certainly I have a biological imperative I have a biological need for food to create energy yes that is true but when is that the case versus a psychological desire for pleasure with food and really being able to feel that sense of ghrelin that sense of hunger um arise within me and then witness its provenance basically was it coming from a biological need or was it coming from some sort of psychological need for Comfort or pleasure and the more I could actually uh train myself to witness that feeling the more I could delineate between the two and say okay actually now I really need to go get like a handful of walnuts or something because you know I need I'm feeling low I need some energy [Music] so let's start with your health Journey you know we are in this era of agency where we have the ability to change our destiny and change our health outcomes and your story is one of just that so what happened to your metabolic Health in your health Journey I was one of those people that blamed genetics from poor metabolism uh I think you know that's a common Trope you know where people just say well you know I just have poor metabolism and you know that's the way I was born and you know here I am you know carrying extra weight but you know also not feeling great and suffering from all of the knock-on impacts of what I learned was insulin resistance Etc and you know as you say I've been immersed in the wellness industry for a long time no that doesn't always ensure that you are also well um because uh you know they say wisdom is taking your own advice well uh it took me a long time to get around to that but uh you know yeah I I always felt as though I was eating a healthy diet I was getting regular exercise but I was as you say not experiencing Optimal Health I had chronic fatigue brain fog I got coveted pretty severely early on and and that kind of set off this trophic Cascade where over about a year and a half I was uh getting um sick on a recurring basis clearly my immune system had been degraded and I really had to take you know a harder look at my own health I just turned 52 so you know that's just orbits around the sun and the chronological age and you know I begin to get more focused on health span or bio age if you will and uh and and it started very much as a product there's like how I was feeling and then it became a more kind of intellectual process so um you know and I'll also say I was carrying around not like a tremendous amount of excess weight but you know typical kind of apple shape uh visceral fat kind of around the middle of my body uh certainly could you know wear it respectfully but uh but you know but but there it was and I was always uh you know throughout my entire life um you know I was a chubby kid and I've always had you know my uh internal uh battles with with weight and so um so yeah you know I I became really interested in um in blood sugar and I got a CGM I got a levels um and I got the levels app and lo and behold I was pre-diabetic I was running fasting glucose levels of 115 to 120 milligrams per deciliter um and post perennial spikes were like off the charts like you know 200 200 plus on a consistent basis and then I was also noticing some other places where I was spiking um related to sauna usage that could be a whole nother discussion but um but I was you know it was a real eye-opener for me and I said okay well you know what's going on here um and you know as I got more kind of insight into you know the dashboard of my personal vehicle here uh you know I was able to adopt a number of protocols based around the observation of data in my own body and that's really the exciting thing about what you call the era of agency or the age of agency is you know this democratization of uh of access to information about your own body you don't just have to you know rely on your once a year you know visit to your PCP if you even make it um Etc so um yeah so you know I'm happy to talk about the protocols that um that I adopted coming out of kind of this moment of physiological Satori um and how I and how it really changed my health around if that's an appropriate to talk about amazing and your story is not uncommon 93 of Americans now are metabolically unhealthy in in at least one or two biomarkers so I appreciate you sharing your story and I think starting with kind of how did it feel to to see those numbers and to begin to have this insight into your own body and then what were some of the protocols or experiments that you you ran to um now achieve your your Prius like State as you sometimes say yeah right well yeah I mean initially it was a head scratcher to be honest I was confused um because like I said I was armed with plenty of information in terms of kind of nutrition um but to see you know data in my own body so you know it was much easier than to adopt protocols once I actually understood some of the mechanism and some of the data so and I guess I would just say that the the weight loss was just really a byproduct of the whole process so I don't want people to get like too caught up on the weight loss part of it yeah I went from like 195 to about 145 where I am now reflect fluctuate a little bit around that um and that's that's feels really good for me uh you know I'm light on my feet I'm an athlete and I've seen just incredible uh you know performance Improvement and my stamina and all sorts of the elements of my life you know from focus and ability to uh to subsume like new information Etc but you know really what I started to do is not that complicated I started to map spikes blood sugar spikes to consumption of food and I started to you know make a list mentally and sometimes on a piece of paper of like oh whoa I can't eat that or that really spikes me or that eating that you know I don't know starch or potatoes or white rice without cadencing it properly with fiber or fats on the front end had you know a much more dramatic Spike effect or something I basically just started to learn all of the different um physical