Allan (00:59):
Robb, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

Robb (01:02):
Thanks so much, Allan.

Allan (01:03):
You know when I saw your book Body by Starfleet: A Fitness Guide, I had to get you on the show. There's just no way. I'm a science fiction fan, I would not say as far as fanatic, you know, I'm not the convention or I'm not the, and the person that's going to collect a lot of things. Uh, but I really, really do enjoy just sitting down and watching something like star Trek. Because it kind of, it expands my mind. It makes me think things differently as you kind of go through these stories. Uh, and it just gives them so much creative opportunity that I just, I really enjoy science fiction. So when you kind of pair up, uh, that with, you know, my love for fitness and like, okay, yeah, this is, this is really, really cool.

Robb (01:42):
It's like two great tastes that taste great together for you.

Allan (01:44):
And they do, you know, this is, yeah, this is not two great things you put together and tastes like crap. This, this actually works, you know? And so, uh, as I got into the book, uh, you know, basically it was just really cool. You obviously you used the series, and kind of put that all together to say, you know, how do I get myself fit? What are some exercises I can do? You often paired them up with a character sure. Or characters, from the series just to really make it fun. And then, you know, the artwork, you got a guy that was doing some art for you to draw these exercises out. So there's, there's visual interpretations of what it would look like, which is also really, really good.

Robb (02:25):
Yeah. The artists whose name is Jason Kaiser did an amazing, amazing job illustrating all of the different steps for all the exercises.

Allan (02:32):
Okay. So, you know, I guess I'll come off with the first question and, I kind of have an idea, but, I wanted to hear from you. Why is fitness important to members of Starfleet?

Robb (02:43):
You know, I think with any, any organization, regardless of the size, you're only as strong as your quote unquote weakest member. You know, Starfleet has always had each other's backs, whether it's in the dominion war or any other large scale conflict or just on the bridge of, uh, of the enterprise. Everyone is all rooting for each other. It's, you know, they're not gonna leave anybody behind. So part of that is being as physically fit as you can. I mean, obviously there are people who have different fitness levels who are differently abled, but at least everyone tries their hardest to pull their own weight.

Allan (03:17):
Yeah. And you're not the red shirt that's gonna disappear after the first three minutes of the episode. You know, you're, you're meant to be on this earth for a long, long time. And so being fit for task I think is really, really important. And that's what you kind of saw. Uh, most of the, most of the characters on there were, we're generally fit. There were some characters typically on the wrong side of the things that weren't all that fit. They were, they were effectively like a military style unit. We did things, we went by rank. And so, you know, yeah, fitness has always been an important thing for the military.

Allan (03:53):
Anything you want to do in life, you're going to need the fitness do so. So I'm excited to kind of get into some of the things that we can do as, uh, we are members of our own Starfleet. Our body is our spaceship and what can we do to make it as fit as possible?

Robb (04:08):
Thats very philosophical. I like it!

Allan (04:11):
Well, we're just flying through space. Right. And it's boldly go. And I think a lot of people when I hear the term workout or you know, they hear train or they hear exercise easy to get overwhelmed and I like how you approach this and thinking this is not something that you have to go to a full service, big box gym to have all the different implements because you know, of course everywhere else and you know, and then Starfleet they had access to, you know, try quarters and all these other tools and gadgets and phasers and tractors and all this stuff. We don't have to have that much to do what you're having us do in this workout or these exercise.

Robb (04:54):
Yeah, no, not really. I mean it definitely helps if you've got standard gravity. You know when I started working out, I was extraordinarily intimidated and I didn't like working out. And quite honestly, it's still not my favorite thing in the world, but I noticed that if I was able to have fun with it, if I was able to “engage” pun sort of intended with the people around me or even just sort of internally I was, the workouts were going faster, they were a little bit easier. My mind was a little bit occupied. You know, when I was consulting with Chris Tutela, who was my trainer on the book, I wanted to make sure that the vast majority of these exercises, we're accessible for people of all different fitness levels and especially for people who didn't necessarily have a gym membership. So I think probably 80 85% of these exercises are just body weight. And then, as you progress, there's ways to increase the strength level on things. You can incorporate dumbbells or resistance bands or you know, some moderate pieces of equipment like benches and things like that. But for the most part it's, it's really bodyweight and very accessible for people of all different fitness levels.

Allan (06:19):
Yeah. I liked the way that you scaled these, you know, you can go from being an incent to a Lieutenant, to a captain on some of these exercises. So there is a progressive model here for many of them. And there are a lot of them are pretty much compound movements. Good focus on core, a lot of cardiovascular work. Yeah. Good balance of exercises. And you know, as I kind of went through it, I'm like, you know, this, this is going to cover everything. And these are, some of these are, I wouldn't say redundant, they're just different ways to approach, kind of the same thing. But you can piece these together if someone were going to go through, like, you know, they get it and there's all these different exercises and you know, there's some Spock stuff. There's Tribbles, there's O'Hare

Robb (07:03):
You know you stayed away from a lot of the captains, but you got into Riker and some of the other first lieutenants he got, he got into a lot of it. You know, there wasn't a lot of, I want to work out like captain Kirk or you know. But you know you got into them. There's a lot of exercises, a lot of opportunity for us to do. And I liked what you said. It's important. It's fun. Yeah, there's a way to go about this. It's not a go do all of them or here's a workout, kill yourself. You've set this up very, very holistically for us. Can you kind of talk how someone should go through the book and use it as a tool?

Robb (07:35):
Yeah, I think to your first point, I try to pair up the exercises, all of which are actual real exercises with characters or situations that felt organic to it. I didn't necessarily want to shoehorn in a character just to have them in the book. So Rikers leg extensions made sense because you're sort of mimicking the, the very unique way that Ryker sat in his chair or you know, Tillys sprints. makes sense because there were a couple of scenes of Tilly sprinting around discovery. The book is organized with stretches and warmups and conditioning, then powering up your warp core and exercises for your upper body, lower body. And we ended it with special exercises for non humanoid species because even a Horton needs to work out every once in a while. So I always recommend that everyone start with the stretchers and the warmups regardless of what you're doing.

Robb (08:31):
And you don't have to do all of them. These are just sort of simple movements just to get your body ready and get your blood pumping a little bit. And then we didn't want to make this a one size fits all book. So we wanted people to consult with their own trainers, consult with their own doctors, really think about their individual needs and goals and fitness levels and sort of pick and choose which upper body core and lower body exercises they want it to do. There's about 30 or 35 exercises and we certainly don't want everyone to do every exercise all the time. That would be a little bit much. But you know, sort of pick and choose. And then you can sort of gradually build on that for half an hour or an hour. You know, the conditioning workouts are really supplemental to the upper body, lower body and core. So if you wanted to do conditioning's on, let's say Tuesdays and Thursdays and then work your upper body on Mondays or lower body on Tuesdays, we really wanted to give something for everybody and a little bit of a smorgasbord for people to choose from.

Allan (09:35):
Yeah. And each exercise in addition to the picture that kind of displaying it, you go through a very cool way of explaining how to do each exercise. You know, your starting position and then the movement pattern. Uh, so it's real fun. And again, I've said that several times. I think that's it. If anyone, if you like Star Trek even remotely like Star Trek and you're looking for, uh, some exercises you can do just about anywhere, which, you know, I don't usually talk about the timing of us recording, but we are, uh, we are right now in a lockdown. I had to close my gym. And so everybody that was going to the gym now doesn't have access to that. But this is something you can do on your own and you can do it still complying with the distancing that you need because you can do it in your living room, you can go out and you know, if it's a sidewalk or a set of stairs and around you, you can go up those. So there's a lot of variety here and a lot of opportunity. Like I said, for you to stay active during a time when it's probably going to be pretty good to get away from the press and think about something fun like this. So really, like I said, it's, it's a cool little setup. I like the way it's, everything's structured. Yeah. I might have to have you explain how some of those non-humanoid weight exercises work because I had a hard time, hard time visualizing some of them, but for the most part all of them are really easy to follow. You go through it. Each movement's well-described. So again, pretty, pretty cool little book.

Robb (11:00):
Thanks. Thanks. Yeah, I want it to get people laughing while they were doing squats. So, for the casual Star Trek fan, there's plenty to enjoy. But I also inserted lots of different Easter eggs within some of the exercises for the real hardcore people to get to.

Allan (11:17):
Well I like I said, not exactly hardcore, but I got a lot of them and I thought, okay, this is this again, this is a fun, fun book. I define wellness as being the healthiest, fitest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

Robb (11:34):
You know, I think for me at least, they're mostly mental, you know, making the decision to embark on a fitness routine. That was key for me. It was feeling lethargic and tired and not very healthy and my clothes were fitting a little weird and just didn't feel mentally on my game and I just decided I'm going to make a change. So I started going to this gym, so that was step one for me. Step two was being consistent and keeping at it and know I was, I'm not a morning workout person, I'm just not that awake enough for it. So my workouts have always been after work in the evenings. And you know, sometimes the commute home isn't very good, but I made a promise to myself just to get off that bus and do what I needed to do and then get to the gym and do it. And remembering that that hour or an hour and a half at the gym was just for me. And that I was, I was working toward a goal and you know.

New Speaker (12:36):
I think third for me, there has always been remembering why I started this in the first place. It wasn't to be the thinnest or the most muscular or the past is, it was just to make positive choices and positive changes in my life, which could then effect change for me, but then change for everybody else too. And I think I tried to make it clear in the book that this isn't about being the fastest or the skinniest or the best basketball player. It's just about making those small little changes that could lead to bigger changes and bigger changes and have a ripple effect on that.

Allan (13:14):
I really liked those. Robb, if someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book, Body by Starfleet a fitness guide. Yeah. Where would you like for me to send them?

Robb (13:24):
I think the best place is just my website. It's Robbperlman.com and there you'll see Body by Starfleet, the other Star Trek books I've written and a bunch of the other books I've written as well.

Allan (13:38):
and you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/432 and I'll be sure to have a link there. So Rob, thank you for being a part of 40+ Fitness and live long and prosper.

Robb (13:50):
Thank you. Allan talk to you soon.

Patreons

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

– Anne Lynch	– John Somsky	– Melissa Ball
– Barbara Costello	– Judy Murphy	– Melissa Cardinali
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Thank you!

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Today's episode is called setting your nutrition cruise control. I chose this topic because cruise control very much aligns with the roadmap prospects of the way that I did in The Wellness Roadmap. And that process is all about helping you get healthy and get fit and, and be happy with the lifestyle that you've set for yourself. And the easiest way to do that is when you can make things automatic, like setting your cruise control. So as you might guess, setting a cruise control is very much like building habits. And so we currently have our eating habits. And if you're like most people, you probably have about maybe a dozen different foods that you eat on almost a regular basis. So we have our regular foods, we have our regular treats, we have the things that we do, and we're all fairly consistent at that.

At least most people are. If you're, if you're eating a wider variety than that, then that's probably good for you. But in a general sense, most of us have those GoTo foods that we have on a day, in, day out basis. And a lot of times those are based on convenience. And so in setting the cruise control, we're going to do a few things to kind of break that down. And this is effectively what I'll call a three-tier plan. So there's a, there's three things that you're going to do here, that are going to basically set you up to have your cruise control set. Okay? The first is that I want you to start logging your food. And I know that's cumbersome, but to take that weight and measure the food, measure the cups, measure, do all that measuring and then logging all that.

I know that takes a lot of time. It's very difficult at times. But taking the time to do that over a week or two is going to give you a good idea of what your core foods are, how much you're eating. It's going to give you a lot of data on the macros that you're getting on the calories that you're eating. And, and in some cases the micro nutrients that you're getting or not getting. Okay? So based on that information, you now know who, what your core foods are and you can choose that and stick to a lot of the core foods that you know are good for you. And then move away from some of those foods that are not so good for you. So that's kind of stage one is to take some time. You don't have to make any drastic changes to your eating, you just start logging it.

And that does include measuring the food. So you're going to have to measure if you know, volume or weight. It does include writing it all down or putting it into an app like My Fitness Pal. So now you have the data, what's your core eating has like over the course of those two weeks. Okay. The next thing you're going to want to do is, is come up with a plan. So this is stage two of this. We set a plan and in that plan the best way and what I found the most effective way of getting things that you need done and making sure that you're ready to move forward, with your eating in, in a cruise control fashion is to make it as convenient as possible by doing bulk cooking. And so what I will typically do when I want to do the batch cooking or the bulk cooking is I will cook like three meals, three or four meals on a Sunday, and I'll cook enough that I have basically, I would say four meals of each of those four meals.

So that's, that's 16 meals that are basically preparing at one time. And so I'm using the slow cooker. You might want to use an Instapot, you know, that can help you get things done a lot quicker. I use the grill sometimes and I'm making a sauce or doing some things on the stovetop. And so it's, it's a, it's a pretty active day. It's pretty busy. But you get a lot of food cooked, put it in containers, and then I put the bulk of those in my freezer. I'll put like the next three days worth of food in my refrigerator. Um, and I'm good to go. Um, at that point now I have my entire week pretty much planned out and if every Sunday I prepare different types of foods over time and going to have a pretty good variety of different types of foods ready to go, frozen.

And boom, there you go. It's very convenient and it really saves you a lot of time because you're doing all that cooking at one time, all at the same time. So it really is effective. And time-effective if you're crunched for time. And one of the other advantages I've found of bulk cooking is I don't have to go to the grocery store as often because I used to have to go to the grocery store about every third day just to make sure I had fresh produce in house. But now when I'm doing like a make it a marinara and I'm used, I saw her that I've got several containers of marinara sauce, I've made a bone broth and I've got several containers of that. Um, I've taken the other vegetables that I would put into a dish and I make that dish and then I freeze the dish.

So I don't have to worry about going out and getting fresh vegetables all the time because most of my meals are already prepared. So I might go to the grocery store once a week now and that's when I do my bulk buying. I also buy some produce and I'm good to go. Okay. So bulk cooking is, is kind of the second stage of this. It's very, very important because doing that really does allow you to be on cruise control. It's, it's what's convenient. It's what's there.

Okay. And then the third stage of this is where you now go into your pantry in your freezer and refrigerator, and you start looking for those foods that are not helping you reach your goal. If your goal is weight loss and you've got a tub of ice cream in your freezer, you know that type of ice cream is not going to help you.

Now, you may still want to enjoy it and you looked at your, your logging and you say, okay, well that's only adding X number of calories, X grams of fat, X grams of sugar, and you're okay with that, then cool. That works into your plan. But if you're the kind of person like me who might go in there and eat the whole tub at one sitting, that's not gonna fit your plant. So going in and taking the time to understand those foods that weren't serving you and getting them out of your house now is a good time to do this. So you've done the book shopping, you've got some good foods for you. You're not be worried about being hungry, toss out those other foods, donate them to a shelter, something you know, just you don't need them in your house. So taking the time to clear out your pantry.

