again, make sure you are growing enough if that's what you're going to do. But for a lot of folks, we are meat eaters, so on the board. So we're going to want a little bit of meat in there too. And that's where things like raising your own animals, you talked about some considerations there as far as vacations and other things you got to do hunting and fishing, which there are also some general considerations about that. Why would we want to raise our own animals, do hunting and fishing? Why would we want to go through the effort of doing that? And then what are some things we need to think about to go through that process? What that's all about?

[00:21:54.170] – Clint

Yeah, harvesting anything like you pointed out, is going to be healthier in the long run. But it's also important to note it might not be cheaper. I think a lot of folks think that, hey, I might save money by having chickens. Well, not at first. And it's going to take a while to get an egg for as cheap as you would buy an egg at a grocery store. It takes a while to get there because you have to invest. But something like chickens are somewhat easy. And it's important to note you have egg chickens and you've got meat chickens. The egg chickens obviously good at laying eggs almost all year round. You might have to put some lighting because they lay eggs based on the sun. And then you've got your meat chickens, which don't really produce very good eggs, but man, they're good to eat. There's even one breeded chicken that you literally have to Butcher it at about eight to twelve weeks because it gets so fat its own legs will snap. So there's a lot the thing about rugged life is each chapter is novels on their own of information that could be written, no doubt about it.

[00:23:07.580] – Clint

But growing your own meat, yes, it locks you at home, but you know where it's been, what it's eaten and what it's doing 24/7. So the safety and eating it, the health benefits in eating it are all just automatically there when you've been doing it. And what I've also pointed out in the book is if the farming aspect of harvesting your own meat isn't your thing, then hunting certainly is the other option, because then it doesn't require you to be stuck at home raising these animals, whether it's chickens, goats, pigs, you name it. So then you can go Hunt. And with hunting it's popular. Bow hunting has become more popular these days, so a lot of variance to going and hunting, but that has its own skill and set of patience and work that goes with it. There is some investment, but I would say buying a rifle and ammunition is cheaper than raising or keeping pigs, for example. If you don't do it right, they can destroy everything. And the same with goats. People see these goats when they go to yoga, climbing on them and like, oh, I want one. But what they don't know is those things will eat the tires off your car if you leave them there long enough with your vehicle.

[00:24:38.030] – Clint

But overall, once again, knowing where your meat is, looking out for it 24/7, butchering it and serving it to yourself. I mean, that goes back to where our country was 200 some years ago, where every man, woman and child were self reliant. And they had all of these skills in the book and then some because it was just a way of life. And by drawing from a couple of these things here and there, you might find out that you like it as well.

[00:25:15.360] – Allan

Yeah. A couple of things that you can consider. In my opinion, if you don't want to go, like, full on with all of this stuff, is it's very common for folks to go in with a farmer. They know everybody goes in with the money, they buy calves, and they know where that's being raised. And there's kind of like a co op, if you will. So it's one way to kind of get around of you having to buy the land and you having to run the animals is that someone who's more skilled at that. But there's a great opportunity for you to learn those skills. Also, with the hunting and fishing is often you can get into groups. I know we would go hunting back in the day. They'd run dogs. So you'd have the guys running their beagles. And we'd all set up in different spots. And then you get done and it's like, okay, the dog that did the chase, he's going to get his first pick. And then the guy who shot the deer is going to get his pick. And then, yeah, the rest of us, if we didn't happen to hit that day, we're getting a little bit of something there.

[00:26:15.210] – Allan

So it's an opportunity to kind of get those things. I can say the hunting and fishing is hit or miss if you're going by yourself, but there are opportunities for you to get involved and try some of these things. And maybe to me, the biggest challenge of a lot of this, if you haven't done it before and you have a lot of great advice in the book, is the butchering of the animal, which is something that many people haven't experienced. But once you start getting into it, it's like, okay, now I understand where my cuts of meat come from. I know what this animal's life was like. And you're right, it's kind of intense, but it's a good intense to know the quality of your food and to know where it's coming from and to know that you had a hand in either making it or killing or catching it.

[00:27:05.210] – Clint

Yeah, you are dead on. And for people that want to try, kinda like the easy route, but it's also somewhat difficult. Homesteading World rabbits have been very popular. And because you can in a very short period of time. And I point out in there rabbits, they do hump like rabbits within a short period of time. With six rabbits, you can turn that into 46 kits or so. And then before you know it, you've got enough meat to eat five days a week for a family of four. And it's just exponential with rabbits. And they're smaller and easier meat to manage, especially if you don't have the land. But yeah, there's a lot of options. You make some great points doing things as a group. And the co op options, both with eggs, milk and meat, are all out there and available these days.

[00:28:05.390] – Allan

Yes, I'm going to tell this story probably shouldn't, because it's just kind of embarrassing. But I'm going to say I'm going to tell you anyway. I had a friend and they raised rabbits. That was their thing. They raised rabbits and they had the kids, the cages for themselves set up. And you try to check the rabbit to know if it's a boy or girl, and it's really hard to tell. And so they thought they had these two boy and a girl, and they put them in the cage and they were fighting. So they assume now, okay, they must both be boys and they're fighting. So the father wanted us to kill one of the rabbits. He picked one of them. He said, go kill the rabbit. And so we go out there, we grab the rabbit, and he hands it to me and I go to grab the rabbit. I'm holding it against my chest, and the rabbit just kind of rests its chin right there on my neck.

[00:28:54.090] – Clint

And you're like, I can't do it.

[00:28:55.540] – Allan

Yeah. And so a little tear starts coming down my eye. I'm 15 years old. My friend turns around, he looks at me and he looks at me for just a second. Then he gets a tear in his eye. And his father drives up about this time in his truck and he looks at the two of us. He says, damn it, build another cage.

[00:29:15.930] – Clint

Yeah, that sounds about right. That's what I said. It's easy, but also could be difficult because killing a rabbit. Yeah. They're so soft and cuddly. It's the last thing you want to kill. And they know that, too, about themselves,I think.

[00:29:32.960] – Allan

Okay, this one did because that chin on the chest, on my shoulder, that was enough to say, okay, this one gets a second chance.

[00:29:42.030] – Clint

That's awesome.

[00:29:43.010] – Allan

But I think that's the other thing that I wanted to kind of get to with this is that you start having a newfound respect for the food that you're eating. So the concept of waste, the concept of just going out and doing something for the sake of doing it. You really get a sense of what the cost of this is, not just from a financial perspective of what we're dealing with, but just knowing that what you're doing is about survival, about you doing the right things for yourself. Again, I think you approach this with a very different mindset. Maybe you do eat less meat because the emotional cost of raising the meat for you is a little bit higher. And as a result, you're eating less red meat and maybe a little bit more vegetables, a little bit more plant based. And in the end, that turns out to be a more helpful choice for you.

[00:30:37.590] – Clint

Yeah, I think you're right. You're investing more than just money. When you go down this path, there's time and effort, then there's on the receiving end, whatever it is you're deciding to grow or harvest what it's given back to you. And so there's this relationship that forms with a lot of what you're doing, and every aspect of it becomes valuable, and you don't want any of it to go to waste. I think with people just do one little thing here and there, holistically they will kind of start to grow up in a different way than what we're used to, because these modern conveniences and technology, I think we all know it and we see it all the time that these things are necessary evil. And I mean, look at us now. It does give us these great capabilities. I'm communicating from Texas to Panama like live feed right now. And that aspect is just incredible. Right. But at the same size really makes us lazy and complacent. Like I said, 200 years ago, everybody knew this stuff, and now it's very rare, and it took a pandemic for people to wake up and go, oh, yeah, it might be a good idea that I know how to make something as simple as hand sanitizer.

[00:32:01.900] – Clint

Right. We all learned it really quick when the shelves got empty, along with toilet paper, which is really odd. But now that we're somewhat through it, this is an opportunity to really embrace it and start trying new and different things. And hopefully that's the kind of impact the book has on everyone. Yeah.

[00:32:24.340] – Allan

And I think other folks are going to look at it and say, okay, there's also the aspects of inflation and where my food is coming from. You look at some of these industrial plants where they're bringing in meat or eggs or whatever, and it's just horrific to see some of the stuff that they do to these animals. And to know that you can do this in a different, more sustainable way, I think is really a big step. Plus, again, not initially, but over time, just depending on what goes on in the world, being self reliant, having the sustainable source of something, whether it's vegetables, food, whatever, meat or whatever and being able to Hunt for yourself, being able to fish for yourself, those things is going to give you a way of having control. When inflation is out of your control and you just have to pay what the market costs. When you want to have a steak or have some fish or have some eggs, you just pay what the market is versus if you are doing your own thing and get to a point of sustainability, it's now just about you taking care of the animals and them taking care of you, as you said earlier.

[00:33:39.090] – Clint

Yup, you've nailed it. I mean, it's a crazy world and I'm not a fear monger by any means, but reality is reality. You come out of a pandemic, you've got Russia invading countries, you have interest rates already going through the roof. The economy is screwed because of supply chain issues. Supply chain issues aren't getting fixed because other countries are still dealing with the pandemic which slows things down. And recovery is just going to take a while. The economy is always kind of like this accordion and the impact of today, we may not recover for a couple of years down the road. And so being more self sufficient and self reliant.

[00:34:23.250] – Allan

Alright, well, Clint, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:34:33.990] – Clint

it's a good question. Number one, having a routine that looks after you first, right? I always have to tell myself, look out for myself first each day. And that's only because if I let the day get a hold of me, then I may not actually do anything for myself. And when I say that, I mean you get up and you work out, right? And get that workout under your belt. It's also the same as, hey, I get my coffee, the MCT oil and collagen in my system right off the bat as well because I'm looking out for myself first and then, okay, sit down and organize your mind, right? So I'm a big list guy. So get those lists and keep your mind healthy and get the clutter out and down on paper. And then start tackling those tasks in the order of priorities in which whatever it is you're dealing with for the day. And then of course, you have to power yourself. So make sure you're taking in the things that fuel the body and fuel the mind. I like the intermittent fast. I feel like it's done. Everyone is different about that kind of stuff.

[00:35:49.190] – Clint

But for me, waiting till around lunch time to really start taking in calories seems to work. And then I pretty much eat somewhat healthy from lunchtime till about six or seven. And then that's it. I think regulating and getting into a routine and then implementing what can I do that's healthy for the mind, healthy for the body, healthy for the spirit and then just integrate that into my day. Then boom, it becomes automatic after some time, and then before you know it, you realize, wow, I feel a hell of a lot better than I did a year ago. And that's how it should be, right? Every year you get older, you should be able to go, I feel better than I did last year. Hey, you know what? I feel better than I did last year, even though I'm getting older and it seems to be working. But I don't know. I'm no expert.

[00:36:43.930] – Allan

It's working. Clint, if someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about your book, The Rugged Life, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:36:53.350] – Clint

Yeah, my entire ecosystem is @clintemerson.com super simple. You can pre-order or order the books right now, right there. And I really do appreciate your time and any of your listeners that go check clintemerson.com out or my Instagram page. I thank you ahead of time.

[00:37:12.140] – Allan

All right. Well, thank you so much, Clint, for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:37:16.870] – Clint

No, thanks for having me, buddy. You got a great thing going.

[00:37:19.520] – Allan

All right. Thank you.

Post Show/Recap

[00:37:27.590] – Allan

Welcome back, Ras.

[00:37:29.270] – Rachel

Hey, Allan. Wow. I'm telling you, you're speaking my love language here. We talk a lot about home studying at our house up here.

[00:37:36.650] – Allan

Yeah, I see a lot of videos. I know that your husband is a Hunter and a fisherman and just kind of the whole idea of the whole concept of going out in a hut on a Lake and cutting a hole in the ice and sitting there, not my thing. I'll take my kayak out here in the water and cast out or fish from a beach. But I think the thing that I wanted people to take away from here is understanding the source of your food and taking that on as a personal challenge, to be more involved in the food. It's good for you. And it's great for the younger generations who in some cases have no concept whatsoever of what this stuff is and potentially how bad some of it can be. I would never encourage anyone to really go spend a whole lot of time diving into this, because it's not pretty how animals can be mistreated and terribly raised. So the more you're able to get involved, the more you're able to create sustainable opportunities for yourself. It doesn't have to be a huge thing, a small herb garden, a small this or that, going in with a few friends and finding a co op.

[00:38:58.810] – Allan

And you mentioned a few cool things.

[00:39:01.100] – Rachel

Yes, we do a lot of gardening at our house, and I say we very generally I do not have a green thumb. It's all my daughter and husband, they're way more skilled at this type of thing than I am. But we choose our vegetable gardens based on how we eat, and we tend to eat a lot of peppers and tomatoes. We do a lot of herbs. So we choose some pretty easy things to grow. And we put some in the ground, some in pots, like herbs can decorate your kitchen. It would look lovely and smell lovely to have some good herbs in your kitchen. And then on top of that, if gardening isn't your thing, our local community has an area in town where you could for a low price of just $20 in the entire summer. They'll give you maybe a ten by 20 or so square foot area where you could grow whatever vegetables you are so inclined to grow. So if there's no room on your property, there's a place to go. And also my brother and sister in law, they have been doing a co op where for a weekly fee, they get handed a bag of vegetables, which is really fun from their local farm because you never know what you're going to get.

[00:40:10.720] – Rachel

So you can get really creative in the kitchen if you're getting some vegetables that you may not normally Cook with. So there's a lot of affordable options if growing isn't your thing. So that's what to look into.

[00:40:23.490] – Allan

And the reality of it is there's some work involved. I grew up and we had three acres, and so that was a chore. And then after you get the food, you have to think in terms of you don't want it to go to waste. Like, we had plum trees and there was like three or four plum trees and they would all come ripening at the same time. I can personally tell you from experience, don't eat a lot of plums at one time. Plums are prunes, okay? They're just moisture prunes, and they will do the same thing. So what you end up doing is saying, what are the preservation techniques that I can employ to keep this food and have it for later? So you talk about tomatoes and you can tomatoes. You learn how to use the Mason jars and hot water and creating pressure and put the caps on and letting it sit and hear that pop. And you're like, OK, we're good. Same thing with the preserves that we did for, like I said, the plums, we would do that also with blackberries. The BlackBerry preserves went very, very fast, though.

[00:41:35.190] – Rachel

That would be delicious.

[00:41:36.650] – Allan

They were. But that's the whole point. We knew where our food was coming from, the chickens and Ducks and turkeys that we raised. We knew what they were eating, we knew where they were. And so that gave us some ownership there and changed behaviors because it wasn't the simple thing of throwing things out and not utilizing them because you knew the cost and you knew what was involved with the fishing and the hunting. It was like, okay, we know where our meat is coming from. And we know sometimes we're going to be lucky and have a good harvest, if you will. And then other times we're not. And we have to look at what's going on. Why aren't there as many deer? And maybe it's a good thing we're not getting a big harvest this year Because if there's not enough deer for us to see the deer, Then maybe we don't need to be hunting the deer as much. So it allows you to get more creative with understanding the environment you're in and hunting and fishing and growing your own, raising your own. I think those are just huge opportunities for us to become more self sufficient.