patterns kind of in my body and then uh and then it really adopt a protocol which was pretty much low glycemic high fiber I mean I kind of think of it as ketotarian so it's plant focused plant focused keto so there's really three protocols that were my primary um ones that really made the biggest impact so one was the adoption of this ketotarian diet essentially low glycemic so keeping blood sugar down high fiber really like feeding the gut so lots of salads veggies Brassica Sprouts I started sprouting a ton at home so alfalfa sprouts broccoli Sprouts kind of mixed Bean legume Sprouts tons of Olives sense of olive oil tons of avocados nuts particularly walnuts and pistachios and some Brazil nuts we ferment quite a bit here so um so certainly sauerkraut I generally break my fast and we'll talk about fasting because that's the second protocol but with a coconut probiotic yogurt um so that is important and then really starting to add a lot of herbs and herbal adaptogens to my body just or to my diet really simple just have a bunch around and I always go to the farmer's market and starting to get parsley and cilantro and stuff and sprinkling that into virtually everything and then in terms of kind of quote-unquote you know primary protein sources though you can get all of your essential amino acids from a plant-based diet but for me occasionally eating like super high quality lime caught fish salmon and and tuna so line cut basically they're not that big so they don't have the same proclivity to develop a lot of heavy metal concentration um but you know super high quality fat Omega-3s Etc and very very good quality protein and then maybe eggs like a couple of times a week and so that was really the diet um quote unquote now it's not a diet at all I don't really even think about it too much it's just a lifestyle it's just what I go to it's what it's in my fridge Bridge and I really have largely eliminated you know the consumption of refined sugars and refined grains and Ultra processed foods I'll put a little asterisk by that because I just went to France for two and a half weeks and when you get to be metabolically flexible you have a lot more freedom to actually eat some of those things when the situation calls for it so we can get to that at the right time but um but the second after this to break my fast just listening to all four of those incredible Whole Foods filled with so many good things for our bodies that I'm I'm coming over after this break my fast cool well yeah so right right around 10 30 or 11 every day you know I will generally uh have a probiotic couple scoops of this very high quality probiotic coconut yogurt which I love um with some walnuts um Goji berries maybe a couple blueberries and some sea salt and that and not very much and then um and that's just an amazing way to break your fast for a whole bunch of different reasons and that leads uh elegantly into the fasting conversation which is completely conjoined with the understanding of blood glucose so you know your your audience is obviously going to know a lot about blood glucose already but for me what I realized is that over decades I had built up insulin resistance and I had done that through stress through probably drinking a little bit too much from time to time um through diet and through over work and just not sleeping particularly well all the time even though I try to adopt you know good sleep hygiene um but what my challenge was to undo my insulin resistance and become more insulin sensitive essentially reconfigure my cells such that they were more welcoming to macronutrients whether that would be glucose or whether that would be ketones or free fatty acids for the production of energy so in order to do that what I needed to do was to down regulate the production of insulin from my pancreas so okay well what's the way to do that well a doctoral glycemic diet and Achieve low glycemic States so I talked a little bit about diet already the other protocol was for me a 16-8 intermittent fasting protocol in which I Consolidated my eating window into eight hours generally between around 11 A.M and 7 p.m and no I'm not neurotic or fundamentalist about it you've seen me after seven o'clock eat probably on more than one occasion um and so but generally try to use those goal posts to demarcate my feeding window and of course the result of that is in some ways the same result as the ketotarian diet that I just talked about which essentially after 16 hours of not uh consuming food your blood glucose levels are going to go way down but your body still needs to um to produce energy but in a low glycemic State your pancreas is not going to produce insulin it's going to produce glucagon which is sort of the counterpart peptide hormone which triggers all of these processes so the release of glycogen self stored glucose but also glucose a little bit of gluconeogenesis but also really triggers what's known as apollosis is this process of breaking down fat adipocytes um into free fatty acids and glycerin I think for the but the real the real point is that you start to burn fat for energy and so for me the 16a protocol was tricky was a little hard at first but then it became almost second nature now you know I don't think about it although I will say in the winter my appetite is I have more morning appetite um than I do in the summer it's a whole other conversation we can have about light and hormones and other things like that but um but generally the 16a protocol um was worked really well for me that is where the most data exists um that I could find mostly out of Sach at Panda's lab in San Diego that's produced a lot of good data around intermittent fasting protocols particularly the 16-8 protocol so so that was two and of course I was watching my CGM or my my levels up throughout this whole process and I Saw My fasting glucose go from like 120 inching down over time till you know 80 uh in the range of 80. and lower in in the than that during sleeping hours generally um and