And then when you do your shopping, just stick to your list and, and stay on plants. So from the cruise control perspective, we log, so we know what our existence is, our speed, our current speed, we know what we're doing. Then we go through and we make a plan and we start batch cooking. So we're putting those foods into circulation that we want to eat. And then we're taking the third stage and we're getting rid of the foods that we no longer want to eat. So the bag of chips, the popcorn, M&Ms, whatever you have in your pantry, that you know is your go to for stress or something that's going to take you off of plan, you need to get rid of that stuff. So if you'll take those three stages, you've set a really good cruise control.

And now the final bit of this that I want to get into because you have to also think about those times when a traffic gets thicker or there's construction or there's a detour, you're obviously not going to be able to leave your cruise control on and just flow through it. It just doesn't work like that. So when there's time that, you know, maybe family is planning a dinner out or it's the holidays are coming up and you're going to be going to a family meal, um, or potluck, if we're here for her, we're to do those again. Um, you know, thing things are going to come up that you know are going to break your, your plan, they're going to get you off of your cruise control and that's okay. But you want to start setting rules for yourself and you want to start thinking through each of those types of detours before it's time to go.

So if we're talking about a dinner out, doing a little bit of research on their menu, knowing that, okay, if I, if I go this route, um, that I would normally have gone, then this is what that's gonna mean. And if I look at their menu online and see I could eat this other thing, like maybe instead of eating the, um, the casserole dish with all the cheese than the fat and the sugar, all this stuff that I would normally eat in a meal, I opt to go for the chicken and a salad and maybe some broccoli or I say, okay, I'm going to go and I'm into the fish. That's a baked fish. Yeah, there'll be a little bit of rice, but that's Ocala half of it and let the rest go. So you can kind of have these plans to go into a, the situation you turn off the cruise control, you go into the situation and then the next day you turn that cruise control back on.

And because you've done the bulk cooking because you made it convenient, it's easy for you to switch right back into things because it's right there for you. Um, you're not falling off, you're taking a detour and usually for a good reason, do it and then be ready to come right back on plan. And that's where, again, the bulk cooking and having that stuff ready, making things convenient, having the other stuff that you shouldn't be eating out of mind, out of pantry is going to set you up to do a lot better.

So, if you have any questions about how to set your nutrition cruise control, please send me an email, allan@40plusfitnesspodcast.com. I'd love to go over that with you can talk about other strategies to help you get on track. If you have any questions, just send me an email, allan@40plusfitnesspodcast.com. Thank you.

Patreons

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

– Anne Lynch	– John Somsky	– Melissa Ball
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– Debbie Ralston	– Margaret Bakalian	– Wendy Selman

Thank you!

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Allan (02:12):
Dr. Barry, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

Dr. Berry (02:15):
Hey Allan, thanks so much for having me.

Allan (02:17):
You know, I've read your book, Lies My Doctor Told Me, I've heard you speak a few times about it as well, and I follow you on social media. So I'm really familiar with your messaging and your approach, which I think is really comfortable. You're a down-home kinda guy. And this book was written in that same kind of style that I would expect from you. This is a, you know, here's some things to think about. Here's some things to do. And I really like the approach you took with this book. Thank you. Now the title, Lies My doctor Told Me, it's a compelling title. It's, you know, it's out there. It's like, okay, well why would my doctor lie to me? Or, you know, is my doctor really lying me? What's going on there? You know, why, why do our doctors had it wrong?

Dr. Berry (03:03):
Well, if you go to get a haircut and your barber tells you, you know, you should eat more whole grains, then your barber has no fiduciary duty to your health, to your nutrition. He just has to cut your hair well. Right? And so that would just be a myth or misconception or a misstatement. But when someone is taking notes to do no harm and who has taken it upon themselves to drape the stethoscope over their shoulder, I believe they should be held to a higher standard. I believe that they should go over and above and go out of their way to actually know about the care and feeding of the human animal. And that's why I chose to use the word lie instead of myth because it's actually, it's legally a lie if your doctor gives you bad medical advice.

Dr. Berry (03:56):
That's legally looked upon in the eyes of the law as a criminal act. And that's why I chose to use that word. Even though the first publisher I thought about going with did not like that. He wanted me to change that. And that's why I initially self-published the book and then Victor Bell publishing later was happy to put out a second edition. But that's why I use that word and I understand strong language. But I think at this stage of the game, at this stage of metabolic disease where it's actually more common in the United States to have at least some of the precursors of metabolic syndrome, thats not. It's actually more common to be overweight or obese or morbidly obese than it is to have a normal body mass index. I think the time for kid gloves and, and syrupy sweet messages are over. I think it's time to be real and be honest and call things what they are.

Allan (04:51):
Yeah. You know, I was an auditor in a previous life and when I first came through, they didn't want to use the word fraud because they felt it was too out there. So we use the term irregularities and after things got bad with the WorldCom and all that kind of stuff, there was this fundamental switch where we said, no, we actually have to start using the word fraud because people are not paying attention. They think in irregularities where someone just made a mistake and we're like, no, and irregularities where someone actually did something wrong, yeah, on purpose. So let's call it fraud. Now my doctor, when I go to him and he tells me I need to get rid of the egg yolk because that's got cholesterol and it's bad for me, still believes that in his heart of hearts that I don't need the dietary cholesterol.

Allan (05:35):
So in a, in a sense as I'm talking to them, it is, it is a lie. Okay. It's a liable mission or a lie of just him not getting the education. Now doctors, they're responsible to go get CPE or I don't know what you guys call it, continuing education units, as a public account I had to do that. I had to do at least 40 hours a week, a year as well. Personal trainer, I have to go for about four days of training. Pick what training I do, why, why are doctors not looking at this crisis of obesity and saying I might want to go to a few things that are going to help me answer these questions and why my patients are getting sicker.

Dr. Berry (06:15):
Probably the main reason that your doctor thinks that he's doing an okay job is because we're taught in medical school and residency as physicians that all patients are noncompliant. And so when he tells you, you know, you need to avoid the egg yolks and eat lots of whole grains and lots of fruits and vegetables, he doesn't think you're actually doing that. He thinks you're laying on the couch eating honey buns and Doritos. That's just the physician mindset. We don't think that patients actually follow our advice, although we're duty bound to give advice. And so I really think positions, they should start falling into two camps. And I think both of both camps are perfectly moral and ethical. And so camp one would be a doctor who's just not interested in nutrition, who doesn't care what I owed her about it. That doctor should just tell patients, look, I don't know anything about human nutrition. All I know how to do is prescribe the medicine and order tests, and order, you know, diagnostic imaging exams.

Dr. Berry (07:17):
I don't know anything about what you should and shouldn't eat. I mean, look at me, I'm 20 pounds overweight, you know, I'm pre diabetic, obviously, I don't know. So if a doctor prefaced any conversation about health and nutrition with that, that'd be perfectly moral and honest because patients look up to their doctor and they expect that their doctor knows. And I think that's a reasonable expectation that your doctor should know about the proper care and feeding of of human beings. And so if you're a doctor and you're listening to this and you're like, I just don't care about nutrition, I don't care if ketos right or again, I don't care, then tell your patient that. Disclose that at the beginning of the interview so that if you do give nutrition advice in the future, they'll know, Oh Hey, this guy doesn't even care about that.

Dr. Berry (08:03):
He's not going to eat. Bro. This is probably wrong. But if you don't put out a disclaimer like that as a doctor, then your patient, there's a bit of blind belief because when it all comes down to it, the patient either has to believe you or not. And if their health is at risk they're going to believe a trusted health expert, which is what a doctor's considered to be. And so the second school of doctors should be doctors who are actively reading and researching and looking and studying about human nutrition because obviously the reason that we're all overweight and metabolically ill is not because we're laying around. I mean there's actually research that shows that we're just as active now as we were in the 18 hundreds back in the 18 hundreds there was no obesity. I mean, you'd have to search all over town to find the one guy who's overweight back then.

Dr. Berry (08:58):
So you can't say it's like an activity. Some people want to blame it on food additives, some people want to blame it on jet fuel in the water. You know, there's all these, these scapegoats. But in the end it's the food we're eating. That's what it is. And the doctor needs to be knowledgeable about that or shut up about that.

Allan (09:14):
Yeah, it was interesting. My doctor, I really liked him, but he had a nutritionist on staff so he would just say, you know, we're gonna look at your blood work and this and this, but here's a nutritionist to talk to you about the nutrition side of this.

Dr. Berry (09:29):
Yeah, that's much more ethical and much more consistent to just admit, I don't know a damn thing about nutrition. I'm going to send you to a nutritionist. Hopefully they do cause that should be the message because often they do not.

Allan (09:41):
Well, he's still put a little bit of tidbits in there. Like, you know, the egg yolk thing. And so he had his own kind of methodology is on approach. His own thought process that was actually in conflict with what his nutritionist was saying, but at the same time I had the information presented to me and I felt like that was a pretty good deal. So if we don't feel comfortable getting that information, we need to, we need to stick it out ourselves or find a better doctor.

Dr. Berry (10:05):
Yes.

Allan (10:06):
You know, over the years, you know, things will come up and then they'll rise back up, they'll go back down. And so kind of the two, I'm going to call themwarring sides because it almost is tribal is you have one camp and then I'm calling both of these Olympic elimination diets. That's kind of how I look at them. One is the vegan and the other side is the carnival.

Dr. Berry (10:28):
Yes.

Allan (10:28):
And both of them, you know, they'll put science out there and say, this is why our diets right. Can you kind of just walk us through, I know you're a little bit more over to the carnivore side of this conversation. So that's why I wanted to have you on here. Cause I just had a vegan on a few weeks ago. And so I wanted to kind of bring this in and say, okay, let's talk about what the science is really telling us.

Dr. Berry (10:49):
Yes. And so I think that a real whole food vegan diet is better then the standard American diet. And so, but now if the vegan or vegetarian diet you're talking about is including lots of processed whole grains and lots of industrial vegetable seed oils and lots of sugar where they're added sugar or natural sugar, then it can be almost as bad as the standard American diet.

Dr. Berry (11:17):
I think that since the beginning of humanity as a species, we have eaten as much fatty meat as we can get our hands on. This is a, this is documented in the paleo anthropological record without doubt. We're able to go back and look at bones, whether they're 10 years old or a hundred thousand years old and look at the bones and the teeth. And we can actually do something called stable isotope analysis. And we can look at the carbon, the nitrogen in the strontium and other elemental analysis. And we can tell without doubt what these people ate. That's not up for debate. And so if being vegan says that we've always eaten a plant based diet and we, we've eaten animals if we were starving or had to, that's exactly backwards. And the anthropological record is very, very clear on that. That's really not up for debate at all.

Dr. Berry (12:11):
If you ask any paleoanthropologists, they'll tell you, we ate as much fatty meat we can get our hands on only we ate vegie but when we wanted to or when we had to. And so is a vegan diet less inflammatory than the standard American diet? Yes, absolutely. Can someone switched from the standard American diet to a vegan diet and improve their health markers are less than inflammation? Absolutely. No doubt about it. But the problem with the vegan diet is they always compare their results to somebody eating the standard American diet. And so that would kind of be like somebody, you know, comparing crack addicts to marijuana addicts. Yeah. Marijuana is a little less bad, but that doesn't make, it good at least for most people. Does that make sense?

Allan (13:00):
Yeah absolutely.

Dr. Berry (13:01):
I think the problem is with their paradigm. I think vegans are very earnest and honest and I think they fully believe what they're saying and I do think there are benefits of removing all the added sugars and the soft drinks and all the grains and all of the highly processed highly inflammatory industrial seed oils from your diet.

Dr. Berry (13:23):
Huge benefits from that. And so vegan may be where you land up. But I don't think you're going to find optimal health there. I think you're going to find health improvement, but unless you continue to move along the nutrition spectrum until you add enough fatty meat to your diet, enough liver, enough bone marrow, enough things like that to get all of the vital nutrition that a human body needs, and the human mind, you're just not going to have optimal health. And indeed we've seen in the last few years, many high level vegans come out and say, you know, I had to add some salmon back to my diet or I had to add eggs back to my diet because although some things were doing well, I just might, mentally I wasn't doing well or energy wise, I wasn't doing well. And you've seen that multiple, multiple times, but I haven't seen many high level fatty meat, heavy Kito influencers or carnival influencer say, you know, I had to add some kale back into my diet too. I just wasn't feeling good. You just don't say that.

Allan (14:25):
Yeah. You know, every time I see a study, they love throwing out the cancer word. Vegans really love that when they're talking cause they're like, read meat's going to give you cancer. But every time I've seen a study that even goes close to that, it says, you know, red meat and processed meat, they have to pair those together. They don't ever kind of segregate those out to see that one might be a confounder of the other. And then they'll go into the, well, when you cook your meat on a grill. Your doing this thing to it. So there's this, this battle there of do we include red meat in our diet? Is it bad for us?

Dr. Berry (15:04):
Yeah. And I actually have a chapter in the book about red meat and about processed meat. All of the nutrition data that's been collected, all the nutritional research that's been done is based on food frequency questionnaires, which I'm sure you and many of your followers are familiar with. And so you would go and ask a person, how many cups of ribs have you eaten in the last six weeks? How many, how many pounds of brisket have you eaten? And so the average person who survied in these studies is not a carnivore, right? Allan? So they're not just, so when they hamburger, they're not just eating hamburgers. When they eat a hot dog, they're not just eating hot dogs and nothing else. They're also eating the ketchup and the bun that's from just highly processed wheat, they're eating the French fries, which is pure starch fried in the inflammatory industrial seed oils.

Dr. Berry (15:56):
They're eating all of the accompaniments of that hamburger because there's not many people like me who would just go to Wendy's and order six hamburger patties and put some mustard on them and that'd be their meal. Most people in these surveys are not doing that, and so you cannot tease out, okay, yeah, this person ate more meat, but what that really meant was that person was going to Wendy's or McDonald's more and getting the super Whopper jumbo supersize meal and drinking a 40 ounce Coke or diet Coke with that little piece of meat that they were eating. That doesn't prove anything about meat. Does that make sense? I mean, that question is totally cloudy and there's no way to tease that out.

