What if I told you that there's a way to keep yourself young? It takes a lot of hard work, and it's a continuing process. However, the payoff is definitely worth it. It also offers a lot of benefits aside from longevity. The secret? It's developing a lifelong passion for learning and growing.
In this episode, Craig Harper joins us once again to explain the value of having a growth mindset. We explore how you can keep yourself young and healthy even as you chronologically age. He also emphasises the importance of fun and laughter in our lives. Craig also shares how powerful our minds are and how we can use them to manage our pain.
If you want to know how to develop a growth mindset for a fuller life, then this episode is for you!
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My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within three years. Get your copy here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books/products/relentless.
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‘My mind is the CEO of my life. So I need to make sure that as much as I can, that I'm managing my mind, and my mental energy optimally.’
‘If you're listening to this, and you didn't succeed in the school system, that means absolutely nothing when you're an adult.’
‘We're literally doing our biology good by laughing.’
‘Living is a present tense verb, you can't living in the future, and you can't live in the future.’
‘Often, more is not better. Sometimes more is worse. So there's a difference between volume of work and output and quality of work.’
‘It's all about those people just taking one step at a time to move forward... That growth mindset that I think is just absolutely crucial.’
Craig Harper is one of Australia's leading educators, speakers, and writers in health and self-development. He has been an integral part of the Australian health and fitness industry since 1982. In 1990, he established a successful Harper's Personal Training, which evolved into one of the most successful businesses of its kind.
He currently hosts a successful Podcast called 'The You Project'. He is also completing a neuropsychology PhD, studying the spectrum of human thinking and behaviour. Craig speaks on various radio stations around Australia weekly. He currently fills an on-air role as a presenter on a lifestyle show called 'Get a Life', airing on Foxtel.
Want to know more about Craig and his work? Check out his website, or follow him on Instagram and Linkedin!
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To pushing the limits,
Lisa
Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.
Lisa Tamati: Well, hi everyone and welcome back to Pushing the Limits with Lisa Tamati. This week I have Craig Harper. He is really well known in Australia. He's a broadcaster, a fitness professional, a PhD scholar, an expert on metacognition, and self-awareness. And we get talking on all those good topics today and also neuro-psycho-immunology, very big word. Really interesting stuff; and we get talking about laughter, we get talking about pain management. We sort of go all over the show in this episode, which I sometimes do on this show. I hope you enjoy this very insightful and deep conversation with Craig Harper.
Before we head over to the show, I just want to let you know that Neil and I at Running Hot Coaching have launched a new program called Boost Camp. Now, this will be starting on the first of September and we're taking registrations now. This is a live eight-week program, where you'll basically boost your life. That's why it's called Boost Camp. not boot camp, Boost Camp. This is all about upgrading your body, learning how to help your body function at its base, learning how your mindset works, and increasing your performance, your health, your well-being and how to energise your mind and your body. In this Boost Camp, we're going to give you the answers you need in a simple, easy-to-follow process using holistic diagnostic tools and looking at the complete picture.
So you're going to go on a personalised health and fitness journey that will have a really life-changing effect on your family and your community. We're going to be talking about things like routine and resilience, mental resilience, which is a big thing that I love to talk about, and how important is in this time of change, in this time of COVID, where everything's upside down, and how we should be all building time and resources around building our resilience and energising our mind and body. We're going to give you a lot of health fundamentals. Because the fundamentals are something simple and easy to do, it means that you probably aren't doing some of the basics right, and we want to help you get there.
We're going to give you the answers you need in a simple, sort of easy, process. So we are now in a position to be able to control and manage all of these stressors and these things that are coming at us all the time, and we want to help you do that in the most optimal manner. So check out what boost camp is all about. Go to www.peakwellness.co.nz/boostcamp. I'll say that again, peakwellness.co.nz/boostcamp, boost with a B-O-O-S-T, boost camp. We hope to see you over there! Right, now over to the show with Craig Harper.
Well, hi everyone and welcome to Pushing the Limits! Today, I have someone who is a special treat for you who has been on the show before. He's an absolute legend, and I love him to bits. Craig half and welcome to the show mate, how are you doing?
Craig Harper: Hi Lisa! I’m awesome but you're not.
Lisa: No I'm a bit of a miss, people. I’ve got shingles, a horrible, horrible virus that I advise nobody to get.
Craig: What it— do we know what that’s made? What causes it, or is it idiopathic as they say?
Lisa: Yeah, no, it is from the chickenpox virus. Although, I've never, ever had that virus. So I'm like heck how, you know, it's related to the cold sore virus and all of that, which I definitely have had often. So it sits on the spinal cord, these little viruses, dormant and then one day when your immune systems are down, it decides to attack and replicate and go hard out. So yeah, that'll be the down for the count now for two and a half weeks. In a lot of pain, but—
Craig: What is it like nerve pain or what kind of pain is it?
Lisa: Yes, it's nerve pain. So this one's actually, it hits different nerves in different people, depending on where it decides to pop out. My mum had the femoral nerve, which is one that goes right down from the backbone, quite high up on the backbone, down across the back and then down through the hip flexor and down the leg. I've got all these horrible looking sores, I look like a burn victim all the way down my leg and across my back. And it comes out through the muscles of your like, through the nerves and nerve endings and causes these blisters on top of the skin but it's the nerve pain that's really horrible because there's no comfortable position. There's no easy way to lie or sit and of course, when you're lying at night, it's worse. It's worse at nighttime than in the day. So I learned a lot about shingles. And as usual, we're using these obstacles to be a learning curve.
Craig: Why on earth are you doing a bloody podcast? You should be relaxing.
Lisa: You're important, you see. I had, you know, I had this appointment with you, and I honour my appointments, and I—
Craig: Definitely not important. What's the typical treatment for shingles?
Lisa: Well, actually, I wish I'd known this two weeks ago, I didn't know this, but I just had a Zoom call with Dave Asprey, you know, of Bulletproof fame, who is one of my heroes, and he's coming on the show, people, shortly. So that's really exciting. He told me to take something called BHT, butylated hydroxytoluene, which is a synthetic antioxidant. They actually use them in food additives, they said that kills that virus. So I'm like, ‘Right, get me some of that.’ But unfortunately, I was already, it's— I only got it just yesterday, because I had to wait for the post. So I'm sort of hoping for a miracle in the next 24 hours.
Also, intravenous vitamin C, I've had three of those on lysine, which also helps. One of the funny things, before we get to the actual topic of the day, is I was taking something called L-Citrulline which helps with nitric oxide production and feeds into the arginine pathway. Apparently, while that's a good thing for most people, the arginine, if you have too much arginine in the body, it can lead to replication of this particular virus, which is really random and I only found that out after the fact. But you know, as a biohacker, who experiments sometimes you get it wrong.
Craig: Sometimes you turn left when you should have turned right.
Lisa: Yes. So that, you know, certainly took a lot of digging in PubMed to find that connection. But I think that's maybe what actually set it off. That combined with a pretty stressful life of like—
Craig: It's interesting that you mentioned PubMed because like a lot of people now, you know how people warn people off going Dr Google, you know, whatever, right. But the funny thing is, you can forget Dr Google, I mean, Google's okay. But you can access medical journals, high level— I mean, all of the research journals that I access for my PhD are online. You can literally pretty much access any information you want. We're not talking about anecdotal evidence, and we're not talking about theories and ideas and random kind of junk. We're talking about the highest level research, you literally can find at home now. So if you know how to research and you know what you're looking for, and you can be bothered reading arduous academic papers, you can pretty much learn anything, to any level, if you're prepared to do the work and you know how— and you can be a little bit of a detective, a scientific detective.
Lisa: That is exactly, you know, what I keep saying, and I'm glad you said that because you are a PhD scholar and you are doing this. So you know what you're talking about, and this is exactly what I've done in the last five years, is do deep research and all this sort of stuff. People think that you have to go to university in order to have this education, and that used to be the case. It is no longer the case. We don't have to be actually in medical school to get access to medical texts anymore, which used to be the way. And so we now have the power in our hands to take, to some degree, control over what we're learning and where we're going with this.
It doesn't mean that it's easy. You will know, sifting through PubMed, and all these scholarly Google articles and things in clinical studies is pretty damn confusing sometimes and arduous. But once you get used to that form of learning, you start to be able to sift through relatively fast, and you can really educate yourself. I think having that growth mindset, I mean, you and I never came from an academic background. But thanks to you, I'm actually going to see Prof Schofield next week. Prof Schofield and looking at a PhD, because, I really need to add that to my load. But—
Craig: You know, the thing is, I think in general, and I don't know where you’re gonna go today, but I think in general, like what one of the things that keeps us young is learning and exposing ourselves, our mind and our emotions and for that matter, our body to new things, whether that's new experiences or new ideas, or new information, or new environments, or new people. This is what floats my boat and it keeps me hungry and it keeps me healthy physically, mentally, emotionally, intellectually, creatively, sociologically. It keeps me healthy. Not only does it keep me in a good place, I'm actually at 57, still getting better. You know, and people might wonder about that sometimes.
Of course, there's an inevitability to chronological aging. Clearly, most people at 80 are not going to be anything like they were at 40. Not that I'm 80. But there's— we know now that there's the unavoidable consistency of time as a construct, as an objective construct. But then there's the way that we behave around and relate to time. Biological aging is not chronological aging. In the middle of the inevitability of time ticking over is, which is an objective thing, there's the subject of human in the middle of it, who can do what he or she wants. So, in other words, a 57-year-old bloke doesn't need to look or feel or function or think like a 57-year-old bloke, right?
When we understand that, in many ways, especially as an experience, age is a self-created story for many people. I mean, you've met, I've met and our listeners have met 45-year-olds that seem 70 and 70-year-olds— and we're not talking about acting young, that's not what we're talking about. I'm not talking about that. I'm not talking about pretending you're not old or acting young. I'm actually talking about changing the way that your body and your mind and your brain and your emotional system works, literally. So that you are literally in terms of function, similar to somebody or a ‘typical’ person who's 20 or 25 years younger than you. We didn't even know that this used to be possible, but not only is it possible, if you do certain things, it's very likely that that's the outcome you'll create.
Lisa: Yeah, and if you think about our grandparents, and when I think about my Nana at 45 or 50, they were old. When I think about now I'm 52, you're 57, we're going forward, we're actually reaching the peak of our intellectual, well, hopefully not the peak, we’re still going up. Physically, we got a few wrinkles and a few grey hairs coming. But even on that front, there is so much what's happening in the longevity space that my take on it is, if I can keep my shit together for the next 10 years, stuff’s gonna come online that’s gonna help me keep it on for another 20, 30, 40 years.
For me now it's trying to hold my body together as best I can so that when the technology does come, that we are able to meet— and we're accessing some of the stuff now, I mean, I'm taking some of the latest and greatest bloody supplements and biohacking stuff, and actively working towards that, and having this, I think it's a growth mindset. I had Dr Demartini on the show last week, who I love. I think he's an incredible man. His mindset, I mean, he's what nearly, I think he's nearly 70. It looks like he's 40.
He's amazing. And his mind is so sharp and so fast it’ll leave you and I in the dust. He's processing books every day, like, you know, more than a book a day and thinking his mind through and he's distilling it and he's remembering, and he's retaining it, and he's giving it to the world. This is sort of— you know, he's nothing exceptional. He had learning disabilities, for goodness sake, he had a speech impediment, he couldn't read until he was an adult. In other words, he made that happen. You and I, you know, we both did you know, where you went to university, at least when you're younger, I sort of mucked around on a bicycle for a few years. Travelling the world to see it. But this is the beauty of the time that we live in, and we have access to all this. So that growth mindset, I think keeps you younger, both physically and mentally.
Craig: And this is why I reckon it's really important that we hang around with people who drag us up, not down. And that could be you know, this listening to your podcast, of course, like I feel like when I listen to a podcast with somebody like you that shares good ideas and good information and good energy and is a good person, like if I'm walking around, I've literally got my headphones here because I just walked back from the cafe, listening to Joe Rogan's latest podcast with this lady from Harvard talking about testosterone, you'd find it really interesting, wrote a book called T.
When I'm listening to good conversations with good people, I am, one, I'm fascinated and interested, but I'm stimulating myself and my mind in a good way. I'm dragging myself up by exposing myself to good ideas and good thinking, and good stories. Or it might even be just something that's funny, it might— I'm just exposing myself to a couple of dickheads talking about funny shit, right? And I'd spend an hour laughing, which is also therapeutic.
You know, and I think there's that, I think we forget that we're always feeding our mind and our brain something. It's just having more awareness of what am I actually plugging into that amazing thing? Not only just what am I putting in my body, which, of course, is paramount. But what am I putting in, you know, that thing that sits between my ears that literally drives my life? That's my HQ, that's my, my mind is the CEO of my life. So I need to make sure that as much as I can, that I'm managing my mind and my mental energy optimally.
Lisa: Yeah. And I think, you know, a lot of people if they didn't do well in the school system, think that, 'Oh, well, I'm not academic therefore I can't learn or continue to learn.' I really encourage people, if you're listening to this, and you didn't succeed in the school system, that means absolutely nothing when you're an adult. The school system has got many flaws, and it didn't cater to everybody. So I just want people to understand that.
You know, just like with Dr Demartini, he taught himself 30 words a day, that's where he started: vocabulary. He taught himself to read and then taught— Albert Einstein was another one, you know, he struggled in school for crying out loud. So school isn't necessarily the marker of whether you're an intelligent human being or not. It's one system and one way of learning that is okay for the average and the masses. But definitely, it leaves a lot of people thinking that they're dumb when they're not dumb.
It's all about those people just taking one step at a time to move forward and becoming, you know, that growth mindset that I think is just absolutely crucial. You talked there about laughter and I wanted to go into that a little bit today too, because I heard you talking on Tiffany, our friend Tiffany’s podcast, and you were talking about how important laughter is for the body, for our minds, for our— and if we laugh a lot, we're less likely to fall victim to the whole adult way of being, which is sometimes pretty cynical and miserable. When you think, what is it? Kids laugh something like 70 times a day and adults laugh I think, six times a day or some statistic. Do you want to elaborate on that a little bit?
Craig: Well, I used to sit down with you know, I don't do much one-on-one coaching anymore, just because I do other stuff. I would sit with people and go, ‘Alright, tell me about your exercise plan and blah, blah, blah. Tell me about your career plan, blah, blah, blah. Tell me about your financial plan, blah, blah, blah.’ Tell me about, you know, whatever. And they have systems and programs and plans for everything.
I would say to them, 'Do you like fun?' And they're like, they look at me like I was a weirdo. 'What do you mean?' I go, 'Well, what do you mean, what do I mean? Like, do you like having fun?’ And they're like, very seriously, like, 'Well, of course, everyone likes having fun.' I go, 'Great. What's your fun plan?' And they go, 'What?' I go, 'What's your fun— like, is laughing and having fun important to you?' 'Yeah, yeah.' 'Okay, what's your fun plan?'
They literally, like this idea of just integrating things into my life, which are for no reason other than to laugh and to have fun. Not to be productive and efficient and to tick more boxes and create more income and elevate output and tick fucking boxes and hit KPIs and you know, just to be silly, just to laugh like a dickhead, just to hang out with your mates or your girlfriends, or whatever it is. Just to talk shit, just to, not everything needs to be fucking deep and meaningful and world-changing. Not everything. In fact, it can't, you know?
Our brain and our body and our emotional system and our nervous system and— it can't work like that we can't be elevated all the time. And so, literally when we are laughing, we're changing the biochemistry of our brain. You know, literally when we are having fun, we're impacting our immune system in a real way through that thing I've probably spoken to you about, psychoneuroimmunology, right? We're literally doing our biology good by laughing and there's got to be, for me, there's got to be, because, like you probably, I have a lot of deep and meaningful conversations with people about hard shit. Like, I'm pretty much a specialist at hard conversations. It's what I do.
But, you know, and, and I work a lot, and I study a lot. Then there needs to be a valve. You can't be all of that all of the time because you're human, you're not a cyborg, you're not a robot. And this hustle, hustle, hustle, grind, work harder, sleep less, you can, you know, you can sleep when you're dead, it's all bullshit. Because, also, yeah, I want to learn and grow and evolve, and I want to develop new skills. But you know what, I want to also, in the moment, laugh at silly shit. I want to be happy and I want to hang out with people I love and I want to be mentally and emotionally and spiritually nourished.
Like, it's not just about acquiring knowledge and accumulating shit that you're probably not going to use. It's also about the human experience now. This almost sounds contradictory. But because of course, we want a future plan and we want goals and all of those, but we're never going to live in the present because when we get there, it's not the present. It's just another installment of now. So when next Wednesday comes, it's not the future, it's now again, because life is never-ending now, right?
It's like you only like, live— living is a present tense verb. You can't living in the future, and you can't live in the future. You cannot. Yes, I know, this gets a little bit, what's the word existential, but the truth is that, yeah, we need to— well, we don't, we can do whatever we want. But I believe we need to be stimulated so we're learning and growing, and we're doing good stuff for our brain and good stuff for our body. But also that we are giving ourselves a metaphoric hug, and going, 'It's all right to lie on your bed and watch Netflix, as long as it's not 20 hours a day, five days a week,' you know. It's okay to just laugh at silly stuff. It's okay, that there's no purpose to doing this thing other than just joy and enjoyment, you know.
I think that people like you and me who are, maybe we would put ourselves in the kind of driven category, right? You and I are no good at this. Like, at times, having fun and just going, ‘I'm going to do fuck all today.’ Because the moment that we do sometimes we start to feel guilty and we start to be like, 'Fuck, I'm not being productive. I've got to be productive.' That, in itself, is a problem for high performance. Like, fuck your high performance, and fuck your productivity today. Be unproductive, be inefficient, and just fucking enjoy it, you know, not— because in a minute, we're going to be dead. We’re going to go, 'But fuck, I was productive. But I had no fun, I never laughed, because I was too busy being important.' Fuck all that.
Lisa: I think both of us have probably come a long way around finding that out. I mean, I used to love reading fiction novels, and then I went, ‘Oh, I can't be reading fiction novels. I've got so many science books that I have to read.’ Here I am, dealing with insomnia at two o'clock in the morning reading texts on nitric oxide, you know. It is this argument that goes on, still in my head if there was an hour where you weren’t learning something, you know, I can't. Because I know that if I go for a big drive or something, and I have to travel somewhere, or going for a long run or something, I've probably digested a book on that road trip or three, or 10 podcasts or something and I've actually oh, I get to the end and I'm like, ‘Well, I achieved something.’ I've got my little dopamine hits all the way through.
Now I’ve sort of come to also understand that you need this time out and you need to just have fun. I'm married to this absolute lunatic of a guy called Haisely O'Leary, who I just love, because all day every day, he is just being an idiot. In the best sense of the word. I come out and I'm grumpy and you know, had a hard day and I'm tired, I'm stressed, and I come out and he's doing a little dance, doing some stupid meme or saying some ridiculous thing to me. I'm just like, you know, I crack up at it. That's the best person to have to be around because they keep being—and I'm like, ‘Come on, stop being stupid, you should be doing this and you shouldn't be doing that.’ Then I hear myself, and I'm like, ‘No, he's got it right.’
Craig: Well, I think he does, in some ways, you know. It's not about all, it's not about one or the other, it's about— and it's recognising that if I look after my energy, and my emotional system, and all of that, I'll get more done in 8 hours than 12 hours when I'm not looking after myself. So more is not better, necessarily. In fact, often, more is not better; sometimes, more is worse. So there's a difference between volume of work and output and quality of work. Also, you know, quality of experience.
I wrote a little thing yesterday, just talking on social media about the fact that I, like all of the things that I do, even study, although it's demanding, but I enjoy it. My job, you know, like, right now you and I do podcasts. I do seven podcasts a week, apart from the ones like this, where I'm being interviewed by someone else, or spoken to by somebody else. My life is somewhat chaotic, but I don't really, in terms of having a ‘job’. Well, one, I don't have a job. I haven't had a job since I was 26. Two, I don't really feel a sense of work, like most people do.
Like the other night, I did a gig. I don't know if you, if I posted a little thing about this on Insta, and I was doing a talk for Hewlett Packard in Spain. Now, how cool is the world? Right? So I'm talking here, right here in my house, you can see, obviously, your listeners can't. But this is not video, is it? Just us? I wish I knew that earlier. Sorry, everyone, I would have brushed my hair. But anyway, you should see my hair by the way. I look like bloody Doc from Back to the Future. Anyway, but I'm sitting in here, I'm sitting in the studio, and I'm about to talk to a few hundred people in Spain, right, which is where, that's where they're all— that's where I was dealing with the people who are organising me to speak.
Just before I'm about to go live at 5:30, the lady who had organised me was texting me. So it's on Zoom. There's already a guy on the screen speaking and then lots of little squares of other humans. I said to her, ‘How many?’ and said, ‘You know, like a few 100.’ I said, ‘Cool.’ I go, ‘Everyone's in Spain,’ and she goes, ‘No, no, we're in Spain, but the audience is around the world.’ And I go, ‘Really? How many countries?’ She goes, ‘38.’ I'm sitting here and I'm thinking, I'm wearing a black t-shirt. I'm wearing my camo shorts. I've got bare feet. I'm talking to hundreds of humans from this big organisation in 38 countries, and I'm talking about the stuff that I am passionate about, right? I don't have to do any prep, because it's my default setting. I'm just talking. I had to talk for an hour and a half about high performance. Well, giddy up, that's like an hour and a half of breathing. You know?
I just had such fun, and I had this moment, Lisa, halfway through, I don't know, but about halfway through, where I'm like, I remember growing up in a paradigm where pretty much when I was a kid everyone went and got a job and you went, you became a cop or you sold clothes, or you're a bricky or sparky or you’re some kind of tradie. A few of my super smart friends went to university. That was way over my head, I'm like, ‘Fuck university.’ But there was literally about 50 jobs in the world. You know, it's like there was only 50 jobs, and everyone or nearly everyone fitted into one of those 50. There was a few other ones but for the most part, nearly everyone fitted into about 50 jobs. I'm sitting there going— I won't say what but I'm earning pretty good money. I'm sitting in bare feet in my house talking to humans around the world about this stuff that I want to tell everyone about anyway.
I do it for free on my podcast and your podcast and I do it anyway. I have this great time, it's a really good experience. Then I finish at 7 pm. Then I walk 15 feet into the kitchen and put the kettle on and check my messages.
Lisa: No commuting, no travelling, no flying.
Craig: I’m like, ‘How is this a job?’ I'm like, ‘How is this real?’ ‘This is a scam. I'm scamming everybody.’ Like, how great is 2021? I know there's a lot of shit going on and I'm not trying to be insensitive, and it's smashed my business too. All of my live events for 2020 got kicked in the dick in two weeks, right? I got financially annihilated, but you just go, ‘Oh well, improvise, adapt, overcome and figure shit out.’ But, I think when you can have it and a lot of people and it's a very well-worn kind of idea. But when you're, what you love, and what you're curious about, and how you make a few bucks, when that can all collide, then life is a different thing. Then there's not work and life, there's just life.
You know, and so when we talk about this idea of work-life balance, you know, it's like the old days that talk about that a lot. And it's like, almost like there was some seesaw, some metaphoric seesaw with work on one side and life on the other. And when you get balance like that— because what happens, think about this, if we're just basing it on numbers, like all 40 hours of work versus however many hours of non-work or however many hours of recreation and recovery. But if you're doing even 20 hours of a job that you hate, that's going to fuck you up. That's gonna, that's gonna mess with you physically, mentally, and emotionally. That's going to be toxic; that's going to be damaging; that's going to be soul-destroying, versus something else like me studying 40 hours a week, working 40, 50 hours a week doing 90 in total, depending on the week and loving it, and loving it. And going, ‘I feel better than I've ever felt in my life.’
I still train every day, and I still, I live 600-800 metres from the beach, I still walk to the beach every day, you know. And I still hang out with my friends. You know, it's like, it doesn't have to be this cookie-cutter approach. The beauty I think of life, with your food, with your lifestyle, with your career, with your relationships with the way that you learn, like the way that you do business, everything now is so much more flexible, and optional than any time ever before that we can literally create our own blueprint for living.
Lisa: Yeah. And then it's not always easy. And sometimes it takes time to get momentum and stuff. Being, both you and I have both said before we're unemployable. Like, I'm definitely not someone you want to employ, because I'm just always going to run my own ship. I've always been like that, and that's the entrepreneurial personality. So not everyone is set up for that personality-wise. So you know, we're a certain type of people that likes to run in a certain type of way. And we need lots of other people when doing the other paths.
There is this ability now to start to change the way you think about things. And this is really important for people who are unhappy in where they're at right now. To think, ‘Hang on a minute. I've been I don't know, policeman, teacher, whatever you’ve been, I don't want to be there anymore. Is there another me out there? Is there a different future that I can hit?’ The answer is yes, if you're prepared to put in the work, and the time, and the effort, the looking at understanding and learning, the change, being adaptable, the risk-taking, all of those aspects of it. Yes, but there is ways now that you can do that where they weren't 30 years ago, when I came out of school I couldn't be, I was going to be an accountant. Can you imagine anything worse than that?
Craig: Hi, hi. Shout out to all our account listeners, we love you and we need you.
Lisa: I wasn't that— Academically that's I was good at it. But geez, I hated it. And I did it because of parental pushing direction. Thank goodness, I sort of wake up to that. And you know, after three years. I had Mark Commander Mark Devine on the show. He's a Navy SEAL, man. You have to have him on the show. I'll hook you up. He's just a buck. He became an accountant before he became a Navy SEAL and now he's got the best of both worlds really, you know, but like you couldn't get more non-accountant than Mark Devine. We all go into the things when we leave school that we think we're meant to be doing. And they're not necessarily— and I think you know, the most interesting 50 year-olds still don't know what the hell they want to be when they grow up.
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You know, I'm still in that camp.
Craig: You raise a really interesting point too, and that is programming and conditioning. And, you know, because we all grow up being programmed, one way or consciously or not, we grow— if you grow up around people, you're being programmed. So that's not a bad thing. That's an unavoidable human thing. So, situation, circumstance, environment, school, family, friends, media, social media, all of that stuff shapes the way that we see the world and shapes the way that we see ourselves.
When you grow up in a paradigm that says, ‘Okay, Lisa, when you finish school, you have to go to university, or you have to get a job, or you have to join the family business, or you have to work on our farm,’ or whatever it is, you grow up in that. You're taught and told and trained. And so you don't question that, you know. And for me, I grew up in the 70s, I finished in the 80s. I finished school in 1981. And I grew up in the country, and most people go to trade or most people worked in logging or on a farm or— and I would say about five in 100 of the kids that I did— by the way, doing year 12 was a pretty big deal in that time.
‘Geez, are you a brainiac?’ Definitely wasn't a brainiac. But year 12 is a big thing now. Now, even if you have an undergrad degree that it's almost nothing really enough. It's like, you kind of got to go get honours, or masters or maybe even a PhD down the track. And that landscape has really changed. So it's just changing again to— you know, and I think to become aware— like this is for me, I love it; this is my shit; this is what I love— is starting to become aware of our lack of awareness. And starting to become aware of my own programming and go, ‘Oh, I actually think this. Why not? Because this is how I naturally think about, because this is how I've been trained to think about work. I've been trained to or programmed to think this way about money, or relationships, or marriage, or eating meat, or being a Catholic or being an atheist or voting liberal law,’ or whatever it is, right.
Not that any of those things are good or bad, but it's not about how I eat or how I vote or how I worship. It's about how I think. And is this my thinking? Or is this just a reflection of their thinking, right? So when we open the door on metacognition now we start to become aware of our own stories, and where they come from. And this is where I think we really start to take control of our own life, and our own present, and our own future that doesn't exist, by the way, but it will, but it won't be the present.
Then, we start to write our own story with our own voice, not our parents’ voice, not our friends’, not our peers’ voice, you know. And we're always going to be influenced by other people. Of course. Just like people are influenced by you and your podcast, and your stories, and your thinking, and your lessons for them. They're influenced. But I always say to people, ‘Don't believe me because you like me. Listen to me, if you like me and consider what I say. If what I say sounds reasonable for you, maybe a good idea to test drive, take that idea for a test drive, and see if that works for you, because it might not.’ Right?
I think, I really encourage people to learn for themselves and to listen to their own internal wisdom that's always talking. So listen to smart people. I don't know if Lisa and I are in that category, Lisa is, listen to her. But at the same time, do your own, learning through exploration and trial and error, and personal kind of curiosity and drive.
For me, I opened my first gym at 26; first personal training centre in Australia, there weren't any. I'd never done a business course, I've never done an admin course, I knew nothing about marketing. I knew nothing about employees. I knew nothing. But I learned more in one year than I would say, most people would learn in five years at university studying business, because I was in the middle of it, and I was going to sink or swim. So in one year, I started a business and I acquired overwhelming knowledge and skill because I had to, because of the situation. But that was all learning through doing.
The way that you've learned, you know you said earlier that, like, a lot of people think that they're not academic; therefore, they're not smart. Some of the smartest people I've ever met, and I don't— and this not being patronising, but like, mind-blowingly brilliant, how they think, live outside of academia. One of the reasons some people are so brilliant outside of academia is because they're not forced into an echo chamber of thought. They’re living outside the academic paradigm, where we're not trying to restrict how you think or write or speak. There are no rules out here. So there's no intellectual inhibition.
Lisa: Yeah, I love that.
Craig: When you do a PhD, like me, and I can separate the two, thankfully. But there's a way of communicating and writing in PhD land, which is incredibly restrictive because of the scientific process, which is fine, I get that. But it's having an awareness of— this is what I'm often talking to my supervisors about is, yes, I'm studying this thing, which is deep, deep neuropsychology, and everything, the way that you do your research, get your data or interpret your data. The whole process of creating new science, which is what you're doing as a PhD, creating, bringing something new into the world. That's one thing. But you write your journal articles, which is my PhD process, you get them, hopefully, you get them published in academic resources and magazines. But then, I don't want that to be it. I'm going to write a book when I finish about all of my research totally in layman's terms so that people can use the knowledge, so that people can— because that's the value.
For me handing in some papers and going, ‘Oh, Craig Harper is an academically published author.’ That's cool, but it's not— and I'm so respectful of people who have had hundreds of things published, but that doesn't blow my socks off. I'm not really— like that's a real, you really hang your hat on that in academia. Oh, how many things he or she had published, publications, which is cool. They're all smarter than me. But I'm not. I'm like, yeah, that that's cool. But I want to connect with the masses, not the few. Also, by the way, people who read academic papers, they raise it— they're reading it generally, just like I am right now, for a specific reason which relates to their own research. There ain't too many people like you. You're one of the rare ones who just thumb through fucking academic journals to make your life better.
Lisa: Yeah. And it's just some real goals. So you've got the wisdom of having lived outside of academia and being a pracademic, as Paul Taylor says, and then actually seeing the pre— and this is a discussion that I had when I was talking to someone about doing a PhD and they say, ‘But then you're going to become a part of the establishment, and you're going to be forced into this box.’ And I said, ‘No, not necessarily because it's— I can see where you're coming from. But you can take that, because you have that maturity and that life experience and you can fit yourself into the box that you have to fit into in order to get those things done. That research done, but you don't have to stay there.’
That's what you know, one of my things has been, I don't want to spend however many years doing a PhD, and then that's not out on the world. To me that that needs to be taken out of the academic journals, wherever you go to publish, and then put out into a book or something that where it's actually shared, like you say, with the masses, because otherwise, it just collects dust like your MA does, or your whatever, you know, that sits on your bookshelf, and how you got hey, your exam your piece of paper, but you didn't actually do anything with it.
Of course, lots of people do their thing, they're going like they're in research, and they're furthering research and so on. But I— my approach, I think yours is too, is to be able to communicate that information that you've learned, and then share it with everyone, so that they can actually benefit from it, and not just the people that are in academia. The other thing I see after interviewing hundreds of doctors and scientists and people is that they are, actually, the more specialised they are, the more inhibited they are by what they can and can't say.
While they need to be doing that because they need to protect what they are doing in their studies and what they're allowed to and what they're not allowed to do and say, it also is very inhibiting, and they don't get the chance to actually express what they would actually like to say. That's a bit of a shame, really, because you don't get to hear the real truth in the qualifying everything flat stick.
Craig: I reckon you're exactly right. But they don't need to be that. And the reason that a lot of academics are like that is because they get their identity and sense of self-worth from being an academic. They're way more worried about three of their peers hearing something that might not be 100% accurate, and then being reprimanded or, rather than just going— look, I always say to my academic, super academic friends, when I talk with them, not everything that comes out of your mouth needs to be research-based. You can have an idea and an opinion. In fact, I want to hear your ideas and opinions.
Lisa: You're very educated.
Craig: You know, that's the— and as for the idea of you becoming an academic, No, you go, you do your thing you study, you learn the protocol, the operating system, and you do that you go through that process, but you're still you. Right, and there's— you and I both know, there are lots of academics who have overcome that self-created barrier like Andrew Huberman.
Lisa: Yeah, who we love.
Craig: Who we love, who, for people listening, he’s @hubermanlab on Insta, and there's quite a few academics now, like the one that I spoke on before, on Joe Rogan. She's a Harvard professor, she's a genius, and she's just having a— it's a three-hour conversation with Rogan, about really interesting stuff.
There's been a bit of a shift, and there is a bit of a shift because people are now, the smart academics, I think, are now starting to understand that used the right way, that podcasts and social media more broadly, are unbelievably awesome tools to share your thoughts and ideas and messages. By the way, we know you're a human. If you get something wrong, every now and then, or whatever, it doesn't matter.
Lisa: Well, we'll all get, I mean, you watch on social media, Dr Rhonda Patrick, another one that I follow? Do you follow her? Fantastic lady, you know, and you watch some of their feeds on social media, and they get slammed every day by people who pretending to be bloody more academic than her. That just makes me laugh, really. I'm just like, wow, they have to put up with all of that. The bigger your name and the more credibility you have as a scientist, the more you have to lose in a way.
You know, even David Sinclair another you know, brilliant scientists who loves his work. And I love the fact that he shared us with, you know, all his, all his research in real-time, basically, you know, bringing it out in the book Lifespan, which you have to read, in getting that out there in the masses, rather than squirrelling it away for another 20 years before it becomes part of our culture, and part of our clinical usage. We ain't got time for that. We have to, we're getting old now. I want to know what I need to do to stop that now. Thanks to him, you know, I've got some directions to show them. Whether he's 100% there, and he's got all the answers? No. But he's sharing where we're at from the progress. Science by its very nature is never finished. We never have the final answer. Because if someone thinks they do, then they're wrong, because they're not, we are constantly iterating and changing, and that's the whole basis of science.
Craig: Well just think about the food pyramid. That was science for a few decades.
Lisa: Lots of people still believe that shit. That's the scary thing because now that's filtering still down into the popular culture, that that's what you should be doing, eating your workbooks and God knows what. This is the scary thing, that it takes so long to drip down to people who aren't on that cutting edge and staying up with the latest stuff, because they're basically regurgitating what there was 20 years ago and not what is now.
Now Craig, I know you've got to jump off in a second. But I wanted to just ask one more question, if I may, we’re completely different. But I want to go there today because I'm going through this bloody shingles thing. Your mate Johny that you train, and who you've spoken about on the last podcast, who had a horrific accident and amazingly survived, and you've helped him, and he's helped you and you've helped him learn life lessons and recover, but he's in constant chronic pain.
I'm in constant chronic pain now, that's two and a half weeks. For frick’s sake, man, I've got a new appreciation of the damage that that does to society. I just said to my husband today, I've been on certain drugs, you know, antivirals, and in pain medication. I can feel my neurotransmitters are out of whack. I can feel that I'm becoming depressed. I have a lot of tools in my toolbox to deal with this stuff, and I am freely sharing this because what I want you to understand is when you, when you're dealing with somebody who is going through chronic pain, who has been on medications and antibiotics, and God knows whatever else, understanding the stuff that they're going through, because I now have a bit of a new appreciation for what this much of an appreciation for someone like Johnny's been through. What's your take on how pain and all this affects the neurotransmitters in the drugs?
Craig: Do you know what?
Lisa: You got two minutes, mate.
Craig: I'm actually gonna give you I'm gonna hook you up with a friend of mine. His name is Dr Cal Friedman. He is super smart, and he specialises in pain management, but he has a very different approach, right? He's a medical doctor, but look, in answer to, I talked to Johnny about the pain a bit, and we have, we use a scale, obviously 10 is 10. 0 is 0. There's never a 0. Every now and then it's a 1 or 2, but he's never pain-free. Because he has massive nerve damage. And sometimes, sometimes he just sits down in the gym, and he'll just, I'll get him to do a set of something, and he'll sit down and I just see this, his whole face just grimaces.
He goes, ‘Just give me a sec.’ His fist is balled up. He goes, sweat, sweat. I go, ‘What's going on, mate?’ He goes, ‘It feels like my leg, my whole leg is on fire.’
Lisa: Yeah. I can so relate to that right now.
Craig: Literally aren't, like, burning, like excruciating. I don't think there's any, I mean, obviously, if there was we'd all be doing it. There is no quick fix. There is no simple answer. But what he has done quite successfully is changed his relationship with pain. There is definitely, 100% definitely, a cognitive element to, of course, the brain is, because the brain is part of the central nervous system. Of course, the brain is involved. But there's another element to it beyond that, right.
I'm going to tell you a quick story that might fuck up a little bit of Dr Cal, if you get him on. He has done a couple of presentations for me at my camps. He's been on my show a little bit. But he told this story about this guy at a construction site that was working and he had a workplace accident. And he, a builder shot a three-inch nails through his boots, through his foot. Right? So the nail went through his foot, through the top of the leather, and out the sole, and he was in agony, right? He fell down, whatever and he's just rolling around in agony and his mates, they didn't want to take anything off because it was through the boot, through his foot.
They waited for the ambos to get there, and they gave him the green whistle. So you know that whatever that is, the morphine didn't do anything, he was still in agony. He was in agony. Anyway, they get him into the back of the ambulance and they cut the boot off. And the nail has gone between his big toe and second toe and didn't even touch his foot.
Lisa: Oh, wow. In other words, psychologically—
Craig: There was no injury. But the guy was literally in excruciating pain, he was wailing. And they gave him treatment, it didn't help. He was still in pain. So what that tells us—
Lisa: There is an element of—
Craig: What that tells us is our body can, our mind can create real, not perceived, but real pain in your body. And again, and this is where I think we're going in the future where we start to understand, if you can create extreme pain in your body where there is no biological reason, there is no actual injury, there's no physical injury, but you believe there's an injury, now you're in agony.
I think about, and there's a really good book called Mind Over Medicine by a lady called Lissa Rankin, which we might have spoken about. L-I-S-S-A, Lissa Rankin, Mind Over Medicine. What I love about her is, she's a medical doctor, and she gives case after case after case of healing happening with the mind, where people think placebos and no-cebos, people getting sick, where they think they're getting something that will make them sick, but it's nothing, they actually make themselves sick. And conversely, people getting well, when they're not actually being given a drug. They're being given nothing, but they think it's something. Even this, and this is fascinating, this operation, pseudo-operation I did with people where—
Lisa: Yeah, I read that one. I read that study.
Craig: Amazing.
Craig: Oh, yeah, it's look, pain is something that even the people who are experts in it, they don't fully understand.