then it kind of naturally Rises with the rise of cortisol in the morning Etc but um but it you know and it also just evened out it became um waves instead of mountain ranges and so then the last protocol I will say that is also completely intertwined with the ketotarian low glycemic diet and the 168 intermittent fasting protocol was I started to adopt a cold water therapy or hydrotherapy right before my I would break my fast so late morning and this is of course you know a luxury that you know I generally work at home so I have a lot of freedom with my schedule to kind of do uh some of these things around you know my own convenient time which I I admit is a luxury but prior to breaking my fast so maybe 10 10 30 every morning I would take a cold shower now sometimes I would take a sauna on the front end of that to raise body temperature just to make it a little easier for me and I love I don't love cold water but oftentimes not and I would just take a 60-second cold shower uh and then not dry off right away just let myself shiver and so what was happening there so of course I was engaging a particular protocol that would lower my body temperature so most of life really is just about creating energy to be warm there's a tremendous amount of focus in the human body just about regulating body temperature um so if you're gonna purposefully lower your body temperature through cold water therapy your cells are going to need to produce to go into Thermo neogenesis essentially raise your body temperature back up into that Goldilocks zone right around 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit and so what's going on there well your mitochondria then go into overdrive and they say we're cold or the body is cold we need to essentially create energy create heat in the body and so then it goes to burn energy but what does it have to burn well it doesn't really have any glucose around because a you have a doctoral glycemic diet but B you're in a fasted state so what does it have to burn stored fat and this is really where I almost could physically see the fat coming off in the mirror would be like app during this process of of um of hydrotherapy before I break the fast and it was those three protocols conjoined that really kind of set me off kind of on my way to a more Optimal Health incredible keto Terian diet intermittent fasting and cold exposure are three phenomenal protocols I would love to jump back to intermittent fasting for a moment because I think this is a a technique that many levels members many people of our audience you know try to do or have adopt or enjoy but you have uh very unique philosophical view of intermittent fasting in one of your commusings you say you had a craving not to Crave and the cessation of craving is a stepping stone to Nirvana and to Liberation and I when I read that it's like wow that really resonates with me it was you know myself and many people are you know Krave sugar you're addicted to sugar and so how does this sort of philosophical perspective of craving not to Crave how did that come into play in your intermittent fasting in your metabolic Health Journey yeah well there is obviously a lot of physiological mechanisms that play with fasting and then there's a whole number of psychological or what you might even categorize as spiritual components to fasting so clearly this has been baked into religions you know Christ's 40 days in the desert um was an exercise in fasting and living ascetically uh I believe Muhammad actually received the Quran from Saint Gabriel in a fasted State though that might be apocryphal but I'll go with it for now but particularly Buddhism uh talks a lot about fasting and you know baked into siddhartha's Prime primary thesis is that we suffer Because We crave and that we are always um looking for external agents to assuage internal discontents or perceived deficiencies so that could be sugar that could be alcohol that could be cigarettes that could be gambling that could be sex or pornography that could be the approval of others essentially anything that you're looking for outside of yourself to for to bolster your own sense of satisfaction or self-esteem or self-acceptance so and then of course you know the way out of suffering is to ha blow out like Nirvana literally the translation of it is to blow out so it's literally to let go to stop craving to stop clinging to stop forcing um and uh and to stop pursuing kind of what I refer to as kind of the hedonic treadmill which tells you that you know if only and only if I can achieve this thing or buy that fancy car or house or you know get this girlfriend or boyfriend well then and only then I'll be happy and so you know there always is a gap there between who we are and where we are and our happiness which sort of looms out there on the horizon somewhere and the moment that we cut the ribbon off that box when we get it or achieve it our eyes then refocus on some other new glittering object on the horizon and that is the hedonic tretino that is the um the uh the chakra if you will of craving this endless cycle that so many of us are on and I'm certainly not you know I'm not out of that that cycle myself but I think being able to witness and observe craving that would well up inside me related to food was um you know served as a bit of an inflection point for my overall relationship with need or craving and because certainly I have a biological imperative I have a biological need for food to create energy yes that is true but when is that the case versus a psychological desire for pleasure with food and really being able to feel that sense of ghrelin that sense of hunger um arise within me and then witness its provenance basically was it coming from a biological need or was it coming from some sort of psychological need for Comfort or pleasure and the more I could actually uh train myself to witness that feeling the more I could delineate between the two and say okay actually now I really need to go get like a handful of walnuts