Dr. Berry (16:37):
The only way to ever do this is to just take 50 people and put them on just a pure carnivore diet and 50 people and put them on a pure vegan diet and then 50 more and let them eat just whatever the hell and then follow those people for 10 years or 15 years. That's the only way this question's ever going to be settled. And I doubt seriously anybody really wants to do that study. The carnivores don't have, we don't have the millions of dollars needed to put on that kind of study. The vegans, I guarantee you don't want to put on that study because they're afraid of what the results will show and that's why you don't see that type of study done by Harvard school of public health or any of the others huge plant based nutrition authorities. They're never going to do that study,

Allan (17:19):
Which then puts us in this, in this paradigm of okay, there are people who've been carnival or for a number of years. There are people who have been vegan for a number of years and if we start paying attention to their health health outcomes, that should give us at least some data and then we can do the experiment ourselves. If we feel comfortable that we're not doing something to harm ourselves, you know, we don't want to run out there and start a way of eating when we start watching other people, you know. And one of the things you brought up earlier, which I think is really, really important is ah, fueling our brain are actually building our brain. The brain is not made out of plant matter.

Dr. Berry (18:01):
Right, not at all. It's made out of pure fat, cholesterol and some collagen to hold it all together. I mean, the brain is a, is a fatty organ and the brain uses 20 to 25% of your total energy each day, even though it's very small in comparison to other huge organs like your liver and your muscles and your skin. But so much of mental disease comes from diet. So much of suffering, so much of fatigue, so much of mental fog, forgetfulness, early onset symptoms of dementia. All of this stuff is coming from the diet. And one of the Blue Cross Blue Shield organizations just published a kind of an alert saying, Hey guys, to doctors, the incidents of dementia in 30 and 40 year olds is up 300% over the last few years.

Dr. Berry (18:56):
Could you guys maybe look into that and see what's going on? Cause you know, Blue Cross is a huge health insurer and they're looking at this like there's no way we're going to be able, I mean if this becomes common for people in their forties and fifties to be disabled with dementia, everybody's going to go broke. And so you might want to look into this. So what went from being a very rare thing a hundred years ago? You know, great grandmother might have a little bit of forgetfulness, but there were not 30 something and 40 something year old people running around with Alzheimer's dementia a hundred years ago. That just did not happen. So even if you went back and ate what I just called the a hundred year diet, literally went back and found a couple of cookbooks from 1920 and ate only what was in those you would do better then you would do with the standard American diet.

Dr. Berry (19:45):
We've really got to wake up or we're going to be faced with not only a personal health crisis, both mental and physical, but a nationwide in a worldwide just health catastrophe where there is no amount of money that's going to help keep people well. It's just, it's going to all fall apart if we don't start feeding the human animal the proper human diet. That has to happen at some point or the problem will become unsolvable.

Allan (20:14):
Yeah. You know, it is something that, you put your head around this idea that what you put in your mouth is a building block for what your body is going to be made out of.

Dr. Berry (20:26):
Yeah.

Allan (20:26):
And if you're not getting well, we obviously know if we don't give ourselves adequate nutrition then we start seeing those deficiencies and that usually manifests in some form of problem for us. But there's this kind of thing going on in the background, particularly like with building our brain, with building our bones, with building our muscles with building all of us. If we're not putting the right material there, we're making ourselves out of fluff.

Dr. Berry (20:50):
Exactly. If I took you Allan and I locked you in my barn, and this is a common analogy I use, and I fed you nothing but ribeye, steak and beef liver and that's and water and salt and that literally is all I gave you. Fresh meat, fresh liver and water and salt. You understand you could live in my barn for decades and you would not develop any vitamin or mineral deficiencies. And I'm happy to talk about vitamin C if you want to because there've been carnivores for 20/25 years whose skin and teeth look amazing. They don't have scurvy. And so there's more to the vitamin C story, then you have to eat lots of fruits.

Dr. Berry (21:30):
But if I took a, took you again in an alternate life and locked you in my barn and fed you nothing but plants and on either one of these diets you can't have supplements. You can only eat food. So you could have any plant from anywhere in the world, from the, from Australia to Panama to the Himalayan mountains, any berry, any herbs, any roots you wanted. It wouldn't be many months if not maybe a year. You would start to develop serious fatty acid deficiencies and serious amino acid deficiencies. You would start to get sick, you would suffer and you would die early from eating that diet that was restricted of the vitamins and minerals that you can only find in meat, in any meaningful quantity. And so again, that's another research study that will never be done. We're never going to lock 50 people in our barn and feed them carnivores and 50 and feed them vegan cause it's very unethical to lock people in your barn first and foremost, you can't do That.

Allan (22:26):
Well, If you have a gym in there. And I get Netflix, I'm probably good to come.

Dr. Berry (22:31):
Yeah. If you had a gym and wifi. Exactly.

Allan (22:36):
Well, you know, one of the things, I was interviewing one week, one vegan and one of the concepts he came up with is because I on the one side, you're like, well, you're not getting B12 you supplement with, and he's in his response was, well, carnivores have to supplement with statins.

Dr. Berry (22:52):
No. Yeah, there is n such thing is a Staten deficiency. Statin medications are one of the most dangerous medications that a doctor can prescribe. And I'm not saying there's never an instance where a statin might have more benefit than harm, but 99% of the time a statin drug, and this is Levacor, Zocor, Crestor, and there's a couple of new ones, 99% of the time they do more harm than good. If you take your statin faithfully for 20 years, you might add three days to your life. In the process of that, you've lowered your testosterone, you've raised your blood sugar, you've raised your levels of inflammation, you've increased your muscle fatigue, your muscle aches and pains. Your life has gotten worse. Just the, just kind of your wellbeing measurement has gotten worse. You've lowered your testosterone, which is uniformly bad. You raised your blood sugar, which is uniformly bad. And really, the only way that the statins work is with an antiinflammatory effect that they also appear to have, which is well known in the literature. It has nothing to do with load lowering, total cholesterol. That's not how they give you those three extra days of life that you got for paying 20 years worth of copays.

Allan (24:12):
Yeah, I don't, my cholesterol naturally runs kinda on the high end. And so that, you know, when those scares come out, you know, my doctor sees my cholesterol, he's, he's always kinda trying to push me in that direction and I just, I just always kind of pull back and say, you know, I've tried them. I don't like how I feel on them. They mess with my muscles. He says, well, we'll just try a different one. I'm like, no, I'm not going there anymore. I've seen enough. I don't believe that's going to be, I don't believe my cholesterol numbers is really a big deal because my high cholesterol relative to my total cholesterol is actually really, really good. My high cholesterol relative to my triglycerides, really, really good. So those ratios to me are what I want to see versus just this big number.

Allan (24:55):
Now doctors in their standard of care are probably still going to have that conversation with you. And you have to talk to your doctor and realize, you know, there are some things that you could probably do to lower it, but it's a building block for testosterone. It, statins, also don't they affect the CoQ10, which damages the heart?

Dr. Berry (25:13):
Yeah.

Allan (25:13):
So if you're going to be on a statin you probably gonna want to supplement with COQ 10, just to make sure.

Dr. Berry (25:19):
Yeah.

Allan (25:20):
So you know, like you said, there's not an absolute for any one of us to say that we wouldn't benefit from it, but it's just something that you're putting a foreign substance in your body and it's causing some other side effects and you have to weigh that and let that pay.

Dr. Berry (25:36):
And just the, the vegan argument of, well, those people are going to develop a statin deficiency. A statin is a patented molecule that's made in the factory. And so you understand their mindset a little bit. They're like, either you're going to have to take supplements made in a factory or you're going to have to take a statin made in a factory. What about a hundred thousand years ago? I mean, how did we get by? How did, how did we prosper and flourish? I mean, we became the alpha species on this planet a long time before people started advocating just eating plants or started advocating patented fake molecules like Lipitor, Zocor or Crestor.

Allan (26:16):
I agree. Another thing that we do now that we didn't do then, we avoid the sun. We slather on sunscreen because we don't want to get the skin cancer. But we need sunshine.

Dr. Berry (26:33):
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I have a chapter in the book about that sun lights and getting a healthy tan is in no way a risk factor for skin cancer. Absolutely not. The research done on this is just laughable. It's embarrassing that when, I mean dermatologists are some of the smartest doctors out there. In med school, you had to have almost a perfect 4.0 to even be considered for a dermatology residency, so these people started out, they were the cream of the cream in medical school and now just to say something as dumb as stay out of the sun or you'll get skin cancer. It's just, it's ludicrous. A lot of the research done on that was done on donated foreskins, so when a little baby boy is circumcised. They would do little research studies on that. Looking for markers that they decided were markers of a precancerous condition.

Dr. Berry (27:31):
The little foreskins didn't develop skin cancer. That's not what happened. They just had this marker that marker go up a little bit when exposed to UV radiation. And so they decided that meant that it's going to cause skin cancer. I mean all, there's just so many things I talk about in the book that just make this a ridiculous lie that doctors tell patients the sun protectors, the blockers, the SPF, what is it, up to 250 now SPF two 50 or something, I don't know. These things are full of, some of them are full of very worrisome chemicals that if you put the size of these on your small child, you can actually detect these chemicals in your child's bloodstream minutes later. There's a study published just recently about that. You're going to slash your child's ability to make vitamin D if you slather this sunscreen on them.

Dr. Berry (28:21):
Maybe exposed them to chemicals that are not good for them. And I definitely don't want your child to get a sunburn. Absolutely not. Because first of all, it hurts and pain is a feedback that we have developed to show, yeah, that's dumb. Don't do that anymore. But getting a healthy tan, getting your vitamin D from the sun, and who knows what else we get from the sun Allan. Because basically back in the late sixties and early seventies when it became the trope, Oh, skin sun exposure causes skin cancer. Just imagine if you'd been a young researcher at Harvard and you'd went to your chairman said, Hey, I want to do a study. I think that we probably use the sun for other things besides just making vitamin D. I'd love to expose people to UV radiation and see what that does to other levels in their body. Do you understand you would have been kicked out of the chairman's office and probably released from your duties?

Dr. Berry (29:13):
It was just, it's an studyable at this point in the, in the higher institutions of learning because it's considered central science that the sun causes cancer, but nothing can be further from the truth and so many of the carnivores play in the sun in their loine cloth every day in their skin looks amazing. They don't have skin cancer. Actually. People who work at the equator, and this is not dark skin people, this is even light-skinned people. They have less melanoma, which is the worst skin cancer, than people who are fully clothed and live in Norway. So you can't say, you just can't say that sun exposure causes cancer. It's a dumb thing to say. And I in the, in the chapter in the book actually give people the email address for the two largest dermatological societies. And I said, email them and ask them, send me the research study that shows that sun exposure increases my risk of cancer. And so many people have messaged me and said, you know, I didn't get anything or I got the foreskin study, which doesn't prove anything. And so literally that's what it's based on.

Allan (30:17):
Yeah. I had dr Dallas Harwich on not long ago, and one of the things that he kind of gets into is that, you know, we talk about light exposure at night being a problem for our sleep, but he proposes that getting out into the sun, getting out into open air, blue skies, on a regular basis during the day is actually very important for us to maintain a good solid circadian rhythm.

Dr. Berry (30:42):
Absolutely.

Allan (30:42):
You know, and so that in and of itself is just saying you need to be outside getting some of that light exposure to set everything in place for you to get a good night's sleep, for you to build your hormones and all the good stuff that happens to us when we go through really good sleep cycles. So that's even another thing, is get outside and do some things. Now what I've found is, is yeah, if you go out there the first day and you stay out for six hours in the sun, you're going to get a sunburn. But if you get some exposure and pull back, get some exposure and pull back, you tan and you get used to that exposure and it's like, like a muscle. You just build a capacity to be out in the sun longer and longer and not burn.

Dr. Berry (31:25):
And I'll tell you something very interesting, Allan, that I've noticed in my own personal health journey. And then hundreds of other people have said, you know, that same thing happened to me. I thought I was crazy, but maybe not. Back when I was just eating just the standard American inflammatory diet, I couldn't stay out in the direct sun on a beach at, at the latitude of, you know, Florida, Tampa Bay, Panama city. If I stayed out for 10 minutes, one minute longer, I was going to get a sunburn and I almost could not build up, I couldn't build the extra melanin and build up the tolerance. So the sun and I was the guy who would tell my phone, hey, wake me up in 10 minutes. And then I would go play with the kids for 10 minutes and then I had to go get to the umbrella or the rest of the vacation would be ruined because I'd be crybabying about my sunburn.

Dr. Berry (32:12):
As I converted to paleo and then to real whole food Tito, I'm not a big keto product fan. I want you to eat real whole one ingredient foods. I noticed that I could stay in the sun longer without burning. I noticed that I tan better and I'm like, maybe it's all of the bright green colors, all the beta carotene or something in the vegetables, but back, what's it been 15 months now when I, did that first carnivore month challenge on my Facebook group and said, Hey guys, let's see nothing of fatty meat for a month and see what happens. When I started the carnivore diet, I can stay out in the sun five times longer now without burning. I can develop a radiant tan and I just, I thought I was permanently fish belly color. I didn't think I can tan back in the day. Now I can develop a good healthy tan. It's much harder for me to burn in the sun now than it was 10 years ago.

Dr. Berry (33:12):
And when I started, when I said that on a podcast, I had multiple people reach out to me who were eating fatty, fatty meat, heavy keto or carnivores, and say, yes, 100% that happened to me too. And so now my current theory is, is that basically every cell in your skin has a cell membrane, right? And if you're eating enough fatty meats to build that cell membrane out of good cholesterol and good fatty acids, then that sale is actually able to function better than a sale that's built out of canola oil and all the other inflammatory crap that we eat. And I've noticed that personally and have had hundreds of other people verify, yep, I had the same thing happen to me. And indeed, if you look at most carnivores, they're always very tan and it looks like that their son is just much more able to use the powerful tool of sunlight to actually optimize their health instead of burning them.

Allan (34:10):
There's, there's one other thing I wanted to talk to you about before you have to go. I was sitting there with this guy. I mean we were talking and of course it comes up who I am and what I do. I own a gym and I do fitness stuff and so that's going to be where the conversation, 99% of the time it's going to go when I'm sitting down with someone and he said, you know, you said I was exercising and I lost all that weight and then I stopped exercising and I've gained it all back and he says, I need to get back to exercising. So I'll lose that weight. And you know, I put up my hand and I said, its what you're putting in your mouth, exercise. And you talk about this in the book. Can you go into a little bit more detail there?

Dr. Berry (34:50):
Yeah. Exercise. I think exercise is like sunlight, Allan. I think it does hundreds of beneficial things for the human body and the human mind. It's a powerful, powerful tool that we should all use regularly. But if you are overweight, obese or morbidly obese, exercise is a terrible method for losing fat. And that's been born out in multiple huge studies, the women's health initiative study, like calorie restricted for a long period of time. And so calorie restriction can either be from burning more or from eating less. So either way that's you're supposed to wind up with a calorie deficit. That's how weight loss is supposed to happen. And indeed, if I lock in that barn of mine Allan, and I starve you, you're definitely going to lose weight. But it's not going to be just fat.