[00:42:41.610] – Allan

And Clint book, again, it is about being resilient, it's about being self sufficient. And it goes a lot deeper. He teaches things about welding, solar panels, water. So all the things that you would say if I was really going to homestead and figure stuff out for myself. And is it a complete manual for how to do this? No, but it is an excellent source. If you're saying I really want to start figuring out I want to buy that cabin in the woods and move there. I want to buy that house, that property down there here about Bocas del toro, where I can own my own island for less than $200,000 And I can build a sustainable house with solar water catchment and all that. This will give you some general ideas about what's involved in doing that and kind of coming to the conclusion. And I really cut out to do that Because so many people move down here and say, yeah, this sounds great until we go three weeks without rain. Or we go three weeks with rain.

[00:43:46.830] – Rachel

Yes, like you just did. Oh, my gosh. Yes. Well, it's good to try some of these little things and absolutely buy the book because it's good to read about and do your research before you invest a whole ton of time. Because you're right. Failure happens. We evicted two groundhogs last year that ate a good chunk of our garden before we could. And it's just these type of things happen. So it's good to try these experiments every now and then and see what happens.

[00:44:15.450] – Allan

Okay. Well, Ras, that's all I really had for this week. What about you?

[00:44:19.750] – Rachel

Sure. No, that's great. Take care.

[00:44:22.440] – Allan

You too. Bye.

[00:44:23.400] – Rachel

Thanks. Bye bye.

Patreons

The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:

– Anne Lynch	– Eric More	– Leigh Tanner
– Deb Scarlett	– Ken McQuade	– Margaret Bakalian
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Thank you!

Another episode you may enjoy

The comfort crisis with Michael Easter

Less...

Let's Say Hello

[00:03:20.710] – Allan

Hello, Ras.

[00:03:21.910] – Rachel

Hey, Allan. How are you today?

[00:03:23.780] – Allan

I'm doing well. How are you?

[00:03:25.560] – Rachel

Good. Spring is finally here in Michigan, at least today. We had some weather over the weekend. We are expecting more weather this weekend in terms of snow. But today is nice.

[00:03:39.540] – Allan

We talked about hormone changes last week, sort of like right now.

[00:03:44.410] – Rachel

Yes, absolutely. Michigan is going through the change right now.

[00:03:53.330] – Allan

But it's a spring change. So it's sort of like puberty and not like menopause. But that said, it's still kind of traumatic increase me. I think the interesting thing is I've got my nutrition kind of ratcheted down and everybody on the island knows, okay, Allan's not doing these things. He's not eating these things. Kind of funny because we will go out to dinner every once in a while and people are like, okay, well, Allan's not going to eat that. Allan's not going to eat this, which is actually kind of it is kind of funny to be sitting there and people watching me eat or watching what I order more interested in what I'm ordering than what I'm eating. But here's one of the interesting things that hasn't happened before. And this is you start thinking about getting older and how things are different because they are they can be very different as you age. I am sleeping. I'm sleeping a lot because I say I don't set an alarm. Right. And I mean that I don't really set an alarm. I think I said it one day about a couple of weeks ago, there were a couple of girls that had to catch like a

[00:04:57.740] – Allan

07:00 boat out. And they're like, can we get breakfast early? And I'm like, sure, there's one of yogurt and all that. Okay, I'll get up, I'll fix them up to go. They actually had time to eat it there. But it was just one of those. That's the only time I set alarm now. So what's happening is I'll still go to bed. Typically kind of normal this time. I'm up to about 09:00, maybe 9:30 now. But I'm sleeping 10,11, 12 hours a night, almost every night. And it's just kind of this weird. Like this morning I woke up at eight. I went to bed at nine, and I'm like and I'm asleep. It's not like I go to bed at nine and I'm up for a little while hanging out, looking at my phone. I put my phone on the white noise sound machine and I lay down and I go to sleep. I'll wake up a few times at night for the bathroom. And literally this morning got up at 8:30. I mean, really between eight and 830, I just rolled up, looked at the clock.

[00:06:00.810] – Rachel

My goodness.

[00:06:03.090] – Allan

Okay, well, on my side. I don't know that this is going to adversely affect this recording, but my power just went off. So welcome to the third world. Now, again, I do have a generator, I mean, a little battery. So I think I'm still online and everything. So we're going to finish our hello. And then we're going to get into our final segment. So if you don't know how this all works, which I'll just share this behind the scenes stuff, this is how a third world country works. Power goes out from time to time for no apparent reason whatsoever. And then it comes back on. But that aside, Rachel and I get together about once a week and we record our hello segment, and then we take a break and then we record the segment that you hear after the episode I'm going to do now is I'm going to finish this recording and then start the new recording for us to do that final segment. So that's the behind the scenes stuff. That whether you wanted it or not, you got live on this episode.

[00:06:58.070] – Rachel

Sure. Have fun.

[00:06:59.440] – Allan

Yeah. We'll talk to you soon, Rachel.

[00:07:01.020] – Rachel

Okay.

Interview

[00:07:29.320] – Allan

Jessie, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:07:31.980] – Jessie

Thank you so much for having me.

[00:07:34.200] – Allan

Now, your book is a very interesting title, Don't Just Sit There, Do Nothing: Healing, Chilling and Living with the Tao Te Ching. And I know when I was reaching out to your publicist came off as a why would a fitness guy want to do an interview on a book, Don't Just Sit There, do nothing. But this is an important book. And I'm glad you wrote this because I think this is gonna be a great tool for a lot of people to get past one of the things that I think is one of maybe one of the biggest health issues that we're personally facing now today, especially today in the modern world. And so I really do think this is a really important book for people to wrap their minds around that we don't have to be doing all the time.

[00:08:28.570] – Jessie

Yeah. Thank you for saying that. I mean, you know, it's interesting. I spoke to the CEO of the Spartan Up program. He does those races.

[00:08:41.130] – Allan

Joe De Sena.

[00:08:43.230] – Jessie

Yeah, exactly, Joe De Sena. I spoke to him kind of when I was launching the book and in an interview. And whereas he was coming at me kind of with the opposite philosophy. Right. Like, you get it done kind of philosophy. What I showed, I think, was that there is a place where the get it done philosophy and the do nothing philosophy meets. Because, of course, you can't live in any extreme for a prolonged period of time without suffering negative consequences. And because so much of our world tout doing and achievement and accomplishment. I believe that the jokey. Of course, the jokey title of Don't Just sit there do nothing. That is actually where our attention needs to go now so that we can create balance in our lives.

[00:09:37.310] – Allan

Yeah. Because one, I'll openly admit I was ten minutes late getting on this call. And you've got the patience that you learned as you put together the information to put this book and just raising your family and living your life. The first thing I want to get into is this concept that is really hard for me because I pride myself, I always have prided myself with being an overachiever. I want to get more done. It's kind of a compliment. I only sleep 4 hours. I only sleep 3 hours. And all the things that are going on. And there's a quote you had in the book. It's a little bit longer than I would normally read. But I want to read this quote because I think it's really important for someone that's trying to figure out what we're here for to understand. And the quote goes like this, do not be afraid to lay down your load for a minute. You can pick it up anytime you wish. Separate yourself from the endless goals and grievances. It will recharge you like nothing else. Spend a breath, then two, then an hour flowing without worry and doing what needs to be done without overthinking it and bask in existence itself. This is the ultimate freedom.

[00:10:57.470] – Jessie

Thank you for sharing that.

[00:10:59.690] – Allan

And it's true. Anytime that I'm frantic, anytime that I'm panicked, I'm a wreck. I'm not nearly the quality that I need to be to be the overachiever. And so it's one of those if you rush in, that's great. It looks like you're doing something. But the looking like you're doing something often isn't doing yourself justice.

[00:11:31.430] – Jessie

That's exactly right. This practice of doing nothing, I use quotations because of course we're never doing nothing. Honestly, if you're alive, your body breathes itself, your cells are recharging themselves. Stuff is going on at all times. The one thing about this existence is it's always in motion. There is actually no complete stillness. And what this recharging that I'm talking about, this taking the time to just be really brief on a busy day. It could be as brief as a few deep breaths. But taking the time to recenter yourself, then reconnect you with a flow of life. Because there is a flow. When you enter that flow and when you are doing stuff from the flow, the doing becomes easier. So it's not like pushing the Boulder up the Hill. It's just going with the stream sort of. And what I've noticed is a lot of the problems with our very overly busy society and all of this barrage of information we constantly get and our brains become overextended. Our minds become overextended and we are exhausted before we even get started in a way. So when we take the time to reconnect and we take the time to block out all that external noise and just kind of connect with the power, with the inner guidance we have within us.

[00:13:04.060] – Jessie

Each person has within them, even when we are doing it's more easeful so that all of the stress kind of goes away and we do or some of the stress, I should say, goes away and we do the next right thing and then the next right thing. And step by step, you live your life. You do the things you need to do, but you're not overly stressed and frantic and crazy about it all.

[00:13:29.630] – Allan

Yeah, it's interesting to me because what I'll get is I'll get a client comes up and says, okay, I need to lose X pounds. We'll just throw that out there and they'll have a reason. Sometimes they have a deadline. There's something coming up. They want to be ready for this or that. They've been carrying this for too long. So they need to do something now. And the first question is, what do I do? Because we get fascinated with a result. What is my life going to be like if I'm in this Pant size or dress size? What is my life going to be like, if I'm no longer carrying this extra weight. If the scale says something tomorrow that's fantastic. What is my life going to be like? And I think in that look to the journey that looked to the results, we lose sight of the journey. And you talk about this actually a good bit in the book, because much of the struggles, much of the things that you went through, you look back and you said it was the journey I remember. The results were great.

[00:14:46.350] – Jessie

Right. Of course it's great that I have this happy life now and I'm a fulfilled person, and that's all wonderful. But it's interesting because my book just said they're doing nothing came out recently. And I have a lot of people telling me because I share a lot of myself in there, and I have a lot of people saying that's so brave or you accomplish so much, et cetera. And there's this push to celebrate this accomplishment, which I think is wonderful, but I'll be 100% honest. I like myself now, not any more than I liked myself three years ago when I started the book, because by the time I began this work of putting down my own lessons and all of the stuff I learned by following Eastern philosophies like the Tao Te Ching, and by reconnecting with my core, by the time I got to writing it, I already knew that it's not the end result that matters. And I think it's so funny and it's wonderful and sweet, but it's so funny that people celebrate the achievement. But if they actually look in the lessons that I'm teaching in the book that every failure is part of the achievement, every mistake, every fall, our entire journeys are as important as any accomplishment, any goal, any achievement that you reach.

[00:16:10.330] – Jessie

And I fully celebrate that journey now of struggle that I had. I'm really grateful for it, because that's what made me who I am. So I would really urge people who are focused on certain goals to remember to focus on the now on the journey and see what they can. That's where our greatest lessons come from. And sometimes our greatest lessons come from the bottom as well before we even get going.

[00:16:37.720] – Allan

Yeah. I was having a conversation with a client yesterday, and he was telling me he loves running, but he hates going to the gym and lifting weights. And so we spent some time talking about kind of the underlying reason that he might feel that way, and then another way that I feel like as he goes into the gym that he should be looking at that time. And a lot of the things we got into were the things that he enjoyed about running, he was experiencing in the gym, he just wasn't aware, he wasn't in the moment to recognize, oh, I can move my body and I can push more weight than I did last time versus being able to maybe run a little bit further or a little bit faster than he did last time. The same feelings are there. They're just coming in a different way. And if you're not open to them, you don't really experience them and you don't really recognize what you're going through. And a lot of it you talk about flow in the book. Can you get a little bit into flow? Because I think part of really getting into the journey is when you recognize that flow is the journey.

[00:17:55.650] – Jessie

Yeah. And actually, I think that flow is very interesting to athletes because anybody who follows any kind of sport sees a difference. We know there's a difference between, say, a Michael Jordan or an Alex Honnold, the climber. Like, there's a difference in the people who are able to exceed their physical limitations to do certain magical things that we get to watch. But the reality is everybody, in order to accomplish something they've never accomplished before, needs to enter the flow state. And then the real gift is the flow state itself. So what happens in the flow state? And it was identified earlier in the 1900, therapists identified the actual characteristics of the flow state. And it doesn't have to be a physical activity. Some people I actually enter the flow state when I write as an example, and some people do it when they paint. But what happens in the state is whatever it is that you're doing consumes you so greatly that you lose for the time that you're doing it. You lose your ego, you lose the judge, the constant judge that's looking at yourself and judging and thinking overthinking, and you kind of become one with the motion, with the flow of the activity that you're in.

[00:19:21.310] – Jessie

And it's a really beautiful experience, obviously very recharging. And this is why I say the Tao Te Ching. This ancient philosophy is very full of paradoxes, because in a way, it's the flow state that helps us reach stillness. But here we're talking about stillness of the mind. And when we become one with the doing, that is ultimate stillness. And it's a very ironic because of course, we become one with the action, but it's becoming one and becoming very present. And what happens is then is that monkey mind kind of goes away for that short period of time.

[00:20:01.160] – Allan

Yeah. And the way I look at it is, okay, you go into a gym and they have the music blaring sometimes. There's people in there, they're talking, they're doing weights or they're all about. So you're not in a confined by yourself space. But when I'm really in the flow of lifting. So during a lift, I don't hear anything. I don't see anything. I'm literally at that moment trying to envision myself inside my body, inside the muscle. And any other feedback that I'm getting my eyes or whatever is really just geared on is my head, my body, my frame, everything where it's supposed to be at this point in the lift. And so for me, the flow state is actually so present that I'm unaware of pretty much anything else. So you're talking about the monkey mind. When you get into flow, say you're only aware of what you're actually doing at that point in time, physically or mentally, but you're in that moment. And it's such a powerful moment. But this book, in your book, they're taking us through a process of trying to find ways to relax, slow down and find that space more often.

[00:21:20.310] – Jessie

Right. So I am a big fan of whatever activity can get you in the flow state as well. And one of the chapters, as you know, talks about finding that activity for yourself, because I do think it's of the utmost importance to be able to find enjoyable ways to be in the present. So it's not always another. I don't want spirituality or mindfulness to become yet another to do thing on a person's list. And the magic of when you're able to enter that flow state, the magic speaks for itself once you're able to reach it. And I say in the book that everyone's reached at some point or another, you just have to sometimes look back on your life and see what that is for you. It's that awareness. And in fact, don't just sit there, do nothing is divided into three parts. The first is identity, which is understanding who we really are beyond just the personality and the body. And number two is the awareness that you and I have been speaking of is understanding sort of the energy flow around us, of ourselves, what we bring to situations, to the world, what others bring into our space.

[00:22:37.020] – Jessie

And then number three is the creation. So it's interesting to me, creation meaning like creating the life you want, achieving the goals you want. And it's interesting because I think most people go straight to the creation. They're so right. They come and they say, how long till I can be this many pounds or look like this? We always as human beings, we're so obsessed with instant gratification that we rush to the creation part. But really it's these other journeys, these other investigations of ourselves that are needed in order to have a full joyous journey to whatever we want. So it's not just there is no snap your fingers and then you're a certain weight or a certain goal is achieved. It's not like that. And there's a reason for that.

[00:23:28.000] – Allan

Yeah. I kind of equate it with the first thing you do when you're going to walk in and try to build a house is start and grab a hammer and nails. You've missed some steps.