or something because you know I need I'm feeling low I need some energy oh but actually now this is just mindlessness you know this is just me you know out of habit reaching for something in the cupboard Etc and um and over time I really got to actually look forward almost to that feeling of craving to be able to witness it to name it and just to say no you know I don't I don't have to fall prey to every desire and it was it's a training that can have its origin around food but that has very wide application because if I can manage my Cravings as it pertains to food well can I manage my Cravings as it pertains to my phone you know or like Instagram or whatever or any other transgression or pecadello that you know I may have and there are many so you know I really look at fasting as much as as a spiritual experience as much as it is a physiological experience incredible that is a phenomenal example of agency right there what were some of the tools or techniques whether it's meditation or gratitude practice you use as you were in the process so sort of training your mind to observe um what was happening both in your mind and in your body yeah there's a couple just specific techniques that relate to meditation techniques and um before I tell you what they are I will say that you know there's a lot of clinical data that shows that one of the best correlations for self-reported well-being or self-reported happiness is correlated with aligning your thoughts with your actions essentially yoking your intention and what you're thinking about what's going on in your head with what you're actually doing so there is real clinical research to to point to the fact that a Wandering mind is a very unhappy mind and of course we have every opportunity in the attention economy to be distracted because every single marketer friend family member spammer whatever is vying for your conscious attention at every possible moment so it's very very easy to become distracted essentially cleave what you're thinking about with actually what you're doing and um and even if you're thinking about something fantastic if you are if there is a um Gap or a separation between your intention and your thoughts and your actions it has been proven to show that that creates a quite a lot of frustration and uh dissatisfaction so one of the um great targets of meditation is to essentially align your self in the present moment with what you are actually doing and there's a couple different ways of doing that I mean one is you know focused concentration um Diana in Sanskrit or Chad and Chinese or Zen in Japanese so people may be familiar with those traditions um where you find a uh what's known as a drishti now that tends to mean like a gaze point and you focus your complete concentration on that gaze point but that drishti could also be your breath it also could be a mantra it could also be some Mala beads that you're um you know threading through your fingers it's essentially finding one pointedness of mind um such that you are absolutely concentrated and focused on the thing that you're doing and know that thoughts of course will come in and out of consciousness and feelings of discomfort and all that stuff and that is um that's actually a good thing that is actually an opportunity to always come back to your drishti or your Mantra um and uh it has been shown that that happiness is really a very much linked or concomitant with people's ability not just to hold their focus but to actually leave and then come back and what is that duration period of actually coming back to focus and people who meditate a lot train themselves to be able to always come back always come back always come back and and that is a big indicator for for our happiness as I said the other one is I described it to some degree as part of the direct experience of observing craving but essentially it is the practice of observing phenomena arising and subsiding in Consciousness moment to moment without fixating on it or identifying with it so you can start with sound because sound you generally don't associate like a valence or too much salience with it you know it's it's kind of morally neutral if you're not judging the car going by I mean you might if it doesn't have a proper muffler or something but you know or the bird Tweeting or you know the HVAC system or your refrigerator humming essentially you know you just become extremely extremely quiet and just observe sound as phenomena appearing and disappearing in Consciousness moment to moment you didn't put it there it just came and it went and you waved at it and said goodbye nice knowing you um and that practice is transferable to emotions and feelings that emotions and feelings in this sense are like the phenomenon of sound they appear and they disappear within your field of awareness they are completely transitory you didn't put them there they just welled up somewhere from under the crest of Consciousness and they again disappeared and so don't fixate on them don't identify with them you know you can't be jealous that you can't be jealous you can feel a wave of jealousy you can feel a wave of Envy or any emotion but these again are transitory phenomena and they're just coming and going and so these are you know two pretty simple basic kinds of practices that help to align your thoughts with your actions and really truly bring you into the present moment because you can't really be grateful without presence um because gratitude is reliant on a certain kind of thankfulness for the miracle of God's gifts but if you are stuck in the projecting your needs out into the future back into that kind of hedonic treadmill kind of situation then you're always out there you're always in Tomorrowland but the sad reality is Tomorrow Never Comes it's always a projection and uh you know so much of the time were were focused on the traumas of our past and um and projecting them into the future as uh anticipated memories you know anticipated negative memories often times and