Coach. Podcaster. COACHCASTER.

Our lives expose us daily to elements that impact our health, which is why a focus on better living today can help insure our better health tomorrow. Today's episode is with Arthur Calenge, the CEO and Founder of Lambs, a cutting-edge technology company focusing on apparel that is both functional and fashionable. Arthur dives deep into the latest science and studies behind EMF waves, 5G, and all of the wireless radiation that is constantly being emitted all around us that can take a hefty toll on our overall wellness, male fertility, brain health, and so much more.

Follow Arthur and Lambs at @getlambs

Follow Chase @chase_chewning

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Episode resources:

• Learn more at GetLambs.com

• 5G wireless communication and health effects

• Risks to health and well-being from radio frequency radiation emitted by cell phones and other wireless devices

• Cell phones and their impact on male fertility

• The inconvenient truth about cancer and mobile phones

• Worldwide awareness on 5G

With the myriad of challenges we’ve all faced this year due to COVID-19, there’s a greater need than ever before to return to the basics of health and wellness, particularly regarding what we eat on a day-to-day basis. Guest Shawn Stevenson and I discuss how food affects so many different areas of our lives. Beyond metabolism, food affects our relationships, our ability to communicate, how we perform in our professional environments, and other facets of life that we normally don’t even connect to food. In short, we have a conversation on the most fundamental must-knows that we can use to truly take our health back.

Listen in as Shawn shares how eating the right foods can totally transform your body and mind, why he considers sleep as the most important factor to one’s health (even above nutrition and exercise), common nutrition myths, why you need to pay more attention to your gut health if you want to burn more body fat, why it’s time to cease the “war on fat”, and what most people fail to see when it comes to maximizing your health and wellness amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Follow Shawn on Instagram @shawnmodel

Follow Chase on Instagram @chase_chewning

Key Highlights

• [08:28] Why Shawn decided to write Eat Smarter

• [17:25] What it means to be “smart” about eating

• [26:25] Dispelling calorie-related myths and overlooked essential aspects in nutrition

• [46:57] The importance of microbiome diversity to fat loss

• [52:20] Best food sources of prebiotics for greater gut health

• [1:01:52] Food sources to fill in the other elements of a healthy gut

• [1:13:16] Why we shouldn’t be afraid of eating fat

• [1:23:50] The extent of the health crisis in today’s world

• [1:30:31] What the focus should really be on if we want to talk about

  prevention

• [1:38:55] How Shawn’s challenging background inspired him to write his new book

• [1:46:40] How Shawn lives a life

  ever forward

Powerful Quotes by Shawn

• I think food is going to be the primary inroads for a lot of people because it’s so multifaceted. It really does work on you and changes you inside-out. Food isn’t just food—it’s information.

• There is no perfect diet for one person. Our personal metabolism is like a fingerprint. Everybody’s different, so a diet that might be incredible for one person can totally fuck somebody else up.

• People want change, but they don’t want to change that much.

• The biggest mistake in our culture today is that we have linked up, psychologically, diet to weight loss.

• The greater microbiome diversity you have, the higher your metabolism and, by extension, fat burning capability.

• The best metric to measure your health is how you feel.

• We have to stop thinking of our food in terms of numbers.

• Today, we have a healthcare system that is not based on health. We are the sickest society in human history, by far.

• We are one species, and we could be helping each other so much if everybody didn’t think that they were so right.

• If you take very smart people and you teach them the wrong thing, they become world-class at doing the wrong thing. It’s just that simple.

• Every day, I have to grow. I have to get better.

More about Shawn:

Shawn Stevenson is the creator and host of The Model Health Show, which was featured as the number one health podcast in the United States with millions of listener downloads each year. He is a graduate of the The University of Missouri–St. Louis and studied business, biology, nutritional science. He then went on to found the Advanced Integrated Health Alliance, a company that provides wellness services for individuals and organizations worldwide.

The Model Health Show explores all things health and fitness with new episodes released on a weekly basis featuring a wide variety of guests. More than nutrition and exercise, The Model Health Show covers topics that make up our wellness as a whole, including relationships, financial health, and mental and emotional fitness.

Shawn is also the author of the bestselling book Sleep Smarter (2016).

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Interview transcript:

Shawn Stevenson

On this episode of Ever Forward Radio, we're going to be talking about how food affects so many different areas of your life that you've probably never heard of before, how it affects your relationships, how it affects your ability to communicate, how it affects your metabolism in dynamic and interesting ways. And I think you're going to walk away with a lot of empowerment. So definitely check it out. Enjoy I look is the daily grind keeping you down 2020 has not been easy on any of us. And here we are trying to just finish strong, right? We are wrapping up the year. As this episode is going live. You got emails to answer calls, to make projects piling up things, wrapping up at the end of the year, the more there is to do the harder it is. It seems to keep up and all that stress can leave you with a bad case of brain fatigue.

Chase Chewning

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SHOW INTRO

Welcome back everyone. This is your number one source for inspiring content from people who are putting a purpose to their passion and truly living a life ever forward conversations and messages that will take your fitness and nutrition and mindset to the next level. I am your host Chase Chewning. This. Is Ever Forward Radio.

Chase (03:05):

My friends. Hey, what is going on? Welcome back to the show. I am your host, Chase Chewning; Army veteran, Certified Health Coach, and health, wellness, & fitness professional. I'm just a human being that really truly honestly has become fascinated, utterly fascinated with the potential we have as humans. The potential we have over the dominion of our bodies and our minds, how we can think, how we can feel, how we can perform, how we can look our strength, our mental fortitude. So many things go into us, what it means to be alive and to thrive. And now more than ever, I personally feel like that is being challenged. We are being shunned away from, from guidance, from help, from even protocols, from the support that we should be getting. I think from our community leaders, our country's leaders, and I not to get on a political soapbox here, but just the way 2020 has been going for me personally, my viewpoint beyond all of the healthcare concerns of COVID-19 social distancing, masks - here's absolutely a time and a place for that. Absolutely. 

But there has been a huge shadow, I feel, placed over the vital importance of just what it means and what it takes. And there's like the simplest ways to just fortify your, your life, your health, your wellness, your immune system. And so much of that comes down to well. At the end of the day, it's our responsibility of what we're doing, what we're not doing, what we're eating and what we're not eating. And today I could not be more honored, more proud, more ecstatic, really to have this man sit down next to me on my couch and just pour his heart and his soul out for you. None other than my personal mentor, my friend, my podcast, homie, Sean Stevenson. You may recognize him from the world-renowned podcast, the top-ranked and with millions and millions of downloads, The Model Health Show. We are here to talk about his latest gift to all of us.

This labor of love. His book, Eat Smarter: Use the power of food to reboot your metabolism, upgrade your brain and transform your life. He is the bestselling author of Sleep Smarter, one of the most profound books I have read use personally, and use clinically even, you know, advised and pulled resources out and given to two patients of mine and my former health coaching practice clinic just, I will link all of his work down below in the show notes, Eat Smarter, Sleep Smarter, someone that just gets it from the human experience level, the anecdotal experience, but also just someone that has done so much of the hard lifting for us in terms of the most recent clinically backed studied information of what it means to truly, truly take our health back. We have so much power do not give your power away. Your power lies within you every single day to choose to sleep well, move well, eat well.

Chase (06:26):

And that is exactly what Shawn and I are here to do for you today. You all do not want to miss this book. It is coming out. You can order pre-order now as this has gone live, but it will be coming out in late December, 2020 for you to get you do not want to miss this. He is the author of sleep smarter, like I said, and creator of the Model Health Show featured as the number one health podcast in the United States with millions of listener downloads each year, he is a graduate of the university of Missouri, St. Louis. He studied business biology and nutritional science, and then went on to found the Advanced Integrative Health Alliance, a company that provides wellness services for individuals and organizations worldwide. Look, if you've been listening to the show for any length of period, you know how much this man has, has done for us in the health and the wellness world, but, but certainly how, how I appreciate him as a human being as a podcast or, and, you know, like I said, as a mentor, and now as a friend, Shawn, this was my pleasure, my honor. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for this latest gift to all of us. Here is Shawn Stevenson and talking about how we can all eat smarter, using the power of food to reboot your metabolism, upgrade your brain, and truly, truly transform your life. Welcome to Ever Forward Radio.

Chase (07:48):

Shawn welcome, man!

Shawn 

Thank you for having me!

Chase

It’s a pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much. It's my pleasure. And I'm so stoked. I mean, cause this is something beyond everything else I know we're going to talk about, but this new project eat smarter. The follow-up, if you will, to Sleep Smarter. No doubt has been like a labor of love, but also from like someone who consumes the content, it's just, when's the next piece coming out. What's coming out, dude. So grateful to have this finally. So grateful. Tell us about it. Why, why Eat Smarter? We went from Sleep Smarter to, to whatever you wanted really, but why Eat Smarter?

Shawn (08:23):

Well, Sleep Smarter really came out of a necessity. I'm a nutritionist. That's what I've been studying. That's what I've been in this space, you know, 19 years now. And so food was my, that was my inroads. For many people, there are many different paths to the goal and for me it was food. And I think food is going to be the primary inroads for a lot of people because it's so multifaceted. It really does work on you and change from the inside out. And I'm a big believer in this analogy, that food isn't just food it's information. So when I was trying to change my health and to get my own body and wellness together, the right foods, once I started putting this stuff in my body, it started to not just change my physical appearance, but also my mind in the way that I thought they made it easier to think that the way that I wanted to.

And so now we have data to affirm that. And that's, what's in the book too, you know, but why this book, this, this was, this was the book that I wanted to write in the first place really, but sleep smarter was a necessity. And what's so crazy. And folks listen to, this are probably well at adept at this point with some of the basics about sleep wellness. Sure. But it, when, when Sleep Smarter came out, it created a movement because there were books on sleep wellness that came prior. And I actually know the guys who wrote it like Dr. Michael Breus, and when, yeah, but that was later, that was later. But he was like, America's sleep doctor. There's never been a sleep wellness book. That's like skyrocketed before and changed culture. And part of the reason that I did it, you know, so I was working in my clinical practice, seeing clients coming in every day.

And we, I mean, I had the food dialed in, you know, like one of the biggest revelations that hopefully people are getting today. And it definitely with the advent of eat smarter is that there is no perfect diet for one person that's going to be perfect for everybody. You know? So we are incredibly unique. Our metabolisms are like a very unique fingerprint. It's a metabolic fingerprint, everybody's different. And so a diet that might be just incredible for one person can totally somebody else, you know? And so, but then we get into this crazy thing in our mind where we start battling ourselves and thinking it's us, we're the problem. It's where the diet is great, but we're the problem. We just need to paleo harder or vegan harder. This worked for Joe. This worked for Susan. Why not me? And, and to see that play out, it creates vicious circles of poor self relation, you know, and, and that's one of the big problems underlying a lot of things too, because not only is this a, like world-class big idea book on nutrition, but it's also very important in layering self-development because really all of our choices really boiled down to how we see the world and see ourselves truly, you know, so I integrate that into the book and I think people are just going to have so many aha moments and, and, and smiles and a couple of laughs and just seeing how we talk to ourselves, you know, because there are, we do kind of fall into certain camps and the way that we see the world and I go through that.

But just the last thing to put the cherry on top of the WHY when Sleep Smarter came out, even though I was seeing success with the patients I was working with, we had like an 80% reversal rate for type two diabetes folks coming in on Metformin and even on insulin, , it was like, it was so we got it. It's just easy. It was easy. But the way that it happened was we were educating them on how their body actually worked doing. The one thing that you would think would be the first thing, you know? So I take them and I walk them through the process, like, okay, so here's what happens with your beta cells and your pancreas. Here's what happens with this, this particular hormone and to see their eyes light up. It's just like such a great feeling and a joy.

Chase

Let me introduce you to Mr. Glucagon.

Speaker (12:30):

Yes. So I take people through, in, in Eat Smarter, you know, I give it these wonderful analogies and just make it so people understand how their body works and it's, it just creates this empowerment. But there was always that other 20% would haunt me. You know, it's just like, what is the problem? And once I started asking people about their sleep and seeing the connection with sleep and, and body fat and all the different research involved in that, I couldn't believe nobody was talking about it because it was very like cookie cutter stuff. You know, you need to get eight hours of sleep. Nah, that's not it. You need to sleep better. And so,

Chase (13:03):

You know, quality you're saying over quantity. Absolutely.

Shawn (13:06):

Well, no quantity matters with calories, which we can talk about. Of course, you're going to talk about today, but you know, it's the, the quality aspect was definitely overlooked. So taking people through and helping them understand what is sleep, how do we know it's quality sleep and also very practical. Here's the big secret in why it was so successful. I know that people want change, but they don't want to change that much. You feel me? So that's like the bitter pill, probably someone just like felt that. Yeah. It's so just knowing that little bit of data, I would take people and give them these clinically proven strategies that they don't have to turn their entire lives upside down. I mean, it's, they get the results. So, and that just made the book incredibly successful. And it took me as a nutritionist and put me in a different stratosphere. So now when I talk about food, a lot of people are listening to it and this conversation needs to be had.

Chase (14:00):

Yeah. You became the guy, which is a whole other concept of, I'm almost even curious, like, do you regret it in some ways, because then you become like the pigeonholed sleep guy, but you're like, no, wait, I know a lot of other things too. There's a lot more going on to health and wellness and performance than just sleep. But I won't, I won't go there, but the book was monumental, Sleep Smarter. And honestly, it's a big reason why now for me, the last, I'll say probably two or three years sleep for me is King. It's paramount. My kind of personal hierarchy wellness has gone through a lot of rotations, but for sure now it's sleep. It's nutrition, hydration, physical activity. And then exercise really is like almost the last thing.

Shawn (14:45):

Yeah. This gets into the conversation of what I was taught in a traditional university. Right. You know, my very first day in my college nutrition class is like auditorium class. The teacher walks in silver way.

Chase (15:02):

Oh no!

Shawn

Pet peeve, but I didn't think in it, and it's looking back at it. I didn't believe that he could tell me what I needed to know, but it's because I thought that this nutrition class I was taking had to do with fitness, right. I thought that this would make me more fit. I don't understand there's a difference, a subtle but important difference between fitness and health. And we were also taught the very first day calories. We talked about calories,

Chase (15:30):

The magic C-word and all the curriculum, calories

Shawn (15:32):

Are King. There's some dirty C words and calorie is one of them, you know? And so we really dove in talking about calories, but in a very conventional cookie cutter way. And the goal, very simple. If you want it to lose weight, you have to expend more calories than you take in. So basically exercise more and eat less. He let us do more.

Chase (15:51):

Same thing I was fed for years

Speaker (15:54):

In this, the whole industry is built on that premise and the craziest thing and what people don't want to acknowledge, you know, quote health experts is that hundreds of millions of people have done that exact thing. And now we know, and I've got the data in each smarter that the number one is like teetering around number, number one and two way that you can foresee somebody is going to gain weight within the next two years is if they go on a calorie restricted diet, really, if they go on a calorie restricted diet, it is the best marker. We have a future weight gain OSHA. Okay. And the question is what's going on behind the scenes. And so we get into that and the analogy really. So if you want, we can talk a little bit about the history of the,

Chase (16:43):

I would. Yeah. I would love to yeah, let's go there. Kind of like in the back of my head question from the first was, I mean, I think we've already been talking about it a little bit is eating better, eating smarter. Yeah. And I was kind of curious, like, what was your mentality going into calling it, eat smarter instead of diets smarter, get rid of that D word entirely, man. [inaudible] Yeah. Which kind of feeds into like the background, the real meaning of calories. It's more than deficit and surplus. It's survival. It's livelihood as longevity is telomeres. I mean, it's all of the things that did that kind of play a role into eats, monitor over diets, modern the influence of the word calorie.

Shawn (17:25):

This is so important, man. This, what you just said is like, it's, it's, it's profound because it's really getting to the essence of why I did what I did in this book. It's because it's not about diet and food in and of itself in the process of eating. The biggest mistake in our culture today is that we have linked up psychologically diet to weight loss. Those two things are really synonymous when people think about dieting and nutrition is largely connected to weight. Whereas now, and I layered this so deeply into the book over and over again in every aspect, food and eating controls, every single area of our lives, everyone. And so we've got the latest data, which again, this is, there's been a lot of this. There's been access to it for many years, but nobody's ever put it together on how food affects your ability to connect with other human beings, how food literally affects your proclivity towards violence, how food affects your ability to have compassion and patience, how food affects your ability to just retain your memories.

For example, like of this conversation, you know, all of these things. So in the first section of the book, we focus on the metabolic side of mood, but finally, I'm taking people through and showing them exactly how their metabolism works. How does food control your metabolism? It's not this little cookie cutter, just get in a calorie deficit. You know, like what the, how does it work? Where does Pat go when you lose it? Where does it go? We take people through and show them the entire process, but in a way that makes sense. Have you ever shared that by the way, with people

Chase (19:16):

And process of fat losing fat losing weight, we breathe it out. Yeah. It's all, it all comes out like particles CO2.Like think about it. Like, yo, those few donuts last night! You’ve been breathing them out. Like that's where it goes.

Shawn (19:32):

So I've, I've been talking about this for a while and I'll include it here and there. But to put it into a book, a book, a book has a virility to it, you know, because nine out of 10 people don't know that. And we think that for us psychologically again, we think that we're losing fat when we're sweating… That’s a big, you know?! Kind of a psychological link-up that feeds into it.

Chase (19:54):

You were saying earlier, I got to do more. If I want to, if I want to burn more loose weight, I gotta do more burn more. Yeah.

Shawn (19:59):

Right. So exercise, that's the, that's the fat cells crying. It's having a good breakup cry. But in reality, you only are losing when you're actually losing fat or losing weight. That's only about somewhere around 10 to 15% is going to be from fluids. You know, and this includes urine. This includes sweat. The vast majority of it is going to be excluded from your body via your lungs. And about a third of that happens while you're sleeping. You know? So I mean, yeah, it's all connected. It's all connected, man. You know, so it's just the, the, the real underlying premise and why it's such a profound book and like the places it's going to be like, this is going to be in stores across the country that you would expect, you know, target stores and things like that to have a books book like that in those kinds of places, it speaks to the connectivity.

But also we're expanding the conversation because I'm taking you through and showing you, so you, now you have more legs under your belief of why food matters. It's not just because I'm trying to get fit because I've been trying this . It hasn't worked now. I know, Oh, this is affecting my relationship with my children. This is affecting my ability to have focused and predict productivity. And my ability to make income. This is affecting, you know, fill in the blank. Like we're really tying it together. So you see how much food matters. And the beautiful part is that certain foods push these, I call them metabolic switches, that help to make all that stuff work better.

Chase

Really? You know, what do you mean by that? Let's go deeper on the metabolic switch there for me.

FOUR SIGMATIC AD BREAK (21:35):

Yeah, Shawn is this guy the real deal or whatnot only does he have the experience, the professionalism, the credentials, but he has the passion. I don't know if you can hear it in his voice, but him and I, both, we are just honestly, a little fed up. And we're, we're very adamant now more than ever of how important it is to take your health back to trust, but verify to, to live a very well life, but a safe life, but also to stop living out of fear. Maybe if that's you, if you're, if you're fearful of the world around you, your external environment, your home environment. Well, here I am to tell you that you can stop you. You can become empowered in the more empowered. I believe we become the less fearful we are of what's out there of what is in our food is what is in our nutrition, our environment.

Because look, if we become educated through listening to shows like this to people like Shawn Stevenson and just implementing things in our own unique way and paying attention to what our body is telling us in response to that. Well, we're here for the long haul. We are adding value and quality to our life. And Shawn and I both know what it means to reach for a little help sometimes to just make a smarter decision and something, maybe we're already using like a great cup of coffee, right? So him and I both use and proudly work with this company, Four Sigmatic. They have been around for years now. They have been trendsetters. I thoroughly believe, I personally believe and just infusing these things. We're naturally doing. We're already doing in our day, like the smoothies and coffees and elixirs and, you know, nighttime hot cocoa is, but just making them better.

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Shawn (26:22):

So the preface to that conversation piece and talking about Metis metabolic switches, we can't even talk about that until we first talk about the calorie paradigm. Okay. Because again, this is the misnomer and it's not that, first of all, it's not the calories don't matter. All right. There, there are a unit of measurement. So it's a unit to measure energy, just like a meter is a unit to measure distance. Right? Right. Yeah. Now the issue is it's very different from measuring distance because that's like in the kind of physical exterior or tangible experience. Yeah. Calories burning in your body, the common format that we have, which we'll talk about just a moment. It totally negates the very complexity of human digestion and energy unit utilization. It's multifaceted. And so I'll take you through, so number one, when the calorie was discovered, well, first, if you think about all the, like, we look at the ancient Greeks and you know, the ancient Romans and, you know, the ancient Egyptians, you don't see thick people pyramids, you know, but they weren't counting calories.

It wasn't a thing. This was invented in 18 hundreds and the funniest part. And I think, you know, a lot of people should know this. It wasn't when people, when the calorie was invented, it wasn't for nutrition. They weren't thinking about it in terms of food and nutrition. It was immediate application physics and engineering. Interesting. Okay. But then it parlayed itself into food. Thanks to Wilbur Atwater, which that water system is a way of counting calories today, which we could circle back to. But it was a couple of physicians, you know, goes back and forth. And I take people through the history in the book, but here's where it made the leap into food and nutrition. Wilbur Atwater started to use calories as a measurement for food. And the way that it's done well, it used to be done was through a bomb calorimeter or bomb calorimeter.