Dr. Berry (35:44):
You can also lose muscle mass. You're going to lose cartilage density, you're going to lose fast or density, you're going to lose bone density. But nobody wants that. When, when we all say, when every one of us say, I want to lose some weight, what we actually meant to say was I want to lose some of this stored energy, some of this fat. That's what I want to lose. To do that, you have to change your diet. And I applaud you for being a gym owner and saying, Hey, Bubba, exercising aint going to help you lose fat. You go fix your diet to lose the fat. Now if you want to increase your endurance and you want to increase your your muscle, then yeah, get the gym. But if you're just trying to lose fat, step one is always, always, always without exception, fix your diet. That's how you lose the fat and how you lose most of the inflammation.

Allan (36:31):
Yeah and I'll tell him then the next step is whole foods. You know, just, just whole food. I don't know many people who eat a whole food diet that really have a weight problem.

Dr. Berry (36:42):
Exactly right. And that's, and you see this often in the vegans, especially now not in the vegetarians are eating lots of whole grains and lots of processed crap. But in a true whole food vegan, they're just not obese. Now they may still be pre diabetic or type two diabetic. They may still be quite inflamed, but they're skinny. And that's because you just can't eat enough whole foods to get fat. It's just, it's very, very difficult to do that. You have to eat to discomfort in order to do that, but eating processed foods, Oh, it's very easy to eat and put on too much fat.

Allan (37:16):
Absolutely. I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and well?

Dr. Berry (37:27):
You got to fix your diet first and foremost. If you're not prepared to eat a proper human diet, then just forget all the rest of it and go watch TV. I don't know what to tell you, but when you're ready to actually achieve good health, then you've got to fix your diet. Number one. That's 90% of the battle is fixing your diet .and whether that is an OVO lacto pescatarian ketogenic diet or whether that is a 100% fatty red meat carnivore diet, I consider all those to be on the spectrum of what I call the proper human diet. That's number one. Number two, then you work on your lifestyle. You work on getting that morning sun, you work on getting your bedroom exactly perfect so that you can get the best sleep of your life. You start working out whether that's going for a walk or whether that's trying to beat your PR on the, on the deadlift, the lifestyle's number two. And then number three plus or minus maybe a few supplements if you're up in, you know, I recommend almost everybody over 40 should probably take a little coenzyme QT and unless they're a carnival workers, you're, you're to get plenty of that.

Dr. Berry (38:35):
Especially if you're a nose to tail carnivore. But most people probably need some coenzyme QT after the age of 40 a lot of people who live at the Northern latitudes probably need some vitamin D. but, so a lot of people want to start. Alan was step three. Oh, let me buy a bunch of supplements. Yeah. Waste of time. Waste of money. A lot of people want to start with step two, let me join the gym. Let me, cause I feel like if I'm paying that monthly fee that will make me…no, no, that's, that's, you're just, that's not ever gonna happen. Step one, every single time is fix your damn food. Eat only real whole one ingredient foods. If it has more than three ingredients on the package, don't even pick it up. And really, if it has a package, don't pick it up.

Dr. Berry (39:22):
That's not real food. That's a food like product that a big food corporation has manufactured to get your five bucks. That's all that is. Okay. And I've been saying for a few years now, I don't, I think that the food, big food manufacturing is going to crater. There's gonna be tons of bankruptcies because there is no real whole food ketogenic product that you can stock on a store shelf that's going to, that you can make in China and ship in a container ship that's going to be shelf stable for two years. Real food don't act like that. And everybody in the keto and carnivores space right now are, they're just trying their best to come up with a keto product or a carnival product. But every single time they do it has to be processed. It has to have extra crap added to it and it's even got a very short, short half life, which means it's still real food or it's turned into a Franken food like product that's just they're after your money.

Allan (40:21):
Yeah, I would, I would just put my money into something like Maria Emmerich's keto cookbooks or something like that.

Dr. Berry (40:30):
Start raising chicken, start raising cows that there'll be some money to make in that, but there won't be billions and billions of dollars to be made in that, and that's what everybody's looking for is a product that can scale up and make $1 billion. It's just not going to happen in the keto carnivores space because we real food here. We don't want your products.

Allan (40:50):
Yeah, I completely agree with you. So thank you doctor. If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about your book, Lies My Doctor Told Me, where would you like for me to send them?

Dr. Berry (41:02):
Lies My Doctor Told Me, is available as a paperback, as a Kindle and Audible wherever fine books are sold. I have a little YouTube channel that I've got I think over 270 videos that you can watch for nothing that's absolutely free to watch them all.

Dr. Berry (41:19):
If you just go to YouTube and search for Dr. Berry, you should find me. Dr. Berry Keto, Dr. Berry Carnivore, Dr. Berry, thyroid, testosterone. I talk about all this stuff on the YouTube channel, even toenail fungus. That's one of my biggest videos is how to reverse and cure toenail fungus and never get it again. And that video has been viewed over 2 million times, so it must be, there must be some truth in it. I've got a Facebook page where my wife, Nisha and I, we go live every Monday night. So this is, we're doing this on a Monday, so it's 7 PM central. We go live and talk about the latest news articles and the latest silliness in the news and in the media. And then we all answered a bunch of people's questions. I'm also on Instagram. I'm on Twitter. I'm even on Tik Toc Allan cause I'm trying to go grab those young kids before they develop metabolic syndrome.

Allan (42:09):
That's perfect. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/430 and I'll be sure to have links there. Dr. Barry, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

Dr. Berry (42:20):
It was a pleasure. Allan, I'll be back anytime you need me.

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Another episode you may enjoy

Undoctored with Dr. William Davis

Less...

Allan (02:48):
Joyce, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

Joyce (02:50):
Thanks Allan. I'm thrilled to be here with you.

Allan (02:53):
Now. I am a huge fan of walking. I think it is one of the most underutilized ways of serving our body. And I say that that way because we're going to get into depth of walking is not just a fitness thing. And I really liked your approach to that. The name of your book is Walk Your Way to Better. And you know, as I was reading through the title I was like, Oh better. You know? And so you know, the words are in your head, health and all and wellness and fitness. And so I think there's a reason you stopped right there after the word better and didn't put the rest of it there.

Joyce (03:32):
Absolutely. So I agree with you. Walking is so simple and so incredibly powerful and I just don't think that we recognize or give it the emphasis that we should. So walking has been shown to improve your mind, your mood, and your body in really, really profound ways. So as you say, it's not just your physical, it's your mental and your emotional.

Allan (04:00):
You know, as you look at things like the blue zones that they're doing studies on and you kind of think about ancestral health and the way people were before we had access to cars and bikes and planes and motorcycles and everything else. We used to have to walk to do most of the things. We walk to go get our water, we would walk to go forage, we'd walk to hunt and we may even migrate. And so there were days of walking to get to a better area for hunting and gathering and doing things. We don't do as much walking now as we did that.

Joyce (04:35):
Absolutely. And I believe, and there are a whole lot of people that agree with me, we were just not meant to sit as long and as much as we're sitting, we're built to move.

Allan (04:47):
Yeah. And you were an attorney at one point. I was an accountant.

Joyce (04:51):
We sat a lot. Right?

Allan (04:54):
Sorry you didn't like accounting. But you know, it's just as we think about that, it's like, yeah, we take these jobs because they're going to give us what we need to take care of our families. But then at the same time, we're not necessarily taking care of ourselves, therefore we're not in a position to always take care of our families. That's kind of a bad, bad paradox to be in.

Joyce (05:16):
Exactly right.

Allan (05:18):
So why is walking so valuable?

Joyce (05:21):
So there's boatloads of research on walking on all of the benefits of walking. So I'll just hit sort of some of the top lines when you talk about walking. And I'm gonna leave the body and physical to last because, while it's super important, it's not even where I want to start. So walking has been proven to have a really great impact on your mood. It's been shown to be a valuable tool in combating depression and warding off depression. It's been shown to have an immediate impact on boosting and improving your mood and mindset. So great for your mind. Great for your mood and then for your mind walking has been shown to improve your decision-making ability, help give you energy. And there's a really interesting study that shows that a regular walking practice literally makes your brain bigger. And then just a couple of years ago, fascinating research out of Stanford University shows that a walk can improve your creativity, your ability to create new ideas and have fresh thoughts by up to 60%. It's incredibly powerful.

Allan (06:35):
Yeah. I know you said in the book you were talking about jobs and some of the other people we would think were these great minds and thinkers. They used walking as their creativity space.

Joyce (06:45):
Absolutely. Uh, Aristotle, Socrates, Benjamin Franklin was a big Walker. Darwin was a big Walker. Uh, so people who are under the kind of pressure to constantly be creating new ideas, processing new ideas, innovating. It's the most effective way you can do that.

Allan (07:08):
And then there are the physical aspects.

Joyce (07:11):
Yup. So a regular walking practice has been shown to reduce your risk of dementia, diabetes, osteoporosis, several types of cancers. There's one study that shows that a regular walking practice can add up to seven years to your life.

Allan (07:28):
That's huge. That's huge.

Joyce (07:30):
It's incredible.

Allan (07:31):
You know, I've seen a study before that said, if you just, you walk just five to 10 minutes after a meal, it helps you regulate your blood sugar.

Joyce (07:40):
We're meant to move. We are not meant to finish a big meal and sit in front of the television or in front of social media. We're just not.

Allan (07:49):
And then beyond that, you had a, I mean, I've seen this other stat out there, well at least another aspect that you've talked about, how walking should kind of get rid of those emotional toxins. It also helps us get rid of physical toxins. Our lymphatic system is, it doesn't have its own pump system. It relies on our muscles or skeletal muscles to actually cause that lymph to move around. And that's flushing toxins out of our body. So if we're sitting still, we're letting ourselves get toxic.

Joyce (08:17):
And you know what's so interesting to me when you look at the last many years, remember the days when people would go in for surgery and then they would be told by their doctors to rest, right? Lie around. And all of that has changed. Practically, regardless of what the nature of the surgery is, as soon as they can get people up and walking, even little bits, they're getting them moving.

Allan (08:44):
Yeah. I had a friend recently, uh, he had a hip replacement and within a day they want him up walking on that hip, you know, just the thought of having them sawing through the bone, applying this metal apparatus, you know, this metal apparatus to your body. And then the next day they're not like, just lay there for six weeks and heal. They're like, nope, you have to be moving.

Joyce (09:05):
Right. And, and 20, 30 years ago they would've had that guy in bed for days.

Allan (09:17):
Yeah, or the wheelchair rest of his life. Yeah. So, you know, walking is something that we must do. It's not should, I mean, we've got to get past the should, the walking is a must. But when you start this conversation of, okay, we've got to walk, and then someone sits there and says, well you know, this is a very busy week for me. I've got to pull an extra shift, I had to you know, I took on extra training time. I've got extra the interviews and things to do this week. I've got, you know, of course my, my other regular stuff that's going on, you know, and I've got to read these three books. And so you kind of pile those and then you say, well where am I going to fit the time to do this walking? Why, why do we have difficulty with that, whereas if you said, okay, you need to take your kid to little league practice, that's a non negotiable. We just, we just do it, but we don't take the time for self care. Why? Why is that?

Joyce (10:10):
You know, there are so many reasons that keep us from taking good care of ourselves. And the first is something that you mentioned just a couple of minutes ago, which is around this paradox of us feeling like we have to do for other people and not take care of ourselves. The paradox of that is if we don't take care of ourselves, we are not capable of taking the best care of the people we love. So that's kind of counterintuitive you want to do for other people and you think that that's the way to do the best you can. The second is we're all just too busy. We have filled our plates to overflowing and we need to take some responsibility and some ownership around that and it's something that I'm working on personally to really try to grab hold of my calendar on a day to day basis and be sure that I am not filling it with things that are just making me busy. Busy is like a badge of honor now. Right. When you say to, when you see somebody you haven't seen for a while and you say to them, how are you the knee jerk? Everybody says, Oh, I'm so busy. And I think the last piece of it, especially for women is we're still being sent the message that taking care of ourselves is selfish and I just think we have to continue to work to try to change that message and change that paradigm.

Allan (11:33):
Yeah, I'm reading the Daily Stoic now. I went, I went through all of that last year. I was really proud of myself for doing that because it was, I've had this book for over three years and each year I get to a certain point and then I stop and I lose it. Last year was the first year I made it through the entire year and I'm reading through it again this year. It's called the Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday, And the funny thing is yesterday's lesson was to not be busy. To be aware of where you're spending your time and what is a a true obligation and what are those things that we just put on ourselves out of guilt and other means. And that's what I really liked about the structure of your book as you break it into 99 walks in each walk is not just a let's get out and walk today and that's your goal.

Allan (12:17):
And then tell me how it went. You're really diving into mindset and one of the things that you got into there that I'd like to kind of get into after you tell me about the structure, the 99 walks and why you put it that way was the making of time, you know, you actually have one of the walks where it's dedicated specifically to making time for this self care. So can you talk through the walks of how you put this together and how this is helpful. And then, you know, some of these that are lessons that you think are pretty valuable for us to go as we're, as we're looking at having a walking practice.

Joyce (12:50):
Absolutely. So the book, as you say, is broken into 99 short sections. Thought starters, research stories, all designed to give people something to contemplate, to think about, to percolate on. One of the things that I see in my own life and in the lives of my friends and the people I talk to all the time is there is a lot of really interesting information and content out there. And I think we're getting better at identifying it and reading it, but I don't think we're giving our selves the chance to really absorb and process it. And because I know how powerful walking is for the way your mind works and the way your mood improves. And of course all the physical, I thought, wouldn't it be amazing if I can share 99 things that I think are important for people to think about and encourage them to then take a couple of minutes to give themselves the chance to percolate and really absorb those messages. So that's, that's my goal. That's my hope.

Allan (13:52):
Well, I think you've accomplished that. That's why I was saying, you know, that's why I brought up the book, the Daily Stoic is because that's kind of my daily sit down, have something to ponder and then I'll meditate on it. I haven't turned that into a walking practice. But you got me, you got me really thinking about that. That's maybe that's how I go about this. But this is a similar structure of here's your daily lesson, give it some thought. And I really like a lot of the things that you get into. Like I said, finding time and then I actually, I quoted a quote out of you. Let me, let me look it up real quick. I've got it. I put it on my Facebook page because, my Facebook group, because I, it was kinda one of those things as I was reading it, I'm like, somebody needs to hear this today. I know someone needs to hear this today. And it was, you deserve your dreams. You deserve your dreams. And so that was one of the lessons as you're kind of going through is have big dreams and then realize you deserve them and should still be working toward them.

Joyce (14:51):
You just can never give up. You can't abandon your dreams, you can't abandon your sense of self. But I do want to talk for a minute. Let's circle back and talk a little bit about, making time.