Lisa: Well, I just like, if I can interrupt you there real briefly, because I've been studying what the hell nerve pain, and I'm like, my head, my sores are starting to heal up right. So in my head, I'm like ‘Whoa, I should be having this pain, I'm getting more pain from the burning sensation in my legs and my nerves because it's nerve pain.’ So I read somewhere that cryotherapy was good. So in the middle of the night, when I'm in really bad pain, instead of lying there and just losing my shit, and have I now have been getting up every night and having two or three cold ice-cold showers a night, which probably not great for my cortisol bloody profile, but it's, I’m just targeting that leg. That interrupts the pain sensation for a few minutes.
What I'm trying to do as I go, I'm trying to go like, can I—am I getting pain because my brain is now used to having pain? Is it sending those messages, even though there's no need, the sores are healing?
Craig: That is possible.
Lisa: Am I breaking? And I can break the pain for about 10 minutes, and then it will come back in again. But I'm continuing on with it, that idea that I can interrupt that pain flow. Then of course, during the breathe in, the meditation, the stuff and sometimes you just lose your shit and you lose it, and then you just start crying, ‘Mummy, bring me some chicken soup’ type moments. But it's really interesting. I mean, I just like to look at all these shit that we go from and then say, ‘Well, how can I dissect this and make this a learning curve?’ Because obviously, there's something wrong, but I just, I feel for people that are going through years of this.
Craig: It's, yeah, I'm the same I feel. Sometimes I work with people, where I work with and as do you, I work with a lot of people who have real problems. I don't have any problems. I mean, they have real problems. And I'm, despite my appearance, I'm quite, I'm very compassionate. It's hard for me because I, it upsets me to see people in pain. I feel simultaneously sad and guilty. How do I deserve this? But it just is what it is. But people like John and a lot of the people that I've worked with and you've worked with, you know, people like that inspire me.
I mean, they're— I don't find typical heroes inspirational. They don't really inspire me like the people we normally hold up as, I mean, well done. I think they’re great, but they don't inspire me. People who inspire me or people who really, how the fuck are you even here? How do you turn up? He turns up. He's actually in hospital right now because he's got a problem that's being fixed. But, and he's in and out of hospital all of the time. And then he turns up, he hugs me and he goes, ‘How are you?’ I go, ‘I'm good.’ He goes, ‘Now look at me.’ So I look at him. And he goes, ‘How are you really?’ And I go, ‘I'm good.’ This is the guy who—
Lisa: Who’s dealing with so much. I've got a friend, Ian Walker8, who I've had on the show, too, so he got hit by a truck when he was out cycling, I think it was years and years ago. He ended up a paraplegic. And then he recovered, he didn't recover, he’s still in a wheelchair, but he was out racing his wheelchair, he did wheelchair racing, and he's part of our club and stuff. And then he got hit by another truck, now he’s a quadriplegic.
This guy, just, he is relentless in his attitude, like he is, and I've seen him dragging himself like with his hands because he's got access now to his hands again. After working for the last couple of years, and he kind of, on a walker frame thing, dragging himself two steps and taking a little video of him, dragging his feet, not the feet out, working, they’re just being dragged. But the relentless attitude of the guy, I'm just like, ‘You’re a fricking hero. You're amazing. Why aren't you on everybody magazine cover? Why aren’t you like, super famous?’ Those people that really flip my boat.
Craig: Yeah. And I wish that, I'm with you, I wish they’re on the front of the boxes and the packages and the magazines. But hopefully we're moving in the right direction.
Lisa: Yeah. Craig, you've been wonderful today. Thank you so much for your time. I will have you back on again, no doubt, because you're just a legend. I loved hanging out with you.
Craig: Thanks, Lisa. Appreciate you. See you, everyone.
Lisa: See you mate!
That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate, review and share with your friends, and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.
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‘The thing is, with addictions, of course, is that people go because everyone is not addicted to it, doesn't mean it's not a thing.’
‘Sugar is definitely one of those things that is one of the hardest addictions I think, not that I've been addicted to anything else but it's a bloody hard addiction to get rid of and stay on top of.’
‘We're fighting a war here, and we've got kids that are already diabetic and before they're even teenagers, and this is a coming huge disaster for the healthcare system.’
‘We've got a metabolic crisis with obesity and diabetes, but guess what? The most important metabolic organ is your brain.’
'Now I understand the need for health fundamentals like sleep, hygiene, and movement, and exercise, and sunshine, and the right diet, because diet is a huge piece of the puzzle because your gut and your brain are connected.'
‘We weren't designed for long-term stress. We're designed for acute fight or flight.’
‘Let's treat people as if they have got a brain in the head. Just because they don't know the jargon. You can explain the jargon.’
Prof Grant Schofield is a Professor of Public Health at Auckland University of Technology and the director of the university's Human Potential Centre (HPC). His research and teaching interests include wellbeing and chronic disease prevention. Prof Schofield is committed to unlocking people's peak performance through consulting. His motto: 'be the best you can be'.
Grant has been interested in human health and performance ever since he started his career. He first took up psychology, went into sport and exercise psychology, then into public health. Prof Schofield has a diverse background and has an interest in biology, medicine, public health, and productivity management. He covers various health topics in his blog and book.
If you want to connect with Prof Grant, you can follow him on Facebook.
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To pushing the limits,
Lisa
Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.
Lisa Tamati: Well, hi everyone and welcome back to Pushing the Limits. This week I have another wonderful professor with me who is going to share some insights and the latest research and I'm really, really excited for this interview. I have Professor Grant Schofield, who is the Professor of Public Health at Auckland University of Technology. He's also the director of the University's Human Potential Center, located at Millennium Campus up in Auckland. His interests lie with dealing with chronic disease and well being and prevention around degenerative diseases, obesity, metabolic disorders. He’s a very, very interesting man, he's written a number of books along with his team. I think you're going to really enjoy this conversation. We're pretty frank and upfront about our beliefs, and they’re very much aligned so I really enjoyed this talk with Professor Grant Schofield.
Before we head over to the show, just a reminder to check out our patron program, www.patron.lisatamati.com, and I'd also love you to check out our flagship epigenetics program. Our epigenetics is all about understanding your own genes, and how to optimize them for your best health. So looking at areas from your food, to your exercise to the what times of the day to do things, your chronobiology, that's called looking at your mood and behavior, your what parts of the brain you use most dominantly, and this is a very powerful program that has changed really, hundreds of lives. We've now used it for a number of years in the corporate space, as well as in the athletic space, as well as with people dealing with different health issues. So if you want to find out more, go to lisatamati.com and hit the work with us button and you'll see our Peak Epigenetics program.
We've also got out Running Hot Coaching. Don't forget that, www.runninghotcoaching.com is the website to go for our online run training system. It's all personalized, customized to you to your next big goal, you get video analysis, a consult with me all in the basic package and plan for your next event, including everything from your strength to your mobility workouts, as well as your run sessions and advice around eating and mindset. So check that out at runninghotcoaching.com. Right, over to Professor Grant Schofield at the Millennium Center in Auckland.
Well, hi, everyone, and welcome back to Pushing the Limits. Today, I have a superstar. I have a guest that I'm really, really excited about speaking to because this is a very learned gentleman and an elite athlete and someone who I greatly admire. I have Professor Grant Schofield to guest. Welcome to the show. I’m glad to have you, Grant!
Prof Grant Schofield: Hey, Lisa. Yeah, thanks for having me. And, yeah, I've been following you from a distance for years. And you know, just enjoying your achievements love, and it's so great to have you on the show.
Lisa: And likewise in reverse. So thank you very much. It's a real honor. So today we, I reckon we just gonna dive into some of the stuff that you've been researching and what's on your mind at the moment, because you've got so many areas that I could go down, you know, looking at high fat diets and obesity and diabetes and prevention. Then we can look at the weight paper that you've just recently released, which I've, I just studied and went, ‘Wow, that was all about glutamate and toxicity and all that’. Well, that's new, that was all new to me. So which direction and firstly, give us a bit of an introduction to you in your background and your sporting career and all of that sort of stuff.
Grant: Yeah. So, like, I'd always, something that always interests me in my life is things that I was sort of good at, and I was only good at it because I like doing them was, not so much school, but science and biology. I just liked it. I just like learning about that stuff. I was right from the very start of school and this is just something that continued to happen. I also like doing sports. I was just like one of those kids who is into the sports and I was okay. It was like, every New Zealand kid plays rugby. I wasn't that great, but I played it, you know, I've got on the 15 rugby and all this sort of stuff and that sort of thing. And the school I said also had rowing as a sport, which Yeah, and they did a performance level. So it was to win the national championships. And they so, the crews I was in, trained hard. And there was high-performance aspects, as long as they were in hindsight of nutrition and psychology and training and the broad range of things that good teenage athletes get involved with.
Then of course, they don't finish as when you finish the school, and I sort of found myself, thought I’ll go to uni. My dad was an engineer and he thought I should go to, I wanted to go to do physical education. That was the main thing I was interested in, and my family sort of pulled me out of it and told me I should have gone to engineering. I lasted a week in there. It obviously wasn't for me. But I ended up in a degree studying physiology and psychology, just a science degree because that's what I found interesting. And then I went from, not really been that interested all of sudden getting these A-pluses. I didn't think I was brainy. But it was just, you know, I was just used to go to lectures, and not really take notes, and just listen and ask questions, and it was really interesting. But because I wasn't that mature, there was never a point in my life early on where I was like, Grant Schofield is now capable of getting a decent job where someone's going to employ him, and he's going to make some difference to the world. That wasn't a thing, right?
Lisa: Yeah.
Grant: So I couldn't finish this one degree and go and get a job because I wasn't capable of doing any work. I didn't think I could at the time. But that's the reality in hindsight, right? So. Of course, this is the early 90s. And this sport of triathlon was coming on the scene where I live in New Zealand, there was these great personalities like Erin Baker, another woman, Erin Christie, another one, Rick Wells, and, just to a young person, and then I ended up, you know, going out training with quite large, and a lot of these people, and I just got into the sport. The thing is about endurance, especially longer, it’s as you know, what, you need to be sort of mentally tough, the pain’s a lot softer than something like rowing or, or, you know, measuring 3,000 meters running or, you know, 400-800 meter swimming, these are sports with a piano actually does fall hard on you. And so that sort of softer pain of the—
Lisa: Softer, longer.
Grant: Longer.
Lisa: There's all the pains that come with it, yeah.
Grant: But it's more of a, it's more of a thinking person sport, right, because you get to work through that. Whereas, you know, in a 400-meter is something that you don't get to work through anything. It's just falling on you, the cut score is coming in. And so I really love that stuff. And so I just did more and more of I just want to do nothing but that. The mindset of the endurance ethic that just wants to do more and more and more. Luckily, I sort of carried on with my studies and then started my academic career. And then I became a psychologist, I'm actually quite useless at psychology because, mainly because I want to give people the answer. And of course, you know, good psychological counseling is about asking open-ended questions, reflective listening, and waiting for the client to come up with a solution, which is absolutely hopeless. As my wife would tell you—
Lisa: You’re an action orientated guy, like no, there is the solution here.
Grant: Yeah. This is why this is the problem for us. It's this sort that out. By then, by the early 2000s, when it really just dawned on us that our kids didn't look like we did when we were kids.
Lisa: Yeah.
Grant: You can look. I actually was reflecting on the other day, I looked at my photo of Twizel Primary School, Year One in 1974. And, yeah, by modern standards, people will be wondering if those kids are properly fed, why the teachers are so lean. And you compare that with a modern day Year One primary school class, or later, and it's a different world we lived in.
So that was the early 2000s, that world had unfolded, right? So didn't, wasn't the same.
Lisa: It’s scary.
Grant: And as fit as I used to be, they weren't the same shape they used to be and we wondered why. And so that was really the field that welcomed me, which was that topic of nutrition.
Lisa: Wow. So that’s where you got into, yeah.
Grant: Yeah, yeah, just didn't mean to. And then, you know, all of a sudden, I guess my research career’s followed my curiosity around the world. So when you're, when you've got young kids, you're interested in young kids. When you've got teenagers, youngsters, young teenagers, When I was racing, elite, high performance, triathlons, we're interested in that. And thankfully, being an academic, it allows you to, especially in my field, allows you the freedom to roam around those and understand those different things. So I've sort of had a, maybe it's a short concentration span, but effectively just a curiosity to keep rolling my research career and practice.
Lisa: It's really good that you can do that with an academic career sort of go go like this and still stay—
Grant: You can’t go off into sort of, you know, rocket propulsion or something, but, you know, yeah, as long as I stick it to the main things, which are being sort of fitness, nutrition, sleep, well being, then those sort of four things combined, have really been my wheelhouse. But in different, the settings, and the context seems to often change. And then you just, you'll do some work and you'll discover what you think an answer is, or not an answer is, it's a dead end or it's actually got places to go, then you're sort of done with it, and you're on to the next sort of variation of something.
So that's sort of been my life. So the latter stuff is really, we've done a lot of work on low-carb and keto diets, fasting, written quite a few books on that.
Lisa: Yeah, What the Fat? and—
Grant: And yeah, yeah, and so that's been really interesting for me, you know, for, for reversing things like diabetes at one end of the spectrum, sort of net, sort of metabolic dysregulation, through to the other end of a high performance.
I'm an athlete, so I coach still, you know, being able to triple their ability to burn free fatty acids at a given intensity and really have a pretty much inexhaustible fuel supply. Before that, they would, you know, really run out of glycogen and struggle through the enjoyment and performance of an event. So—
Lisa: Let's start with that one, just if I may interrupt you there, because it's, you know, something that's fascinated me. When I was, you know, active career, I'd never become fat-adapted as an athlete. Your take is that, should endurance athletes be always fat-adapted? Or is it a genetic thing some people are good at, and some people are less so? What is your take on it now, like, given the knowledge that you have and the experience?
Grant: So I think that the normal human condition, if you wander up to a Paleolithic human before we started farming grains and wheat and stuff, that sort of hunter gatherers that they would have enjoyed this metabolic flexibility to use fat as a primary fuel source when are resting and moving around low intensities, and then as they got higher and higher intensity, then they would have supplemented that fat burning with extra energy produced from burning glucose in the body. But that doesn't exist. So commonly, and so we're just in the normal human state that lets you burn fat in some circumstances, and carbs and fat in other circumstance.
But if you went down to the local Westfield shopping mall and went to the food hall, and you you bought all those people up to my lab and put them on our metabolic card and measured there, because you can measure both breath by breath gas analysis and understand whether they've been in primarily fat or carbohydrate or whatever mix of. So we do that sort of graded exercise tissue stop at risk, just breathing into the tube. The machine’s analyzing fat and carb burning, and as you increase your intensity, like running speed or power on the bike, then you just see this greater change.
Now, your average person off the street in the food hall doesn't burn fat, even at rest. So they’re metabolically inflexible. Yep. And then the question is, can you train that? And can you train that even on high performance athletes? I think the answer is yes, and I'll give you a good example. There's a young fellow I trained, Matt Kurt and what I mean, saying this. I've trained him for a few years now. So he came from a CrossFit background. He was a fit young man. Yeah, he would be eating mostly carbs, actually.
Lisa: Yeah, we were all told back in the day.
Grant: Yeah, totally. So he wanted me to help him prepare for an Ironman triathlon. And so I started training him and say, on an April one year so over in New Zealand winter, didn't really mention diet, because we couldn't seem to get to that but we sort of got on the on the idea that he had to go bike riding, and what running would look like, and it was learning the sports. And by December, he did his first triathlon, which was a 70.3, sort of half Ironman, with a view to going through the Ironman in New Zealand three months later and beginning of March, and he did pretty well actually, like it came fourth overall in the amateurs, so he is talented young man, and he’s a swimmer. He could hit a bike, he could run a bit. But I knew he was a cub and I was like, I need to put you in my lab and we need to measure your fuel burning on that.
So in early December, we got them in there and his peak fat oxidation was about half a gram, a minute, at about 165 watts in the box. So it's not very good power, output is not going to be very fast. And he's only getting because a gram of fat has about nine calories, he’s spending half of one of those a minute over 60 minutes. He’s got about 400 to 500 calories an hour available from fat, and you know, he's going to be racing at 1200 calories an hour.
Lisa: Yeah.
Grant: So over several hours, yeah. He's simply is going to run into all sorts of trouble, because he's got this deficit of 800 calories an hour, he needs to find from glucose. He's got probably 2000 calories that he's got in his muscles and liver. He can consume another couple of 100 by eating gels and stuff, or bananas or something. So he's woefully short. And so it means he can just make a half, I mean, over four hours. We probably have eight or nine hours, he's going to grovel home. He’s going to be a really bad mess. And that's what you see. It's always frustrated me. I got things like Ironman Triathlon, they sort of, 8-15 hour events, or 17 hour events for people.
And I think the saddest thing for me is, first of all this, two thirds of the fittest still mimics the general population, which is overweight.
Lisa: Yeah.
Grant: And virtually all of them run out of glucose or glycogen and their body, sometimes during the bike or shortly into the run. And so the whole marathon experience for them is a very unpleasant affair.
They don't like doing it, they finally make it, it's been a real drain on, and they've had so much support from their friends and family over that preparation period, and it was all avoidable. So with Matt, within a mile, we're like, what this is going to happen with you, Matt. So we're stuck on a strict keto diet for three weeks, his training over that period was fairly low intensity, we didn’t really go for any intensity up until after the new year period. And then just sit them on to Iron Man training, and that includes his long run and his long bike which he did weekly, and I've been doing them fasted. Yeah, so with just water. People find that a little bit extreme but his intensity is really low. We'd go out and do you know, like a six hour bike in the end that with no food, and he’d be fine.
Lisa: And that’s the thing, you're adapted.
Grant: You get adapted. And so going back into the lab just before Iron Man, and he’d improved his maximum fat oxidation from half a gram a minute at 165 watts or something, to 1.1 grams a minute at 260 watts.
Lisa: Wow.
Grant: So now he's able to supply 800 calories an hour from fat, and he can do it at 260 watts, which is actually a reasonably competitive pair out, but he's going to get along at you know, 39, 40 calories an hour.
Lisa: Wow.
Grant: And yeah, and so in his first, second ever triathlon, in his first Iron Man, he does, he finishes, I don't know, the top 10 and 9 hours 22. So good effort.
Lisa: That’s amazing.
Grant: Yeah, we come back the next year, now with a bit more training on his belt, and he can he manages 8 hours 50. Wow. And this year, he comes back and he wins the entire age group race by half an hour, breaks the course record by seven minutes and does 8:27. And I got him back in the lab straight after that. And what we saw as further fed adaptation over that two-year period, so now he is able to burn 1.8 grams a minute of fat at 310 watts, and that's an astonishing power output. So 310 watts, yeah, you're doing 42 Ks an hour, on a decent course. And that's, he rode 4 hours 29 480 Ks, it's an astonishing time, especially for a guy who's working full time as a teacher.
Lisa: That's insane.
Grant: So that's what we mean by being metabolically flexible, and, and becoming a real fat-burning machine.
Lisa: But what about the arguments about you know, I mean, keto diet is a very difficult diet for people to, if we're talking about the general population now, and it's quite a hard diet to stick to, long term. What about adherence to things? Do you have to be strictly keto? Do you have to be really low on your carbs in order to get the ketones and be in ketosis and to get this fat adaptation? Is there any middle ground? Can you—
Grant: Oh, yeah, yeah. It's a great question. I mean, the series of questions you got there, Lisa, are just crucial. And the answer is, initially getting into that. as I'm, for that three, it's very strict. And so that's three weeks. After that, it's very much cyclical. So we generate nutritional ketosis and fat burning by fasted long workouts. And on other cases during the week, we're adding carbohydrates quite a bit. So it's definitely not a strict ketogenic diet at all. And we'll have off periods where he's just eating whatever. In fact, I have trouble trying to get him off the ketone to be a bit more loose, frankly. But that's, that's an athlete, not a normal human, in that sense. This is why I introduced the idea of fasting and intermittent fasting and I'm quite keen on that. And for me, what the fast what I tried to sort of mimic what I felt was an easy, sustainable, cyclical way for me to eat that generated fat burning.
Lisa: And pursued it with autophagy? We're all talking about intermittent fasting and I do it like an intermittent fasting, a short-ish intermittent fasting. Is that going to this, I'm not gonna get into ketosis doing an intermittent fasting.
Grant: So I just, I would do this sort of pattern of Sunday, try and be reasonably good on the low carb, just eat whatever I wanted. But try and be okay with it. Monday, do some restricted eating windows. So you know, might be, a longest window. Someone who's experienced like me, I could just have one meal that day, and the Tuesday I just did the same thing. So you know, and when I hit a meal I made sure it was super filling, super nutritious, I was calling that super meals. So that's my, that's my Monday and Tuesday, my hard parts of the week, right I worked hard and I concentrated hard on my freshly generated nutritional ketosis. By Monday lunchtime, despite the weekend, Saturday being quite poor, I was back in full ketosis.
I made a bit of an effort, I managed to sort of hang on to some stuff with no real particular restriction but trying to keep the carbs down for Wednesday, Thursday. By the end of Friday, everything had sort of gone pretty loose. And Saturday it was, could be, sometimes off the route is completely out of nutritional ketosis and plenty of carbs, even the odd bit of alcohol, which I'm not encouraging, by the way, but that just seems to happen sometimes.
Lisa: Yeah. And we've got to live, too,
Grant: Yeah, yeah. So I'd be completely out of ketosis and in no shape for that at all. But by Monday morning, I'll be back in again. So I just get this period.
Lisa: So you can do that. It's been my question today is like, do I, if I go to keto, you know, go the keto diet. Do you have to do it as a religion? This is me. And then you get people like Dave Asprey and and if you read his book, Fast This Way, and that, he talks about cyclic keto, and how that's even better than just being straight keto, because keto itself can have some negative benefits.
Dr Grant: Yeah, I completely agree. And so unless you're wanting to be on keto, for some sort of therapeutic resume, I said, you know, glioblastoma, brain cancer or brain injury like a TBI, I think so. Interesting thing, some other cancers, or you're in chemotherapy, then I don't see any reason to be in that state all the time. But the point is having a bit of bollock machinery to be able to be and easily get in and out. My hypothesis is the Paleolithic one, which is really that humans are metabolically flexible, it's the normal human condition and to see modern humans that have really lost their orchestration of the metabolism to, to burn fat as a primary fuel sources as a sort of denying your own humanity type situation without being too dramatic about it, really.
Lisa: But yeah, if we, I was reading one of your blogs, and you hit another, Dr Lisa Te Morenga, I think it was, saying, oh, but you know, like, if we look at from an evolutionary perspective, the caveman because this is an argument that I've had with people too, oh, but the cavemen didn't live very long, so therefore, it's not a good diet. To say that that's, but that's not a bit that helped us survive till now. You know, like we—
Grant: I think that’s a complete straw man of an argument, by the way.
Lisa: Yeah, I think so too.
Grant: I mean, I think, you know, I mean, first of all, while the average lifespan, is fairly low for people, it’s just for other reasons!
Lisa: It’s for other reasons.
Grant: So if you didn't have those reasons, your actual survival was pretty good. And actually, the important thing to remember is that Paleolithic humans didn't have chronic disease. So they didn't have this, these, what is it a New Zealand at the moment, 12 years of disability in their life before they died, which, so subtract 12 off your lifespan, to get your health span, to health span, span with the same thing. And also question about that.
Lisa: We don't have infant mortality, like they did. And we didn't have lions chasing us, and we've got all these other things that make us live longer. But now we have to take even more care of our metabolic state, in order that we don't have these long term. And I mean, I've been living with the consequences of mom's metabolic disorders, leading to an aneurysm, for the past five years, and trying to undo the damage. You know, what I'm talking about is like, in that decline that we see with so many people for over decades, sometimes, and it's just a horrific way to go out for starters.
Grant: You know, I don't think anyone, if you ask them when they're in good health, about how they want the rest of their life to track, says they want to be in poor health with a low health span. I don't think that's a topic that people raise as being a good thing.
Lisa: No.
Grant: It's my experience. When I ask even people who aren't doing many healthy behaviors of what they want, then they'll say health, family, friends and happiness, whatever that means. But they, yeah,
Lisa: yeah. And I think this is the discussion that we need to be having, so that we find out what the optimum diet is. People I know, I've struggled with my diet over the years. One of the reasons I started running was because I wanted to eat more, because I love food. And then, then I suddenly, at some point, I realized, this hypothesis of calories in calories out is absolute bullshit. This isn't working and that really came to you know, people who hear my podcasts and hear me say when I ran through New Zealand, and I just suddenly woke up. I was running 500 kilometers a week. Yeah, and I was getting fatter because I was in a complete state of chaos. You know, my hormones were up, my water retention, all of that sort of—
Grant: High amount of inflammation, probably.
Lisa: Huge amounts of inflammation. And I ended up flaccid, losing muscle mass and getting fatter and having a slower metabolic rate. I could have sat on the couch and eaten chips and gotten better, you know, in shape?
Grant: Yeah.
Lisa: So that's when a light bulb went for me, and then it also had other reasons like genetically I'm not really made for the long distance stuff, I'm more the high intensity, shorter, sharper, is more suited to me. So I was doing that wrong as well, because some people, it's better to be doing the long. But I think having these discussions where we really dig in, and you've done the research, you know, what, from an evolutionary perspective, what we need to be eating. The state of our food now is horrific. Then you, you add into all that the whole addictive nature of all the stuff and the additives, or preservatives, the MSGs for all of the sugars that are added to our phones, and people are up against it. Like, you know, you can’t even—
Grant: Yeah, I agree. Those two topics that might be worth going into those, I've got two—
Lisa: Yes, please.
Grant: —sort of bases, working in both those areas, the first you mentioned, like you go out, the state of our food supply. So what we've been doing recently is we've been going to primary schools around the place. And we've been taking photos of all the year sixes’ lunchboxes. And whatever you think, particularly on what we call that social gradient, that sort of tipping of rich versus poor at the bottom end of that, whatever you think the food supply’s like, I don't care what you think about how bad it is. It's worse than you think.
Lisa: Yeah.
Grant: I actually cried, I actually physically cried.
Lisa: That’s what our kids are getting to eat every day.
Grant: Yeah, and how that's not a priority. Just remember that the biggest cost to our healthcare system for our kids is having to anesthetize them to extract teeth because they're rotten at age five, and we can't walk around too much if they're not anesthetized. So yeah, I mean, what society treats its most vulnerable like that? Just one little rant: in kids healthcare, we have to go and do fundraising and buy raffle tickets to pay for the hospitals for kids. And we don’t do that with adults. That sort of fundraising for that is despicable. It's not a government that cares.
Lisa: Not to mention the whole bloody ambulance service.
Grant: Yeah, there’s all of that, wouldn’t I fund that? There’s all of that stuff as well. So that's just a mess of how, frankly, Ad the second thing is I've got another student who's just really got into this, the addiction side of food. And as a former psychologist, she goes through and look at the, some, you know, use this Diagnostic and Statistical Manual DSM, DSM-5 is the latest version, which is a way of characterizing disorders.
And you look at the substance misuse disorder, which is really around addictions. And you know, if you change the word alcohol or methamphetamine or tobacco for sugar, yeah, then, you know, the sorts of things you know, sometimes feel withdrawal sometimes. I eat more than I should change unprofessional behavior and makes things worse in my life. You go across all 11 criteria, and you go, Yeah, it's pretty plausible. That's a real thing. Yeah. And the thing is, with addictions, of course, is that people go because everyone is not addicted to it, doesn't mean it's not a thing. So there's this, there's a lot of alcohol drunk where people don't turn into alcoholics It doesn't mean there's not such a thing as alcoholics. And there's, you know, for many people, it becomes a substance they can't control using and I feel the same things about sugar in your ultra processed food in general really.
Lisa: Yeah. And the sugar I mean, the I mean like people like you I know you've done a lot of work with a Pacific Island population and Maori and so on, we have a predisposition to you know, not being able to cope with the sugars and more cardiovascular disease and more metabolic disorders. So even more Prater the stuff because we've already and haven't had I don't know hundreds of years of of having it to a certain degree in I mean, I've struggled no sugar is definitely one of those things that is one of the hardest addictions I think, not that I've been addicted to anything else but it's a bloody hard addiction to to get rid of and stay on top of.
Grant: Something like smoking or alcohol like the absence of is part of it is hard but just slightly easier because it's contained whereas sugar’s so ubiquitous in the food supply, you can't stop it. It's very hard, you know, all of a sudden you put some chili sauce on your something and you're damn near 75% sugar, you know, like?
Lisa: You don't even realize it unless you start baking them and making everything from scratch.- And then you know, not to mention all the MSGs and the additives, preservatives, emulsifiers that are you know, destroying our guts and causing us to want more. I mean, there's a real reason why you can't eat one chip. If you eat one chip, you've eaten the packet,
Grant: Well, that's certainly my experience. But strangely, and I had an argument with a dietitian the other day about this, there's a total open quote and short of eating. And it's like her hypothesis was, well, the whole reason we I was like, Look, there's no point having salted chips in my house, because they’ll last five minutes, I’ll eat the whole lot. Yes. Oh, no, no, no, the way you should overcome that is just have dozens of packets on there and just eat yourself silly and then you'll get over it. That’s just bullshit in my experience
Lisa: Pretty much done that, and that didn't work. That doesn't work. I've heard that theory too. I think that's absolute rubbish, and not something that I'd recommend for starters, because you're gonna start on an either like, that's like, you know, a little bit good, then we must have just have some more.
Yeah.
Lisa: That's ridiculous. Really, they still think that.
You know there's a whole movement?
You're kidding? Okay. But how do we help people? Because people are unaware of the addictive nature of their food and we're so like, I don't have a big garden full of organic veggies. I never time, all the knowledge and I used to having my dad used to do my garden and then it was good. But now I don't. Most of us don't have access to good quality foods.
What the hell do we do? We go into a supermarket and it's just so easy to pick up a pre-made sauce, you know, tomato sauce, or Bolognese sauce instead of, you know, buying a bloody lot of tomatoes and making it. But yeah, but we've fallen into this trap. And now we're addicted all of us. Because the big food industry wants you to eat more of its crap.
Grant: Yeah, they've conspired both on research and practice. And then just in all practical ways. In fact, I wrote a paper with a couple of superstars actually a guy, Aseem Malhotra, who's a cardiologist, in London, and Rob Lustig, who's pretty famous, a pediatric endocrinologist from San Francisco about the the tricks that the food industry has pulled, which are pretty much the exact same ones as Big Tobacco have over the years, you know, creating bogus interest groups, false advocacy, sponsoring athletes, list goes on.
Lisa: I’m a part of that machinery, unfortunately, you know, when I was a young athlete being sponsored by Coca Cola—
Grant: I didn't, I was told, I was told not to come back to, I'm in New Zealand. I spoke there one time, a couple of years ago, because I had to guard the sponsors product, which was Nutrigrain, Kellogg's Nutrigrain, which is four and a half staff health rating food, that's, you know, a third sugar. It's just a disgrace. Yeah, that was not welcome again.
Lisa: When you see famous sports teams, I won’t name any, but they're nutritionists on the telly telling you to eat stuff that really is not what you want your kids eating. And you’re like, ‘Wow, that's wrong on so many levels’, you know?
Grant: I’ll tell you a story about that. I don’t know if I should tell this story. Years ago, I gave this talk on a sort of update on physical activity and health for the first-time executives of Coca Cola over this Waipuna Lodge in Auckland. I'd finished my talk, I was just at the back. And the head and corners in and go on. The next guy that got was a corporate guy from the US about how they're going to discredit various nutrition people and active tactics. I went around, and I sort of sat there and listened to it. And I was like, ‘Oh’, and then about halfway through, I was like, ‘Shit, I'll make sure I get out of here alive’. Yeah, but there was like an active discussion about, about the tactics to deal with scientists who were dissonant to the view, to the worldview, which I thought was a really interesting,
Lisa: This is a reality. And this is what's happening not only in the food industry, it's also happening in the pharmaceutical industry. It's also happening in many industries that we in the public are not, and when you've got people like you that are brave enough to stand up and say stuff, you get attacked. I'm quite surprised that my podcast hasn't been taken off here yet. But anyway.
Grant: Yeah, that's right. And yeah, it will heavily wind but people will be, there’s forces in play there. You don't want to get too conspiratorial because it sometimes requires a degree of organization that doesn't, that we’re capable of, but yeah, I think in the food industry case and pharmaceutical industry, the evidence has been there for a long time.
Lisa: Yeah, yeah. And I think, my approach to it now is like, we are possible, light a candle toward the good information rather than fighting and banging your head against the, you know, because otherwise you can end up in a very bad place. But okay, so we know that there's all these addictive forces, if you like, at play. And so because you just look around town, you know, in the obesity and they are boys they’re looking like girls and, you know, the hormone regulation is just obviously affected and fertility rates are going down. We're fighting a war here, and we've got kids that are already diabetic and before they're even teenagers, and this is a coming huge disaster for the healthcare system when you’re in public health.
Grant: Yeah, yeah. The present one that I've become much more interested in because it's, I think it's become more obvious today for a bunch of reasons. I'll tell you a few stories as mental health, particularly Youth Mental Health. I've been an academic for a few decades. And, you know, a decade ago or two decades ago, okay, students will get seconds, some would have some mild mental health problems, but it wasn't really a thing that you would see very much. Now at the moment, all the time I get students, students like it's dropping out of the degree now because of their mental health.
They've got anxiety. And these are really smart, intelligent, switched-on people with, these are the top of the socioeconomic ladder, we don’t know how much worse it is at the bottom. I didn't even get there in the first place. That youth suicide rate in New Zealand, it keeps getting talked about as the tip of an iceberg for a major problem. One of the women that I work with, mid-20s, beautiful, intelligent woman. Yeah, we're talking about SSRIs, antidepressants, because I've been on those I could have knocked me over I said, are, you know, is it a common thing for your friend group and that sort of thing? She goes, I pretty much everyone I know is on them. Yeah, yeah. And, and so we've got this—
Lisa: It’s a good sequence, isn’t it?
Grant: Because the brains are metabolic. We've got a metabolic crisis with obesity and diabetes, but guess what? The most important metabolic organ is your brain. Somehow, again, here we are, asleep at the wheel, we've got this, you've got this treatment gap. So even if we could treat them with anything effective, which is doubtful. From our current system, yeah, they can only treat half the half of the 910,000 people in the country of 5 million. Because 910,000 is the number of serious mental health problems. Wow. Half of them don't get any treatment whatsoever, because there is no treatment. You bring the mental health crisis line, which we've had to do. And they will say, are they killing themselves right now? And that's just like, no, that's like—
Lisa: ‘Okay, we've got time.’
Grant: Yeah, then okay, we're not doing it, I think. And we'll go to your doctor. If you go to your doctor, you know that there's a nine month wait to see a psychologist?. It’s just unacceptable.
Lisa: And what's the answer? The course, the easy answer for the doctor is to give them a SSRI.
Grant: Which doesn't work very well. No. neuroplasticity, if they're a young person, causes them harm.
Lisa: Closes down hormones. And does it different.
Grant: Yeah, 100%.
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Grant: So to me, the unacknowledged metabolic crisis here we can see obesity. We can measure diabetes. Yeah, and those are problems. But you know, to me the most perverse one, especially having, you know, teenage kids myself and that sort of thing is this youth mental health thing. It's despicable. Like my dad, yeah, good for him. He had metastatic prostate cancer and was sorted with this keto diet, but the amount of access to expensive treatment, he was able to get in his 80s. Compared to a young woman in her early 20s, who has a serious mental health problem that's going to affect her, and even around for the rest of their lives, who can get none. It's perverse, who spends their money on health that way? Yeah, like, I want my dad to get his treatment and get better and everything, which he has, but, what sort of society prioritizes that over these young people?
Lisa: Yeah, and what can we do? Like why, there is a lot of I mean, I talk research a lot, and I know that your research is also pointing in this direction, that there's a lot of health fundamentals that we can get right, that can actually help people without costing anything even, without having to be a pharmacological intervention. How about we try to teach people how to manage themselves? And I mean, I've had, I was on antidepressants for over 20 years, and I could not get off them, because they are addictive. It took me three years to get off them, and thank God I did. I, in my early 20s, had relationship crises, was put on them, just stayed on them because I didn't know any better.
What are, what implications that’s had for me, and then trying to get off them. And of course, your body starts to downregulate your own if you're not producing your own. I've got off them now, and I'm fine, and so on, and I'm helping other family members off them. But that was the first port of call. Now I understand the need for health fundamentals like sleep, hygiene, and movement, and exercise, and sunshine, and the right diet, because diet is a huge piece of the puzzle, because your gut and your brain are connected. And there's a lot of, like you say, a fix. When you have a bad diet, and you have bad nutrition, you're going to have more mental instability, if you want to put it that way, you're going to have more problems, than if you're on a good, really robust, solid, good diet. That's going to affect your mental health. And what are our kids, they're not giving any of that information, or any programs around it.
Grant: Yeah, and you interfere with one aspect of metabolic homeostasis with an antidepressant, and you're surprised that it doesn't work very well, and there’s unintended consequences. What we're trying to do is, and humans, I think, all want to be in the state, we're trying to return ourselves to a sort of metabolic homeostasis where things are balanced and well-regulated. For the most of the body, that's the primary target, there is a sugar in your blood and the insulin in your blood, because if those aren't right, then you're an inflammatory environment and pro-growth and no chance to, you know, being that autophagy of tightening things up. So that's the big metabolic picture. But in the brain, I've just started to stitch together a much more, I think coherent view of what's going on.
Because the balance of neurotransmitters in the brain is important. I just think with the low fat revolution, we pick fat, not carbohydrates. We pick the wrong one of the three. Yeah, well, this is alright, we pick serotonin as the neurotransmitter to manage, we need to get it back to where it started more quickly. That's what reuptake inhibitors do. And actually, sorry?
Lisa: You've written a paper recently on glutamate and its role in all this. Can you explain about it?
Grant: I have, six months ago, I had heard of glutamate because I, trying to, from psychology, and frankly, I'd forgotten what it did. Until one of my smart students reminded me that glutamate is the most important and most prevalent excitatory neurotransmitter in the brain. It's about 90% of your neurotransmitters, it runs in tandem with an inhibitory system called GABA. And so these two things operate together. The inhibition fine tunes the excitation. And not only that, the glutamate gets recycled onto glutamine and then back into GABA and they rely on one another to be in a sort of, you know, good, healthy relationship, right?
And so what happens is, when there's over-excitation, which chronic stress does, then glutamate because it's excitatory neurotransmitters, just keeps getting pumped out. Pumped out, pumped out, and it hits its receptor in the other side of the synapse, between neurons. That receptor, it's called the NMDA receptor, it's downregulated. So it stops seeing the glutamate as much as it could be, which causes even more glutamate to be produced. And then this glutamate starts to seep out of that cleft and to just general space. And the trouble with it—
Lisa: It's toxic.
Grant: It’s toxic, and this is called glutamate excitotoxicity. So this is not a theory, this is a thing. And it starts to kill brain cells, and the trouble with it, first of all it atrophies neurons, which is never good, and they're not there anymore when they die. But those dying neurons themselves spill out glutamate, into more glutamate into the space, and you get this downward spiral of—
Lisa: Neurodegeneration.