[00:23:40.890] – Jessie

Exactly. So what I do, don't just sit there, do nothing but what I also do for myself. Because, look, I'm a human of this world. I am very human. I also want everything I want yesterday. So what I do is remind myself constantly of the beauty of the now, the very imperfect now, not some perfect future scenario. Because of course, there really never is. That right. There's always going the movement forward. There's never really a static moment where you've arrived and that's it. And forevermore. That's not how we work. So I always remind myself and bring myself back. And whether it's with breathing, whether it's with the flow state, whether it's just a mental exercise, the ability to bring myself into the present, to practice the mindfulness, I remind myself that this is where it's at. The journey is where it's at. I don't want to get to the end of my life and have missed the whole thing.

[00:24:44.050] – Allan

Yeah. And the one thing that I find really interesting and I want people to really wrap their mind around this is the fact that you're reading these books, the fact that you're listening to podcasts, you have something huge going on for you right now. You've made some internal changes of self love and self appreciation and now self awareness to make some drastic changes. Now that will they be drastic in the means of I want it now? No. But you've already made a huge change just by listening to this podcast. Just by reading this book.

[00:25:21.850] – Jessie

Such a good point. Once you open your mind to possibility. Because I think of myself as a lifelong spiritual searcher, I'm never going to stop my quest for more information about personal development, more information about growth and anybody who is on that journey. And of course, if they're listening to your podcast, if they're reading, don't just sit there, do nothing. They're on that journey. I say you're there already because. Yeah, sometimes changes happen slowly. They're not always overnight. But when you open yourself up to new possibilities, new ways of thinking, to quote Wayne Dyer, he's a great spiritual teacher who passed some years ago that I was a big fan of he said, change your thoughts, change your life. It's not a change that happens in one instance, but you're on that journey of change and improvement and love and all the good stuff that we want.

[00:26:27.890] – Allan

Now some people will say they don't want to live forever, and a lot of people do want to live forever. But in a lot of the books that you read, a lot of the studies they go through and say, okay, well, why are certain people living to 100 years old or other? So you've heard about the blue zones and all those types of things. And one of the cores that's in there that I think is missing in the modern world for a lot of us is the concept of finding purpose. Individuals who live longer, live better lives because they have a purpose. And you talked about how you were on a particular career path, and then you had your car crash moment.

[00:27:06.600] – Jessie

Yeah.

[00:27:07.380] – Allan

Can you talk a little bit about that?

[00:27:09.300] – Jessie

Yes, for sure. A literal car crash moment. So just a little backstory. I am an immigrant. I came from the former Soviet Union. The country is now Latvia. But when I was born there, it was just a giant blob of Soviet Union. And I left there when I was seven. We were refugees, and my family went through a bunch of different countries before we sought asylum in America. And a lot of my early life is defined by this sort of loss of self, loss of identity, and just molding myself to what was around me so that I could be accepted, so that I could belong, so that I could find friends and fun, etcetera. And then also at the same time pleasing my family, so pleasing those around me, being the good immigrant child. So eventually that catches it up with you when you're living not for yourself, when you haven't connected with your own desires, with your own purpose, as you've mentioned, it catches up with you because you're not living an authentic life. And so I was in College, straight A student, kind of walking the path of goodness according to what my immigrant society wanted for me in business school, internally, I was really suffering.

[00:28:32.390] – Jessie

I had an eating disorder. I was depressed. I suffered from anxiety, panic attacks. And as soon as I graduated College and I had so many interviews with all the big banks lined up. But as soon as I graduated College, I got into a major car crash. And that was my really rock bottom moment because I was, of course, struggling emotionally with all of these kind of secret struggles. I think my mom was aware of them by then, but nobody else was. And then my body was broken physically. And in that moment, why it was such a beautiful downfall for me is because I realized I can't live this way. I have to figure out who I am, what I want. And how I want my life to look. And that was a very life changing moment because in my literal downfall, I reached for information, I reached for the Tao Te Ching and other spiritual teachings and my own health. And that became more important to me than the discomfort of letting people down. So my own truth became the most important guiding light of my life.

[00:29:39.770] – Allan

And I've had a couple of those car crash moments. One of mine was when the Challenger exploded in 86 and I was a sophomore in College, majoring in physics. That made me rethink some things. And then with my layoff in 2017. Now I'm a personal trainer living on a Caribbean Island. If you'd ask me, before 2017, that was not in the plan, that was not there. And I guess what I would just put forward is we probably have these car crash moments every day, every week, every month. They just aren't as rock bottom as you want. They're not actual car crashes. How do we go about recognizing when our spirit, for lack of a better word, our oneness who we are, is need something but the judges outside of us, the people have different expectations of, how do we recognize that disconnect and kind of steal ourselves for doing something different?

[00:30:42.390] – Jessie

Well, I love this quote that the universe speaks to us in whispers, and then it speaks to us and shouts. So when you go through enough shout moments, those car crash moments, it becomes more important to you to start listening for the whispers because I don't want to learn from strings of bottoms. I want to be able to learn and communicate with my life and with myself throughout, like you said, on a weekly, on a daily basis so that we don't have to wait for those car crash moments. And by the way, I also refer in Don't sit there do nothing to the pandemic, a society's car crash. And unfortunately, our societies often do wait for those car crash moments before changes just take place. But that's a whole other topic, of course. And I wholly believe that change on the big scale happens one individual at a time. When enough of us sort of awaken, the world will change as well. And the way to do that is to develop a constant communication, to understand, first of all, the understanding, just the awareness that life is speaking to you, that's really important. I don't believe in luck.

[00:32:00.180] – Jessie

I don't believe in coincidences. I believe that life communicates with us and it gives us feedback all the time. And there's a part of us, there's a center within us that knows and understands that. But often we cannot hear it, and we can't hear it because of the noise of the outside world and the messaging that we've allowed to enter within us. And, you know, I read recently that today in one day, the average person takes in more information than just a couple of hundred years ago, people did in their entire lifetime. But we're the same humans, right, with the same brains. So that's just to show how much we have coming at us. And there's nothing wrong with you for being overstimulated, for being confused, for being tired, because there is a lot coming at us. So then it becomes on us to create moments of stillness, moments of flow, moments where we shut everything else out so that the only thing we care is our own breath and our own spirit and our own inner power. And when we do that enough, we are able to recognize that communication, that constant communication with source energy, with the universe, with life.

[00:33:22.560] – Jessie

Call it what you will. I don't really care what your religious beliefs are, because it's not about that. It's about establishing a really good level of communication with you could call it life itself if you don't believe in a higher power. But there is that line of communication, and we need to be able to hear it. And that's just a daily practice.

[00:33:46.430] – Allan

Yeah. Because you're not going to get your purpose from anybody else. Unfortunately, you're not going to get it from a podcast like this one. You're not going to get it from a book. Your purpose is your purpose. And you have to be listening to yourself. And to do that, you have to be quiet.

[00:34:02.910] – Jessie

Right. And I love that you said that when you lift weights, all the noise disappears. So that's a good reminder to us that it doesn't need to be a literal quiet. It needs to be an internal quiet. And whatever gets you there. And guess what? If you don't know what gets you there, that's just like most people. And that's fine. And some days I don't know what's going to get me there. And it's just a beautiful experiment. When you look at life as this beautiful experiment, you kind of take all the pressure off because also enlightenment. I like to think of it as lightening up a little bit. We also take ourselves Uber seriously. Finding your purpose doesn't have to be this heavy thing that you carry. It could be finding your purpose today, for the day, for the week. And then when you start being more and more aligned with your inner calling, with your inner knowing, before you know it, you're living your purpose. And it's not always that put in a box or put into words like my purpose being a or, you know, when you're living your purpose because you feel fulfilled.

[00:35:08.850] – Allan

Absolutely. Now, every health and fitness coach out there has probably heard this quote from Lao Tzu. A journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step. Now, what most of us haven't heard is the next line in that verse, which is people often fail in their tasks just as they're about to accomplish them.

[00:35:29.930] – Jessie

Yeah.

[00:35:32.890] – Allan

This is really important because you may have heard the parable of the guy, the gold miner who was digging for gold, and he decided he wasn't going to find the gold, so he sold the gold mine and a guy dug like a foot deeper and biggest find in history. 1ft it was just 1ft. Can we talk a little bit? Because, yes, starting is extremely hard, so it's finishing. Can we talk a little bit about that?

[00:36:09.140] – Jessie

Yes. It's the chapter in my book that I talk about that is called journeying, actually. You are so right. So first of all, I think most people know that quote, the journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step. But I'm not sure if a lot of people know that it comes from the Tao Te Ching, which when I tell people, they're often floored, because that's from 6th century BC. And it's funny to me that human nature has been changed all that much. Right. We've always had a fear of starting. And yes, the other part of the equation is, of course, seeing something through to the end, not giving up too early. And people often fail in their tasks just as they're about to accomplish them. And then it says, so give as much care at the end as in the beginning, then there will be no failure. And I love that because what is failure really? Failure is only failure if you quit. Otherwise, it's a teaching moment from life, from the universe, from yourself. And sometimes and I would actually venture to say a lot, maybe most of the time things don't turn out exactly as we had envisioned, but that doesn't mean they can turn out much better than what we plan for.

[00:37:36.550] – Jessie

But we have to allow for the flow to be different. I think that human beings tend to want to control things so much that they miss the bigger picture sometimes. And I say in the book, when if you look at your life, have you perhaps quit too soon, whether it's on a venture, whether it's on your health goals, whether it's in a relationship, just when maybe it would have gotten good, but you decided to quit. But the other side of it, I would say, is sometimes quitting is the right thing to do. When your goals like in my case, before my car crash moment, when your goals are not aligned with yourself, change, of course, is absolutely the correct choice there. So again, this goes back to that connectedness with your inner self, because your inner self knows. Your inner self knows if you check in with it, just hang on longer, just keep going. And sometimes you do throw in the towel before too soon.

[00:38:42.200] – Allan

Yeah. And I think we all go into these like, okay, so I'm going to go on this diet or I'm going to start this exercise program or I'm going to do this thing, take a new course, to learn something new, to do something different. And the problem comes in is not that we can't do it. It's that we don't believe we can do it. And one of the things you had in the book is another quote from your book. I think I could probably sit here and just read the book is we cannot wait for proof in order to believe in our visions. And I think too many people are waiting for proof that they can lose the weight, that they can get healthy, that they can solve their health problems, that they can learn something new. We're over 40, so we're not supposed to we're the old dogs. We're not supposed to be learning new things. But you can. People are doing it every day, but you don't have to wait for that proof. How does someone listen to themselves, listen to their inner voice in a way that says, okay, I need to get confidence from this.

[00:39:50.420] – Allan

Because in reality, if you're waiting for someone else to give you the go ahead to give you that confidence, you're not going to be happy with the results. That's what I've seen. How does someone reach inside and find that self belief?

[00:40:07.730] – Jessie

Sometimes you have to fake it till you make it. And I say this jokingly, but in my section on creation, we talk a lot about there are steps right to getting what you want. And again, I will say what you want with a little bit of space around it, because often in my experience, things end up looking a little different and that's okay. Or there's like another step that I hadn't foreseen and that's okay. I also find that when you commit so fully to a path, you're often given some obstacles to overcome or some tests. The hero's journey always has tests on it. But to me, I kind of divided the steps of creation into three smaller steps. So one is intention, two is embodiment, and three is releasing the goals, releasing the end results. And so intention is what we're talking about of making your goal, making your vision a more clear one, because a lot of people walk around without a real vision for their lives. And for me, like, for someone like me, because I have become quite a flexible person, my vision changes sometimes from day to day. Or I allow my vision to alter, but I always have a vision and intention.

[00:41:32.250] – Jessie

And the second part is what we're talking about here. The second part of embodying it now, what embodying it means is acting as the person who already got what they wanted. And that's the really hard part. Yes, you need to believe before there's proof that's where we all get tripped up. Because it's like, yeah, when I see that I can do it, I will give my all to it, but it actually works the opposite. And the how. There's no magic bullet for the how, but I do in this case, I will go against my own title. And I'll say that sometimes in the doing, the belief comes. I've seen that for myself. So I also watch my kids closely. I have a five and a seven year old, and kids are a lot better at a lot of these spiritual lessons than we are because they haven't been taught out of them yet.

[00:42:27.820] – Allan

We haven't been out of them.

[00:42:29.330] – Jessie

Yeah, exactly. The world hasn't. And if you ever watch, how do they play pretend? They are so invested they're not thinking. Yes, my five year old loves to pretend. She's a teenager. She's 13, she's going to high school, whatever. And obviously in some level she knows that is not true. But she has no problem pretending for like 3 hours straight. I'm a teenager mom and she talks differently. And I love it because what stops us from doing it? Sure, I know on some level, for example, I have not yet lost the weight. I have not yet reached my level of fitness. But why can't I pretend for the hour that I'm in the gym for the hours that I set aside to run? Why can't I pretend that I'm already that person? Why can't I play with it and play that game of pretend and just start doing it? Because our brains don't really know the difference between pretend and reality. If we tell our brain enough times that I am this, you'll start to believe it. So you got to play with it. It's really adapting, in my opinion, a playful attitude and allowing yourself to pretend that you already are what you want to be, allowing yourself to believe in it, even if it seems ludicrous.

[00:43:48.810] – Allan

I saw this. It actually came over. It was a business podcast and the guy said it and I've kind of adapted it, but it's the same thing. And his thing was be do have. He said so many people start with the do. And he says, that's not how you do it. You start with the Be and Be being is okay. If I'm someone who is this person is healthy and fit, then that's who I am. And then what does the person like that do? Well, okay. They set aside time on their calendar and they show up at the gym, they shop and they buy whole foods, they Cook for their family so they know what they're eating. Yes. They still go out and have a drink with their friends every once in a while. Yes, every once in a while. Okay. They're going to take a holiday and they're not going to do their workouts. But a person who is reasonably in the position you want to be, if you're doing the things that they do, eventually you will have what they have. And so that's the whole principle of the Be do have is very similar to what you're saying is that if you fake it till you make it, but you still have to do the work, you got to do both.

[00:44:57.130] – Allan

There's a middle section, like you said, the doing.

[00:44:59.970] – Jessie

Yeah.

[00:45:00.900] – Allan

But you got to slow down and see it first.

[00:45:04.050] – Jessie

Right. And when you embody the person that you want to be, you'll naturally do the things they do. Like you said, the person who is already fit. Well, yeah. They leave time for exercise. That's what they do. And the releasing part, I think, is also very important because, again, this is where instant gratification needs come in. Releasing your timeline and your goal is important from time to time. It doesn't mean that we don't have a framework in which we operate, but releasing the rains that hold everything so tightly, so that you realize that if you aren't, for example, whatever weight you set for yourself on the day you set for yourself, but you're getting there, that's good enough. You don't need to have 100% control over everything as long as you're doing that step by step journey we spoke of.