Allan (15:04):
Yes.

Joyce (15:04):
Can we dig into that a little bit?

Allan (15:06):
Absolutely. Please.

Joyce (15:07):
So I do talk about that a fair bit in the book in a couple of different contexts, even because we are all so busy that we think we don't have time and a lot of people refer to it as finding time. How am I going to find time for the things that are important? And the first thing I always say to people is, it's not about finding time, it's about making time. It's about saying, this is important for me, therefore it's important for my family. If you need that to encourage you to actually take those steps forward and then you have to make the time.

Joyce (15:44):
So one of the stories I tell, and I won't, I don't want to belabor it, but my daughter was doing gymnastics and I would go and she really wanted me to watch her entire class. And I thought, this is being a good mom. I'm going to sit and I'm going to watch it. I'm going to support her. And then at some point I realized she was sort of performing for me. And that's not what that experience was about for her. That's not what I wanted that experience to be for her. So I started taking 30 minutes and going for a walk. So I would drop her off, get her settled, leave and go take my walk, come back and watch the last 15 minutes and all of a sudden I found 30 minutes in my day, twice a week.

Allan (16:23):
Yes, I've heard, I've heard of moms doing that, you know, taking their child to soccer practice and then just walking around the field.

Joyce (16:28):
You don't have to watch them.

Allan (16:33):
They're awesome. But yeah. And I think one of the keys of what you put forward there, is about the prioritization. You know, what are those things that we are doing that really aren't serving us. You know, sitting there watching really wasn't serving you or your daughter, whereas you going for the walk, you're going to come back at the end of her practice with so much more energy. She's going to be energized because of what she did. You're going to be energized for what she did and then the drive home is a much, I think probably it was a much more joyful experience.

Joyce (17:08):
Absolutely. Absolutely. Because to your point earlier, you are better able to show up for the people you love when you are in a better space, when you are taking care of yourself.

Allan (17:19):
And that's one of the things I really like about the 99 Walks in each one is you're going through a, you're sharing a lot of personal stories yourself and your stories included and it's really just kind of one of those times for you to wrap your mind around something, kind of let go, be mindful of what you're doing. Go out there with some intention and solve some problems and as you said in the book, there might only be a couple dozen of these that really resonate. There might be some that just completely don't apply. You know, as a guy reading the book, I was like, well, you know, a lot of these lessons, if I just read them out, right, wouldn't necessarily apply to me. But if I think about what the underlying purpose of that discussion is about, it applies to all of us at some point.

Joyce (18:03):
For sure. We're all suffering from decision fatigue, even if we don't know it. We all need to be mindful of the people we're surrounding ourselves with. We all have to be intentional about how we're spending our time so much.

Allan (18:20):
Now you've, you've put together this organization, it's called 99 Walks and it's, I went to the website. It's actually really cool. You're doing monthly challenges. You're building community. In a lot of sense. It's, it's more than getting people to walk more. I mean that's, it's awesome, but it's about connection. It's about eliminating some of that isolation and loneliness. We have, you know, you might have a thousand friends on Facebook or Instagram, but you still can feel very lonely. Can you talk about what your organization 99 Walks is doing and how it, how it's, how it's put together and how it's benefited you.

Joyce (18:55):
Yeah, you're so right about the loneliness piece. We have some proprietary research that 73% of American women experience loneliness and that dovetails with some national research around both women and men who put that number right about 70% so there really is a loneliness crisis going on, a very quiet crisis going on in this country because people don't want to talk about that. People don't want to raise their hand and say I am lonely because it makes you feel bad. It's something people are super self conscious about. But the reality is most people are wrestling with that. So I thought if we can create community and encourage people to get out and move in what is this incredibly simple but effective and powerful way. Just by lacing up your sneakers and walking out the door, we could really start to effectuate change. So 99 Walks is a movement to get, we are very focused on women in 99 Walks. So our mission is to get a million women walking. And we do that with a wonderful walk tracker and these monthly challenges. And we reward our members with what we call wearable inspiration, which is a tangible reminder of the goals that you have accomplished at the end of the month. Uh, and building this very powerful, supportive and wonderful community. And along the way we're trying to educate people as well.

Allan (20:26):
Yeah. And I think that's one of the key things here is this is about being, you know, kind of a healthier, better, happier person. Not because you're out there, you know, speed walking for three hours. But you're just getting out and you're in a community, rather you're walking particularly with people around you in your local area or you know, virtually by having friends online that you know, are going through similar things. It's just getting out for that, you know, that 5, 10, 15 maybe 30 minutes each day as a part of, or at least several times during the month as you set your goals to just trying to do that for yourself. That self care that we struggle with.

Joyce (21:04):
It's always, and you know this from the fitness world, it always starts with the mindset and the mood because when people start moving, you don't see physical changes or physical benefits for some period of time if that's your goal. But if you are really tapped in and paying attention to how you feel and how your brain is working, you'll realize that you feel better from day one of getting yourself moving. I assume you've seen this with clients and with other people, right?

Allan (21:34):
Oh yeah. Yeah. I have some clients here that prior to working with me had like zero exercise at all. You know they might walk around a little bit here over around town, but really not a lot. Um, and you get them into a program and the first day they're just, you know, they're just dad on their feet. They're struggling to do any of the exercises and then you're, you're sitting with them, you know, a month later, yeah, they're pumping out reps, you know, they're not getting winded. They're, they're smiling while they're doing some of the work. They're joking while we're going through some of the exercises and um, you know, so there is this kind of boost and it's not just a physical thing. It's really this emotional, they leave feeling better, not just about themselves, but just feeling better in general. There's a, just a wellness that comes out of movement. It's just really hard to explain until you've experienced it.

Joyce (22:28):
Exactly. That's exactly it. And then with 99 Walks, my hope is that we can encourage people who, who haven't had that feeling, who don't know how much better they can feel simply by moving their body and connecting with other people.

Allan (22:44):
And so start with the first walk. Just get that first one done? But by the time you get the 99 Walks in, I do believe that they're going to see some exceptional change in their lives from a mental perspective and a physical perspective. I define wellness as being the healthiest fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

Joyce (23:06):
Oh just three.

Allan (23:08):
We have to start somewhere and then we can add on later. But yeah, just three please.

Joyce (23:12):
Yeah, the first, and forgive me cause I'm repeating or I'm repeating myself and I'm repeating what we've been talking about, but it's being willing to invest in yourself and that means investing the time and making your wellness in that broad definition a priority. And the second I think is being willing to do the work. One of the things that I've come to really accept in my life over the last many years of hard work is that everything takes work. Whether it's happiness, people think that happiness is a destination and you can get there and you can just hang out. But the truth is happiness takes ongoing, consistent work to do the things that lead to happiness. Fitness, wellness, those things take work. It's a lot easier to pick up the fast food than it is to go home and wash the kale. It just takes work. And the third is, and this is really important, is surrounding yourself with people who are like minded in that way. I have a section in the book called people are like bananas, which is one of my favorite expressions, but it goes to the fact that you will inevitably take on some of the characteristics of the people with whom you surround yourself. So if you are surrounding yourself with people who don't take care of themselves with people who are not happy with people who don't prioritize wellness, you're going to take on some of those characteristics to your own detriment. Well, thank you Joyce.

Allan (24:50):
If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book and what you're doing over at 99 Walks, where would you like me to send them?

Joyce (24:58):
Well, the book is available on Amazon so you can just head over to Amazon and search, Walk Your Way to Better. I am available on social media and all the channels that Joyce R Shullman, and to learn more about 99 Walks and our movement, you can find us online 99walks.fit and the 99 Walks app is available both Amazon and Android.

Allan (25:20):
So they can get the book, they can contact a local friend and say, Hey friend, I bought you a copy too. We're going to do this. And when they get their book they can, they can start their 99 Walks. So Joyce, thank you so much for being a part of 40 plus fitness. Uh, if you guys want to get the links, you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/429. So Joyce again, sorry. Thank you so much for being a part of 40 plus fitness.

Joyce (25:43):
Absolutely. My pleasure. Allan, thanks so much.

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Another episode you may enjoy

Running injury free using the run walk run method with Jeff Galloway

Less...

Allan (03:24):
Dallas, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

Dallas (03:26):
Thank you so much for having me.

Allan (03:28):
It's just an honor for me to have you on the show. It's a, you're someone I've really wanted to get in touch with for a while. And when I, when I got your book, The Four Seasons Solution and I started reading through it, I was like, this is profound. This because I had sort of already taken the nutrition thing to a kind of a seasonal idea thinking through ancestral eating and you know, my Northern European family would not have been eating papayas in December. And so I would typically do, and I coined the phrase seasonal ketosis cause that's a natural place that I found myself at now. I did it backwards because I like football season and beer and hanging out with my friends. And so I kinda, I kind of switched it up, but I have to admit, I have found myself very much where you talk about in the book and that kind of this perpetual summer, which we're going to talk about. So I really did resonate with the message that you have in the book. And I think the folks, anyone that's going to read your book is going to as well.

Dallas (04:30):
Awesome.

Allan (04:32):
So now part of what you have in the book and you talk about are these rhythms and you know, we, we can talk about circadian rhythms, we can talk about the rhythms that happen over the course of seasons. Cause everybody, particularly in the Northeast and the North is going to experience some form of seasons in the Southeast they'll call it 10 seasons, rain hot, a little bit more rain hot. And then you know, a little bit more rain. But down here in Panama, you know, we really only have rainy and hot and so we don't have the longer, shorter days and things like that. So it's a little harder to kind of go into the whole that, but there are those rhythms and I think most, most people that are listening to this are going to kind of resonate with that idea that there's, Oh yeah, there's these seasons and there's different things that we do and should be doing longer days, shorter days.

Allan (05:22):
And then there's the seasons of life. And so you kind of use that concept as you go through this to build, for lack of a better word, as I went into reading it and thinking through as a helix, our life as we go forward going through these series of rhythms. But we've got to get in sync with those rhythms if we really want to be well. So can you kind of talk through those different rhythms that we should be paying attention to and how they're going to benefit us for wellness.

Dallas (05:50):
For sure. And you know, that's both, a simple question and a really complex question. I, it's one of the things that I'm most interested in is patterns. And what I started to identify over the last 6 to 10 years is a sort of recurring fractal pattern of expansion and contraction that occurs on a daily rhythm. Actually, there are shorter rhythms call trading rhythms and we're familiar with REM cycles when we're sleeping. So there's a very sort of rhythm. There's the very obvious daily rhythm or circadian rhythm. There's also the same expansion-contraction cycle over the course of a year. And then we have this expansion-contraction cycle over the course of a lifetime. And there are so many fascinating comparisons between all those different cycles of what happens for us experientially, motivationally, emotionally, physiologically, metabolically. There are so many comparisons there and that fascinates me.

Dallas (06:44):
And what I started to do was layer in and sort of glean some of the patterns that are already encoded into our DNA. These are biological principles that have always governed the way we live that govern basically all life on earth is governed by these different cycles. And the circadian rhythm is a really obvious one across the course of the day. We have light, we have dark, we have sunrise, we have sunset, we have bright midday light. Like all of these things send physiological signals to our bodies and they affect our neurochemistry, they affect our metabolism, they affect our alertness, they affect our motivation, they affect our pleasure responses to things. And so it changes this. There's this entire, like I sort of envision this almost sort of pulsing, throbbing sort of amoeba shaped thing. Like we are constantly in motion in all of these different ways.

Dallas (07:41):
And what I seek to do in this book, and is giving some simple structure and organization to that. And that is basically just observing the natural patterns that are already there in nature. So I talk about rhythms with what we eat. I talk about rhythms with the light dark cycle, including sleep, but not limited to sleep. I talk about rhythms and oscillations in that same expansion contraction cycle in the way that we move across the course of a day across the course of a year and across the course of a lifetime. And I talk about connection, and I think that's one of the things that is overlooked in a lot of discussions about health and wellness is the sense of connection, not just to other people. That's kind of the obvious one. There's a large and growing conversation about social isolation and loneliness and that the social, emotional unhealth cost of loneliness, but that's not the entire story of connection.

Dallas (08:31):
So we also have this opportunity to connect deeply with ourselves, connect deeply with a sense of place and belonging and home and sort of mother earth. And then we have this sense of connection to a larger purpose, sense of contribution to something larger than ourselves, which is also correlated with some of the happiest and most long lived people on earth. So it's complex in that there are multiple moving pieces in this expansion contraction cycle. But it's also incredibly simple because what it does is allows us to get back in touch with our intuitive rhythms that are present in our bodies already. And we've just learned to ignore them or we've never learned to listen to them in the first place. So that the closer we get to aligning with these natural rhythms, the easier decisions get, the easier we make healthy decisions because it's just what we want to do intuitively.

Dallas (09:25):
So one of the major problems with the modern world is that we have largely eliminated those rhythms. We've flattened everything. So it's made, we've made everything like a light switch. It's off or it's on, it's go or it's stop and all of these things, we're at work or we're not, we are exercising or we're sedentary and this, it's very binary and polarized. And one of the things that argue for in this book is that across all of these different domains of living, we should be much more like a sign wave than a right angle or a straight line because there are no straight lines and right angles in nature. They're all curvaceous and beautiful and cyclical. So that's the, that's the sort of, that's the sort of conceptual background. And then the book gets much more, specific into each of those areas and, and kind of how, in my recommendations of how to actually implement those different things.

Allan (10:20):
Yeah. I think, you know, intuitively, we kind of know these things. If we do shift work, someone who does shift work, you know, there's plenty of science out there to say that they, they struggle with their health and wellness because the shift work interferes with their normal circadian sleep rhythm. They don't know when to be awake and when to be asleep. And yeah it really impacts their health overall. And so it's that when we break one of these, I'm not going to say a rule, but just a natural rhythm of, of how we should probably be living our lives, how we've lived our lives for millennia. It's, it really does take a toll on our bodies. Now I want to kind of start because I think that the easiest way to think about this beyond the, of course the circadian rhythm is kind of an easy one to do, but most people think that relates to sleep and you believe it's relates to all of it, but I want to talk about particularly the four seasons of the year because like I said, it was fascinating to me.

Allan (11:17):
I thought of it from a nutrition perspective of okay, my ancestors would not have had access to this food, therefore it probably shouldn't be eating that food during this time of the year. I need to have a winter, I need to have a time of famine where I'm predominantly eating meat and fat and that's my food products because that's all that's available. And there's going to be a period of time when I'm eating leafy greens and then there's going to be blueberry season where I'm just going to go crazy eating the blueberries. So it was easy for me to conceptualize this from a, from a food perspective, but you take it across all four of those dynamics, the food, the movements, the sleep and then of course the relationships both with ourselves and with others. Can you kind of walk through the four seasons and kind of give us an idea of how over the course of four seasons that would impact each of those four pillars of health and then why we find ourselves today kind of stuck in this summer. Because we've had this linear, like you said, we've smoothed everything out and we just happen to smooth it out at a time when we love, which is that dopamine summer.