Grant: Neurodegeneration, exactly right. And so the most interesting thing in my mind about this, and this is why I'm so excited about it is because, and you'll see this. So the most obvious is a concussion or mild TBI, traumatic brain injury, is that what causes your initial brain cell death is just an insult, right? You bang your head, right? So you get that glutamate excitotoxicity. The initial effects of the concussion is mild, but the long-term effects of the concussion because of the glutamate excitotoxicity are severe. That's why concussions get worse and worse and worse for time after they've happened.
Lisa: Okay, thanks that somebody's saying that! Because people go to the hospitals with a concussion and they go, no, there's, you've had a mild concussion, go home and rest. And that's it. It's like we there's so much we can do—
Grant: 100% there's so much we can do. And I think we already do it when it gets really severe, right? So if you're in hospital with ischemia, lack of oxygen in the brain from a heart attack, or sometimes in some hospitals, that neonatal hypoxia, so newborns become deprived of oxygen. One way that they deal with that is they induce hypothermia, because cold exposure, especially in those areas, helps reduce glutamate. And they provide intravenous magnesium because magnesium antagonises as a receptor and allows glutamate to get back to its homeostatic levels more quick, and it's highly effective. And the animal studies are very, very convincing. And it's near a clinical practice for things like spinal cord injury.
And then you start to think about other ways that the brain gets damaged. So Alzheimer's and dementia is an interesting one. So for other reasons, including high glucose, we start to lose brain cells. But as soon as you start to do a little bit excitotoxicity, then exacerbates the problem massively. A mild or severe stress, which results in post traumatic stress disorder, is another way of damaging the brain initially through chronic, elevated glutamate but it rolls onto itself. And this is solved, then it's not a problem.
Lisa: This is why stress and trauma—
Grant: And chronic stress, you’re just stressed out, your fight or flight response is up more than it should. And it goes on a long time. The two to three minutes that it's designed to be up for is actually days, months, years, same thing. And so you've got these different pathways, getting brain damage.
Lisa: Brain damage is happening as well.
Grant: When you take, if you if you scan people with major depressive disorder, you autopsy people who've committed suicide, then you see severe atrophy and things like the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, important areas. And it's caused by chromatic toxicity. But the reason why that's interesting is that there's a lot you can do about it. And so we mentioned cold water therapy, just getting in cold water, especially you can breathe slowly and deeply through your nose, which downregulates the nervous system, as medical therapy for depression, right? Yeah. So and potentially I think for TBI and concussion and Alzheimer's and that sort of thing, because it helps with that.
But so is aerobic exercise for the same reason. So is a whole range of nutrient supplements, particularly magnesium, particularly you have to take them in the form of magnesium citrate or magnesium l-threonate. And the clinical trials of magnesium citrate and depression is a more effective medication than an antidepressant. And there is no real side effects. So magnesium, zinc, omega-3 fish oils, B complex vitamins, vitamin C, vitamin D, all anti-inflammatory, antioxidant type.
Lisa: And all stuff that I'm on every day, and my mum's on with her brain injury on, all the time.
Grant: That's right, because and they are downregulating glutamate transmission and achieving a glutamate GABA balance in a better way, as does presence of ketones in your blood occasionally, as does any sort of diet that’s anti-inflammatory, and any diet that's inflammatory, exacerbates the problem. So—
Lisa: So for things like brain injuries, like someone like mom who was in a coma and they were putting a ba- basically a glucose strip into the, you know, into feeding tubes. That's just like causing more damage than if we'd had ketones present if we'd had—
Grant: 100%, because you're, there's also a fuel cri- an accompanying fuel crisis on the brain where it can't—
Lisa: Uptake the glucose.
Grant: —uptake the glucose in the normal fashion, but you can use ketones. So you've got the glutamate part going on, and you've got the glucose fuel crisis. So you know—
Lisa: And isn't the same with Alzheimer's, and they, it's a, when you get insulin resistance, you also get the glucose not being able to be uptaken in the brain, and therefore the brain starving for glucose.
Prog Grant: Yeah. So ketogenic diet for that group is actually a pretty therapeutic diet, that would be the one situation that would be, you know, granted, for keto is hard. I mean, obviously, it's a hard population group to work with them on that, but that doesn’t make it not therapeutic. That's another whole—
Lisa: No, and that's what I put, you know, like with mum’s brain injury, once I started to realize that from the research I was doing. I was doing I had her on as good as possible, keto diet for that first couple of years. Not so much now, because she's got autonomy so it’s harder regulate. But she does do intermittent fasting, and she has got all the supplements, and she has got a very, low-carb diet, as much as I can get it to do it, when she’s not sneaking things around my back. But this is just so crucial for all of these degenerative diseases, and I'm really excited about this glutamate thing, because it's only just come on my radar through your research, and I think that this is perhaps gonna go to the next level. Are you continuing the research on this?
Grant: Yeah, and I'm really interested in, I haven't been that interested in micronutrients through my career. I sort of felt while you're eating whole foods, you know, that should be the template. And I still think that, but I increasingly started to think, especially my colleague, Julia Ruckledge, who's a professor of psychology at University of Canterbury, in her work with micronutrients. She uses fairly high doses, but how effective those have been in her clinical trials with various aspects of mental health. And just as I see also random other outcomes like they just happened to be doing a clinical trial when the Christchurch earthquake happened, and they're only halfway through it. So the randomization wasn't quite complete.
They noticed at the end of the trial that the people in the micronutrient supplementation group, about 19% of those ended up with some sort of post traumatic stress from the Christchurch earthquake.
Lisa: Yep.
Grant: Those without, who are in the placebo group, 69% have post traumatic stress. And this is consistent with other research around, you know, the stress of natural disasters, natural disasters, and that sort of thing. And all sorts of things go wrong in the brain. And it's just, there's a mess of effects. If you could get this from a pharmaceutical, the pharmaceutical company would be all over it. But, you know, inexpensive micronutrients. So, you're interested in those really.
Lisa: So that improves your resilience. Basically, you've got the right vitamins and minerals and things in your body to do the work that's needed to be required. Have you ever heard about the research of ketamine and post traumatic stress? When that ketamine is able to stop the formation of the memories, the traumatic-ness if that's a word?
Grant: Yeah, so, so yes, yeah.
Lisa: Because it's part of that there'll be part of that glutamate thing, wouldn’t it?
Grant: Ketamine is, antagonizes the NDMA receptor, as the same mechanism magnesium roles a play, plays a role on. And so ketamine is a little bit more of a difficult substance to think about it because it's an analgesic and it's sort of that pre-anesthetic and acidic and it really spaces people out. But you're right across PTSD, single treatments have been shown to be highly effective. Single treatments with major depressive or otherwise intractable have shown to be temporarily effective. The most interesting one, for me, I was just talking to an ethicist the other day about this. He was talking about ketamine with chronic pain sufferers, and about half of the people they treat with ketamine with chronic pain, they have an instant and complete alleviation of the chronic pain. And they give them ketamine at a subclinical dose for five straight days. I don't know the ins and outs of that.
Lisa: Because it stops the pathways from—
Grant: I don’t know what, I’m thinking of. Re, re —
Lisa: Receptors.
Grant: —re-tokenizes the receptors, and they go into my pathway for a start, which is the only real known mechanism amongst possible other things, but again, it's astonishing right? So this is otherwise incurable life debilitating chronic pain. Five days of treatment of the subclinical dose, you're not unconscious, you probably can't drive around, but it's gone, not there now. So ketamine is an interesting one. And equally, there's other interesting antagonists of that receptor, which, I am obviously no expert, but other people are starting to do the work and unfortunately become illegal drugs, like some of the solutions like psilocybin magic mushrooms, and, there’s are ayahuasca ceremony type things in South America.
Lisa: I hope they didn’t keep researching those. Just because they're drugs doesn't mean that they haven’t got therapeutic benefits.
Grant: So they have potential therapeutic benefits. And to understand that I think it's going to be that's, people will follow that, however I won't be doing any of that research, of course, but someone will be, and it'll be interesting to follow that as it unfolds. And you understand, just to finish it, and US in the 60s, all that came out. I was there, no one knew what to do with these drugs. So they just made them illegal, which is, you understand at that time, but probably needs to make another think about that.
Lisa: They do. So when we, so all of these things from things like Alzheimer's, to brain injuries, to stre-, chronic stress, to big stressful life events, all cause an excess of glutamate, is that correct?
Grant: Yeah. Because it's just overexcitation. Because it's the excitatory system, and you're overproducing and you haven't got a pathway.
Lisa: So you're in a sympathetic state, you're in a fight or flight response.
Grant: Yes, correct. And then it'll get there. And some of those are, just because there's, well, not the traumatic brain injury and the Alzheimer's aren't because of that. There's other reasons that they branch off. But for the PTSD, for the depression, for the, you know, chronic stress sufferer.
Lisa: This is why stress, one of the reasons why stress is just so damaging to us, isn't it?
Grant: Yeah, we weren't designed for long-term stress. We're designed for acute fight or flight.
Lisa: Yep, yep. And then be now, this is why I think there were the research and information around how to turn on your parasympathetic nervous system at will, breath work, cold therapies, or, saunas, heat therapies, all of these things that we can do to manage our stress levels, because which, you know, stress is probably not going to go away anytime soon. We've got these incredibly stressful lives that we lead now, with thousands of jobs that we have to do and things and things like when my dad passed away eight months ago, that was a stressor I couldn't control.
Grant: It's life, isn't it? Stressors evolve.
Lisa: And that's, I’ve lived a mess of post traumatic stress that, so I'm interested in all this research on how do I undo that damage, if you like? Yeah. How do I how do I manage it? This sort of stuff is really interesting.
Grant: I just think you know that the mainstream medicinal effects of cold therapy, hot therapy, and breath work, especially nasal breathing are now sufficiently well established to be mainstream. These are normal things to engage in your daily life, to manage your life.
Lisa: Absolutely, yeah. I think nasal breathing the work I don't know if you know, Patrick McKeown and James Nestor and stuff, they just absolutely amazing work that and information that we can put into our daily lives to help cope, or to help us cope with this stress that we're under, and the bad food even, can all help, and athletic performance.
Grant: And I love about those guys with that stuff, they've actually, they haven't tried to dumb down the science from the late for the lay public. They treat them with the respect that they deserve, and they just translate it into an understandable manner, but they don't dumb it down. They give you the full noise.
Lisa: I love that.
Grant: I love that. I just think, it's like I ate three plus servings of vegetables and fruit and exercise half an hour a day, and not too much gardening or do it. It's just bullshit. It's just treating us with disdain, and not with the deserve I respect, and respect that we deserve. For where’s the science in that? Now I actually get fitter, the more the better. As long as you manage it. It’s pretty friggin, like, why do they not. And I see cancer patients getting told, I just want to eat whatever makes you feel good.
Lisa: Oh, no.
Grant: No, I want the best possible information. Thank you.
Lisa: Yes. And not eating cookies while you're having chemo. You know, and that's what they're doing. And it's just like, do you not? Are you not aware? Have you looked at them for metabolic you know, approach to—
Grant: Often, the excuse that, the excuse that Lisa is, are well, they won't do it so there's no point telling them. That’s just not good enough, right?
Lisa: I know, and that is just treating you, and I've experienced this unfortunately firsthand, treating you like an idiot because you're not a professor.
Grant: Yeah.
Lisa: Just because I don't have a ‘professor’ in front of my name does not mean I'm an idiot. And don't treat me like an idiot as if I don't know anything and that is unfortunately the way you get treated in the system.
Grant: The health system’s not good for that. And they try and use jargon to bamboozle.
Lisa: Yeah. Doesn't work with me. And that's not fair.
Grant: Yeah.
Lisa: When I'm teaching people or working with people, I find that it's absolutely crucial that I explain the mechanisms of action behind why I'm giving you this information. And I try to keep it to a level that I don't overwhelm people, but I want them to understand why they're doing this in order to make, because then they're more likely to go, ‘Ah, actually, I get it now’. Just telling you that stress is bad for you, you should meditate for a day, but I don't tell you why. What are the mechanisms, and what is this actually doing in your body, then you're less likely to do it, you know?
Grant: Just today, and the reason I'm late with you is that I had a group of first year electrical apprenticeships. Young guys from 17 to 20 here at university, and we did today's Stafford is a fitness stuff with them, but I did a bunch of content. You know, frankly, I can get my master's level. These are smart guys. Probably they're interested in it. That's great. Yeah, and no one's treated them like that, they never had got tread lightly by some of the teachers office at school. They didn't get interested in those areas. But you know, like—
Lisa: Yeah, let's treat people as if they have got a brain in the head. Just because they don't know the jargon. You can explain the jargon. And when you understand, one of my great podcast loves at the moment is Professor Andrew Huberman, you know him from The Huberman Lab?
Grant: Yeah. Following that, he's done a great job of just sort of sitting on the couch and having a, no graphs, nice. Pictures, just, it's deep scientific lectures about cortisol and stress exes. And—
Lisa: Yeah, and even if you're not, they haven't spent a decade studying this stuff, you can you can understand how. He makes it very—
Grant: High grade neuroscience and medicine just available to the public, I love it.
Lisa: I know. It's so awesome. That's why you've got to get your podcast back up.
Grant: Yeah, yeah, I’m gonna get it going. You gotta remind us to get on your one and get reinvigorated.
Lisa: Exactly. Because we need, we need to, we need it straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak. We need it from people who are at the cutting edge of academia, of academia, the cutting edge of research to deliver it to us straight, rather than it going through the zigzag of ten, you know, professionals along the way, getting dumbed down to the point where it's of no use to anybody.
Grant: Yeah. And then it goes into the Ministry of Health and comes out on another format altogether.
Lisa: Yeah, it’s just complete bullshit. If you just look at the whole, you know, vitamin C recommendations, they've been trying for years, the scientists to get it, the recommended daily allowance, recommended daily amount that you meet to have put up just a little bit. Yeah, but no, we can't do the head. You know, even though the science says that that's not enough.
Grant: Well, I mean, the entirety of nutrition dietary guidelines, in a complete state, which is a drag so far as I'm concerned, but yeah.
Lisa: Professor Grant Schofield, you've been amazing today. I've really loved this conversation. I've taken up a heap of your time, I would love to have you on, obviously, for more sessions, if we can. Because we haven't even touched the sides, really, and there's a heck of a lot. Is there any last things that you want to share? What are you, you're a couple of takeaways from today in our conversation today that you really want to spotlight in?
Grant: I still think that. Yeah, your body wants to be in a state of the scientific ord isw homeostasis, but in a state of balance, I guess with the world that lives in. But the world is designed to live in, needs to have some mesh, or be at least somewhere close to their current world, and often those are a long way apart.
So I think that's probably the major issue isn't it is that we can't reach this homeostasis. So we end up with either glucose or insulin being really high as sort of global things, or the soul glutamate thing running amok. And it's entirely predictable, then, on that basis. So we're actually not going to be as well functioning as we would like. And so then the question is, what can you do about it? The thing is, we always put it back on us which is good, what doesn't need to start with us but I think we forget we live in you know, most people listen to this live in a democracy. And part of a democracy is everyone actually has a say. So, you know, my hope is that, you know, everyone you guys out there, become a little bit more vocal about that. I think that's a really important thing.
There is a democracy around health as a, sooner we'll be, we get to decide like the country decides. And actually we do eventually overwhelm the food industry, that pharmaceutical drug That sort of stuff, it becomes that important, it's become pretty obvious that, especially if you're young people, we can do so much better. And we just need to. And so that's up to everyone, not just me. I'll keep trying, guys.
Lisa: Please, please do. Because at least you have the titles, the credibility, the name, the books, the stuff behind you to actually make a massive impact. But if we collectively all put our two cents and so to speak—
Grant: Yeah, that's miles more than I can do. And just on that, we've been, I've written the books, it's great, have a look at those.
Lisa: Yeah, list out your books, and where can people find you.
Grant: So this, www.whatthefatbook.com. And it's got the What the Fat, What the Fast, What the Face. The latest one is What the Fit recipes. What the Fit sport performance. I'm really incredibly proud of me and the rest of the team, it's not a solo effort. Those put those together, especially Caryn and Craig Roger. We've started a company called PreKure. It's been going a few years now. And we've really concentrated on filling a sort of treatment gap and health and the health sector with health coaching. This time health coaching and nutrition and mental health aspects as well. In my opinion, if you're passionate about health, then you don't need to go to university for 10 years to make a difference.
There's some stuff you need to learn, especially on the coaching aspects around how to help people find the most for themselves, meaning where they're at, and those things and those are good fun skills to learn both for yourself and your family, but also for helping other people. So, PreKure was sort of felt such, prevention is cure, PreKure p, pre with a K.
Lisa: P-R-E-K-U-R-E.
Grant: Yeah, dot com. We're really passionate about helping you help yourself with your health, but more than that, helping help others and that sort of help, you know, taking us out of, taking an active part on this issue for us as around, you know, take advantage of democracy, but also take the advantage to help you know, when you get new knowledge and it's useful. Share it, for God's sake.
Lisa: Share it, yeah.
Grant: That's gonna chip away at the food industry and the other forces that tend to undermine any attempt at human wellbeing.
Lisa: Change and yeah, and I think this, you know, the health I mean, obviously, you had in the health coaching space, and this is a new burgeoning area. We need more people coming into this area that can share this sort of knowledge and bring it out there.
Grant: And, you know, how better to keep you on track and helping you with things for friends and family and other people around your community rather than having to go to the clinic and the doctor, and it's all sickness orientated.
Lisa: For 15 minutes if you're lucky, yeah.
Grant: But someone who's actually got a genuine interest in how you're going and wants to help you. And, you know, so I think we'll go that way. I'm really looking forward to that.
Lisa: Yeah, let's keep working on this mission. I think we're on the same mission. Professor Grant, you're just awesome. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed our conversation today, and we'll hopefully have you on again soon.
That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate, review and share with your friends, and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.
The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.
You’ve heard it before: go hard, go long. But do we need to go hard all the time? Many people think that harder is better. However, overtraining and overexertion can reduce your gains and also be detrimental to your long-term health. Let go of this mindset and take on a healthier view of your body.
Legendary long-distance running athlete Lorraine Moller joins us in this episode to talk about how training and racing should not be about winning at the expense of your own body. It's all about your personal journey of learning more about yourself and growing from it. With the Lydiard approach, Lorraine shares how her career was mostly injury-free. Her body's performance is stellar, proving the merits of her training!
If you want to know how you can adopt a holistic approach to your training, then this episode is for you.
For our epigenetics health program, all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/.
You can also join their free live webinar on epigenetics.
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‘What I did with the Lydiard system was look at what were the principles, not looking at the hard and fast rules. Because as soon as you start looking at rules you have limited yourself, and it doesn't work that way. It's an experiment of one. Your journey as an athlete is completely unique.’
‘I think the journey of the athlete is a wonderful way to get to know yourself and to be able to tap that in the knowledge and to learn.’
‘That's the beauty I think of the Lydiard training is that It is holistic. It puts all the energy systems and every type of training response in its rightful place. So that you can be at your peak on the day that it counts.’
‘And that's why you go on principles. So you look at what you're trying to achieve, and then how best to achieve it based on the level of that person.’
‘You want a cooperative relationship with your own body and it will give you the information that it has and which is better than if you're trying to perform to these external measures.’
‘We approach a lot of the things that we wish to do, or the things we wish to create in our lives from a state of fear… And then we can't get into this natural flow. ’
‘I think that as we get older, our world should be getting bigger, not smaller. You know, and, and I do think that a lot of what we attribute to old age is just bad habit.’
Lorraine Moller is the only woman to have run all of the 20th century Olympic marathons for women. She is a 4-time Olympian, Olympic bronze medalist, world track and field finalist, multiple Commonwealth Games track medalist, and winner of 16 major international marathons, including the Boston Marathon.
Lorraine’s career started as an exceptional 14-year-old middle-distance runner, coached by John Davies. This continued into a 28-year stellar career as an undefeated master runner. Her wide range of accomplishments earned her title as ‘New Zealand's greatest women's distance runner’.
Lorraine credits her mostly injury-free career and high-performance longevity to the Lydiard training approach combined with her unique ‘inside-out process' philosophy towards competition.
Since retiring in 1996, Lorraine has helped establish charity running events in Cambodia, Mongolia and East Timor, served as vice-president of Hearts of Gold and NGO in Japan and co-founded the Lydiard Foundation, which educates coaches and athletes on endurance training. Lorraine also wrote her autobiography, On the Wings of Mercury, which became #2 on the New Zealand Best Seller List.
“Sports is a powerful spiritual path. When one seeks their most excellent self, they invite the noblest of human qualities into their lives.”
Interested in Lorraine’s work? Check out the Lydiard Foundation.
Reach out to Lorraine through lorraine@lydiardfoundation.org.
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To pushing the limits,
Lisa
Welcome to Pushing The Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by www.lisatamati.com.
Lisa Tamati: Hello everyone and welcome back to Pushing The Limits this week. Today, I have another athlete to guest, for a change. It's not a doctor or scientist, it's an athlete. This is an incredible athlete. One of my role models from childhood, Lorraine Moller. Lorraine, if you don't know her, she's an absolute legend. She's a four-time Olympian. She won the Boston Marathon, that’s a serious marathon, that one. She has won the Osaka marathon four times. She was in the first four marathons for women in the Olympics, which is an incredible thing. She also was a middle distance runner before doing marathon.
She's also the sister of my good friend, Gary Moller, who I've had on the show previously. Lorraine, she has her insights on what it is to be an elite athlete. Lorraine is still training athletes today as part of the Lydiard Foundation. After Lydiard she came through that school, of Arthur Lydiard's training style. It was really interesting to talk to her and sort of go head to head on ideas around coaching. She is available there for help if anyone wants to find out more.
Yeah, really interesting conversation with a very, on-to-it lady. I hope you enjoy this conversation. I certainly did. It's really nice when you get to meet your heroes from yesteryear, so to speak, or when you were a kid, and they’re just as cool as you thought they would be. Before we go over to the show, make sure you check out our patron program. If you haven't joined already on the podcast family, we would love you to be a part of our VIP family. There are a lot of member benefits when you do, if you wouldn't mind helping us out. Keeping this great content coming to ear, we've been doing it for five and a half years now. It's a globally top 200 ranked podcast now on health, fitness and medicine.
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We also have our NMN, our longevity supplement, an anti-ageing supplement that I'm recently started bringing into the country and from New Zealand or Australia. I've teamed up with molecular biologist Dr. Elena Seranova. This is an independently-certified, scientist backed and developed product. This is a longevity supplement that is aimed at upregulating the sirtuin genes, which are longevity genes in the body and science, it’s too complicated to name here.
But I would love you to check out those two episodes that I've done with Dr. Elena Seranova. Also, head on over to nmnbio.nz. That’s N-M-N-bio.nz, if you'd like more information and more on the science behind it, or reach out to me and I can send you a whole lot of information around it. I've been on it now for over seven months and my mom's been on it too for that period of time. I've had huge changes. Actually my whole family has, and we've all had different things that it's really helped us with. It's working on a number of levels, so make sure you check that out. Right over to the show now with Lorraine Moller.
Hi, everybody, and welcome back to Pushing The Limits. Today, I have an amazing woman to guest, certainly one of my role models, Lorraine Moller, welcome to the show. Fantastic to have you here with me.
Lorraine Moller: Thank you, Lisa. Fantastic to be here with you.
Lisa: I'm excited for this conversation already. Before we got recording, we already dealt with some deep topics so who knows where this conversation is going to go, but I think it will go pretty deep. You are a legend in the world of running. You have so many, four times Olympian you've won the Boston Marathon, you've won the Osaka marathon three times, you're an author, you're still involved with running. Lorraine, can you just give us a little bit of your background for starters? When did you realize that you were this amazing, incredible athlete? What was your childhood like? Should we go back that far?
Lorraine: Usually, not in my childhood, although, you know, we were brought up in a time where we were naturally active and very just a part of nature and engaged in the community and local athletics and swimming and you know, all those things. Walked their feet and just went to the beach on the weekends and got sunburned. All those sorts of things. So it was a very lovely, free, close-to-nature sort of upbringing in my little town of Putāruru, right in the middle of the North Island, and where everybody knew everybody and it was just pretty easy-living, and our needs were pretty simple.
Those were the times when we had the quarter-acre section, with the garden out the back and like okay, go get a cabbage for tea. So you'd go cut one and bring it in. So it was, yeah, I suppose it sounds idyllic, but in certain terms that was. It was just a fabulous basis for growing up healthy. I had my trials as a kid. I was in the hospital a few times, and just that separation, and just the emotional eggs have been taken away from my family for long periods of time. It's very lonely.
I think that was, I think, you know, we have things that happen to us, and they sort of set you up. They set your story up, and then it's like, okay, go see what you make of it. So I had, I think, running for me was a real freedom. Something that just, I don't think it was something that I really decided to do. I just think it's something that took me.
Lisa: It happened to you.
Lorraine: One of the key events was, when I went to high school, and we graduated from the little kiddies athletics, doing 50 yards, 100 yards, you know, yeah, I met all that was. We graduated to being able to do the full 40 yards. In my first full 40 yard race at the local club, I could beat the girls who beat me in the sprint. It took me a little bit longer, but I've got your number, you know. So I was really excited by that.
So I started to get really keen and show up during the school events, and I won just about everything in the school events.
Lisa: Just naturally talented at the event, sort of.
Lorraine: Yeah, but you know, at that time, and that would be in the 60s, there was, it wasn't like the girl thing to do. It was nothing in your vocabulary. The four-bill athlete or woman-athlete, professional athlete, even, that just didn't exist back then. That was not a career choice, being an athlete. It was even discouraged, somewhat. It was considered as a man's sport. If you did too much of it, you would become manly and—
Lisa: Your uterus might fall out, as Catherine told me once.
Lorraine: That’s universal, you know. People tell you that all across the world I think, that yeah, that was just a popular meme. You had to wear clean underwear in case you got run over and taken to the hospital, they find out you've got dirty underwear on. Those things sort of just become popular culture, but nobody really thinks about how true they are or whether they really apply. We just accept them.
I accepted that as a girl, we didn't have longer events, that we didn't have official events. The cross country was unofficial, usually. So we would have a men's race. Then they would have a little short bill’s race, but, you know, that's just the way that it was, I didn't think I was disadvantaged in any way. You just get on with what's available and go like it, and I loved it.
Lisa: How did you develop, because even back in the 60s and 70s, there wasn't any official thing that you could go to. How did you actually get—I mean your later career was phenomenal. How did you actually bridge that? Was it a time change too that in the 70s, things started to open up, and or how did that sort of unfold?
Lorraine: People were really kind and the club system was very nurturing. So as soon as they realized I had some talent, they took me in hand. I was taken to a neighboring town of Tokoroa, which was sort of like a big town, and introduced to John Davies, who was the bronze medalist from the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. They wanted me to have a proper coach. I was introduced into the Lydiard training theory, from about the age of 14, and for races, et cetera. My event was the 80 yards. I really loved it, and so laps of the track.
I also did cross country. But those events I competed in, there were no junior woman. So I was competing against women who were probably 18 years my senior. I did go to my first national championships and the senior women's at the age of 14. Yeah, and I made the final. I came last in the final. We're like a mate. We're pretty darn good. You know?
Lisa: Yeah. You were 14?
Lorraine: Yeah, sort of, like hanging on, I can remember coming around the straight. I had two people behind me, and I could just see them going, ‘I'm not letting this kid beat me.’ Yeah, threw me off, but you know. I was going—representing New Zealand from the time I was 16. That provided opportunity, and that was so damn exciting. Just to be going overseas, and wearing the silver uniform, and getting on a plane and going somewhere, and it was just the most amazing time, and I absolutely loved it. I was put into a competition at a time when I was young enough not to have any respect.
Lisa: You had no idea what was coming at you yet.
Lorraine: So I sort of figured I could run with the best of them. Yeah, so that was sort of part of my make-up or my set up. Which really, you know, it just went from there, until finally, I sort of took off on my own and went to the US and just sort of, seeking greener pastures. That makes a big wide world and yeah.
Lisa: Oh, wow. So tell me a little bit, like Arthur Lydiard. What was he like? Tell us a little bit, you know, so I've heard you say on articles or something, there's a bit of a misrepresentation of how he trained. What was his actual philosophy as an athlete that was actually in under him for a while? What was he like, and what sort of training regime did you have, and how did that develop you?
Lorraine: Yeah, I think I was really, really fortunate to grow up in New Zealand, and his system was pretty much adopted by the New Zealand running culture, and I think still has—is part of the culture, yeah. It's based on endurance training. So that's the first thing that John Davies did, was give me a training program. He used to write it, handwrite it on a— and send it to me by mail. So I would get a letter with my training program written down. It would be so exciting.
I ran with my dad. So my dad didn't want me going out there by myself, or we ran on the bush a lot. We got lost a lot, but wouldn't have me there by myself. Although I'm sure if I'd navigated, we wouldn't have got lost, but anyway. Yeah, I mean, we just—and we had a great time. It was really fun for me to get to know my dad. I don't think I would have developed that closeness without having that running. It was just fantastic. So we just ended up doing longer and longer runs. It was just building up mileage, just getting some aerobic base, which is really the crux of the Lydiard training, is that you build your aerobic capacity, and that's the main engine.
Lisa: Yeah. Because a lot of them, you know, like I had Rod Dixon on last week, on the show. He's also trained under that. Of course, a lot of the great runners that have come out of New Zealand, and there's been many, have trained on that system. Then, you know, was it a real high mileage system? Like, was it—is there anything that you do different now? Because I know, you're still involved with Arthur Lydiard? The groups that you're taking through now, is there any change in the approach that you’ve had? Because you know, a lot of the listeners out there are runners that are listening to this. So is there anything that you've learned along the way that you do differently now?
Lorraine: No, no, the Lydiard system was sound. I mean, the only thing was, as an athlete, I'd come off a season and then I'd go, ‘I'm gonna just train harder than I've ever trained before,’ and then I jump in and overdo it and sort of mess it up. That's what we do, we overtrain. So the Lydiard system itself, I think if you just take the way that he put it together, and the, he was the grandfather of periodization, we didn't call it periodization. The exercise physiologist came along a lot later and then just started to put the jargon onto it, and all there is.
Arthur was very practical. So it's just what worked, it was about 60 years in the making. So you will find Lydiard, that he evolved it with just trial and error. Then, as more people started to do research, he started to incorporate other things. But he was really like, just what works, and what he put together worked really well. What I did with the Lydiard system was look at what were the principles, not looking at the hard and fast rules here, because as soon as you start looking at rules, you have limited yourself, and it doesn't work that way. It's an experiment of one, and your journey as an athlete is completely unique. You occupy your own place, and space and time that nobody else can occupy. If you can respect that, and get away from any sort of cookie-cutter staff.
Lisa: I love that personalization approach. That's what I'm heavily into now. It's not like we have access to genetic testing and things like that now, where we can actually tailor things to people's genetics even. But back then that wasn't the case. But to make it your own, so here's the framework, and then you make it yours. That fits with you and your style of being, in your style of life, and in everything that fits to you, rather than just forcing yourself into the confines of just, this is black and white. I think that that's pretty insightful, especially back then. Yeah.
Lorraine: Yeah. So what I'm teaching now, and I teach courses through the Lydiard Foundation, two coaches, on how to apply the Lydiard training. The big thing, I think, is to look at things and the overall picture because the, you might say the devils in the details, but the details can completely tell, like the devil, the wrong story So it's very easy for people to, and most common, I think, to overshoot the mark. To put in too much. Then if you put in too much energy into the task at hand, you will get the opposite of what you intended.
Lisa: Yeah, overtraining and burnout.
Lorraine: Also we live in this culture where we think more is better. He said also, we pander to outsourcing our information, and so not tapping into this incredible vehicle that we have that can synthesize and put the information together that is specifically tailor-made to you. That is there. It's innate within all of us. We're just not tapping it. I think the journey of the athlete is a wonderful way to get to know yourself and to be able to tap that in the knowledge and to learn.
So the focus, and this happened to me, during my own running, there was, initially you're motivated by the—just winning or getting a faster time and all those kinds of things. Then you think, well, what is it really payback? It's pretty silly, you know, you're all just running around the house and in circles. Somebody goes, ‘Oh, I'm really great, because I finished in front of you.’ You get all worked up. Does that really matter, in the big scheme of things?
Well, in certain terms, it doesn't. The exercise is, and I just gave a talk to our advanced classes on the hero's journey. The hero's journey is that the focus is then on the inner journey that's taking place. Yeah, and is a path for us to get to know ourselves. Socrates said, ‘Know thyself.’ It's really sound advice, because, I mean, what else are you going to do to see, you know, you go through life, and then suddenly you get to the other end?
Lisa: You don’t know what the hell it was about. I mean, this is, this is exactly in line with what I like to talk about, which is like, you know, that we, we learn so much when we do these, you know, athletic endeavors, and I don't care whether you're good, or you're really not talented, and you don't have any ability. It's all about yours—your personal journey. That's why any athlete who's just starting out and doing the first kilometer, you know, is on a journey, to get to know their own body, their own mind, what they're capable of, and we find it, you know, and it's, I hate comparing, you know, like, the actual winning of races and stuff is amazing, but how many of us are actually going to have a career like yours, where you're actually at the top of the podium?
For 99% of the people, it's about what they learn along the way, the health benefits that they gather from the training, the strength—mentally. All of these aspects are just even more important, I think, than the, getting the gold medal put around your neck, or the silver or the bronze. It is much more about a personal journey for most people. I mean, you as an elite athlete, at the top of the pyramid, so to speak, did you find that as well? Has it had a bigger implication on your entire life and your life philosophies than just winning? Part of it?
Lorraine: Oh, yeah. In the end, though, the inner journey became more important to me than the outer journey. In a way, I think with life, you have your experiences and you're influenced by your parents and your upbringing and your ancestors and all the rest. So we have all these influences that make up who we think we are I think then—and then we go into our older adult life, and we proceed accordingly with this concept of self, which then I think starts to happen. You start to dismantle that concept themselves, and you start gradually stripping it away, so that, hopefully, when you're ready to go out the other end, you have connected with the essence of who you truly are. Not just all these roles and the expectations and put on yourself, you know.
Lisa: Was it for you,was there a lot of expectation, you know, like, I had a lot of expectation in my early years from my dad, who I loved dearly, and wanted to impress and wanted to please and so I had a lot of expectation all the way through. So a lot of the things that I did weren't necessarily what I wanted to be doing. They were things that I felt compelled to do, or expected to do. Was that a part of your journey with running? Or was that more, you just had this passion and actual, like Rod just loved running. You know? What was it like for you? Was it a cut and dried thing that this was a passion of yours, or was it more of an expectation that you would—because you were so good?
Lorraine: Yeah. No, it was mine. I mean, it was completely driven by me, instigated and driven by me. My family was really supportive. My dad got on board with it. So my dad got into running because I was a teenager that got into running. He figured he was like the canary in the coal mine. If there was—if I was doing too much or overdoing it, you know, and he did the same as me. Well, then he would clog up before I would. That was very nice of him. He did, you know he actually died while he was out running. That was the way he wanted to exit. So he did.
Lisa: Well, yeah, it's never a good thing to go. But if you're going to go, I suppose doing something and being healthy until the last moment is the way that most of us would like to exit this world.
Lorraine: My parents were, oh, they were obviously proud. I mean, you get out there, and especially when you're in an Olympics, or Commonwealth Games, or something that's really big for your country, you do feel the expectation of your country and how you do and you know it really matters. It's quite personal. Sometimes when I didn't do that, well, and you get refreshed.
Lisa: That's harsh.
Lorraine: Yeah. Yeah, it is. You just, you know—I don't know, you get over it with pursued— you realize that you have to keep things in perspective. I think one thing I could always come back to and just be in love with the journey of the race and yeah. That it didn't go away.
Lisa: That passion stayed right throughout you. So let's talk now a little bit about the actual—some of the highlights of your career because this is like for most of us, we're never gonna get to do these sorts of things at this level. What was it like to go to the Olympics? What's it like to compete in the first marathons that women were allowed to do in the Olympics? What was that like for you?
Lorraine: Well, the first marathons, my foray into marathons was another thing. That was sort of serendipity in a way. It just sort of came to me, and maybe there was a certain, I don't know, maybe openness, the new experience, I think that yeah, that just led me into different sorts of places. But what happened in—when I left school, and I was already a nationally recognized runner as a high school kid, and what to do? I didn't know what to do, so I decided to go to phys ed school because it was the closest thing that I could think of that’s for a woman.
Lisa: It is, exactly. That’s all we had back then.
Lorraine: Yeah, yeah, you just, that's what sporty girls do, become a phys ed teacher. Gary was, my brother, was already at the phys ed school underneath. So it seemed really easy to hit off down to the need. I thought that was really great because it was really a long way from home. Yeah, you know, and I just loved being a student. I just thought that was so fantastic.
So the first day I was there at the phys ed school I got, I was standing on the steps of the phys ed school, and I was sort of looking to my left and looking to my right, and I didn't know where anything was or which way to go for my run. This group of guys came running past. They were a bunch of lunchtime runners, and some of them are very good runners. One of them looked up and saw me standing there in my running shoes and shorts and said, ‘Hey, chick, you gotta come and run with the boys today.’
Okay, there's an invitation I can't refuse. Down the steps, I glommed on to the back of this group, I could barely keep up. But we did this run. The next day, I was there again, and the next day, and so I became the girl that ran with this group of guys.
Lisa: Crazy girl.
Lorraine: Yeah, and they sort of took me under their wing. So I did all the rounds with them. Sunday was like the Needham version of the white tacori run, was the white Eddie's. It’s just, just, you run out somewhere over a mountain and down the other side and you’ve gotten 20 miles, you know. So I started doing those every Sunday with the guys. As a 800-meter runner, you know, I was building this incredible base, and I just got stronger and stronger.
Lisa: Did it make you slower doing the long stuff, for the actual short track races?
Lorraine: I'm glad you asked. Yeah. No, that's not true, that. Yeah. Endurance running does not make you slow. No, it does not. Though, you do need to do the faster work to bring on your speed. But the endurance will enable you, eventually, to be able to sustain your fastest possible pace. That's the basis of endurance. So nearly all events over two minutes would derive their energy mostly from aerobic means, right? So the greater aerobic capacity you have, the greater capacity you have for any event over two minutes.
Lisa: But what about, I've never been fast, that’s why we’re long. So I don't have a comparison really, of having lost speed because I never had any to begin with. But doing the super long stuff, you know, the ultra marathon distances, I got dreadfully slow when it comes to the shorter distances over time. I always put that down to my muscle, fast twitch fibers mainly tuned into slow twitch fibers.
Now, actually, like, in the last five years, where I stopped doing the ultra marathons, and I've been concentrating more on shorter, sharper, I'm still not fast by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm a heck of a lot faster than I used to be over the short distance. So even in your 50s, you can start to go back the other way. But it’s interesting to hear you say that, no, you don't find that. Because that's—yeah, interesting.
Lorraine: With some caveats in matters that, if you—your body will respond to what you give it. In terms of training, stimulus response, so what training is, you are giving the body a specific stimulus to get a specific response from the body. It will do that really well. So the thing about the Lydiard pyramid is that you build the endurance, but you don't do that ad infinitum. Right? So then you go on and then you go through the faster phases and you develop the muscles on faster twitch and the different ones, right through to your peak events.