Okay. All right. So bomb calorimeter can measure the caloric energy and food. And what it does is you taking, you're taking the food, you put into a container. So which go into a furnace thing, right? Well, they actually exploded it. So you take the food, you put into a container, and then that goes into another container that's filled with water. And so then from there, they use electrical energy to incinerate the food and see how much they can warm the water. And that tells you how many calories were needed to warm the water. Right. So that gives you the calorie amount. The problem with that right off the bat is that your body doesn't digest everything that's in that food. So that is already, that creates a schism in the format. There's indigestible products, especially if you're eating real food. Right. So, okay. Now here's where it made the jump into common calorie. Lexi lexicon was in the early 19 hundreds as a physician named Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters. And she wrote a massive bestseller, 2 million copies… well, in a way in the early 1900’s not everybody got it!

And she basically, this began the indoctrination of our culture of starting to view food in terms of numbers. And so she, and she had, I gotta preface by saying this, she had constant battles with her own weight, and she essentially said that any woman could eat whatever she wanted, as long as if she was her height, as long as she maintain a strict diet of 1200 calories a day. Okay. And so she said that now we'll look at food in terms of, of numbers instead of food. So she said from the here, from here forward, we're now I'm going to say, instead of saying a slice of bread, you're going to say a hundred calories of bread. Okay. Instead of saying a slice of pie, you're going to say 350 calories of pie. And now this little, it seems like a subtle thing, but now food, isn't food and multi dimensional and dynamic anymore it's numbers.

And we're not looking at the impact it has on you body is that it's a variable in the life formula. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's so much bigger than just numbers. Now, she also, within these pages and I went in a read this old fangled writings, and it's just, it's such an adventure. Cause I couldn't, I couldn't believe some of the you would say she, this was when she began to usher into popular culture, connecting food with morality and really affirming that any kind of struggles with weight had more to do with character defect because it's all just comes down to numbers. Words, punishment are starting to be used. And the word sin is starting to be used. Oh, well this was also around the time of World War One. So the food was really hot and popping. And with that rationing, she was leveraging that she was putting her elbow into it and saying, Hey, when you feel those hunger pangs, because you're going to be hungry, you should have a double joy knowing that you were saving a child from having hunger pains or you're helping a soldier to eat.

You know, so now, and, and you know that you were having the hunger pangs of losing a pound. So it's also linking up that weight loss involves you being hungry. Oh, right. So all of these things are becoming a part of our culture and we were born into it. So we don't even realize it. So that's, that was really the advent of calories making the leap into nutrition. And it's just gotten worse from there. And by the way, the Atwater system is they don't use a, the bomb calorimeter to measure that that's a lot that takes a lot of time energy. These uses the Atwater system, which is like stuff. Again, we learned in school protein, four grams of calories, carbohydrates, four grams of calories table. No, I mean, what one gram of protein is four calories. One gram of carbohydrates is four calories. One gram of fat is nine calories. And one gram of alcohol, just throw that in there. We might talk about that is seven calories as well. And so basically you just do some math. You know, if you, if you got 25 grams of protein in here, you just do some math multiplied times bar, you know? And so again, that's what people are seeing on the calorie label there that they're obsessed with. Yeah. And not understanding that the real change in how calories impact our bodies. And this is the acronym that is in the book, but I actually put this in the book. This is what it goes down in the DM right down in the DM. So the first word, the, you know, so it's T H E D M all right.

Chase

The DM, I love your analogy!

Shawn

First aspect of how calories don't fit into this conventional model that has so many people suffering is the T is for the type of food. The type of food itself has a massive impact on whether or not your body is storing, absorbing, or even utilizing those calories in the first place.

Chase (33:17):

Exactly do you mean by type?

Shawn (33:19):

So there's a wonderful study and this was published in a food and nutrition research. All right, great. This is a really fascinating study. They wanted to find out if there was a difference in the rate of calorie burn for a meal of whole foods versus a meal of processed foods, they took study participants and they gave some of the folks what they deemed to be whole foods, which was whole grain bread and cheddar cheese. All right. So this was the whole food camp and they gave the other group white process, bread and cheese product. Okay. Which is craft by the way, craft can legally say it's cheese!

Chase (33:55):

Come on?! All right.

Shawn (33:57):

And so they gave them these meals and then they measured their rate of energy expenditure, which is fascinating that there they're actually just seeing what happens in their body when they have these foods, after they compiled all the data, the folks who were eating the processed food sandwich had a 50% reduction in calorie burn after eating half, half. Just by the nature of the food, the type of food that they were eating half I wasn't expecting to have prevented their body from burning as many calories from their food that they just ate. Okay, please get this. This is some powerful . Right. And like we say this like, Oh, the quality matters. No, I got that data now. So now you're going to understand, everybody's gonna understand, everybody's gonna know this study. Right. So the type of food matters. So that's number one. So that's the, the T and the DM goes down in the DM. The H is if we're looking at, so the type, so first of all, we got type of food. And with the H this one is, it's a little bit complicated, but it's incredibly simple…

Chase

This feels like it’s got a story behind this relay this.

Shawn (35:10):

Yeah. There's like two stories. I'm just trying to pick which one, so how the food is prepared. Okay. This matters. Okay. So I'll just make this super short. I also discuss how the cooking of food, how the advent of fire really helped humans to evolve the very complex. We have the most complex brain on, on the planet. And then in the, you know, the known universe from, from what we know and a big part of that, this massive increase in the, in the sheer volume in capacity of the brain was tied directly to the ability to cook our foods. We were able to extract more nutrition from the food suddenly. And some folks might be like, what about raw foods? Raw foods is the truth. I'm not saying it's not, but we know this is just based on real data. Sure. This was a massively important thing.

Now, here's why this matters in the context of how calories affect us is that the bioavailability of those calories is going to be influenced by the, by how the food is prepared. So I'll just give you an example. Everybody is probably made spinach before sautéed spinach, right. Where I was going. I know that might go to example of spinach and heat. So you got spinach and the older, the spinach leaves, the more sturdy the cell wall. And plus, you've got some plans over that. One looks like a big finished leaf right there. I wish I could take the green thumb credit that's on my wife. Then maybe get a spinach plant. So you take that. And if you understand that the older, the more mature than plant the sturdy of the cell wall. So if you just eat that spinach leaf, it's difficult to extract any nutrients or R or calories from it is literally more fortified at the cellular level.

Chase (36:49):

So it's more, it it's locked away, higher maturity, right?

Shawn

Yeah. It's locked away in his cell. That's why baby spinach in the same volume, you can get more because of the cell wall isn't as sturdy. Or if you cook that spinach, suddenly the calories become more accessible to your digestion, right? If that makes sense. So, and when you cook it, the, the, the ability to chew it and digest, it becomes easier as well, which we'll come back to in a minute. But the sheer volume of spinach, if you take, you get this massive, like Sam's jumbo box of spinach and you cook it and it's just huge box. And then all of a sudden, it's like a teeny little baby, you know, when you cook it, let it go. And it's all that, all that caloric density is now, you know, so the sheer volume you can eat is more so it makes it easier.

But bottom line is when you cook your food, how has how the food is prepared, it's going to influence how many calories you get from it. Right? So with that said, I don't want to take that down too many different lanes, but you want to have a diversity of how are you foods are prepared. It doesn't mean to just don't cook your food or to just eat only raw food, because you won't get as many calories from it. You want to be in just aware that this matters, understanding this processes behind that can influence your decision making process for the foods that you eat, because these are the things that are not accounted for on nutrition labels. Yes. We're going to, I'm telling you, man, Eat Smarter is really ushering in a transformation of how we see food. So that's the T H the E is your efficiency of your digestion process.

Okay. Okay. I'm going to flip this a little bit. I'm going to, I haven't talked about this yet.

Chase

All right!

Shawn

So I'm going to flip it a little bit, but so next up is the E and the E is going to stand for energy exchange. Oh, okay. Okay. All right. So energy exchange has to do with the process of taking calories from the food that you eat requires calories to process. All right. So making digestive juices your enzyme production in your mouth, that salivary amylase your, the chewing action, taking that, the swallowing, the churning of your stomach, secreting the bio, the nutrients moving throughout your gastrointestinal tract, getting pushed through your, your small intestine and the different vitamins and minerals and amino acids going different places, all that requires energy to happen. So this is not being accounted for either.

There's an energy exchange that takes place when you consume a food. Now, this, some, some of these pieces are a little bit better known, which protein, for example, requires more energy in that energy exchange to digest. So to digest your proteins right off the bat, you say you consume just to make the math easy, a hundred grams of protein. No, actually we'll say a hundred calories of protein. Okay. So a hundred calories of protein right off the bat about 20 to 30 of those calories are going to be used to digest it. So you're going to get a net gain of about 70 of those calories bodies commission, man, it's pretty steep. You got to think about this too, is because with proteins, it has to take the protein and unravel those, those bonds and just get those amino acids that the body is looking for.

So it can actually do something with them. So it's an energy exchange for carbohydrates, somewhere in the ballpark of five to 10% of the calories you consume are used to digest it. And for fats zero to 3%, somewhere in that ballpark, maybe upwards of five. So there's a big difference with protein and protein is the one is really left out of the conversation a lot now, and then all the debates about what's the most important which of course like we can get into a whole conversation on that. But bottom line is it costs calories to digest your calories. This is not accounted for in product, in product labels. I'm going to give everybody a good, like a really good example of some, a Tam tangible takeaway for today. There was a wonderful study that found that the study was basically saying the Atwater calorie system is flawed, or really.

And so what they did was have folks that eat some almonds, 170 calories of almonds, and they found that they actually only had a net reception or gain in their body of 129 of those calories. Interesting. Right? So your body is doing more energy and work to digest the KA the calories and get all these other potential benefits. You know, the vitamin E the phosphorus this there's calcium. They're always getting all these micronutrients that you need for other cool stuff. And it's far less calories that your body is absorbing than you think, versus if you're consuming a Twinkie, you know, or, you know, some ding-dongs, you can, a lot of those calories. Matter of fact, we strove from the processed food example, your body not only is going to consume those calories, but it's going to be much less likely to burn them off and let them go.

Chase

Interesting. All right.

Shawn

So that's T H E is where we're at energy exchange almost in the DMS baby, almost there. Now we're going to jump to the DM, which is the digestive process itself. Okay. Or digestive efficiency. So what this means is this really goes to everybody has this, this unique metabolic fingerprint. And so the way that you digest, if we both ate a hundred calories of almonds, your body's going to digest it differently than mine. And every other person of the billions of people on this planet. No two people are going to digest it the same.

Chase

Wow! You mean to tell me your body's different from my body, Shawn hahaha?!

Shawn

That’s what it is! A lot of cases be like Captain Obvious stuff. But, and even men and women, you know, men and women's bodies process just right off the bat, hormones are different calories different, but it's not the same body as you get through age, you know, your body changes zero to 12, 12 to 2030s. 40 is like, that's a whole other rabbit hole with hormones and everything. Just working against you. The commission gets deeper. Yeah. That's for sure as we age and what it really boils down to for folks to like, okay, so my audition is different. So your production of enzymes you, your enzymes are biochemical catalysts that basically enable your body to do everything that it does to turn that food stuff into youth stuff. So your, your expression or cascade of enzymes in that production, that's going to be an influence in that digestive efficiency, your stomach acid, which this is a huge, this is an epidemic today. Really with people actually being able to produce adequate digestive juices, to properly digest their food, to really break it down and to extract. So this is what I mean, like these so-called heartburn, right? This is man, it's an epidemic, man. Like so many people have no idea how bad this issue is. And I'm sure that feeds into another section of the book. We'll we can get there if we want, but the whole gut health microbiome, I mean, that's, that's the M.

Chase (43:50):

Oh . Let's just go, goes down to right here. So the microbiome,

Shawn (43:56):

Your microbiome is really, this is, this should be step one when we're talking about calories, because your gut bacteria viruses, fungi, you know there’s, there’s an incredible cascade of microbes that reside inside of our bodies that are determining what your body does. If anything, with the calories you eat, really, they decide burst. All right. And this is not part of the conversation. And so how does, how has this demonstrated, it’s a really cool study that this was published in a peer reviewed journal cell, very prestigious. What they recently found is that there are specific bacteria in mice that actually prevented their body from absorbing as many calories from their food. Interesting. Now you might be thinking, well, I’m not a mouse. Well, now we have human studies. And one of them is at the Y the Weizmann Institute. And they found that these, that there’s a certain prevalence of different types of bacteria that are more prevalent in folks who were obese. And when they took these, what they call these quote fat bacteria from obese test subjects and implanted them into mice who were lean, it caused these mice to become insulin resistant, gain weight, and body fat, versus when they took the bacteria from healthy human subjects and put it into the mice and they stayed lean, bruh.

Chase

Yeah, yeah, yeah!

Shawn

So this bacteria talk, this is, this is real, and this is not being accounted for. And also the fact that we have massively disturbed and destroyed the human gut microbiome in the last few decades. Like, just, just to give you an example, like if you think about allergies, peanut allergies, for example, when I was a kid, there was no such thing. Now it’s like, you got to go through like a peanut metal detector. Like I know you got them nuts on you, you know, you can’t come in this school within a hundred foot radius, so you’re out!

And what it is, what, what the best data, we have shows that it’s because of the disruption to our microbiome. And it just causes this cascade of like immune immune responses, these hyper immune responses to our environment. Like we’re not supposed to be allergic to the world. You know what I mean? But yeah. You know, so, and I was one of them I had, man, I had absolutely terrible asthma and hay fever, dude. I can’t even, I can’t believe it was my life, but I had, like, I had a blue inhaler, a white pink inhaler… You know, like I had, it was my thing to get by and I haven’t had any of those. It’s so crazy to say this, but it’s been like 20 something, you know, about 20 years. Yeah. But it was just normal to me. I just thought that that was normal. Like I can’t breathe. I can’t, it’s just who I am. This is me.

But you know, once I, again, I didn’t know that I was fixing these underlying issues at the time by modulating eating real food. So one of the best studies that we, that I highlight in the book really points to the fact that the greater microbiome, microbiome, diversity, you have the much more likely or higher ratio of fat metabolism or fat burning, you have correlated well, like the bacteria, probiotic prebiotic, all those enzymes, all these things you’ve been talking about. That’s what you’re referring to. So specifically we’re talking about bacteria factors, a specific thing. Okay. And there’s certain bacteria like there’s these camps of like Firmicutes and bacterias, but in bifido bacteria, lactobacilli, excuse me. There’s so many different types of bacteria. 

But the greater, the diversity. And so one of the things I looked at was, okay, what’s happening in folks who have more of a kind of traditional like hunter-gatherer, gut microbiome. And it’s just like four times more diversity, 10 times more diversity than the Western gut that you’ll see in a, in a person who eats the Western diet and that lack of diversity. So basically what the summation is, as your diversity of gut bacteria goes down, your rate of weight gain, specifically fat gain goes up, they’re directly, directly connected. And as we can start to increase the diversity, the rate of body fat goes down. Amazing. So how do we do this? This is where, you know, I focused a lot of attention as well because there’s very practical, but we gotta make it fun. You gotta make it cool. And I wanted to just clear up so much of the confusion and all the infighting, like it’s the keto versus the vegan versus the, this is a unifier me versus you, us versus them. Yeah. We should not be doing that at all. I agree if anything, we should be us versus Ronald McDonald. You know what I mean? Hamburglar is getting everybody, you know, so…

We should unify for that, but you know, Ronald’s out here swimming in it. Like he didn’t give a about a pandemic and he’s welcomed open arms, kept making he’s an essential business for dinner. So, but what we do, what, what I’ve done here is like bringing together all the most poignant and, and really visceral points that are universal in every diet. So no matter what diet you subscribed to, we can make that framework work better. And most importantly, giving people permission to be flexible within that diet because the compounds of any diet, if you’re hurting yourself, because a lot of times, again, somebody might get great results, but then a year later it stops or the friend does that gets great results and they don’t. And so they blame themselves and they stop it. It all comes back.

But that should never, that should not be happening. I agree that that goes back to when your body, you, when you’re actually doing something abnormal and you’re setting your metabolism up to fail, they go back to that. You know, the, the focus on calories, you know, like when you stop existing on this credibly, low calorie diet, and you start eating again, you shouldn’t just balloon back up. You know, if you’re eating 500 more calories a day, it doesn’t work like that what’s happening is changes in your endocrine system. And the, the organs that are regulating the hormones related to fat loss. And I take people through that too. But with clearing up the, the miscommunication, everybody’s heard about probiotics at this point. Now the biggest problem with this, cause you could pop probiotics all day. You’re like, Oh, I just got to get that diversity.

That’s what people are here. Like I just got to increase my diversity of bacteria. And especially I have to see the data in the book. I’m just going to take probiotics or take some probiotic foods. No, get that boots. That’s not how it works. It does not work like that. How does it work? You, the only way that this diverse array of microbes is going to actually proliferate and stay and feel welcomed in your gut is if they have the food that they want to eat, there it is. Okay. It’s just like, anywhere you go, if you go to a party and you don’t have any other choice, you know, about like, I’m going to party, I know it’s going to eat there and they don’t got the you like, well, guess what? Del Taco’s open. Like they’re going to leave. You know what I mean?

So it has to have the appetizers and the food for the specific bacteria strains that you’re trying to proliferate in your gut. So some folks are doing elimination diets and removing complete categories that could launch it might help them feel better. Might help the here and the now. But yeah, that longterm, it’s doing a great disservice. Yes. So we have to be aware of these things and not put foods into these like evil categories. Like this is bad. This is not, especially when we’re talking about real whole foods that folks have been eating for thousands of years, the new process, food inventions. I’m not talking about that stuff. You know? So we have to keep that in mind, there might be a strain of gut bacteria that really thrives on a food that you’ve put on the no-no list. And once you add that food back in, but here’s the problem too.

We do have some data showing that, that you can, like, they’ll never come back while basically, you know, they, and it’s, that’s kind of scary, but for me, I’m always, I’m very optimistic. I’m just like, ah, we could stack conditions in our favor to make it, you know, so it’s not like that. So anyways, what are those foods? What are the appetizers that the probiotics went prebiotics, right? So prebiotics, most folks have heard of this, but now you’re really gonna understand why this matters. And it’s not as small as you think. So if we’re talking about prebiotics, a lot of those, so it might be like inulin, you know? So we might think about foods like garlic and onions and leeks and apples and pears. Asparagus is a great prebiotic source as well. But on top of that, there’s this growing understanding of this category of resistant starches and resistant starches.

This is so important. The data is just remarkable when I’m looking at the impact of resistant starches. So resistance starches, it just basically is what it, when we think of starches, it’s like carbohydrates, right? These are like indigestible. These are resistant to digesting, right? And this feeds your, your bacteria. And again, I’m not saying this is not for everybody though, but for a lot of folks, I’d say even the majority of folks having some resistance starches in their diet is essential just because the, our genetics for most folks have had a nice a nice level of resistant starches in their diet. So what does that look like? Well, this is going to be foods that might be a little bit unexpected. Okay. I’ll give a common source of resistant starch. So, Oh, super common is green bananas, right? When bananas are green, they’re very high in starch, but as they get more and more yellow, they become, you know, that gets converted, starts to shift over and trans mutate. It’s more sugar, right? So green banana, like throwing the half of a green banana into a smoothie, for example, great source of resistant starch. Probably not, probably not gonna wanna eat that thing. We’re all busy, but it doesn’t taste happen to those nutrients that bioavailability more by just making it more accessible.

Chase

Yeah, exactly!

Shawn

It doesn’t, it’s not, and this is the thing it’s like, for me, I’m a big fan of enjoying the process of getting well. So if you don’t want to do that , don’t do it. There’s banana. There’s actually a green banana flour. You could throw some of that into, you know, I don’t know a recipe, you know, something you’re already doing, you know what I mean? So you could do like some keto brownies or something, throw some of that flour in there. But anyways, so this that’s one domain. And also as the, as it starts to get more yellow, there’s still that tip of the banana though, the devil’s anus and nasty part, you know what I mean? The part that we do not speak of, we flipped that off, but so that’s agreement as, but here’s another one and this is super fascinating. Is white rice. All right. Now this was tough.

So it was a no, no, right. Everybody’s saying white rice. No, no. When I went to college, they were like, if it’s, if it’s white, it’s not right. If it’s brown, you gotta be down. Right. Basically that was like the tenant, everything white is bad. Yeah. And so here’s the thing, when this, when this knowledge came, I was on a man, I was eating whole, whole wheat spaghetti. I was eating brown rice. I just went full tilt with it. And, but I still wondered I would go to a restaurant and I would see the, the owners of the Chinese food restaurant. And they’re like eating white rice and vegetables. And I’m like, what did they not get the memo? A lot of Asian foods, Italian foods you know, even for me last several years has been a lot of my wife’s Persian. So a lot, you know, basmati rice, a lot of things like that. Yeah.

Wait a minute. Like, y’all are healthy as hell. Like for the most part. Yeah. That’s the thing too. You guys are way healthier than us. Huh? So there’s a, there’s a, we have to acknowledge those moments. Like, wait a minute, something’s not adding up. And for me, I’m just like, okay, do they not get the memo? And I just went on about my business and now it is my business, you know? And and I was like, okay, what’s the connection here? And there’s a great like sub I’ve got these little like short story, like little sub bar, little fun fact sections in each smart as well. And it’s this one’s called rice rice baby. And this one is looking at this, this conflict between white rice and brown rice. And so it’s absolutely true that Brown rice has the fiber. It has the far more micronutrients.