Dallas (12:20):
Totally. Totally. So I mentioned expansion, contraction cycle. So there is kind of the two sides of the coin there and I grouped the four seasons into two and two. So spring and summer tend to be all about expansion. They tend to be about stimulation and fun and novelty and excitement and exploration and hard work and stress and all of that is totally okay. Like that's a natural rhythm. So it's akin to kind of morning and mid-day and the experience of a, like the sort of the titillation of early spring when we're like, let's go do some work in the garden or clean the garage. Like that sort of spontaneous motivation to do things or to start a new exercise program or to go on a trip or like the draw towards new exciting things is driven by dopamine and then the stress hormones of adrenaline and cortisol, which help us adapt to that stress and maximize our sort of performance under stress.

Dallas (13:20):
And that's all good stuff. And I think that sometimes we make the mistake of sort of idealizing some other metobolic processes or neuro transmitters or motivational experiences and then demonizing others. And what I'm saying here is that actually all of these things have important functions because if we didn't have some of those motivational experiences to go try new things, go places, meet new people, we would stay at home and probably starve to death because we didn't have that spontaneous motivation to kind of go out and explore. So those are all really important things. So spring and summer are the expansion phase. Fall and winter are the contraction phase. It's the balancing point. And fall and winter are about slowing down, restoring and recovering from the stressful spring and summer. It is about coming home and reconnection and being grateful and being generous and knowing our place.

Dallas (14:16):
And it's all of the ideas that are really kind of epitomizes by American Thanksgiving. This sense of like gratitude and connection and generosity that are such hallmarks of fall. And then winter then is this experience of deep healing and restoration and contraction and what's wrong into like the most intimate parts of yourself and most intimate connections with people. It's not, it's kind of the opposite of the summer barbecues and block parties. It is sitting around the fireplace with your closest circle and all of those things are important. There's not, there's no good or bad here. What there is is this expansion and contraction cycle that works beautifully when it's in balance and works really poorly when it's out of balance. So fall and winter then are symbolized by the neurotransmitters of serotonin and melatonin. Serotonin as well known for its role in mood, in pleasure, in feeling a sense of contentment and connection and belonging.

Dallas (15:16):
And it's a very, it's a very peaceful, Placid, satisfied experience. And of course melatonin being the sort of darkness hormone, so to speak, is all about getting us into that very deep contracted, restorative phase of sleep or in the case of deep winter, a very kind of therapeutic experience. The problem is that back at the Dawn of agriculture, roughly 10 or 12,000 years ago, and as we started to kind of get civilization going and ownership societies and economics and urbanization, the whole thing sort of started to shift from being hunter gatherers in sort of integrated into their local environment to start to take control of the environment at first through agriculture and stabilizing the food supply. But then through, you know, later through the industrial revolution with artificial light, we started to kind of really craft the environment around us and that's where we went off course. Really kind of starting back at the agricultural revolution and then later through the industrial and technological revolutions.

Dallas (16:17):
Because what we did is we got stuck in this summer mode, this mode of success, of hard work, of accumulating resources of like go, go always on excitement and fun and expansion. And we got stuck there because it's good for civilization, it's good for the human species as a whole in that expansive mode. And of course you look at the population of humans on earth. We have done plenty of expansion, but it is out of balance. And what the challenge there, and I explained this in the book, but part of the challenge is that it's so fun and exciting to experience the dopamine and adrenaline and cortisol components of life. The excitement and the pleasure and the reward aspects of it. It's very difficult to tear ourselves away from that to have the corresponding contraction experiences. So I write in the book that we are stuck in a chronic summer and if you think about having the feeling you have at the end of summertime and let's say at the, in the Northern hemisphere sort of at the end of August and early September, you're like, Oh, I'm so tired.

Dallas (17:25):
I can't wait for the days to start to get shorter and they start to cool down and maybe the kids go back to school and like things start to kind of settle in and get a little bit saner because we're so tired. And that same sensation is the one that a lot of us have like deep in our bones over the course of years. And decades because we're living in a chronic summer. And the reason that's a major problem is because the behaviors in the summertime, if they are out over again years or decades, those chronic summer behaviors produce chronic disease outcomes. So all of this gets tied together as we can not only prevent and reverse chronic disease by stepping out of that chronic summer situation, but we can actually make all of the rich, beautiful human experiences better by reintroduced saying a balanced oscillating system.

Allan (18:15):
Yeah, and I think that's kind of the key of it is it's exciting. We're out there, we're doing stuff in particular as we start talking about sleep. I think food people get, it's like we have access to some foods all year round. And so we're, we're eating that all the time. We're getting all that sugar, all that, you know, the blueberries are there every day, every season I get and I'm everyday and if I keep doing that, my body's not getting that retraction, that contraction, that should be getting later. But with sleep kind of thing is an annual visits, the badge of honor that I only sleep five hours a night and do this stuff. You know what, I've got all these things, these, these responsibilities that, you know, put the kids to bed and then I've got to catch up with this and then I got to do that.

Allan (18:57):
And then I'm so wound up, well I guess I'll just go ahead and watch Netflix for an hour or so or four or six. And then I got to catch up on Facebook because totally all my friends that have been up until two o'clock in the morning, they're also posting now. So that's coming through and, we're one, we're giving ourselves all this artificial light, which wouldn't exist. We're not going with the natural cycle. And I think that's one of the, to me, that's where the, like the aha moment with what you were going into when you went through and said, when your book, you had your other book, which is, it starts with food. But in this book you said, you know, maybe sleep is easier, a better place to really think about this. And I'm agreeing with you here, if you sleep more when it's darker longer, that's probably how our ancestors did it for millennia, and it's probably a good life lesson for us. So can you kind of just talk about why sleep is so important to us and how we can use the seasons as a kind of a flag for us of better sleep and better health?

Dallas (19:55):
Certainly. There's this principle of evolutionary mismatch, which might not be a familiar term, but the concept is familiar and you've already spoken to it in that in our ancient past and the way that our bodies have evolved, we, our bodies expect oscillation. We expect certain types of kind of environmental conditions. And the modern world, the way we've constructed is extremely new to our physiology. We haven't had time evolutionarily speaking, to adapt to that. So we have a mismatch between what our physiology expects and what our environment provides us or what we provide ourselves through the modern environment. And that same principle. So you've spoken to food and said, okay, we can actually solve a ton of the problems with food by eating what is locally and seasonally available. And that's a beautiful elegant solution to food is literally just doing that one simple thing is eating what's available to you locally and seasonally.

Dallas (20:49):
And of course that takes into account what your local geography is. And in Panama you've got a different and certainly much smaller amplitude or smaller oscillations season to season, but there's a small change. It's of course much larger at higher and lower latitudes respectively, higher latitudes, North and South, North and South of the equator. And there's another principle that's akin to that with sleep, which is basically you should track or your sleeping patterns should be reasonably close to the sunrise and sunset times wherever you live. And that doesn't mean that in, you know, the Northern United States that you'd go to bed at 5:00 PM, you know, in the winter time because the sun goes down that early. But the closer you can track that this is like a beautiful, simple kind of heuristic or or sort of shortcut.

Dallas (21:38):
The closer you are to that, the better your health and wellness is going to be across the board. And that's true for a number of reasons. The single largest one is that our physiology is incredibly dependent on the light dark cycle. And that's something that has been, that I and many other researchers, have really underappreciated in years and decades past. And as we start to understand how significantly our metabolism is affected by that light dark cycle, we can start to identify the downstream consequences of mismatching, what's going on outside and the natural rhythms that are there with what we are with the environments we are providing with artificial light. And especially to your point, the sort of staying up late, which is basically a summertime behavior, right? Where the kind of long days, short nights, and what we basically have is a chronic shortage of sleep, but it's not just shortage of sleep, it's actually a deficiency of time spent in darkness.

Dallas (22:36):
So I kind of reframe that in the book where it's not just that people need to get more sleep and needs to go to bed earlier and whatever. They also need to spend more time in relative darkness. So there's this principle of mismatch that shows up in the realm of sleep because we, not only do we not have enough time spent in darkness and including sleeping, we also don't have enough exposure to bright, natural light. So, so much of our physiology is dictated by exposure to bright light because that is one of the triggers for our metabolism to say, Oh, I should be awake. Our nervous system gets regulated by that. And we have these, what we call clocks, these, these genetically encoded mechanisms within almost all of the cells and all of our bodies that have a roughly 24 hour rhythm, but they are made more accurate and more consistent by exposure to bright light.

Dallas (23:28):
So bright light early in the morning really helps to kind of reset and coordinate all of those clocks so that as we advance through the day, we have a more coordinated system. And as we get into the hours after sunset or approaching sunset, we are, we have coordinated clocks within our bodies such that we can start to wind down more naturally. And that requires that we avoid the artificial light after sunset. And that means dimming the lights at home. That means avoiding the computer and tablet and smartphone screens that have a lot of that blue light. Because if you think about blue light, especially when it's quite bright, blue light is effectively the signal that it is mid day. And this is sort of blue sky environment. Blue light tells your brain you should be alert, you should be active and you should have this sort of stress hormones on board so that you can perform maximally.

Dallas (24:20):
So this the experience of summer of having lots of sun, lots of light and lots of stress that goes along with all of that gets stretched over into the evening hours when we have artificial light that we get from all of these screens, so it's quite a well known recommendation at this point that we should be avoiding blue light in the evenings, especially in the hour or two before bed. I'll maybe extend that even farther and say the longer you get after or the longer you are awake after sunset and the more blue light you were exposed to after sunset, wherever you are, the more problems you are likely to have with your circadian rhythm. So it just hearkens back to this really simple and elegant solution. You should actually just follow the natural rhythm with a light dark cycle to the extent that you are able, just like you would follow what is present for you in food with local and seasonal foods. These, all of these, these really simple guidelines of like, this is how we go back and this is how we undo some of that evolutionary mismatch to improve our health overall.

Allan (25:23):
Yeah. I did some personal experiments to just kind of see what my sleep cycles were. You know, you wear wearable devices and things like that. About a year or so. And yeah, I'm right on the sleep cycle of 90 minutes. And I was going through that and I would say, okay. What I found was, yeah, in, in the summertime I, I felt okay with just sometimes four, but usually five sleep cycles. And then when it's the longer winters, and this really hit me when I would travel up to Calgary from Arkansas. And Arkansas, I'd go up to Calgary in July and it's, it's daylight at eight o'clock at night. And I'm like, ah, I just want to go to bed, but what am I supposed to do?

Allan (26:14):
You know? And so that would really mess with me. That would mess with me as much as traveling to Europe for sure. It really threw me off that there was that much difference in the length of a day and when the sun was out, when it wasn't. And so I recognize that my, my body had, was adaptive to the seasons and to the sun. And you know, obviously everybody knows about jet lag, but these were this kind of experiences of I sleep longer in the winter just naturally because I never set an alarm. I always go to bed early enough that I never have to set an alarm. I go through my sleep cycles and when I get through a sleep cycle, if it's after, you know, if I know I have to be up at seven, if it's after five o'clock I just get up. Cause I know 90 minute sleep cycles not going to work, I will, I'll sleep through the alarm if I even set one, which I typically don't. So I just kind of had these natural, okay I'm gonna I need to get five, sometimes six. Then in the winter I always found it was almost always going to be that extra sleep cycle, which you know, is just kind of one of those learning opportunities I gave myself by going to bed earlier. So I gave up a lot of Netflix watching for the sake of science and my health and that's where I found myself.

Dallas (27:23):
Yeah, well I love that you've already taken on so many of these experiments and just sort of naturally gravitate towards something that's very much in alignment with the entire model that I put forward in the book. Because what you, what I hear you saying is you have gotten better at trusting your own body's instincts and intuitions and, and not just like, like hearing them and trusting and acting on them in a way that drifts naturally over time to a much more harmonious and effortless place. I mean, the fact that you can go to bed and just sort of wake up without an alarm really speaks to the, the rested state that you're in when you do wake up. And I think that's extraordinary and beautiful. So I applaud you for doing those experiments.

Allan (28:05):
Yeah, but let my wife wake me up when I'm not like, my whole brain is off. I'm like, wait, where am I? What's going on? And it's like, Oh, we gotta we gotta go. And I'm like, Oh, I need one more sleep cycle. But okay, yes, I'm up. But, so yeah, I've done a lot of that myself cause it's, you know, when you're doing a podcast and doing the health and fitness and you know, this is my thing now, I make that a priority to, to experiment. And I think everyone should do these experiments. And what's really cool about your book is that you give us a lot of experiments. There's a lot in here that we can't get into all of it. But I did want to cover one more thing before we really get going. And because I do interview a lot of people and I'm fairly agnostic with what people eat.

Allan (28:51):
You're gonna eat the way you're going to eat and it's either going to serve you or it's not. So you need to do those experiments because experiments are good for you. But one of the things, like I said, I really liked about your book was that it just kind of broke through all of that and it said there's gonna be periods of the year that you would just naturally be a vegan because it's the blueberries are there, the vegetables and fruits are there and they're in abundance and you're going to be just doing that. You're still going to get your protein and do your thing. So I do want to get into the protein aspects cause I think that's another huge thing. But then you say, okay, when we get around to the winter time there's not any more blueberries, there's not as many leafy greens though our diet would naturally have changed. So you kind of break through the diet tribalism cause it gets very tribal.

Dallas (29:42):
Absolutely. Well, and I think, you know, one of the points I make in the book and I'll make here as well, is that one of the reasons why we have such sort of fractured tribal perspectives on nutritionist because this science is extremely inconsistent in its conclusions. You can find a you know, a research paper that says people should eat only meat. You can find a research paper that says research paper that says people should be vegan, they should be extremely low fat, they should be high fat, low carb and everywhere in between. We look at Mediterranean diets and paleo diets and ketogenic diets. Like there's all of these different things that are really often in quite sort of conflict with each other, but yet there's research to support all of them. And I view that like you, I mean I have a, a broad evolutionary template that says the things that are most likely going to nourish us well are the things that have been around for the longest.

Dallas (30:37):
So it goes back to the meat, seafood, eggs, vegetables, fruit, nuts and seeds and naturally occurring fat sources, which from a conceptual standpoint, it looks like a quote unquote paleo diet. But I'm less concerned with what is technically paleolithic and more concerned with like, does this make me healthier? And the beautiful thing that is written into, and not because I wrote it in, but because it's in all of us, and this is to your point, the beautiful thing it's written into our physiology is the ability to adapt to many different nutritional inputs. And so what we have in the research is evidence that we can adapt in positive ways to a low fat, high vegetable kind of plant based or vegetarian diet. We can also adapt to a meat and fat-based low carbohydrate or even kenogenic dietary approach. We can adapt to something that is more moderate, like a sort of meat and vegetables, paleo approach.