so we're creating memories in the future that are completely Phantoms of our own projection completely Phantoms and this is the cause of a tremendous amount of anxiety and suffering and then we become anxious about the anxiety and then we become anxious about the anxiousness that we feel about the anxiety but you know the witness of the anxiety is fine the witness is just watching it and um and it and that's really yeah I think one of to the degree that meditation has to have a goal and I don't always like to give it a go because mostly it's really just about grooving with the present and at in the benefits become sort of self-evident as part of the practice but to the degree there there is a goal um you know one of them could be the relief of a lot of anxiety by moving ourselves into the reality of the ever now and out of the imagination of the future and the tyranny of the past beautiful beautiful thank you one of the things I hear you have clearly cultivated through your meditation practice is just this deep sense of gratitude um for for food for the natural world you talk about gratitude for things as simple as green beans how beautiful a long string green bean is how does that like sense of gratitude kind of impact how you view food you know when you're going into your fridge when you're making a meal how does that sense of gratitude sort of carry through to your relationship with food yeah sure I mean this is a um will be a slightly sort of spiritual answer to that question but you know Sonia like I would advise everyone to give up on trying to answer the question why we are here um I mean it's a noble Pursuit but just you know go to Barnes and Nobles and you'll see twenty thousand bucks in religion and twenty thousand books in New Age and it's an open question it hasn't been determined but for me a lot of the answers to why we are here um begin to become clear when you examine how we are here and the metaphysical is so often patterned in the physical as Nature's Cosmic foundational intelligence and so when we um examine a green being or an apple or a pear or you know any luscious fruit or crispy you know vegetable or you know to actually understand how that particular life form came to be um well I mean the only appropriate response to that would be a sense of wonder and awe and gratitude and you know there's a lot of uh in the news right now about Fusion right so we've been working on this Humanity's been working on this project for for decades um and of course you know the primary fusion reaction that exists in the universe happens you know billions and trillions of times per second in the Sun and you know this is the source of everything that animates uh all life including human existence but they you know the process of two hydrogen nuclei fusing you know to create a helium atom and as part of that the release the release of electromagnetic radiation as a quanta and this Photon hurdles through Interstellar space into you know our atmosphere and happens to find a chloroplast and a leaf of a of a string bean plant or an apple tree and that chloroplast actually has its origin as a bacteria two billion years ago that merged with an archaea that became eventually my mitochondria in human life and that became a chloroplast in plant life and you know the the reaction of that Photon on that leaf you know triggers this process of photosynthesis in which you know water and carbon dioxide are essentially then metabolized into chemical energy out of solar energy and in combination with the genomics of that particular plant whether that's an apple tree for example creates uh this juicy fruit that hangs very conveniently right about shoulder height for us to kind of you know pick and and now and then you move into this process of human metabolism and human digestion which is really the unlocking of the sun's energy inside of your body uh such that you know you are animated and that you know your intentions and your emotions uh can express themselves through your motor neurons or through you know neuro transmitters that get built through the production of energy that then are animated to make you feel a particular way to um and you know when you begin to dissect all of these processes and know that all of these systems are also just produced from self-assembled atoms that were part of a massive star explosion billions of years ago I mean it's you know the only appropriate responses is gratitude I mean how is this improbable unlikely Miracle possible and you know so this is so this is kind of for people that are curious you can you know keep um studying these patterns of existence and and it can invoke really just a lot of Wonder and a lot of awe and a lot of gratitude um so when you you know then sit down at the dinner table to uh to eat your string beans or whatever and know that you are in this co-evolved relationship that leverages billions of years of cosmic intelligence you know into that moment such that like this energy is then being transferred from the Sun to the plant to you and then back out as carbon dioxide and water and all of the energy that then you produce it's uh it's amazing I'm never going to look at a green beam the same way again I I love that description so much um that's truly beautiful thank you Jeff I'm gonna transition us from green beans back to French croissants um so another thing we can have a sense of awe and wonder around but you mentioned earlier in the episode you know recent trip to France and the sort of metabolic flexibility that you experience when you're maybe eating things outside of what you would have at home so I would love to hear a little bit more around what that metabolic flexibility looks like and feels like for you when you're outside of your normal routine yeah so for me it's a little easier right now because my metabolic vehicle here is is pretty tuned up um after a year of protocol so let me rephrase because I don't like I have because it's not a product it's a process but I'm currently in