[00:46:01.070] – Allan

Yeah. Jessie, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:46:12.390] – Jessie

this is you're asking me to define? Good question. So I define wellness and success and all of those big words that I think we all strive for as the feeling of purpose, fulfillment and joy in your body, in your life, in your situation. And that doesn't mean happiness 100% of the time, but that means that you know, you are where you're meant to be. It's that feeling. And I think we spoke of this feeling a little earlier when we have those car crash moments or those smaller car crash moments that realize we're off course, is that ability because we still have them. Even if you are living the life you want to live, you still have moments like that. And it's also wellness to me, is that conversation, that communication with life where you're able to course correct as you go along. It's that faith in yourself. And can you tell me again, the second part of the three?

[00:47:21.380] – Allan

What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:47:27.650] – Jessie

I'm actually going to use the Tao Te Ching for this one. Perfect. The three main teachings of the Tao Te Ching, which are really helpful to me for my wellness and my health. And of course, I look at health as both a mental and a physical well being. And I know you do as well. So the three kind of cornerstones of the Tao Te Ching are simplicity, patience, compassion. So to me, simplicity is simplifying all of those messages that we talked about that are bombarding us non stop, simplifying daily, even if it's for moments a day, to that conversation within yourself. That one voice, that one inner guidance constantly simplifying our craziness, our crazy mind, our crazy schedules, simplifying it as much as we can to our own inner guidance and our own physical well being, because I do strongly believe that we are in this body for this lifetime. And we must take care of our vehicle. And I'm a very spiritual person, but I will tell you that I'm also a fit person, not because I'm so great. And clearly I wasn't always because I suffered from an eating disorder for many years, but I take my health very seriously because this is my vehicle to have my spiritual growth in in this lifetime.

[00:48:55.390] – Jessie

So when I simplify everything, I understand that all I need to do is take care of my mind, take care of my spirit, take care of my body, and I'm good. And then the number two is patience. And that's what we've already discussed is the patience to get to where you want to go and not to rush things and to understand that the journey is as important, if not more important than the destination. And the last is compassion. Starting with compassion towards yourself. When you practice compassion towards yourself, when you forgive yourself for falling off the wagon, for example, if you're on a health journey or overcoming addiction, when you have compassion for your very humanness, you're able to forgive yourself instead of beating yourself up, you're able to continue. You're able to forgive and continue. And when you give that to yourself, you give that to others naturally. And so you live in a more natural state of ease.

[00:49:58.250] – Allan

Thank you for that. Jessie, if someone wanted to learn more about you or learn more about your book, Don't Just Sit There, Do Nothing. Where would you like for me to send them?

[00:50:08.510] – Jessie

My website. Jessiekanzer.com, JESSIEKANZER.com has all of that information on there. But of course, don't just sit there, do nothing is available everywhere books are sold, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Target, even. But the information on my website has a lot of free resources as well. I have a free ebook, I have bonus chapters you can actually read. The first two chapters, don't just sit there, do nothing for free. And I also have all my upcoming events on there. So I'm teaching at Omega Institute, which is in Rhinebeck, New York in May. But as well, I do virtual panels and workshops from time to time. So all of that is on jessiekanzer.com.

[00:50:51.350] – Allan

You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/534. And I'll be sure to have links there. Jessie, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:51:02.030] – Jessie

Oh, thank you so much. And I am 40 plus, by the way. I forgot to mention that, but I'm 40 and a half at this point, so I'm with you guys.

[00:51:09.430] – Allan

Welcome to the club.

[00:51:10.890] – Jessie

Thank you.

Post Show/Recap

[00:51:19.530] – Allan

Welcome back, Ras.

[00:51:21.170] – Rachel

Hey, Allan, a lot of that discussion with Jessie has a lot of correlation with my running habits, especially the flow state. It was interesting to hear her discuss flow state in a way that I never would have thought about it before.

[00:51:37.710] – Allan

Yeah. I mean, if you've ever played an athletic sport or ever done something like running consistently. So you got to get past that. It sucks part. But when you get to a point, for lack of a better word, performance where you actually are very comfortable doing what you're doing, there's an opportunity for flow state. And for most of us, our experience goes back to athletics. It goes back to sports. That's when we feel the flow state the most because there's a performance improvement, there's an enhancement to what's going on that we feel. And it's very real. I mean, you literally are doing better at that point, but we're capable of doing this with just about anything that we have some competency for. So it can be making cookies, it can be knitting, it can be at work, it can be at play, it can be at learning. I'm right now studying for my performance enhancements specialty. And there are points in time when I'm sitting there studying and it's like, okay, this stuff is really coming in. I'm understanding it. I'm doing well on the tests, pre-tests anyway. And it's just a function of the focus, the attention, and then the comfort that flow state kind of gives you.

[00:53:08.930] – Allan

And so the real specialty here is if you can slow down enough, as you said, do nothing. But even in short spurts, if you can do nothing to allow your body and your brain and everything to kind of just relax, flow state becomes a lot easier.

[00:53:28.050] – Rachel

Oh, yeah. It's interesting. She mentioned that we have such busy lives. She's true. It's so true. We're barraged with information all over the place. It's kind of frightening how much information passes through our eyes and into our brains on a day to day, hour to hour basis. And it is hard for people to be still and appreciate the silence and the quietness. And then, like we had talked about earlier in our personal lives, when everything seems to be going crazy, the car is in the shop, the kids are sick, something broke at the house. There's all these problems going on because our brain I like to use the analogy of a tornado. My head is just swirling with information, and it's hard to grasp on something to identify a problem and solve it. But if you can get into a flow state where your brain is still and you can appreciate the silence, then you can identify and solve problems probably a lot more efficiently than if you're freaking out about it.

[00:54:29.800] – Allan

Yeah, because we talked about this a little bit during the episode so many times. You want the tool, you want the strategy or tactic. How do I do this? Okay. And we're immediately into strategies and tactics instead of the pulling back in and the saying, okay, well, one, why is this important? Okay, why is this important? And is this important right now? Okay, so something's going on at your house, and it's like, okay, great, great. You know, there's a problem is this something I have to deal with now.

[00:55:08.790] – Rachel

Right.

[00:55:09.970] – Allan

And the only way you do that is to come back to your commitment, come back to your why your vision, a whole bit of it. Why are we doing this? Where are we going? And then the self awareness. Okay. I know this is going to bother me until I get this thing fixed. Is there something I can personally do to make it bother me less? Can I actually shift my brain and say, you know, I got to take care of the kids first, and I'm not going to call the repair man and argue with him about needing a window of opportunity for him to be at my house because that's when it works. Like, okay, fine, you can't make it today between four and five. Done. I'm out. Take care of the kids, get the car out of the shop, call the repairman in the morning, figure something out. But it's really hard to do that when the faucet is calling you. And so it's that self awareness of okay, yeah, that's going to bother me. But if I look at the bigger picture, the bigger journey, the who I need to be, the where I need to go.

[00:56:22.810] – Allan

Am I even going to remember that trip, trip, trip a year from now, five years from now.

[00:56:30.370] – Rachel

What I've recently told the kids, both of my kids are College age, by the way, and so their problems are a little different than my problems in life. But I tell them, do these problems require the baggage and the emotion that you're assigning to it? Is it really that important? And like in your analogy of a home, if the faucet is dripping, is that something that needs to be tended to immediately? No, because there's not a burst pipe or something that's bigger or worse. But if you could just take it down a notch, not panic about it, not fret about it and not worry about it and just assign the debt task to it and it'll get done. And like you said, it'll be forgotten in days from now, weeks from now, it'll be all over.

[00:57:15.390] – Allan

Yeah. But I'm going to be the first to admit that is hard. That step right there is really hard, which is why having the foundation, the why, the vision, who are you and who are you going to be? And so a big part of what her book is about is really getting to that self awareness. It's really getting to who you are and who you deserve to be and who you want to be. And making all those things line up in a way that makes sense for you. And is Jessie where she wants to be in her life? And the answer is no, but she's closer than she would have been if she hadn't taken this approach. And we all love those quotes. And so you kind of go through a lot of those quotes that they came from this book, not from her book, but the book that her book is sort of based on, which is she's taking that ancient wisdom, if you will. And it seems pretty weird. Okay. Someone 3000 years ago was actually going through the same emotional issue that I'm going through. And they didn't even have Twitter.

[00:58:32.210] – Allan

and so you're like, okay, well, they had wars, they had famine, they had struggles. They may have been slightly different struggles, but the human nature to approach everything as a disaster was still there. And so for someone to say, okay, is it a disaster? No, it's not a disaster. Actually, stopping and doing nothing gives me the opportunity to put it in its place and really come up with a structure that works for me for solving that problem if it needs to be solved at all.

[00:59:07.930] – Rachel

Sure. Yeah, I love that. And you guys discuss at the end that we do have concept as well. And not skipping any steps to get to the end to the outcome.

[00:59:19.130] – Allan

Yes. Because again, if you don't believe it, it won't happen. It just won't. If you don't believe that, you can lose the weight you want to lose. It's not going to happen. I tried everything. Nothing's going to work. Well, you have to believe that the next thing you do is going to work and you do that from okay, sit back, have a reason, a why, have a vision of what that is really an emotional one. And then a structure of who I am and what has stopped me in the past. And then a plan, and most people go at this with the tool, throw a hammer at it. Okay, well, it's a screw. Okay, great. And then the next time you try it's a nail and you got a screwdriver in your hand because you didn't stop to define the problem and we all do it. Everyone is just as guilty as everyone else of doing these things, because this is the hard part. This is why we struggle and we've always struggled. And that's why books like this, writings like this, exist most of the time. Those lessons were meant to be handed down to our children, to our students, things like that.

[01:00:36.700] – Allan

These were teachers. These were what we would call the intellectuals that were putting together the content of making us a better society. And so they became writings later. They were often oral at the time, and sometimes they were written. And then once they were written, then there was a printing press and then there was more of these ideas. Now there's the Internet and there's more of these ideas. The ideas are great, but you got to go back to you, you've got to go back to that very beginning of this has to be about you and what works for you and you're unique. As odd as that sounds, with over 8 billion people, there's no other single person exactly like you. What you need at this point in time is very different than what anyone else needs. The only way you're going to get that information is to be really quiet and still and listen because your inner voice is going to help you get there.

[01:01:34.890] – Rachel

Yeah, we have a saying in our family that goes way back generations and apparently my great grandparents and grandparents used to say to their kids, remember who you are and what you represent and it just gives you pause for thought. If my mom was heading out on a date or some such thing, my grandparents would tell her, remember who you are and what you represent and it's just a simple reminder to focus on yourself and what values and morals and things that you hold important to you. And remember that when crazy things happen or you need to make some decisions in life, remember who you are and what you represent.

[01:02:19.910] – Allan

Love that. So, Rachel, next time we're going to get an opportunity to talk about your race.

[01:02:26.490] – Rachel

Yeah.

[01:02:27.590] – Allan

As we're talking right now, you haven't quite done it. You're close, but good luck with that.

[01:02:32.960] – Rachel

Thank you.

[01:02:33.390] – Allan

And we'll talk next week.

[01:02:35.170] – Rachel

Thanks so much. Take care.

Patreons

The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:

– Anne Lynch	– Eric More	– Leigh Tanner
– Deb Scarlett	– Ken McQuade	– Margaret Bakalian
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Thank you!

Another episode you may enjoy

How to get to know your true self with James Petrossi

Less...

Let's Say Hello

[00:03:27.790] – Allan

Hello, Ras.

[00:03:29.230] – Rachel

Hey, Allan, how are you today?

[00:03:31.110] – Allan

I'm doing all right. How are things with you?

[00:03:33.360] – Rachel

Good. As we recorded this, we're leading up to my race day, which is this weekend. This is my final week of taper, so I'm just going to enjoy myself this week.

[00:03:43.580] – Allan

Good, good. And unlike a lot of people that would be in your position, you're not carving up. You're not really changing anything about your nutrition. And that's a different take than what you'll read elsewhere of what you do for a long race like this. But you know, your nutrition, you're set, you've done the training, so you're set. And you have a plan. You have an actual plan for approaching this race, which I think is outstanding.

[00:04:15.850] – Rachel

Yeah. My trainer only suggested that I not changed my eating habits this week, that I eat, get in enough calories. I may not be as hungry as I would be as I'm running tons of miles and doing tons of drills, but just to maintain my standard way of eating. And in the past, I would do something very similar, and I just prefer to play it safe this week. So no restaurant eating, no crazy spicy dinners, nothing that I think could even possibly upset my digestive system. I just want to keep it status quo as I lead into race day.

[00:04:56.590] – Allan

Yeah, it's funny. There was this article they were talking about how they opened up a Popeye's restaurant in UK, and nobody was complaining that the mild was too spicy.

[00:05:09.430] – Rachel

Oh, boy.

[00:05:10.500] – Allan

Good. Don't get me wrong. I love the spicy stuff. I love it, love it, love it. In fact, I had been to Lou this weekend, and I have the sauce in there so I can put it on my eggs. So I love spicy foods. But it was just they were complaining that Popeye's chicken was too spicy in the UK.

[00:05:31.270] – Rachel

Oh, gosh.

[00:05:32.250] – Allan

Well, they might not make it over there, which is probably just the better because it's not the best food for you to be eating so good. You've got control. Yeah, well, things here are going pretty good. We're winding down to our big season for Bocas, so Lula's will start to probably wind down. We've been fully occupied pretty much for the whole time since we opened in November, which has been good. But it's just that point we're like, okay, go. Hopefully we're going to get a little bit more of an opportunity here to settle down. Tammy is planning a trip to Ireland, and then we're going to have our anniversary break, which will just be a kind of a staycation for us. So we're planning those things. Nothing huge. And then just being I am looking at launching my six week program again. I'm kind of going back and forth of whether I do it as a group thing, like where we literally have everybody come through together or whether I do it at their own pace over a six week period of time. So that's kind of where I am planning it. But I am planning on going live again.

[00:06:45.970] – Allan

I only take clients during certain periods of time, and that's really just to fit my lifestyle the way I want to. So if you are wanting to work with me, this is a good time to send me an email, allan@40PlusFitness, I'm sorry, coach@40PlusFitness. It's coach@40PlusFitness. And let's get you on the list. Let's make sure you're aware of what I'm going to be doing as I figured it out. But it is a six week program. The intention is to teach you what you need to know to lose weight, to get fit, to figure out where you need to be. And so it's an educational thing in addition to the direct coaching. So it's a very direct, intensive coaching for you about what you need, where you are with what you have to do, what you want and be who you need to be. So if you're interested in that, coach@40Plusfitness.com and we can start that conversation.

[00:07:41.830] – Rachel

Sounds great.

[00:07:42.980] – Allan

All right. So are we ready to have another conversation with Dr. Cabeca?

[00:07:47.680] – Rachel

Sure.

Interview

[00:08:23.660] – Allan

Dr. Anna, welcome back to 40+ Fitness.

[00:08:26.950] – Dr. Cabeca

It is great to be here with you, Allan. Thanks for having me.

[00:08:30.910] – Allan

Initially, you brought up the concept for me anyway. I mean, I talked to some other people, but in general, how there's pulls and pushes and there's a keto community and there's a plant-based community. And never, ever should we go between the two. You got to pick your tribe and you got to get on one side or the other. And then you come out with Keto-Green, which is basically saying, yes, you can have your meat and your vegetables, too, and you can do it in a way that promotes health. Your new book, MenuPause: Five Unique Eating Plans to Break Through Your Weight Loss Plateau and Improve Your Mood, Sleep and Hot Flashes. Love the title.