Right? However, it also is where there are anti-nutrients and there are nutrients that are containing Brown rice that can actually block the absorption of some of the other nutrients you’re trying to take in. And what they found out our ancestors thousands of years ago is that there are gut irritants in that germ, in that brand that surround Brown rice. And when we’re talking about whole grain bread in one context, so what they would do with bread for example, is there was a commonality deferment the bread Oh, wow. Help to reduce those gut irritants. So ancestors knew what was up, man. Right? So by staying on the lane with the rice, by getting rid of that part, you, of course, it’s just like you’re taking, you’re getting rid of the, the fiber and the and the micronutrients. However, you’re not bringing in something of can blatantly hurt you right.

As well. And so some folks are listening to like brown rice is fine for me. Just stay with me, stay with me now. Here’s, what’s so fascinating. The white rice, when it’s cooked and then cooled all the way down and then reheated the resistant starch content of that white rice skyrockets is one of the best resistance starts sources is when white rice is cooled and then reheated.

Chase

All right. So I’ve never heard this before.

Shawn

Yeah. Your specific strains of bacteria absolutely love that are really found to be supportive of healthy metabolism, love resistant starches. So that’s just a little hack. Now you still have the full reign to choose. It doesn’t mean to go balls to the walls, eating white rice, and you can eat that. You can even have both, but with brown rice, I would highly encourage you to soak the rice or, and, or use a pressure cooker and, or even sprout the rice.This helps to reduce the potential gut irritants because some folks, they go for the Brown rice and just wonder why I’m bloated all the time. Why am I bloated? Like, I know this is better for me, but we don’t question it because we know we’re doing the healthy thing.

Chase

Right. I’m doing something that I’m supposed to be doing for me, but I still feel like… meh.

Shawn

So yeah, exactly, exactly. But also one of the most important things that I strive to do is just keep bringing people back to their very best metric. We’ve got all these cool self quantification tools that we have today, but the very best metric is how you feel. How do you feel? How do you look? How do you feel how you perform and to keep directing people back to that over and over again, because we’re, unfortunately, we’re so disconnected from that. We’re not in our bodies. 

Chase

We’re so externally focused, focused on the diet that I’m supposed to be doing. What’s cool. What’s trendy. What, you know, what is the guy? And the girl left and right. And me doing, we’re focusing on what we think we’re supposed to be doing, but missing out on the greatest teacher right here. And as coaches right here, it’s our mind, it’s our body. That biofeedback tool quality is literally just, I remember going back into my clinical health practice and I would tell so many people all the time I look this ditch, My Fitness Pal, let’s ditch the calorie counting. How the hell do you feel after this meal versus that? Yeah. And I mean, that taps into the whole other world of mental health that taps into just unveiling things that were preventing you, or keeping you from a certain modality, a certain mindset, a certain diet for sure.

Shawn

Yeah. And it’s stressed out enough. Yeah. And even in that vein too, on top of that, our external focus is also social media television, all the fear and problems going on in the world. And so we lose a connection with that internal guidance system, which we all have, you know, but there’s, we can end up with a lot of like static on the line and miss out on that valuable feedback that’s happening all the time. You immediately know how food feels in your body. You can just tune in, you know? And so, but that’s just one of this category of resistant starches. There’s, there’s many different choices that folks could, could look into. But that’s just one category of prebiotics that we covered. There’s, there’s many others as well, but I just want folks to start to be aware of that resistance starts. You’re going to hear a lot more of that, about that coming up in recent years.

I mean, sorry, in upcoming years, and with that said, so we got prebiotics and then also yes, absolutely. Probiotic foods are important. We, we do want to bring in friendly flora and I’ve got, I mean, again, I went in, okay, so we know this prebiotic probiotic, food boot, does it have any data related to fat loss? Oh, and you’re going to be, so you’re going to be so blown away. You’re going to be so surprised. But one of them that, no, I’m not even gonna get it to, okay. I never going to get into it because there’s going to be some surprises on the opposite side as well. It’s just like something that is the hottest thing on the streets. Doesn’t really have that much data. However, a lot of anecdotal data, which we can not negate that as well. Some folks add something in and it’s clearing up their skin.

They have more energy, whatever we can not negate that just because we haven’t ran clinical trials doesn’t mean that it’s not effective. I’m saying so what, but what I really got into was here’s the things we have, we know for sure that you probably aren’t getting information about, you know, so that’s it man. So prebiotics, probiotics, and then they’re going to actually make vitamins and minerals in you for you scaffolds, right? Short chain, fatty acids. This is one another thing you’re going to continue to hear so much more about, this has a direct correlation to gut inflammation, to your metabolism and fat loss or the ability of your gut bacteria to make these short chain fatty acids in you for you. So these are, so you got pre Biotics pro and post Biotics. So they’ll make these postbiotics for you, you know? And so “biotics” means life by the way.

Chase

So pro means for life? Probiotics sounds like it sounds like a win-win to me!

Shawn

So yeah, it’s a beautiful, beautiful day man. And then one of the other things that we do is focus on, okay, what are the foods that are clinically proven to help in this entire process of fat loss? So, because like I mentioned, we take people through, you know, all the different enzymes and hormones involved, like how this Oregon produces this hormone that does this thing that gets the fat out. Right. And a couple of the surprising things, man which I guess, you know, it’s not really that surprising, but the ratio of omega-3 to Omega six fatty acids is a huge, huge player in this equation because one of the most recent studies affirmed what we kind of already knew. So through our evolution in Dr. Cate Shanahan, Shanahan’s really good friends.

She’s amazing. Early 1900’s, when they did biopsies of human body fat, they, and this is great because you can actually take a sample of what is the fat made of. And it was founded about two to 4% of our body fat as humans was made up of these polyunsaturated fatty acids or PUFAs right. . Right, right. Get that out of here, puffer. So that two to 4% and that’s okay. That’s from naturally, it’s not the polyunsaturated fats are bad. There are naturally occurring foods, specifically nuts and seeds right today when biopsy taking a biopsy from humans of today, the average Western person, their body fat content is now 15 to upwards of 30% polyunsaturated, fatty acids. The ingredients that make the human of today is different. All right. The very stuff that makes us up and what the hell happened and is this okay?

It’s not okay because the vast majority, probably 99% of the PUFers that we’re taking in are from these highly processed seed oils. And so when I’m talking about our canola oil, soybean oil, rapeseed oil sunflower sunflower oil, and this quote, vegetable oil, greatest, greatest marketing trick in history because you got vegetable in the name, even though it’s not, it literally is not a single vegetable. And it comes from and flip the ball around people take a look. Yeah, man. And what’s so crazy is what’s required to make that oil to get that oil from that plant is insane. The, the bleaching that amount arising just to be fit for human consumption and to not be disgusted by it is unbelievable. And there’s actually a study that I cited in the book from one of the most prestigious journals on the subject, matter of inhalation and toxicology found that even smelling these oils, when you cook them can damage your f’in DNA! At that level...I just edited myself!

Chase

I caught that, hahaha!

Shawn

Maybe even smelling it while cooking, it can damage your DNA. Sure. Right. That doesn’t even make sense. Right. But it does. It kind of does. So what the data shows is that traditionally be a three to one ratio of omega threes. I’m sorry. Make a six to omega threes. Now it’s upwards of 50 to 1% average is somewhere around 17 to 22 to one, which is astronomically different from what we evolve having. And so what one of the coolest studies found was that as you start to shift that ratio back into, into balance, we have you know, closer to that three to one ratio, or even like 10 to one ratio, we see a direct impact on reduction of body fat reduction of weight, regardless of the caloric intake. So taking folks and having them on the same caloric diet, simply shifting that ratio of fatty acids folks lose more weight.

So this gets beyond the calorie conversation. When you know these so-called weight loss experts, I was just like, what are you in a calorie deficit? You’re not in a calorie deficit staying at calorie deficit. That’s not the whole story and people are hurting because of it. You know? So it’s like we have to stop thinking about food in terms of numbers and also the quality and the ratios that our genes are expecting of us. You know? So what do we do with that with the mega threes? So most folks know fish is going to be probably the most common source fatty fish, the wild caught for sure. So now this is, this gets into why don’t people leave them there? What if I’m vegan? What if I’m vegetarian? What if I can’t even watch Aquaman, a sea horse like bothers me? You know, if you don’t dig fish, there are other options, you know, we take folks through, but please don’t be, don’t get the illusion that you can get the specific, but the data shows it’s DHA and EPA that you can get that from plants because it doesn’t work that way. You can, your body can convert it, but you lose about 90% of it in the conversion process of turning ALA into DHA and EPA, DHA and EPA are absolutely critical. The data that’s in the book on how it affects your cognitive performance will knock your socks off. Like you would not believe. Right?

Well, vision health, like I mean, so many things in anti-inflammatory markers, it’s unreal. That reminded me a lot of the stuff reading about that reminded me a lot of a lot of what max, Luke talks about which you guys have a lot of parallels in terms of really looking at kind of debunking a lot of things, but really just prefacing like, Hey, here’s food, here’s food, here’s a human body. Here’s what we know in terms of the science and the data. And here’s what we know in terms of the anecdotal, how I feel, how you feel, how you might feel, should feel I’m taking all of these things into the equation of life. And it’s not just here it is here. It’s here. All the things go down, one rabbit hole, learn, pull what you need, you know, paying your own corollaries kind of thing, but pay attention along the whole way.

Chase

Yeah, absolutely.

Shawn

So what can folks do with DHA EPA algae oils? So you do want to get these in, if you’re doing a vegan protocol, vegetarian protocol, if you’re doing a vegetarian protocol, including eggs, you can get, you know, the egg yolks will have a pretty rich source of DHA. For example, however, the best source is going to be, if you’re just trying to do food only is going to be fish. There’s going to be some in various different, you know, other types of meat as well in eggs, however, algaes. And this is another category of foods that have been used for thousands of years, but it can, it just depends on you. Like, does this make sense for me, if I’m going to eat like some, this great super green, we were looking at or we’re talking about getting in the chloral Ella world, spirulina, chlorella, AFA. But I, I add, I have all of these, but we dive into what’s the data actually show, not just thinking, you know, of course like spirulina is the highest protein food that we’ve ever discovered. The highest ratio of protein gram for gram, you know, it’s about 71% protein by weight, which is nuts by the way. But the thing is, it doesn’t weigh that much either.

So like given it’s like microscopic size, so you can, of course you can have that as a supplemental form of protein in your diet. However, because it doesn’t weigh very much. If you have the same amount of protein from your spirulina versus, you know, somebody who’s having a chicken breast, for example, you’re going to have to have technically the scientific term for the amount of spirulina you’re going to have to have is Butler. Right. You’re going to need a buttload Butler metric, but low, you know, so that’s what we’re talking like two cups and nobody’s going to do that. So don’t get it, don’t get it twisted, but also the quality of the proteins too. Right. You know, that’s something special about plant foods and spirulina. If we’re talking about that category, very digestible, you know, there’s like soft globular proteins. When we talk about something like hemp seeds, for example, very digestible, very similar to what’s found in egg whites. And I know I be talking about this for,  for a minute. Yeah. For 10 years. Yeah.

So that’s, that’s, that’s what we got on the food front, but we basically go through and, and knock out like, okay, so this food, this food, this food, and we actually, I put together, I hit the studio and put together a mini course of 10 of these specific foods that are clinically proven to have a massive impact on your fat loss related hormones. And I put that mini course together and we’re giving it away for free right now as a folks. Pre-order the book. So, and this isn’t one of those, like, here’s this PDF, like this is a real 10 video course. And it’s so beautiful. And just like so rich with information and fun. Like, I really feel that the process of learning this stuff should be enjoyable.

I mean, or else it’s not going to stick or people aren’t gonna want to come back to it. They’re going to have resentment. They’re going to have PTSD for all this stuff that they’re learning to try to make themselves better. You know, and that’s what we’re trying to cut off.

Chase

Couple of things, top of mind, can you sit with me for a little while longer?

Shawn

Of course!

Chase

Again, why I loved how you titled this book, what to eat instead of the diet, everyone needs the diet you should eat. You really kick things off with kind of describing, I won’t put words in your mouth, but like most of us are focused on fat loss and, or probably should be. And I’m not saying from, you know, like like that last five pounds or a hundred pounds, but just in general, I think it’s a fair statement.

A lot of us are focused on fat loss when it comes to our diet. And if we’re being honest, we probably could. But then you immediately went into not just making a statement and providing this information, but just breaking down what fat is. And I mean, for me, it was a great reminder and some new information in there. And it brought me back to years ago. We both actually had our own show. I found her through you Dr. Sylvia, Tara, The Secred Life of Fat. That book probably helped me the most. And I, I gave out copies to my patients at when I was a health coach. And I was like, this book blew my mind. So if you could highlight not only why at a high level is somewhat of a focus on fat loss for most people, a good thing. And then please like share with us why fat is not this big, scary monster that we all make it out to be most people.

Shawn

Yeah, man, it’s such a good question. And this is a big part of the issue. This is a big part of the reason we haven’t solved the problem is that there’s been this war on fat. Yeah. And not even understanding what it is. Fat is very good at what it does. It’s an organ. It’s an organ first. I mean, we could start there so fat. Isn’t just, we tend to think of it as just like… Yeah. I mean, we tend to think of it as like, there’s this, you, you got some fat tissue or fat cells. It’s an organ that is deeply interconnected. And it communicates and produces hormones, its own hormones and send signals throughout your entire body. Constantly feeding back information with your brain on the reserves that you have available. But here’s the thing, like I said, it’s very good at his job. If we didn’t have fat, we wouldn’t, we wouldn’t be here. We would have went extinct a long time ago. Yeah. It’s giving us, it’s given us this incredible evolutionary advantage to be able to store energy and use it for the things that we need to get done, to continue to consume energy and store energy. Now, the problem is that we don’t have a famine around here anymore. Not no we’ve got 24 seven access to basically any food you can see conceive of for most folks today, you know, with, you know, within some certain bounds and our genes are not wired up for this kind of exposure to food and your body fat is just use, it’s waiting.

It’s a job it’s waiting around for time when you’re not eating. So it can do its job. It’s a, it’s a container. It’s a storage place. Now when we’re targeting fat to try to get rid of it, when we have to number one, bring a level of great gratitude and respect because that body fat has been so helpful in us surviving, right honor, the fat respect, the founder of sensei fats.

Chase

And with that said, so here’s, what’s so interesting is that when we’re talking about fat loss, we also need to be more specific on what that means because there’s many different types of that as well. And that’s what you really highlight in this section.

Shawn

I really appreciated that, Oh man, it was, it was a pleasure. And it was an adventure, you know, like, and I was, these are the things I’ve been talking about for years now, I get to put into this form where so many people are going to be like, Oh my God, I had no idea.

So we can start with subcutaneous fat. So subcutaneous fat is a fat that’s basically just below your skin. And when folks are looking, talking about subcutaneous fat is the fat on your arms or your butt, your legs. You could have someone in your belly as well, but this is kind of stuff that you pinch. The other type of fat that we’re talking about around their midsection is visceral fat. And so your visceral fat is not the stuff that you can easily pinch. It tends to be more firm to the touch. This is known as more of like organ associated fat. It’s deep in the abdomen. And it tends to put a lot of pressure on your internal organs. So your pancreas is stressed or your liver is kind of like crowding and pushing stuff around. And like, you know, your kidneys, it’s just really creating a lot of pressure around your core.

And it’s very dangerous of all the different types of fat visceral fat is most associated with mortality, higher rates of mortality and basically death from everything. And you want more social distancing with, yeah. You want to increase the social [inaudible] of the visceral. Yes. And what’s so is that there are hormones that actually take visceral fat and can redistribute it to a subcutaneous fat. It can shift it around in your body and make it less dangerous. And we talk about that too, but here’s okay. So we’ve got subcutaneous fat, we’ve got visceral fat. So these are kind of our two targets, but we also have intramuscular fat. And so intramuscular fat. When I was in school, I was, I had this belief system because of the education that fat and muscle are dichotomous. Like there are two different things.

Like you have one or the other you’re gaining one or losing the other kind of thing. They’re actually very interconnected, especially intramuscular fat intramuscular fat is right there on site with the muscle to provide energy for your muscles to do the you need to do. So a lot of times when you’re like walking and whatever, you’re getting it’s from the intramuscular fat. If you want to know what it looks like. It’s, if you think about a marbling of a scale, like a ribeye or something. Yeah. So that’s very, but also that can get out of balance too. You can start to have these chubby muscles. If you have too much intramuscular fat, it could be dangerous. So those three categories are all lumped together under this umbrella of white adipose tissue. When we’re talking about losing fat, we’re talking about targeting white adipose tissue, all right, the storage fats.

On the other side, we also have fats that don’t store energy. They burn it. And this gets into the conversation of Brown adipose tissue, which a lot of people have heard of at this point now, but not in this context that we’ve dive into an eat smarter. So Brown adipose tissue, when we are babies, you know, with baby chase and there’s baby chase, you had a lot more Brown fat, you know, as far as the, the ratio on your body, because it basically it’s like this evolutionary advantage to help the baby to maintain its body temperature and prevent against the Bible. Yes, but as we get older, the Brown fat ratio goes down substantially. Most of us carry it around. Like our collarbones are upper shoulder blade area and our long our spine. And now here’s, what’s so cool. You can improve the production and activity of your brown adipose tissue through specific changes in your lifestyle.

Most notably folks know about the cold stuff, you know, exposing yourself to cold, but also there are things you could do with your diet that can increase and improve the function of your Brown adipose tissue. Now this is what’s really cool. Your brown adipose tissue. Again, this doesn’t store fat, it burns fat, right? It burns fat. And just to share this I’ll just, I just want to share it. I’ll share it, please, please. One of the most fascinating things that was found as far as nutrition is concerned to increase your, your body’s the, the activity of your Brown adipose tissue. So this, it just I’m hesitant because it comes with the whole story and I don’t want to make it a big thing. We can always leave them wanting more that’s for sure. One of the coolest studies found coffee consumption actually can improve your body’s ratio of brown adipose tissue.

Here’s how it, what the research has found. First of all, was that folks who are consuming coffee in the study, they could see that there was heightened activity. They could see the brown adipose tissue areas on the body start to light up demonstrating higher rates of thermogenesis. Now it comes in through a back door mechanism. Now it’s the other category of fat, which is beige fat. So you’ve got brown fat and you’ve got beige fat. So what they found was is that, and so beige fat is so unique. And this is so it’s just, I love is about the human body. So powerful, so amazing, but base fat cells can become either white fat or brown fat. It becomes what your body is using depending on what you know, how does it get there?

It becomes what your body needs. However, the needs can get skewed. Your body can think because of processed food consumption, stress that it should produce more white adipose tissue. We need to save up for a rainy day and you just keep making more of it. And versus adding more to the Brown adipose tissue, basically, there are things you can do to basically make the base shells, get a tan. You can come up Brown, right? And so one of those ways is coffee was found to be able to do this, to, to promote the Browning of your base fat cells and base fat cells are they’re genetically distinct and different from Brown fat, by the way, they have their own precursors. So it’s pretty fascinating. However, there’s a U shaped curve of with coffee. I was a catcher. You can bring me because you know, America is like, some is good. More is better. Give me the whole like Folgers, you know, saying, I’ll start like mainlining, let me get it. You know, like 30 ounce of Trent, that’s a secret thing of Starbucks. You’ve got like the 16, they got the, like the big goal of a Big Gulp stimulus. I think it’s a thing. Starbucks is handing out anxiety.

So what’s so cool about the human body and nutritionist interaction. And but each of these things come with a certain level of intelligence. Humans have been utilizing coffee for so many centuries, but there’s a way to go about it. And if you’re getting your fresh cup of coffee along with a nice piping, hot serving of pesticides and herbicides and rodenticides and fungicides and all those things are, and I, I made sure to this, isn’t just talk anymore. I’ve got the data are all proven to suppress your metabolism, right? Because they’re either estrogenic or neurogenic. So they’re made, they’re designed to disrupt the reproductive cycle of pests, small organisms, or their neurological cycle. Think about why these things were made for, or what they were made for in the beginning. And they don’t want that. I don’t have that in my coffin there to kill stuff bigger than your gut microbiome, your gut bugs.

So they’re getting smashed. They’re getting demolished even a fighting chance and we’re not thinking about, okay, why is our diversity changing so much? It’s because we’re assuming this and enough is enough. Now we know why. Now we understand why. And this is another reason why getting this book into popular culture is such a big deal because now you’ve got the data on the things that we just logically. We can just take a step meta perspective and see like, okay, this stuff is designed to kill pests. I’m mostly made of micro microbes, much smaller. Right? You think there’s a problem? Yeah. We know there’s a problem. So again, we got with, with all of those different types of body fat in the support, it still really revolves around the hormones. Cause like I said, it’s an organ. So we want to improve the communication within the fat communities.

And there’s certain for certain foods to do that. And some of them are in that in the course as well, that free course that folks get. And by the way, if I didn’t say it, it’s eat smarter, book.com is where you can get it. The bonus course, it’ll all be in the video link shown us for sure. For everybody. Thanks for, thanks for sharing that out. Yeah. It’s, it’s important, man, because right now we’re at a very critical time in human history where we have seen, I mean truly if, if you’re willing to look at it, we’ve seen the ramifications of a healthcare system that is not based on health. We are the sickest society in human history by far, and I’m really, I’m going to confess to you. Absolutely. I’m going to continue every opportunity. I get to highlight these numbers because it takes a while for it to click.