So, we have quite a few ultra runners who come and do our coaching courses. They get in and they get really excited about doing the phases and getting the full development. That's the beauty I think of the Lydiard training, is that it is holistic. It puts all the energy systems and every type of training response in its rightful place, so that you can be at your peak on the day that counts. What I find with a lot of ultra people is that they've just lost their flexibility and range of motion because they haven't practiced it.
Lisa: That's definitely a big part of our training and how we coach—a lot of strength and a lot of mobility, in proprioception, work and coordination and drills and things that traditionally, when I, because when I started back in the dark ages to when we had no idea, and I certainly had no coaching back in the day, I just ran and ran long, because I wasn't very fast, so just run longer than everybody else and I was good at that.
But now I understand and what you know, that whole mobility piece of the puzzle is absolutely crucial, and the drills and the form and the strength training or all the foundational elements, to be able to run the mileage, you know, it's like a pyramid for us, how we how we build it. So yeah, I totally agree, and I think most ultra runners neglect that part. That's where they come unstuck to some degree. You get very slow and stiff. There's reasons for that. But you managed to finish the distance, but the quality sometimes goes down with the length of time you’re out there.
Lorraine: Also, if you're out there for a heck of a long time, you don't want to spend much time in the air. You don't need a lot of upwards motion, or that long, beautiful stride, et cetera. You develop a bit of a shuffle, it's just being efficient at the distance that you're doing, yes.
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Lisa: Yeah, that's really fascinating. It is like, I did, like I said at the beginning, everything wrong that you could possibly do wrong, I think in my early career. It was just like, go long, go hard, though, you know, but no strikes, no mobility, no drills. I didn't know what running form was. I just ran. Incredible that you can still achieve great distances and that way, but it's certainly not healthy. It was very high mileage in those early days, and that has its own toll.
Now we try to train people efficiently because most of the people that we training are also, you know, got careers and kids and jobs and stressors. So we find that you can't train them like you would a 20-year-old professional athlete when they're a 45-year-old mum with three children and a full-on career. Then you're going to break them if you have that high mileage model. So it's much more about time efficiency and getting the best results that they can get with the level of stress that they're already under.
So yes, it's just really interesting to compare notes on all this, especially as you've come from the elite level, in a lot of the things that I find with people who are not in that elite group, don't respond the same way that elite runners would, like when you were doing your top level stuff, the amount of mileage and manner of training that you would have been able to cope with is not what your average person can cope with, because you would have been focused on that solely.
Lorraine: I think if you look historically at Lydiard training, he started coaching the first joggers group in the early 60s. So the story is that he was invited, after his Olympic successes, to the Tamaki Yacht Club to talk to the businessman there about training, etc. He was asking them about their own levels of fitness. A whole bunch of them said, ‘Well, we can't do any, our doctors told us to take it easy, because we've had cardiac arrest’. And Arthur’s like, you know typical, Arthur, you know, ‘That's absolute rubbish. If you guys want to start jogging with me, I will teach you how to run a marathon.’
He had quite a group, of which quite a few of them were cardiac patients, and had this running group. He got them to run a marathon in about nine months. You're talking more than a couch potato? Yeah.
Lisa: Exactly. He approached that differently than he would with his elite athlete, obviously?
Lorraine: He had to, because if they couldn't start out on 100 miles a week and he realized that you can't expect middle-aged men getting run out to do that kind of mileage because they spend so much more time on their feet, that they're actually doing a lot more work than an elite runner, yeah. So then he changed the distance to duration.
Lisa: Yes, that's what we do too mostly, duration, because then that's more of it. Because otherwise if you run your good marathons at incredibly fast times, but the person who is at the other end of the marathon is taking six hours, they're going to be athletes for twice as long or longer. That doesn't equate from an equivalent point of view. That's—yeah, so that's exactly what we do. Yeah.
Lorraine: Physiologically, it's about the same based on duration. Not based on distance. If you spend two hours out there, and you're just jogging along, and that's as fast as you can go, you will have about the same effect as somebody who runs at the same effort but is heck of a lot faster. The system is adaptable to all levels of runner. That's why you go on principles. You look at what you're trying to achieve, and then how best to achieve it based on the level of their person, but, you know, the—we're all, physiologically, we all basically work the same.
We all have—we metabolize fats and glycogen and have the same energy systems and they are invoked at the same perceived effort or level of effort and can be developed. We all have this system of adaptation. We all are losing cells and regenerating them all the time. That is basically so, if you're becoming a new person, like they say, maybe 95% of our bodies are replaced every year, just cells dying and new ones coming on. Or in seven years you get a completely new you. So it doesn't really matter, the point is that, can you direct who you are going to be in the view. Yeah, you can. Athletes know that.
Lisa: Yeah. That's what our reputation is all about and why we do it, that’s why we train so that we get that reputation. In heavier like—what do you do with people, because we get a lot of athletes who are just head through the wall, type A personalities who want to go harder than what their bodies, and I'm putting myself in this category, to harder than what their bodies can actually cope with, they're burning themselves out, breaking themselves and not actually reaping the reward that they should be for the amount of effort that's going in to their training. How do you try to get them to back off a bit?
Lorraine: Yeah. Yeah. So, one of the key things that I teach is that we start right from the beginning, learning to pay attention to our bodies, and getting this rapport with ourselves and learning that you want to a cooperative relationship with your own body and it will give you the information that that it has, and which is better than if you're trying to perform to these external measures, which, there's so many of them because we can measure every frickin’ thing that we do, and post it some way of where other people can look at, and they couldn't care less, because they're too busy putting their’s up and wanting other people to pay attention to it.
So this constant pandering to make ourselves into somebody that we think that’s something on the outside that's going to approve of us. So people who overdo it have a lack of confidence, and a lack of trust in their own body and their own physiology. Because my goodness, your body does an incredible job to keep us alive, and to keep us going and to perform the tasks that we give to it so we can achieve the dreams that we have. Then that will bust itself, for you.
But we do have sort of certain sort of measures, then that will also put into place when you’re going to to kill yourself. But those that are well, I'm not doing this because yeah, our minds are incredible also. But most of them use our minds like a slave driver.
Lisa: Yes. I certainly did.
Lorraine: Yeah. You have to learn the hard way sometimes. But we have, being able to recognize, and to know where those danger signals are, and to be able to catch them and back off. Those, I started out my courses, were talking about the fallacy of hard work. Hard work is not where it said, everybody thinks, ‘Oh, God, you must be a really hard worker.’ Well, you know, I can knock a knuckle down, but you know, why put in more energy than the task requires? So hard is redundant. Just do the work. Don't make it hard. Because then now, as soon as you say hard, people start to stress, they tense up, you know, okay,
Lisa: It plops your brain and it becomes a negative, that you associate with, pain with your exercise and things and that it creates a negative loop.
Lorraine: It's horrible. When I won big races, it was actually you get in the state of flow, and it feels wonderful.
Lisa: Wow. So when you're actually at the top of your game, and winning these international events and things, you felt like—so it didn't feel as if you were killing yourself to get across the line on those days.
Lorraine: I always get pretty tired of the marathon.
Lisa: Yeah the in and out it. But you felt like you're prepared for this, but not overprepared for this, not burnt out and sorry about it. You actually enjoyed that, you enjoyed those top races that you really did well in? Did that feel like a flow state?
Lorraine: The system that I teach, it's a performance system, right? It's good, so that you get the best you possibly can on the day that counts. So that's getting yourself into a peak performance state from wherever you're at. Right? Everybody can do that. That feels amazing. I'm sure you felt it, that you just get there and everything's clicking right. You've got it.
So it is a coordination of body, heart, mind and spirit. It's just, they all come together and you reach that state of flow. Actually, for most of us, we don't get there because we are working too hard. We have too much tension. That getting into a peak state is actually an act of surrender. Yeah. So, when you hit it a few times, you go, ‘Man, this feels so good. I'm gonna try and figure out how I got there again’.
As I said, when I was young, I'd just go on the on the train harder than ever before, and you know, and then it seems to sort of go away from you and then you get injured or something or you don't perform as well, because you're in the syndrome of hard work, you're overcooking it, you've got excess energy. That energy has to go somewhere, and all it does is that just messes things up. So that precision of giving the stimulus that is needed for the effect. The thing is that the effect of it takes place during the recovery period, not when you’re actually doing the task. So, you know—
Lisa: That's an important point. If you had a bad night's sleep, you're being under the pump all week with work, you've got kids who have slept in, everything's going to cast it, and then you go and smash yourself, because it's on your list today to do a really long, hard run. You’re not going to get the adaptation, you'd have been better to go hang on, well, ‘Life, come at me this week, I'm gonna actually take it a little bit easier.’ Having that confidence to do that, and back off, because I think a lot of people are like, ‘Yeah, but I have to go harder’. They congratulate themselves when they slave drive themselves, and they push them through the bad event.
While that might make you mentally tougher, and there's some advantages of that approach for a while, it isn't going to get the adaptation that you're going to want, because actually, it's in the recovery, it's in the sleep, it's in the downtime that you're actually going to get that benefit. If you're not able to adapt, and then all that training was for nothing, or worse, it can be even detrimental to your immune system and to your health, your mental health. That's a hard sell, tough-minded athletes who think that they have to enter. I certainly struggled with us, and still do so on occasion, we, but I have to go harder, and I'm not, you know, doing enough, because I'm not getting the results, therefore, you know, a little is good, more must be better. That approach doesn't work.
Lorraine: Yeah, look, it's a lack of trust. I think a lot of us are brought up to sort of think in the negative all the time, and to talk about what we don't want to have happen. We approach a lot of the things that we wish to do, or the things we wish to create in our lives from a state of fear. That's a real shame, because that immediately puts us on the backfoot. Then we can't get into this natural flow. Look, the world has set up for us to be creative beings, and for us to have, be able to manifest our dreams and make works that are worthwhile and contribute it, so when we leave this life, we have lived something better, we have used our own talents and things are more enhanced, because of our being here.
I think most people have a very huge drive, I think all human beings do, to be of value in this life in some way. I think, you know, we started out talking about this, that we have these systems in our systems, they're not human, you know, they’re just systems that are put in place that eventually become self-serving, and they don't serve us.
So they will perpetuate fear, etc., because it just gets us putting our energy into the system, rather than putting it into ourselves and our own dreams. I think that what we need to realize is that it is set up in our favor. I'll give you just one really good example of that. When we train, and we give the body a training stimulus, so to meet that training task, that run or whatever we do, that workout, you have used this fuels in your body and you've broken apart all these bonds to provide energy to enable you to do the task, and then you stop doing it.
As soon as you stop doing it, the body gets busy. It starts to reconstitute those energy bonds and etc. So all these adaptations are taking place. That brings us back to normal again. But it doesn't just bring us back to normal. It gives us more, it makes us stronger, more storage space, you know, stronger muscle fibers, better oxygenation. It actually adapts itself to better accommodate what we're asking it to do. Yeah. So nature has given you a bonus. I mean, if you can't see that everything is set up in your favor just by that little thing alone, it’s like, ‘Wow.’
Lisa: Yeah, biology is just incredible. These are hormetic stressors. So when we put our body under strain, we come back stronger. When we put ourselves under too much strain, we actually break it down. So that's the fine line that we have to, for us, for each of us individually, find where those points are. That will shift as we get stronger, and you'll be able to take on more training.
But we have to honor the process, that honor the the hormetic stress, recovery, stress recovery, and then build on that so that we can then, you know, eventually you can be running at the best, if it's a training thing, but this is in every area of life, that we're more stressed, we're more resilient. Resilience, the word. We're more able to take on a load, this is just the beautiful thing of all these hormetic stressors and if we don't push ourselves at all, well then, we're going to definitely, the body is going to go well, this is a piece of cake, I can just keep being where I'm at, and then actually start to decline.
What I'd be really interested in your take with older people. One of my passions in life is to empower older people to not give up on on their lives because society sees your past that, and that you've got a use-by date, you've passed, you know, all of these sorts of attitudes that are just insidious in our culture that, in the Maori culture, it's a little bit better, where we actually respect their elders, and we value their wisdom, but in general culture, it's pretty bad.
We also have this thing—when I retire, then I'll recover and I’ll relax. For me, that's the beginning of a downward spiral. So in the rehabilitation journey that I've been on with my mum for the last five years, you know, I set her tasks every day that she has to achieve. She has goals that we're aiming for. Of course, we have phases of recovery, and so on. But she's always on a mission of some sort or another, and she's 79 years old, and we're going forward. I will treat her like that until there is no hope, you know, to the end of her days, because I believe that humans need challenge.
They don't need comfort. They don't need to be, you know, mollycoddled and stuck on the couch to watch telly all day, because you're older now. No. I'd like to see people having their challenge, whatever their challenge is, and it could be like, mum has offered art classes now and just loving the creative. She's got time to do something different and that's a goal that is helping her brain stay on point. What's your take on the way society sees people when they get older? How do you approach that from your personal standpoint?
Lorraine: Well, from my own personal standpoint, they’re getting older. Yeah, I'm with you 100%, Lisa. I think we need to continually be adding new stimuli, and you know, they can be stress, you know, stimuli stress, it's all just, you're asking the body to do new things. So then you’re just inviting new experience into your life. I think that as we get older, our world should be getting bigger, not smaller. I do think that a lot of what we attribute to old age, it’s just bad habit.
Lisa: It's accumulating it for many years and makes it the typical aging things. I mean, we are all going to die at some point, but my goal is to live an extremely long life that is healthy until the end, that's my goal. None of us know what's going to come at us from left field. I’ve experienced an awful lot, I know that some things can still, but that's the goal. That's the approach that I take. So I'm doing everything in my life and in my family's life, to make that as best as possible.
To have constant challenge and have constant goals that you're aiming for and new things that you're learning. It keeps you in this growth mindset for starters, and it keeps your body not knowing what's coming, so it's still having to adapt and go forward, rather than going backwards. As we get older, we get wiser, well, hopefully we do, most of us do, we've got more experience, we’re more able to cope with, you know, all the, the emotional things that we probably weren't able to cope with when we were 20, we've got all these experiences.
It's just fantastic if we can look to our older generations as the one who provide wisdom for the ones that are coming behind, and they're seen as a valuable resource in our society, because and not as being your past that because you're over 50, or you're over 60, or you're over 70, or whatever, you know, this demarcation line is that people have and they put on themselves, you know, partly because society does this.
Lorraine: Yeah and it's a horrible thing for you to be made redundant and society in terms of your value to it. That is largely, I think, exacerbated by what runs the show is generally money. So people are not seeing older people as being contributing into. Yet we need to start valuing other things besides that.
I think we are at the moment, just with the times and what it's for, the time of shifting, and there's an invitation here to make sure that we reconnect with our humanness, and start to prioritise what things we value as human beings, because we're in danger of losing a lot of them. We look at our older people, and we also look at our children. Now children have a life expectancy less than that of their parents.
Lisa: Yes, horrific.
Lorraine: It’s the wrong direction, and you can't cut off your old people and your young people are not benefiting from the wisdom that is available, and that wisdom is something that you can't put a price on. We need to get back to, away from this sort of outside focus and measuring everything in those sorts of terms, and start to value our human relationships and our depth of experience and our connection to the divine spark which we all have within us. To value that journey and support each other on that journey. We're all in it alone, and we're all in it together.
Lisa: That’s beautifully put. I think we are in an age of change, and I hope things will gather some more momentum. We've got lots of problems in the world but we've also got lots of opportunities now to change things. In the areas that I'm working in, I'm seeing huge changes taking place within just the last few years and that's encouraging. Then there is lots of negativity, but I like to focus on the positivity.
But I think, yeah, let's start valuing our elder, older population, and they have a lot to bring to the party. What we want to do is help people stay healthier, longer. That requires a bit of a mindset shift. When I take my mom to the gym, she's training her butt off there at 79 years old, and people know where she's come from, like being in a wheelchair for a few years, and not being able to do anything. Now she's doing all this, you know, crazy stuff, well, you know, compared to where she was there. That's a role model. She's a role model for so many older people who now have actually joined the gym, and, you know, we're doing stuff because they go, ‘Well, if Isabel can do it, I can do it.’
That's, to me, the greatest, beautiful thing that's come out of that tragic journey that we've been on. It's empowering now, other people to not give up just because they're older. To have that attitude of, ‘I'm going to fight my way back.’ Then it's a team event. I'm mum's coach, mentor and driver. She's the one who's willing to put in the hard yards and to do whatever I asked her to do to the best of her ability, and that's a winning combination. I'd like to see more people have that, if they've been on rehabilitation journeys. Even for younger people, that they've got someone in the corner that's willing to help them fight because when you're in a big health battle, you need people fighting with you and alongside you.
Lorraine: Yeah. When you're down and you don't have the energy, that's what families are for. That's what families are for. To help you when you need to help and how you can all be putting in and bringing it together. I just think this divorcing ourselves from old people and just giving them a bunch of pills, then putting them in front of the telly, what a waste, what an incredible waste of resources.
Lisa: Yep, and loneliness and despair, and all of those things, and the value of that person's life history is just disappearing, when it could be being impassioned, if they, if we can keep their minds active, and their bodies as strong as possible for as long as possible, they have a great value. It's not like, from a societal standpoint, it's often thought, well, once you retire, you're no longer adding value to society, it's measured in monetary value, and you're costing more in the health systems. Hopefully, you don't live too long. That’s just an approach to me that is just horrific. The way that society treats its young, and it's old and it’s vulnerable, as is the mark of a civilization, I think that is, you know, is that is what we should be measured by, not how strong—
Lorraine: Yeah, and I think the example of your mum, is that, all we have to do is take care of what's in front of us and do the best that we can. That is being an example to other people, it just starts to, so she's going to the gym and other people see her and they go out, and they have a whole different mindset about the possibilities and what happens and, and that's all it takes.
Lisa: You like the work that you're doing, that's imparting your knowledge. You could be sitting back on a beach somewhere and just enjoying life. Instead, you're still teaching, you're sharing, you're imparting that valuable knowledge that you have to other people, and that is gold. It's so important. Gary, your lovely brother, who I absolutely adore and admire, thinks he's crazy and awesome at the same time.
Still world-leading mountain biker at his age, and he certainly helped me on my journey when I was broken and burnt out and came to him, a few years ago going, ‘But Gary, I’m broken, can you help me?’ He put pieces of the puzzle back together again, and helped, gave me actually a role model, because he'd done the same thing, burnt himself out and blown himself apart. He had found a way back. So that was a role model for me. There is a way back when you have smashed the crap out of your body and you didn't listen to it. The work that he's doing is, I think, fantastic.
Lorraine: Yeah, well, it's the same. It doesn't matter what age you are, your cells are still regenerating themselves. You can still direct that process to make a better you than you were before.
Lisa: Day by day.
Lorraine: We do things in increments. It's just giving it just that bit of what you want, and the direction that you wish to go and go.
Lisa: You don't need to be perfect, you can just be inching your way forward with one bite at a time and one exercise session at a time, and one good sleep at a time, all of these things add up. I think we've totally aligned. Lorraine, this has been a really interesting, amazing conversation. I think we need to have a couple more privately, because I think there's a lot more that we need to discuss and maybe do some things together.
But I really just want to thank you for your time today. It's been really an insight. You are a legend in the sport and what you've achieved is just nothing short of amazing. I remember, as a kid, watching you and a lot of your fellow people in that age group who just did amazing things, and it was awesome to have, like, Rod on last week, on the show as well. Those are role models for me. I can never win in the Olympics or anything like that, but I did things in my own way. You pioneered a path, especially for a woman to be able to do long-distance running, and that's just gold.
Lorraine: Well, thank you very much, Lisa. It's been an exciting journey and I feel so privileged to have been born in this time and this body and to have had the experiences that I've had, and it's not over yet.
Lisa: Hell no! [1:10:10-1:10:12 unintelligible, garbled audio], and you're obviously still doing that. Lorraine, where can people find you if they want to, you know, learn about what you're doing, read your book, On The Wings of Mercury, where can they reach out to you?
Lorraine: Yeah, they can reach me at lorraine@lydiardfoundation.org. So you got to get your eyes in there, like Lydiard, with R-D. Yeah, just write to me. They can go to our website, lydiardfoundation.org, to see the programs that we've got. We have quite a few New Zealand coaches. They've been through the course and they're very popular and we've got a lot of wonderful things, expanding it all the time.
Lisa: Awesome. Maybe we collaborate and go and do them. Do one of those as well. always adding courses to my list of things that I have to do. That might be a good one of them that I have to add.
Lorraine: You'd be most welcome, Lisa, we'd love to have you.
Lisa: Thanks. Alright.
That's it this week for Pushing The Limits. Be sure to rate review and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team at www.lisatamati.com.
The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.
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NMN: Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, an NAD+ precursor
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‘It was about physical, it was about mental, it was about emotional, it was about intuitional and spiritual aspects of our being. In that, I learned that if you train those together, then you will integrate, you'll become whole again.’
‘Human beings have not learned to be whole, and they don't recognise that we're all interconnected. And every one of our thoughts, every one of our emotions, every one of our actions has an implication or impact on the whole.’
‘How you talk to yourself has an incredible impact on your energy and your motivation. Literally, we use the terminology “feeding the courage wolf” versus “feeding the fear wolf.’
‘Understanding your capability as a human being, the potential that you have, the power that we have, you can then project that into the future and say, “What does victory look like for me?”’
‘I think that there's two reasons we're on this planet. One is to evolve to become the best version, highest and best version of yourself in this lifetime. The second is to align with our calling or our purpose.’
‘Ultimately, we create our own reality. It's all basically, it's all experienced with [the] mind. So that's powerful.’
‘You can do anything, one at a time.’
Mark Divine grew up in Upstate New York. He has a degree in economics from Colgate University and an MBA from NYU. He is a New York Times best-selling author, leadership expert, entrepreneur, motivational speaker.
Mark is also a retired U.S. Navy SEAL Commander. He spent nine years on active duty and 11 as a Reserve. With 20 years in service, he served in over 45 countries. During his time in the military, Mark created a nationwide mentoring program for SEAL trainees. Because of his success, he decided to start SEALFIT. This fitness company aims to prepare civilians for the physical and emotional demands of a SEAL-like lifestyle.
Mark knows the value of emotional strength in transforming lives. With this in mind, he published Unbeatable Mind in 2011, which includes an at-home study program.
Mark also has several other entrepreneurial endeavours and books in his name. He’s also the host of the Unbeatable Mind podcast. With all these ventures, Mark’s ultimate aim is to create more resources to improve the lives of everyone he meets.
If you want to know more about Mark and his work, check out his website and Instagram.
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To pushing the limits,
Lisa
Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential. With your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.
Lisa Tamati: Well, hey everyone, Lisa Tamati here. Fantastic to have you back at Pushing the Limits this week. Now I have a wonderful man who I’ve followed for a number of years. He’s one of my heroes, I was a little bit of a fangirl in this interview I have to admit. But it was pretty crazy. I have Commander Mark Divine on the show. Mark is an ex-Navy SEAL. He was a Commander in the Navy Seal. He was there for 20 years, and he was a fantastic leader. He was deployed in over 45 countries around the world. He also trains, trains a lot of the SEALs who are going into BUD/S training. He was number one on his course when he went through BUD/S, and that’s saying something. That’s nine months of hell on earth, so if you get through that, you’ve got to be pretty cool, and to be number one in the end of the whole 190 that went on, that’s pretty amazing.
He’s the author of a number of books: Staring Down the Wolf, Unbeatable Mind, and SEALFIT, and runs a number of multi-million dollar companies. As a leadership consultant, he trains, not only does he train the military, he helps people prepare for SEAL training. He also now runs through his innovative SEALFIT and Unbeatable Mind training systems. Kokoro crucible is one of his programs. He shares the same secrets with entrepreneurs, executives, and teams through his book and through his book, and through his speaking, and through his award-winning podcast. He has his own, and I have the privilege of being on that one shortly. He runs world-renowned leadership and team events. Wonderful man to talk to, someone that I really, really look up to and respect. His discipline that he brings to everything that he does is quite amazing. So I hope you enjoy the show.
Before we go, I just want to remind you to check out our epigenetics program, if you haven’t already. Head over to lisatamati.com and hit the work with us button, and find out about our Peak Epigenetics program. This is all about understanding your genetics, and how to optimise them for your best performance. So everything from food, to exercise, what types of exercise to do, what times of the day you should be training, what times of the day you should be eating, and how often. What type of diet is right for you, right down to the nitty gritty. You know, eat almonds, don't eat cashew nuts, right specific to your genetics, so to speak. It also looks at your whole mood and behavior, what makes you tick, why do you think the way you do, what areas you may have problems with, your predispositions.
That's not to be all deterministic, and negative, that's all to be like this is what you're dealing with, and this is how we can hit things off at the pass. This is a really life-changing program, and we're really proud to bring it to you. We've been doing it for a number of years now. We've taken hundreds of people through this program, and we work with corporate teams. So if you're out there and you have a corporate team that might be interested in doing either this or our boost camp program, which is all about upgrading and learning all about how to manage stress, how to reduce the effects of stress, and be more resilient and bring a higher performance to your game, then please reach out to us. Go over to lisatamati.com. and check out all the programs that we have here.
Just a reminder too, I have a new book out called Relentless: How a Mother and Daughter Defied the Odds. If you've listened to this podcast for a while, you would hear me harp on about my amazing mum and the journey that we've been on back from a massive aneurysm that left her at the age of 74 with hardly any higher function, and a prognosis that said she would never ever do anything again. And they were very, very wrong. So I want to share this book, I want to share the story, because it's a very empowering story. So if you haven't read the book Relentless, I really encourage you to go and do that. I'm really keen to get this out there because this will empower and change lives, and already has, so make sure you read Relentless. Right, over to the show with Commander Mark Divine.
Hi everyone, Lisa Tamati here. I’m super, super excited. I'm jumping out of my skin, I can't sit still. I have one of my great heroes that I've followed for such a long time, so I'm a little bit, being a bit of a fangirl right now. But I'm sure I'll calm down in a minute or two. Commander Mark Divine is with us. He has such a huge history. You are known, really, as the warrior man, Unbeatable Mind, SEALFIT. You've done a heck of a lot in your life. Mark, it's just, I can't wait to share some of your insights, because what you do and what you've done is just absolutely amazing. So, welcome to Pushing the Limits. Can you give us a little bit of background, Mark, on where you come from and what you've done and how you've, just to give us a little bit of, because you, obviously you've been in the SEALs, you're a commander in the SEALs, you're a trained SEAL. So let's start there. Let you come to it.
Mark Divine: Oh, my God, where to start?
Lisa: Maybe childhood.
Mark: I was born at a very young age in a very small town in upstate New York, a province of the United States. I'll try to keep this short because sometimes I have a few run-on sentences. Go like 40 minutes, right? We don't want that to happen. That’s when we have a good time. So yeah, I was a pretty normal kid growing up, running around the woods of upstate New York, crazy family, lots of alcohol and anger. The belt would come out pretty much every other night. My brother and I would literally just provoke my father just to do it, because we stopped taking him seriously after a while. In that regard, I feel pretty fortunate that my young spirit was like, ‘You can't break me’. I realise now that we all choose our parents, let's just say, from a spiritual perspective, I certainly believe that. For certain experiences, and for a while I played the victim, woe is me.
But now I look back and thank God, that really forged my mental toughness and resiliency. I had to unpack some crap from that, obviously, but it made me a Navy SEAL warrior, right? When I went through Navy SEAL training, you could not hurt me, because nothing was compared to my dad. Anyway, so that's a little aside. Upstate New York had a really— it's beautiful. I've been to your country in New Zealand. It's just absolutely gorgeous. I feel the same way about America in certain places, the much bigger. New York is one of those areas that, 6 million acres of unfettered, protected land in northern New York called the Adirondack Mountains, and that was my playground. And our summer home was on the west shore of a lake called Lake Placid where the Olympics were, you're probably familiar with that.
Lisa: Yeah.
Mark: There was no road access to my house. There was no TV, no internet. Still, there's finally internet after but no TV, and we would have to take a boat to get there. And so I grew up with boats and I grew up hiking in the Adirondacks and a lot of time alone in the wilderness, which is one of the reasons I became kind of an endurance athlete. I know you're an endurance lady. Because I was comfortable, being alone. I was comfortable running the trails in the mountains, and I used to have a friend, we would run up Whiteface Mountain, which is at the base or the foot of Lake Placid. Not a huge mountain, it’s 4,000 feet, but you know it took a couple hours. If you're going to hike up there it takes a few hours. For us to run up there, took us 45 minutes. People used to think we were crazy. When we got to the top we would wrap our ankles and our knees and we would play tag on the way down. The trails are steep and just rocks and ruts and roots. It's amazing we didn't kill ourselves.
So that was my like early childhood upbringing, nature being in the woods and in the water were my solace away from the family dynamics. That led me to be a competitive athlete in high school, 12 varsity letters and then into college, I was recruited for swimming and I became a competitive rower. And then I started triathlon. So, I was an athlete, but the athletics really was my escape and kind of my grounding rod, like it is for so many athletes, right? When I— then I wasn't sure what was going to happen. I didn't really spend a lot of time in my youth thinking about my future, I kind of accepted a lot of the stories for my family that I was going to go back and be part of the family business. That business was really the place that Divines go, you know, we don't go into the military, we don't go into academia, we don't do those things. So anyways, it's as your listeners are hearing this, they're probably like, ‘Yep, check.’
Lisa: They may have done that.
Mark: That's the norm, right? That's not, I wasn't off, but it's certainly not what I teach today, right? Because, right, I think if we're— if we don't follow our passion and find our calling in life, then we're going to have discomfort later on, and discomfort is going to lead to existential crisis. So I was very fortunate, incredibly fortunate that when I left college, I got a job with a big accounting firm, consulting accounting firm called Coopers and Lybrand, which became accountant, became—
Lisa: You were an accountant. I mean, that makes me laugh, really.
Mark: I was an accountant.
Lisa: I was on the way to being an accountant too. So because of what my dad wanted, and I'm about as far from an accountant, as you can get, you know.
Mark: I was too.
Lisa: That’s a good story.
Mark: But I stuck with it long enough to become a certified public accountant, I had to pass the exam.
Lisa: I didn't.
Mark: I got my— I tell you what, I would rather go back to BUD/S Navy SEAL training than try that darn exam again. That told me something right there. But you know, it is a great opportunity. Because here I am, you know, I got a degree from a pretty good university called Colgate. But I didn't really have any skills. And so this job opportunity gave me and sent me to a top business school in the United States called NYU, New York University. So I got my MBA in finance, and I became a certified public accountant for four years. I got to work on a lot of different companies as a consultant and auditor. So I saw a lot. But, so that was kind of formative, in a sense, like, I learned a lot. What was probably more formative, or more substantial for me was, once I got into that suit and tie, and I was working eight hours a day, mind you, they allowed me to work only 8 or 10 hours a day. Most people in those scenarios work 15 to 20. But because they were sponsoring this small group of us to go to business school at night, they had to let us off, and then we would go to school full-time during the summer, and just come in on Fridays.
It was a really cool program. So I was working 8 to 10 hours a day, going to school at night. And it's— I was an athlete, right? And I was like, ‘How am I going to, how am I going to stay as an athlete?’ Right? Most people don't. Because you know, in the corporate world, and I was like, ‘I've got to, I've got to continue my athletic career.’ And so I would get up really early in the morning and go for a six mile run. And then at lunchtime when all my peers would go have a beer or martini and lunch, I would go to the gym and do like this, what I now know is a high intensity functional workout, which back then nobody talked about. Because I had to go fast, and I was wanting to do a lot of different variety, and I had to be in and out of there in 45 minutes. And then after, they let me go at five o'clock in the afternoon, and my first class wasn't till 7:30. So I'm looking at that saying, ‘Look, I got two and a half hours. I could do some training here.’ So one night, I wasn't sure what I was going to do. But one night, I was walking down 23rd Street, I was living on 22nd in Manhattan, and I heard these screams coming out of this building. And I stopped and I looked up and I was standing under the flag of the World Seido Karate Headquarters.
‘Oh, interesting. Maybe it's a martial art.’ And I had been intrigued with the martial arts. But in Upstate New York, that just wasn't much. There's nothing as a matter of fact, in my time, and so I didn't really get a chance to study anything. So I went in there and I was floored. I was stunned by what I saw. It was an incredible art. This was the headquarters of a worldwide art called seido, they had three or 400,000 students. And the Grand Master, the founder was on the center of the floor, this Japanese man, 10th degree black belt, looked like a frickin’ tank. And he was, his name was Nakamura, and he became my mentor, my first real mentor. Yeah. Now what's interesting, he says it wasn't really the karate that changed me. It was the zen training. And he is one of the few masters who kept the old ways of training the mind and the body and the spirit, and understood that they all had to be in balance, and they all were part of the package of developing these corrupted, these trainees.
I loved the zen part, and there was a zen class we had every Thursday night for an hour, we would sit on that little wooden zazen bench. And honestly, this studio is the headquarter, had well over a thousand students. There were ten of us in this class, most of them black belts, and I was a white belt, and I was like, ‘Where is everyone else?’ I didn’t get it. And then there wasn't a lot of understanding or talk about meditation back then. But boy, I did this thing to do meditation. I had all the usual kind of resistance to it, and my monkey mind going all over the place and wondering if it really worked. I trusted Nakamura and the way he acted and presented himself as a character, just who he was, was so different than any other human I've ever seen or experienced. And I was like, ‘There's got to be something to this, right?’ So I stuck with it. And it literally changed almost every aspect of who I was and how I saw the world and what I perceived to be my calling and my purpose in life. And it was sitting on that bench that I realised that I was going down the wrong path with this MBA, CPA, working in the corporate world. Even if I went back to the family business, it just wasn't what I was meant to do. That was the first time in my life that I allowed myself to examine my core story that said, this is who I am, and to recognise it was built on a lie.
Lisa: Yeah. And you weren't following your true path.
Mark: I wasn't following my true path. But my true path wasn't exactly laid out for me, in those meditation sessions. It was more like the archetypal energy in the arc of my life was shown to me and that that art was to be a warrior, and then it would lead somewhere else that wasn't quite clear to me, but the warrior part was very strong. And it didn't— I didn't get messages while I was meditating, saying, ‘You're going to be a Navy SEAL.’ What I got was ‘warrior’ and, ‘You're going down the wrong path with this business stuff.’ It was when I finally started to accept that, that I learned about the Navy SEALs, right. Remember, this is 1987, 88, there was no TV shows and movies, no famous names.
Lisa: They weren't famous back then.
Mark: Nobody knew them. In fact, the few people that did know them were like, crazy guys. So I— one day, I was walking home from work, and I came across a Navy recruiting station. I didn't even know it was that but I saw a poster in the window. I took a double take of this poster. I was like, well, the title of that poster was, ‘Be Someone Special’. And it had Navy SEALs doing really cool shit. Jumping out of airplanes, yeah, blocking out little mini submarines, sneaking through the water. It's just so cool for me. I just sat there kind of transfixed, looking at that, and I didn't say anything about the SEALs. They said, US Navy, and I was, ‘Huh, interesting.’ So I went back and I talked to the recruiters so what, ‘Who are those people in that poster?’ They said, ‘Oh, they're crazy Navy SEALs. You don't want to do that.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I do. Tell me more.’ So long story short. I started that whole CPA, MBA bullshit, 1985. In November of 1989, I got my black belt, I got my MBA, I got my CPA and I was on a bus. I was on a bus to Officer Candidate School.
Lisa: That was the next mission.
Mark: On to the next mission. I wandered away from, I walked away from probably what would today's dollars be $200,000 salary to get paid $500 a month?
Lisa: Wow. That takes—
Mark: For heading off as a candidate.
Lisa: That takes courage. That alone takes courage.
Mark: But I didn't question that. You know, I knew it. I knew this is the right path. And when I got to SEAL training, what we called BUD/S, basic underwater demolition SEAL training. Man, I felt like I was home, and there was no way that they were going to get me to quit. I mean, other people said this, but I said this very clearly: ‘You have to kill me to get me out of here.’ And I don't think they can legally do that. Although they sure do try.
Lisa: It can get pretty close.
Mark: It can get pretty close, yeah. I sailed through SEAL training. We had 185 in my class, hardcore, awesome guys. And 19 of us graduated. I graduated number one in my class and my entire team, my boat crew that we trained together from day one, graduated with me.
Lisa: Wow.
Mark: So there's something about that meditation training, Nakamura and the skills, and the values on team building and taking my eyes off myself and putting them on others, the taming of the ego, it really allowed me to help lead my team to success, right? We made it about the team and not about me, and everyone else was about them. And they— the team's, the instructors are, their job is to select the next crop of teammates that they will go to war with.
Lisa: Yeah.
Mark: So what they're looking for is not who's the toughest guy, not who's the best athlete—
Lisa: Not the coolest, yeah.
Mark: Yeah, exactly, not the best looking whatever. It's, ‘Are you a great teammate? Are you gonna have my back?’ So that's something that I guess I demonstrated.
Lisa: Wow, that's a brilliant intro into your background. What fascinates me with you too is that you like— you know, because the SEALs are known for being hard asses. I mean, you know they are hard people, they have been through tough stuff, they go through tough stuff every single day that you're out there. But you've got this meditation side, you do a heck of a lot of yoga. You do, you talk about authenticity, and I know you don't like the word vulnerability, but you're quite, you're open about the stuff. That's quite the opposite of most, in the training that you get. I suppose this comes from Nakamura being your master, that he taught you that very early on, they're sort of the both sides of the coin.
I get that question quite a lot, too. When they— when people read what I've done and achieved and so on, they're like, ‘Wow, you must be a super hard ass.’ And then they meet you and realise that you're actually very vulnerable or cry a lot. I'm very full of mistakes and problems and stuff that I'm working on at all times. But the difference is, I think, that you embrace both sides. And that you are always in pursuit of excellence, and you're always improving, and you're always developing. And I found that a really interesting combination in someone who's so physically tough and mentally tough to have had both sides. Was that a hard thing in the beginning with the SEALs?
Mark: I think you're right. I did learn that initially from Nakamura and so every day, you know, I was so committed. Every day I would stretch and I would do my breathing practices and my visualisation while I was going through SEAL training. Every day in the SEALs, I do some version of that. It was you know, it's difficult for a military operator to keep a daily dedicated practice going if you're up 24 hours a day, and you're in combat. Honestly, when I went to Iraq and combat, I meditated and trained yoga every single day. And it had a profound effect on me, right? In the war zone, all my teammates are just getting frayed at the edges, and I felt strong and confident, and I knew I was going to survive, because I did, I had that vision. I was going to be home with my child, you know, my wife and son.
So it came first from Nakamura, and then I started into yoga. It's not my career, it's important people know, I did plus-20 years in the Navy SEAL, but about nine years active duty and 11 years reserve. So as reserve, so nine years after I joined, even while I was on active duty, I started to get into yoga. But when I got off active duty I had more time. I went full on in, and that was because— actually it is a blessing in disguise. I was living in San Diego and there was no seido karate out here. Otherwise I would have gotten back into seido karate. So first I got into something called goju karate, I got a black belt there. It was very similar to seido but it lacked the spirit and like the mental, the meditation, so I didn't really stick with that. And then I got into ninjutsu, thinking ninjutsu might be a little bit more spiritual. I really liked the teacher but he was a horrible business guy, so right on the cusp of getting my black belt, he shut his school down and ran out of money.