[00:09:12.710] – Dr. Cabeca

Thank you.

[00:09:13.820] – Allan

But it takes a lot of the concepts from your previous two books, and it kind of lays it out in a way to say, okay, food is medicine, so let's use it that way.

[00:09:25.310] – Dr. Cabeca

Absolutely. And bringing in these different pauses in our life. And I say there's magic in the pause. Right, Allan? We really have to look at it that way, and especially when it comes to a hormonal shift, whether we're talking about menopause or andropause or whatever. But there is magic in the pause. There's a rewiring or reshifting. And where I was, I certainly had fun with the title Menu Pause. So I thought that was great. My editor came up with that title as we were looking for a new title, and I just love it. So I laugh every time I say it. And the five different eating plans to each pause, something different. And that came out of women in my online communities doing keto green and me now keto green since 2014, 2015, and how that's changed my life, especially with hormone balance and seeing the changes. But sometimes we had a roadblock. Why isn't it working for this person or why did it stop working? And so that had me really looking at, okay, well, what are some of the pauses that we have to make that we've had to make or adjust to break through some of the plateaus that we can hit?

[00:10:37.560] – Dr. Cabeca

Because when what we're doing stops working or we stop seeing those improved benefits, we start seeing continued improvements or some of the problem, we need to look a little bit deeper, change things up, bring some variety as a spice of life, right?

[00:10:54.840] – Allan

Absolutely.

[00:10:56.150] – Allan

And there's a lot of good reasons for this book. But I want to say before the men tune out and I always say this in the preamble and I'll say it again to them is that this is first and foremost a weight loss book and a hormone shifting book, but not just for females. If a man uses these five eating plans as a way to structure their eating, they will lose weight too. So if you're in a relationship, not in a relationship, it doesn't matter. These eating plans will help you. And what you were saying about the pause is I think that's right. In Dr. Fung's book, The Obesity Code, one of the things he says is all diets work and all diets fail, and it's because our body will adjust to the way we're eating. So you start eating a certain way, a keto diet, and then something happens and your body just stops responding to it. You go vegan and your body's doing great, you're losing weight, and all of a sudden your body stops responding to it. So this ability to have these different eating plans, that structure pauses for various different things for various different reasons gives you a structure to say, okay, I'm going to go in, check this out, see if it serves me.

[00:12:05.420] – Allan

If it does, then I'll stick with it till it stops serving me. And if it doesn't serve me, I move on.

[00:12:11.690] – Dr. Cabeca

Absolutely. And we give it enough time to figure out every plan is designed to be safe. And we give enough time, the six days to just be the shortest, essentially amount of time to really get a benefit. And then also to see to be able to check in with yourself. How are you feeling now with this lifestyle, with this diet plan, it's always more than what we eat too. And I really established with my whole Keto Green approach, it's the keto green way, it's the lifestyle, it's the hormone oxytocin becoming more oxytocin rich in our lives. And that joy connection, that important physiologic effect of joy connection. Right. Pleasure and becoming more insulin sensitive. So when it comes to guys too, we'll see an improvement in their adrenal hormones, their testosterone, a decrease in blood pressure and sugar management and blood sugar as well in the short amount of times. And I expect it pretty much with every plan because again, there's a shift, there's a change up, except for maybe the carbohydrate up plan that I put in as plan number five.

[00:13:26.630] – Allan

Yeah. Now, I think a lot of women and maybe even men when they're going through some of these changes, obviously a woman's change is drastically different. So I'm going to try to compare what we guys go through, through what women go through. Not even close. So don't think it does, guys. I guess it feels bad, but not even close.

[00:13:46.820] – Dr. Cabeca

He's a wise man, right, ladies? He's a wise man.

[00:13:50.200] – Allan

But as they go through this, I think the knee jerk reaction today is what supplement do I need to take? What pill can I take? What surgery do I have to fix this problem? Why is food the better answer?

[00:14:10.910] – Dr. Cabeca

Definitely. Because how we nourish, our body is a whole framework for how we nourish other aspects of our lives. Right. And we have to give our body the fuel. We are designed to work with our environment, to interact and to respond to the energies of the food we eat. So beyond the micronutrient and macronutrient breakdown of what we're eating, there's a lot more to it than that. And I think when we set up, as we set up our eating plans, the key aspect is diversity. And I always tell clients, I interview a lot of people and selling when someone says, yeah, I eat a chicken salad every day for lunch, I just want that hand emoji to the top of your head. Like, I want that hand emoji because it is like, okay, we're eating the same thing every day, and that's just not good for you. I don't care how good of a health food you're eating. If you're eating the same thing every day, you can create a food sensitivity to it. So the importance of how we nourish our bodies, how we're going to do everything, and that sets the tone for hormonal balance.

[00:15:25.730] – Dr. Cabeca

Our behavior is affected by our physiology. So a balanced nourishing eating plan is key for willpower, brain power, love power, whatever it may be that we're working towards. So for physical and mental, wellbeing, how we nourish our body is key. And so having that as food, as medicine, it's absolutely true.

[00:15:53.510] – Allan

Yeah. Now the other aspect of this that I thought was really interesting and you brought science to bear. So this wasn't just you saying this is how you solve this problem or this is why this problem might be worse for you than someone else. I think we know is if you have a knee problem, you go to your doctor. Your doctor is going to say if you need to, you might want to lose some weight because the excess weight is causing knee pain. That's why part of the reason why you have the pain. So he encourages or she encourages you to go lose some weight. Why is weight loss part of a solution to the menopause symptoms that many women suffer with?

[00:16:30.390] – Dr. Cabeca

Yeah, because our fat is inflammatory and two of the things that cause worsening symptoms in menopause is inflammation and hormone imbalance, those two things. And fat is a contributor to both of those things. We naturally become more insulin resistant as we age, and that's why we can develop diabetes or prediabetes in menopause. And we've been doing really well up until then. And post menopause, that's because we're becoming more insulin resistant. And so type two diabetes becomes very prevalent in our age group, and that's got to stop. And that's why that's, again, why keto green eating is so critical for this. But fat holds inflammation and it creates basically cytokines storms within our body and inflammation creates increased hormonal imbalance. So what we see as people clear this up decrease inflammation through how we're nourishing the body, providing appropriate nutrients and not feeding it junk and sugar and inflammatory foods. We also see an improvement in hot flashes tremendous. Within two weeks, we can see 80% reduction in hot flashes through these lifestyle and nutritional changes. The other big thing I want to mention is, like, women will say, oh, I can't fast 13 hours. I'm hungry when I go to bed.

[00:17:58.480] – Dr. Cabeca

I'm hungry when I wake up. That's just how you've trained your body. Your body is not designed to be like that. And so let's retrain it into a healthier way that's actually going to serve you. And we know this really important factor. So built into the plan, I do at least 13 hours of intermittent fasting between dinner and breakfast, but you start where you're at. But the reason I do that is because research has shown in women with breast cancer that if you have at least twelve and a half hours between dinner and breakfast, you have a significantly reduced risk of recurrent breast cancer. So that should be number one health guideline, all the initials that you want, but really should be promoting that intermittent fasting is a key component of our lifestyle. And that improves insulin sensitivity and then improves really all of our symptoms and age related diseases that can occur. So the hot flashes, the mood swings, the night sweats, difficulty sleeping will improve with these shifts and how we're nourishing our body.

[00:19:02.530] – Allan

Yeah. And the same is true for men. If a man is obese, it's affecting their insulin sensitivity and therefore, it's affecting their hormones. And so it's creating a similar effect to us, we call it Andropause but it's basically a very similar approach, similar thing happening in our body. If we can reduce our fat stores, we're going to improve all of that and improve our health. And weight loss is often a side effect of better health. But basically what we're showing is the main symptom we see is when we step on that scale.

[00:19:38.540] – Dr. Cabeca

Yeah. And we want the weight loss, but we want in a way that we don't gain Yoyo dieted from my teens through my 20s and into my 30s. And I think that especially others, I went to high school and College in the 80s. So that's when the low carbohydrate craze was in place and we would do all these crazy things like Apple juice fasting and just nut stuff, like you're fasting on sugar. What the heck? If you're going to fast anyway, now we fast on bone broth a little bit better or just fast on water. But the key thing is and what we know is that calorie restriction decreases your metabolism more than fasting does. And that's a really important concept for people to understand. So you're not going to Yoyo diet back. And being of the, I would say of the warrior body type because there's an epigenetic component. We know this just from observing friends, family, colleagues, et cetera. Some of us are designed to be empowered to be very conservative with our nutrient use. I would say I could survive in the Sahara for six months without food or water, and I'd still be fine.

[00:20:47.780] – Dr. Cabeca

I'm thriving. And I see that among many of my clients, I say they have Pocahontas or Warrior, Viking heritage or Amazonian. Right. Because you're designed to be metabolically conservative, so you're at higher risk. However, you're designed to live through a famine, right? Live through deprivation cycle. But in America, we don't have that right. And so then we think, oh, I just have fat genes. I have obesity and diabetes on both sides of my family. And I want that mind shift to switch to say, no, you've got Warrior genes, you've got Survivor genes. You're amazing. You've got leadership genes. Let's use them. Part of what I really want to empower people to understand this epigenetic component. So it's kind of built in into my plans and into my program. And that's where that whole individual bio individuality comes in, like, what's right for you right now based on what you've been doing up till now and the state of life you're in, how your hormones are, are you burned out? Is your DHA estrogen, testosterone progesterone? Are you tanked in your hormone levels? Are you pretty resilient? And I think with this, with changing up and my goal with this, with cross training in the gym, cross training in your diet is to improve your resilience.

[00:22:11.080] – Dr. Cabeca

So you improve the diversity of your gut microbiome, and with that, you improve your immune system and you improve your overall longevity and quality of life.

[00:22:22.590] – Allan

Yeah. Now you have in the book five plans, and each of them starts out with kind of a six day approach. And I like the six day approach because it gives you that opportunity to check in with yourself to see how it's going. And I think anyone can agree you can do anything for six days if you put your mind to it. So it kind of gives them that finish line, even though it's not intended to truly be a finish line. But it's just give it six days, see if it works. And I like all of that. Obviously, if we've gotten ourselves obese, it's not going to fix itself in six days. So don't think that these are magic pills that are going to make everything great in six days. But each of them gives you a kind of a phase. A pause is the way you like to put it, gives you a pause on something so you can start to see the results and move forward. I want to go through each one of them because I think each of the one of them is really important, but I think it's important for them to know why would they use this plan and what is the plan entail?

[00:23:21.590] – Allan

So the first one and it has extreme in the title because it is kind of an extreme one, is the Keto Green Extreme. Can you talk about that one? Why we would want to use it?

[00:23:33.320] – Dr. Cabeca

Yeah, definitely. First want to say why six days? And six days if we consider that the gut gastrointestinal mucosal lininging of the intestines of our intestinal tract, GI tract regenerates in 72 hours. So that's three days. So incorporating two, three day cycle should be very healing and restorative to our GI tract, certainly in the cleanse. But even as we remove some of these inflammatory triggers or these pauses, as we take these pauses, it gives our body those two full 72 hours cycles to regenerate, respond, react. I think that's where some of this checking in, checking in with yourself can really be powerful. So with Ketogenic Extreme, because I definitely have clients who have had autoimmune diseases and have reactions to night shades. I mean, I was sitting at dinner with Dave Ashbury the other day and he sent his plate back twice because one time it had peppers and one time they had mushrooms in it. So anyway, some people are super sensitive to nitrates. Right. And so I removed that. It's really an autoimmune, kind of following some of the autoimmune protocol dietary changes with restriction of nightshades and peppers and some of those other inflammatory foods, if we're sensitive to that.

[00:25:02.410] – Dr. Cabeca

So checking in on that one is the number one reason to do that, especially if you have an autoimmune issue.

[00:25:08.970] – Allan

Okay. The next one is and you're using a word, well, there are two words that you use in two different ones, and I'm talking about each of those, but it's not exactly what it would mean to somebody else. Is the keto green plant based detox. Now, a lot of us will look at detoxes and thinking, oh, this is one of those where I'm going to take this supplement thing, and I'm going to be going to the bathroom for three days really bad and then not feel good. But this is a detox, but it's not a normal detox. Can you talk about this one and why we would want to use it?

[00:25:40.410] – Dr. Cabeca

Yeah. This is a grain free plant based plan. So it's more of a keto green plant based plan. So again, low in carbohydrates also. And I wanted to address my plant based eaters because my keto green 16th book, I did a 16 day omnipresent, a 16 day plant based plan. So I got a lot of feedback. Right. And then people who are omnivores did the 16 day plant based. And they loved it, too. So being able to again, do that periodically, and this is why I put it in for all of us to just detox from meat. And that's where that comes in. Detox from meat. And plus, one of the biggest problems that keto eaters and diet and diabetics and et cetera have is constipation. And the number one thing I want to clear from your system without, ideally, additional drug support vitamins, et cetera, is having regular bowel movements. So I put it after ketogenic stream. You can do them in any order. Certainly. But I did have a method to my madness, as usual. So putting it there because right now we've just reduced a lot of inflammation. But it's been pretty ketogenic. And I want to make sure your bowels are resuscitated to 72 hours of a low inflammatory diet.

[00:27:04.020] – Dr. Cabeca

But let's work on this to add in fiber support the gut microbiome. To add gut microbial diversity. We know the more plant diverse foods you have, the higher diversity in the gut, the better your immune system, the lower your risk of all inflammatory diseases, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease. And that goes again for men and women and all the menopausal symptoms. So that's why I incorporated a six day plant based diet, because we all need to do it periodically.

[00:27:31.290] – Allan

Okay. And now we're going to go to the other extreme because you have this carbohydrate pause. Can you talk about that? Because this is going to get some attention. It's like, wait, are we plant based or are we meat eaters? So where are we here? Can you talk about that?

[00:27:45.620] – Dr. Cabeca

Like I said, variety is the spice of life. And this is one of the things that I definitely had tried carnivore being keto green for a while and wanting to switch thing up, tried carnivore. And again, same thing felt good for a little bit, but then started gaining weight. I was like, wait, what's going on? Actually connected with another perimenopausal woman in the carnivore community. And she had run across this issue, too, again with women. Again, we talked about this before we started recording. It's really awesome to have diversity. There are certain plants that work for a short time and not for the long time. And that's why disruption. We want to disrupt what we're doing. And it's so good for us. But the carnivore knows to tail. And I wanted to show people how a healthy way to eat carnivore number one. Also, again, after I've just increased the microbial diversity of the gut that was powering you up. You're taking a break from all plant foods pretty much in the carnivore plan in just a healthy way, very carbohydrate restrictive. And again, we're pausing plants in this cycle.

[00:28:59.670] – Allan

And I can say this, if you go through the carbohydrate pause, when you finish it, you're going to be in the deep cut ketosis, which is going to help with your sensitivity. Whichever direction you go after this is going to make that next plan that much better for you.

[00:29:18.870] – Dr. Cabeca

Yeah, exactly. Right.