But here in the United States, we have over 200 million people who are overweight or obese. So when I’m talking about the science behind this whole process, millions of people every year get onto conventional calorie, restricted diets and they fail. Not because they’re not smart or because they’re not trying hard. The system is flawed and it’s incredibly one-sided. And so over 200 million people are overweight or obese over 125 million people have type two diabetes or pre-diabetes here in the United States alone. It’s unbelievable. And the ratio of children, we, it used to be adult onset diabetes. We had to change it. We had to change it. My entire family. Yeah. We had to take that out now. It’s just type two-ten, you know? And so, you know, again, I grew up in these conditions, so I didn’t know that food mattered. It was just stuff. I just felt like, again, if I just exercise, I eat whatever I want.

I’m good. But it’s such a bigger story. And on top of that, about 115 million people in the United States are regularly sleep deprived, chronically sleep deprived. How does it affect your body composition? That’s that’s in there as well. How does it affect your ability to communicate with other people? How does it affect your ability to, to just think and focus and be productive? You know, all of these things are stacking conditions against us. And one other little piece here we’ve got over 70 or somewhere around 70% of the United States population is prescription medications right now. And it's not normal. It's not okay. And many of these things we're treating symptoms. We're a pharmaceutical based society, really, because that is the main go-to by very smart and, and, and, and loving human beings who get into the field of medicine to help people. And some of the medications are because of other medications.

Chase

Oh yeah. Like one band-aid on top of another causes, another problem…

Shawn

And we're just, yeah, we're just plugging holes instead of figuring out where the hell is this water coming in, and this is our time we can change it because our greatest susceptibility to the virus that's on everybody's lips, you know, hopefully it's not on your lips, but the virus that's top of mind for everybody is and I, I stared this data very early on, back in April, you know, we had data coming out of of Italy and the folks, you know, their, their minister of health. Who's kind of like, you know, their Fauci-type tad character. And I, when I was like reading transcripts, and when we're talking about researchers, like I've read over, over a thousand peer review journals just in the past 12 months, this is what I do know.

And it's not, this is not like seductive, you know, Dan Brown, you know, DaVinci Code reading. It's not like all joyful, but I find this joy in him. And so I'm able to like, just look to see the data and I could see you have to come into it expecting to be wrong as well. And it's a muscle you have to build up. Yeah. That's working against bias either way, which again, we all have them in the science and the, you know, the anecdotal and everything for me that definitely came across, always comes across in your stuff, which if you want the end result to be a happier, healthier life of longevity to stack the conditions in your favor and every way that you always talk about, we have to have that mentality. We at least have to learn how to create that or else we're always going to be dogmatic and stuff.

Chase

And we're always going to be the us versus them kind of thing.

Shawn

Yeah. And it’s totally an illusion this whole us versus them paradigm. We are one species and we could be helping each other so much if everybody didn't think that they were so right. You know, the reason I really feel, and just being open about this, that I have this level of expertise. So that I'm really good at this is that man. I'm just I'm so I love to learn. I just love I'm obsessed. I want to find the, the very nature of science is like making science obsolete again, you know? And like that is not happening right now. All of a sudden, everybody thinks he's got it. They've got to figure it out. The top virologists in the world knows less than half of a percent about all the viruses that there are and what they could do. They don't know , just like, come on. And this is beautiful, but they know something they know more than, than a more than me pharma, but we have to understand the magnitude of what we, what we don't know. And I marvel at that is so amazing. We will never know. We will never know all there is to know about nutrition. We know bits and pieces, and now we have some really, but it's just gets us back to fundamental things that our ancestors have known for that.

Coming out of Italy is showing that about 88% of the folks with COVID 19 on their death certificate had additional causes of death and, or pre-existing chronic diseases. This is not to say that COVID-19 was not the cause of death. This is to say that there is this vulnerability that's implicit in. Why, what I want people to really get is that this is for 88% of the folks. And when I saw the data, I started to ring the alarm. I'm like, we're in trouble. United States. We're the sickest nation in history. We're in trouble. And then sure enough and most when I put the data out there, 99% of people was like, ah, yes, this makes sense. But then there's a 1%. It's like, well, it's just COVID is just, it's just COVID. We have an underlying susceptibility. And recently the CDC just last month published.

The data that I had, I was talking about is coming back in April - 94% of the people who died, 94% of them had preexisting chronic diseases and or additional causes of death, main three. And this was published in JAMA, by the way, as well, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, we can fix this. We can, that's say underlying weakness is an underlying vulnerability in our culture. That's not normal. We've accepted as normal, not once. Have you seen any of these on TV or, you know, these public health officials talking about let's get our citizens healthier? Yeah. It's all about suddenly it's about prevention of exposure, right? They don't know about prevention at all. And now all of a sudden, Oh, we can prevent this thing. And it's such an arrogant thing. I'm probably sounding a little arrogant, cocky.

Chase

I'm with you, man. It's a soap box. I mean, I can tell you recently I put up a video kind of realizing some things in my social media that were like working against me. And every time it was a flag of like, are we allowed to be talking about this stuff? I would want to educate, to talk about wellness prevention, these preexisting conditions. Why is nothing being routed to that content? Why, when I put out something about that it is not - “Hey, here's a resource on lowering your cholesterol. Hey, here's a resource to a free diabetic clinic in your area.” But no, I'm just being bombarded with someone else's agenda on what they think is going on. And I mean, that's a whole other rabbit hole in and of itself, but I have to show on these last like six, seven months, man, in, in everything you've been putting out. And now I know like in the background we are fighting like this uphill battle that absolutely has to keep going on, but it's just like, look at, look at what we're facing.

Shawn

Yeah, this is, but this is the beautiful part of what keeps me excited and happy and joyful about it. Because of course I get in these moments even just a moment ago, like I kind of get a little because it's so it's right there for us to see that the attention is not being put on the thing that matters most in our underlying it's as if we can't fix it. That's how the system is operating. As if you've got diabetes, it's just the end of the story. And now we know that this is completely reversible for the vast majority of people not talking about type one diabetes, but there are people with type one diabetes who are freaking killing it as well. They're thriving, they're fit, they're healthy. They're living a full life. That's possible. But what examples do you have? And I when I grew up, I didn't have these examples.

So my body started to break down when I was 20 years old when I was 15, actually I broke my hip at track practice just from running because my bones were so brittle. I was made out of the . I was eating that I thought was normal Glassman. Yeah. I was Mr. Glass. Then I turned into Bruce Willis, you know, but here's the beautiful part is that when stuff is so unstable like this, and there's so much nonsense, we can actually see it and bring it to the surface and we can change it when the system, prior to all this happening is very sturdy, very strong. Now people are questioning things finally, you know? And so it's so funny that the things I've been talking about for again, about 20 years, they start integrating themselves into wellness, cultures, and incorporations and things like that. Now they reach out to me like, I'll say Nestle reached out like really, like they reached out to ask me to like, you know, work with their team and their employees and all that stuff. And for me, when I see them as like, we need you to help change our optic stuff.

We've been just basically weaving it into the culture, just bits by bits. And here's the most shocking piece that I want people to really know. I would say this, but now we actually have some data on how long it takes from a, a really well done peer reviewed randomized controlled trial, proving the efficacy of say this specific food and nutrient to be used in place. And we'll just say something that's even more effective than a pharmaceutical drug in its clinical trial, proven to be effective. It takes from that stop, that trial being done on average, about 17 years for to make it into clinical practice. We don't have that kind of time. You know what I mean? But the beautiful part is we also, right now we have this instant connection where you don't have to wait, but you need to be tapped into the right thing, you know?

And so that's what this is about. That's what you do. You know, that's what I'm about is I live in breezes and right now is a really important time for transformation because there's no way that when I was saying earlier about having this kind of, you know, our health experts right now, you know, the, the, the folks who are running the different task force is this level of arrogance that you can outsmart a virus that is way smarter than you obviously like that's the problem. The thing that we do know that we have some education on is human health in sovereignty, what does it take to create a healthy, sovereign human being? If we're not doing those things, we shouldn't be talking about that other. Or even if we're talking about the other, please talk about the stuff that we know is, come on, come on… You know, even the playing field a little bit. Yeah. So I'm very passionate about it, man. And I feel that, you know, I'm here for this moment. Like we get, we all get to choose our meanings, you know, and I, I choose to believe that I was born right now at this time in human history for this moment of change, because I know that our children and grandchildren and generations to come are going to be looking back at what do we do now? What do we do in this inception point of 2020? And this, this virus that took over our reality, did we decide to become a healthy, happy sovereign human species? Or did we ignore all of the signs in our faces and, and continue to buy into the medical paradigm that has continued to fail, to fail us every single year, everything gets worse and worse and worse, and I don't have to make it up anymore.

Heart disease continues to go up. Cancer continues to go up. Alzheimer's continues to go up. Obesity continues to go up every chronic disease. They haven't cured . And as a matter of fact, heart disease is the number one cause of death. Number two cause of death is cancer. Number three cause of death is iota Genesis. Most people have no idea about this and you can go look up the study on Johns Hopkins. The third leading cause of death is hydrogenesis ultra means. Physician Genesis means created like, just pause right there. Physician created our form auditing our medical model. Medical error is the third leading cause of death in our country every year. Not just one year, every year. And people do not understand this. And it's, again, this is not to say that these aren't good people, but if you take very smart people and you teach them the wrong thing, they become world-class at doing the wrong thing. It's just that simple. If the only tool you have is like, okay, they have high blood pressure prescribed, you know, lisinopril and a satin. If that's what you do, that's what you're going to do, but we're changing it. We're changing. There's a big shift happening with integrative medicine, functional medicine, big shift to, to nutrition and health it's happening in bits and pieces. But this is the inception point of a big change potentially, but we need everybody listening to be a part of it.

Chase

Shawn I've got like doggy ears moments from what I picked up from what to eat so far that dude, I mean, I could like hold you captive for like six more hours, but I want to ask one more question before we begin to wrap up. And I've heard in your story, what we've been talking about a little bit today and just what I know of your story to begin with. Hell it's even what you literally put in your introduction - Where you come from! Like the background of not having the immediate access to information and stuff like this really resonated with me a lot too, growing up a country boy in the mountains with my grandparents, you know, those of like a dichotomy because it was, I didn't have access and didn't really sound like you had a whole lot of access to a lot of these great resources and foods and stuff like that. So it was a little bit of no food deserts or whatever you want to call it. But then also like we had, we almost didn't really need it. I mean, I ate so much of the foods that my grandparents grew in our garden and I just ran and played and sunshine and light just lived. So it was like, it didn't have access, but I was good.

And then when we got plugged back into society, that’s when kind of like, Oh, like the world is our oyster kind of thing, all these other variables. And that's when process foods and too much information, all that. I've heard this in your story. Like I said, you literally launched the book with it. And you're talking about earlier, this books can be everywhere. It's going to be in target. Did your background of lack of access to this kind of information, play a role in your mission? It kind of sounds like now to get this out into those areas, because I know damn well it is going to be at  Amazon, it is going to be all the places that we can learn. All the people have access to that can learn, but the people that are going to target, you know, the lower socioeconomic or food deserts, like was it that important to you? And is that intentional?

Shawn

Yes. Yeah. This is why I did it. This is, I might not ever say this again on the show, but that was the underlying reason for writing this book. I felt a man, you know, and it's because of we, before we started recording, man, it was getting like the vibe was JJ is getting emotional because the kids, man, you know, like there's so many children who were, who were the victims of all of what's happening right now, you know, because, and they can't choose for themselves. I was born into the conditions. So I'm speaking from this from a very firsthand perspective, you know, growing up on welfare and having the government cheese and having, you know, the, the food stamp Christmas and then having nothing, you know, and being able to find a way to just eat. My mother sold her blood so many times just to get us food, you know?

And if we talk about, you know, why don't you just work harder and pull yourself up by your bootstraps? She did, she was working overnight at a convenience store and she ended up, somebody tried to Rob her and they stabbed her eight times. She almost died. You know, like these are the conditions that I grew up in. And so it's not just as cut and dry as just like work hard. It's going to be all right or just buy better food. We have to work as a society. And first just realize and put the spotlight on the fact that there are some massive like food inequalities, you know, because all the conditions that I saw, you know, when I was in college, all of these, you know, I referenced when I was in college. Yeah. I lived in Ferguson, Missouri, you know, which has become very popular now. But I experienced a lot of the same issues that you might think about. And in my neighborhood, hopefully, are you kidding me? Like, I didn't even know that existed. I didn't know. That was a thing. You know, like I walk out my door, liquor store, Chinese food, three pizza places, these chicken McDonald's steak and shake. If you want to get fancy steak and shake dairy queen and McDonald's Arby's, which I never eat!

So that's what I'm saying. But in my hood though, as kids, you know, they don't want you to win. What's going on Krispy Kremes, Burger King. I'm just walking through walk, just taking a walk mentally. I can see you got that mental map. Yeah. Then we've got Jack in the crack right there. We've got Wendy's across the street from that. This is what I see every day, every day, there wasn't a gym in like, no gym, no farmer’s market… None of this, this wasn't in my reality. I didn't know those things existed. The first time somebody took me to, it was a a friend of mine, you know, this, she was a woman know I was in college. I was probably like, maybe, you know, 19, 20, no, sorry. I was, I was 21. I was 21. And she took me to wild oats. She was a chiropractor. Right. Cause she went, took me to wild oats. And I'm just like, what wild, who, what is first of all, how the wild do you know what I mean? And they're in there like juicy, you know, this guy, grass growing. I'm like, why is that grass in the stores? You know? And, but I wind and I started to, there were these books in there, you know, the nutrition prescription books, you know, and just like looking at all these different nutrients that did these different things.

And at the time I was dealing with this essentially massive degenerative condition with my spine arthritis of the spine. I mean just pain. I couldn't even walk and just, it was terrible. And I started to see, okay, wow, this thing does, this, this thing does that. I thought my bones were degenerating because of calcium or whatever. Cause this is what I saw on TV. I found it, Oh, I make a threes are important with your bone formation. You know? So I start to see that these things existed. I got exposure. And then I, it changed everything.

Chase

No one told you what to do or told you what to read, what to believe. But just the access, the access is the gateway to all of us being able to, to figure our own shit out.

Shawn

Yeah. Yeah. And that internal guidance system that the static on the line started to dissolve. And because of that exposure, I ended up changing the world. And how often can that happen? You know, for so many little kids, little boys and girls that just need access, just some exposure, just get good things into their body and watch their, their intelligence and consciousness flower. You know, just imagine what we can do if we get people on real things, you know, like we're building rockets and on like, you know, gas station food, you know, just imagine what we could create. You know, we've got all of these crazy problems. There's, they can not be a problem without a solution. It's two sides of the same coin, but we can not continue to think in the same way that we're thinking to fix them. And really right now the greatest mission is to get our communities healthier. And I'm very passionate about looking out for those who no one else is looking out for.

Chase

I love it, man. Well, you've definitely been doing it. You are doing it. And come December 29th, man. Everybody's going to eat and smarter. Even, even for me, like going back to, I call it going back to basics. Not just not basic by any means my man, but just like going back to fundamental things that like was the origin of my, my access, my entryway, my gateway drug to health and wellness. It's just a reminder. I don't need to be taking this for granted. I shouldn't be taking this for granted. Here's why, here's what this does. Here's an optimization tool. Like it's crucial for learning

Shawn

Every BODY, man. I got to say this man. Yeah. And I, because for me, my, my passion would, I would want to know for myself personally is what can take me to the next level. Right. So that's, it's in there for everybody. Yeah. But to take that kind of data, but also to make it apply for the everyday person who is just at ground zero. Absolutely. That's, that's the beauty. That was the fun and the art of putting it all together to make it all make sense, which can't be easy. I mean, the stories to, to, to take all the things that, you know, and to put it at the level that it needs to be clearly understood reduce confusion, but just to have the science, the anecdotal the slide.

Chase

Yeah. It's I mean, clearly, like I said, at the beginning and it just translated so well, so congratulations. And I'm so glad we're able to kind of dive into some of these key concepts of a eat smarter using the power of food to reboot your metabolism, upgrade your brain. It transform your life. That's that's, that's the root of it. All right here. Yes, sir. Well Sean, like the final question I ask everybody, and I dunno, I haven't really actually fully kind of like shared all my background with you. We've connected a lot over the years and always grateful direct, indirect the passion, really the, honestly, sometimes even the fear, even at the beginning of the fear of what is my life going to look like if I don't take control of my eating habits, if I don't learn genetics, if I don't learn what maybe the future has, the whole concept came from a position where I watched my hero pass away, my father died from a terminal illness.

And it was just like, look at what's possible. You think somebody is taking care of their bodies and their minds, but just even at that moment, it's not up to you. And so he had these two words, his mantra that he just instilled in us growing up ever for whatever, for whatever, for, and he lived literally to his dying breath and it was just something that I grabbed hold of and not only helped me get through that loss, but now it's like my whole purpose for what I do. So what does that mean to you, man? How do you live a life Ever Forward?

Shawn

You know, that's, it's, it's, there's so much wisdom in that statement and I think you could phrase it of course, different ways, you know, just based on, you know, your exposure. So for me, my goal every day, and my wife would tell you this before, before I would, you know, since you're asking the question every day, I have to grow, have to get better in some, in some area of my life. If I don't, I am, that's my, that's my only connection point to feeling like worthless in like this disconnected from my purpose. You know what I mean? And it's such a strong, using very strong words because that's kinda how I feel I have to get better.

And so for me ever forward would be every day, just striving to get 1% better, just do a little bit more, find something else out, find something new, but married with that I think is just that, that, that character trait that I think so many of us can use right now, which is just being like a lifetime student and being curious and being open and just continuing to strive to learn, because that's what we're really here for. You know, it's just to grow into it, to become more of ourselves. So that's what I would say to that, man.

Chase

I love it. Thank you. Thank you for sharing. I always tell everybody there's never a right or wrong answer. And I appreciate you kind of sharing your interpretation. So Shawn, my dude, again, my pleasure, like my honor to have you on here on the show and I'm, so again, grateful and proud of your new work here. We're going to have everything down in like the video notes and show notes for you guys. Definitely wanna check it out. And also, Ever Forward Radio would not be a thing, I'm 99% sure, if it was not for the Model Health Show. And and it was just a testament of like do the thing that you want to do! Do the thing that's going to help serve you and the most amount of people at the same time. If not for you and if not for them, like the model that you can set for other people that are just waiting for you to do that thing.

Shawn

I appreciate you so much and that's powerful. Thank you. I receive that, man. So grateful.

2020 ushered in my third full year of being self-employed and with it brought many lessons. In this solo episode I breakdown the biggest lesson each year taught me as an entrepreneur and what they actually looked like in my businesses and in my life. You will learn how I arrived at each lesson, the steps I took to work through them and apply them to my business, and resources that helped me level up along the way.

Follow me @chase_chewning

Episode resources:

• Get FREE shipping on Recharge by LMNT for zero sugar, clinically-proven rehydration at www.drinklmnt.com/everforward 

• Get your free 30-day trial of audio books at www.AudibleTrial.com/EVERFORWARD 

• Get The One Thing book

• Connect with Zach Mobius

   

Darin Olien is an accomplished entreprneur, best-selling author, and world-renowned superfood hunter. In his latest work with Zac Efron on the hit Netflix show Down to Earth, Darin traveled the world in search of the healthiest and most natural sources of energy, nutrition, and wellness that humans could possible ask for. In the process he realized that many global forces for good and governments were missing the mark for countless groups of people for such basics as clean water and reliable energy. In this episode Darin shares his unwavering passion for how we can live a 'superlife' through what we eat but also how to improve the quality of life no matter where we are on the globe, plus what he calls 'fatal conveniences' - when we allow conveniences to persist that are actually draining our wellness (and our freedom).

Follow Darin on Instagram @darinolien

Follow Chase on Instagram @chase_chewning

In the New York Times bestselling book “Superlife,” Darin Olien provides us with an entirely new way of thinking about health and wellbeing by identifying what he calls the life forces: Quality Nutrition, Hydration, Detoxification, Oxygenation, and Alkalization. Olien demonstrates in great detail how to maintain these processes, thereby allowing our bodies to do the rest. He tells us how we can maintain healthy weight, prevent even the most serious of diseases, and feel great. He explains that all of this is possible without any of the restrictive or gimmicky diet plans that never work in the long term.

Olien has traveled the world, exploring the health properties of foods that have sustained indigenous cultures for centuries. Putting his research into practice, he has created a unique and proven formula for maximizing our bodies’ potential. He also includes a “How-to-eat” user’s guide with a shopping list, advice on “what to throw away,” a guide to creating a healthy, balanced diet plan, and advice on how to use supplements effectively.

Ever Forward Radio is brought to you by our partners at Four Sigmatic and Caldera + Lab

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Episode resources:

• Get Darin's book The Superlife

• Listen to Darin's podcast The Darin Olien Show

More about Darin:

Darin Olien is co-host with Zac Efron on the widely popular Netflix docu-series called “Down to Earth with Zac Efron” and host of the #1 Health & Wellness podcast The Darin Olien Show.

 Darin is also a highly recognized exotic superfoods hunter, supplement formulator, and author of the New York Times bestseller book, “SuperLife: The five fixes that will keep you healthy, fit and eternally awesome.” 