the experience of metabolic flexibility which is essentially a certain um capacity to switch relatively seamlessly between burning fat and burning carbohydrates or glucose for energy so having achieved that metabolic flexibility which is really also representative of like an upgrade of mitochondrial function really and you know we didn't talk about fasting and mitochondria but there is an incredible relationship between intermittent fasting and mitophagy which is essentially autophagy for mitochondria the breaking down of dysfunctional mitochondria but also mitochondrial biogenesis the creation of new mitochondria which of course everyone knows is the energy power plant in your cells they also do a whole lot more than just produce energy but that's for the purposes of this conversation you know let's focus there and so you know it's fair to say that you know my mitochondria are functioning at like an efficient clip at this juncture so then when I go to visit my firstborn who has uh tortured Me by restationing herself in the City of Lights uh but also given me ample excuse to visit her more than she who wants to be visited at this juncture um you know so I was just there for two and a half weeks and you know parked in a in a funky little Airbnb with basically no kitchen um and uh so and you know and then you're in Paris so you want to you know we're walking to the Muse and the Picasso Museum in the Louvin and we're going out to Jazz at night we're doing you know all of these different things we're out in the world I don't really have a kitchen so that means you know despite the fact that the French have all these great markets and all this kind of stuff you know I was eating out pretty much every single meal for two and a half weeks and um and so the wonderful thing about getting metabolically flexible is that you can if you get to that place then you can actually I would say just be more liberal and cheat a little bit around the edges and just be okay because your body has upgraded its functionality but I will also say that there were things that I did there to keep myself on some form of protocol like it was pretty easy for me to maintain my fasting protocol there so you know and largely and I would say that this could be applied not just to travel but the holiday season it's like I would just basically eat one big meal a day um we would go out for in when I was in France anyways we would go out for these like fantastic dinners and we'd all like hang out around the table and we'd be there for hours and you know all that kind of stuff and during the day I was to be honest pretty espresso fueled um but drinking a ton of water staying super super hydrated I had all my kind of supplement regime and all that kind of stuff but really trying to kind of concentrate those like big heavy meals just like one per day and then always walking and getting some form of exercise postprandially so after eating which is a amazing way to control um glucose spikes so you know one of the cool convenient things about holiday season is sometimes you know you're cooking all day um in the kitchen uh but you can maybe just eat one big meal around four or five in the evening and you know you're just hanging out around the table forever but that's really kind of like all you're really eating for that day and uh and so you know I there's certain ways to manage it and also have fun and don't be too crazy and neurotic and fundamentalist about it and just know that like this is a particular time of year where people get to commune around the table and be with friends and be with family and just make the absolute um most of it um I guess one other thing I would say is that I've really tried to develop some kind of mindful practice before eating and part of that is gratitude you know reflecting on like the wondrous journey of the string bean but you know we have a ritual in our house that's called Rosebud Thorn that before yeah speaking my language Jeff okay see not not very very many people know about Rosebud Thor but I'm slowly spreading the gospel around it but you know so many so much of the time in modern culture the way that we're eating is extremely rushed and so you know it's often said you know you are what you eat but really a more precise Axiom there would be you're you are what your body can absorb and if you are consuming food while you're driving or while you're staring at your phone or while you're watching a thriller or a horror movie or you know in any form of distracted state where you might be in your sympathetic nervous system or you know you might be getting triggered in some way well what's happening there you know just physiologically well all of your energy is being diverted from your gut and from your immune system to your extremities to your muscles your heart rate and your respiratory rate are going up your pupils are dilating sometimes depending and essentially all of the energy allocation is moving away from digestion and Metabolism so what you really want to do before you eat and consume food is you want to move yourself out of that sympathetic nervous system out of that cortisol infused amygdala hijacked state of being into your parasympathetic rest and digest State and you can do that you know through breath work through prayer through a gratitude practice or if you want you know we have Rosebud Thorne which is the ritual that we engage in around the table where you know I'll have three daughters and and we go around the table and you know we share our rows which is kind of the best part of our day are are sworn which is um uh clearly the thorniest part of the day and um and then uh our Bud something that might represent some potential for the future uh although don't get too caught up on the future and um and you know it's just a wonderful way to engage in conversation for me to learn about what's up in my kids life for them to pretend to care about what's up in my life and um and it really just brings us down into this grounding place and