Dallas (31:36):
We can adapt to something like a Mediterranean diet that is rich in many different types of micronutrients. But there's a lot of commonality in all of these things. And so what I look for is patterns and commonality. And what I see in commonality is that the nutritional research that across the board, the nutritional principles that make people healthier include whole food sources, adequate dietary protein, plenty of nutrient-dense plant matter and some variation across the course of time. And one of the weaknesses of nutritional research is that they're typically difficult to control short term studies. And so we can come to all sorts of different conclusions with these different dietary approaches. I think there's an opportunity to recognize that the human omnivore is so amazingly adaptable to all these different inputs that we have a seasonal opportunity to implement and gain the benefits of many of these approaches.

Dallas (32:35):
So for example, a springtime diet that is rich in tender greens and healthy fat sources like avocado and olive oil and rich in foods like poultry and seafood would look a lot like a Mediterranean diet. A summer diet of a wide variety of vegetables and starts your roots and fruit, especially fruit in the kind of mid and late summer and is lighter on the kind of meat and fat approach. Looks a lot like a sort of plant based diet that still does include some whole, some complete protein sources, but it looks a lot more like that sort of, you know, what is what we now describe as plant-based. A fall diet might look like a paleo type diet that is again still based on whole foods that has both meat and vegetables present in wide amounts. So there's an amazing opportunity there to gain all those benefits to not have to become really zealous and dogmatic about our nutritional approaches and also still to have all of the health producing benefits of these different dietary approaches.

Dallas (33:38):
So I think that's fascinating because it explains all of the nutritional, the conflicting nutritional information and it just sort of takes away the charge from the diet wars and says, actually here's what works, here's what we know and here's what basically everyone in the nutritional realm would agree on. And that's why I like someone like Michael Paulin, such a sane, moderate research and kind of research based and grounded approach. Like eat food, mostly plants, not too much. Like that's such a beautiful synopsis of that. And I really support simple solutions. So, I think that's a fun way to kind of take some of the charge and the confrontation out of discussions around nutrition.

Allan (34:22):
Yeah. Because if you eat that you're, you're not just going to die. But now I define wellness as being the healthiest fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

Dallas (34:37):
Ooh, that's such a great question. So I think, I like simple ones. So here's one in the realm of nutrition which is start moving towards eating foods that are, that are available locally and seasonally. And that in the summertime is really easy because there's a wide range of things, you know, going to your local farmer's market is a great way to do that. In the winter time, especially in the higher latitudes, that gets a lot more restrictive. So it might be more challenging there to be limiting some of the more processed foods and especially carbohydrate sources and introducing, and maybe you have to learn how to cook some new things. But the thing, there's also a real adaptive metabolic benefit to restricting carbohydrate to getting a really rich protein source and a lot of healthy dietary fats each meal because we have all of the instance insulin sensitizing and anti-inflammatory effects of that approach as well.

Dallas (35:30):
So there's lots of great stuff there, but it's literally just eat what's available locally. There is the, just tag us in there. Try to do all of your eating during the daylight hours. So not the lights, not the hours when you have the lights on at home, but during the daylight hours because that starts to introduce a natural compressed feeding window or we talk about narrow like early or late feeding window. We talk about intermittent fasting and I think that's a really elegant way to just provide some natural oscillation there. So in the summertime there's very long windows of time when you'd be eating in the winter, they're much, they're much narrower. And then around movement I haven't talked to much about movement so far, but if you are not currently doing a some kind of resistance training, functional fitness training, something that is based that is the anchor for a strong resilient body.

Dallas (36:21):
Introduce that now and lots of times we take, we take people who are somewhat sedentary or who kind of are underactive and we overemphasize the cardio metabolic or the cardiovascular fitness training and we underemphasize getting good joint mobility and having good strength because building strong muscles and bone density and joints that can tolerate very functional ranges of movement is highly correlated with the ability to maintain independence into our later years. So that's one of those things that is an anchor in my program. And I think the last thing I'll say, and again circling back to connection, most of us spend lots of time in easy, shallow, stimulating, fun, light conversations either with coworkers or people on social media or friends. We don't tend to do a much as much of that contractive fall type, deep vulnerable, intimate kind of open, present, grateful grounded communication.

Dallas (37:24):
That would be more like fall. So I would encourage you, whether it's with your partner or spouse or with some of your closest friends your family or children or parents invest in that experience and it's unfamiliar and it's scary and we don't quite know how to do it. And especially for us men, it feels awkward because our fathers didn't probably didn't do very much of that and it might not be viewed as sort of masculine, but really human beings need connection. And I think in general, if this is a safe stereotype, I think men are particularly isolated because society has taught us that we need to be strong and invulnerable and tough and we take care of ourselves. And usually it means it's hard for us to open up about what's going on for us, psycho emotionally, how we are feeling or what we're feeling, what we're experiencing. So this is my support for and suggestion that we do a lot more of that men and women across the board. But I think for us, men, it's a particularly difficult and scary and unfamiliar thing because it wasn't modeled to us in earlier generations. So those are my three.

Allan (38:32):
Great Dallas, thank you. This book, like I said, it really is an awesome book and I, I am going to be going back into it time and time again because there's so many lessons in there. We, we just, we just scratched the surface your, your concepts on anchors and how we're going to do this pivot. How we make it fit into practically fit into getting out of our summers and getting into the lifestyle that's gonna work for us. Again, there's so much there that's not just theoretical, but it's totally practical, really deep, good book. I appreciate the opportunity to read it. I really appreciate the time you've given us to the show. If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about the book, where would you like for me to send them?

Dallas (39:16):
They could go to dallashartwig.com. I'm active on Instagram, primarily has social media, which is @DallasHardwig. I've got a mailing list and the book is available on Amazon and Barnes, noble and everywhere else books are sold.

Allan (39:32):
All right. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/428 and I'll be sure to have links there, but do make sure you get this book. This is one of the best health and fitness books I've read in a long, long time. So Dallas, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

Dallas (39:47):
Thank you so much for having me

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Less...

Allan (02:33):
Dr. Selassie, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

Dr. Selassie (02:36):
Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be on your podcast Allan.

Allan (02:40):
Well, I am eager to talk about your book because I loved, loved, loved the title when I saw it on Amazon coming out soon, and I was like, okay, I got to get this. I got to get her on here. The book is called Aging Brilliantly: How to Eat, Move, Rest, and Socialize Your Way to Long Life. And in that book, I think you do a really good job of just kind of taking us through some of the basic fundamental things that we should be doing to keep ourselves healthy and in doing so, aging better.

Dr. Selassie (03:09):
Absolutely. Yeah. It's back to the basics, you know, I think that that's always going to be the foundation.

Allan (03:16):
And the way I kind of get into it when I'm talking to clients is I'm like, let's look for the big rocks. You know? And it's, I think everybody pretty much knows I could eat better, I could move more, I could rest better and I can socialize more. So it's a, it's kind of this natural go-to. Can you kind of go through those four pillars and just kind of talk about what each one means to us and how we should be mindful and focused on each one?

Dr. Selassie (03:41):
Yeah, absolutely. And even though these are just the basics, I just want to say that the basics are heavily backed up. By research, I mean there's been tons of science and clinical studies showing that these four pillars are really important for aging brilliantly. So eating, I mean, you know, right now I think that everybody is really kind of gets excited about the latest trends, you know? And if you've been in the health field for a while, you understand that these ideas change. Like I think maybe 10 years ago or not even that long ago, everybody was like all excited about the paleo diet and eating bacon and now everybody's all excited about the plant-based diet, but if you're around 20 years ago, the plant-based diet is really just the vegan diet, but despite all the trends, no matter if you're like I'm gluten-free or I'm paleo, which is not a trend for some people, but no matter what diet you're on, the most important thing I think is really that you get some of the fundamentals that you see in all diets, which is going to be healthy plants.

Dr. Selassie (04:47):
No matter what type of diet you are on, you want to make sure you're including plants. And good fats are really important and I know that there was a time when everybody was eating fat-free and now we've got to like get with the times because when I fat-free is just not the way to go. There's been the most research done on the Mediterranean diet and I think it's a very adaptable diet for lots of people. Whether you have gluten sensitivities or you don't want to eat animal products or you can't, you know, you don't do well on dairy. There's always food available for people and ways to make it more tailored towards you. And the Mediterranean diet shortly is just pretty much lots of plants. You want to have nuts and seeds and oils, a little bit of fish, a little bit of protein.

Dr. Selassie (05:38):
And that's the basic pillar of, and there's definitely more details in the book. Moving is really important. I think that we all understand now that we live a very sedentary life. Most of us are working at a cubicle. We're not even standing. And studies show that even a little bit of moving, so I think a lot of people get intimidated because they think like, Oh, I've got to start that CrossFit now. You know, or I got to, you know, New Year's is here, so I got to start my exercise regime. But a lot of the studies are showing just even three minutes every hour makes a huge difference in your health and aging well. So moving and moving every chance you get.

Dr. Selassie (06:19):
Resting is really important. People do not prioritize sleep. In fact, I live here in Brooklyn, New York, and people I think glorify like, Oh, I can get by on four hours or I only need six hours.

But it's really about if you want to age brilliantly, you've really got to prioritize rest and rest is sleeping, is associated with everything. Better body types or healthier body sizes, less stress on the brain, better performance at work and for school, for children. So rest is really important and I don't think it gets focused on as much. And then the last thing is socialization. Whenever you have people that you are loving around you, whether it's like your true flesh plant family or friends, which are like family that you choose. And also purpose, like serving people in the world, making the world a better place, those people tend to age longer. You know, there, there's a reason for them to kind of hang around. And so they do.

Allan (07:23):
Yeah, you based a lot of this off of Buettner's work, The Blue Zones. And so this is a brilliant piece of work. And I, I did have Dr. John Day on the show and he found a small city in a small town village actually in China that was kind of remote and found a lot of these same things. You know, the way they eat, the way they move, the way they rest, the way they socialize was just kind of their natural day to day life, which was a lot more reminiscent of how we were in 1700s, 1800s and early 1900s. And then automobiles and transportation of food and industrialization of our food kind of put us on this path of moving kind of away from that. And I think that's why we're seeing a lot of the issues that we're seeing today is because we're just not really applying these four pillars in our life on a daily basis.

Dr. Selassie (08:19):
No. And just like you mentioned industrialization of food and agriculture, there's also things that we've introduced in our lives that were not there in the 18 hundreds like smartphones and electricity and computers and things like that that are sort of keeping us attached to the desk, you know, so and getting us off our natural rhythms. You know, we can be looking at a smartphone way into the wee hours of the night and then realize later it's, Oh my gosh, it's 2:30 AM. I hear that a lot. So we forget about that. We're human and we have natural, you know, natural basic needs that we need to make sure we're incorporating into our life.

Allan (09:01):
Yes. Now the Mediterranean diet you mentioned, and I think this is really, really important because you know, like you said, there's, a lot of push and most of them, the way I turned them as their elimination diets, when you, when you kind of break down a vegan diet or a carnivore diet or paleo diet or keto. All of these diets are basically focusing on one type of food or deemphasizing the other foods. And saying, okay, you shouldn't eat this and you can eat really crap food and be a vegan. You eat really crap food and be a carnivore. Interestingly enough, you know, if you're not paying attention because you know, it drives me nuts when I'm like, Oh I'm just going to eat bacon for 30 days. And I'm like, okay, you'll lose some weight cause you'll get tired of eating bacon. But beyond that, is that, is that really going to help you age well?

Allan (09:53):
Is that really gonna give you the nutrition that your body needs to be healthy and maybe losing weight is something that's kind of important to you. The doctors told you you need to do that and if this helps you do that, that's great. But you have to go back to something that's generally sustainable. And that's the one thing that kind of comes out in the science over and over again is that the Mediterranean diet is effectively one of those diets that you can stick to. Uh, because people did eat that way and have eaten that way for centuries. Now that the interesting thing about the Mediterranean diet that I think is misinterpreted, this doesn't mean go eat at the olive garden every day. It's slightly different. Now you, you, you briefly touched on, on the Mediterranean diet. Could we dive just a little bit deeper into kind of the background for, you know, these folks are living longer and they're getting a lot of heart, healthy, natural ingredients. Can you kind of talk about that a little bit?

Dr. Selassie (10:50):
Yeah, sure. And I just want to comment on what you're saying that a lot of people you hear about these amazing results that they get on, they get from like, Oh, I went on the this X diet. Like the keto diet is a great example and you're right, it's pretty much eliminating products that might not be so great for us, like things made from flour, which doesn't really have a lot of life in it. And suddenly, they lose a lot of weight, but it is honestly a hard diet to sustain. And the Mediterranean diet is a diet that's very easy for most people to sustain. It's just a matter of making sure you include, it's very inclusive. You've got to include a lot of these foods. So I think that the foundation, like I said, is plants. There's a lot of, you know, all kinds of plants.

Dr. Selassie (11:36):
I mean, you know, you've got your leafy greens, you want your foods from cruciferous family, like the broccoli and the cauliflower and the chards. And you know, other foods like that have been shown in some of these blue zones to really be healthy for us. Tomatoes and eggplants and things like fava beans and all kinds of beans. Lots of these cultures that, that live where they've got people living to a hundred are eating lots of beans and all different kinds. Black beans in Nicaragua and fava beans around the Mediterranean, and even soybeans in Japan. So, that's really important. There's lots of olive oil used in the Mediterranean Diet and I think all of what all is in general have very healthy properties for us. They're very strong antioxidants. They even have even has antimicrobial and antiviral properties, or at least the olive leaves.

Dr. Selassie (12:37):
And the fat is really a sustainable oil. Like it helps us. It's a sustainable oil and it also helps us as humans to sustain our blood sugars. It helps balance out our blood sugars. And it's a really good fat You just want to make sure you don't cook on high heat. You know, there's, are there things like grass-fed butter for example, is considered a good fat. And also from close to around the Mediterranean. Meat, you know, an animal protein is also consumed but not in that, not these big pound quarter-pound burgers. You know, it's more like it's part of the meal that includes many other food. Also even sardines and fish and even eggs, but in smaller amounts. But it is included in the diet. Lots of spices I think are really important. And yeah, I think that you're right, when we think of the Mediterranean diet, we might just think, Oh, this means pizza, you know, around Italy or lots of flour products. But there are, you know, there are, there is so much processing and the American idea of a pasta is a little bit different than how it is in the Mediterranean. They're served much smaller proportions and there's a variety of other foods and variety is really the key.