Darin worked with fitness-company Beachbody to formulate one of the top super food shakes in the USA a whole-food supplement called, “Shakeology”, as well as the plant based, “Ultimate Reset 21-day” detoxification program. 

 Darin is one of the founders of Barukas™, new super nut from the Savannah “Cerrado” of Brazil. Through sustainable business practices the company is committed to supporting this important biome by planting 20 million Baruzeita trees. 

 He also launched in early 2020 a health APP 121 Tribe created to help people learn about whole food plant based eating, recipes, easy to follow education, habit tracking and exercise.

An advisor to P5 Energy a cutting edge “green” technology incubator with a primary focus on zero- pollution power systems.

Partner in GREENPATH™, dedicated to real solutions for a new world with cutting edge nano technology for hand and surface sanitation. 

Darin is also the Director of Strategic Alliances and the Global Health Ambassador for APPICS, a revolutionary new social media platform monetizing passion and content through cryptocurrency and block chain.  As well as an advisor to Footprint™ which is eliminating single-use plastics with plant-based compostable products that don’t harm you or the planet.

 Darin holds a Bachelor of Arts in Exercise Physiology/Nutrition and a Masters in Psychology.

Interview transcript:

Darin: Well, or people want you to get over it and be better. Yes. Do does this world, especially the United States, let's make a general statement. Understand grief. No. So dealing with real grief and feelings and cultivating the learning, I think we largely fail as a society. Just look around, we're still fighting each other. We're fighting each other. We're not learning anything. We're just more divisive. You're saying this, you're doing that. It's just, it's a bunch of crap. And so, so on the one hand, I think the insensitivity of people just want you to get through it quick, or we don't want to sit with pain. We don't want to sit with the reality of what our world is doing, what we're doing to animals, what we're doing to the environment, what we're doing to each other, what we're doing as political divisiveness. Uh, we, we don't want to, we just want to be right.

Darin: And in that being right, we, we divorce ourselves from connection. We divorce ourselves from the opportunity. We divorce ourselves from the actual compassion, empathy, and love that is there. I believe underneath it, all that we'd largely exponentially are more connected at the base needs of all of us. We all want love. We all want connection. We all want security. We all want abundance. We all want water, food, power, shelter. We all want peace for ourselves and our families. We all want the same thing, but yet the world just teaches us not that the world. So as I'm going through this, I'm seeing the seduction of victimization. So I think that the world it's so weird, so used to the seduction and I saw it, you know, I saw the seduction of be a victim, and now it's subtle. It's very subtle because for now it's been two years since I lost my house and people that, Oh my God, I'm so sorry. And, and although that's coming from a place of kindness, the world actually teaches us. I believe to stay in that vibration. Oh my God, the house, Oh my God. I lost everything. Oh my God. Uh, I love, I love to stay in the world or to stay in the laws.

Darin: When in truth, it's all an inner game. It's all an inner of the truth. Who am I? What am I, where am I going? What is my view? And what do I hope to accomplish? Because my view is it's not happening to me as it's just randomly occurring. It happened for me in ways that I may not be able to unpack maybe some right away, but maybe I'm not until you're able to unpack all of the blessings that happened to me, losing everything I own for the another, for the next 10 20 for the rest of my life, 20 years, 30 years, whatever. But I teach her for sure. Yeah. But I do know that there has been infinite gifts as the result of the tremendous loss that I, that I occurred. So that being said, isn't, isn't a lot of life. We can't escape pain.

Darin: We can't escape confrontation. We can't escape. Fear, resentment, shame, anger. But how long do we want to hold on to it? Are we willing to look underneath it? Are we willing to take ownership of our experience of what is there for me to look into the mirror and to be a better person as a result. So if I look through the lens of everything in my life, everything is happening for me, everything good, bad, whatever you want to define, it's happening for me. So if I look at it through that, there's no accidents. There's no accident in the universe. There's no, there's none of that. That it's the symphony of balance within this mystery that we can't possibly get our heads around. But I look at life because that, for me, that takes me out of the victimization, puts me into this, understanding this unity that I am absolutely without a doubt, connected to everything and everyone. And every cell in my body is connected to every cell, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, so for me, that's the seat that I sit in when every thing gets hard or when everything is not hard, it's like, listen, it is this, it's an up and down. It's a turnaround. It's a twisting, it's turning. What are you going to do? What are you going to do with two 12, 2020? Are you literally just going to complain about all these things and people

Chase: And wait for January one, 2021 to hit. And all of a sudden, all our problems are solved. He doesn't work that way, you know,

Darin: And it's not, yeah, there is no vaccination. That's going to take this away. There is no, uh, official government or otherwise it's going to magically have all the correct answers, none of it. But I do know that there's a lot of things that we can do. There's a lot of things that we can choose choosing how to take care of ourselves. If these people aren't going to have the, the, the conscious conversation and the rational, common sense, conversation of sleep well, eat well, drink, good water, eat plants, celebrate your family and community. Get good sleep exercise that you largely will be the strongest person ever to deal with everything in life meditate, do breathing exercises, do all, get outside, get under the sun, turn on your vitamin D turn on your connection with the entire planet. If we're not going to, if, if the mainstream is not going to talk about that, then they're doing something else that does not align with truth.

Darin: There is another agenda. Yeah. So it's like without getting into that conspiracy, that I'm probably will never know that we, you and I speaking right now and the people listening, you know, that what I just said is common sense where we can do connect, connect, like this, be open with each other, smile, take your fricking mask off at home and smile with your kids and your family. And you know what, and I'm going to say it, the fact that any government are California and sanity telling us who we can't hang out with during Thanksgiving, and the fact that you could jump in your car and it's killing exponentially more people than anything else COVID or otherwise that they can take. Uh, you know, they can take that agenda of telling me who I can hang out with them the holidays and go fly a freaking kite with,

Chase: You know, so it's

Darin: Like, you know, that, that I did not, that is not the freedom of this country, you know, so informed decision. So I'm not going to go off on COVID and all of that stuff, my point to all of that is don't give your power away command and demand your power, your strength take care of yourself because you will have infinitely exponentially, more power, more sovereignty, more serenity, more community, more joy, more power to make choices, and then resonating and collaborating with people like that. That is how our country was developed. And if things don't align with that, then we need to take our country back, whatever that means, whatever that means. So, you know, again, person in the mirror. So anyway, I don't know why I'm going off on all that, but yeah,

Chase: I love it, man. Uh, if there ever was a more powerful introduction into the show, uh, I think that was it welcome officially to ever forward radio I'm on here with Darren Olien and, um, truly man, uh, before I could even get into my spiel of, uh, of our story here. I mean, that completely embodied it, um, that, uh, that is the ever forward mentality. That is that everything that happens around me is for me. Uh, and we have to step up, it's a choice. I love how you're talking about that. It is a choice to, to view it like that. And it's not an easy one. It, it, with that comes all of the work, all of the responsibility for, for self empowerment, self-education and fulfillment. Um, but then also, you know, to become the teacher for those around us, because if we can maintain dominion over our world and then spread that and resonate, like you were saying out to the people in loved ones around us, I mean, that is the world that I want to live in, that I choose to live in. And the one that I am building and sure the one you are building as well, man. So welcome. Welcome to Ever Forward brother.

Darin: Well, I love, I love that. What a great, what a great, uh, title of your podcast. Thank you. That is, that is, it is ever forward. It is ever forward leading, but it's also not like you said, you hinted at and mentioned that this is not it's. I use this term all the time and my podcast to a fatal convenience. The convenience is to not turn and own your pain, your shame, your anger, your resentment, and your fear. It's so easy to project that out at the world and to find all of the reasons to support your pain, your anger, your resentment, your fear, and projected all over. Somebody vomit all over somebody. When in fact most of it, you already have inside of you and so much vitriol, so much anger that's coming out. You know, there's a, there's a great, there's a native American that said to me, maybe 15 years ago, he said that when you squeeze an orange juice, what's in the orange comes out.

Darin: So, so when you squeeze an orange, orange juice comes out. When you get stressed and life squeezes you, what you already have in you, it's coming out. Wow. Now it's up to you. What do you want to do? Do you want to run around being upset and angry that your world is destroyed? If this guy becomes president or this guy, did you gonna let that suppress and depress you when in fact maybe this worlds, maybe 98% of this crap going on in our lives is affecting us directly and to certainly have so, uh, no, so, but, but at the end of the day, when I'm in my home, when I'm living my life, largely 99% of my life, I'm, I'm not thinking,

Chase: Thank you for saying that. Thank you for saying that. I mean, not to discredit any other way that any other person is affected by the higher ups. And, you know, I know how that goes. Uh, that reminds me a lot of my time in the military. Um, but really here we are now in our homes, more than ever in our world, having to create a life out of our home, out of our home unit, it does not directly affect us to the level that I think we allow it to. And I may get some hate on that, but I mean, truly like we are home, we have dominion over our home and what else is going on that is choosing for us. It really, I think we're just allowing that kind of excuse to just go on and on and on.

Darin: Yeah. And listen, you know, there is, of course I agree with you. And, and, and, and there's very real is millions of jobs that have been destroyed. You know, there's a part of me that wants, that wants to, if anyone is listening to this and knows of an organization, a small business organization, that's, that's potentially filing class action lawsuits against, um, governors, uh, uh, um, and higher ups that are making these choices, uh, and destroying people's lives over the small number of people, uh, that are being, uh, adversely affected by, uh, this pandemic over, they're not talking about the suicide rates. They're not talking about the, the exponential lives of our children that have been just absolutely destroyed. Um, and so there's a, there's a massive amount of information that they're not talking about. And that, that, that is being affected. And, you know, the, the low class middle-class all of us class or being new in class are being impacted.

Darin: So I want to, so if anyone's listening, I want to support anything where it makes sense that, uh, those people that have lost everything that, that they give another chance to reopen and let informed Americans make their own choices, protect those people that are compromised a hundred percent, but then the rest of us that have a 99.9, 8%, um, dominion over, uh, this suppose, you know, this virus and Corona and all of that, then let us make our own choices. Just like you make our own choices of eating, whatever we want. And, you know, we have, uh, only 2.5% of Americans are actually deemed as healthy. So we're letting that happen. Uh, we're letting people die, uh, by the truckload every day in cars and accidents,

Chase: We are letting chronic illness and disease just run rampant in the world. And, uh, that's been something that I really want to dive into. I know you could speak volumes on this. Um, I, before doing this, I worked in a clinical environment. I have been a clinical health coach for years, and I would hand in hand with people's primary care providers, walk them out of the doctor's office and into my room to go over, working out, to go over physical activity, to go over nutrition, to go over relationship health, to go over stress and not to knock anything significant that they worked on with their doctors. So much of that work is necessary for acute care. Um, but the feedback that we would get when they would just address making small little healthy changes in their day, by addressing a past trauma in their life, by addressing, uh, a superior at their job that was just suppressing them and adding immense stress, that they would then take home to their families. Those lifestyle, healthy habit changes were the ones that I over years saw build up the greatest healthy snowball for them, but then also would melt away so many things like obesity, disease, uh, indigestion, chronic illness, headaches, fatigue, energy levels, like where does it all begin? Darren, if you could boil it all down, like where does it begin for somebody to truly just to take ownership of their health and really their life?

Darin: Well, I think you, you, you hit it on the head and that, that ownership is first, uh, understanding that you're making the choice and choice is deciding that you're going to make a change is the single greatest choice. Now it, isn't no longer rocket science. Now, listen, if you have a underlying condition, then you need to address that. And that always should be done with your healthcare provider. Um, but th th the foundational things, which is what I put in put, put in my book super life is, and the reason I wrote it that way is because people 7% of all Americans, nearly 10%. So, uh, 30 million people are not even drinking an ounce of water a day. So consider that water never arms reach. There you go. Exactly.

Chase: I'm on my second one already, and it's only 11:30 AM.

Darin: Perfect. So, so imagine that the core of every chronic disease is dehydration, and then you add on top of it, people are drinking poor quality water that can't even effectively get into the cellular membrane. Um, and then on the add on top of it, water quality, uh, is it's convenient to turn on the tap, but it's inconvenient to have pesticides, herbicides, PCBs, pharmaceuticals, uh, VOC, volatile, organic compounds, reacting to, uh, every many different types of chemicals in the, in the water, uh, heavy metals, uh, uh, pencils,

Speaker 5: Things that we maybe don't even know about yet, you know, that are at such a minute level that we haven't even tested. You know, what is the efficacy against us?

Darin: Exactly. So, um, Erin Brockovich, you know, big, big advocate for water and not, and let's not wait until, you know, the waters so bad that it's literally killing people, but slowly, if we don't clean our water and rebuild it back again, then, then largely we're just getting this, you know, thinking weed, drinking water. When in fact it's kind of a toxic soup over time, it's really detrimental. It's not allowing for pure hydration. So hydration is key. Number one, uh, reverse osmosis, add a pinch of Himalayan crystal salt, which gives the electrolytes the size molecules that you need for, for osmosis in, in, in and out of the cell. So super easy. Um, and then, you know, you know, again, plants, plants, plants eat more variety of plants, uh, salads, um, you know, try different colors and add that to your diet. Realizing that every color is basically a different polyphenol, different antioxidant, diff different vitamin and mineral content support your local farmers more than ever support people that are growing food next to you, uh, that you know, where these farms are from, uh, support the farmers that are also transitioning into organic agriculture, permaculture, biodynamic, uh, you'll, you'll pay for local food as well as not transported food that was picked too early and is micro micro nutrients.

Darin: So certainly add in all your plants, add in the diversity. I would say, if you, if you're not cutting out meat, dairy, fish, and eggs, which are largely a whole nother toxic side of it, um, most of that, where it's coming from, uh, just lower that consumption and increase your plant intake, increase your water intake, make sure you're getting eight hours of sleep a night, get a mask, turn out all the lights, put a mask on, uh,

Speaker 5: Apart for sure sleep is King.

Darin: You can't, you can't make that up. You can't coffee yourself out of a bad nights. We try, right. We try, we try all the time. And so when your number one incident of dehydration is fatigue. So imagine that I'm tired, but I'm jittery because of the coffee. So my adrenals are shot, and then I try to go to sleep, but I can't really go to sleep. Cause a acidification is hard, creating it hard in order for my body to switch over from the melatonin to really then allow myself to sleep. And then we wake up again, we don't drink the water. We reach for the coffee. We haven't slept so good. And the cycle continues and continues and continues. So you're way behind not to mention, I think the stat is one night of bad sleep or one to two hours less sleep a night cuts your immune system down by 30%. Yeah.

Chase: Not to mention most people. When you wake up in a poor night's sleep, like you're saying, you actually wake up. If you took your labs, you would be considered pre-diabetic most, most of the times, exactly. That's the power of sleep people.

Darin: That's the power of sleep. And that, that kind of research when they start pulling those bits of information together is so astonishing. And then the, also the microbiome is so reactively, different and stressed when, when you don't get a good night's sleep. So therefore the body's ability to break down a simulate and transform your food to be able to be used, uh, by your body, which your microbiome is intimately connected to. We have to have it in order for the proper metabolism. So all of those things are so connected. So that is a stressful situation that you can remedy. Um, and then, like I said, diversification of food, I would also then nose breathe. Uh, I just had my podcast with Patrick McKeown. I think it, I think it just came out today, uh, or whenever this is, it's going to be out whenever this is aired.

Darin: But, um, so Noah's breathing takes down. The stress puts you into parasympathetic nervous system. So, uh, optimal performance rather than a stressful response, try to shut your mouth while you sleep. Some people even have used tape. I've heard of that. Yeah. Yeah. So if you don't have a compromised sleeping apnea, obviously do not tape your mouth shut if you're compromised, sleeping, but it can very much even a light athletic tape where you can actually, uh, breathe through it a little bit, helps train your system to receive more oxygen through the nitric oxide induction through the nasal passages. And, and then not to mention you'll receive more oxygen and more oxygen saturating, and your body is intimately connected to no disease, bacteria, virus can survive.

Chase: No one's ever going to knock adding more oxygenation to your circulatory system. It's exactly. Yeah. You can't go wrong. It reminds me, uh, are you familiar

Chase: With James ness doors breath, the book, powerful, powerful

Darin: Edible stuff. And so it's, it's beautiful that we've taken, uh, what the yoga practices been trying to tell us for a long time, but now we've really started to understand and implement breathing in a whole other way. It went from kind of this esoteric explanation to this very grounded, physiological stress, less situation, and, uh, optimal performance. And that's not for an athlete. That's for someone, uh, sleeping well, drinking well breathing well, you're now eating well. Now you're talking about basically improving your performance by, by exponential amounts just by those things alone. And therefore getting out in the sun, getting back into circadian rhythm, viewing some light without, um, glasses on in the morning, allowing for that circadian rhythm to, to support your rhythm. While you go to sleep your melatonin production, like these are all

Chase: Easy, easy, easy ways for sure

Darin: That are going to then boost your immune system and naturally keep you strong. And of course, exercising and moving. Uh, there was, uh, um, Dr. Hagerman just had this article that his colleagues put out and, uh, there's some incredible serotonin dopamine effect in the brain just by moving forward. So literally taking a walk or doing anything that, that is like even

Chase: Propulsion, just

Darin: Moving forward in any kind of way. That actually turns on brain mechanisms, neurogenesis, uh, optimizing immune system response.

Chase: Hey, that bodes well for my brand. That's for sure ever forward baby

Darin: Connected to research. That's supporting brain performance, uh, healing performance and, and, you know, that's, that's, that's a no, no, no pun intended, but that's a no brainer that moving. Even if you're having a bad mood, if you're fighting with your spouse, if you have enough awareness to go, you know what, I I'm getting really upset. Let me just go walk around the block, come back, take a breath in my head. And you're literally changing your brains chemistry and your brainwaves. And you will have a greater instead of convergence, right, converging down on a issue or a problem or a person you'll be able to expand and have a greater view and a greater ability to step out of the fight or flight response. And then not further support the anger, fear, resentment that you're about to just pour gasoline on. So, you know, we all come from those arguments. We've all had them. We've all made mistakes. We've all said things that we didn't want to say, and it only further, uh, creates bad situations worse. So these are things that are going to help your body, but they're also going to help your brain and your relationships. And you mentioned that as well. I mean, it's so key.

Chase: Well, I say it all the time where the mind goes, the body will follow and, you know, even vice versa, if we honor and respect the external self, eventually I believe in my experience, we will have, you know, eventually kind of get to that internal reflection point and we'll begin to address things, same thing inward versus out. You know, if we address internally what's going on and try to help that self, then it is only natural that it will trickle out and manifest into external physiological change

Darin: A hundred percent. And you know, and I, you know, I love, I love the faith of that too, when you just like, Hey, not only am I benefiting right now of filling myself up full of love and support and just acknowledging this amazing connection and even asking those questions, who am I, you know, like every day, who am I, and just sitting with the answer, not allowing your doesn't cap to come from your mind, you don't have to go, Hey, Oh, and the answer that I'm Darren, I, or you really just Darren, or are you this kind of being that's how,

Chase: Who am I today? And that we get, we get to kind of have some, some malleability with that. I think, you know, who we are, I'll even say should kind of change day to day, because look at what everything you were just talking about when we're incorporating all of these things, uh, health, wellness, sunlight, water movement, like it is changing us at the molecular level. Um, and we do things, you know, for a positive influence, we get a positive result hopefully. And just so just think about all the things that we're not doing and or that we are doing that we believe that we have a negative connotation, imagine that negative influence it's having. Um, it's so kind of esoteric in a way, but also it's so fundamental, I think, um, and this, I think is just the fundamental, simple truth that if we can all get to imagine what the change we can create in our own lives, in the world and on that kind of global scale, Darin, I'm really curious when you were traveling the world when you were, you know, going through this TV show and when you were connecting with people and countries and superfoods and just, you know, biohacking and all of these incredible things that people of the earth and the earth have to offer.

Chase: Was it more of, for you like a confirmation of yes. The things that I have found, things that I'm working on for, you know, myself to be true, because look, what else is going on in the world, or were you just kind of like in all of what else is out there that you have not even tapped into?

Darin: I think it's a combination of both, for sure. I mean, you know, it was certainly fueled by a curiosity of course, and the curiosity for me didn't end at, okay, I've read enough research papers on, on, on my Google search. Um, it came by way of realizing that that's not the end all be all of anything, just because we can find out information about information, about information, about information, and it doesn't mean that it's accurate or true. It doesn't mean that that stops there. And so for me, I, I, my curiosity was, I mean, really at the core of superfood hunting and that kind of thing was about, I mean, the, all of the world when you're sitting on a mountain top at 17,000 feet, or if you're sitting in the jungle, uh, having ants bite you, or, you know, stranded on the Amazon river, um, and having to rely on a, on a, on a group of people to, to stay the night that you've never met before.

Darin: It, it was that human connection. That was first when you go off to these places, because largely you're in a very, very foreign situation. You have to immediately trust the people that are bringing you into those areas. And then it was about, okay, I am curious about these foods and nuts and how are they living? How are they using these plants and nerves and all these things. And then I'll always for the last 20 years in the periphery, I'm like, wow, they're on the one hand, I'm learning so much about old ways of doing things. And on the other hand, they're suffering, they don't have clean water. They need to provide for their family because largely we're, we're, there's very few cultures in the world that completely live off the land anymore. So, so we have to rely on this, uh, modernization on the one hand. So how do they do that? Very difficult. Um, so I'd look at like, how can I improve their lives if I do a trade with them and they can, they can do that. And at the same time I was started, gut start, get, start started to get into water, born issues that, you know, 9,000 kids a day are dying of waterborne diseases that are fecal infused bad water situations, where they're filling up Jerry cans and then bringing back to their family and playing Russian roulette. Every time they drink water. So

Chase: More or less should be air quote here, easy

Speaker 6: Fix, right. Just clean water.