there's a beautiful emotional side to that um but there's also some physiological impacts there which is then you know you are in a better place to digest and absorb as much possible nutrients from your food by pulling yourself back into that grounded place so there's a lot of different things inside of there that I would I would recommend um that people do specifically around the season but also in general I love it Rose blood Thorn is one of my favorites I'm notorious for having my friends and family play and I've actually recently added an addendum so you can see what you think of this it's Rosebud Thorn Chow so the Chow is either something you're really looking forward to eating if you're doing it before dinner like I'm so excited for these mashed sweet potatoes that we're gonna have or if it's at the end of a weekend it's like what was the most incredible thing that we enjoyed and that ends up being one of the most fun parts of the game so if you're open to adding an addendum it's Rosebud Thorn ciao all right I'll I'll introduce it and I'll report back and see how much traction I get oftentimes we don't even oftentimes you know we get we digress you know and we don't really make it through all of the requisite categories but that's part of the the fun and the part of the processes that you you discover something new about a friend or a loved one that you might not otherwise have known about it it's very sweet practice the best part about the game is that if it lasts like three to four hours and you realize you still haven't answered all of the road Thorn questions I love it yeah we do this at Kami and Topanga quite a bit and um you know we have some really pretty interesting people that are coming through there on the regular and so you know pretty recently we got to do Rosebud Thorne with Gabor mate it was really funny just to see like everybody has like a rose bud and a thorn it doesn't matter who you are it doesn't matter if you're an internationally renowned author or celebrity everybody has a rose but thorns great point that that um sort of leads me to another question you have spent your life you know spreading education and amplifying thoughts of incredible doctors and authors and thought leaders through your work with commune especially have there been any kind of learnings from those conversations around well-being and behavior change that are really changed the trajectory of your personal health Journey yes um I think it's really after interviewing 400 people for the podcast writing two thousand words a week for three years making 125 courses sitting around the table hiking taking saunas cold baths with dozens upon dozens upon dozens of the world's most brilliant people and authors and um teachers and thought leaders and sages and Mystics of All Sorts um you know I've been so lucky because I can just be a sponge and absorb and um and grow my own breath of knowledge and if I can synthesize that into wisdom great but from you know the Brilliance of other people and then synthesize that into something that is my own and so through all of these hundreds and hundreds of conversations you know what I began to notice what I began to notice were certain patterns or I would say kind of a consilience across all of these different people that I've talked to and as you say I mean they could be microbiologists or virologists they could be spiritual leaders or monks or whatever all across the map but I I think what one of the themes that has come up over and over and over again is that all phenomena that arise as a product of consciousness arise as a coincidence of opposites so for sleep there is wakefulness for up there is down for beloved there's a lover for there's Sun there's Moon there's the Sunny Side of the Mountain has to have the Shady Side of the Mountain the head goes with Tails everything goes with something else and um Nature's foundational intelligence brings polarities into a sensitive kind of balance like a like a dissonant Harmony or a a kind of an asymmetrical order I think about it in terms of love for example where love requires a lover and a beloved and those roles might switch back and forth a bit but the healthy relationship is like a teeter-totter where neither people's feet are touching the ground and you can apply that same theory if you will to almost every phenomena that exists with or every relationship that exists within the natural world so you have I mean your respiratory system and the pro and your cellular respiration essentially is an exchange of oxygen for carbon dioxide you have glucagin and Insulin as we discussed earlier you have growth Pathways like mammalian Target of rapamycin and then you have repair and autophagy Pathways like ampk you have neurotransmitters that are inhibitory like Gaba and serotonin you have neuro transmitters that are excitatory like dopamine and norepinephrine and adrenaline hormones like that too you have everywhere that you look you know electricity is essentially the repulsion and attraction of negatively and positively charged particles um you know I could go on essentially forever about like homeostatic drive and sleep and wakefulness and cortisol and melatonin and antioxidants and free radicals and like everywhere that you look within human physiology within the natural world within plant life what you have is The Coincidence of opposites and you have this intelligence that is foundational that is a that is attempting to bring those opposites into some form of coherence and that is what it's like to be alive is finding that uh eubiosis that sense of of sensitive balance or sensitive order which is never a thing it's never a product it's always a process and uh and this and every interaction that you have as an organism um with your environment is either adaptive so it's bringing things into greater balance or maladaptive pushing things to their polarities and so when you begin to sort of approach life with that overarching philosophy um you get to see that that that