And then I found yoga kind of about the same time as ninjitsu. But I didn't really understand it until I read Patanjali’s yoga sutras and also Paramahansa Yogananda’s autobiography yoga. And those just absolutely shattered my paradigm of what was possible and what yoga was, as the oldest science of mental and personal development. So I fully went into yoga and I ended up getting 700 hours of certifications and started my own yoga program and wrote a book about it eventually, but, and started teaching it to SEALs. And so all this I was still a SEAL officer. Because I didn't retire from the SEALs in 2011, but I was able to do all this and build a business that started to teach Navy SEALs everything I would have been learning. And that's called SEALFIT. That was the business that everything I've been learning and applying in my own life, right? And this was this integrated model of development. It started with Nakamura where it wasn't just about the physical. It was about physical, it was about mental, it was about emotional, it was about intuitional and spiritual aspects of our being. In that, I learned that if you train those together, then you will integrate, you'll become whole again. What that means is you'll become more, you have access to more of yourself. You have to put more potential. You can maintain peak performance, you can serve more profoundly, you can do more, you've got way more energy, way more enthusiasm, way more motivation, way more peace of mind, way more clarity.
It's extraordinary. In a sense, it's like coming back to who we are. That's why I call it integration. In fact, the word ‘yoga’ means union or integration, and so does is zen, believe it or not. Those practices and traditions are really all about becoming whole as a human again, as opposed to fragments and separate, separate from yourself and separated from others. So I stumbled upon this, and created my own path or my own model. And then when I had started to teach it to SEALs and special operators, and other military operators, a ton of people, even from New Zealand, some of your listeners might have been to my training. Then I started to recognise that, ‘Wow, this is necessary in our culture.’ Because most Westerners have no connection to this, this way of living of, taking care of the internal while you are working in the external, the yin and the yang, the balance between being and doing, becoming whole again, so you can do your work from a whole perspective as opposed to a fragmented, separated self. Which leads to suboptimal results, at a minimum, in at least a flat out crisis or destruction at the maximum level. And that's, we're seeing that both in from the investment in violence, military build-up, conflict, as well as environmental degradation is because human beings have not learned to be whole, and they don't recognise that we're all interconnected. And every one of our thoughts, every one of our emotions, every one of our actions has an implication or impact on the whole.
Lisa: Yep. This is really good. Because I think, we live our lives very much in the doing. We're busy all day, we're busy with a billion million things, we're running businesses, we're— we’ve got families and so on. And it's really hard to find that stillness. And I know that even as an athlete who, I think for years, I was just headed through the wall, you know, taking—
Mark: Most people are, that’s how they learn, until they hit the wall, right?
Lisa: Yeah, no, I hit the wall a couple of dozen times before, because I was a bit thick. I didn't wake up, said, ‘Hang on, this stuff isn't working anymore.’ And it works when you're 20. And it works when you're 25. And it works when you're 30. And but when you start hitting your 40s, and you're still smashing the crap out of your body, and you're not really not refilling the tank, and you're not re-examining what the hell are you doing, I think that's when the wheel started, when the wheel started to fall off for me. And I'm like, ‘Hang on a minute, this— why isn't my body doing like, it wasn't what it was supposed to do?’ And when you've grown up, though, with that expectation of, you have to be tough, you have to be hard. And I grew up different to you. But I had a dad who was very, he was an awesome father, but he was a hard ass. And he expected you to be tough and mentally tough, physically tough. He didn't really tolerate a lot of weakness or sickness or anything like that. And he was an amazing dad, but he pushed really hard. And that sort of makes you think, well, you have to be hard all the time. And then when you break down, then it's you being weak. Instead of looking at the whole picture, and quieting the mind and doing these things like meditation was for me. Yeah, I know, I hear it's really important, but I can't sit still. I need it twice as much.
Mark: Yeah, well, there's a reason for that. It'd be fun to talk about. But think about, when I reflect back, and my SEAL training and all these other guys were trying to be hard, and they had the same thinking, because America has a real soft side to it. But there's a lot of freakin’ warriors in America. And we have that same kind of what your dad's talking about. Gotta be hard. Like, there's no room for weakness. It's got to be tough. You think about the metaphor, the guys who quit were just bad asses. Yeah, why did they quit? They quit because they didn't— they lacked the emotional strength to understand what was happening to them in their either most extreme moments of crisis or moments of just doubt, right? And then they're like, so they let uncertainty in, let doubt creep in and corrupt their decision making and then, one mistake leads to an injury we call, quinjury. And you've probably seen this in endurance athletes’ is when all of a sudden the injury kind of crops up and then the person's out. And then really, reality is they created that injury to quit.
Lisa: Yeah, because they wanted a way out.
Mark: Because they wanted a way out. It's very subconscious. It's not prepared. It's not preparing properly. It's not recovering properly. It's not understanding that this is a long game and getting your ego out of the way.
Lisa: It used to prop up for me every— before any big race, that in the week ahead of that race, I would get sick. And I would, I'm sure that that was my subconscious trying to stop me do it.
Mark: Yeah, I've given you an out, right. And so—
Lisa: You’ve got a cold, you've got the flu.
Mark: Think about the metaphor between, if you got a tsunami coming, like, consider tsunami a metaphor for a crisis, or a big challenge, like BUD/S or a 50 mile or 100 mile race or something like that. There's a tsunami coming. Would you rather be a mighty oak facing that tsunami, or would you rather be like a reed?
Lisa: A reed, definitely.
Mark: Yeah, if so, when I went to SEAL training, I tried to be the reed, right? I tried to be really flexible. I didn't let anything bother me. You know, structures would come up and, during Hell Week for us, which week seven back then. But now it's more like week three or four, seven days non-stop training around the clock, no sleep. Everyone's heard about that. Like a day, Thursday, like the day before, we're over it most of it, we’re down to 60, 35, maybe 45 or 50, actually, in our class from 185 already. And instructor evil comes over and he's like, ‘Mark, I don't like you, I'm gonna make you quit.’ And in my mind, I was like, ‘Good luck.’ And I even think I started—
Lisa: That confidence!
Mark: I don't know, it was just my spiritual strength saying, ‘No, you're not going to get me to quit, you can't.’ And so I actually was challenging him in my mind, and it must come through on my face. And he goes, ‘I'm gonna wipe that smirk right out that effing face.’ And he just made me start doing 8-count bodybuilders, which are like a burpee, basically. And I remember in my mind thinking, ‘Okay, all right. Let's do this.’ Right? All I got to do is one 8-count bodybuilder at a time, until he gets tired.
Lisa: Until he gets tired.
Mark: Exactly! So that's what I did. I just did one. I just want, did one 8-count bodybuilder. And then I just did one 8-count bodybuilder. And then I just did one 8-count bodybuilder. And when we got up to like—
Lisa: You broke him.
Mark: 800.
Lisa: Holy heck.
Mark: Which is nothing, right? I did 24 hours of burpees last, a couple of years ago, as part of our challenge. We did, check this out: we did 22 million burpees as a tribe to raise money for veterans. And part of that was to break a world record where our six-person team, you would love this, three men and three women, we did 36,000 burpees in 24 hours, so I did 7,500 or something like that. So 700 is nothing. Back then I didn't know if it was going to be 700 or 7,000 or 70,000. But he got bored, and he walked away at about 700, and I have to say, that worked. That's a good strategy.
Lisa: What about the burning in the muscles and the exhaustion and the running out of glycogen—
Mark: You can do anything, one at a time.
Lisa: Wow.
Mark: It's just like in a race, I'm sure you get to a point where all you have to do all you are saying to yourself is, ‘Just one more step.’
Lisa: One more step. Yep, absolutely.
Mark: Same thing. We call them micro goals. And so we teach— I started teaching these to SEALs, and the best guys already did this. But now we teach it, the SEALs are teaching what I call the Big Four. And they're teaching box breathing for controlling their stress, they're teaching positive internal dialogue, and mantras. And they're teaching visualisation, visualise every event and visualise what the end state looks like for you and then visualise the mission and whatnot. And then micro goals. Like go to BUD/S thinking about eight months of training, you go to BUD/S thinking about, ‘What do I got to do today to win this?’ And then when today gets hard, you just collapse. ‘What do I need to do to win this evolution or event that I'm in?’ And then when that gets harder, you know, it's like, ‘What do I got to do to get to the next five minutes?’ Anytime you quit, or you have the thought, ‘Well, this sucks. I think I want to quit.’ You just say, ‘Well, let me just push through to another— let me just push through another five minutes.’ Or, ‘Let me just get to that berm up there,’ if it's a run, or Log-Pt could go on forever. ‘Let me just finish this evolution, then I'll make a decision.’ And so you just keep kicking the can down the road of the pain and the quit decision and the suffering and eventually the suffering goes away, because that's a temporary state.
Lisa: And this is like that you just dropped so much golden inside of two minutes. Take a couple of those because these are things that I've took me 20 years to learn.
Mark: Play it back in slow motion.
Lisa: You know, like this. That's how that's how I break down. You know, every mess of the like, I remember and my listeners have heard me tell the story. But I ran 2,250 kilometers from New Zealand for charity.
Mark: Wow. Good for you. Holy cow.
Lisa: Yeah, no, it's like, but I've been so busy in the build-up doing— I've been at other races around the world, done Badwater in the States, just come back from that, just launched a book and then I'm standing at the start line. I've been so busy in the thing that I actually hadn't thought about actually running the— because I was just like, ‘Yeah, I got everything, sweet.’ And then I’m starting at the start line and I just had a panic attack, like the first real big panic attack. And I'm not, because you're staring down the barrel of this—
Mark: Like, holy shit, this is too high to climb. What the heck have I done?
Lisa: What the frick was I thinking? And I went home, we had media, we had all my crew and everybody there and I just went away behind the one of the cars and got my mum, my mummy ‘cuz she's my safe place, went to my mummy and I just bawled my eyes out. And said, ‘Mum I can't do this, I don't know what the frick I was thinking. I can't, and there's no way out.’ And mum's just like, ‘Hey,’ as she hugged me, as mums do. And she said, ‘You don't need to do 2,250 today. All I want you to focus on is that little box up there,’ you know, that was a couple of hundred meters up the road. ‘That's what you got to do right now. And then you're going to, you're going to get through to lunchtime, and then you're gonna have lunch. And then we're going to get through to this and that.’
She just broke it down into pieces, and she took all of that load that I was just like, ‘Oh my God, this is huge,’ and she broke it into one step at a time, basically. And that was some of the greatest learnings that I've taken away for every event that I've done when— and there have been times when I've broken and I've just crashed on the ground. I don't know how to get up and people have come along and they've got me up and walked me through the next few steps. Or the next— and that has gotten you over that hump, you know? And I just wait, you know, that's so much gold, right there, what you've just said. I think if we can do that in daily life so when we're faced with some big scary thing coming at us, how do I just get through this moment? And we're very— if you can get through these impulses, you know, like there's 30 seconds, through the 30 seconds almost, sometimes you can get to a place where you can cope again. And then you can sort of get back up.
Mark: And this goes back to like the internal dialogue. Most people don't examine their internal dialogue. And this is where meditation is so critical. And you can also consider, like running or swimming or biking, endurance sports generally, are also very good for examining internal dialogue, because you're going to meet resistance. How you talk to yourself has an incredible impact on your energy and your motivation. Literally, we use the terminology ‘feeding the courage wolf’ versus ‘feeding the fear wolf’. Feeding fear is allowing negative dialogue and negative imagery and negative emotions to kind of run the rule the roost of your psychology, and that weakens you. Negative thoughts demonstrably weaken you as a human being.
Lisa: Yeah, because—
Mark: They're gonna not just weaken your motivation but literally musculature-wise you get weaker, and that's been proven through kinesiology. So positive thoughts create a higher vibration, which bring more energy, more access to more creativity and motivation. And so you got to train positive thoughts. That's what I mean by feeding the courage wolf. And the more you feed the courage wolf by training positive mantras and positive thoughts, then the more you starve the fear wolf until he goes away, until he just doesn't have the food anymore. And those patterns dry up and blow away. So I created a bunch of positive mantras that I would say in the SEAL training, and they're still with me today.
As soon as I start a hard workout, they kick back in. ‘Feeling good, I'm looking good, ought to be in Hollywood. Feeling good, I'm looking good, ought to be in Hollywood. I can get out of me in Hollywood. I've got this easy day, piece of cake. Boo yeah, hey, got this. Easy day, piece of cake. Boo yeah, hey.’ And then I'll synchronise that with my breathing. So, hardcore, run three steps and inhale 1, 2, 3, ‘I've got this. Easy day. Piece of cake.’ Exhale 1, 2, 3. Right.
Lisa: And the rhythm is good too, hey.
Mark: Yeah, exactly. So I was synchronising those before, the big four. The first skill I said, box breathing, it's really breath control. Running, anything you're doing, always breathing through your nose as best as possible, and controlling the breathing and creating a nice rhythmic pattern with the breathing. It's going to be different depending upon what you're doing. If you're lifting weights, gonna be one thing, if you're running another, swimming another. Swimming creates its own little breathing patterns, because head in the water versus out of the water. But just starting there, controlling your breathing and adding a positive mantra, or a positive internal statement that's linked to the breath is transformative. Not only does it keep you in the game athletically or whatever, but when you do this during your regular day, day in and day out, you're training your mind to be really positive and to be very concentrated. So you're developing concentration power. So you're turning your mind from like a scattered floodlight, which is flickering on and off, the monkey mind, to a very, very concentrated laser beam that you can point that laser beam on anything, any task, any project, and it deeply improves your productivity, the ability to get things done, you know, significantly.
Lisa: Wow.
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Mark: And then the imagery, right, the imagery. Well, let me backup. The other thing that that process of paying attention to the quality of your thoughts and changing them to positive thoughts, and increasing your concentration power, as you start to look at the dialogue too, in your head. What is actually going on? And you recognise that typically what's going on in your head is a series of statements that are also based upon belief systems, but it can be framed as questions. When people say, ‘I don't think I can do this,’ what they're really saying is, ‘Am I worthy? Am I competent?’
We can begin to recognise that our belief systems are based upon questions and statements that may or may not be true. And so you want to take a look at the ones that are questionable, especially if they have a negative quality, and say, ‘Is that true?’ And you realise, ‘It’s not true. I am worthy. I am competent.’ Now, I may not feel that yet. But the more I tell myself that and the more I can see that in myself, and the more that I meditate and actually feel into my worthiness and my confidence, and the more I work to eradicate the emotional side or shadow that may have, be tied to related to that — for me, it was because of the childhood abuse, I kind of felt a little unworthiness and whatnot, even though I was capable as a SEAL, it's still kind of plagued me for a while, until I had to stare down that wolf of fear and be like, ‘Yeah, that's all bullshit. That's just a story that I'm holding on to and I was able to release all that energy and feel that worthiness now.’ Then that leads to a whole nother set of questions, which are extraordinarily empowering, right. So when I— understanding your capability as a human being, the potential that you have, the power that we have, you can then project that into the future and say, ‘What does victory look like for me?’ Right? ‘If I'm going to run this 2,000 meter, or 2,000 kilometer race, and I'm going to raise money for charity, what is that for? What's my ‘why’? And what does victory look like?’
You get a clear sense of what victory looks like. And then you can even do that with the micro parts. So you chunked it down into 100 kilometer segments, let's just say. What does victory look like for that segment for the next five days? What does it look like for today? What does it look like— this is, in a sense, what your mom was doing, but she was doing it from the other way around. What does it look like for the next six hours? What does it look like for the next three hours? You get a clear picture because you're asking the right questions, and you're winning in your mind before you step foot into the battlefield. So asking really powerful questions like, what does victory look like? Who is on my team? Who's got my back? Why am I doing this? How is it related to my purpose in my life? These are the questions that we start asking, because now we've drowned out the negative incessant chatter, which is just holding us back and distracting us. We've created this space, and I use the metaphor still water pond. We've taken our mind and we've created it instead of this choppy, you know, bouncing all over the place, turbulent thought stream, largely negative, we've calmed down. And it's now this still water, and on this still water, you can look at it, you can really see a reflection clearly. So that's kind of a nice thing, you get to see your true self more clearly, but also, what you drop into that water in terms of the thought is going to ripple out and affect everything. So you end up dropping thought seeds that are really powerful, instead of chaotic and negative.
Lisa: Because there's this whole, these automatic negative thoughts and if we think about how we evolved that was there for our survival. Because we needed to be aware of dangers and things in our environment, so we were always looking for the bad thing that was going to come at us. But in our world now, where we just, we have this constant chatter in our head. And it's, you know, I've certainly dealt with this for a long time, and I and I fought against the whole sitting still thing, and focusing inwards. Because it's very unpleasant, when you having— when you want to move, you just want to move. Give me a hard ass workout, any day, over meditation, you know, because it's just like this energy, this agitation, but that's why I need to do it. So that I can break through that piece of the puzzle. And then you can tap into strengths that you didn't know you had, and quietness, and then you start to really reflect and like, for me, it has only really been, even in the last few months where I've been—
My dad passed away, and it was one hell of a battle for his life. And I, yeah, it was a real— I was fighting against the system. And it was a mess of battle. It's all good when you win, but it's also good when you don't win. And so this one, just been— I was a bit of an existential crisis after that, because I'd lost this battle for my dad, who I loved dearly. And it made me go inward. It made me start to really question some of the biggest things because you start realising that life's short, shorter than I think it's gonna be. You want to understand why, and then going inside and doing some deep work and doing some trauma work and doing all that sort of hard stuff has been great. There's always good that comes out of shit. You never ever want to go through things like that, but when you do, you can always turn them into something, a learning curve of some sort. And having that, I was listening to you with Bedros Keulian, who's also is another one that I—
Mark: Yeah, he’s an awesome guy.
Lisa: Yeah, he's just a rock star. in you, when you were talking about how you went through the zen process where you were, for a start, you started meditating, but you're just learning to quiet the mind. And then after a few months, that became then mindfulness. Where you’re starting to observe yourself from outside in splitting the mind or somehow you put this and you're actually observing yourself as this higher self, if you like. Can you explain that a little bit? And how does that—
Mark: Yeah, so glad you brought that up. Because I wanted to talk about that. Because you're right. It's— meditation is hard, especially for active people, which everybody, everybody listening, everybody in the Western world is pretty much hyperactive. Yep, that's what we're taught; it’s reality. Like, ‘Go, go, go. Do, do, do.’ We get over-committed. Now we have, you know, constant distraction with our iPhones and social media, and it's just gonna get worse, worse, worse. Wait until we get plugged in with a neural link, you know, like, wow. So we got to push back against that. The only way to push back against that is to disconnect from all that and to sit still, or stand still, or take a walk. But don't do anything, right. Don't do it for a goal. Don't do it to check it off a box. Don't do it to be the best meditator you know.
Lisa: Tick that box.
Mark: It doesn't work, right?
Lisa: That was what I was going to—
Max: There's no goals here. Right? It's about becoming still, getting that clarity and this still water mind back, if you ever had it, but we had it when we were kids, of course, but in a different sense. So that you can evolve. You know, let me start there. I think that there's two reasons we're on this planet. One is to evolve to become the best version, highest and best version of yourself in this lifetime. The second is to align with our calling or our purpose. And those two really kind of go hand-in-hand or hand-in-glove. You can’t evolve if you're constantly doing. You actually will stay stuck. You'll keep getting your ass handed to you. You'll keep suffering. You'll keep feeling victimised. And you'll keep looking outward for the solutions. And you'll keep blaming other people, or society, or taxes, or the government, or God.
Lisa: A lot of fingers are turned.
Mark: The answers lie within, right? And so the only way to go inward is to slow down and just be quiet. Right? So it's imperative. Now, why do most people fail? A) Because everything I've just talked about, they haven't been taught this. And B) because they're body mind, their body brain is very, very agitated. It’s amped up because you've been taking all this stress on throughout your life. So what I teach is that the first step in meditation practice isn't mindfulness. It isn't a mantra practice. It's just a box breathe, which is a pattern breathe, five-count in, five-count hold, and five-count out, five-count hold, or four, or three, if you have trouble with that. And just let that nostril breathing in that massaging that the vagus nerve, stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system. And it's bleeding off stress and bringing your body brain back into my balance.
Lisa: Yep.
Mark: When your body brain is back into balance, your brain is going to experience that as a lower frequency rate. Lower frequency means fewer thoughts, right? If you're in gamma, it's like tick-tick, popcorn brain. But if you're in alpha, like listening to beautiful music, classical music, or you're maybe doing some journaling, your mind stops racing. It starts to get into—
Lisa: A lovely alpha state of focus.
Mark: Yeah, and so the box breathing practice trains your mind to get back into alpha, trains your body to de-stress, and you do this. It might take you months, usually about three months. I— my clients have this extraordinary calming that comes over them. And they're already changed. But this is, you know, just the preparatory work, right? This also, for those who are working on their physical structure in their health and their weight, this also has enormous benefits because you begin to feel a lot better. And you begin, you know, you're starting to breathe in that life force again. You're getting more oxygen with every breath, and you're retraining the breathing patterns so this becomes your more natural state. If you, let me just pause here, if you train for 20 minutes a day, have a five-count box breath, that's three breaths per minute, over time, and might take a year or more, you're gonna eventually settle into a natural breath pattern of six breaths per minute, which is now proven to the optimal.
Lisa: Exactly.
Mark: I've been doing this for years, I never knew that, it just settled out there to where six breaths per minute through the nose was standard for me, or a standard, and that's what will happen to you.
Lisa: Yep.
Mark: Yeah. But those are full breaths, full exhales, getting all the toxins out there.
Lisa: Basically the exhale.
Mark: It's enormously beneficial for your body, and everything starts to come back into balance: you start losing weight, you start eating better. Because you want to eat better, you start sleeping better, because you got all that, less cortisol and less stress. Wow, all that is foundational. Now, with all that starting to happen, after three to six months, you can start to sit comfortably, and you're starting to enjoy it, and you're starting to look forward to it. That's when we can start meditating.
Now everything looks like meditation, but you're really sitting in box breathing. But now we turn that box pattern into a concentration practice. That's part two. And so the way I teach that is to visualise the box being drawn with each side being drawn in a different color, lighting. And also adding that mantra, or one of the other, but they both work and they work together. So now you're giving your mind one thing to focus on. This then develops that power to concentrate deeper, but also gives you the ability to notice when you're— when you lost your focus, or you split your focus. You’re wandering. And then you get, develop the ability to bring it back quicker and quicker to the box better, and that's called attention control. So you're training yourself: concentration, the ability to control your attention, and the ability to be less distracted. Wow.
Now that's mind training and that's the part where I say you're training your mind first with the box breathing, then with the second part of concentration and attention control. To be like a tame, beautiful stallion that was a wild stallion. A wild stallion is gorgeous, but it's dangerous. And most people's minds are like that. They're beautiful, but they're dangerous.
Lisa: Yep.
Mark: They’re dangerous to themselves and to others. But once you train it by lassoing that mind and stabilising it and calming it down, de-stressing it and then being able to focus it, then it's much happier and it's much calmer, and it's going to serve you, instead of trampling.
Lisa: Achieve more and do more.
Mark: Right. That's step two in the process, and this might be like, again, everyone's gonna be different, but six months to one and a half years. That's step three. Some of this stuff naturally unfolds, but it's really powerful if you recognise and you're deliberate about it. You don't want to rush meditation; this is a lifetime practice. Be comfortable, get it right in the beginning, because it'll serve you for the rest of your life. So many people bounce around with meditation, they draw in it, they're off it, they quit. They're just using an audio app, you know, and they're not really training their brains. It does have some health benefits, but it's not really training their minds.
Furthermore, if you don't end up doing the emotional work, you can really do what they call spiritual bypass or an emotional bypass where you can have some nice experiences. You go for the bliss and the white light and all that. But you're not doing anything to change your character, your underlying structures of beliefs and thoughts and biases, right? I had a meditation teacher who told me, ‘Mark,’ he wasn't talking to me, he was talking about meditation. He said, ‘If you're an asshole, and you start meditating, and you meditate for 20 years, you don't do anything about that, you’re just gonna be a more focused asshole.’
Lisa: There’s just more asshole-ness. Oh no.
Mark: Right? So you want to get this right. Meditation can be transformative at all levels, but you got to do it, right. It's just like learning foot placement and proper alignment and structure to run 2,000 kilometers. If you don't, you break. Same thing with meditation. If you go straight into, like Kundalini Yoga, and you think, ‘Oh, that's it, that's my path.’ And you have a Kundalini awakening, and you haven't done the foundational work to integrate that, or to deal with that in your body, then you could go crazy. And there are people around this world who are absolutely batshit crazy, because they had Kundalini awakenings, and they weren't ready to handle it.
Lisa: Wow. Okay. So you need to do this—
Mark: You need to do this work. This is why the yogis would train for years and years and years, in the asanas, the physical postures, so that when they were ready for that experience of enlightenment, which some some had, and some didn't, and they had that massive, like lightning bolt of electricity just explode up their spine and integrate all their chakras and, and just drawing and all this life force that they were able to handle it.
Lisa: Wow.
Mark: It’s an intense experience. Now that's a little bit advanced training, probably, we don't need to go into much more of that here. But my point is that, take your time, don't be so goal-oriented with meditation. It's okay to be goal-oriented with your athleticism and with your business stuff. But when it comes to raising your kids and the meditation, it's better to be patient, and to be present and just allow the process to unfold because it's going to be a little bit different for everybody, depending upon where you are at psychosocially and physically and emotionally.
One thing I do want— so one thing I just want to finish up this part. So you have the first part, which is the de-stressing the routes of control where you're just breathing for that. Then the second part where you're breathing for concentration, power, and attention control. The third part, which you alluded to, that opens up naturally, is you start to take a little bit of the pressure off of the concentration training, and you allow any thoughts streams to arise. Where concentration training, you're trying to like— you're not trying to empty your mind of all thoughts, because you're thinking of one thing, and that is the concentration, you know, the object of concentration. And so you're putting a lot of effort into that, mental effort, which develops mental power. But eventually, you've got enough of that. And so you, you take off the gas a little bit, and you allow less energy to put it— be put into the concentration and allow other things to arise.
This is where you get that metacognitive split, which is interesting. So now it's almost like your brain has been partitioned into two hard drives. And one hard drive is your right brain and right hemisphere, which is fully online and aware now, because of the concentration. It’s not all subconscious, it's aware, say able to see context. And the second partition is the left hemisphere of your brain, which is the content, thinking. And so your box breathing softly, just, mindfully, this being aware, and you're seeing what's coming up. But you're seeing it from a perspective that's separated from the thoughts and emotions. This is a sea change in behavior. It's awakening to this understanding that you are not your thoughts and emotions. And therefore you're not the stories and you can change your stories, you can change your life by inserting new stories.
Lisa: So you're observing yourself from the outside as an extra character that's watching the emotions and the things that you're off and understanding the actual brain that's been partly programmed in childhood and our culture and everything that it's exposed to, which is running this pattern that's been running forever. And you're actually watching and saying, ‘Well, that's interesting.’
Mark: I do that in the observer. Yeah. I call that the witness.
Lisa: Yeah.
Mark: So then, there's two more things we do in meditation. So once you begin to open up to the witness, the most powerful way to visualise is from the witness perspective, because you're doing it from your higher self, you're visualising your future from that perspective. It's just, a lot of people start training, they start with visualisation, and they're like, I can't get a clear picture of my future. And they're really hooked to their thinking mind and they're thinking about doing in the future. When you can decouple from the thinking mind and look into the future from the perspective of your witness, you're basically seeing what your spirit wants you to see. And so that's going to be much more in alignment, if not in total alignment with what your real purpose is on this planet. And you're not seeing yourself doing, you're seeing yourself as a type of person, like an archetype or calling. Seeing yourself as a healer, as a teacher, as a warrior, as a leader, as a— and then that's gonna have a certain flavor to it, like a healer might be a healer of the earth, or it might be healer of children, or it might be healer of elderly, right, so it's gonna have a flavor to it, that's going to come to you spontaneously.
That's where intuition comes from. It's like this deep knowingness inside, or transrational, from outside of us, which really isn't, nothing outside of us. Ultimately, we create our own reality. It's all basically, it's all experienced with mind. So that's powerful. So witnessing can lead to the most incredible thing, which is, like embodied visualisation, where you're visualising from the perspective of the witness, and you are seeing your future clearly. And you practice that every day. And then that creates this massive magnetic pole. Because you're actually creating a memory of a future that is bound to happen, right? You know, we have these different kind of futures strands, which are possibilities, but we get to choose which one now, that's going to become the go from possibility to probability to destiny.
Lisa: Wow.
Mark: That's profound. And then the last thing that happens is, when you stop doing anything at all, and this happened to me on the on zen bench when I was in my 20s. Now it's routine, where you know, you can start breathing, for control, and then you breathe for concentration, then you open up to the mindful awareness, and you see what's going on and check in and make sure that everything's cool. And then you do your visualisation, and then you just stop efforting at all, you just stop trying to do anything, and you just sit and rest and let your mind rest. You're not going to sleep. But what you're doing is kind of turning inward and just letting awareness kind of search for itself. So awareness, your awareness is searching for, let's just say, absolute awareness, is trying to recognise itself in the totality of everything. And it will find itself because it is the same as that.
This is when you get this incredibly, deeply connected feeling to all that is, right? This is where you know, the ultimate road to the end of separation is this sense, this unity we experience.We're super easily connected. We all arise on same thing. Our higher selves all arise from the same thing, we have our unique aspects of it. But the metaphor is that I love to use is, you know, we recognise that we're all like waves in the ocean. But we're still all, we all have the same awareness and we're connected to the ocean.
Lisa: If we were part of the ocean, vessel in the ocean.
Mark: This is another transformative experience in meditators’ progression and evolution is that they then never, never do go back to feeling separate again. You may have moments but you remember, ‘Oh, yeah, this is just a temporary experience of separation. So let me go back and continue my training.’ And then the training starts to become integrated into your daily life, and then every moment becomes training, and then you've— that turns into a permanent state of unity experience. And that's, that would be called enlightenment.
Lisa: Wow. And this is like the whole body things, it's not just training your body because everyone wants to know, ‘What diet should I have and what exercise should I be doing?’ We’re forgetting this big piece of the puzzle that we're not just physical beings, and that we can access our neurology, through our physiology, and we can access also higher, higher things if we take the time. It was a hard sell for me, like I said. I struggled because I just wanted to be doing. I'm an action-oriented person, I want to be doing things and to actually take that time and it's not a waste of time, even though you know when people say to me, ‘But I haven't got time to meditate.’ Well then, you need to make time to do all this stuff. Because— and you start off you don't start off eight hours a day up in the mountains. You gotta progress.
Mark: You’re not sure you might want to do that. That's—
Lisa: Really great. There was one other thing that you discussed too, with Bedros that really interested me, which was recapitulation. Can you explain what recapitulation is and how that works?
Mark: I will. And before I do, I would like to just say that as an athlete, I imagine most people listening are athletes, we have a great opportunity and also great responsibility. Because most of the people, at least in the past who have been drawn to meditation don't have the physical strength or capacity that we have. And so you end up seeing you know, this might be one thing that has turned off a lot of people, you know, healthy people fit people, is there— that Buddhist monk is fat, right?
Lisa: He doesn't look like I want to look like.
Mark: Right. I don't want to look like that, or I don't want to wear a robe, check out a society and sit in a monastery woods. And yeah, yeah, and I— so those, you got to recognise that like zen monasteries, I've been to zen monastery before, and it's just not my thing. And people who are drawn to spiritual traditions, but ignore their body, and ignore their emotions, they're incomplete. They might have some advanced mental training, but they're incomplete. The physical structure— and a lot of these people fall, right, they fail in the long run, because they still get stuck in their ego, or they get really unhealthy and they fall apart. So athletes can approach this from the perspective of total health, right? Body, mind, spirit, and we say physical, mental, emotional, intuitional, and spiritual. And it's going to be a more complete process, or package. And furthermore, you're going to be able to help others because you're going to be really healthy and really strong, really motivated. And you're gonna have a lot of endurance. Yeah, and you're gonna happen, you're gonna be whole. So I think it's athletes and warriors who also become enlightened or awakened, who are serving the world, who are— who can change the world.
Lisa: Yeah.
Mark: Together, right, because we got the strength and the staying power. And also, because we're— you know, we have to face our fears and our shadows, because we do hard things, we tend to actually be more emotionally balanced than people who don't. So that's— I wanted to say, that's a really— that should be a motivating force.
Lisa: I mean, that's, you know, like, you know, we’ve sort of come full circle in this holistic approach, rather than a hit through the wall approach. Which, you know, in the gym, or in the training field, you have to go sometimes to, through to places that are not pleasant. But you don't need to neglect this other part of you, and that that's your whole and it's not contradictory, because a lot of people think, you know, ‘Mark Divine, what's he about, man? Is he this hard ass athlete? Or is he this amazing spiritual teacher?’ And he, well he's both, you know, and—
Mark: I’ve done my three hours of training this morning.
Lisa: I haven't.
Mark: Today was deadlifts in a nice functional lot and my yoga and meditation all together. It's all one thing. Back to your question. So imagery and visualisation is just such an incredible powerful tool for us to create our destiny, which I've already talked about, but also to heal our past. So recapitulating is where we use imagery, ideally, also, from the state of the witness, right? When we get there, to go back into our past and to relive, re-experience and relive traumatic events. And then to recontextualise them and to forgive both from your heart and from your dialogue, conceptual stuff, but also with the imagery to see yourself forgiving your younger version of yourself.
And then to change that picture, to change the image that you associated with it, and the energy associated with it. This is often best done with a qualified coach or like therapist, in the process of like EMDR, eye motion desensitisation training. It’s really valuable, and that's something I do all the time. I have an EMDR coach, and I continue to do this because there's no there there, right? You can peel the onion forever. And then many, many past lives, right work on the past life, right? There's no end to this stuff, right? Once you get into it, you realise that this is a lifetime of work. And the more you do, the lighter you feel, and the more energy you have, and the more joy and bliss you bring into life. I like, I call it akin to like dragging kettlebells of regret and resentment.
Lisa: I love that quote, because you're draining all that, like what I've felt in the last years, like I'm pulling this heavy load of shit that's accumulated from all the traumas and all the shit. And so I've been working with Dr Don Wood, I know he's been on your show, working through some of the traumas and taking the colour out of those memories and recapitulation or what—
Mark: What Dan is doing is recapitulation, it’s a form of it.
Lisa: It’s the same thing.
Mark: It's the same thing: to change the association, the energy, the emotions, and the imagery with past traumatic events. First, you have to identify those events, right? So awareness is the first step. I learned to recapitulation, I've done thousands of hours of training in different systems, not just Navy SEALs, but obviously yoga and Tibetan Buddhism and martial arts, tai chi, qi gong, and now aikido and my earlier stuff, and then even a patchy scout training and some Toltec training. Toltec training, they're— the ancient warriors. required the young men— I don't know if I don't think the women in ancient times— and the Toltecs were warriors, but the men. By the way, I only say that because of all the culture weirdness is going on in America anyways. Yeah.
Lisa: You got to be careful what you say.
Mark: I don't want to get canceled.
Lisa: Google might take us off here.
Mark: Right, exactly. So they require the young men, before they were allowed to become warriors, to spend a year in nature. Now that's, people heard of that, right? You can take your year walkabout and assuming you survive. But what they had to do during that year was what was unique. They had to recapitulate their entire lives, day by day, all the way back to birth.
Lisa: Wow. It’s heavy.
Mark: It's heavy. So this did a couple of things for them. One is it really developed their visualisation skills.
Lisa: Yeah.
Mark: Which then they were going to use for great benefit for their future, but they had to learn, you know, first, to work with their past and secondarily, let them see and recontextualise and heal any regrets or any wounds or any trauma that they had, or any mistakes that they made. So that when they were admitted to the warrior clan, and they actually had to face battle, they didn't have any of that energy holding them back.
Lisa: That's so—
Mark: If you think about anyone listening or even you, if you walk outside right now, and someone's standing there with a sword, first thing that’s gonna leap into your mind and your heart is like, ‘Holy shit. I don't know if I can do this.’ Or there's energy there that is going to prevent you from acting in a powerful way. Well, recapitulation and clearing all the energy will clear all that up, and you would just literally spring into action.
Lisa: Wow, so you wouldn't have that?
Mark: You wouldn’t have that, you even overcome fear of death.
Lisa: Yeah. Wow. You haven't got that heavy backpack of shit.
Mark: Right. Exactly. I love that metaphor. We use that in our Kokoro camp, which is 50-hour training that we have for SEALFIT, which, at once, in one sense, simulates Hell Week. But in other it’s really designed to train these five mountains of the physical, mental, emotional, intuitional, and spiritual. We have, the students end up in this very long, painful hike, and they've got these 40-pound sandbags in their back, and they're doing all sorts of drills and skills. At the end of this, we haven't take the sandbag out. You think about their biggest regrets, like the big one. Like everyone's got like one big one. The monster regret. And then we have them cut the sandbag, open, and then they dump that regret out. And it's so powerful, because people are literally in tears as they let that shit go.
Lisa: Wow, that is, that's amazing. Because you've literally carried it up this bloody mountain. You've exhausted yourself. You're letting that stuff go. It's absolutely brilliant. And I think, yeah, we need to be doing, and then doing this as a daily practice at the end of the day, going back over your day, so that you’re not taking the shit from this day forward.
Mark: Yeah, I'm glad you said that. So that the morning routine is to prepare to win your mind for the day and the evening routine is to look back and make sure that you won the day and you learn from your mistakes, and you let go of all regret. So recapitulation is used in two ways. One is to go back and overcome the big things, the big traumas, like you're doing with Don.
Lisa: Yep.
Mark: And the other is to go back and to literally just make sure that every day that you're not dragging any new kettlebells of regret into your sleep cycle. You deal with it right away. If you did something that you think, ‘Oh, man, I wish I hadn't done that.’ Well, either forgive yourself right away, or go make amends right there if you can. Pick up the phone. Send a text. Do it now. Or plan the critical conversation for the next morning to get it off your chest.
The faster you do, the better off you do. Then this becomes a practice of letting go and having a daily practice of letting go of regrets and resentments is extraordinarily valuable, right? Because then it frees up all the energy before it takes root and starts to create a cancer of energy in your body, or real cancer, literally.
Lisa: Yeah. And then we've got much more power to actually do the stuff that we’re meant to be here doing, to create the programs, the books, podcasts, whatever it is that you are in for. You can't when you're carrying this huge great load on your back, yeah, I don't know. My ability when I was in my 30s and I didn't have quite so much crap in there, I was unbeatable. I was like, and then as life keeps slapping you around the face, and you're getting some big traumas happen, you start to lose that energy and you start to like, live. And people go, ‘Oh, well, we’re just getting older, you know, the mitochondria and all that.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, well—’
Mark: This is where people start to give up, right?
Lisa: Yeah!
Mark: And that's, no. It's the time to get busy.
Lisa: And the older you are, the more you have to work. That's my mantra because I've brought my mum back from a massive, massive aneurysm, which I've written a book about called Relentless. And this story is really, really powerful. And, but it's about like, she's 79 years old and I train her like an Olympic athlete.
Mark: That’s awesome.