Darin: And in fact it really is, which is why it's, which is why I've struggled with that going, okay, so you have number one, people dying 97.5% of the people dying of degenerative diseases in America at least have degenerative diseases. Um, you have 9,000 kids dying of waterborne diseases. Most of which the whole communities are suffering from, from clean water. You have all these nations around the world that largely are absolutely failing at basic needs of the people. So I kind of was like, I'm not an anti-government person at all, but I'm kinda like you guys

Speaker 6: Suck at your job. You guys, you guys are,

Darin: And almost just have me throw a dart at the globe and there's gonna be people suffering that don't have food. Don't have water, go to Malaysia and go hang out with people who are living in our plastic. And tell me that that is something that's, uh, anyone should be living in, of course not. So, uh, I just believe that it's a power of us and our communities and our resonance of our own groups. I mean, you're film the military, get a band to get a band of brothers and sisters together. They can do some, right.

Speaker 6: Small team on a mission. You'd be amazed. The change that can ripple out. Yeah.

Darin: Yeah. So if you take instead of destruction or protection, you do it out of the desire to actually change, create safety for, for animals around the world. They're being tortured and butchered and, and inhumanely used protect our oceans from plastic and all of this stuff, protect our people, get our people, shelter, get our kids clean water. So you name it. Uh, every country I've been in, um, your government's failing. And so all of these NGOs that pop up. Yeah, great, cool. But it, it comes by way of small bands of people getting together and actually doing things. Um, uh, you know, just in the news, uh, uh, world animal news just released a share, came on board. It was called the loneliest elephant and the world was, uh, by itself in a cage forever. And they finally got this, this, uh, elephant free, uh, brought it back to Pakistan where it had this beautiful place to live the rest of its life.

Darin: You know, it's like, so, you know, look a chair. Did she use her influence, put her own cash in, uh, and did that, why don't we keep doing that? We can, and we have great organizations doing stuff like that. So, so I care about the environment and people and animals. So it's like everywhere you look, you're seeing the destruction of choices and the destruction of power, uh, thwarted in the wrong direction. So, so my world right now is moving from soup. I will always be connected to superfoods. I will always find superfoods. I will always connect, uh, and, and be involved with all of that stuff. But I'm moving and expanding my world into all of these things I've seen for so long on the ground into actionable things that we can do differently. It's so much, we started to do it on, on, down to earth as well.

Darin: We were able to go to these places, that Jaguar rescue that was in Costa Rica, saving these beautiful monkeys from being electrocuted from unprotected line, you know, uh, human power lines and stuff like that. And so, you know, there's so many things that we're doing horribly and I don't stay on that. It's like, let's just get together with groups of people that know what to do and how to do it. And let's make some changes. That's where I'm moving. And so going all the way back to take care of yourself and your health and your relationships, and then be altruistic. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Without a doubt that being in service outside, beyond yourself is therapeutic to your heart, to your cholesterol, to your brain. We know that we can measure

Chase: In ways that I don't think we ever will,

Darin: You know, exactly. But at the end of the day, I feel good when I am in doing that, I just did a tree planting for, uh, um, uh, one tree.org. And we're planting endemic trees throughout California. And just literally with my own hands, putting new saplings in the ground and to be able to do that is so incredible to do it. And then knowing you're connected to this goal of hundreds, of thousands of change of trees that are changing and helping the ecosystem. And then let's just keep doing that and doing that. And those are infinitely different things like that, that you can get involved with, um, human trafficking, uh, plastic free ocean, you name it,

Chase: Throw a dart on the globe and, you know, pick a cause. Um, yeah. All necessary. Yeah. Well, Darren, you mentioned earlier, uh, to kind of, you know, shift gears a little bit, uh, I want to address something that, you know, I have learned so much from you about, uh, and that, you know, from book and all of the work that you're putting out now, I would say it's kind of like the foundation and that's super foods and so much, so, I mean, you've even got your own product out shutout, you know, Baruch has a, I haven't tried them yet, but, uh, I mean, I know anything you put your name behind is going to be powerful, immensely powerful for us. Um, what does that term superfoods, what does it really mean? What does it not mean? And you know, what are some examples of things that people can like tap into, go out and get today here now that is going to add value and vitality to their life?

Darin: You know, I, I will define superfoods a little differently because I think, I think you can make a choice of romaine lettuce to romaine lettuce is next to each other. One was sent to you from who knows where you don't know where it's from. Another one was, uh, grown in biodynamic, rich regenerative ag agriculture from, you know, your farmer down the street, five miles away. One could argue that that is super food, right? It's super connected to everything that supports the economy, the people, the local communities, and the better way of growing food, as opposed to monocropping and, or chemicalized growing food conventionally. So I will expand superfood from that perspective. I think our lens needs to change my lens

Chase: To change.

Darin: Exactly. So, you know, so, but, but that being said, think of it also as the food you're taking in every bite you're consuming, how much nutrients and benefit are you getting from each bite, as opposed to something that is not grown very correctly. It may have also toxic compounds and that's detrimental to your health. So not only you can look at us organic and biodynamic and all of these locally sourced foods, et cetera, and that is free of toxic compounds, compounds, and pesticides. And it's also highly contributive from a polyphenol antioxidant, micronutrient rich. So is there sometimes a little cost difference? Yes, but you're not taking in disease causing cancer, causing pesticides that they've been experimenting on us for the last 75 years, which is insane to me, glyphosate, Roundup, ready, all of that stuff, which we already know the beautiful work by Dr. Zach Bush ripping apart. I digestive system

Chase: Recently.

Darin: Incredible. Yeah. So, so, so my superfood definition at the same time, there could be a beautiful Apple. And then I could say, you know, a incredible durian or jackfruit that is, you know, unders or, or Kaimuki bamboo like everyone on the show, right? So Camou Khumbu is like under so much stress in the Amazon it's being flooded by the Amazon. Uh, and, and within that environment, and then markets 16,000 feet, uh, she Zandra, uh, stressed in the sovereign areas of, of the mountains of China

Speaker 7: Earning their existence every day, they have to earn their existence.

Darin: Yeah. So their, their environment is stressing them. And they've adapted to those stressors with compounds that are not only protecting them to continue to grow. It just so happens that these beautiful plants and fungal kingdom mushrooms and mycelium, that it just so happens that we consume them. And we benefit largely from all of those compounds, um, to help us thrive. So you've got, you've got herbs, you've got super herbs, you've got super mushrooms, you've got super foods. So it's really taking on this idea that everything you put in your mouth and I get food needs to taste good. And I, and I celebrate food like crazy. Like when, when food is fresh and alive, it is exploding with flavor and I'm not afraid of carbohydrates. I'm not afraid of fruits zero, not at all. And the great work by, uh, uh, the guys. Um, uh, what's the name?

Darin: Uh, I forget, I'll have to remember the book, but there's so much that we're missing out with this phobia food that we need to get back to our common sense, get back to the harvesting, the celebration of whole healthy foods that are so delicious and so abundant, but we've been manipulated through sugar, salt, and fat. And that is an interesting thing because that the sugar, salt and fat has manipulated our senses, which then, um, the evolutionary aspect of leaning forward. It is always a score when you find food that is nutrient dense in our, in our limbic system. So if I don't have to expend too much energy to find caloric density, that's a win from an evolutionary standpoint, survival exactly. At its deepest level, because the body doesn't want to expend more energy than what it, what it can find and use or else we would die.

Darin: Right. So, so now sugar, fat salt is added fat for sure. Refined everything else. When you have, we can just go down the street and find all this caloric density that's processed without, you know, the proper fibers and whole food. Then it just goes right to that limbic system. That's a score. I'm just going to keep eating that. And that's the problem with overeating. It bypasses all the food manufacturers know this, so we, and then our microbes change. And so now that micro biological system changes, which largely is, is it gets thrown off and changes our entire assimilative function as well as our immune system

Chase: Rewrites our operating system. Absolutely.

Darin: Yup. And so, and so now if we go back and go, listen, I've been manipulated through food science and through, you know, the, the largely these few corporations that are running most of these processed foods, I've been manipulated through that, just realize that that is true. And then go back to whole foods, go on the outside of the grocery store, get the whole healthy food, true

Chase: External lab people.

Darin: Exactly. And then you will start rewriting and then those cravings will also start going away and you'll start craving the beautiful bounty that is already here, eat, eat, eat a fresh organic date. And tell me that, that, that the universe and God already did create the most beautiful candy in the world anyway.

Chase: Amazing. Well, so well said, man. And, uh, one other thing I want to definitely dive into here, as we begin to kind of wrap up, you definitely began to talk about it in the beginning. And, um, it's one of my favorite chunks of your world and particularly in your podcast, the fatal conveniences, um, what a mind blowing concept, something that is so duh, uh, but also kind of scary. I mean, the things that you go over in that segment, I think like if we just took those two words, fatal conveniences and the listener or the viewer, we just took those two words in that concept and applied them to today. You life here today. Can you dive deeper into that for us please? What does that term really mean? And how can we use this lens of a fatal convenience to, to empower our lives, to empower our healthy habits, to empower our questioning? Just everything really. I love this concept.

Darin: Yeah. Perfect. Yeah. You know, it's funny because I really, I realized that what was something that was going on and two very powerful ways in my life, my father, before he passed away, passed away 17 years ago, but about five to six, seven years of his life before he passed away, by the way. Uh, so he passed away in 2004. My father passed in 2005. Yeah. Oh yeah. Wow. Sorry.

Chase: Likewise, uh, um, terminal illness, uh, one of those just freak freak things. Absolutely. But it was, you know, not to go too off on a tangent, but was the biggest catalyst in my life for questioning everything for my own health and my wellness. And just in the beginning it was fear. Like I don't ever want to end up like that, but also now empowering because we, we get to learn this human body, right? Yeah.

Darin: Oh a hundred percent, dude. I mean, if, if there's anything that doesn't spark the legacy more than that, like seriously, because that now how I take that information and expand the legacy and like, I can't do the same thing, look at the results or whatever that is, whatever those messages are, but I'm certainly going to live full on ever forward.

Chase: That was his phrase entirely like talk about legacy. Yeah. It was his mantra. He instilled in us, my whole family growing up for years and to his dying breath, you know, nothing was a problem. There's a gift and it's somewhere in here and, uh, yeah, ever Ford is my entire being is legacy everything for sure.

Darin: Dude, I'm honored, honored to hear that celebrate. I celebrate him. That's why we're here

Chase: Today to celebrate this

Darin: Amazing. Um, I love that. I feel, I feel that powerfully and I think, and I think, uh, yeah, I mean my father, uh, you know, that his death was the catalyst for me to get to get rolling. And um, I forgot what the question was, fatal conveniences, you know? Yeah. So, so, but, but going back to my dad, so when my dad, my dad was, uh, uh, ag and agricultural professor at the university of Minnesota, he then tenured and retired driving his motorcycle through the hallways of the university. He just wanted to do it. And he just wanted to rip his Harlem. Yeah. He had that little part of, and then he tried, he tried to be so good and like, be the professor, be the smart guy, be all, but yet he had this a little tweak. That's awesome. Which, which is funny because very much I found out later as we kind of got to know each other as adults, I'm like, Oh, I see that in like, we're very similar.

Darin: Um, and so my dad, after he retired, then he went back, uh, became a counselor at the university of Minnesota. And in that process kind of, as he got into that, he realized that he was getting foggy. His brain was fogging out and he couldn't think, and you'd go into these daises. And what he realized was way before anyone else he researching and realizing that he had what's. Now people don't even know still called a chemical sensitivity disorder. So chemicals in the environment, if there were colognes on someone deodorants, uh, laundry detergent, uh, carpets that were new paints, fire retardants on, um, sofas, you name it, all of that stuff, tweaked him out, couldn't even think. So he had to end up writing these letters and educating people who was around him, Hey, please, don't wear this. Here's an alternative, please don't wear that. Here's an alternative. That's really where I started seeing fatal conveniences. So my father was trying to educate and listen, I'm thinking, that's weird that it is this in your head. And

Chase: You can't be asking everybody to change their life in their colognes in their sense. And like the carpets right on the surface, that's, that's crazy. Right.

Darin: Right. And then you come to realize the reality is the reality that 99% of this stuff is never tested. And that the data is actually showing and proving that these are disruptive compounds or going electric compounds that we are ingesting. And we're also in, like transdermally being exposed to that are absolutely hormone disrupting cancer causing toxic compounds that it was only, then it was just this tiny bit. And not everyone else because my dad, he was an alcoholic and sober for 30 years, but his liver and he lost his thyroid because he was an engineer, uh, on creating a atomic bomb. Radiation. Yeah. Yeah. So, so my dad was at one of the chief engineers in the atomic bomb creations. Uh, and which I didn't know until later, but I did know that he had his thyroid was shot and his liver was shot from the alcoholism.

Darin: And so he, his immune system was just compromised. Any exposure to the stuff with throw him over the edge. So long story short, that is in the back of my mind, I'm now smelling stuff. And I'm now like, I'm, that's invasive to me because I can start picking up on how that is not good for me to ingest and to smell. And so to this day, if someone wears any perfume, I don't care if it's the best in the world, essential oils, all that stuff. Fantastic. Anything chemicalized it just, it gives me a headache. Wow. So, so this, so when I'm looking at the world 20 years ago, with this amazing researcher, Dr. Mohsen, who are managed that I studied with 20 years ago, he was telling me about the fatal conveniences of a cell phone. And he's like, this is changing the RNA DNA signaling, creating tumors.

Darin: And I'm looking at him going, yeah. But why would they have these? I don't understand. It's this kind of frequency, it's this kind of Hertz frequency, it's this kind of vibration, it's this kind of blah, blah, blah. And I was just like, wow. And so of course, do I have a shield device on here? Yes. Do I turn it off when it's on my body? Yes. So all of these things, so most of my life I'm being exposed to this information. So I had to finally go, okay, I got my own podcast and I'm seeing this stuff for the last 20 years. Like everywhere. I look, these chemicalized companies from detergents to deodorants, to, you know, uh, toxic compounds that, that, uh, they put in women's underwear, uh, contributing to breast cancer, uh, heavy metals in our underarm deodorant, getting into our lymphatic system. Uh, obviously the cell phone and the radiation, the EMF

Chase: Think about everything at home. I battle everybody with on this all the time. Oh, it smells so clean in here. I say, clean doesn't have a smell. That is a fatal convenience. The smell of something clean. No, no, no, no. We have been completely misguided on that

Darin: A hundred percent. Yeah. I mean every, and that's the aha. We've gotten so used to this stuff and to the smell I did, I did a fatal convenience and tweet people out on new car smell.

Chase: I just saw that one. Yeah. I haven't listened to it yet. Yeah. I was like, Ooh, there's going to be good. This is gonna be good because we all love that. Right. Yeah.

Darin: We all have this association to it. And same like what does tide laundry smell like? We have this association, my mom did it in the seventies. It definitely what didn't have any testing whatsoever, but we have this association to clean, but we have to reorient ourselves just like you said, with what clean is and how to get clean. Yeah. And so everywhere I look, there's a fatal convenience. Every everything from do I have blue light glasses on. Yeah. Cause a fatal convenience of this overstimulated blue from these computer screens are hurting my own circadian rhythm, hurting my melatonin and the overstimulation of blue light. So it's like, that's a fatal convenience staring at screens, sitting in the stupid chair too much, right. With closed off, uh, concentrated. So as muscles pulling in our lower back with our shoulders, rolling forward head position, push forward, neck pain, back pain. So much

Chase: Sacrificing our health for conveniences. I just truly from start the day, like the more and more you talk, I'm just like, wow. Like it's, it's even more ingrained everywhere then than we were

Darin: A hundred percent. So my, my dream that I've started here is just to wake people back up, gain the power. It's not to be overwhelmed by this stuff, but just make small choices because it literally is just replacing habits. Like some of this stuff we've advanced so well into creating clean products, right? We have clean deodorants. We have this incredible company. Caldera Lab is one of the most beautiful face serums, right?

Chase: We are both partners with them! I saw, I saw your ad pop up the other day. Absolutely. I have been using for a year.

Darin: Incredible dude, 27 active botanicals, incredibly clean tested, no animal cruelty. I'm like, dude, if I was going to formulate a product, that's what I would do. And so it's, it's we have to, as a society, support these companies and, and, and not, we've got to evolve and then de-evolve our conglomerates that we've spent so much money towards and, and push these companies towards making changes. Now are some of them doing it? Yes. But we need more pressure. Some of these big companies I've been finding out and learning absolutely want to get back into the game and change these things. So I don't want to make every big company evil because there are some good people in those companies pushing in the right direction.

Chase: No, they rely on our feedback. They rely on our, our, our dollar purchase power. You know, we are voting with our dollars, so let's let them know people.

Darin: Yeah. So if they don't change, then they're out, don't spend your hard earned money, uh, towards companies that, that we're now revealing and sharing with you don't care. Uh, largely there is conscious choices of, of putting toxic compounds in. They know it. Uh, so there is, it's not about evil per se. It's about, uh, money first and don't fix it if people don't know about it. And so part of the, part of the love here that I want to share is I saw my father suffer daily with this exposure. And this is happening. Whether you are feeling the effect or not, your body is swimming in this toxic soup. And I just want companies to do better. And I want people to ultimately not have to suffer from this stuff.

Chase: Well, Darren, um, I feel like I could talk to you for hours, man. So, so much truth and value here, but I cannot think of a better way to kind of round out here. The question I ask everybody at the end, um, is this, how do you live a life ever forward? What does that mean to you? And it's even more pertinent here because of how you just ended that statement of watching your father suffer. I went through the same thing, 18 months with this terminal illness. Um, and it was in that duration of time where I thought everything was ending. I was losing all of this and I did. We lost him, but we, I gained so much. I gained everything that I'm doing here today. I gained this new perspective and appreciation for the human potential in the human body and what we can do internally and externally. And I told you before, that was his phrase ever forward, ever forward, EVER FORWARD. And so that's the only reason I'm here today, doing what I do and connecting with people like yourself, that in my opinion are doing the same, but I would love to know them. And what does that mean to you? How do you live a life ever forward?

Darin: I'm going to go back to, there's nothing, actually the irony of going back, I'm not going back and going forward, I'm going in and moving forward. Always for me, the only thing that fuels the truth for me is, is deeply being quiet when I'm deeply quiet, the voice, the connection, the essence of the truth of who I am and what I am and what this beautiful universe and planet is. That is what I'm in service to the truth of myself. The light in myself that is connected to everything in all things that moves me forward. I do everything I can to not be directed by anything else. And I, and I practice that on a daily basis. So if it is not of the light, if it is not contributing to the planet and the people and the animals to make everything better without a lose, and that's a win-win win, I will move ever forward in that direction because I can't, and won't, uh, be excited to do anything else for profit, for money for this or that. Um, it's the, it's the, it's an inside game. And so the more I listen to myself, the more I connect to the infiniteness of myself, uh, the more that fuels me ever forward.

Chase: It's an inside game. I love that, man. I love that. Um, it's been an honor. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time. And, uh, I cannot wait to see what else you got coming out, uh, in the world, through your books and your podcast and your content and just, you know, everything you're doing, man, it's, it's, it's needed and appreciated. So thank you.

Darin: Thanks, Chase. This has been such a pleasure and I'm glad you brought up your dad and I resonate and I'm grateful for the, for the work that you're doing and what you're putting out. So I appreciate you. Thank you, brother. Thank you.

In this special solo episode I go over specific questions from the guest speaker panel I was a part of in collaboration with American University, the school I attended for my MS in Health Promotion. Health promotion is the science and art of helping people, organizations, and communities change lifestyle behaviors to move toward a state of improved health, resulting in decreases in chronic disease and health care costs. I answer questions about motivation in your career, finding your WHY, entrepreneurship, the variety of types of jobs in the health, fitness, and wellness space and so much more! If you are interested in a career in the wellness space hopefully this episode will help you along your journey.

Follow Chase @chase_chewning

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• The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan

What are you working towards in your life? A cleaner diet? More income? Improved fitness? All of the above? Guest Kaylin Pyles helps others do just that; set and reach a higher standard in the most important areas of their lives. Former collegiate softball player and NPC Bikini competitor, Kaylin now runs The Higher Standard online health and fitness coaching company out of Austin, TX. She shares her story about how she made massive personal and professional pivots in her life by finally taking a pause to become crystal clear as to what she wanted, how she defined success, and more importantly the clues that those successes left behind to pass on to others.

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• Save 60% on the Level 201 podcast course from Operation Podcast with checkout code EVERFORWARD60 and learn how to successfully record, edit, launch, and even monetize your podcast 

So you are thinking of becoming a health coach, but... which curriculum is the best? Which certification has the highest pass rate? Why should a personal trainer or health care provider consider health coaching for their business? All of these questions and more are discussed in this episode with host Chase, ACE Certified Health Coach, and his wife May, IIN Certified Health Coach. In this episode, they share why they chose health coaching, the differences between the Institute of Integrative Nutrition and American Council on Exercise curriculum, and the type of experience you can expect to have as a health coach.