that healthy life that thriving flourishing life is clumpy it's bushy it like clusters to the middle and you can see that in healthy physiological systems that have like high concentrations of both oxygen and carbon dioxide or a healthy balance between neurotransmitters or cortisol releasing at the right time of day and melatonin releasing at the right time of day or like all the different balances the right release of glue again the right release of insulin you know all of these kinds of things but you can also start to map it on uh social and cultural phenomenon you know it's like it's not healthy to have three men in the United States that own more than more Collective wealth than the bottom 50 percent of the population combined right it's not healthy to have a hundred billion cows sheep chickens pigs and people and then have Extinction of species on the other side same with biodiversity of plant life it's not healthy to have downtown main streets shuttered up and you know little jazz stations and local newspapers and local markets all going out of business and then have one big Walmart on the edge of town that only provides people with ultra processed foods and cheap goods and I mean and you can go on and on and on essentially healthy systems are ones that take polarities and balance them and move things to the middle and unhealthy systems are flat and move things to the edges and so when you see the world and the universe becoming flatter and flatter you know that is a sign that we're headed you know towards some sort of significant Calamity I don't want to over dramatize it with like the sixth grade Extinction though I could make a case for that for sure so you know when I talk about um you know kind of pulling this that particular thread through the needle this is my own synthesis of having hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of conversations with different people talking about this phenomenon in their own you know field of expertise so whether that's a neuroscientist talking about you know neurochemicals or neuromodulators in the brain or whether that's a regenerative farmer talking about the balance the healthy balance of microbial life in the soil it's all pointing to the same thing and of course the the Chinese knew this thousands upon thousands of years ago because they developed the the symbol that encapsulates this which is the yin yang it's a it's the balance between the light and the dark and originally The Sunny Side of the Mountain and the Shady Side of the Mountain but of course there's a little bit of shade on the sunny side and there's a little bit of sun on the Shady Side and all of this is existing as ons and offs and crests and troughs you know and those patterns are are everywhere in the material world uh you know in Hydraulics you know you see waves of you know water they go like this they go up and they down they have an amplitude and a frequency an electromagnetic waves same thing you know every all of these crests and troughs ups and downs ons and offs can be tracked through virtually every natural phenomenon and you know to the degree that we want to live happy and flourishing lives the best we can do is study the patterns of Nature and try to align ourselves with them such that we're kind of applying the rudder uh within Nature's current and um and that's a process what a gift Jeff to have you synthesize that learning those money learnings from 400 plus people truly um such wisdom that you've imparted so thank you it's really such a gift well you're just squeezing the sponge by nature of what I do um you know I'm just I'm a plagiarist I'm a synthesizer plagiarist you know it's just really just taking everybody else's ideas and trying to find some common links to them amazing well to close us off I'm going to ask three shorter questions um and sort of a rapid fire type of thing but the first one is what is your number one most metabolically healthy favorite food I have to go with avocados because I can eat avocados all day long so I'm sticking with avocados I love it in one sentence or a phrase what does Health mean to you well health is a process of healing of moving toward wholeness and is one thing optimistic about with regards to solving our country's metabolic Health crisis yeah I think there's two things if really the democratization of of information and tools that give individuals more agency and empowerment over their own health and that is a really exciting uh development and obviously you are playing a significant part of that um but there are many others as well and I think that human curiosity around their own people's own physiology has only grown and and that might be one of the few Silver Linings um in the alpen glove of covid I think the other piece is that we seem to be taking regenerative farming and soil Health more seriously as a culture and I think this has become uh you know a sort of a bipartisan issue and there's not many of those because nutrient dense foods are completely and 100 reliant on nutrient dense soil and and that message seems to be getting out there and seems to be resonating with more and more people and um and I'm very hopeful about that well I wish we could do a whole other hour on regenerative agriculture maybe that'll have to be a a future episode thank you so so much Jeff where can listeners find more from you and join your community yeah well I just uh encourage everyone to go to the commune platform at onecommune.com we have 120 courses up there with brilliant brilliant people thought leaders that will provide you with a lot of information about how to live healthier and happier life and the protocols to adopt too so we can really pair both mechanism and protocol on that platform and then if you're interested in uh listening my podcast it's just called the commune podcast um and it's on all the different pod catchers and I'm exhorting both pathetically and poetically on Instagram from time to time at Jeff krasnow so um you can see me there [Music]