Lisa: I make little concessions every now and again, which tells me off, like the other day, she's, she's willing to go through the hard yards to rehabilitate her brain because her brain was in a vegetative state when she first had this. Not much happening upstairs at all. I’ve spent five years rehabilitating her, and spending hundreds and thousands of hours, retraining her from the time of being a baby, but like a being a baby, being an adult, and read the neuroplasticity, and all the things that I had to learn and hyperbaric, and through all the stuff that I did with her.
She hasn't given up. She hasn't ever said to me, ‘I don't want to anymore.’ Because she's a fighter. Even though she's a quiet, lovely lady, and you think well, that she's just a nice, gentle lady, she's tough as nails when it comes to just getting up and doing the work today, at the age of 79. That is a huge role model for other elderly people. Because we tend to— and I really honor our elderly, you know, they're part of my culture, I'm from Maori culture, and we do that quite well. And in normal culture, we seem to tend to think that, you know, older people are no longer worthwhile, and they should, they cost the society and though they're a burden, and they're not. This is where our wisdom and their experience if we can help them be healthy and strong, and my opinion is that they have to have goals, and they have to be working. People always told me, ‘You should make it comfortable. And, you know, hasten her exit of this world.’ And I'm like, ‘Hell no.’
Occasionally, like, the other day, I was pushing down on the back, and she's doing squats, you know, to give her some weight resistance, because I can't put a barbell over here. For once, she comes up and she goes, ‘I want to punch you in the face.’ And I was like, ‘This the first time in years!’
Mark: There’s the fighter!
Lisa: She usually just does whatever I ask her to do, but she’d had enough of me that day. But she fights every day, you know, and that those sort of stories are powerful. But you know, you have to, she just gets up and does the work every day. So it's never too late. And we should be honoring our elderly people, we should be giving them goals. I don't care whether you're five or 105, you need to be aiming towards something. When you let go and you be comfortable, and you just get into your comfy world. And this is you know, I'm going to sit back on the couch and watch Netflix and eat chips. Well then you’re on the way down.
Mark: You're toast. Yeah, that's why the idea of retirement is such a killer. It's just a horrible deceit. So get rid of that thought, don't ever retire, just change what you do and find something else you'd love to do and keep on setting goals and achieving and growing. Yeah, keep growing.
Lisa: Yeah, that's absolutely true. Mark, you've been absolutely amazing. I want to be respectful of your time, because I could talk to you for hours. Literally, honestly, I'd love to just unpack all this stuff. But you've been absolutely amazing. Now you have a number of books, you have courses online, and then you have live training camps that people can go to, which, I’ll think twice about. I think they’ll be really tough ones. But where can people find you, your books? All of it.
Mark: I love your sell there, ‘Think twice about going to his training.’ That's probably a good advice. Well, my personal website is www.markdivine.com. They're just kind of like a catch all, and my podcast can be found there. You can find my podcast at iTunes and all that. And then follow me on Instagram, @realmarkdivine. And books, if you're interested in this training, you know, here's my last like this one, Unbeatable Mind is where it all started. And I'm actually working on the fourth edition, my pandemic edition will be out in September. Staring Down the Wolf is came out last year, right before the pandemic. This is about emotionally powerful leadership. And then The Way of the SEAL is really like how to think and lead like in the lead warrior, like how to get shit done. And there's some really good stuff in all these books, and they're all, there's a little overlap, but they're all very, very different.
Lisa: That actually, just before we do wrap up. That leadership piece of the puzzle, I have to ask this, because my husband's a firefighter and he's leading teams and so on. How do you get— if I can just ask for a couple of quick tips on the leadership stuff because it's probably another bloody hour. But how can you be a good leader? How can you get people who are disengaged back into the game, into the team, being part of a team?
Mark: You know, that's a really good question.
Lisa: Yeah, I’m sorry I only thought of it now.
Mark: The first thing to do as a leader is to show up as the best version of yourself: humble, authentic, trustworthy, courageous, and respectful. To develop those qualities takes some time, and you got to work on that. And you got to work on it with the team, in front of the team, and not hide it from the team. And not pretend to be perfect, not pretend you have all the answers. So most leaders are, in their own way, in terms of being able to unlock the power of their team, because they don't, the team doesn't trust them, because they don't know they're wearing a mask. So take the mask off, develop your whole self as a leader.
Then what we like to do in our company, Unbeatable, is we like to develop leaders. We like to create teams within the companies that we work with, for the sole purpose of development, which is really cool. We call them boat crews. So imagine you're in a company or a fire department, and you're in a boat crew with guys that are working on becoming better versions of themselves. You’re working on things like we've been talking about. That ends up developing incredible trust and motivation. Because now everyone's— they're taking the mask off together, and they're holding each other accountable to be better people. And then they go out and fight a fire together. That's simple things, it's like box breathing with your team. It’s very intimate, and it creates this incredible resonance and trust with people.
You start to recognise, like we were saying earlier, that we're not separate. One of the best ways to be motivated, to help someone who's unmotivated get motivated, help them in separation themselves to feel connected.
Lisa: Yep. And how do they get him to take that mask off and let you know, because you said once somewhere, that leaders are also followers, and that when you're— like the team is the new way of the future. The team is the new leader, and leader follower?
Mark: The way we do it, is to put everyone together into a crucible experience, into some experience where they literally cannot solve the challenges alone. This is why we do these events that we have, they’re not all hard. The SEAL events, the SEALFIT events are ridiculously hard, and they’re for people like you. In SpecOps candidates for FCS or SEALs or Green Berets, whatever. But with Unbeatable Mind, my company, I'm doing mine, which is the same behind me. We do this with corporate clients. And we have 50 year old women who are out of shape and they're like, ‘Aah!’ But we don't beat ‘em up like Navy SEAL training, we just get everyone uncomfortable together. This will be like doing yoga and breathwork and ice baths, and integrated training. We teach them a lot of the skills of Unbeatable, all the skills of Unbeatable Mind.
We have them do it together as a team, we have them hold each other accountable, we have them really open up and develop more of that vulnerability. It's really uncomfortable for a lot of people. We did an event last week where two of the individuals hadn't even spoken to each other in over a year. By the end of the event, they were hugging. They were like, ‘Wow. I'm sorry that I treated you like that, and I projected all that on you.’
It really helps— we start all of our training events with corporate teams, or organisation teams, or even athletic teams with a three-day or two-and-a-half to three-day event like this, which is very, very dynamic, very integrated, it’s not all— it's only a little bit of physical training. But it's definitely there, right? They're learning all these skills, all five mountains, they're doing physical, mental, emotional, intuitional, and spiritual development as a team. After that, we work with them for a minimum of four to six months in a boat crew, in a small team setting with a certified coach. The combination of those two is just transformative, because then they're practising all the skills we talked about both individually, but all the team and they're being held accountable. They're doing challenges together, they're having really authentic communications together and they're working on emotional things, are working on their mental strength and physical strength and setting goals. It's really, really powerful.
Lisa: It must completely change corporations when you do that in teams—
Mark: Yeah, it can be.
Lisa: Because we will go to— a lot of people go to work and they have this professional persona that they put on and they're all doing their interactions with this. And then they go home and—
Mark: They take the mask off and pick up the beer or the wine.
Lisa: Yeah, because of the frustration and, ‘Oh my God, I'm not coping.’ And if we can, I often get, I know we have to wrap it up. But if we can, you know, like, just be real with each other. We're human beings. We do not have to go around like the Queen of England and observe all these protocols and stuff and be professional. Can’t we just be us, you know?
Mark: People are craving leaders who are real.
Lisa: Yeah.
Mark: And that's what we need. And that's what we need to work on. Just doing the work that we talked about today brings it right, it brings that reality back. Because you're discovering the truth of your own nature. And then as a leader, you just want to bring that to your team. First is how you show up. And then by starting to introduce these ideas, and then by starting to train together, and eventually, I think, where the world will change is when, when we all start changing yourselves. But then, we then— each organisation becomes a change agent internally, meaning you're changing the people, you're not trying to have a bunch of jerks, trying to change the world through donating to some social cause, or demanding some social cause on social media. You're all changing. The organisation is changing, because you've got the practices, you're practising breathing and mindfulness and authentic communications and compassion within the workforce. And then that shows up in how you interact with your customers and how you interact with the environment, etcetera.
Lisa: It just covers that whole area in this theme of leaders-followers and having that change around. Just because you're the one that's got the officer or whatever on your shoulders, it doesn't mean that you are always in the lead role. Sometimes you can be in the follower, if you've got that and having been comfortable with that.
Mark: That's right.
Lisa: I think that this is a good place to wrap it up. Mark, you've been absolutely wonderful today. Thank you so much. So unbeatablemind.com. The three books, The Way of the SEAL Unbeatable Mind, and what was the other one again?
Mark: Staring Down the Wolf. And I’m going to say, we have this amazing entry course that we created this year. It's a 30-day challenge course, where it's a 15 minutes training day. I have a video training, and then there's a little journaling. And it can be found at www.unbeatablemind.com/challenge.
Lisa: Wow. And we can do this online.
Mark: You can do it all online. I’ll email you. And people love it. And it's a great way to learn box breathing and visualisation and micro goals and a lot of things we talked about. It's super cheap. Like it's ridiculously cheap.
Lisa: It sounds a good—
Mark: $99 or something like that. So check it out.
Lisa: That sounds like a really good place for people who, you know, stuck in New Zealand can't fly to America together.
Mark: That's right. Yeah.
Lisa: Or something. Right. Which I'd love to. Mark Divine, you've been amazing. You're just incredible, man. And I thank you so much for your time today.
That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate, review and share with your friends, and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.
The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.
When your loved one has a serious illness, the world feels a bit darker. But you shouldn’t lose hope. In this episode, I talk to Cushla Young, my lifelong friend and the co-author of Relentless. This book recounts my mother’s road to recovery despite seemingly insurmountable odds.
Cushla and I talk about the challenges my family and I face to cope with my mum’s sudden illness. You’ll also hear a little from my mum and her experiences through this ordeal.
Our circumstances didn't stop me from being relentless. My goal was for my mum to recover, despite the experts saying otherwise. I wanted to extend my mother's lifespan and give her the best quality of life I can. Throughout my mother's treatment and rehabilitation, I had to step up and take control. I managed to compartmentalise things before they got out of hand.
If you want to learn about my relentless effort to defy the odds, this episode is for you. You will gain insights into how I challenged myself to keep my family together in a time of crisis.
For our epigenetics health program all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/.
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If you are struggling with a health issue and need people who look outside the square and are connected to some of the greatest science and health minds in the world, then reach out to us at support@lisatamati.com, we can jump on a call to see if we are a good fit for you.
If you have a big challenge ahead, are dealing with adversity or are wanting to take your performance to the next level and want to learn how to increase your mental toughness, emotional resilience, foundational health and more, then contact us at support@lisatamati.com.
My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within 3 years. Get your copy here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books/products/relentless.
For my other two best-selling books Running Hot and Running to Extremes chronicling my ultrarunning adventures and expeditions all around the world, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books.
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‘She was really the rock of my world. And then that turned upside down very much overnight. And you go from being this adult kid to complete role reversal where you're now having to do everything for your mum.’
‘We need to set up systems and processes and understand our own bodies and how our bodies work so that we can manage the stress levels.’
‘What I want people to understand is you have to fight for the resources that you want for your loved one.’
‘I'm only ever going to listen to the ones that tell me I can do, not the ones that I tell me I can't do. They may be right. I'm not saying they're not right, but I'm gonna throw the book at this. I'm gonna do whatever it takes.’
‘They're (professionals) making educated guesses, based on the statistics of the past whatever and their experiences. And I get that. And we can't give people false hope. But we've also can't take away all hope.’
‘The older you get, the more effort you have to put into [working hard] if you want to stay alive... If you still want to be alive and enjoy life, then you have to fight for it.’
‘If you have some self-care and take those small steps, whatever that may look like for you at the time of your life, then you are living a life that is relentless.’
Cushla Young is a life-long friend of Lisa. They met in a running retreat they both participated in 7 to 8 years ago. She is also the co-author of Lisa’s book, Relentless: How a mother and daughter defied the odds.
Cushla is a teacher at the St. John Bosco School, New Plymouth. She is also a Trustee and Educational Coordinator at the Taranaki Gifted Community Trust. Having an interest in gifted education, Cushla provides intellectual and creative ways to support students with advanced and complex learning skills.
The other things Cushla is passionate about are digital technology, literacy and pedagogy. Cushla currently lives in New Zealand with her family.
If you want to reach out to Cushla, you can find her on Twitter.
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Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can find comfort and hope in fighting for their loved ones’ lives.
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For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts.
To pushing the limits,
Lisa
Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential. With your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.
Lisa Tamati: Hey everyone. And before we get on the way with the show today, I just want to remind you to check out all our great programs that we have. We have our www.runninghotcoaching.com, where you can find out all about our online run training system, we get video analysis, your customised personalised plan made specifically for you, and ongoing support and help and education around everything running. So check that out at runninghotcoaching.com.
We also have our flagship epigenetics program, which is all about optimising your genetics and making the best out of them and how to do that. Understanding what your genes are all about and how to get the right food, the right exercise, the right timings for everything. Understanding every aspect of your life, your place, your career, your social environment, all of these things, your predispositions and much more. So check that out. Go to lisatamati.com and hit the work with us button and you'll see our Peak Epigenetics program right there.
Also a reminder to check out the longevity and anti-ageing supplement that I am now importing into New Zealand and Australia in conjunction with Dr Elena Seranova, a molecular biologist who is behind this product. Now this is all about the sirtuin genes basically, which are all your longevity genes. Now NMN is a precursor to something called NAD, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. And this is an absolutely essential compound for every in every single molecule— every single cell, I should say, of your body. It's very important in regards to ATP production, and in regards to metabolic health, in regards to autophagy, in regards to sirtuin genes and upregulating those. Make sure you check out the episodes that I did with Dr. Elena Seranova and head on over to www.nmnbio.nz if you want to find more about the science of that, and why I am super excited about this product, this longevity and anti ageing product, NMN.
Right. Now, today I have something very, very different. I've turned the tables on myself and I have a very dear friend interviewing me about our book that we wrote together. Cushla Young, she's a, got a master's in English and she is the person who helped me rescue my book when I had a hell of a mess, basically. So I hope you're gonna enjoy this interview. This is all about my mum's story. It's about mindset. It's about going up against all the odds, it's about going against the establishment. So it's a lot of things we cover in this interview. So you're also going to hear from my very special mummy. She's going to come to work and tell us a little bit before she heads off on her coffee date. So now over to the show with Cushla Young and Isobel.
Well hi, everybody. Welcome to Pushing the Limits. Today I am doing something very unusual. And so hi everybody in YouTube land who's listening to this as well. I want to introduce my best friend, Cushla Young. Cushla, welcome to the show.
Cushla Young: Thank you.
Lisa: For starters. Now I'll give you guys a bit of background. Cushla and I have been friends for now, a decade or so. Cushla is the lady that helped me write this book. Without her it would not exist. It wouldn’t have come out before Cushla came along. The book is Relentless: How A Mother and Daughter Defied the Odds. It's my latest book, and Cushla is the magic behind that book. What we're going to be doing today is talking about what the book is about, which is the story of bringing my mum back from a mess of aneurysm, major brain damage at the age of 74, when it was against all the odds, when the medical professionals were telling me the brain damage is so bad that she's never going to recover.
Being an athlete I went, ‘No that's not happening, and we'll find a way.’ This is going to be all about that story. Now I'm going to hand over the reins to Krishna to actually interview me, but I've actually got a very, very special guest sitting here next to me, who is the actual star of the show. And so Cushla is going to, she's going to take off for a coffee date. So I'll have to let her come to work first. So I'm going to pass you over to my very special mummy. There she is, Isobel. And she's gonna talk to Cushla for a second so I'll just pass over the headphones.
Cushla: Hand over the reins.
Lisa: You’re on, Isobel.
Isobel: Okay.
Cushla: Hi Isobel, morning.
Isobel: Good morning, Cushla. How are you?
Cushla: Taking off for a coffee date soon, are you?
Isobel: Yes.
Cushla: So you are a guest of honor for a few minutes on this podcast. This is, I'm going to be a little bit different because I get to interview your daughter rather than her interview others today.
Isobel: That's good.
Cushla: So, but we'll start with you. So you have been on one heck of a journey over the last few years.
Isobel: I sure have.
Cushla: So how can we start with how you're feeling now?
Isobel: I'm feeling good.
Cushla: You're looking great.
Isobel: I can go for a coffee and I can go walking on my own. And I can do almost anything.
Cushla: When Isobel left my house after a lovely glass of wine the other day, you didn't have one, but Lisa did. You drove, didn’t you? You drove her home?
Isobel: I did. Yes. I can drive now. That's good. Especially if Lisa’s having a wine.
Cushla: You get to be a mum.
Isobel: I do, I get, revert back to being mum. Yeah.
Cushla: Yeah, and that must have given you a lot of independence that you have lost for quite a few years.
Isobel: Yes. It’s awesome. You don't realise how isolated people are. They haven't got— We all have a way of getting around here. It’s isolating. Yeah.
Cushla: And can you tell us a bit about what you have been getting up to? I understand you've been doing some art classes with your sister. How's that going?
Isobel: Not as well as I would like to but it's, we're doing all right, you know?
Cushla: Yeah.
Isobel: I'd like the results to be a bit more spectacular. But—
Cushla: It must be nice to be creative.
Isobel: Oh it is. It’s good, it does me good.
Cushla: Now, do you have much of a memory of the hospital time?
Isobel: No.
Cushla: No. What's your first memory that you can recall?
Isobel: Probably where we went to a meeting with all the big guns—
Lisa: At the hospital.
Isobel: At the hospital, and they wrote me off, really.
Cushla: Did they? They underestimated you as well.
Isobel: I can remember saying—
Lisa: I was feeling good. I was feeling good.
Isobel: I was, I was feeling fine before this. Now. I'm feeling terrible. I have been demoted, I've been, lost my independence. Just because they were talking like they were, they shouldn't have done that.
Lisa: They took away all your confidence. And—
Isobel: Yeah, they just.
Cushla: And so your background is similar to mine. You're an educator.
Isobel: Yeah.
Cushla: Have been for decades and decades. You must understand how demotivating it is when somebody tells you what you can't do rather than what you can do.
Isobel: Yeah, that’s it exactly.
Cushla: So when did it change for you after that meeting? What were some of the first things that happened that gave you a bit more confidence?
Lisa: Driving?
Isobel: Getting on a driver's license probably was a major breakthrough. Lisa took me down to the dam by the port and just—
Lisa: It’s been months.
Isobel: Happier—
Cushla: Round and round you.
Isobel: You will, ‘now you drive.’ I was totally gobsmacked.
Cushla: But you did it.
Isobel: I did it.
Cushla: And I understand the doctor was utterly shocked—
Isobel: He was.
Cushla: —when you went in to get your medical for your license.
Isobel: Totally blown away.
Cushla: Yeah.
Isobel: That was a blow away.
Cushla: It had probably been a while since the doctor had responded that way.
Isobel: Yeah, I think so. He was a nice doctor. So that was good.
Cushla: So could you give some advice to someone who might be going through something pretty tough at the moment. What would you say to them?
Isobel: Just hang in there and—
Lisa: Fight.
Isobel: Fight hard. Yeah. Yeah. You've got to grit your teeth and just carry on, really. Yeah.
Cushla: You're one tough lady, aren’t you?
Isobel: I must be.
Cushla: Definitely.
Isobel: So that's what we did.
Cushla: Can you describe some of the routines of things that you do at the moment that keep you in such good health?
Isobel: I go to the gym most days.
Lisa: Do weight training, cardio.
Isobel: I do weights, I do cardio, I do walking on the treadmill, yoga.
Cushla: And you still do your hyperbaric as well?
Isobel: Yes, every day at the moment.
Cushla: Everyday? Wonderful. Still eat the smoothies that Lisa makes you in the mornings?
Isobel: They’re pretty terrible.
Cushla: But they’re good for you, right?
Isobel: But they are good for me. Broccoli is not exciting, and it’s sickening.
Cushla: What we've noticed is, about over even the last six months, is how fit and agile and glowing that you are. That's amazing.
Isobel: It is amazing. It's amazing that you said that. I don't always feel it.
Cushla: Right.
Isobel: It's hard to know where you're at, so.
Cushla: Yeah, I think sometimes what you see is yourself reflected in others’ eyes, and that's a really good indication of how far you've come.
Isobel: Yeah, and I have come a long way.
Cushla: Really.
Isobel: Yeah, a really long way.
Lisa: A bloody long way. All right, now you can go get coffee.
Isobel: I’ll pass you back to Lisa—
Lisa: —and get yourself a coffee date.
Cushla: Enjoy!
Isobel: I will.
Lisa: Thanks, Mummy.
Isobel: Okay.
Lisa: She’s an absolute legend. Thanks, you have a nice coffee. We're now actually going to get into her backstory. Because, I would have done it the other way around and had her at the end of the show. But she needed to get to a coffee date. So she’s just rolling. Yeah, we're rolling with the punches.
But Cushla, this— can you, I'm gonna pass the reins over to you fully. Because you know the story, you lived it with me, you helped me from the get-go pretty much. So over to you. Oh now I’m an interviewee.
Cushla: Got you. We're flipping the tables, aren’t we?
Lisa: Yeah, we sure are.
Cushla: To be interviewed for once, which is fabulous. So this has been a long journey for you and your mum and your family, and you're right. I was, I had known you for a few years before this happened. I think from my perspective, the thing that was so shocking about what originally, with the aneurysm, with your mum, was just how quick things changed overnight. I think we see Isobel now and— how old is mum?
Lisa: She’s 79.
Cushla: 79. So we're going back quite a few years, and I used to often pop into the shop and see your mum, and just pop in and say hello. And she is now but she also was been a very intelligent, clear spoken woman that used to do acro-aerobics all the time, she was very fit and healthy, very independent, working still pretty much full-time.
Lisa: Yeah, she was.
Cushla: For somebody watching, to see overnight that she went from that, from a completely functioning full-time working adult, to just being, nothing was there. Overnight, the aneurysm took her from being completely functional to nothing. I think the shock in that first visit and I saw her quite a few weeks after the aneurysm, and you’re back up to New Plymouth. You'd been in Wellington. The shock of seeing her lying there, she had aged a decade overnight.
Lisa: Yeah.
Cushla: It’s hard. Hard to see. I think the shock of that must’ve ripped through your family quite viciously. You notice that change overnight.
Lisa: It was huge. Yeah, to have growing up with mum being always the one supporting me. And the one that was there for me in all the phases of my crazy, upside down life that I've had, you know, with all my adventures supporting me with all lower— dramas and relationship breakups and divorces and business growing.
Cushla: Rooting for you at most of your races.
Lisa: Oh, yes. Yeah. She’d seen, been there, done that with me, I can tell you that she had a hard life with me. She had a good life, she had exciting times with me. She was really the rock of my world. And then that turned upside down very much overnight. And, you know, you go from being this adult kid to a complete role reversal, where you're now you know, having to do everything for your mum, you are advocating, you're fighting, you grow up really quickly, even as a fully-grown adult. Obviously, I still am very much, when you've got a parent, you’re still like a kid in a way to them. That is that was a biggest shocker for me I think was to be, no, now you are the one that's caring for your mum, and you are going to have to pull out all the stops to help her and it’s you know, no longer about you being the selfish egotistical athlete, and there's nothing wrong with it, if you’re an athlete, you have to be if you want to reach, know, do the stuff that I did. But that was a shocker.
And then not, like the— we had medical research mishaps from the very get-go when mum had this aneurysm that happened early in the morning. And an ambulance driver came into the house, you know, they got her into the ambulance up to the hospital, he knew already that she was having a neurological event. And he told the doctor so much, and he just ignored it. He ignored it.
He said, ‘No, she's having a migraine, I think. So we'll just leave it for a few hours and observe her and give her some painkillers.’ Well, you know, ‘Thanks very much for that.’ The first six hours not knowing, and she was dying, basically. She was dying. And I knew she was in deep trouble. And I didn't know what to do. Because at that point in my life, I had no idea of anything like this. So I was never, you know, in a situation like this, I didn't know what was wrong with her. But I knew we were in trouble. And that was a very big wake up call. I actually got our mutual friend, Megan Stewart, who's a paramedic here and the head of the ambulance here. And she came up to the hospital at that time. She sort of rattled some bloody cages very quickly. And because she knew immediately what was happening, stroke or aneurysm or something neurological, migraines. She went and told this doctor what for. He then relented, and we got a CT scan. And that's when we saw the blood right throughout the brain. So that was a very big wake up call for me in a number of ways. Obviously, the shock of it happening to your mum, the fear of her dying, she's being very, very, very close to death at this point. And then realising that, you know, the medical system had not worked for us. And I'm not— you know, we're all human, and we all make mistakes and stuff. But that was a pretty big one. That was a pretty big one.
Cushla: I think, in those situations, we want to trust the people that are— the medical professionals that are around us. For the most part in ED, they're an amazing group of people. But I think also there is a lot to be said for your mum. You knew what a migraine looked like, you should have before. And it's a matter of trusting yourself, isn't it, enough to then think, this isn't to your question what you’re saying, and then fight as hard as you can for a different outcome. Because my understanding about aneurysm is there's a golden hour, or it's really important to be treated.
Lisa: Exactly.
Cushla: A short time.
Lisa: Surgery, that's the golden hour, they talk about getting you into surgery within the hour. It took 18 hours. 18 hours, because not only do we have the medical mishap and we also had the fact that we had to get to our Main Hospital down in Wellington, neurological. Living in a regional area, unfortunately, that's just the way it is. But we had to wait another 12 hours for the air ambulance to actually get to us, and when you're over 65, you’re sort of bumped down the hierarchy, especially if you— if they don't think you're a good, you got good odds. So, you know, we— there were, at that time we had a baby that needed help, and that was more urgent than mum. They have to make those calls. I understand. I don't like it; I understand it. It’s your loved one and you don't really give up.
Cushla: Not at the time because you're also going through the shock of what's happening and trying to process that. In that moment, can you describe, I suppose I want to focus a little bit on what was happening to you and your body. Because I think the thing about this really, this story is that it's not just about a mum surviving an aneurysm, but it's also about you and your family and how you've managed to pull yourself back together as well. So not just Isobel but yourself. I know that a lot of us, all of us will face a moment in our lives where we have to handle a bit of trauma.
Lisa: Yep.
Lisa: What was going on in your body and how did you cope so that you had the ability to fight for your mum? What are you doing in your mind?
Lisa: So in the initial phases, Cushla, you know, you are in shock, you're out, you're terrified. But very, very quickly, oh, especially after the mishap, once I realised what had just happened and the ball’s up that that was, and that it was likely going to cost your life. I just went into what I call mission mode. Like, ‘Okay, right, I am not going— I'm going to research the hell out of this. I'm going to learn everything I can. I'm going to be hypervigilant. I'm going to watch everything they do. I'm going to question everything they do. I'm going to get my family organised.’ Because I had get them down to Wellington. My father was, of course, falling to pieces because it’s the love of his life. He's been, you know, married to her for 55 years. He came up to me already in the ED and said, ‘We better start planning the funeral.’ Because they were, you know, saying to us, she's like, unlikely to survive. And I'm like, ‘Dad, we're not even considering that. She's alive, she's still breathing, and we're gonna fight with everything we have. Here's a list of jobs to do: I want you to go ring so and so, organise this, get the boys down, my brothers down to Wellington, blah, blah, blah.’
When people are in a crisis, you need to take control and give them jobs to do so that they, their, you know, their amygdala, that their permanent part of the brain doesn't go into complete full-blown panic, and which doesn't always work. And I'll relay a story a little bit later, where I did go into full blown panic. It's all very well and good to say this. But at that point in time, I was like, ‘Dad’, I shook him, I grabbed him, I held him and I said, ‘No, you've got this and this job to do, we're going to do it, and follow me, dad. Follow me.’ And that was basically how it was then for the next few years. Yeah. My brothers as well, they were very much, ‘What do we do?’ I had no idea at the time, but I pretended like I did. Fake it till you make it. What we're doing this is how we're going to operate over the next few weeks. So it was being down on Wellington together, organising the family to be down there, all the logistics that go along with that, and your jobs and your, you know, partners and all the rest of it. And then a 24-hour watch over Mum, and being hypervigilant, explaining to the boys everything that I was learning medically, because I was like, studying forever, I was just going, going, heart out, trying to understand and get up to speed on something that I was completely not aware of prior to this, learning what an aneurysm does, what vasospasms are, what I've been looking for, what they— signs.
We were only in the neurological unit, we weren’t in the ICU, which, looking back when I arrived, what the hell. When she got down to Wellington, they get straight into surgery, they started draining her blood off the brain. She started to— start to have that pressure released. But then we had to decide the next, in the next couple of days, though it had stopped bleeding at that point, but it was about to go out in time again, it could go at any moment. How do we clamp it? What do we do? Would we cut into her brain and put a physical clamp over the area? And it was a mess of aneurysm. Like we're talking a 16 millimeter huge aneurysm. We went up through the femoral artery, and we weighed up the pros and cons and you make that call. She's got a 50% chance of dying this way, she's got a 30% chance of dying that way, pretty much. So we'll take the lesser evil, but she was going to have to have two operations and in that way you know. So that was gonna be really touch and go, really touch and go. I remember them wheeling her off for that operation. I think it was on day two, through the doors, and you just don't know if it's the last time you're going to see them alive, and the whole just trying to hold your shit together.
Cushla: I know that you're very good at compartmentalising parts of the— of something when it happens. What I remember you talking about when we were writing the book, was how you were able to put the jobs that needed to be done in that box. The research you were doing in this box, your family in that box, and probably, and I know this because we had phone calls and I was in touch with you at the time, your emotions and your shock and your trauma in this box. It was a matter of kind of keeping you know, all those juggling balls in the air at one time. But also, and importantly allowing you to have that emotional spot as well. And I know that you were very good at compartmentalising and giving yourself time to do that, but not letting it overtake you, letting you drop all the other balls at the time when you were dealing with the emotional side of it. I think that's really important because I know— so when Lisa and I first met, I was a bit of a Lisa Tamati fangirl, before we became friends, and I got to know you really well.
Lisa: And then realised, oh no.
Cushla: Yeah. I mean, we just saw you as Wonder Woman. You know, there's tough, tough, you know, athlete. Then I got to know you, as a human being, of course, a woman, there’s a vulnerable side to you. But what I think is really important at that time, an immediate trauma time, as you gave yourself time to release a bit of that stress and that trauma by leaning on your husband Haisley, by your phone calls to me. But also, like, I know that you went for some runs, went to get gym, threshed it out, you probably screamed at the ocean at one point. Do you know? That's also important, isn't it? It's not just—
Lisa: If you want to sustain— we knew this was going to be a long, long, long battle. While we hoped it was going to be a long battle, a short option was not a good one. This is something that I've learned doing ultra marathons: is to— in particular in the Libyan desert crossing, where you have to read the book for the whole story. But I did an expedition across the Libyan desert with three other guys, one of them being this abusive boyfriend that I was with at the time. There was a very extreme situation that we were in, we needed two liters of water a day, etcetera. And I'm having this big domestic fight with the boyfriend right in the middle of the Libyan desert.
Cushla: In the most extreme environment on the planet.
Lisa: In the most extreme environment, walking 45 kilometers a day with 35-kilo backpacks and only two litres of water a day in a military bad zone, not a good time to breakup with a boyfriend of five years. And in that moment, when he left me and disappeared over the sand dunes, that was a turning point for me, and I fell apart initially. And I was like, ‘Oh, God,’ started crying in the rails. I can't afford to lose any more tears here. I've got to pull my shit together, because I cannot let the energy dissipate that at the rate of I want to actually survive. It was getting down to that sort of level of you know, you're going to survive this or not. And so I learned in that moment, really a very hard lesson in compartmentalising things in your brain. So like, ‘I'm going to fall apart, but not right now. I'm going to put that off right now because I have to focus on this, and getting through the desert and surviving.’ That's been actually a really good lesson. It's never a pleasant one to actually have to instigate where you have to actually compartmentalise.
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Lisa: But in this in this situation where you're dealing with— you're having to study like really hard. And we have access now to the greatest minds on the world that come in, all those information about out there that you can study. So I was studying all the drugs that they had on, all the procedures they were doing, what is the normal plan, and what happens when you have an aneurysm, what are of the some of the dangers, or of the things that I should be looking out for, what are the signs in your body. You know, all of these types of things in the initial phase and then later on at it went into rehabilitation research and study. And so that was one aspect of it. And then we had a 24-hour clock system, much to the disgust of the people at the hospital because they didn't want us there 24 hours. They don't like that. There was no way I was leaving my mother when she could die at any minute alone. No way.
So I had massive battles with the hospital, for them to be able to allow us in. And then having to fight for that. So you're fighting on all these fronts, you're already fighting with— your mum's in deep, deep trouble, and then you're fighting against these systems. And they may have some good reasons for those systems. But there was no way I was leaving my mother alone when she could die any second. A family member had to be with her at all times. And I was very, very strict on that. We had some big blow-ups at the hospital. We got through really in the end. And we tried to be as unobtrusive as possible when we did what we were. And we picked up things that they missed, because she was on a neurological ward, they only come around a couple of hours into obviously, patients. But going back to the whole compartmentalising things. I know how to manage my body really well, and how to pace myself really well from doing ultra marathons and stuff, and expeditions. And so I knew that we were going to be in the for the long haul, I knew sleep deprivation was going to be a problem, I knew that the family dynamics were going to be a problem, that there was going to be fighting because of the stress there was it we were under, and we were all living in one motel unit. And that mum was in deep crap, we had my father to look after who was just, you know.
Cushla: And he was down with you in the initial stage.
Lisa: He was here, he was; and he's very much, was a homebody. He didn't like to be out of his garden and sheep. So he was very, very stressed on that front, and of course his wife in such dire straits. He was, but he— so we managed to, had him to manage home because he started having heart problems. And so I had to eventually actually send my dad back home and actually lied to my dad that, ‘She's okay now, we've got her, Dad. She's all good.’ Because I think that we're gonna lose him. I was making those sorts of decisions and just running the ship. Like you said, I know the importance of, for me, especially exercise and fresh air for my mental well-being, that if I was going to sustain it, I had to have at least half an hour to an hour every day out from this whole thing, where I just go and do a workout.
Again, all the fear, the cortisol, the adrenaline that's running through my body flat stuck and try to manage it, and making sure that she was looked after, and that time. You know, you feel guilty and everything for leaving the hospital all. But you had to do that after a few days. You know, just a couple of days, I didn't, but after that. It was— it’s setting all these things in place. And we need to do that in our daily lives. We need to set up systems and processes and understand our own bodies and how our bodies work so that we can manage the stress levels and we can manage the movement that we need, the sunshine, and needs for sleep and recovery and all those aspects. And of course, in a situation like that, sleep deprivation was a massive, and there's not much you can do about that, you have to function at that level for as long as you have to.
Cushla: And I think a lot of people that are in stressful situations, whether or not it be something like what happened with your mum, or even at work or just in daily life, big stressful moments. A lot of people put the self-care to the side. And they just think, ‘Well, I'm not that— I don't have time for that,’ or, ‘I shouldn't have time for that.’ That's when the guilt that kicks in, and yet, it probably is one of the most important things to prioritise in terms of your day and compartmentalising your day through to handle stressful situations because it allows you to have the focus and the energy that you need and get back into the the stressful—
Lisa: Into the fight you're in. Yeah, absolutely. You need to be able to have that energy put back in. It might only be 10 minutes out in the bloody— you know, like when we, here's another situation which we'll probably get onto later with my dad. In his situation, in the hospital for 16 days, fighting for his life. It was sometimes 10 minutes in the waiting room doing press ups. That was all I could get before I went back into the battle zone if you like.
Cushla: Just to release that.
Lisa: Just to manage the cortisol. Reach, I call it discharge and recharge, and then reset. Come back into the moment. But yeah, it was a heck of a lot of lessons to be learned and then leading in a crisis situation. My brothers were amazing. They were very supportive, and they were, followed everything that I asked them to do, basically. Because I'm the study-er of the family, I'm the one that is into research and science and studies. They trusted me to do that thing. And they were like, ‘Well, you tell us what to do, we'll do it.’ And that's really great. Because you've got your roles. That is, in having somebody lead the charge, so to speak, even though you don't know what you're doing, where you're going, and there’s certainly no rehabilitation over the next years, because this process took years, having that person that's got that responsibility, got that, ‘This is what we're doing. This is how we're doing it, I just need you guys to do this bit and the other thing.’ And my whole entire family were willing to do that. They were— my dad was just, jumping ahead in time, my dad was just amazing, how he stepped up to the mark. When he had a wife that had done everything for him pretty much.
Cushla: He was, back when she came back to New Plymouth, he was cooking, and—
Lisa: He was doing all the things.
Cushla: He was doing all the things, yeah.
Lisa: It was a shocker for him, but he stepped up to the mark to the best of his ability. He was the most wonderful, caring husband. He didn't give a— he didn't care that she— when she came back home for the first time, and we actually got her out of the hospital after three months. Now, I'm jumping ahead in time. But he didn't care that she had no function, basically. She was in a vegetative state who had a heartbeat. She was alive, and we were fighting. That was all he needed to know. He had his wife at home, she was alive, she's stabilised, we were fighting together, and we were on a mission. Every day he had his jobs to do and the things to do. He was just relentless in his love for her, stepping up.
Cushla: So going back to the moment where— so she's in Wellington, and you need to read the book to find out what went on in Wellington. The moment that she was transferred back to New Plymouth was a bittersweet moment, wasn't it? You were able to come home and be with Haisley and be back at home with the family and friends around that were helping. But you knew that the care that you would receive back in New Plymouth wasn't at the level that it would be in Wellington, basically just because Wellington is way more resourced. And fair enough, you can have a very small region. Taranaki here, you know, we're a little provincial spot in New Zealand. So we knew that we wouldn't get the care that you got in the big city. So talk us through how it was like to come home—
Lisa: It was terrifying. I was happy for all those reasons, but at the same time, and I was happy that she's apparently stabilised. But she was in ICU for the good part of the two of the three weeks that she was in Wellington when she was in and out of coma. Once she'd gotten out of the coma, then they had to get the stent out of her heart, and she kept dropping. What happens when you take the stent out is that pressure can start rising in the brain again, and three times as they tried to take the stent out, the pressure went up. On the third time, they said, ‘Well, if it doesn't work, this time, I'm going to have to operate and put in a permanent one.’ And the third time, it worked. But it only worked for the next 24 hours, and then they were like, ‘Right, she's not— her pressure’s not going up. She’s keeping consciousness, she's not falling back into the coma. She's good to go.’ And I had researched, I knew that that was not the case, that she couldn't have— that pressure could go up over the next 70 days at any point, and if that pressure went up, it would happen very quickly, and she wouldn't— she could die.
So I knew that even though they weren't telling me that, she could still die in the next 70 days. If that happened in Wellington and the pressure started to go up, they were— they might be able to recognise that, they might be to go in and do something. They wouldn't be able to in New Plymouth. I was hypervigilant on trying to understand how I could notice if something in her consciousness was going down, right. All I could do was to understand some of the symptomatic things that she did which might exhibit if her pressure is starting to go up, because you wouldn't be able to communicate it to me, you wouldn't be able to see it, you would slowly lose more and more of a brain till it was gone basically. So that was a huge fear bringing her home, and of course putting her in an airplane with a pressure change. Yeah, I didn't know what it would do. In fact, it was nothing, but there wasn't a problem, really. But you know it this time you just—
Cushla: You don't know.