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• American Council on Exercise

Facing problems in life is part of being a human. Finding purpose out of these problems requires much more perspective and attitude. Overcoming obstacles is not always easy but is doable, but what could we possibly think when these obstacles never seem to be over? In this episode, Sam Tooley shares some special and honest stories of his past and how he was able to channel bad experiences into action and transformation.

Losing someone we love, dealing with depression or anxiety, not knowing what path to follow… These are all barriers that life throws at us. When something similar happens, we have a choice: we could give up, surrender, and go down the rabbit hole. Or we could accept it, believe that this event happened for a reason, and in the end, rise stronger and more resilient. 

Connect with us!

Follow Sam: @coach.samtooley

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[6:15] – What Sam does to recharge and reconnect with himself.

[8:52] – Sam’s background and origins.

[21:57] – Gaining perspective with problems.

[24:38] – Too much freedom can be an issue sometimes.

[35:55] – Helping others is helping yourself.

[45:15] – Having support and taking the right step.

[52:31] – How Sam became a Mindset and Endurance Coach.

[59:08] – Dealing with losses and grief.

[01:10:24] – Responsibility in life.

[01:13:46] – Sam also lives a life Ever Forward.

[01:16:12] – Connect with Sam!

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More About Sam:

Sam Tooley is an Online Endurance & Mindset Coach who has been working for years with people trying to overcome their own limits and barriers. With an impacting presence on social media, Sam is also an entrepreneur and gym owner, two of them being The Garage Gym and Alpha Fit Club.

You prioritize your physical activity and nutrition, but what about the third wellness pillar that could be solely responsible for actually allowing the first two to be optimized? SLEEP! Humans spend years of their lifespan doing it but are we actually getting the quality of sleep we need? Serial entrepreneur and lifetime athlete Matteo Franceschetti believes that when we focus on improving our sleep fitness we can actually optimize our performance, recovery, and overall wellness to levels we have only, well... dreamt about. In this episode, you will learn about cutting edge new technology that will help you sleep better and live a healthier, happier life.

Follow Matteo @matteofranceschetti and @eightsleep

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• How variable is sleep? case study

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Episode transcript:

Matteo: 00:00 My name is Mateo. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Eight Sleep. We are the first sleep fitness company. We develop a technology that helps you improve your sleep. Quality. Sleep matters is one of the three pillars of health with exercise and nutrition. If you want to leave at healthier and longer lives, take care of your plate.

Chase: 00:21 Welcome back everyone. This is your number one source for inspiring content from people who are putting a focus to their passion and truly living a life ever forward conversations and messages that will take your fitness and nutrition and mindset to the next level. I am your host, chase churning. This is ever forward radio,

Chase: 00:56 This show is meant to help you reach your dreams. And I know that you will, but you won't get there without hitting the pillow first every night, right? And that's where today's sponsor at cure nutrition steps up to the plate with their recovery line and sleep products that have been carefully crafted with your daily reset in mind. And I particularly want to bring attention to my tried and true my old faithful for when I absolutely need and even want to get just the best quality night's sleep possible. Something that is going to help promote my complete deep and REM sleep cycles to get me waking up refreshed in non-drowsy every day, to help me get to sleep and stay asleep from something that is non-habit forming, which is crucial for me. So important. Something that I can rely on that as naturally source a very high quality herbal supplement.

Chase: 01:45 I am talking about the one and only Zen from cure the relaxation and sleep supplement. You can get yours and save up to 15% by simply heading to cure nutrition.com and using checkout code ever. Ford that's cured nutrition.com. Check out code ever Ford save 15% off of their Zen or any other highly rated high quality rooted in nature. Wellness supplements cured@nutrition.com. Check out code ever Ford to save 15%. The wo don't drift off into a dream land just yet. For me, gave me just a second, my friends, because you do not want to miss today's episode. Don't sleep through class today, everybody. All right. Hey, what's going on? I'm your host, chase you and welcome to ever Ford radio. And today I'm joined with entrepreneur athlete and fellow sleep junkie Matteo, Trent Shetty. I, I'm always excited to talk shop, especially when it comes to, you know, what it means to live a life over four and all of these little things that we can do and become aware of to just get 1% better.

Chase: 02:52 But if you've been listening to the show for a minute, then you know, how valuable and how much I love sleep, the science behind quantitative data qualitatively, you know how we feel so many things that are individual and unique to us and to, you know, what should be taken into consideration for when I go to sleep, when I wake up my caffeine cutoff time, the temperature in my room. Well, what if you could have a lot of information bounce back to you? What if you could have a mattress really work with you throughout the night in terms of temperature in terms of, well, I'm not going to give away at all. Okay. You definitely want to tune in today to learn about Mateo and his company eight sleep. This is well, it's a technology company. It is a sleep company. It is a mattress company.

Chase: 03:37 It is, it is sleep fitness, a term that Mateo, I don't know if he coined it, but I'm here for it. They have cooling and heating. They've got gentle ways to wake you up. Just there's so many things that can contribute passively. Once you get your baseline established to just getting finally that good night's sleep so that you can rest and recover and just go on living your life, sleep is so, so important. And if this is you definitely find value in today's message, you're gonna love it. And if you think somebody in your life, a coworker or friend can maybe use a little help in the sleep world, please just share this message out. That would mean the world to me, just send it to one person. And if you got any takeaways, any fun pieces of feedback, please don't hesitate to hit us up.

Chase: 04:23 You can always tag us on social @everforwardradio on Instagram. And without further ado, please join me in welcoming Matteo and eight sleep in all things, sleep fitness to ever afford radio. Welcome to the show. Well, Matteo officially welcome, and I am so excited to have you here on the show and to just like learn continuously what it means, you know, to have good sleep hygiene, good sleep health, and you know, all the other things I know we're going to dive into. And just the power that sleep has for us in our personal lives and our longevity in business. And the backstory really behind why creating a business like this was even important necessarily for you. But you know, before we dive into all the goodies, man, please introduce yourself. Who are you? And what are we here to talk about?

Matteo: 05:13 Yeah, sure. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Eight Sleep. We are the first sleep fitness company. We develop a technology that can improve your sleep performance and it will help you recover faster and better. And so today we'll talk about sleep what our technology does, but also what you can do on your own to just improve your sleep efficiency,

Chase: 05:36 Made some bold statements. They're the first company to, to what exactly I, to make sure I got the words, right.

Matteo: 05:43 We have the first asleep fitness company. So we think of sleep as a sort of fitness. And we develop a technology that improves your sleep, which is a bold statement, but is proven with hard data. So let's, let's define our terms out of the gate.

Chase: 05:58 What is sleep fitness? What does that mean?

Matteo: 06:01 Yeah, so I think leap in particular, in the eighties and the night, this was considered like something that, Oh, I just cut my sleep. I'm a stronger person and I'm a stronger or whatever. Well, instead our vision is that sleep is exactly like your fitness and that is why we call it slippage. As you need to take care of that. And in the same way you go to exercise every day or every other day to the gym for an hour, you need to sleep every single day between seven and nine hours to be fit and to be healthy that this live treatments,

Chase: 06:36 I don't disagree with you sleep for me over the years has been something that the more and more I prioritize it, the more and more I respect it. I get incredible returns on that, that ROI, you know? But I'm curious, what was the origin story of this? You were talking about, you know, not that long ago when sleep was kind of something that like I'll do what I'm dead kind of thing. What has been your personal experience of that changing over the years? And you know, how, why do you think?

Matteo: 07:08 Yeah, so, I mean, I was one of the people saying exactly that, right. My, my grandpa was a, was saying the same. But I have always been an athlete in particular, when I was a teenager, I was playing tennis tournament and ski racing. So I have always been into recover. And five years ago I started really looking into sleep because I was not understanding why do I have to sleep eight hours? Can I sleep six hours and get the same? And so I, I learned two things that I think could be interesting here. The first one is it's not written anywhere that you need to sleep eight hours, seven to nine is just what you usually need to get a certain amount of [inaudible]. And so our vision is eight sleep is that potentially we will compress the sleep in the future. So what if in 10 years from now you could sleep only six hours and get more rest than when you were sleeping eight hours,

Chase: 08:00 So less quantity, more quality I'm hearing. Okay.

Matteo: 08:03 Correct. Okay. Because at the end of the day, what you need is that amount of Ram and the, and right now our body is that inefficient. And it takes between seven and nine hours for an average person to get that amount of sleep. But it's not the, you need seven or eight or nine hours. If you are completely inefficient, maybe you need model. Yeah. At the same time, as there is much more evidence of the impact that sleep has on your health. So if you look at health, health is based on three pillars. So recently there is exercise and the reason nutrition and actually sleep is really the foundation. Because if you start sleeping two hours a night, there is no nutrition. There is no exercise.

Chase: 08:52 I, you actually said things in a kind of a hierarchy I have as well. It's it's for me sleep nutrition, exercise. That's kind of how I now live my life. And before, you know, like, no, like, no matter what, even if it's the last thing I do at night at 9:00 PM, I'm going to go get my workout, or I'm just going to scarf down though. I miss my calories by, you know, 800 or something like that. I'm going, I'm going to go train. I'm going to get a workout in no matter how tired I am or the time. And I'm going to just consume a bunch of food. Now, I'm making a little bit of a generalization here. Also, I'm speaking about my personal self. So I don't want a bunch of trolls coming out and yelling at me about what I'm saying, but is that the right way to go about respecting sleep? You know, should it be, should it really be kind of a reprioritization, no matter what, like, no matter what, like at a certain time you need to be sleeping a set of training, no matter what you need to be sleeping instead of eating more calories can you kind of walk us through like why each of those are important and maybe why sleep should be higher up on people's totem pole, so to speak?

Matteo: 09:58 Yeah. I always think sleep should come first for a couple of reasons. First is the easiest, right? Compared to training. And so at least make sure that every day you hit, that is the simple, the simplest of the three second. If you sleep well, you will feel energized as there will be, or mono changes in your body that will help you to eat less or eat healthier. And second, because you have more energy, you will be more prone to go and exercise that day, right? If, if you go to train at 11:00 PM, just because you want to exercise that day, then you will look through this new plate. Probably you will struggle to fall asleep because you just reactivated your body. And so maybe you fall asleep two hours later, and the following day, you wake up and at that point you are sleep deprived and you will start craving bad food. You will not have energy to performance work. And probably you will now less inclined to go and exercise again.

Chase: 11:01 Yeah, you're, you're really, you're setting yourself up to make decisions that maybe your higher self wouldn't and you, you said some key things there, it's your hormones begin to get out of whack, right? You know, you have an imbalance, some things that are going to lead to satiety that are going to lead to your sense of being hungry or full or not, you're then fluctuating with blood sugar levels. You know, then on top of all that, and I'll even go as far as saying, if that's how you choose to kind of prioritize fitness, sleep nutrition, and all these things in your life, and you're willing to always make those sacrifices when it comes to your health and wellness, then that's probably spilling over into other areas of your life as well. You're willing to make other sacrifices because you think this needs to be done first, but you don't really pause to realize how things spill over was that kind of origin story to kind of tap into your personal side a little bit. Cause you know, you said being an athlete your whole life, I doubt you had this foresight the whole time. I'm sure you were making sacrifices for your sport for your training, right?

Matteo: 12:05 Yeah, absolutely. And what, what you understand as an athlete is sleep is great and fundamental for your performance the following day, but it also has a major impact on making sure that you get, you don't get injured another because usually you will never get injured, but sleep is correlated to your recovery. And the recovery has a direct coordination with the amount or the type of injures. And so that is why right now there are metrics like HRV heart rate variability,

Chase: 12:37 Shout out. I track mine right here on whoop. Yeah.

Matteo: 12:42 HRV is so important to really know how hard you should push today. If you want to work out and HRV is strictly correlated to your sleep quality. And Hmm.

Chase: 12:52 Can you walk us through that a little bit more? Can you go a little bit deeper on on that correlation between HRV and sleep quality? How it, you know, how do you describe and define HRV and how do you define and describe sweet, sweet quality sleep quality?

Matteo: 13:08 Yeah. So the, the best time to look at HRV, it should be comparing your HIV during the first deep sleep phase with your HRV in the latest deep sleep phase that Delta is indicative of your recovery during the night, that is the optimal way to look at your, your HRV. Then you can track HRV during the whole day, but as you can imagine, every day is different and then it differently get more tired. And so if you want to look at your HIV really on a daily basis, that will be the perfect time. And that will be the perfect combination of metric. In terms of quantity, I mean, quantity for sleep is always a tricky word because at the end of the day, as we were saying at the beginning, it's not really about the quantity is at the same time. So you need a certain type of quantity, a certain amount of quantity to then achieve the polity, which is what really matters. And so the, the end goal is to try to get around 20% deep sleep and 20% of time that is the bottom line. Like sleep is the part that we would like to compress because four hours is just in a, in, in efficiency in our body. But as long as you are able to hit those percentages percentages, keep on ramp, then you should be good,

Chase: 14:32 Sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep is so important. And if you've been tuning into the show for really the past year, year and a half, you have probably heard me talk about how, how I have prioritize or rather reprioritize my sleep as like the one thing from my personal wellness hierarchy, not only how much more rested I am the next day, but just, it seems to me that lead domino for me, for my productivity, for my energy, for my focus, for my vitality, it's that lead domino. That just, if I can square that away, it seems to just really nine times out of 10, or I should say six days out of the week, six days out of seven, just knocked down all the rest of the stuff, not to say it does it all. But when I treat that right and I respect my sleep, it's like, everything else gets respected and everything else is just in

Speaker 4: 15:23 Alignment. It truly is

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Speaker 4: 17:34 Oh,

Chase: 17:34 You say it's kind of your split when it comes to tracking. Cause right out of the gate, we've been talking a lot of quantitative ways to track, to monitor, to look at this stuff, to really kind of guide our decision making process when it comes to, you know, our nutrition, our training, our sleep, what is your opinion on qualitative? What is your opinion on and like how do you personally kind of tap into look, you know, my, my tracker, my, my bed, my app, whatever is saying one thing, but I'm feeling something different. How do you kind of, how do you navigate those waters?

Matteo: 18:09 Yeah. For sleep only, or for all the three of the three dimensions. So there's an exercise and nutrition. So for sleep, obviously, I mean, how you feel is at the end of the day is the most important thing, right? How you feel in the morning. What I have personally seen is if I hit certain percentages in particular, on, on deep sleep, but also in REM there is a direct correlation with how much, how I feel. If I get more than 18% deep sleep, I usually feel good if I'm above 20%, I feel like great. But obviously a qualitative feedback is probably the most important. And that is a reason why a lot of sleep trackers struggle because most of the people, yeah, they look at these data for a couple of days, but then they say, you know what? I know how I feel.

Matteo: 19:04 I don't need you to tell, I know my body, I know my body. And I know these, I know myself much better than, than you. And so there is where we have a different approach because for us, the data is not the end point, but it's just the starting point. Do we then use thermoregulation based on your data to improve your sleep performance? What do you mean by thermal regulation? So we heat and cool your body during the night to help you fall asleep faster, get more deep sleep and get more Ram. So for us, the data is the baseline is okay, this is how your body is functioning. And based on what in real time is happening in your body, we make adjustments while you are asleep to improve your sleep performance. Wow. But instead Moses. Yeah. And that is how a lot of people, even today I tweeted about that, there was a review of the pod, our technology, there is a person who just posted a tweet about his group data. And with in the group, data is being shown that he's got, the more deep sleep is getting less disturbances and a more restful sleep. So there is an improvement in his sleep across the board, and it's not even as, or our data showing it, but it's Whoa. Wow.

Chase: 20:26 Okay. Amazing. Yeah.

Matteo: 20:28 The same with Dora. So there was another customer a few months ago that posted his zip graph from aura. And he was showing that since when he started using the pod and thermoregulation, so the cooling and the temperature adjustment, he's still sleeping creased, the amount of deep sleep he gets per night. Yeah.

Chase: 20:50 Or ring though, they've been in the game for a long time. Yeah. It's we have all these tools and trackers, you know, Apple watches. I'm double-dipping I wear my whoop. I wear my Apple watch. That's a YouTube, you know, and then we've got, you know, things like aura ring. We've got a lot of technology that has progressed over the years to give us these numbers, to give us this kind of biofeedback to help us better make decisions on how we do know our body. What's your opinion on the technology overall? Do you still think we have a lot of room to grow when it comes to really trusting and how accurate is this data, you know, should we be, should we have all the things, all the devices to kind of like pool our own average? Like what's your take on the technology side?

Matteo: 21:36 Yeah. I think there's still a lot of room. I would say we're at 30%. Wow. 30 and achieve. Yeah. And in particular, on the medical grade, accuracy is where you will see all these devices, including the party, improving a lot. They will all become medical grade devices. It will be able to track our heart rate, our respiration, our temperature, and our sleep in real time. So going to the hospital will be something that you need for a surgery, but for body tracking you will be able to use these devices. And this is really coming in three to five years. So certain areas like heartbreak, where the accuracy is already pretty good in our case, compared to a medical grade device, we are within one heartbeat per minute. Wow. So, yeah, so, and I'm sure most of the other devices are reasonably good as well.

Matteo: 22:32 Respiration will be the second one that will be nailed compared to a medical grade device and then sleep sleep is usually the, the harvest, because the best way to measure your sleep will be through brainwaves. And so you should use a Sam thing on your, on your forehead in order to monitor the brainwaves and into the brainwaves, you can distinguish very clearly with medical-grade accuracy, deep sleep and REM and light sleep what everyone else is doing it right now needs. We are trying to infer detective sleep stages based on other metrics like heart rate or movement. And that's why sometimes accuracy maybe is not comparable yet to a medical grade device.

Chase: 23:20 It's funny you say that. I actually it just goes to show, like I said earlier, I'm always looking at sleep stuff and I'm always being targeted with ads for, you know, mattresses and sheets and, you know, sleep where technology and all this stuff. And I saw a company pop up a couple of days ago and it was a sleep monitoring headband, and I didn't think anything of it. I was like, ah, you know, I got my sleep routine, my bedtime routine. I crank down the temperature, know I cut out caffeine. I, I got my monitoring devices here. That's just some gimmick while actually I got some homework to do. I had no idea that monitoring brainwaves was actually, if we really want to dive into the weeds of quantification of sleep measurement and sleep health that's, that's kind of the King. Huh?

Matteo: 24:03 The reason why. So there was a company that was doing these, I think in the early two thousands, it was called Theo. And they raised a lot of money and they were pretty accurate. The, the issue is people don't want to wear the thing. Yeah.

Chase: 24:19 Yeah. It's not that sexy, right? Yeah. Not, yeah.

Matteo: 24:21 It's not sexy. It's not comfortable. And and so even for us, sometimes, you know, we need to wear it to just to do comparative studies. Sure. And, and it's a nightmare because you really don't want to wear it. Yeah. And that is what is blocking that type of technology, which otherwise we'll have already a beach.

Chase: 24:45 Yeah. I can remember years ago I was going through a I was questioning whether or not I had sleep apnea. I went through a sleep study, you know, in the hospital, hooked up to wires and leads and I'm in a hospital bed. And I'm like, how really accurate is this data going to be? Because I'm not in my own home. I don't ha I'm not in nothing is the same. I've got all these wires and stuff hooked up to me. I can't roll over. I can't really just sleep naturally. So how really reliable is this data? So going from, you know, an eight, nine, however many point lead head, man, and in a hospital to having a band at home, it is, it's an advancement, but it's still, it's not that comfortable. It's not that sexy, but I do see, you know, they have grown a lot, but still some room for improvement, but then it just comes down to probably, well, how much really information do you want to know?

Chase: 25:38 And that's where I know, you know, your products, eight sleep here provide some of that information as well. So not only, you know, let's kind of let's shift gears and go there. So really what is this product? What is it, you know, just, it's more than just a, a new mattress. That's, I'm assuming, you know, the cleanest, the healthiest, it's got all of these things that we've expected mattresses to be, but then it has some data trackers in it. Emma, am I understanding correctly? So, you know, how is, how is your company providing, you know, kind of twofold solution here?

Matteo: 26:09 Yup. So our technology, the pod comes in in two forms, right? One is the whole mattress or you buy a mattress and it gets shipped to your door, or you can buy only the Thermo cover, which is a cover that you install onto any mattress. You can retrofit any mattress you have, let's say you don't want to change yours, but you want to move from Danville mattress to a smartphone. The technology does a couple of different things. The first one is thermoregulation. Temperature is the biggest factor impacting sleep, quality, outside sleep, medical resources. And what we do is we control the temperature of each side of the bed. You can set the temperature at whatever temperature you like, or you can let our machine learning and our algos adjust the temperature for you during the night, the results can be up to 20%. The more deep sleep you can fall asleep up to 20% faster and you can also get the more around. Wow. Yes. So pretty impactful. And you can read about these even on why we sleep the book from Matthew Walker at the Berkeley professor, but there is a bunch of clinical studies that they talk about the importance of thermoregulation and each side of the bad can have a different temperature. So if he's living with a partner and you have different preferences, we are going to solve the problem. And the temperature can range between 55 degrees and one degree, Whoa,

Chase: 27:36 That's pretty okay. Yeah.

Matteo: 27:40 Rooney called really warm and everything, anything in the mingle, right? The way we adjust temperature is based on your metrics. And so the mattress that technology is like, if you were sleeping on a stack of sprints, we are able to pick anything about your habits, right? Anything about your respiration, including sleep apnea in the future, and also everything about your sleep based on these data, we can adjust them personally, real time to maximize your sleep performance.