[00:29:22.720] – Allan

Okay, now the fourth one. And again, this is using one of the words that I typically don't like to see in any kind of eating plan is the cleanse, because it usually involves buying some very expensive juices and spending a lot of money and not getting many calories and rebounding after. But yours isn't going to do that. It's called the keto green cleanse. Can you talk about that?

[00:29:45.580] – Dr. Cabeca

Yeah, absolutely. And actually ran my pre release permission from my publisher to run my selected group, my girlfriend doctor club, through the six day cleanse. And the reason for the cleanse, too, right, we're in high ketosis number one from our carnivore for going in this order. And then so we're not hungry. We are not hungry. We're chewing. We've had good protein. The other part of carbohydrate pause the carnivorous plan is to give us more protein. Women, we don't get enough protein. And protein is so important for our muscle. And muscle is magic and menopause. So then going into cleanse number one, you're not hungry. And now we really want to detox the liver and detox your gallbladder and really work to support your body so the cleanse, we did this six days. I start you with an oil, lemon juice, olive oil, lemon juice, shot in the morning. And believe me, I had objections. They're very intelligent group of women, but they're like, okay, you're recommending it. So by day three, they're like, I can't wait. Can I stay on this forever? Can I do this? I'm like, no, just six days. We have to change things up.

[00:30:56.630] – Dr. Cabeca

So this liver, gallbladder flesh and very much it is a cleanse. So it is smooth, smoothies. It is teas, it is alkaline broth or bone broth. And making sure ideally you're getting enough protein and healthy fats during this. But it is a cleanse. So you are continuing to give your GI tract rest. You will see glowing skin, glowing complexion. You will feel higher energy. You'll start checking things off on your to do list that have been on your to do list. And so it's cleansing off the things that are weighing you down, as well as really working on an internal system. So, yeah, I'm excited for that. And honestly, you're not hungry. You're doing great. You're very supportive advice from my girlfriend doctor club because some of them were used to extended intermittent fasting. They're like, just follow the plan, as Dr. Anna says it, and you're not going to get hungry. And that's really key.

[00:31:57.210] – Allan

And then the final one is and I think this is really kind of a critical piece of all of this is at some point you're going to fit a level of health and maybe a level of weight loss where you're like, okay, this is a weight I feel comfortable. And maybe it was a weight that you were when you were 29. Maybe it was a weight you were when you graduated high school. And now you could wear the same size jeans, you were wearing then. But you get to a point. And now it's like, okay, I don't want to Yoyo, I don't want to go back to where I was because it worked so hard to get to where I am. So the last plan you have is the carbohydrate modification plan. Can you talk about that and how that works?

[00:32:36.810] – Dr. Cabeca

Yeah, and I love it. And I just opened my book to one of the recipes in the Carb modif. My Texas Rodeo Skillet. Skillets are big in Texas and everything's bigger in Texas. That's where I'm living now in Dallas. And so this is a modification for some of the beautiful skillet breakfast. So this has sunny side up eggs, Sriracha sauce, avocados and sweet potatoes and bacon mixed in. I mean, it's just so yummy. I'm getting hungry thinking about this plan. But the reason is because being in the keto green community for so long, sometimes we've been so restricted that we need the additional carbs. And when some of my clients have added in a sweet potato in the evening, they're sleeping better. Right. And I think it's really important to understand that. And some of them will lose weight once they do that because they have been really conservative and adding in a carb, at least it's a beautiful thing to do. And I think once you get through the plans, it's the principles of the plant and how balancing the fats, but also for flavor, the salts and the citrus that just makes things so much better, addressing your full taste palate so that you're really looking forward to your meals and even better.

[00:33:58.990] – Dr. Cabeca

So these concepts that have been built into the recipes that are all outlined in the book have really been designed to balance and nourish and set. You enjoy them, too. So I think that a lot of times we'll do a carb up, we'll do a carb up day periodically. That's absolutely okay. And it can be very good for you unless it triggers eating disorder. Unless it triggers an eating disorder.

[00:34:30.650] – Allan

Yeah. And just as you mentioned, you mentioned the recipe. So I'll kind of jump into that. You believe in variety. You talked about that several times today. And so this cookbook is really built on a massive variety of different foods. And each plan has some foods that fit. And some of the foods some of the recipes you have actually fit multiple plans. And you put that in there. In fact, last night for dinner, my wife and I had your egg roll soup because I love egg rolls. And I walked by the Chinese we have one Chinese restaurant here on the island, and I walk by there all the time. And I'm like, I just love to go in there and order their egg rolls. And I was just like, no, I won't do it. That's not what I'm doing right now. But I was able to make your soup and it was delicious. And I actually had a second serving of it because it was that good. So these are really good recipes. They fit each plan. So it's not just that. Here's a plan and go figure it out. It's like, here's how this works.

[00:35:30.100] – Allan

Here's a plan. Here's some tips. Here are some recipes. And so you build out recipes to pretty much fill the six days. And you give guidelines if you want to do it yourself. So it's really kind of a cool way that you're not going to get bored because it's not like a lot of plans. You're eating the same foods every day. In this case, I think the most I saw you like, you Cook something one day, and then maybe the third day you have it again as a leftover for lunch or something like that. But it's not eat the same food every day all the way through. You work through these plans, and maybe other than the cleanse, you're doing fairly similar things through the cleanse. But for the others, there's great recipes that are going to keep you interested. And you even give them a shopping list, which I think is also pretty cool.

[00:36:18.670] – Dr. Cabeca

Thank you. You know, my mom raising kids, was making things early. Sometimes having leftovers is just a one less meal I have to Cook. Right. So that's always definitely an option in the plan, too. And maybe if there's adding something a little bit more interesting, too, but to create as much simplicity and shopping as possible. But it's six days. So I want this diversity. I want this experience. I want it to be an experience.

[00:36:48.970] – Allan

Yeah. It is. That's what I'm saying.

[00:36:51.980] – Allan

Mine, it's something I would order at a Chinese restaurant. I'm like, I want egg rolls. So it's like cabbage. And I did it with pork and went through the whole process of making it. And I think it took me less than an hour to make the soup. And that included prep. And I'm a slow prepper. So I didn't even get to watch a whole TV series. I was watching a TV show. I didn't get to watch the whole thing because I had the meal ready before I finished. So really good recipes. You should check that out.

[00:37:22.400] – Allan

Dr. Anna, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:37:31.510] – Dr. Cabeca

Thank you. Well, definitely get keto green. So incorporate the lifestyle, the nutrition into your lifestyle. That concept, that is by design, a number one way, certainly for me and for women going through menopause, and I think for so many, my kids are doing it. The second thing is make oxytocin the most powerful hormone in your body and so not stress. Really think, where do I see love today? Where am I loving, giving, grateful? What am I grateful for? Really focusing on that. How am I showing love to those I love? How am I receiving love? Sometimes that's even harder. So make oxytocin the most powerful hormone. And the third is just smile. Really smile, really genuinely feel good about yourself. And for women, oftentimes we have this, like I would say the negative, that nasty bitch on your shoulder talking down to you. So like, knock that nasty bitch off your shoulder and enjoy yourself. And that concept of truly, genuinely being happy in your own skin with whatever is in your life at this moment, it's a really powerful concept.

[00:38:43.750] – Allan

Well, thank you, Dr. Anna. If someone wanted to get in touch with you, learn more about MenuPause or your Girlfriend's Doctor club, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:38:54.220] – Dr. Cabeca

Definitely, just come to my website dranna.com. We have a MenuPause book page and some great bonuses to go along with the MenuPause book. So some trackers, some additional handouts and recipes and good things to support you in the videos, cooking videos, all this good stuff is there for you. So, dranna.com, and then join me on social media at the Girlfriend Doctor.

[00:39:19.120] – Allan

Awesome. You can go to fortyplusfitnesspodcast.com/533 and I'll be sure to have the link there. Dr. Anna, thank you so much for being a part of 40 Plus Fitness.

[00:39:29.970] – Dr. Cabeca

Thank you for having me, Allan. I love what you're doing. Thank you.

Post Show/Recap

[00:39:40.850] – Allan

Welcome back, Ras.

[00:39:42.380] – Rachel

Hey, Allan. That was a fun interview with Doctor Anna Cabeca. Anytime I hear anything having to do with menopause, my ears peek up. So her book, MenuPause sounds like a really good book.

[00:39:55.130] – Allan

It is good. Obviously, I will not experience menopause, can't and won't. And so for me, it's really just about understanding what my wife, with my clients, with my friends, with my family, what they may experience as they're going. And I think there are periods of time when we really have to ratchet in our nutrition. For the most part, most of us can go through life and not really think about what we're eating. But there are particular periods in a woman's life where I think it becomes really important. Obviously, when you're trying to get pregnant and you are having a baby, there are times when your nutrition is tantamount to having a healthy baby, dealing with any kind of major illness or recovery. So cancer surgery, something like that. Nutrition is going to be really important to make sure that you're addressing your body's nutritional needs so that it can heal properly so that you have a good, strong immune system, really important. And then, of course, during menopause, when you're going through significant, significant hormone changes, and those changes, the perimenopause process, if you will, can take minutes where they're actually pulling out your ovaries and uterus, or it can take decades as you're going through those.

[00:41:24.750] – Allan

This is month to month, day to day, week to week. All of it changes in your hormones. And if you are just eating about doing your thing, you don't have information. What you have is a symptom. And you don't know if it was directly affected by what you're eating, what you're feeling, the movement or, yeah, you're just going through a huge hormone shift that you really couldn't deal with otherwise. Those are important. And within approach, you literally can sit down and look at a swath of time, the six day plans and say, okay, I'm going to do this thing over six days and see if my symptoms abate. And if they do now you have data, now you have information to say, hey, if I cut out this food, yes, my body screaming at me, eat more chocolate, but I don't eat more chocolate. Instead, I eat more vegetables, I eat more meat. I make sure that I'm eating whole food, and you feel better. You didn't need the chocolate. And I know that's hard to hear. Sometimes you need the chocolate. I understand. But sometimes your body is telling you something, and the answer is actually the exact opposite.

[00:42:54.060] – Rachel

That's so true. And what's interesting, how Anna put it, is that instead of turning to supplements or surgery or something, that a lot of doctors will suggest a pill for this or for that, it's turning to food. And food can actually really be true medicine for you. And I appreciate how she created these five different eating patterns or these five different types of eating for a six day window of time. Six days isn't that long. You can get through some sort of change, and you never know how you might feel afterwards. If it works for you, then it's a tool in your toolbox for all these different times in our lives when our hormones will fluctuate. Like I mentioned earlier, all of us have different symptoms as we approach menopause. Perimenopause is kind of tricky. That way our hormones can fluctuate day to day, week to week, month to month symptoms could be different from another. But by trying food as medicine, at least you have another tool in the toolbox that you can pick out later on.

[00:43:55.880] – Allan

Yeah. The only caution I put out there is if you're making a fairly drastic change. So let's just say you're eating the standard American diet today or something close to it, and you immediately say, okay, well, I'm going to go to the hardcore, intense low carb thing. Six days might not be enough time for you to fully adapt to that change. And so just recognizing that if you find that this food is affecting you and maybe even in a negative way, you may need to lean in instead of pulling back and saying it's not working. The six days is a great trial. And for a lot of people that don't have, say, insulin resistance or some other health issues going on, they're going to start seeing some potential positive change, weight loss and some other things will be happening during that period of time. But you might not feel really good. And there's a couple of reasons for it. One, yes, could be that you're going through the change into keto, and they call it keto flu. I prefer to call it carb withdrawals because your body used carbohydrates for fuel and now it doesn't have as many it's got to shift fuel systems.

[00:45:12.710] – Allan

That can be a little disruptive for most of us it is. But there's also other things. Our body stores toxins in our fat. So if you're starting to lose body fat, your body now has to deal with those toxins that it shuttled away earlier and didn't deal with. And if you're under a toxic load at home or at work or whatever, now you're adding more toxins to the mix. You might feel worse before you feel better. So just recognize six days is a good rule of thumb because as you said, you can do just about anything for six days.

[00:45:46.600] – Rachel

Absolutely.

[00:45:47.630] – Allan

People can go without eating for six days and be fine. But that said, if you're feeling bad, you're making a change. If it's hard, just consider whether this is something you need to lean into or whether it is okay. You did your six days and it just didn't work. And let's say you tried that and it didn't work. That doesn't mean that tool is useless. If you needed to screw in a screw and the first thing you grabbed was a hammer, the hammer didn't work, but you get a screwdriver and it works. Later on, you got a nail. The hammer is going to be just fine. So just recognize that time and space and where you are now is different than where you will be later. So a tool today that's not useful can be a useful tool later. But there's really good eating plans in there. Really sound advice from Dr. Cabeca. And if hormones are an issue for you as you go through these changes, food will affect your hormone levels. What you think will affect your hormone levels, what you physically do will affect your hormone levels. All of that input, all of that information and it will affect how your body expresses hormones.

[00:47:06.550] – Allan

So while you can't fix this change because it is what it is, it's coming, you can reduce the impact of it with the right foods.

[00:47:16.740] – Rachel

Yeah, well, you both were discussing bio individuality and what is right for you right now is going to be different from what is right for you later. And that's just the way our hormones fluctuate. I think every woman understands and agrees with me that like I said, week to week, month to month, our hormones, our symptoms, the way we feel just changes so greatly. So what works for you today may not work tomorrow, but the point is that you get to try something new and it sounds like Dr. Cabeca offers several different meals that you get ways to try to eat in order to satisfy those changes. It's a great idea.

[00:47:56.510] – Allan

And if you're listening to this and the guys have tuned out, they can eat this way too.

[00:48:02.710] – Rachel

Oh, for sure.

[00:48:04.670] – Allan

These are healthy, good ways to eat. This is not like, oh, well, here's an estrogen pill. I'm going to give it to my husband too. No, it's not like that. This is food. This is really good. These are really good meal plans. They're very easy. She gives you the shopping list, the whole set. So it's really simple for you to kind of go in and say, okay, this is my meal plan for the week. It's the meal plan for my family for the week.

[00:48:25.090] – Rachel

I love that.

[00:48:26.110] – Allan

And so they're getting what they need to be healthy. You're getting what you need to heal and be healthy. Just recognize this is not a woman's eating plan this is an eating plan that anyone can do and be more healthy for doing it.

[00:48:42.500] – Rachel

That sounds great. Sounds like a great book.

[00:48:45.040] – Allan

Yeah, it is. All right, well, Rachel, we'll talk next week.

[00:48:48.120] – Rachel

Sounds great.

Patreons

The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:

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Thank you!

Another episode you may enjoy

The hormone fix with Dr. Anna Cabeca

Less...

Let's Say Hello

[00:01:12.910] – Allan

Hello, Ras. How are things?

[00:01:15.190] – Rachel

Good, Allan. How are you today?

[00:01:17.480] – Allan

Doing okay. I guess as this comes out, we'll be hitting the prime of tax season. And today I went ahead and said, okay, well, I got a new computer. I'm going to go ahead and move my files over and start my tax return because I got my accounting done for this and that I can't find my tax file from last year. So I'm a little bit of a freak out as we came into this call of I can't lose that file. It should be backed up somewhere. So hopefully that was backed up. I know my head backup is going. So I just got to go back somewhere and find something in the history and say, okay, Where's this file? Because it has to be out there somewhere. But it's not on my hard drive. And when I open up the old TurboTax, it doesn't find the file I filed with them. So I don't know, I don't do the online thing. I've always had it on my desktop because I don't always again, not always having connectivity. Sometimes web based apps are just not all that cool. Sometimes I just like having the application on my computer because again, if I went out there and tried to open up an old year's tax return, they'd say, oh, this is an old year.