Lisa: Yeah, so for the next 70 days, I'm like, hypervigilant. If I noticed something down on, I’ll be like, ‘I think she's doing this and doing that.’ Then they took her off the oxygen at the same time, and that was a big problem. They didn't see it as a problem that she was, ‘Her oxygen states are alright.’ What they were forgetting was that she was sleeping 18, 20 hours a day. So when she was asleep, she wasn't breathing properly, and I believe she had sleep apnea. So I said to them, ‘I want a sleep apnea assessment.’ They said, ‘No, she doesn't need that, why should she need that? Her oxygen stats are okay when she's awake, so why would she?’ I knew about sleep apnea. So I got a friend of ours, he's actually a sleep apnea consultant, Jez Morris. I said, ‘Come into the hospital illegally, would you do that?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I'll do that.’ Well outside of rules actually, so not illegally, but you know.
We sneaked into the hospital at nighttime, put on these machines onto her, did an assessment overnight, because it had to be an overnight thing. We got the results, and when it came back, severe sleep apnea. Now, this is absolutely key. Like her oxygen levels were down at 70% SPO2. she was Cheyne-Stokes breathing, which is not a good thing. Probably going to be on your way out in the next couple of months. Her oxygen was so low that she was knocking off any brain cells that she has, the infections that are in her body were just going apeshit. So bacteria was exploding, and they're already known. That was actually the one of the signs that I picked up because I had done a lot of racing at altitude, and I was seeing a lot of the signs in her that I had at altitude when I had altitude sickness and things like that.
That was at first wind, because I had to convince the bloody staff that we needed to have the CPAP machine on here, and they weren't trained in CPAP machine, so they didn't want to do that. I'm telling what she needs, she's got this and you know, him being a sleep physiologist was able to convince them that okay, this is a good thing for her now. He said he'd been banging his head against the brick wall for decades, trying to get for stroke patients an assessment that is part of the process. Because very often, this happens that that part of the brain is damaged in the stroke or the aneurysm, and even in things like concussions, that you can have a change in your breathing situation. And that part of the brain that monitors that is not working properly. So it should be staying apart and perfect, and that's what I believe, and that's what he believes.
So anyway, we got the CPAP machine. Initially started to have little bits of improvement, but we're already two months, three months, two and a half months or something into her time in the hospital and we're running out of time. But she's stable, nothing we can do with her, basically. She's pretty bad, and we've given paid lip service to some physio and some speech therapy and stuff, and now it's time to get you out of the system.
Cushla: And I think at that point, I think they, if you saw Isobel at that moment in the hospital, you would see an old woman who was probably on her way out. You didn't see the vibrant person that we saw before the aneurysm, that was so independent, and so highly functioning. For the hospital, I think they just saw an older woman—
Lisa: Another older woman.
Cushla: —another older woman, and a family that wasn't willing to accept the fact that they had an ageing mother. So there's that little bit of not understanding who she was before, and how abrupt this change was. We knew that if we could just get her back, even if it was a little bit back, then you could take her home and start working on rehab. Can you talk about how quickly they just wanted to move her into a home?
Lisa: Oh yeah. And this is what happens very often when you're over 65 is the answer is get them out of our budget into someone else's budget. That means putting them into a hospital-level care facility. If you've got anything, that's the normal route that you go, and they will try and convince you of that route, at least in our situation. I can't speak for everybody obviously. We came up against a brick wall of this, especially the social worker who shall remain nameless, who just was totally against us being able to have the caregiver that I wanted, the caregiver for in the morning for an hour, and one in the evening for an hour, which is part of, they do provide the service and so on. But it costs more money, and you stay in the budget. That's the key point.
We were fighting over these resources. What I want people to understand is you have to fight for the resources that you want for your loved one. And we have limited resources, it's a fact of life. If you want to get some of those resources, and you think your loved one is worthwhile, worth it, because they’ve spent their entire lives paying taxes, being good citizens and have a right to have some of this, then you better be prepared for a fight because that's what you're in for. And we did have the fight.
Cushla: And it was interesting that, because as a family, you were willing to bring her home and you're willing to do a lot of the care yourself. You didn't want to be taking up a resource in a care facility. You were prepared to do that yourselves, as a family, at home. So in a sense, there's a lot of money to be saved. Because I know how much you have given up and how much it costs the family to care for her at home. But that is what you wanted, and your family wanted was to just, to have her home. I remember in the book, you spoke about wanting Isobel to hear familiar sights, smells, sounds around her to aid her in her rehab. And that in having those, you felt that she was going to make more connections, neurological connections, because she was in her own home, with her own people around her, with her own sights and sounds and smells around her. Can you talk a little bit about how positive you felt that was?
Lisa: Yeah, that's a huge piece of the puzzle. I had a friend's mum who actually worked in stroke rehabilitation. She really encouraged me to do that and said how important this was, and it just made total sense to me. I knew that when you're in the care of any facility, no matter how good they are, they can never provide the love and the attention that you can. Because they've got other people and you're just another patient and in— they provide a magnificent service and so on when this is absolutely necessary. But in this case, we had the willingness and the ability to do this. They said to me, the social worker said to me, ‘There is no way in hell you are going to cope with her. She's 24/7 around the clock care, two people at all times, there is no way you're going to cope with her.’ I actually came and threw my books on his table one night, across the table at him. And I said, ‘Read these. This is who I am and my family are, and we are not giving up without a fight. We may go down fighting, but we're going to go down fighting, we're not going to go down and take the easy route out. It is not in our nature.’
It's a fundamental difference between a family that’s a fighting family and a family that isn't. It's very much influenced by the people in power in these situations, the medical professionals, the people that are associated with all of it. And you have no confidence to stand up against all these professionals, usually. They're the ones that have been to medical school, they're the ones that have been to whatever, social work. Whatever the case may be, and you have a tendency to think, ‘Well, they know better than me.’ But one thing they don't know is you. And they don't know how strong you are. They don't know the resources that you have. They don't know your mentality. And they don't know, really, they're all guessing as to what will actually happen based on their experiences. But that's what becomes partly a self-fulfilling prophecy. So when they say to you that there is no hope. No, that's their opinion that there's no hope.
I had time and time again, people telling me, ‘There is no hope, there is no hope, she's 74, her brain damage is so massive, it cannot be that she would ever.’ I was like, ‘We’ll see.’ I'm only ever going to listen to the ones that tell me I can do, not the ones that I tell me I can't do. They may be right. I'm not saying they're not right, but I'm gonna throw the book at this. I'm gonna do whatever it takes. And it's all about attitude and effort and grinding it out then I'll take that one any day, I'll take that option. I'm a fighter. I'm a worker. And my family is too, and we're not going to go down without a fight. I've seen lots of— I saw lots of other families going through the same process, because this thing's happening every day in every hospital around the world, right? It is very much, ‘Well, statistically, this person's not a good bet. Therefore we'll just go through the standard of care, we’ll be the— do the humane thing, we'll do all this— tick all the boxes or do it all right.’ But the anomaly cases, the cases like mum’s, why is nobody coming to say to me, why do I get— no, I'm out there telling everybody that story. That’s why I've written the book is to empower other people in these types of situations, even different ones. But why is nobody asking me, ‘Well, what did you do?’
Cushla: What did you do to get there?
Lisa: They’ve been— I’ll let you know, when they mum here today, talking and walking and going off for coffee and driving up to see her friends, you would have no idea that she ever had anything.
Cushla: No.
Lisa: She’s just completely normal again. But I was told that was an impossibility. How many people are told, you have a terminal illness, you are going to die of this thing? When you plant this sort of stuff, they're making educated guesses based on the statistics of the past whatever and their experiences, and I get that. We can't give people false hope, but we've also can't take away all hope.
Cushla: No. That's a really powerful message, I think. I was talking to a friend of mine who is battling with cancer at the moment. She has the most amazing mindset, her mindset. So she's— you know, she was told she had three months to live, that was, I think, six months ago. Her mindset— and she's just been through some chemo and the tumors have shrunk. Her mindset, basically, is that cancer is not welcome back. It's just not. I'm going off to live my life. If I die of it, well, okay, I die of it. But in the meantime, I'm living my life, and I'm— it's not welcome back. She is charging in life and sure, she has her rough days. I really love how you said, it's— there's a responsibility for them not to give false hope, but at the same time not to take away. similar situation with my father, he has myeloma, so cancer of the blood. I think at the time, the doctors said, ‘After this treatment, you have between five and fifteen.’ He immediately said, ‘I'll take the 15, thanks.’
Because it puts them at that, at the point that it would have taken them to 85, and he was quite happy with it, because at the time he was 69. I love that. And we're six years down now. And I think mindset is huge—
Lisa: Oh, yeah.
Cushla: —in the way that you approach things. Because, sure, we might, I might die by being run over by a bus today. But if you don't live life thinking that things are going to get better, that you have the power to do, to have control over your health and your well-being, the way that you deal with these traumas, if you don't have that mindset—
Lisa: You're definitely not going to—
Cushla: — you're definitely not, you're going to roll up in a corner. As my friend with cancer said when she went to hospital, she's like, ‘Oh, I'm surrounded by all these sick people.’ Which I loved. Because she didn't see herself in that.
Lisa: That’s one of the reasons I take mum to the gym every day.
Cushla: Exactly.
Lisa: I don't take her, I didn't take her, we did go to the physio program at the hospital. Don't get me started on that. But it was dreadful, it was shocking. The story’s in the book, if you want to read that one, that is a real battle. But they— I like her to be surrounded by athletes going for it. Because that rubs off on her. She's not a patient, she's an athlete. She's training for her Olympics. That is the attitude we take every single day. And I make no concessions that she is 79 years old, and, ‘Oh, isn't it time for her to relax?’ No, it isn’t time for her to relax. It's time for her to work harder. It's time to go harder and the older you get, the more effort you have to put into, if you want to stay alive. That is the key.
When you stop wanting to be alive, then yes, sit on the couch and do nothing. Because it's what that will lead to. If you still want to be alive and enjoy life, then you have to fight for it. This goes whether you’re bloody 10 years old, or 95 years old, or 105 years old. If you give into the easy way, if you go, ‘I don't feel like training today.’ I don't feel like training most days. But most days I train. Because it keeps me healthy, fit, and I'm being prevented. That's what I'm all about now is being in the prevention space, and then helping people who are in dire need navigate the waters of into connecting people to the right doctors in the right studies and the right information and the right books and all of that sort of jazz.
Cushla: When I was in the depths of my training for a marathon, I remember that exact conversation with a friend. She said, ‘I can't—’ You kno at the end of the day, I go for a run. And she's like, ‘You've just worked a full day.’ And I'm like, ‘Yeah, And I'm tired. But I'm going to go do it because you never regret it when you finish it.’ At the end of that 10k, you've never thought, ‘I really shouldn't have gone for that run.’ You don't. You come back thinking, ‘That was awesome.’ Sure you're tired, but you were tired before you went out for the run. So you actually end up more energised.
Lisa: You mean that will energise your cortisol in—
Cushla: My muscles might be tired, but you’re energised.
Lisa: And you’re getting stronger.
Cushla: Yeah, I think that's a really good message, that you don't regret it once you get out. It's always just those first, first few five minutes, or I always say the first 4k of any round was always more difficult than the rest.
Lisa: 20 minutes is all it is.
Cushla: Yeah, it is. It’s always shit.
Lisa: So same for me. And if I warm up properly, then it's only shit. If I'm in a hurry, and I run out the door, and I don't, then it's gonna be more shit, warm up quickly.
Cushla: The more experience you have with training, or with whatever it is that you're doing for self-care, understanding that the first little bit is always tough. And the more that you experience it, the more you know to expect it, then you know that you're going to get the buzz at the end and you start looking forward to that.
Lisa: Yeah, yeah, I had that conversation with my brother yesterday, because I've been telling him, he's very funny. He does a lot. He's amazing, boaties, he does weight training. He's a surfer, and he surfs sometimes six hours a day, but he doesn't do cardio. And, you know, I monitor his blood, and his health and his everything. ‘You've got to do some cardio, we've got some issues here, we need some cardio please.’ And he's like, ‘I hate cardio, I don’t want to do cardio.’ And then we’ll do five minutes, and he’s like, ‘I don't want any—’ and I said, ‘It's about pushing through that barrier. It's the same as if you tell me, why aren't you going surfing anymore? And I'm like, “Oh, because it's so hard, and I don't want to get hit by the waves and get smashed around.’ And he's like, ‘what are you talking about? It's awesome.”’ As long as you go through that barrier. Pushed enough, long enough to get through that, and I'm having to go through that.
It's always that initial adaptation phase, that time when you're not fitting, you're not good at the surfing or the running, or the whenever, when it's shit. Let's be honest. But if you hang in there long enough, if you stay with the tension long enough, then you'll start to make the adaptations, and then you start to actually like it, and then you start to enjoy it, and then it will become like, ‘Wow, I’m actually into this.’ And you still have the days we don't want to do it. And those are the days when you have to just take action, a small piece of action, and put my running shoes on or I'll go to the letterbox and I'll see, or I'll just do 20 squats and then 10 press ups, and then I'll just stop there. Then you do those, and then you're like, ‘Oh, now I've got a couple more minutes.’ And then, you know, the next minute you've run for an hour or something.
Cushla: And, really, this is such a good title for the book. Because it's not, it's not just about your mum's story. It's about the process of taking those small actions and how those small actions all build up and all add together to make a big amazing solution. What I probably— again, going back to the fangirl in me, this isn't a story about Lisa Wonder Woman who can do everything, because she can't. She has vulnerabilities, and she has rough days and she has days where friends need to pick her up.
Lisa: Definitely.
Cushla: But what you've done with your mum, and what you can learn by reading the book is how those small actions actually build up and accumulate. That is relentless. That's what it means to be relentless. It doesn't mean that we should all run a marathon or an ultra marathon, or that's the journey that most people should take. That's not what we are saying here, but it's about how, if you have some self-care and take those small steps, whatever that may look like for you at the time of your life, that you are living a life that is relentless.
Lisa: Yeah, yeah, I love that.
Cushla: Be way more powerful, more fulfilling, and you’ll last longer.
Lisa: You’ll last longer! We all want that. And you last longer helps me, you know, rather than yeah, it's all about for me, it's about healthspan as well. You don't want to be living in a horrific state of affairs and barely alive, but still kicking, that's not living. It's— we want to push that degeneration out for as long as possible. And the exciting thing, what I'm excited about, because I study this type of stuff obsessively, is the stuff that's coming down the pipeline with regards to longevity and anti-ageing.
I'm like, ‘Mum, if I can keep you alive for another 10 years, the technology is gonna keep you alive for a lot longer.’ That the advances in medicine, the advances in science are going to mean that you can possibly live for a hell of a lot longer. If I can hold my, you know, 52 year old body together, now, by the time I get to my 60s here, I'm going to be things that are probably going to mean that we're going to live to, they're talking 150 and beyond. Whether I'll see that or not, but my children might, or our little ones, and this next generation might, and we may. Who knows? Because things are changing so rapidly. And there's one having each and the latest and greatest stuff. I love shiny objects. I’m doing the research and in staying across all that and maintaining so that I can actually get to hopefully enjoy the benefits of it and not have something major happen out of the blue. Because most of these things that come at us, the big four, the cancer, the cardiovascular diseases and strokes, and the diabetes, and the Alzheimer's, if you take just those, they are predictable a long way out.
If I had known more about things then mum’s aneurysm was bloody written on the couch. Her dad died at 52. Now I've done our genetics and we have, I have a very poor lining of our blood vessels. They're like glycocalyx is very, very poor quality, which means we're more prone to strokes and aneurysms and stuff. So now I know that, okay, so now I can do something preventative about it. I didn't know that when mum went down, she was always struggling with her weight and always, always having problems with that. Now we've cracked that code. She's tiny now, she's very slowly, and she’s lost 35 kilos, and we've cracked the code on it. But hey, it's taken me bloody years to work that out with for here and now. But we have that science now. We have that epigenetics and all the genetic tests, and we have all that available to us, you know? And yes, it all costs, and people go, ‘I couldn't afford this.’
Cushla: Can you afford not to?
Lisa: Yes, can you afford not to? Yes, this stuff costs money, all this stuff costs money. To keep mum going, costs me over a couple of grand a month. But I would— instead of having a fancy car—
Cushla: Yeah?
Lisa: — I got a fancy mum.
Cushla: Love it.
Lisa: You know, it’s just, if you don't have anything within your—
Cushla: Yeah.
Lisa: —you can do the stuff that makes, you can get for free, which is exercise, which is not eating bad shit, and eating right and things. But if you have got a little bit of resources, where are you putting it? Are you doing it, for me superfluous things like, I don't go and have facials and massages. Well, massages will be actually healthy, so I probably shouldn't lump that in with it. But, you know.
Cushla: You don’t have fancy shoes.
Lisa: No, I don't have fancy clothes. I wear the same thing all the time. You know, but I spend it on stuff that might keep us alive longer.
Cushla: When I was going through some rough health over a year ago, I talked with Lisa and we booked in a whole raft of tests. I think it was probably just over $1,000 to get a really good picture of where things are. Sure that's a lot of money. But the fact was, my health was bad enough that I wasn't coping. I wasn't getting more excited for work. So you know, for me to be able to earn an income, for me to be able to be a functioning adult, you know, that can walk me through the world, I had to invest in it. I think that sometimes we can feel guilty of investing in those kinds of things, especially if you're a mum, or if you have other commitments. But the fact is that if you need to be around for your kids, or in my case for my class, I'm a teacher. Yeah, I need to be there, 100%. I need to be at 100%. And so they're there.
Lisa: Yeah, so it's chicken and egg scenario. You lose your job if you’re not healthy.
Cushla: Exactly.
Lisa: If you lose your job, then you're not going to be able to stay healthy. So it's a chicken and egg scenario, and I'd rather invest in those things and prioritise those things.
Cushla: Before they become something major.
Lisa: And then, you can't see everything coming. I've been— I mean, you know, the journey that I've been on with my dad, and he unfortunately passed away in July last year, after one hell of a battle. Now, I didn't see that one coming. He was, I had him, but he— Dad did one thing that I could never stop him doing, and that was smoking. And that's what basically got him in the end. That's addiction, and I was, I'm just sad about that. But you can't— and I spend a lot of time studying. I study hours every day so that I'm not caught short. And since losing Dad, even moreso. But I realised I can't know everything, and they will be curveballs that come at me anyway. But I can be as prepared as I can be, and then I can react to the situations the best I can, you know. And I can hit, I at least know where to go to get help. I know where to go if I have something. If I have something tomorrow, I'll probably find out who the heck to talk to very quickly.
Cushla: Exactly.
Lisa: To deal with it. And that's a good resource to have.
Cushla: So in that Relentless, in our book, at the back is a bunch of resources. We've listed them out. So— and Lisa said something really funny to me the other day, she got some feedback from a bloke that read the book. He said, ‘I normally would have never read a book with the two chicks on the cover.’ It was hilarious. But, and then he said, ‘But it was a rocking good book.’ He didn't— he said it was a really good book. He read it through and also provided him so much information in here. And I thought it was interesting because we— the process, of course of getting the book published and the cover, and everything was quite a major wasn't it?
Lisa: And we obviously made a mistake.
Cushla: Made, and in some things fixed. But I thought it was worth pointing out that it's not just a story about your mum, but it is a bunch of lessons and resources that you can apply to in any situation that involves either health or stress. Big—
Lisa: Big mindset.
Cushla: Big moments that require that positive mindset and real strategies in there about what it takes to survive trauma and in stressful situations that can apply to health or work or relationships, or all sorts. So I just thought, you know, I kind of do that little promotional push. When we need to do book launches, you’re all booked to the map, hadn’t we? We would join them. And then—
Lisa: The day after.
Cushla: The day after. We managed to, week one in our hometown, which was also a book launch, which was fantastic. But unfortunately, we couldn't do the big push. So as your co-author, because I know Lisa touts this book any chance she can, but as the co-author of it. I'd like to recommend that everyone does get a copy. Read the heck of it, and really gains from, really can get some benefit from reading the resources and the steps and the strategies that are in there. Yeah.
Lisa: Yeah. Thanks, Cush. Yeah, it's not a book just for ladies, it's not a book just for runners. It's not a book just for people with brain injuries. It's for all of the above class. It is the people who are taking on massive challenges and who are up against it. It's for people who want to understand what it takes to succeed, want to understand what it takes to take on massive challenges and have a chance at actually coming out the other end. It is a coaching book, basically. It is written in a story form, but there is a lot of learnings in there. And there's also a lot about a lot of the therapies and the doctors and the podcasts and the books and the resources that I used in order to rehabilitate my mum.
And this is the whole point of the podcast now that we've been doing Pushing the Limits for five and a half years. I actually started it before mum had her aneurysm, but it became one of the greatest resources for me personally, because I got to get the world's greatest scientists and doctors and their latest research, and to share that with everybody. And whether it was around health and fitness and running or mindset, or high performance or longevity or anti ageing or any of those things, it was all relevant. For me, it was partly a selfish endeavor, because it did help me in that whole process. We're very passionate about the show, and we'd love that anybody who isn't already subscribed to Pushing the Limits, or as a podcast, to make sure that you head on over to iTunes or wherever you listen, and subscribe to the show, because we really get world-leading experts up on here, every single week. It's pretty, pretty fantastic. And a great resource.
Of course, it'd be marvelous today, as always. And we're working on another book. We haven’t started working. We haven't started yet. We've discussed next year. Yeah, yeah. So she's a very brave woman, because back with me on this book.
Cushla: Look, the journey has been an absolute privilege to be a part of this book, and also to be a part of your life. It's interesting, I've never written a book before. So I just like to put that out there, that sometimes you have to do brave and scary things, just to see what you're capable of. What we really hope with this is that people get a lot out of it. It's a great read, there's some comedy in there. As well good moments, as well as the hard stuff. And I think that's what I've learned is, being part of this journey is, you know, life's about putting yourself out there, do the things that are scary, that you've always potentially had in the back of your mind you wanted to do.
Lisa: Absolutely. And you know, you with the Masters in English, that was a good place to start.
Cushla: I’m afraid that—
Lisa: It's fabulous and has now made the emphasis for you to write your own novel, which is fantastic. So that's what happens when you step outside your comfort zone. You're very much good at pushing, push further outside your comfort zone.
Cushla: Yeah.
Lisa: Yeah, yeah. Lots of beaches along the way. Yeah, I haven't told you yet. So it's—
Cushla: Not yet.
Lisa: I am being good. Cushla, thank you so much for your time today in being the interviewer, in being an author on this marvelous book, and we hope it's going to empower and help lots and lots of people along the way.
Cushla: Definitely.
That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate, review, and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.
Contrary to popular belief, optimum nutrition is not one-size-fits-all. What works for others may not work for you. Our body type is dictated by genes that we cannot change. What we can do is tailor our exercise and diet so that our genes respond and are expressed the way they are supposed to.
This week, Neil joins me to explain how to personalise your optimum nutrition and exercise. Throughout the episode, we emphasise the importance of knowing your body type in building the right diet and exercise for your specific set of genes.
If you want to achieve optimum nutrition and health according to your genes, then this episode is for you.
For our epigenetics health program all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/.
You can also join their free live webinar on epigenetics.
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My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within 3 years. Get your copy here: http://relentlessbook.lisatamati.com/
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‘We’re all born with around 23,000 genes; we’re all born with a blueprint. That’s a blueprint of our genes, and those genes were given when born. But what we can do now in a way our body responds with the exercise and food we give it will dictate how our genes express themselves’.
‘Here's my genes. Here's how I can optimise them, and how I can also be aware of perhaps some of the weaknesses that I might have and how I can make the best out of my body, and out of my mind, and out of my sporting performance and out of my health’.
‘If you look around — look at your family, your friends, those around you — you'll see that we are all different shapes. And we should be different shapes. It's okay to be different shapes’.
‘You can still be a long-distance runner, but it becomes more important, then, that you rest harder’.
‘You can get gains without pain’.
‘It's okay to be me, in all aspects’.
‘There are advantages and there are disadvantages to every body type. The thing to take away is let's work with our advantages’.
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To pushing the limits,
Lisa
Introduction: Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential, with your host, Lisa Tamati. Brought to you by lisatamati.com.
Lisa Tamati: Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Pushing the Limits this week. Coming up, I have a very good interview with Neil Wagstaff, who has been on the show regularly, my business partner at Running Hot Coaching. And today we are getting into personalized nutrition and personalized exercise. So, understanding how to build the right exercise and diet plan for your specific set of genes. So, this is related a little bit to a couple of episodes that we've done prior, but it's focusing in on the nutrition aspects, and on the exercise aspect. So I hope you really enjoy the session.
Now Christmas is coming up. So if you haven't got your Christmas presents ready yet, you might want to grab one of my books. We've got three Running Hot and my first one, Running To Extremes, both of those chronicling my adventures all around the planet. Lots of successes and failures, and lots of laughing, lots of fun we have at those books. And my recent book, Relentless—how a mother and daughter defied the odds, which is really a book about empowering you to overcome obstacles, think outside the square, take control of your own health. And it's a love story between a mother and a daughter and family. So I hope you grab one of those for your Christmas present this year. You can get them over on lisatamati.com, under the shop banner.
And before we go over to Neil, I just want to remind you, we are taking on a small—very small number—of clients on one-on-one sessions. If you have a health problem—I just was getting asked all the time, ‘Can you please help me with this or that problem’? And so we've actually opened up a number of places, we're only dealing with 10 people at a time on their health journeys.
If you've got a complicated health journey that you want to help with, or you want high performance, or you've got some big massive goal that you have, and you need some support around your mindset, or brain injuries, or a cancer journey, or stroke, or whatever the case may be, then please reach out to us, support at lisatamati.com and tell us what you're looking for. And we can see whether we'll be able to help you. We're enjoying working with a number of people and getting some fantastic results. So, let us know if you want to do that.
Please also give a rating and review to the show if you haven't. It really, really helps the show. And I can't emphasize enough how appreciated that is when I get a rating or a review from a listener, it really makes my day. I love hearing from listeners because you don’t—you're always talking into a microphone, you don't actually get a lot of feedback. So, we do appreciate you telling us what you think. And if there's guest recommendations or if there's things that you want us to talk about then maybe we can add to the list, then please let us know. Okay? Reach out to us. And yes, right, over to the show now. We'll be enjoying this conversation with Neil Wagstaff, all around personalized diet and exercise.
Welcome back, everybody. Fantastic to have you with us again. Today, I have Neil Wagstaff in Havelock North, my business partner at Running Hot Coach, my long-time coach, and exercise scientist, brilliant man, welcome to the show again, Neil. Fantastic to have you back again.
Neil Wagstaff: Thanks, Lisa. Nice introduction. I like that.
Lisa: Yes, well, got to [00:03:40 unintelligible] you up a little bit. (laughs)
Neil: Very nicely. Very nicely.
Lisa: All very well entertained, by the way people.
So today's subject and I love having these conversations with Neil because we love to learn together, develop our philosophies together, train together. Yes, it's all fantastic. So today we're going to be looking at exercise and nutrition, and how to personalize it to you, so that you are doing the right diet and the right types of exercise for your particular body.
So, Neil, where do you want to start with this? Do you want to start with the body types and that type of thing?
Neil: If we give people a little bit of an overview of just the phenotype, what we're going to be looking at and then we can go into some of the body types in there. So just everyone should appreciate and understand, Lisa, they're all unique. And it's okay to be different. It's okay to be themselves. And gone are the days of the one-size-fits-all program for the exercise and nutrition point of view. And your exercise and nutrition should be personalized to you.
Now as we look at that and sort through, it is good to look at it through the lens of—which is where we're going to be looking at it—through the lens of epigenetics. So, as you know, we’re all born with around 23,000 genes, we’re all born with our blueprint. That’s our blueprint of our genes, and those genes are what we’re given when born. But what we can do now and where our body responds with the exercise and food we give it will dictate how our genes express themselves.
So, if we're giving ourselves the wrong type of exercise, or the wrong type of nutrition, or doing it at the wrong times of day, or a different time of day, then our genes can respond in a different way. And what we get as a result that is a phenotype, with you and I looking at each other with how we look. Our phenotype can look some differently different, it can be affected from a health point of view, if we've got the exercise, wrong time of day, wrong dosage, and the wrong intensity. And the same from nutrition point of view—wrong foods, wrong time of day, and the wrong amount. And all of a sudden, our phenotype can change quite significantly. And we can end up with a body that is not in a good state from a health point of view.
Lisa: Yes, and this is where the one-size-fits-all approach of the fitness industry—up until recently, at least—has put certain body types in down the wrong direction. And you use a couple of terms there, I just want to clarify, and people would have heard on a couple of our earlier podcasts, if they have listened to a number of them. We're really big on understanding your genes and understanding how to optimize your genes and how to make the best out of your body, and not seeing the genes as something as deterministic. But seeing them as a, ‘Well, here’s my genes, here's how I can optimize them and how I can also be aware of perhaps some of the weaknesses that I might have, and how I can make the best out of my body and out of my mind and out of my sporting performance and out of my health’.
So the word phenotype is a word that we use in our daily language now. But people probably don't quite understand what a phenotype. So, if you think of your DNA, your 23,000 genes odd, we're still counting, but around about there. And then everything that happens in your environment, or your food, your nutrition, the way you think, the perspective on life, your emotional well-being—all of these things affect your genes. And what is the result of that is how you are. That includes not only the way you look physically, but also the state of your mind, the state of your body, and the state of your health. It’s a combination.
So the ‘epi’ meaning above the gene, it’s outside of the genes, what's influencing the genes. So when we talk about genes being turned on and off, this is where it gets exciting because we have the ability. So, we inherited our genes, we can't do anything about that, mum and dad did that for us. We are given the blueprint half from mum, half from dad, we got to make this or that. However, which genes are actually activated and which are being transcribed—transcription is a word that is used in regards to genes—and actually read is very much in our control.
So some people get a little bit nervous when they hear genes or ‘Getting my gene system, maybe I'll come back with some bad genes’. Well, there's no such thing really as having—well, there is some bad mutations and so on—but we don't need to say, ‘Well, that means I'm going to get cancer. I've got the bracket gene, so I'm going to get cancer’. Or ‘I've got the MTHFR gene and the methylation, and I've got some bad mutations, therefore I am going to get XYZ’. That's not the case. It's like, ‘Oh, okay, got a bit of a problem here. Right, I have to do some certain interventions, or certain things that can help support my body’. And that's what we're all about. And today we want to focus in on the exercise part of the puzzle, and also the nutrition part of the puzzle.
So, if we go now into some broad body types, to give you a bit of a framework to build this around, and unfortunately, the podcast, for those watching on YouTube, we do have slides and stuff, but we haven't got them with us today. It's a little bit hard to picture. But if we go in now and talk a little bit about the three major body types, Neil, can you explain visually how they look? And what, yes?
Neil: Yes. So somatotypes, as they're called, are basically three different body shapes. Okay, so different bodies are going to respond to exercise in different ways.
Okay? So an ectomorph are generally taller, longer, slimmer, low percentage of body fat, leaner, and generally, depending on what they're doing, we'll find—will often struggle to put more lean tissue on. And regardless of whether exercising or not, they normally keep a similar sort of shape.
A mesomorph are normally a little bit shorter in stature, then that sort of traditional triangle shape. So broader shoulders, narrow at the waist, and shorter with the lower limbs, and they're very, very good at putting on muscle mass and usually put it on very quickly. And they're usually those a little bit more agile, quick, good coordination. And usually those good in the sporting arena as well.
Endomorphs are usually bigger bones, great putting on all tissues. So great putting on adipose tissue or body fat, also great putting on muscle. So bigger, much, much bigger units from a body point of view and evenly sort of shape with upper and lower body so that that mass is kind of distributed quite nicely across the whole body as well. And if you look around you, look at your family, your friends, those around you, you'll see that we all different shapes. And we should be different shapes, it's okay to be different shapes.
If I'm an endomorph, I don’t want to spend my entire time...
Lisa: ...trying to be an ectomorph.
Neil: ...trying to be an ectomorph. But this is the way the health and fitness industry has been set up, it is the picture of, ‘This is what we should all look like we should all look like this’. And we should all be great, which for some people, they're going to fit into that box and they're going to go, ‘Yay works for me’. Others, it's just not good news. We need to trade some more individuality and personalization around it, that people getting the right results.
If we take it a step further as well, this whole process starts when you're growing in your mum's tummy. So, the science of embryology, this all happens at that phase. And if you imagine as you're growing in mum's tummy, how much energy you're given to each of your derms. So you've got your ectoderm, your mesoderm, and your endoderm. As you're developing and growing in mum’s tummy, you'll get certain amount of energy into each of those derms. So this whole process of what body shape or somatotype you're going to be starting as you're growing in your mum’s tummy.
As you're developing—I’m just kind of sit as a ecto-meso, a little more on the ecto side. So, I'm kind of taller, stroke, with muscle — I can put some muscle tissue on more than the true ectomorph could. As I was developing in my mum’s tummy, I have much more energy go into my ectoderm. So, I have more development through my nervous system. So, I've got quite an active nervous system, more sensitive to pain, and a little bit of a very active mind. And probably described the body's a little bit more fragile than an endomorph body would be, which has more development through the digestive tract, and the ability to put more on tissue. So therefore, a much more resilient body, going to be better to deal with the calibre stress...
Lisa: The human weight
Neil: Endurance wise, it’s great at taking a whole lot of burn, physical endurance. From an exercise point of view, it’s a sort of body that's going to be well suited to powerlifting and things like that, but great endurance wise,
Lisa: Dwayne Johnson is a good example of one of those, isn’t it? The Rock.
Neil: Very much so. Very, very resilient body. This whole process is starting, as you—when you come into the world, you're kind of already going to be an ecto, a meso, or an endo, or a combination of—you might be an ecto-meso, meso-endo, and an endo-ecto.
But if you can start to relate as you're listening and look at your body shape, and start to think about where, what sort of body shape I've got, and what sort of activities should I be doing for that for that body? And what time of day, should I be doing it? And how should, what sort of dose of exercise should I be applying? Then you can start to get some good wins. Okay, you can start get some real, real good wins with your exercise and nutrition plan.
Neil: And that's what we sort of want to cover off today, it’s a little bit of a broad—it's a very broad overview. So Neil, and I have a program where we actually do your genes and have a have a whole technology behind us if you wanted to go into it and do a deep dive and find out exactly what you are and where you sit and what the right recommendations are for your body—the right foods, the right exercise, the right times a day.
But to just give you a broader overview here, what are some takeaways from today, so start to think where do I sit? So, I know that I sit on the ecto-meso sort of side of things. So I'm not a true-true mesomorph but I am quite muscular in built. I'm a little bit taller than your average mesomorph. So I have some ectomorph tendencies as well. So if I'm looking for me, there are certain things that are really good for me and certain things that are not so good for me.
And so, we're going to cover off a little bit today, those from them three major groups, the ectomorph, endomorph, and the mesomorph. What some high level wins that you can just take away from this podcast today and actually go, ‘I think I fall into that category or a combination of those two’, and then you can start to experiment. I mean, of course, come and see us, ask us some questions, do the program if you want to do it, but if you don't want to do it, you can take some high level wins away from this.
So for the—let's start with a mesomorph because it's sort of the part that I fall into and know quite well. So the mesomorph from our body type is very good at putting on lean muscle mass, they're very quick adapters. So when they exercise, they get results quite quickly. They're very coordinated usually and quite athletic. From a personality perspective, they can be quite into challenge and into beating everybody else, very competitive. They love to express themselves. So they're quiet, they need to be able to share their thoughts. Sometimes there's no filter between the brain and the mouth. And they have a dominance in testosterone and adrenaline if they're true mesomorph. And this means that they have a bit more of a risk-taking personality, they have a lot of drive and determination, they can push through, and they tend to go hard out. And they like a lot of change, and a lot of like, challenge, and that sort of thing. So, you can see, possibly, that I fit nicely into that category with a bit of ectomorph in there as well.
So for that person, Neil, can you explain what are some of the high level wins for them from an eating and an exercise perspective?
Neil: Yes, no worries, Lisa. So natural strengths for the sort of body you're just describing is going to be good from sort of hand eye coordination point of view. So, getting involved in activities that involve good hand eye coordination. They're going to be quite agile and quick, they're going to be able to move quickly, and respond quickly. From a body awareness point of view, they're going to have good connection with their body. Often you'll find—if you're the sort of body, you'll be able to pick things up quite quickly. Try sport, try an activity, and get it quite quickly. As you say, quick responders, so the type of exercise you're doing, and you're going to respond quickly to.
To be fair and probably very honest, this is the message the sort of people that the fitness industry is...
Lisa: Catering to
Neil: ...screaming about for years when you should do high intensity and sport training. So CrossFit style exercise, high-intensity interval training, short bursts of high intensity exercise worked very, very well for this body. So if you've got this body, those shorter sessions are sort of 20 to 40 minutes, is going to work very well for your body.
And things to be careful of here exercising for too long. So exercising for long periods of time, it's a lot to involve in, resulting in additional information and additional load on the body. So one of the biggest wins—and we've worked a lot on this, at least ourselves as well with your programming—is making sure that there’s enough rest in the program. Here, it's all about going hard but then resting hard. Going hard, resting hard.
Now what often happens is, a lot of our athletes, the runners that we work with, and just people looking for general health goals as well, we find that they go hard really well, but they don't rest so well. So, you end up with that inflammation, that additional load on the body, and then the next one, you end up with the injuries, niggles, and health burnout as well.
So just, yes, rest hard and all right to work out, make sure the rest hard is there as well. Move daily, the regular movement. As I'm talking to Lisa, now she's moving around on a...
Lisa: Rocket board.
Neil: Rocket board. So she's rocking back and forth. That’s great for her, it means we can do what we're doing. And she can stay in flow and she can stay in flow because she's moving regularly. For this body type, leaving it sat still, desk all day, is a recipe for disaster.
Lisa: Kills me.
Neil: So don't be sitting in the tree in the afternoon. Okay, be conscious about moving in that 2 to 4pm window, getting out and moving. If you sat at your desk, then stuff where you can work and move is very useful as well.
Lisa indicated that about having a competition—the challenge, whatever you’re doing, exercise-wise. This is why for the mesomorph programs like CrossFit works so well. You get a workout after the board, it’s like, ‘Right. What is the challenge for today? I don't know what it's going to be, what is it? We've got the challenge, it’s up on the board, the way we go, and now the whole group of people I can be’. So that’s why it works so well for the mesomorph.
Looking for opportunities as well. Working out earlier in the morning. Some good wins when you work out through the afternoon. But make sure that you are dipping things down and going through your working install exercises in the late afternoon and evening.
So you turn in the body down, mobility work, meditation work, stuff that's going to slow the system down and get you into a parasympathetic state. So, you're then ready to rest and recover and go and do the same thing the next the next day.
Lisa: Don't go hard out all night, which I used to do, day and night (laughs). Relinquish.
Neil: Rest, rest, rest hard. Food wise, you can start to see that it's a similar—it's going to be with the amount of movement that we're encouraging for the mesomorph. It’s like, ‘Right we're going to need to feel that’. So food to this body is like kindling on a fire. If you put it in and it burns through it quickly, transit time from mouth to bomb is pretty quick.