Chase: 28:11 That's pretty impressive. I know temperature is huge. I'm really curious as to why you all chose it, allow to go with that high. I understand we were talking about the, kind of the uniqueness of each individual. You know, we, we do need to apply different things because we are different human beings, but one tent that seems really, really high. Like why would somebody ever need or want to go that high of a temperature to get good quality sleep?

Matteo: 28:36 Yeah. The reality is no one slips up one time. And all of a sudden the 55, I think only 1% of our users slips up 65 degrees, which is the coldest setting. 

Chase: 28:49 Really curious about that. That would be me. I want it cold. I want to Chile for sure.

Matteo: 28:53 Yeah. But the point is from a technical standpoint, when you designed the Thermo engine you need to optimize for cooling because it's the hardest to be achieved. And at that point, as you optimize for cooling them, you're also able to achieve those one 10 on, on, on heating. But it's extremely unlikely that anyone women tend to sleep warmer than men. But in general, temperature preferences changed based on your metabolism and based on your age, on your fat percentage and just personal preferences if you had alcohol or not, if you train in the few hours before going to bed or not, all these factors have an impact.

Chase: 29:35 Oh, well, they have an impact for sure. But are you saying with with your product, you can, can you actually take that into consideration? Can you say, Hey, I just did a workout. Hey, I've had alcohol. Like, can you actually customize that sleep experience to that level?

Matteo: 29:50 Yeah. You will assume you will be able to do it soon. So based on our call right now, we already adjust temperature automatically for you based on weather and temperature in the bedroom. And so if we see a change, we send you a notification and we automatically recommend the new temperature setting. Let's say there is a heat wave. Your bad is going to ping you on your phone or is a heatwave. We suggest you adjust the temperature on these to maximize the performance and the same will happen with yeah, we are connected to Apple health. So in the future, we will be able to see that you just work out an hour ago. And so probably you're know you're still dissipating heat or going to bed. Then we might recommend you a call there.

Chase: 30:34 That is extremely impressive. That is extremely impressive. I think what I'm liking, what I'm hearing here also is that you were, I think a lot of devices kind of missed the Mark and I understand like you create something unique to you, proprietary technology, whatever, or you make multiple devices. And of course from the business side, you want everybody to get all the things, right. And I'm hearing that you're actually allowing people to use your product, but they're also most likely using other things as well. You know, you said Apple health, their smartphone, their Apple watch. So it's almost like, Hey, why would we punish or reduce anybody's ability to kind of tap into optimization, sleep health, wellness, if, you know, if not reward them, you know, look, they're already doing these other things. Let's just make it all more, you know, one seamless experience, right?

Matteo: 31:25 Sure. Yeah. I mean, we are in a lie of all these trackers, right? Because our value proposition doesn't end with data. It starts with data. And so if you use [inaudible] or if you use an Apple watch, keep using it and keep tracking your sleep with that, then we are the only ones who can really improve your sleep to have more regulations. So we are very different for that, but we still use data, but for a different purpose.

Chase: 31:52 Amazing, amazing. I want to ask you a question that's actually has been kind of top of mind for me over the years, as I've, you know, I've gone through a variety of different mattresses. And like I said, as I've explored my own kind of sleep fitness performance level you know, I've gone from standard coil, I've gone to Tempur-Pedic, I've gone to smart, I've gone to cooling pads, have gone to cooling sheets, bamboo all of these things. And while it may be contributing to my personal sleep, hygiene, sleep, health, sleep fitness, I'm now learning that a lot of these things, you know, are extremely processed. There's a lot of other chemicals and things inside the mattress that, like I said, maybe helping me get more quality sleep, but possibly could be detrimental to my health and wellness in some other ways, you know, long-term how have you all kind of that? What, what's your, what's your take on that and how, how are you making sure that this is not only helping someone's sleep fitness, but not possibly making anything worse for them?

Matteo: 32:50 Yeah. I mean, it's a good point. And obviously we will comply with all the regulations that, that applies to us, but think about, you know, wearing an Apple watch or wearing your group, it's really the same thing, how you use products and use, you know, fabric or some type of plastic that shouldn't shouldn't hurt like any other electronic device. And your case in the case of a mattress, you put your bed sheets over that. So there is also that we use fabrics that have been heavily tested. But yeah, we didn't see any major impact on, on, on that really like anything else that you're wearing, even your headphones, right? Yeah,

Chase: 33:40 Yeah. Yeah. It's like, you could go down the rabbit hole of, you know, wired. Everything only are no electronic devices, no Bluetooth, no 5g, you know, and that's a whole part of this process, right? We, we have to make choices for our fitness or nutrition or sleep for ourselves, our relationships, our jobs. We have to make things that make sense for our definition of success, our, our pursuit, our goals. But, and we understand that may feed that, but just being conscious of saying yes to one thing usually means saying no to another increasing one thing here may, may mean decreasing something else, but then just along the way, you kind of just fine tune and optimize and move forward. Like I was just saying, you know, I, I do, it's like you take sometimes in this wellness journey, right. We feel like we're taking one step forward, but then two steps backwards. And a part of that truly is I'm sure you would agree is just kind of catching up with the times. We don't know what we don't know. We don't know, you know, all how possibly some things are affecting us or what is doing to the environment. But what we can do is just, you know, pay attention enough to, to change things along the way. Would you agree?

Matteo: 34:45 Yeah, absolutely. And there is where not quantifying results and monitoring them. It's super important, but that, that's what I do in all the products that I tried first start testing it. And then you decide if it's worth the effort, but it could be even a small effort, like recharging the product. That's why 60% of the customers now 80% of the cost or something like that stops using a wearable within six months, something like that, right? The asphalt becomes to match compared to the value. And in our specific case, we have data, right? Almost 90% of our cast, a improved sleep before you were asking me about this subjective perception. So almost 90% of our customers purely from a subjective, qualitative perspective, they report better sleep. And then we also have heart every day. It's a, from a quantitative standpoint, but the way we design our products since from the beginning was to be the most seamless thing you could think of, right? We don't change your habits. We don't ask you anything, keep going to bed as you did for the past years, but don't change anything in your routine, but this time magically, it will start getting better sleep. That was an obsession I had since day one, because we are so busy that even charging a device, if the device is not extremely valuable, for me becomes annoying.

Chase: 36:08 Oh, I'm sure how many times have you, how many times have I, or anybody listening like left, not one, their Apple watch or not worn whatever device that we got to help us, but because quote, it's too much work to just remember to charge it, you know? Yeah. That's so true.

Matteo: 36:25 And here there is no work, nothing. It just happened on its own. And that's why we have these things insane retention where people obviously keep using our products every single day for six to 10 years.

Chase: 36:38 Hmm. Amazing. Wow. So let's go there. You know, the entrepreneur journey, I'm always curious as to, you know, how and why did somebody decide to actually create something they recognize a problem, or they just had a horrible or great experience and want to just make it better? What was it for you? How did this baby, you know, kind of come about

Matteo: 36:58 Everything's? So first I was the typical entrepreneur working long hours, trying to sacrifice, sleep and compressing it and looking into that, then why do I need to sleep a power? So I started talking to some doctors to helping sailors crossing the war alone. And because there was this concept of polyphasic sleep where you just leave two hours and then nap, and then you wake up and then leave two hours. So I really tried to see, can I sleep less? And that is where I understood that Elon Musk is taking us to Mars, but we still spend a third of our life on a piece of dumb form and wiser is not technology and having my recovery and fleet. And I want to build that. And that is how we start.

Chase: 37:47 So you are like the Elon Musk of sleep, the Elon Musk of mattresses

Matteo: 37:53 That he may

Chase: 37:54 Be physically taking us to Mars, but you'll be taking us to Mars and outer space in our dreams. Right. By getting quality sleep, actually getting into deep sleep. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. I'm also curious someone who loves this so much and has made it their business. What is your kind of sleep routine? What is your bedtime ritual? What is your sleep fitness look like? Walk us through, you know, a night in the life, a day in the life, please.

Matteo: 38:19 Yeah. So I tend to go to sleep quite early. It's embarrassing, but yeah, by nine 30 to 10 by 10 I'm asleep. Okay.

Chase: 38:29 That's not bad at all.

Matteo: 38:30 Yeah, not too terrible. Yeah. So before I was waking up at six at the time, so I was getting my eight hours since March I started sleeping nine hours. And it was amazing the way I feel or my biometrics HRV improved 14%. And so now on average, wow. And so now to go to sleep earlier, like nine 30 and I wake up at six 30 because there is no commute. And I get started working with tuna, right. So I tried to get these nine hours every single day. I usually start slowing down before, so the, the lights in my house, they start switching to orange before and by nine 30, all the lights are off and this is an automatic routine, so I won't do anything. And so I use these also to really almost set the time on my mind of what is happening

Chase: 39:26 In those environments to use a little bit.

Matteo: 39:28 Yeah. I use Phillips. You, you create a routine and at seven 30, they switched to orange at eight. They've been down at eight 30 and nine and nine 30 there. I always eat, I'm obsessed with the temperature of my bed. I keep optimizing our, our speed to that. I also use plugs when I was sleeping a very completely, you know silent place. It's pitch dark because I use some black curtains. One sort of twice a week. I take a melatonin usually during the weekend to even relax a bit more. I take magnesium because it helps with the non salts. I use the NormaTec boots before going to bed. I don't actually know them. They are compression boots put on your legs. And yeah, I love them to relax before going to bed. It's like a massage.

Chase: 40:23 I see a lot of like endurance athletes use those, you know, a lot of like, it's a great recovery tool. Absolutely.

Matteo: 40:29 Yeah. A couple of hours before going to bed. So before dinner, I take a hot cold shower often. So you keep switching, you do 30 seconds, 30 seconds cold. And that creates a micro thermal shock with how to relax. And then I wake up with our vibration alarm. There is a smart alarm in our bed and it changes the temperature, accelerating your heart rate before you wake up. So you get out of the program. And then at the same time, it vibrates and very gently. So I wake up without any noise without any sound, but just naturally

Chase: 41:07 I love that. Actually, I would love to let's explore that area a little bit more. Another little sleep hack that I've had, that I've found a great ROI on for over, over a year, year and a half. I, unless I need to catch an early flight or something, I don't set an alarm anymore. I have my, I go to bed at this time. I wake up at this time. And that was one of the things that I learned most of actually how detrimental to your stress levels to just, you know, your flight or fight kind of responses. How detrimental waking up to a like hard sound can be, and actually can disrupt sleep where maybe if you actually just slept a couple more minutes and just naturally woke up, you would be totally fine. Walk us through this, this kind of gentle, awake process that you have, you know, what's the reasoning behind it and, you know, how's, it actually contributing to our sleep health versus just, you know, not starting the day off with a rude alarm clock. You know,

Matteo: 42:04 That is exactly your point. So you don't want the alarm to goes off for while you are in, in the rack or even in the second part of why is that? Because you will just feel drugged game, right? You're you're, your body was doing something else and you're taking it away from that and just say, Oh, now you need to be ready. And, and so your, your, your brain was processing a different faction and that is why you feel drowsy. And then maybe you are in a bad mood, but just because of that. And so what we created is a, is a smart alarm, right? That make sure that by the time you need to wake up, you're not in any of these sleep stages. And the way we do it is through temperature. And so for example, I who my, my bed as much as possible, what happens is by cooling the environment, your heart rate accelerates because it needs to keep your body warm Riley needs to know to, to start running the body in order to maintain the, the perfect body temperature. In that way you substantially almost wake up. It's like, when it's too cold in the middle of the night, you know, you wake up because you are helping yourself. We just do it through technology. And if you don't wake up all it through temperature at the set times, there is also vibration that starts to very gently and it becomes increasingly more evident. So you wake up, even if you have to catch a flight in this way, you're a hundred percent weaker because there is no sound.

Chase: 43:40 I love that. I love that. Honestly, I think in a world that, you know, is, is bombarding us by ways that we think, and probably are in many ways, helping us through, you know, notifications, texts, alarms, buzzes, vibration sounds, colors. You know, we have all these ways to quote, you know, hack biohack, you know, sometimes, you know, it may be too much, there may be a softer, gentler way that is going to be more respectful of the natural bodily processes that will still get us that end result we're after. Or at least just make it. So we don't wake up on the wrong side of the bed and hate the world. Right,

Matteo: 44:18 Exactly. Yeah.

Chase: 44:20 Where do you kind of see the future of, you know, I'll say sleep technology, sleep health going, you, you definitely have been in this for a minute. So you probably have an understanding of where, where, and how it started, what's going on currently, but where do you see it going? Where do you want it to go? Like, where do you still see the biggest room for improvement maybe in in our sleep fitness?

Matteo: 44:43 Yeah. So in, in our vision, there's are two things that we will achieve first. We will compress sleep. So how can we sleep less, but achieve more rest, sleep only six hours and get more rest than when you were sleeping eight hours Saquon, because you still go to bed for six hours, which is a meaningful amount of time. How can we make your bed and medical-grade device in the future, you will not go for a sleep session to the TAC. If you have the popping out. Now, it will just happen from, from your house, from your so devices like ours, they will be able to predict strokes. They will be able to predict if you're getting sick. If we can introduce the sensors, we envision, we might be able to monitor your organs while you sleep and do a sort of MRI, but without the, the, the, the x-ray, you know, because you couldn't take an MRI every single day, but there are other of technology like ultrasound that you will do it every single day. And you could really do a, a deep checkup of your body. So save compression and achieving Medi-Cal grade accuracy.

Chase: 46:00 Wow. That's a quite a challenge, quite a vision. And to that, I'll kind of ask maybe a question. A lot of people might be thinking, or, or maybe you've already heard, is this too much? Are we, you know, is there gonna come a point of diminishing returns? Are we going to maybe monitor something in, get a false positive, or just learn something that maybe, maybe just knowing could be more detrimental? Are we ever going to reach a point of diminishing return with this kind of technology and understanding ourselves? Do you think

Matteo: 46:34 Two things? I mean, first again, if we go back to the point of being seamless, all these will have kind of, without asking you anything, we will not ask you to, to do anything, nothing to charge you, nothing to where you will just flip back there and know if there isn't anything wrong with your body. So wouldn't you be happy to, to save your life and to know in advance, if there is there is anything wrong. Personally on my side, as an entrepreneur, one of the things that excites me the most is to save lives and here we can save lives. It was the dad that for one of our employees who died of a stroke in the morning, that that shouldn't happen to me. And, and so I want to solve that problem too,

Chase: 47:21 Not a bad problem to want to solve. I can definitely get on board and support that as well. Oh, well, I, I thank you so much for coming on here today. And as we begin to kind of wrap up, I just want to remind the listeners here that I'm going to sound very biased. I'm sure Mateo is too. But I've gotten so much from prioritizing my sleep by just, just even the simple thing of all right, what can I do in the morning to set myself for success during the day, so that I'm actually tired and can fall asleep? Just how can I make sure that I go to bed at the same time, you can do a lot of things and this quantified self world biohacking world. But when I brought more attention and awareness to my sleep, it helped so much helped energy focus, de-stressing weight, loss, weight gain, because it truly is where all of the magic happens for everything else, for managing hormones, managing stress levels for, for dreaming, for getting ideas for building muscle, for recovering, for, for being able to step into the next day, your strongest, most refreshed, best self.

Chase: 48:28 So any final words, Mateo, you would say to someone who is, you know, on the fence about changing anything in their sleep fitness or sleep routine, you know, what can we say that you haven't said that it's just going to be like, this is how important sleep is.

Matteo: 48:43 If, if you care about your health and if you care about your longevity, sleep is one of the three pillars of health is the easiest to manage because it requires less effort. And it has connects, there is a 10 X right on, on your health because it can have any impact on parking so they can have any impact on your blood pressure can have an impact on your cardiovascular system. HRV have three progressed. It has an impact on the food that you crave. And so you could lose weight by sitting back there and clearly has an impact on your performance. If you want to work out very hard during the day,

Chase: 49:22 Well said, well said, great summary. And the final question I ask everybody is, you know, we kind of have three pillars here at ever forward, three kind of main categories of life many other things, but if I only had to pick three, it would be fitness, nutrition, and mindset, kind of these three areas that I say when we bring heightened in attention and awareness to help us live a life ever forward to help us just, you know, pursue tomorrow. I make maybe 20, 21, I'll have to add in officially that fourth pillar of sleep. It's that important. But what does it mean to you? You know, kind of just the constant momentum, the pursuit of human optimization and, you know, no matter, no matter what comes before us, how would you say that you live a life ever forward? What does that mean to you?

Matteo: 50:07 I mean, in terms of pillars are really, for me sleep fitness and nutrition. I think these are all the three things. If you manage them well we will have a major impact on your health and your longevity. So I try from a health perspective, I designed my life around that. And you know, is the 80 or living a healthier and longer life. I have this concept of lifespan and health span. Lifespan is how long you leave to live 80 years or hundred 20 years. But health span is also, it's really important to be healthy until the last day of your life. So you can enjoy the flight. My grandma stopped working when no 20 years before dying. We don't want to go to that. And so that is why taking care of these three pillars is so important. It's not even the lifespan if they have.

Chase: 50:58 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the nail on the head there, you had it longevity. Yeah. We want to live as long as possible and have as much quality of life as possible. Yeah. And get your sleep. Absolutely. Well, Mateo, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I, of course, I'm going to have all of your information and you know, eight sleep information here for everybody to check out. And if you've been listening, watching the show for any length of time, you know, how important and viable sleep is to me, and I'm always trying to bring the latest and greatest. So you guys definitely want to check out eight sleep. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Ma'am

Matteo: 51:30 My pleasure. Thank you for having me

Chase: 51:33 For more information on everything you just heard and make sure to check this episode, show notes or head to everforwardradio.com.

Have you reached your limit for success? Are you questioning why you keep hitting ceilings in your business or staying stagnant in your goals? Lisa Fabrega explains why it is not your strategy that needs to be re-evaluated but rather your capacity. In this episode, you will learn key questions to ask yourself to break through any plateau, to realign your actions with your goals, and learn how to create more capacity for your finances, relationships, and more!

Follow Lisa @lisafabrega

Follow Chase @chase_chewning

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Episode resources:

• Learn more about Lisa's work at lisafabrega.com

More about Lisa:

"I help successful women like you reclaim your agency and solidify your legacy—through expanding your capacity. It’s been my experience that once a woman reaches a certain level of earning and success, she needs to stop obsessing over strategies, hacks and tactics and instead start focusing on how she sees herself-her capacity.

What good is making 7 or 8 figures if your relationships have fallen apart by the end of it? Or you’re suffering from adrenal fatigue and have to shut down your business? Or feel unfulfilled, exhausted, and have lost the essence of who you are?

When you expand your capacity, everything changes.

Have you ever wondered how people like Oprah do all that they do and still enjoy their lives? In one day they could hop on a plane to fly across the world, deliver a press conference, shoot an episode of a TV show, sign a lucrative merchandising contract and then be home to enjoy their families or get in the tub for some self-care time.

How the heck do they manage to do this?

The answer is capacity.

When you have capacity, you can hold, handle and RECEIVE MORE without burning out. Plateaus melt away. The sky is the limit. You feel like YOU CAN HANDLE IT ALL. Because you CAN.

Have you ever introduced someone to another friend and those two become better friends than with you? Or have you ever stayed friends with someone another person introduced you to and now that original relationship is dead and gone? You may be a 'friend broker' like us! In this relationship health episode my wife May and I reflect on how we meet new friends and sometimes get left in the dust. Also, we play a really in-depth and fun new card game that gets us asking vulnerable, beyond-surface-level  questions about our own marriage.

Follow May @mayyazdi

Follow Chase @chase_chewning

Ever Forward Radio is brought to you by our partners at Four Sigmatic - save 15% off their immune-boosting and delicious golden latte!

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Episode resources:

• Save 15% off of the golden latte at Four Sigmatic with checkout code EVERFORWARD

• What We Said podcast

• May's Anatomy podcast

• Get the game We're Not Really Strangers

And in corner number one... MIKE LEE! With a professional record that includes 11 KO's, former professional boxer is a champion that knows what it means to perform at his peak. However, as all things must come to an end, Mike has recently transitioned into new endeavors and retired from his successful boxing career to begin the next phase of his life. In this episode, Mike talks about his new entrepreneurial endeavors and how he has created a new life but also what the many years in the ring taught him about pain and its bigger life lessons.

Follow Mike @officialmikelee

Follow Chase @chase_chewning

Ever Forward Radio is brought to you by our partners at LMNT (Elemental Labs) - save money and replenish your body with the valuable nutrients and zero-sugar electrolytes from LMNT at http://drinklmnt.com/everforward

Role of Electrolytes:

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Episode resources:

• Get free shipping on LMNT Recharge electrolyte drink mix

• Mike Lee official website

• Soul CBD

• Angie Lee

• Learn how to launch, grow, and monetize your own podcast and save 60% off of Chase's Level 201 course at Operation Podcast with code EVERFORWARD60

More about Mike:

With a 21-1 professional record that includes 11 KO’s, Mike Lee is a bright, hardworking quick learning, power-punching professional boxer with a deep motivation to be a champion.

Lee graduated with a degree in Finance from the Mendoza School of Business at the University of Notre Dame in 2009, and the Notre Dame faithful has followed the popular All-American boxer across the country to support him in his fights. Out of college, Lee went undefeated in his amateur career and was signed with Top Rank Inc. after winning the Chicago Golden Gloves.

In addition to being a true fighter inside the ropes, Lee is known as an intelligent, personable young man outside the ring, whose presence in the pro ranks enhances the sport.