[00:02:26.940] – Allan

You can't whatever. I like having the application on my computer. And I've been using TurboTax forever, so I should have all those returns. But we'll see what I got to do. I may have to request a transcript from the IRS just to do my damn taxes.

[00:02:42.970] – Rachel

Well, I hope it shows up. I'm sure it'll turn up somewhere.

[00:02:46.000] – Allan

Yes. How are things up there?

[00:02:47.870] – Rachel

Good. Spring is here, getting busy this season. My son graduates from College. And so we're planning all those types of celebrations. And it's really a beautiful time of year up here.

[00:03:00.340] – Allan

All right. Yeah, you showed I saw some pictures on your Facebook frogs and whatnot things that are coming out of there all of hibernation.

[00:03:10.630] – Rachel

They're all defrosting right now.

[00:03:13.450] – Allan

Frog man. I'd so be going south. They have it so made down

[00:03:18.910] – Rachel

Yeah, that's for sure. Yes. Beautiful. A lot of new animals are coming through. The birds are migrating. It's really a fun time of year to be outside.

[00:03:28.690] – Allan

Enjoy all six weeks of it.

[00:03:32.170] – Rachel

Right.

[00:03:33.430] – Allan

And in about a week or so, you're going to be doing your run. I mean, I think we're listening to this. You've done it probably, I guess, or you're close to doing it and then you're going to be on your way back. And so we'll know more. But you're in your taper.

[00:03:49.990] – Rachel

Yes, in the taper taking the mileage down, but not the intensity. And I've got a meeting with my coach coming up to talk about goals. I've surpassed what I had expected. So my five hour goal is pretty much in the bag. I just need to maybe tune into a better time goal, I think for me. So it should be interesting to have that conversation.

[00:04:13.570] – Allan

Yeah. All right. Well, so you'll have your pacing down and all that and kind of know a plan going into the right.

[00:04:19.580] – Rachel

Yeah, I'll have a race plan, hopefully in the next week or so.

[00:04:22.880] – Allan

Cool. Well, we'll talk about it next time we're on and we can get into your well, next time we're actually going to record two episodes and then the following time. So it will be a few weeks before you hear how Rachel did on her trial. Five hours is the goal. She's going to blow that out of the water, I'm pretty sure, but

[00:04:41.990] – Rachel

I hope so.

[00:04:42.840] – Allan

You will.

[00:04:43.790] – Rachel

That's the plan.

[00:04:45.490] – Allan

Don't play courts. Yeah. But anyway, we'll talk about it in a few weeks.

[00:04:52.280] – Rachel

All right. Great.

[00:04:53.310] – Allan

Are you ready to get into a conversation with Amy?

[00:04:56.120] – Rachel

Sure.

Interview

[00:05:37.150] – Allan

Amy, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:05:40.100] – Amy

I'm so happy to be here, Allan. Thank you. Thrilled.

[00:05:43.130] – Allan

So your book, Food, one of my favorite topics, Food: Eat with Ease Every Day. Like you, I'm kind of a foodie, too. I love food and it's a big part of my life as well. I love cooking. I love having that as a part of my life. And for you it was. But then it became kind of a darker part of your life. We're going to get into that in a bit about what you went through a little bit. And some of the feelings and things that you had around food and dieting and exercise and all the stuff we're told, just move more, eat less kind of conversations and why that wasn't necessarily the way you needed to do this. And I think the message that you're going to bring out that you brought out in this book is a good message for a lot of people to hear.

[00:06:30.730] – Amy

Wonderful. Yeah. I'm a foodie, too. I love food. And I think one of the things that was so difficult was as a child, some of the things I went through, I turned to food to move through it. It was the only thing I had that was consistent, that I felt like I was in control of that was, quote, there for me all the time, no matter what. But what happened over time was constantly turning to food brought more problems, which for me was severe obesity, body pain, not being well, not being strong in my body. And then internally I say in the book, the bigger I got on the outside, the more I shrunk on the inside. Until honestly, I was a shadow of myself, trapped in a huge body, saying no when i desperately wanted to say yes and just not showing up the way I want to show up. And I know that's such an overused term now showing up. But for me, that truly was it, because I was just saying no to things. And Amy inside was like, please, I wish I could do that. I wish I could water ski.

[00:07:32.150] – Amy

I wish I could put on a bathing suit and go to the beach. I wish I could say yes. I don't know if the movie seat is going to be too tight on my hips. These are all things. That's how bad it got for me, so that I was just completely retreated within myself. And then there was always food. So I think Irene Pace summed it up really beautifully in the forward. She's a nutritionist. When she said what had once been adaptive for me and brilliant because it helped young Amy get through difficult things, ultimately became maladaptive. And she was quick to say, that doesn't mean we're bad or broken. It means in a way, we're brilliant. So I thought that was such a beautiful way to start the book because so many of us live with this hyperactive critic just beating us down all the time. And if you think about it as a moment of brilliance that got you through so that you're here today to make a new decision, it's really pretty powerful.

[00:08:31.810] – Allan

It is. I really want to ask you the question about the gorilla and your mother and the child.

[00:08:41.330] – Amy

You're the first person who brought that up. And I knew when I dropped that I was like, someone is going to ask me about this.

[00:08:49.130] – Allan

If you want to talk about it, we can. I've got another direction. We can go. We can talk about it offline or whatever. So.

[00:08:55.570] – Allan

Yeah, go ahead

[00:08:56.820] – Amy

tell the story?

[00:08:57.900] – Allan

Yes, please.

[00:08:58.870] – Amy

Okay. My mother was kind of a tough customer, and she took a bunch of us to a local game farm. That was, I think, by today's standard, probably illegal. There were like, Panthers there roaming around with basically a dog leash. They were riding around on the back of sort of like half car, half trucks with a little rope. And she brought a bunch of us kids. And I think I was six or seven, and my best friend's little brother was five. And they had this chain link fence with a full grown male gorilla inside and pulley system. So you dropped you pulled like a clothesline pulley system. You pulled the bucket. There was a bucket hanging off of it. You pull the bucket over to you. You dropped the food in. And the gorilla was so smart that it pulled the pulley back. It ate the food out of it. And that was the fun. Well, my friend's little brother somehow got up on the chain link fence and leaned his head over it so that the chain link was here somehow the rope got slipped behind his neck and the gorilla started pulling.

[00:10:12.590] – Amy

And what that did was trap him in between the chain link fence and the rope behind his neck. And he was hanging there. He wasn't dead or dying at that moment, he wasn't, but he was definitely in distress and he was definitely stuck. And then the gorilla started pulling, and then he was in big trouble. His face was red. He was hanging off the ground. He was literally trapped there. And my mother dropped what she was doing ran over. There was no help because this was like a really makeshift outfit here. And I remember her, she had long fingernails and she got natural. She got her fingernails under the rope between the rope and my friend little brother's skin. So she had to use so hard that she did scratch him and it did bleed. But she got just enough room between his skin and that rope. And she pulled and the gorilla started pulling and she pulled and he pulled and she pulled. And she got open enough that Kyle dropped to the ground while she was PO. She was furious. So she took Kyle and she went to the owner's office. And it really is kind of like a funny image.

[00:11:20.600] – Amy

And I still remember it. He had, like a Safari outfit on these big alligator skin boots, and he has them up on his desk and a big ten gallon cowboy hat on the desk. And she went in there, like raising hell. And she said, this is unacceptable. This child was injured. Look what happened to him. He was trapped. The gorilla had him pinned against the chain link fence. And I had to pull him out. And he said, hold on a minute, lady. What are you telling me here? Are you telling me that you had a tug of war, basically with a gorilla and you won? And she said, yes, I won. This child would have died. And he said that gorilla had the strength of ten men.

[00:11:56.760] – Allan

Yeah. Well, when you're in that kind of mindset, strange things, interesting things can happen. So thank you for sharing that story. In all fairness, it was just one sentence in the entire book. But I did have to ask.

[00:12:11.730] – Amy

I thought it was better to leave it as one sentence because it got your question like what?

[00:12:16.650] – Allan

It did get the question. Absolutely. Good.

[00:12:19.200] – Amy

Thank you for asking.

[00:12:20.460] – Allan

Yes. But there's one other story that I think is actually much more important, particularly of what we want to talk about today. And that was towards the end of your father's life, and he was talking to your son, and you were fortunate to be an observer in that conversation because he could have just as easily said, no, I want to talk to him alone. And you wouldn't have been in the room, but you were. And he said something that changed your life. And I'll let you say the quote because again, I think it means a lot to you, and I think it's going to mean a lot to our listeners if they hear you say this. But go ahead and say what you heard him say to your son.

[00:13:01.110] – Amy

Make the life you want, be happy.

[00:13:05.370] – Allan

And that's powerful. That is hugely powerful. I'm so glad your son heard that. I'm so glad you heard that because it really did change the direction of your life.

[00:13:16.530] – Amy

It absolutely did. And there's a simple sort of brilliance in it. There's no arguing with the logic for me. I do believe that we have the ability and actually taking it a step further, the responsibility to fashion a life that best suits us and those that we love in this life. And if you step into that responsibility and you make choices that align with it, amazing things happen.

[00:13:50.550] – Allan

Now, a lot of folks want to lose weight. And one of the ways they know to do this, and it's the way they try and they don't succeed. I'm not going to use the other word. They try and they don't succeed. They try and they don't succeed. And eventually even the word diet and dieting becomes synonymous with punishment.

[00:14:15.090] – Amy

I agree 100%. I'm nodding my head furiously here. When I was on just about every diet known to man and woman here. And none of them worked for me because the minute I started to diet, I felt I was being deprived. It was about deprivation. Now I can't have my favorite thing. Now I have to go to bed hungry. I have to eat small portions. And keep in mind, up until this point and including this point, actually, food is my go to coping mechanism. So without the ability to go to food, when I'm feeling an uncomfortable emotion, what do I do now? I'm not a drinker, I'm not a smoker. What do I reach for? What do I do? And that's I think for me why I always didn't succeed, to use your words, because I felt like I was deprived. I felt like I was being punished. Food is now my enemy. The thing that got me to live as long as I did is now my enemy. And I don't know how to be right with it. I couldn't make heads or tails of it up to that point.

[00:15:24.610] – Allan

We're going to get into some of those in a minute. But I did want to take one more step and have this conversation because this is the other side of it. You go to your doctor and they say, well, you need to go on a diet and you need to move more. And if you've ever been out of shape, like really out of shape, the concept of moving more is painful. The concept of doing these things, particularly around people at all, there's a lot of stuff going on in there in your head and what you're telling yourself. And so in a sense, it's another punishment.

[00:16:05.770] – Amy

You're exactly right. I didn't feel I belonged in a gym, a 320 pound woman getting on equipment. Am I going to hurt myself? The first thing I used to think was, am I going to break this? Is this thing going to hold my weight? Because I had been on things that didn't hold my weight. I was in a patio chair that collapsed. It's horrifying, it's mortifying, it's embarrassing. And I also knew that I wasn't tremendously fit. I think I always had sort of a strong structure under my body. First of all, I carried all that extra weight, so I had to be pretty strong, but I wasn't traditionally fit. You know, I sort of bullied my way through things. Bullied meaning in my own mind, I'll just do it. I just have to get that done with. Let me just get that done and then check it off. So for something like going to a gym, that's the mindset I would have. It was not enjoyable and it was scary and embarrassing because you know that if you're really and the really big people listening to this know what I'm saying, to put yourself in a spot where there's predominantly very healthy people, you feel like you're sort of an object of glances at the kindest and ridicule at the worst.

[00:17:28.950] – Amy

So it's nothing pleasant or fun about that proposition.

[00:17:33.490] – Allan

Well, I will say this, and it won't make any sense or it won't really necessarily change how you feel about this. But I can tell you that most of us at the gym are happy to have you there. We're happy to see you doing things that are positive for yourself.

[00:17:53.650] – Amy

Now that I'm a person who is a little more fit, who goes to the gym. I agree with you. But my experience as a 300 plus pound person, that was the critic in my head. Saying I didn't belong there. I was going to break something. I was going to hurt myself. And also, Allan, I had no confidence in my body's ability to do this. And as soon as my heart rate got a little faster, I was frightened, I'm going to die. I'm going to blow up my heart can't handle this weight. Just a lot of things. It means to your point, all internal within my head, I was so used to being ridiculed that I expected it. Everywhere I went, I said, oh, I'm asking for it. Going in here.

[00:18:38.410] – Allan

The way I like to couch this is you found a tool chest. Okay. You didn't have that tool chest when you started, when you heard the message from your father, make the life you want, be happy. You knew that's what you had to do, but at that point, you really didn't have even a plan, which in the end, I'm going to tell you to your benefit, because so many people throw tactics and strategies out there without actually figuring things out for themselves first. Now you call them the eat with ease commitments. And I love that word. That's a very important word in my vocabulary as well.

[00:19:22.870] – Amy

Which one? Ease or commitments?

[00:19:25.090] – Allan

Well, ease is not necessarily work commitment, for sure. And we'll get a little bit into it. You've talked a lot about your why and things like that. But to me, commitment is the marriage of the vision of where you're supposed to be, who you're supposed to be, that happy person living a life they're supposed to be living. And the commitment is the why you got to get there. You had a young boy, I had a daughter. There were reasons for us to decide, okay, I'm not going down this path. I need to get on a different path. My aging path. I see it's in front of me. If I keep doing this, then this there was no other thing but to change it because I made the commitment to be different. And predominantly at the time, it was my daughter that was the driving force emotionally for me, of why I did it. That's where I come up with commitment as a basic phrase. Now yours are these kind of steps, and they're tools, as I like to say, of how to get there, quite literally. Yeah. Listen to this part again. She's going to say these, but I want you to listen to it time and time again because these are not easy.

[00:20:38.410] – Allan

But when you have these in your tool chest, you've got the magic key, you've got the formula sitting right in front of you. So, Amy, if you would take us through the nine, eat with ease commitments.

[00:20:51.230] – Amy

Yes, I would love to and exactly what you said. I knew what I had to do, and that was aligned myself with now my new mantra, which is, make the life you want. Be happy. That's all I thought about. Like, how am I going to flip this and get to the point where I feel happy? I didn't know how to do it, and if I had to know how to do it, I never would have started. So what I realized when I sat down to write the book was that I owed it to the reader to sort of dissect what was my path in retrospect. So I want to just reiterate that you don't have to know how to get all the way to the end. It boils down to one choice, and that one choice can unfold and lead you to the next choice.

[00:21:36.630] – Amy

So the nine that I came up with in retrospect are the first one was patience. I had to accept. I'm a pretty intense person. I want to make a decision, make my life. I want to be happy. Now, I'm going to be happy, and I'm going to do it yesterday and I'm going to lay my head on the pillow and I don't have a check Mark on it.