Allan (13:59):
Yeah. And one of the other things that I will say about most of the countries that are around the Mediterranean area is they, they eat differently than we do. And what I mean by that is a meal is an event. They, they don't go, they don't go to dinner and eat and scarf down a pizza and then go watch Netflix. They meet up, they start socializing and they might have a beer, but they're going to sit down and they're just going to start socializing. And then there'll be kind of a, you know, some olives will be put out. So maybe some cheese, a little bit of this and a little bit of that. They'll sit there and nibble and then, you know, the main course will come out and you know, they'll work through that. But they're spending most of their time talking and showing and listening and getting along and socializing and de-stressing from the day.

Allan (14:47):
And then they might have a glass of wine, maybe two, but usually just a glass. And then they might have a light refreshing fruit or something for dessert and then boom, they're done. I mean that's their meal. But that meal took two hours, maybe two and a half because it's a part of their social environment building. So it's not, you know, the meal is not just to scarf down enough food to feel full. It's, it's intended to be a part of a social structure. So I think when you look at the four pillars, we don't often think of how related each and every one of these are. We have to eat to move, we should socialize while we're eating. And if we're using our time with friends and family in the right way, it reduces stress and just makes us feel more inclusive. So the Mediterranean diet to me is a little bit more than even just a diet. It's a lifestyle.

Dr. Selassie (15:36):
Yeah, I totally agree. Like, you know, putting your fork down in between bites, you're in parasympathetic mode, which is the kind of rest and digest mode you're practicing. That's actually what I call in my private practice, proper food hygiene. You know, you're like, you're resting you're not like answering emails on a computer while you're chewing, you're, you're actually looking at your friends and families in the eye or listening to what they have their day when exactly right. It's part of socialization. It's not these big portions of food that we all get quiet and dive into and talk with our mouth full. It's kind of like a much slower pace and the portions are smaller and there's rest in between.

Allan (16:20):
So yeah. It's an event and I think that's what I really liked about when I'm at the times I've been over in Mediterranean countries with people that are from that area is that they just, they approach everything a little bit differently. It's a little bit like that over here in Panama, but not, not quite to the extent of what I saw in Spain, in Italy. But, um, one of the areas that I really want to get into because it's part of the reason that I am in Panama is just stress. And in the book you did a good job of talking about what stress does to our brain. Could you take a little bit of time to talk about that relationship and what's going on?

Dr. Selassie (16:53):
Yeah. So I just mentioned it. There's, there's two different modes in our body. You can be in sympathetic mode, which is really fight or flight or parasympathetic mode, which is rest and digest. And in this day and age, most of us are in sympathetic mode, sympathetic mode. Our bodies were designed to shuttle between the two. I talk about like how you're most, you're supposed to mostly be in parasympathetic mode where you're like walking around, living your life with your family and then like a predator might jump in your way. And I'm talking about like thousands and thousands of years ago. And your, your design, when you see that predator to either run that's the flight or fight, fight the predator. But these days there's no predator. What there is our bills, an angry boss, a coworker that's hard to deal with, even work projects that have to get completed.

Dr. Selassie (17:50):
Commute's, terrible communities that people have to endure. And so a lot of the times our bodies are in a constant sympathetic mode. And what happens is you constantly stimulate your brain that way, and it sends signals to what's called the amygdala. And your amygdala is important for, it then sends signals to the hypothalamus, which is another part of your brain that basically sends messages all over. And if you're amygdala gets overused or over kind of overstimulated, then it gets bigger and bigger. And this is something that you don't want. You don't want an enlarged amygdala. You want, you know, it's sort of like when you, when you, you use your biceps over and over again, you get a bigger bicep. But that's something you do want with an amygdala you don't because now you're a McDilla is overstimulated and it sends these cascades to your body of all these stress hormones that happen.

Dr. Selassie (18:46):
And so furthermore, the frontal cortex of your brain as it receives some of these stress signals get shrunken. So you have such a thing called age-related cognitive decline. And that's basically, you know, when you start forgetting names of people, even people that are close to you or you can't remember that vocabulary word or you walk into a room and you forget why you walked in there, can't remember where you put your keys. Now this is a sign that your brain is pretty much starting to age, but I think a lot of it is really can be delayed if we were to kind of stop stressing out, take time to take care of ourselves and give our brains a little bit of a break. You know. And then again, all the pillars are intertwined. So like sleep is a really important time for your brain to regenerate. You're not regenerating or restoring when you're at work in your cubicle or washing the dishes, you're really restoring your brain when you're resting.

Allan (19:45):
Yeah, that's during one of the stages of sleep, that's when your body's actually flushing out the brain and cleaning it, which is are the restorative part of sleep. If we're not getting good sleep cycles or enough of them, we're not taking care of our brain. Now you touched on something and I think this is also really, really important because it's, it's so hard for people to do this and I'm just, I'm going to stereotype a little bit, but I don't mean in a bad way. It is. I think women have always been the caretakers of people and as a result, you know, so they're taking care of the children, they're taking care of the home, they're taking care of and they a lot of times it's very, very difficult to take that step back. I know as a personal trainer sometimes I just get so tied up into, you know, my business and taking care of the people I'm working with that sometimes I also don't do this and it's, it's called self care. And in the book you share some restorative self care ideas. Can you, can you kind of go through a few of those, what you think are some good ones for us to consider?

Dr. Selassie (20:43):
Yeah, I totally relate to that. I mean, you know, I'm a woman. I have five children, I have a private practice and a lot of times, and I talk about this in the book, that I get caught up in, Oh, I don't have time to prep a meal. I don't have time to, you know, drink a glass of water right now and be running to the bathroom. I have these children to take care of, I have my patients. I have, but let guess what I mean, if you don't take care of yourself, all of that, you will lose all of that, you know? So you've got to prioritize yourself and it doesn't mean that you have to stop everything and like move to Panama. Though that is really good. I would highly recommend that. But if you can't manage that right now, I mean there's a couple little tips that you can do.

Dr. Selassie (21:29):
Like for example, water is so important. You could savor a big glass of water. That's something that I do first thing in the morning before anybody else gets up is I make sure I drink certain amount of ounces of water and I savor it. And I really think about how this is, you know, hydrating me and giving me life. There's other things that you can do to just squeeze in a little self care, like a bath versus a shower. It might take you maybe 10, 15 minutes more, but it can, you know, your muscles under the hot water, it really, it really, let's go, you know what I mean? And then if you put some magnesium salts in there, you're adding some nutrients that can help relax your muscles. And it's alone time. It's me time. It's like there's nobody that can really bother you.

Dr. Selassie (22:16):
You can lock yourself up in the bathroom. Going out in nature, I think is a huge one. Even, you know, like I live in a city, so I'm either in my office or in the subway or in a car or in a building. But even just going out to a park, you know, a green space. And even just for three minutes, 3 to 10 minutes. It doesn't have to be long. Of course the more time you can spend in nature, the better. But our bodies need that. Our bodies are used to seeing plants and getting energy from live things. So that's also a really quick thing that you could do. Like literally just leave your building for a minute, look at some trees. Taking a nap, that's always my favorite one. Like there's nothing like you could be going, going, going and exhausted and you're really not getting much done.

Dr. Selassie (23:02):
But sometimes then that might be all you need. I talked about savoring a glass of water they can, there could be savoring a glass of herbal tea. I mean there's just, there's just so many things. Reading something inspiring I think is really important. One I really love is connecting with an old friend. I've had some amazing, fantastic conversations with people. Just pick one randomly that I haven't maybe talked to in a couple of years and just say, Hey, what's up? There's something really special about connecting with someone and it doesn't mean that, Oh gosh, I haven't spoken to John for two years, it's going to be an hour on the phone. It might just be, you know, 5/10 minute like I'm thinking about you just sending you some love, some good energy, you know, so connection is another one.

Allan (23:48):
Yeah. Now this can sound like a lot and I think when people are looking to change, they're like, Oh, I got to do all these things. I gotta do all these things and I for one I don't, I don't even have enough time to do the things I'm already doing. My to do list just grows every day and I keep pushing things off and pushing things off. And so this just feels, sometimes it feels like there's, there's more there to do. And I would say probably not, but it's really hard for a lot of people to just bridge that gap. Now in the book you talk about setting an intention. And I like, you know, in every chapter as you go through, you have a self assessment set of questions for someone to just kind of answer a few questions really easy, get a score. And then based on that kind of a general idea of how well they're doing on those things. So by the time they get to this sudden intentions part, they should have a pretty good idea where they're weakest, where they're strongest. And what are some of the questions that they answered that they didn't get the score that they thought they should've gotten. Can you talk about setting an intention and what are the steps? What are some things that people would want to consider as they're thinking about doing these things? Because I think you're right, setting the intention is really the key to getting anything done.

Dr. Selassie (25:03):
Yeah, I mean I, I totally get it. Like my things to do list seems to be getting longer and longer too, every single day. And the thing is though, if you want to age brilliantly, you're going to have to, that might have to be sort of a goal that you're going to attain. Otherwise you're basically receive what I call a certain future, which is just can it be aging? You know what I mean? If you don't take a step here or there, you're just basically going to be aging rapidly instead of aging slowly. So you know, that's the thing as you've got to take some time to sort of assess what's going on. I think the self assessments help you to do that and kind of see what areas of your life that would really make a bigger impact for you. So the smallest shift with the bigger impact is really where you start and after you do all the assessments, you'll kind of, you'll, that will kind of come through.

Dr. Selassie (26:00):
You'll kind of see like, wow, sleep is really a big thing that I've never prioritized. Maybe that's an, and I like to sleep. So maybe that might be an area that I really work on. And you want to kind of even look at yourself like where do you see yourself in five years? Where do you see yourself in 10 years or 20 years? Or like I would say that like if you're in your 50s now, you know, where do you want to see yourself in two decades? Do you want to see yourself active? Do you want to see yourself like doing and enjoying all the things you love? Do you see yourself with grandchildren? Do you see yourself playing tennis or you want to kind of project in the future and what will understand now? What will it take to get there? If you see yourself tennis in two decades, so like let's say you're in your mid fifties now and your mid seventies like what would that really mean?

Dr. Selassie (26:50):
That would really mean like preserving your joints, you know, keeping your joints active, you know, taking care of your physical body. If it's really just like seeing and being around your grandchildren, you know, maybe something like diet is going to be more important. You know, you can talk about that. You can think about your diet, you can set some intentions, you can think about your grandchildren and what you want them to see you doing. And I really believe in writing things down because when we kind of think about our intentions or we imagine that's really important, but when you write it down, it's sort of like you're writing a contract to yourself and it's sort of becoming manifested through words. So I really encourage people to get what I call a super agers journal. I'm a big fan of journaling and started. Sort of set these intentions down and, and write down what it is that you see yourself doing and how you can, you know, what are some baby steps or little tiny 1% shifts that you can take to get towards that?

Allan (27:50):
Yeah, I think a lot of people miss out on just how powerful small movements can be, particularly at first, you know, it's like as you're making a snowball, you start out with just a handful of snow and that handful of snow is easy enough for you to grab. And then as you start rolling that down the Hill, it's going to get bigger and bigger. And so just starting with something small over time can have some really great impact in your life.

Dr. Selassie (28:14):
Yeah, totally. I think that as a mom with five children, I can get really lazy and I can be like, you know, ask my daughters, go in the kitchen and fetch this for your mother or run upstairs and turn the thermostat down. But I started to really realize like I am, it's almost like I'm sitting on a throne and pointing and telling my staff what to do, but that's not going to keep me alive and around to see my grandchildren. So I make the extra effort to go up the stairs and put away the laundry or stand up when I'm seeing patients stand up every hour. These days, we've got so many little gadgets on our watches, on our smartphones that can remind us to do that and standing up. I mean, that can be something that can really impair someone as they get older is just standing up from sitting. So you've got to use your, you've got to use your joints, and even just standing up can make such a huge difference. You're actually pumping, there's no blood supply into your hip joint or your knee joint. And so pumping in the nutrition right directly into the knee joint by movement is really the best way to do that.

Allan (29:19):
Yes, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

Dr. Selassie (29:30):
Well I think that one is definitely being active with your friends and family, especially like you mentioned, the women who sometimes start to really focus you know, where the time they're in their mid fifties they're really focused on their career. They're really focused on their family and they forget about their girlfriends. So I think that really enlarging your circle, social circle is really important and it doesn't have to be a huge social circle, but you want to always kind of be stepping out. So I think that that's one strategy, whether it's like having tea with a new person, maybe it's even somebody that could be a possible business colleague, but maybe you're going to go out and like ask about who they are and what's their family like and kind of include socialization into your life. Just a little bit more. Prioritizing sleep I think is one of my favorite ones and I think if you go to bed before rather than sleep in, you're going to, there's more of a likelihood that you'll get those sleep cycles in. Your, the sleep that you get before midnight is actually really important because I get more of those cycles and we're diurnal human beings.

Dr. Selassie (30:40):
We're not nocturnal like rats. So trying to go to bed early I think is another great strategy. You know, just go, just do it. Just put yourself in bed. A third one is kind of, you know, one that I think is really great is kind of go into your local farmer's market or getting, ordering one of these CSA shares online or are there so many different local agriculture, organic agriculture boxes that you can get and just trying a new vegetable, just like seeing it, kind of discovering it and cooking it. Just seeing what you can make out of it and enjoy it.

Allan (31:17):
Thank you. If someone wanted to learn more about you, learn more about your book Aging Brilliantly, where would you like for me to send them?

Dr. Selassie (31:26):
So my website is doctorselassie.com and the doctor is spelled out, so it's simply D O C T O R S E L A S S I E. and you can read all about me. I have a private practice here in Brooklyn, but I do see people via zoom or Skype or on the phone and there's, you'll see my book, but my book is basically on pre-order at Amazon right now. So you can just also find it on Amazon. Dr. Salassie aging brilliantly.

Allan (31:57):
Okay. Well. This is going to be episode 427 so you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/427 and I'll be sure to have a link to Dr. Selassie's page and to the book there.

Dr. Selassie, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

Dr. Selassie (32:13):
I loved being here. Thank you so much Alan. Thanks for the good work that you're doing for all of us over 40

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

– Anne Lynch	– John Somsky	– Melissa Ball
– Barbara Costello	– Judy Murphy	– Melissa Cardinali
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Thank you!

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Patreons

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

– Anne Lynch	– John Somsky	– Melissa Ball
– Barbara Costello	– Judy Murphy	– Melissa Cardinali
– Bill Gioftsidis	– Leigh Tanner	– Tim Alexander
– Debbie Ralston	– Margaret Bakalian	– Wendy Selman

Thank you!

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