[00:21:57.500] – Amy

I'm a big checker offer. I'm a total type A, but this weight owned me, so I couldn't type A it. So I had to take a breath and realize that it's okay. I don't have to know right now. I gave myself permission, and I trusted in myself enough that if I got really patient about it, time would work in my benefit. I, over time, will be able to figure this out. So that was the first step. Rather than looking for the quick fix, the shakes, all the things that I had not succeeded at in the past, let me be patient and see what unfolds and what I can figure out. Let me get my brain in on this and work through it. That was the first.

[00:22:38.020] – Amy

The second one was be curious, which goes right along with be patient, because you can be patient all day. But if you don't wonder about things, the answer may or may not start to unfold for itself. So I decided to, once I realized that I'm going to give myself time to figure it out, I realized how much I absolutely didn't know. I didn't know about my body.

[00:22:58.950] – Amy

I didn't know about metabolism. I didn't know about macronutrients. I didn't know about hey, here's the funniest thing. I didn't know that what you drink counted as calories. I don't know why I thought that. I thought that because it went right through. It was a zero. A lot of things I didn't know about my own body as a grown woman who'd given birth was, like, amazing, right? So I got curious about all the things that I didn't know about, and that came out in time. And what I realized looking back was that allowing myself to be curious really let me start to find things that worked for me. And I don't think this is a one size fits all, no pun intended proposition. I think people have to get curious and wonder about what really feels right to them, even for now, and that we can adjust as we go on because this has to work long term or else it absolutely falls apart.

[00:23:52.850] – Amy

Next one was I absolutely refused to punish myself around food. That was done because my whole life I suffered around being severely overweight or around food. It was time to give that whole thing hard stop done.

[00:24:09.870] – Amy

So I made that commitment. No more punishment, no more suffering around food. That means no starving, no going to bed hungry, no depriving myself of my favorite thing if I feel like having a little piece of dark chocolate that is not going to gnaw away at my head, that I can no longer have dark chocolate for the rest of my life, because, news flash, I'm going to quit. If you tell me I can't have dark chocolate, I'm out. It's a no deal thing. So I had to solve that, too. And then once I started to realize the things that would start to work and not work with me, I realized I needed to meet with some experts. That was someone who could help me move safely. A trainer or Pilates instructor, in my case, a nutritionist, somebody you know, who was right on my insurance plan that I was able to go speak with. And she taught me about my resting metabolic rate, why proteins and carbs and fats are different, how they work in the body. I had no idea about this level of chemistry or nutrition in the body and the cellular level and what your body actually needs to function well.

[00:25:18.120] – Amy

And I also didn't know, like, breaking down muscle and how you build it back up using protein. No idea. So once I started to meet with people who are experts, it sort of informed me. And then with the information they gave me, I was able to say yes and no to some things that fit that I knew I could commit to long term.

[00:25:37.550] – Amy

And then the next, speaking of committing, the next one was I promised to move my body. And my promise to myself was I wouldn't go to bed. I wouldn't put my head on the pillow that night unless I moved. I had to do something. It could be a couple of hours of housework. It could be walking around the village. It could be going to the gym. It could be a Pilates session, it could be yoga, it could be a stretching session. I was so disconnected from my body at that time. The Amy inside was so shrunken that I didn't inhabit my body. I didn't want to inhabit my body. So I had to mend that break. Again, I know this now. Back then, what I just could muster was I think I need to move my body.

[00:26:23.030] – Speaker 4

I need to feel like it's under me when I'm walking up a flight of steps. I know I have to get healthier because in the back of my mind, I'm going to be this 400 pound woman in a wheelchair in a nursing home sooner rather than later. And I didn't like that idea at all. So I knew I had to start to move a little bit.

[00:26:38.470] – Amy

And then we're up to number six. Number six was super helpful and I still do it today. I have a tracker on my smartphone and I enter everything I eat and I treat it like my trusted accountant. A friend of mine is like, oh, I don't want to track all day. I don't think of it as the negative. I think of it as like a really important tool in my to use your words, my tool chest. This thing is helping me to be successful with my food budget every day. And I know I really love food, right? We talked about this and I don't want to be deprived. So I'm having to find and get curious about ways to eat food that I really enjoy and still feel satisfied so that I can do this long term.

[00:27:23.500] – Amy

So the food tracker for me is the key. Also, because it tracks the nutrition, the nutrients, it really helps me try to look for that balance.

[00:27:33.130] – Amy

Number seven. I love this one. Discover my love tribe, which again, in retrospect, along the way, I had really nice people supportive. When you said there's people in the gym who are really happy to see you there, I did come across those people. I had this three mile route around my house and one day a woman pulled over and said, you don't know me and I don't mean to startle you, but I've been watching your transformation and you're amazing and you're inspiring me to do this too. So it's these people who will show up in your life and cheer you on, or more than that, become a partner in it and a buddy in it and really help you. And you don't have to know them now, just trust if you're ready to take this step that they're going to show up in your path for sure. I think of it like Dorothy and the wizard of Oz. Come across all these characters who help you get to the Emerald City.

[00:28:23.230] – Amy

Really cool. And then commitment eight, utilize new tools. For me, that was like weighing my food with a kitchen scale, getting a digital scale. These are the physical things that helped me. The food track around my phone, a good pair of sneakers. Just some basic things that helped me to get through. Not too expensive either. Affordable for most people.

[00:28:42.850] – Amy

And then nine, I committed to writing from what I call right from the spirit, which is I kept a Journal and I shared my trials and my tribulations and my love tribe started to get in on it and cheer me on or jump into and share their struggles around food. And we sort of like put our heads together and figure out, all right, is there a smart way that we can get through this and still maintain what we're trying to do for ourselves? So those were the nine with these commitments.

[00:29:12.370] – Allan

Yeah. And like I said, those are really great tools as you go through, and you don't have to have all of them. When you start this, over time, you're going to develop the things and develop in the way that's important, particularly if you're doing the first tip. You've got patience, which is maybe the hardest one. And then you add curiosity from there. The rest of it is just solving problems and putting it all together in a way that's sustainable for you as you go. It's not going to happen overnight. And it didn't happen overnight, but it was happening. And as it happened, you got momentum. You started snowballing. You met the right people. You brought the right people into your life. And over time, it just gets better and better and better.

[00:29:56.080] – Allan

Now, you mentioned Dorothy, and so I'm going to play off of that a little bit now. In the whole story of Dorothy, she always had what she needed to get home with her. Okay. And that's kind of the message that you brought up towards the end of the book is that this is all born out of self love. This is already in you.

[00:30:21.890] – Allan

And while you said the bigger you were on the outside, the smaller you felt on the inside first became true. And I'm going to say as you got bigger on the inside, you got smaller on the outside, because as I read the story, that's kind of how I interpreted it. You started getting bigger on the inside through self love and your health and your weight took care of themselves.

[00:30:51.650] – Amy

I love that. And I think there's some truth to that, although I didn't feel that way during the process, if that makes sense. And there's this sort of this push out there, oh, you just have to love yourself. You just have to love yourself. Well, my experience when I was so overweight, I didn't feel that I loved myself because I was at such disk ease with my body. It didn't feel good, Allan. I mean, I was painful. I was compulsively eating. I was saying no to things because of this vehicle didn't allow me spiritually to get out and do what I wanted to do. And that didn't feel very loving. But what I realized is that even by just choosing patience, that's a huge loving gesture. And wouldn't we do that with someone that we loved around us? Of course, if your child comes to you and they're really upset the first thing you have to do is be patient and listen to them hear them out, try to help them arrive to their own solution right? Be a sounding board yet the old Amy was overly critical and I wasn't patient with myself so I think the biggest step in starting the whole idea of self love to your point is that moment where I decided I'm going to do it differently now let me just start by being patient and I think you're right that was the creation of the whole thing. I have to say I didn't say let me love myself, I love myself and look myself in the mirror and say I love you Amy, none of that was happening, none of that but what was happening was I was exerting a sort of kindness to myself that I had

[00:32:44.460] – Amy

never done in the past and I didn't intellectualize it as I'm being extremely kind with myself. I intellectualized it as I'm going to make the life I want yeah, I was holding on to that mantra boy with white knuckled love that made such impact on me that I held onto that for literally my dear life.

[00:33:16.890] – Allan

And good.

[00:33:19.950] – Amy

Thank you, Dad.

[00:33:22.170] – Allan

Amy I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:33:31.350] – Amy

This is a great question. Obviously, I'm going to have to go back to a couple of the commitments in the book the first one is we talked a lot about patience and curiosity and wondering about what feels good and what fits best for us but the next thing I want to add on to that is just expressing a level of kindness to ourselves. If someone out there wants to get started but they feel like they have to do it perfectly there's many of us who are perfectionists and that whole idea that I don't know what to do therefore I won't start I would just invite them to be beautifully imperfect, you know. There's a type of perfection in embracing our imperfection because it allows us to step forward and sometimes that's all we have to do the second thing that I would offer is that any journey, any decisions and actually everything and anything we do every day boils down to one choice at a time. So if you came to me, Allan and five years ago and said you know what, Amy? You have to lose 150 lbs and you have to know how to do it right now and you have to stick to it and you're going to do it, I would be out of my mind because I didn't have any of that skill set but what I did have was that mantra in my mind and that why so having the why for me was a way for me to put 1ft in front of the other and just try the next choice and also realize that if the choice wasn't perfect.

[00:35:01.340] – Amy

I could make another choice. So that was the second one. And the third thing I would say is start. Every day is a clean slate. And if we break it down even more, every moment is a clean slate. And there's so much opportunity in that.

[00:35:19.790] – Allan

Thank you, Amy. If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book, Food: Eat with Ease Every Day. Where would you like for me to send them?

[00:35:30.230] – Amy

If they want to learn more about me, they can jump on my website, which is amyfreinberg.com, and I'll spell it out. It's www.amyfreinberg.com. And if they want to grab the book, they can go to Amazon and it's Food: Eat with Ease Every Day.

[00:35:49.820] – Allan

Right? You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/532 and I'll be sure to have the links there. Amy, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:36:00.670] – Amy

Thank you. This was a blast. Love it.

[00:36:03.870] – Allan

Me, too. Thank you.

Post Show/Recap

[00:36:13.050] – Allan

Welcome back, Ras.

[00:36:14.790] – Rachel

Hey, Allan. That was really an interesting conversation with Amy. And food addiction is one of those really hard topics to tackle. But she seemed to get her situation together pretty well. And her nine rules, Eat with Ease Commitments, were a really nice guideline for her.

[00:36:32.960] – Allan

Yeah. You know what I really took away from this conversation, and I've had similar people on in the past, and I've had people that were on the exact opposite of this paradigm is that we all have this relationship with food, and some of them become, for a lack of better word, abusive relationships. We're using food at the time maybe for the right reasons. It helped her get past a very hard time in her life, but then it becomes a problem. And food is not something you just stay away from. You can sit there and say, okay, well, that's abusive. Stop it. This is not something you can just stop. You have to deal with it in your own way. And we had Susan on a few weeks ago, and she had a very clear I have to set my lines. I have to stay within the boundaries. And if I stay within the boundaries, then I'm successful and I feel good that I'm doing the right thing. Now, again, she knows because of the testing she's done that she's addicted to food, and therefore, there are certain foods that are going to trigger her. She knows those foods.

[00:37:38.790] – Allan

She's taking the time to do that, whereas Amy comes at it for more of a I'm going to have compassion for myself. I'm going to find my way through this because I believe in myself. That whole make yourself do your thing, be happy, which again, I misquoted that. But again, it's the concept of she deserves to be happy and recognizing that she deserves that she's doing the things that are necessary to care for herself, not all the time. She doesn't have to have those bright lines that Susan had to have, but she's doing her thing.

[00:38:15.450] – Rachel

Well, Amy mentioned her dad had mentioned make the life you want and be happy. And so that sounds like the foundation for what she needed to build on her plan to get healthy. Whereas Susan, like you said, she had some very hard lines with the flour and sugar, I think, were her triggers to send her spiraling out of control, whereas Amy had some different situations that she was able to navigate instead. But one of the couple of the top rules that she had for her eat with ease commitments was be a patient and be curious. And those are two great rules. You just need to be patient with yourself, and you need to learn how to live a different lifestyle, how to change your eating habits, and how to view food as fuel or for a different reason and not just coping from the hard situations in life.

[00:39:11.950] – Allan

Yeah, it's a big part of self awareness. And I've talked about this over and over again that you do have to know yourself because in this space, in this diet and exercise space, there are so many absolutisms. I just want to say, you have to go keto, you have to go vegan. You can't eat this. You must not do that. You have to abstain from these foods, all those different things. I tend to be a lot more holistic and agnostic about all this stuff and say if you're eating whole food, you've solved 99% of the problem. And then it's just making decisions on your day to day. When you're put into situations where something else is there and maybe the whole food option isn't available, you find yourself stuck. And now here you are in an airport, and it's like, okay, you're walking through the airport to try to find something healthy to eat, and they don't make it easy. You got to walk by six McDonald's and a subway to get to a place where you might find something that's a little bit more to your liking and fit what you're looking for. That's really hard going to dinner when 90% of the menu is not your menu.

[00:40:33.520] – Allan

It's not meant for you at this point. And so the absoluteisms of avoiding the word diet, avoiding these other things. I'm like, no, for some of us, it is a diet. It's a temporary thing. We do it and then we stop doing it. And that's okay. For others, it's the bright lines rope yourself off and you do your thing within those parameters. And we were talking before we came on. It's sort of like some of the laws that are out there, but I know it's okay with the traffic law, the speed limit. You're like, oh, well, if I go about 7 miles over the speed limit, no harm, no foul. Right? Whereas you say, well, I sort of Rob a bank.

[00:41:18.920] – Allan

yeah. Sometimes you need the bank robber rules of don't Rob banks, don't kill people, don't do these things. These are rules. They're specific and some of us really need those rules.

[00:41:30.130] – Rachel

Right.

[00:41:30.580] – Allan

And then other people if you tone it down a bit you're just a little over the speed limit. It's okay. So you say yes, I can have this temporarily or occasionally I can enjoy this detour and get back on the road and I really haven't lost any ground. For some people, that's fine. For others, it's like, no, these are bank robber rules and I've got to stay on my road. Yeah, exactly. And this is how I'm going to do it. So as I go into my tough mudder training it was okay, this is my food and I wouldn't normally do this but I step on the scale every single day. Every morning when I wake up, the scale is literally right beside my bed. I roll off the bed, I weigh myself every single morning and so I know how I'm tracking because I know that if I'm able to lose a certain amount of weight that is going to make my race better. Easier, more enjoyable. There's zero reason for me to try to carry 228.6 lbs on this race When I know I can get myself down to 200 or less. So for many of us, it is hard, fast rules.

[00:42:49.270] – Allan

For others, maybe a little softer approaches, a little bit more self compassion, a little bit more speed limiting type stuff where you give and take across time. But you have to know yourself. You have to have that self awareness.

[00:43:04.330] – Allan

All right, well, it looks like we had some internet issues on my side. Third world country issues. But it is what it is. Anyway, Rachel, I appreciate having you here. Good luck on your run and we'll talk next week.

[00:43:18.960] – Rachel

Thanks, Allan. Take care.

[00:43:20.430] – Allan

You too.

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