So you need to keep fuelling. So, three good meals, with breakfast, lunch, dinner, and then regular snacks. So, you're going to be looking at up to sort of five or six meals a day, that paleo style food recommendation, again has come out from the fitness industry, is great for the mesomorph.
Lisa: This type...
Neil: Okay? And enough protein. Protein is going to be key. Often we find that a lot of mesos we work with, and some are even vegetarian or vegan, where we get some massive wins, is getting the protein up. So protein is needed for the recovery, it's needed to see more so for this body type, so getting that happening and increasing that can be can be key.
Lisa: And to that point, quickly we did a podcast was two weeks ago, I think, with Dr. David Minkoff, make sure you go and listen to that podcast because it was all about the perfect amino combination and getting the right—so amino acids bring the building blocks of proteins, and this is a game changer for a lot of athletes, especially people who are in the mesomorph interview.
Definitely if you're vegan or vegetarian and try in your office body type, or if you're like me, and you're constantly dealing with a protein deficiency, then that can be really detrimental to your health. And there's a product that Dr. Minkoff has put out, which is just next level. I've had some great ones with it already with a couple of people that I'm working with and with myself. And just healing much better, much more calmer and so on because you're finally getting all the proteins that you need in the right combination.
So make sure you go and listen to that because when you have a steak, only 33% of that steak is actually going to turn into protein. So just because you eat meat, don't think you've already got it covered. So make sure you go and listen to that episode a couple of weeks ago.
Just as an aside, but the mesomorph does need a lot more protein. The mesomorph also has a lot more oxidative stress—they have a lot more oxidants. So, they need a lot of antioxidant support. So these antioxidants are things like your vitamin C, which I've just done a massive series on as well. Very, very important for this body type to define as your master, antioxidant bioflavonoids.
So, getting your fruits and your veggies and your things that have got this antioxidants in there can really help this type as well.
Neil: Connecting the dots a little bit for the listeners as well, Lisa, is that we're recommending here, when we said sort of dosage wise, we were talking about that sort of 20 to 45 minutes short session.
Now it could be, we got some runners listening and doing ultra-marathon runners like you used to, with your big distance you've done in the past, is looking at right, it doesn't mean you've got to stop running long distances and you've got to cut back to doing 20 to 45-minute sessions. You can still be a long-distance runner, but it becomes more important then that you rest harder. So the rest dosage needs to go up. Plus, really conscious then, are you getting the right amount of food in each day? And is there enough protein to support that additional workload?
So it's getting clever with going, ‘Right. There's other exercise that I want to do, which isn't necessarily the best choice of exercise for my body type, but I love it. So I'm going to carry on doing that. But now I can use the other information I've got to go right. What do I need more of to support my body through this’?
Lisa: And that's working in the grey, if you like. We've got our personal goals and then we've got our genetics and what they want. So, it's that's what we help with people to work in that grey area to make—like I wanted to do ultras, I did it for 25 years and had some fantastic times and successes but it did come at a cost because I wasn't aware of all this spec being and not necessarily covering all my bases which lead to problems, as shall we say.
Okay, let's move over now to the endomorph body type. So, these are those—the types of people that are bigger boned, like literally bigger boned, and they have more muscle mass, more bone mass, and they tend to be conservationists in their body type.
So, my mom's a classic example of an endomorph body type. Can level the smell of an oily rag basically, as far as food goes for a long period of time, and not lose weight and also not lose muscle which can have huge advantages and huge disadvantages.
So Neil, what are some of the exercise and food recommendations for the endomorph body type?
Neil: But generally, these guys' bodies we said when we're talking about the embryology side with the body shapes, these bodies are going to be good for endurance, they're going to be great for strength, you can put a significant amount of load through them.
Okay, so we've talked for now you start to see some differences coming in. We talked about the mesomorph, short, sharp, high-intensity, fast, explosive, quick style movements, Cross fit style stuff. Now we're going to talk about getting heavier weights. Okay? So heavier weights, lower repetitions, could be in the sort of five to eight rep range with good rest periods in between. So, you can get gains without pain. That message again, that's come out of the fitness industry over the years is, ‘Got to keep pushing. No pain, no gain’. Yes, we can get gain without the pain, that's fine. Just let the body take its time, put some good loads for a bit.
Things to take into care in here as well as we've got runners listening, which we probably have with the audience. Lisa's looking at making sure you've got a longer warm up. So, this body is going to take longer to warm up, if you're going to do some endurance stuff, give it a good 15, 20 minutes. A mesomorph body type might not need as long to warm up. Okay? There's going to be differences and care for the perfect repetitive impact and jumping without the extended warm up can still do them, but you need the longer the longer warm up for it.
Now, and generally in the morning, this body type—we said with a mesomorph get up early and get into some stuff. What we're saying here with this, the endo body shape is start slower. This body is going to have a different hormone balance as well. So, getting up early and loading the body with a high intensity class at 6am is probably going to result in that body putting on all adipose tissue and body fat tissue.
So you could do bootcamp, literally three days a week. You can train like a HIIT train and get better or not change at all. So both are just crazy concepts. I train three mornings a week, I eat six meals a day, and I'm getting better. So it's looking at—the morning should be about improving your circulation and rising slowly. So if you want to move, move, but keep at low volume.
Lisa: Low stress level. Go for a walk.
Neil: Low stress level. Ease into the day, spend time in nature, and then slower heavy lifting will start to get you better results.
Optimum times—when doing some training is going to be later in the day. So, the later you can push your training in the day, the better against slow start, pick up steam, and then go hard. And then use your energy before you go down into the latter part of the day.
And yes, just look at low reps, try it and test it. Okay? Like you said at the start, if you want to get the exact, here you are, come and look at the program. If you want to play with it and test it, see what results you get. Some more traditional style lifting, bigger compound movements, get some good weights through the body, and that weight will—sorry the body will respond well to that additional resistance. And that applies to guys and girls. Ladies, don't worry that you're going to start getting bigger. The result of this will start to change shape in a positive way by getting more load through your body.
Lisa: Exactly, and muscles are good things, girls. And an example of this is my brother Dawson, who looks like The Rock actually. And his classic training style is heavy, heavy weights, and doing them quite slowly. Whereas if you watch us two at the gym, I'm going hard out hard out, like back-to-back seats, changing. And he's sitting near with his music on and he's doing one set, and then he's having a rest, and then he's doing another set and having a rest.
And I used to think, ‘Shit, I don't want to do that because that's wasting my day. Like I don't want to spend so long at the gym’. And then he’s cut it down to the size he wants. But that's the right way to exercise for his body. Conversely, with my husband, Haisley—and I've said this before—I used to make them do CrossFit at 6am in the morning, which was a complete disaster for his body.
Neil: You’re a hard woman, Lisa.
Lisa: Yes, I am a hard woman. Poor Haisley.
And now that he does super long-distance running. And he does heavy weights, he doesn't like doing the weights particularly, so I got to drag him to the gym. But that—his body responds to that heavier slower weights but don't make him do CrossFit, he won't get the results and it won't be a good experience for him.
From a meal perspective, let's talk a little bit about their eating times and the chronobiology of their—when they should eat.
Neil: Yes. We talked about with the mesos that five or six times a day, the food is like kindling on a fire. Now we're going to change that. For this body type, we're looking at potentially changing the meals to say 10, 2, and 6. So later breakfast, later lunch, with lunch being the biggest meal. Lunch being the biggest meal of the day and then a smaller dinner as well. And in some key cases, depending how close you are to the meso and how close you are to the ecto in some cases, looking at—for the endomorphs looking at getting rid of breakfast all together and having a longer fast in the morning. Higher vegetarian. High vegetarian intake for these bodies as well.
And it's amazing, some of the local wins we've had with some of the guys working with locally in Hawke's Bay. Big guys, big sportsmen as well, and just going from eating sort of four or five times a day, lots of meat, reducing that meat down, increasing the vegetarian portion of food that's going into a diet, longer fast in the morning. Their energy has gone through the roof, their clarity of mind has gone through the roof. Their resilience with regards to niggles and injuries that they had before, which was probably down to inflammation, has now started to go. And the results they're getting is phenomenal.
Now, again, you see in the media that everyone should be fasting’s next best thing. What we're seeing now that for some people it is the next best thing, it's the perfect thing.
Lisa: For these guys, it’s great.
Neil: For these guys, it’s great. For others, if you put me on a fasting process like that, when we talked about the ectomorph having the high nervous development in the nervous system, need carbohydrates for the brain. I'd be out cold by lunchtime, if I follow through a meal time like that. I would have probably eaten one of my limbs.
So the more time for a person...
Lisa: I mean, you could do a fast. But you do a shorter fast don't you, Neil? So you do a 12-hour as opposed to...
Neil: Yes, so generally I won’t eat after seven in the evening and then don't eat until seven again in the morning.
Lisa: So it’s a 12-hour fast type of thing? Yes
Neil: So, to kick start my day, I need to eat the carbs.
Lisa: Yes. And so that's just working in with your thing. Because there is good things about fasting, don't get me wrong here. Like there is really good things about fasting for all body types to a certain degree. Woman have to be a little bit careful with a longer, longer fast, in relation to—so I find and if you're of an ectomorph side of the wheel then, and to a certain extent, a meso, then your fast should be a little bit shorter.
There are some great things about fasting, especially if you're dealing with weight issues or inflammation on the body. Or if there's some specialized reasons why you want to do longer fasts for autophagy, inhibiting mTOR and things like that. But that's outside today's discussion.
But it is a general rule, a good 12-hour intermittent fast for an ecto is a great thing to give your body a rest. For an endomorph, if you can last for up to 16 hours or even longer, brilliant. And you can actually even go for longer periods of time if you're really on the endomorph side of the scale without too much detriment.
So it's a learning to understand but definitely only two to three meals a day. And not five to six meals a day is probably a key takeaway point.
Neil: Correct. And the way we've had the biggest wins just as a little summary for these guys is changing the exercise time. So, moving the exercise the later in the day, and going to three meals, at 10, 2, and 6. Huge, huge, huge wins.
Lisa: Already.
Neil: So it's simple changes, massive results.
Lisa: Yes, slower, slower periods in between your seats, or long-distance slow sort of aerobic activity perfect for these guys.
Okay, now let's go to the ectomorph, the last sort of group on the spectrum, if you like. What do these guys need?
Neil: So these guys are generally going to be your speed endurance guys and girls. They're going to be the ones that got the ability to live on that threshold. So, they often be your triathletes, your sort of middle-distance runners, those people that—and some people also long-distance runners—but they can live on the edge, that lactate threshold quite comfortably and enjoy it for quite long periods of time.
So high drive to do that as well. So, they want to do that, enjoy doing that. And we talked as well about them being more developed in the nervous system. So, the rhythmical exercise of cycling and running and swimming, that helps calm his body a little bit as well. So the rhythm is a good exercise, almost like a meditation, will help calm that I find being able to process my thoughts of mine while I'm on a bike or running is the best place to do it.
Things to be careful of. This body will often be stiffer through the spinal cord and will often have to tie some more rigid tissue. So, you need a balance of that speed endurance work and but also to complement that, you're going to need a lot of mobility work, flexibility work. Okay? Stuff that's going to mobilize, moving up the spine.
From a repetition point of view, we've just talked about the endomorph having higher reps. I am personally, historically would always come out...
Lisa: Oh right. Actually.
Neil: ...generally done a strength block a couple of times a year. I would end up doing reps of sort of five to eight heavy lifting and that's when I'd usually pick up most of my injuries. The reason is my body just wasn't, is...
Lisa: Not designed for that.
Neil: Not capable—capable is not the right word—it’s not designed, as you say, to do that. I can put some heavier load through it but we need to be a lot more careful than an endomorph body would. So high reps, 12 to 20 reps, lots of mobility work and really going a day of high intensity, endurance base work followed by a day of recovery, yoga, mobility work, and peaking and troughing like that.
Okay, and good windows of opportunity with exercise around seven in the morning. And then again in the afternoon, depending on what works best for this body type. Okay, again, seeing quite big differences. Differences in body shape, therefore differences in the type of exercise you're going to respond to and the results you're going to get from it.
Lisa: Yes. Now, I think that rounds it out really nicely.
So you got your ecto, your endo, and your mesomorph. And this is a helicopter view, guys. If you want to dig deeper into the whole science of the genetics and epigenetics, then we can get really granular. Like we can tell you, ‘Don't eat kale, do eat spinach’, like down to that root sort of level.
But just to keep it so you can take away some wins for today, those that I think, try and identify what you are. Whether you're like me, a bit of a mixture between a mesomorph and an ectomorph, and where use it on that scale, listen to this, again. Pick out some of those—because this is about low hanging fruit and getting a couple of wins. And if you take away from this that you should be eating a little bit later in the day and doing your exercise later in the day, then that's a little bit already a positive one then, that’s an understanding.
I think one of the biggest things that I've gotten out of this whole genetics, this whole genre of it, you and I’ve gone down, Neil, in the functional genomics and the epigenetics is, it's okay to be me. In that in all aspects, whether it's us working together in our business, in the way our brains work, in the way our personality is, in the times of the day that we do things, right through to the nutrition, and right through to the social, and understanding, ‘Hey, I was born this way’.
Not that this is an excuse to be not great at something, but it does explain why I do things in a certain way, and why my brain works in a certain way, why my body reacts in certain ways. And that gives you permission to be you because like as a young woman, I know that I was always wanting to be an ectomorph. I always wanted to be the super skinny model type girl and I was a muscular athletic girl and that was not okay because that was not what I wanted to be. And I know Neil's struggled with the same thing here. Small calf muscles and thought, ‘If I do a billion reps of calf muscle exercise, I’m going to have big calves’. And you're pushing should have basically, aren’t you, Neil? You can’t be what you’re not.
Neil: They weren’t enough.
Lisa: Now you love your calves because you can run a lot faster than I can, that's for sure.
Neil: Yes. They’ll look great in heels.
Lisa: Exactly. And you know, for someone like mum who struggles with the weight because of the endomorph tendencies. I tell you what if she hadn't had that type of body, she wouldn't have got up out of a wheelchair after two years of being unable to walk. Because she still had muscle mass. She still had good bones, she still didn't have osteoporosis, or anything.
So there are advantages and there are disadvantages to everybody type. The thing to take away is let's work with our advantages. Let's be aware of our weaknesses and let's accept ourselves, I think, as we are and understand ourselves better. And that's probably a good place to wrap it up...
Neil: Nicely.
Lisa: ...for the day.
Neil: We'll wrapped up. Very good.
Lisa: Okay guys, well thank you very much once again for listening to us. Please do reach out to either Neil or I if you want support doing this program. We'd love to have you join us of course.
Or if you've got any other health issues or whatever you want to talk about, or your fitness journey, you're running, you've got some goals, please reach out to us. You can get us at support@lisatamati.com. Give the show a rating and review and share this please with your friends. We love doing this type of thing, aren’t we, Neil? If we could just do this all day, we’ll be stoked.
Neil: Would be nice. Would be nice.
Lisa: We love teaching, we love sharing, we love having good content out there in the world. So, thanks very much, guys and we'll see you again next week.
That's it this week for Pushing The Limits. Be sure to rate, review, and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.
The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.
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‘If someone disagrees, “I didn't think you're gonna do it”. The best way to prove them wrong is actually physically doing it.’
‘You can't control the uncontrollables, you know, as long as you have a plan. One thing I saw, really take from the military is that meticulous planning and detail that goes into it.’
‘What I really took from the military is that unrelenting pursuit of excellence, trying to be the best you can be.’
‘The world's very quick to tarnish certain societies with one brush because of what they've seen on TV.’
‘Before you get, sort yourself out, you know, we'll sit down, and we'll ask three questions: “What worked? What didn't work? And if you're going to do it again, what would you do differently?”’
‘And then it was just, look at the next two hours. Look at the next stage. I didn't look at the afternoon, didn’t look at the next day. And before you've done it, you've done a day, you've done a week, you've done a world record.’
‘Don't worry about what other people are doing. Just focus on yourself. You know, I always say anticipation is worse than participation.’
Dean Stott is a former member of the British Special Forces, where he travelled to dangerous places for 16 years. After an accident, he was forced to find other ways to use his time and skills. With his experiences in the Special Forces, Dean is now a world-leading security consultant and avid adventurer.
Indeed, Dean redefines the meaning of adventurer in everything that he does. He has set the world record, cycling the entire 14,000 km Pan-American Highway in less than 100 days.
Apart from these successes, Dean is also a motivational speaker who helps others overcome fear and adapt to change. His positive mindset and wide range of skills also enable him to work with brands and charities. He also incorporates advocacies into his adventures, with his most recent world record supporting mental health.
Check out his website if you want to know more about Dean and his next adventure. You can also reach him through other platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
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Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can understand the meaning of being an ‘adventurer’ and go on their own adventures.
Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts.
Lisa
Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential. With your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.
Lisa Tamati: Welcome back everybody. Lisa Tamati here, your host. Fabulous to have you with me again for another crazy episode of Pushing the Limits. Before we get underway with today's guests who I know you're going to find very, very exciting and interesting, just a reminder, to check out our epigenetics program, our flagship program that we do. One of our main programs besides our online run training system, where we look at your genes and how to optimise your life, your nutrition, your food, your exercise, all aspects of your life, including your social, your career, what parts of your mind you use the most, your dominant hormones, all this information is now able to be accessed and we can identify the lifestyle changes and the interventions that we can make to optimise your life. So if you want to hit know a little bit more about that program, head on over to lisatamati.com, hit the work with us button and you'll see our Peak Epigenetics program, go and check that out.
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Right. Today's guest is oh he's a bit of a legend. Dean Stott is his name. He's a ex-Special Forces soldier, he was in the special boat service, British Army's where he came from originally. And he spent 16 years going into the most dangerous places on the planet and doing his job as a frogman. That's his nickname on his website. Even, as The Frogman. He is the author of a book called Relentless. Go figure, we've both got books called Relentless. I think we knew that we were going to get along. He's a motivational speaker. He's also a world record holder. Most recently he cycled the entire Pan-American highway. What are we talking- what is it, 14,000 miles or something ridiculous. And he did it in under 100 days. He's an absolute legend. And he had to get it done in time to get to Harry and Megan's winning. So he was desperate to get it done under 100 days. It's a really interesting story. This is a guy who's lived life on the edge in every which way you can possibly imagine. So I'm really looking forward to sharing his insights and his story with you now. Right, over to the show with Dean Stott.
Well, hi everyone and welcome back to Pushing the Limits. Your host Lisa Tamati here, sitting in New Zealand and ready for a fantastic interview today. I have a bit of a hard ask with me. I think it's a bit hard to describe this man, what he's done. I have Dean Stott with me. Dean, welcome to the show. It's fantastic to hear you. Yeah, you're sitting in Orange County?
Dean Stott: I say, yeah moved to move to Orange County in California six months ago, actually in the middle of the pandemic. Just took advantage of the world pause, and just changed scenery.
Lisa: Just change the scenery. Right, Dean we're gonna have a really interesting conversation because when I discovered you actually through another friend's podcast, My Home Vitality, shout out to Sean and everyone over there. And I realised that we had the same title of our books, was your one right?
Dean: Yeah.
Lisa: My one's been smaller. I thought, you, ‘This guy's probably right up my alley’. So you are known as the frogman, you've been in this Special Forces, Special Boat Services. You have also become an expeditionary athlete and adventurer and, in many years. But I want to go back a little bit, and it's starting to, were you always this determined and crazy and head through the wall type of person? And tell us a little bit about your background for starters.
Dean: Yeah, so I don't know whether I was on reflection, you look back and think maybe I was slightly, you know, you touched when I was in the military, my father was in the military. And I grew up surrounded by that, in that environment, but was never forced upon me to continue any sort of tradition and things like that. My father was the army football manager and coach. So he was very sports-oriented, what we would call a tracksuit soldier. He very much that, you know, his career was based on his sport and abilities. So there was that competitive drive anyway, that I had from my father. My parents split up when I was a young age. And when I was about eight years old, I moved away with my mother for a couple of years. My father then got custody of me and my sisters, we went back to live with my dad, so I only had the single parent, and we just went everywhere with him. And it was all with the military and all these sporting events. I wasn't, you know, the children of today, with technology, you know, when we were younger, as you will know, we know you weren't allowed in the house unless it was absolutely raining.
So we had some natural physical robustness. And by, I joined the military, I approached my father and told him my intentions of joining the military, when I was 17. And he, he told me, I'd last two minutes. I don't know whether that was reverse psychology for me to push harder and prove him wrong. And, but I was about 65 kilos, and five-foot-seven, so I wasn't, you know, the figure, the man that I am today. And, but when I did join the military, I then went through training and things. And I didn't have aspirations of being Special Forces or commandos or anything like that. And I didn't, I wasn't really aware about the structure of the military anyway, because it was just sport. That's all I've seen where my dad, I hadn't seen the bigger picture. So then when I pass basic training. It’s only 10 weeks long, you know, you then get a little bit of confidence in your abilities. And then you started in a short period of time, by the age of 20, or 21 actually, I was a para-commando diver and a PTA, done every arduous force within the military. But I'd grown so quick over those two or three years, and I will be about 85 kilos, now. I'm five-foot-eleven. So I was getting confident in my own abilities. And I was also growing into the individual that I was today. And I mean, once you pass a certain threshold, or pass a course, you then sort of look at, ‘Well, what's next?’ You know, I wasn't the best on the courses, but I just gave it my 100%. And then you sort of, your career then starts channelling in one direction, you then those before you or your peers, the mentors are all going Special Forces. And then it's like, the next question is, ‘Why not? Let's have a crack.’
Lisa: Yeah, that it takes a special type of person to be able to, like, I grew up in a family with lots of stories, like my dad was only in the military for a short time, but he was a firefighter. And so, you know, my husband's a firefighter, my dad's a firefighter, my brother's a firefighter, we’re a firefighter family. And when I was a girl, when I was a little girl, we couldn't, I couldn't grow up to be a firefighter. It wasn't, it wasn't you know, unfortunately. Thank God, you can now. And, you know, if my dad had had his way, I would have been a firefighter, I would have been an SAS soldier, I would have been like, because he was a hard ass And he wanted all of that for me. And, you know, unfortunately, society sort of stopped some of the things. So I ended up doing it in other ways that I could do it. But wasn't there a lot of pressure? Did you feel like you had to live, you know, your dad saying that to you? Was it sad and just a thing? Or did that really bite with you that, ‘Hey, I'm going to prove you wrong,’ you know what I'm going for?
Dean: Yeah, I think for me, it was. And we'll talk about other stories in my career, and it seems to be a common theme. I know, I fought. There's no point in arguing my father, you know, and or anyone, if someone disagrees, ‘I don't think you're gonna do it’. The best way to prove them wrong is actually basically doing it. Yeah. And then you don't even need to say anything. You just need to just leave that pause. And so I think for him, I don't know. I think it was a throwaway comment, you know, the fact I still talk about it now. And you know, a lot of people say to me, would you say that to your son? So of course, you know, I mean, I and, but for me it was that drive. Now, my father we talked about, you know, he really, he was sport oriented, actually when I joined Military I got sent to Germany to play football as well, because they knew I was Dave Stott’s son.
Lisa: Yeah.
Dean: And see, after a year of being there, I said, ‘No, I don't want to follow the same footsteps as my father, I want to carve my own path.’ And that's when I then went, commando, para and things. So I was going a different path from my father, he wasn't a para commando and things like that. So for me, it was like, this was new territory to me. I wasn't really put under pressure from him. I know a lot of guys who I served with, you know, from a young age, from young boys, all they ever wanted to be was a Royal Marine, or a para, they wanted to be SAS and things. I didn't, I wasn't, there was something that I didn't–
Lisa: You weren’t conditioned.
Dean: Look, I wasn't even aware of it. That was why. So when I approached these courses, I didn't put myself under that self-induced pressure with some of these guys– guys and girls do. And I think that helped in a way. I sort of approached it in a, you know, it is what. It is not being naive, it's not what was involved walk in the park. But, you know, I was aware how difficult it was. But it wasn't the be-all or end-all. You know, some guys who did it, don't achieve the grades or, or the standards, and then they're broken. That’s all their life. And I think it's actually too much pressure on themselves. So sort of going into these situations, you just need to be a bit open-minded.
Lisa: And what was the training like to go into the Special Forces and to know what you do? What is it like to go through– because we see the stuff on the telly, and you know, everybody knows about how hard ass all that type of training is. And what do you need? What did you get out of it? What was the experience like for you to do those extreme sort of courses?
Dean: Well for me, it’s very much a grown-up course. You know, the way that then, you've got this stuff on TV, where you have the perception it's hard-ass and everyone's swearing and shouting here. And it is night and day from that, you know. I understand with TV, there's a fine line between authenticity and entertainment. Actually, if you film selections, it’s actually quite boring. You know, these guys just get told where they got to go. And they just do it. So, and that's what I liked about the course is that the fact that you're– you all grow– you’re all treated as grown-ups. There was no shouting, and they just told you what to do. They didn't need to shout, the selection was that hard in itself, that they didn't need to put that additional pressure on you. So I did what I can. And in fact, they gave you some sort of independence. To think on your own. I was fortunate to be an instructor on the commando course and also the senior dive instructor. So I've seen it from an instructor's perspective. And on those sort of courses, you do give the students some motivation and inspiration as well.
But on this one, you don't get anything. Yes, you get the reverse when you go to the jungle, and they tell you about how you're not doing well. And you know, just give up now and save six months of your life and things out. But again, I got that reverse psychology as a young boy telling me I couldn't do it. So yeah. And for me, I didn't go– you're– I was from, I came from the army. So I, the normal traditional route was especially SAS. I went SBS. I was one of the first army guys to do that. And that was because I'd spent eight years with three commando brigades, Brigade Iraqi force and I was a senior dive instructor. So water, I was more comfortable in water. So the special boat service was that natural transition for me. So they say when you go on selection, be the gray man, you know, just don't don't stand out and bring attention to yourself and things. I’ll be the gray man for about two minutes. Because they will react, they’ll scream my name out. And that's why I was going this way and not the traditional, right?
Lisa: Because you came from the wrong place.
Dean: Yeah, although I didn't put myself under my own self-induced pressure. I had that sort of hovering above my head. But again, once you– if you're confident in your abilities, and there's a fine line between confidence and arrogance at that age. I was a 28 year old sergeant. And I spent seven years in Brigade Iraqi. I've seen those who've gone before me and I knew that I was just as good as then. And you sort of know that they're going to play these mind games and when they come, as long as you identify when they come in and just deflect it.
Lisa: Yeah. Has it really helped you in everything that you've done since like, what are some of the key learnings that you take away from doing such arduous, tough, scary stuff?
Dean: Um, I think, you know, you can't control the uncontrollables you know, as long as you have a plan. One thing I saw, really take from the military is that meticulous planning and detail that goes into it. And the fact that we rehearse, rehearse, and rehearse. You know, we do that over and over and over again. You know, I've been guest speaking alongside some, like, some of the England rugby players. They talk about the World Cup, now that how they repeat an exercise, until they get 1% better. You know, we'll rehearse, rehearse all these different scenarios. And, but ours is a bit of a different situation. You know, if we get it wrong or pause or hesitate, you know, we don't lose five points in a row, we lose lives. Guys, people will get killed.
So yeah, so there's that which what I really took from the military is that unrelenting pursuit of excellence, trying to be the best you can be. But also, as well as the planning, and that we talked about that, we'll probably talk about it later when we talk about the bike ride, is the fact that not– nothing always goes to plan. Plan is the best plan in the world, you know, and things never go to plan. And don't worry about that. And that's what I liked about the Special Forces is there were a lot of, ‘Well, if you don't go as planned, you just react to the situation that's in front of you.’ And a good friend of mine told me a quote, ‘You can't be experienced without experiences’. And that's what I got from the military. The military, a lot of these big corporates around will, would love to try and replicate the scenarios or, or conditions that these people have been in, but you just can't. And that's the great thing about the military. They put you in some high octane environments, in difficult positions, difficult environments, and having to make difficult decisions. But you learn from that, you know, my decision, when was the wrong decision? You know, when you have to make? Yeah, you just reflect back on what worked and what didn't work.
Lisa: Wow. So you were in the military for, I think it was 16 years, was it, or something?
Dean: Yes, yes. Yeah.
Lisa: And so it was a big chunk of your life. And then and then what happened? Tell us about the accident.
Dean: Yeah. So I joined, I joined a special forces in the height of the war on terror. So I was the pinnacle of my career, everything was going really well. I was doing what these children nowaday plays Call of Duty. That was my lifestyle, day in day out. And we're just about to get pre-deployment training to go back out to Afghanistan again, and we're out training in Oman. And I was doing what's called a HAHO jumps, it’s a high altitude, high opening jump. So unlike freefall, where you're free aligned, you're actually still connected to the aircraft. You exit the aircraft at 15,000 feet. And you do that, because that's the limits of oxygen. Any higher and you need oxygen. You open the aircraft and the parachute will open– pull open straight away. And when you travel up to 50 kilometers, or 30 minutes in the air to the target area. So I've done– no– we've done hundreds of these jumps before, I think it's about the third or fourth jump in a day.
And I just exit the aircraft as I normally did, no different from any time before. But this time, when I look, there was something wrong and my leg was actually caught in the line above my head. So I was trying to clear my leg in time before the parachute opened and potentially rip my leg off. But I couldn't clear it in time. The parachute opened, pulled my leg up over my head and the right. Thankfully made my foot released. And otherwise wouldn't be here having this conversation. But straight away I knew there was a problem. The pain was so severe that I was vomiting and because of how thin the air was, I was drifting in and out of consciousness. But no one else in the team knew there was a situation so I wasn't going to come over to net and tell them that I had a sore leg. So I managed to stay with the team, assess where the other parachutes were coming in against the wind.
And my first challenge was to land it because if I didn't land it correctly, you know, on one leg, you know potentially, you could damage your good leg. So, but I did. It was a great, great landing, landed one-legged. And fortunately, the damage sustained on the exit show in my career. As I tore my ACL, my MCL, my lateral meniscus, my hamstring, my calf and my quadriceps, so all these supporting muscles–
Lisa: Just got ripped.
Dean: Yeah, just got ripped. But you know, in the ideal world you would go straight back to UK and you start physio, you just start working on it. But it was the same time as the Icelandic volcano which grounded all aircraft. I was there for about nearly five weeks just thrown in a hotel with painkillers.
Lisa: Are you kidding. So that was it.
Dean: Yeah, yeah, I sort of missed that, and then got back to UK. I remember I made it back to UK, got sent home for six weeks and leaves. We’re now talking about 11, 12 week period from the injury. Then they lost my MRI scans. It was just a spiral of failure in the medical system there. And so yeah, so I left. But all I've ever known, it’s 16 years. Military, even as a young child growing up. So I didn't have, I didn't look beyond the military. For me, I was a lifer. That was me.
Lisa: Wow. So how did that, apart from the gun to the physical injury, but how did that affect you mentally? Like you suddenly– you're at the top of your game, you've been training for this forever, you're doing your job. And then all of a sudden, you're out of the game. And you’re completely sidelined. What happened to you mentally from that side?
Dean: My wife will tell you a different–
Lisa: You didn’t get divorce. So that's good.
Dean: But the one of the things I scored an identity crisis. Well, it is whether you believe in the military, whether you're a professional sports person, or whether you're just someone who works in an organisation or a team, but I've been– I've gone from working in a tight-knit unit, having a role and having a purpose, knowing what I was doing for the next two years, to like, ‘Where do I now fit in society? What was my role and purpose?’ But I got to where I got to, because of my physical robustness. That had now been taken away from me as well. I couldn't even run 100 meters without my leg being in pain. So I had that going on in the background. Also, to add to the pressure, my wife was eight months pregnant. So also wondering whether there is going to be any work there. How am I going to support my family? And thankfully, for me, my wife is very entrepreneurial. You know, you hear horror stories of men and women when they leave the military, about that transition can be quite turbulent. Mine was quite smooth. You know, the military, like your mother and father, you know, they clothe you, they feed you, they pay you on time. You don't even know what, who provides the water or what to eat. You’ve just got a job to do.
But when we leave, we're not aware of who we need to speak to in the council's or the state. There. So my wife was a bank manager for three sons and their banks in Aberdeen. So the stuff that I would normally be worried about, she was, ‘Yeah, I've got all that.’ And she sent my first security company on a Blackberry watching TV, you know, done the right paperwork. So when, so whatever I was going through a hard time having to talk personally, you know, thankfully, wasn't that bad, because my wife had sort of–
Lisa: Yeah, she's awesome.
Dean: But yeah, I just had, you know, talking to the security industry, the pressure of trying to, if there's any work. And I was very fortunate. Within 48 hours I was asked if I can go out to Libya, which I know you're familiar with, to help set up the different project restart the British Embassy during the Arab Spring. And so that's what I did. So wow, look at me, I had work straight away. And I was out in Benghazi, helping sell that project.
Lisa: Can you tell us a little bit about that story? Because that sounds like a bit of a movie.
Dean: You know– familiar I did– when I left, I wanted to find a niche within the security industry. I didn't want to go to Afghanistan and Iraq and do the hostile action, because I've sort of done that, you know, I've done that bit. And you know, I was very lucky to survive. So why would you take another risk? And I looked at the security industry, and actually, a lot of my friends from the special boat service. They were, they had their maritimes companies who are dealing with the Pirates of the east coast of Africa. So I didn't want to be competing with them either. My wife's from Aberdeen, so I moved back to Scotland with her. It’s the only gas capital of Europe. So where is all this trouble? So I was looking into more in the corporate clothes protection sort of industry, that's where my head was focused.
But when I got to Libya, I soon identified that Libyans didn't want another Libyan, another Afghan or Iraq once Gaddafi had fallen, they wanted to take control. But also these larger security companies, the big five, now sort of like dominate the industry. They were charging crisis management in evacuation plans, when actually we just scraped the surface, there was nothing in place. So I flew home, my wife gave birth to our daughter, Molly. And I said, ‘Look, I have a plan. Do you mind if I take our savings out of the bank?’ And that's what I did. And I went back into Libya, there was a huge proliferation of weapons at this point. It's actually ammunition was difficult to get hold of, weapons are not a problem.
So I bought 30 weapons off the black market, and I buried them between Tunis and Egypt and buried them with communications equipment money, and just designed my own evacuation plan, spent a month in the desert. These in design. And I mean, I sold them to a couple of the oil and gas companies on a retainer and just just sat on them. Then the security industry. You know, for me, I didn't want to work for an organisation and be on rotation and things like that. I took a gamble and it was very ad hoc. So each time I got a phone call was a different job. So you know, for example, we did London Olympics. And then next thing you're taking the UAE royal family superyacht from Barcelona to Maldives, and you're training the Kurdish Special Forces in Erbil.
Lisa: Wow! Fascinating!
Dean: It's very diverse. When you tell people in the security industry, I mean, they think you're a doorman from the local nightclub.
Lisa: Surely not.
Dean: I'd like to help people as well. And I'm for me, but what it what it was good for me was– is I was seeing– some of these countries that I've been to anyway with the military, but seeing all the cultures and seeing how things, not from a military perspective, because it was almost a little bit blinkered, there, you know.
Lisa: Yes. Like you say, your head, your role.
Dean: You know, it’s understanding more the politics, the demographics and things like that. So I just come back from the London Olympics. I was in Benghazi. And in the evening, the American ambassador got killed. And they made it into a film called 13 Hours.
Lisa: Yes, that's what I thought, it sounds very familiar, I'm sure.
Dean: I know, I always say, ‘Right place, right time’ or ‘Wrong place, wrong time’. And I was there in Benghazi. And I was asked by a German oil company if I could get some of their German engineers from Benghazi to Tripoli. So I had safe houses in the desert. And that's what I did over the three days. I took them back out. And then two years later, I was in Brazil, covering the World Cup.
Lisa: You’re just like… You just got them out through a hole and you do that like going to the supermarket.
Dean: There's no real, no threat to them, no direct threat to them. the only issue I had with that one, you know, we could have– I had drivers from Benghazi, who took us out initially. The problem in Libya, you have 167 tribes. And this is where there's real issues. Because, I mean, you have, you know, those in the East in Benghazi, don't like those in the West in Tripoli. You know, the politics are in Tripoli, the oils are in the East. And so it's understanding that as well. And that's why, so we did it over three days, and the reason we did that is, I was actually, I had the drivers from Benghazi in the safe house. And now that will, ‘You know, Mr. Dean, we can go on because Tripoli is only, you know, it's not far, 300 kilometers’. But they didn't realise I had drivers coming in from Tripoli.
Lisa: And you didn’t want them to–.
Dean: And I didn't want the drivers to compromise us when we go in. So I woke up that morning that we were setting off and the drivers that arrived from Tripoli, the drivers and Benghazi in there. They all had their guns out.
Lisa: Oh, my God.
Dean: I say I mean, I mean, they’re worried they weren't gonna get paid. I said, ‘No, you're paid. I just can't take you to Tripoli.’ And so it's just understanding that sort, rather than just driving as fast as you could to Tripoli and potentially running into issues along the way. And so yes, that was a success. And two years later, I was in Brazil covering the World Cup. And we now had the Tripoli war, which is a civil war between the militias and the government. And I think that's just ended now. And I got a phone call from the Canadian Embassy saying that they'd been stuck in Tripoli. And so they had 18 military within an area close protection team with them, but they weren't allowed to leave the city. So they'd never seen the coastal road out and didn't really have eyes on. So in the days leading up to that, the British Embassy got shot at every checkpoint between Tripoli and the Tunis border. So I went out with my fixer, and just spoke to the tribal elders in those regions at war and everywhere else. And it was actually just showing them courtesy and respect. Just let us know who we are, when we will come in, we were no threat. And again, it's that understanding the politics and the demographics, which was a success to that. And yeah, we got 18 military in four different maps safely back to back to Tunis.
Lisa: Wow.
Dean: But you know, I've never like they said in Hollywood, I never needed to dig up any of the weapons. They're still there. It’s more of an intelligence-led security thing. But I came home from that trip and my normal procedure would be to wash my kit, repack my bag and everything else, and then get ready for the next phone call. Yeah, one of my shirts was covered in blood. But I've been doing first aid and RTA. And I said to my wife, ‘Can we get the blood out of the shirt?’ And she said ‘Yes, but I’m more concerned why there's blood in there’. Totally what I just got yourself is like a throwaway comment. Yeah, you see, this was the second time in my life, I realised the pin dropped. There was something more mentally, I was just five years now from the military and I was trying to match the adrenaline rush that I had been, without coming to terms with the fact that I'd left and I didn't have that support network. If something had gone wrong, my friends were gonna come in and parachute for me. And so something had to change. And my daughter was young, and my wife now is, you know, she had a very successful property development business. And she said, ‘Look, this was actually all about communication’. She thought I wanted to go away. And I thought she needed me to go away.
Lisa: Yeah, yeah. Because you've been used to that sort of setup for so long.
Dean: Yeah. And I've just been disconnected from society. I just thought that was the norm. You know, I was going to Somalia on my own. Yeah. Just doing–
Lisa: Were you not like, like most people listen to this, I mean, it's such a foreign world for the average person who's never been exposed to any of this. And I've never been anything military. I've been in some tricky situations, and self-caused, gone into shit places which I wasn't really for or shouldn't have been in. But for most people, this is a terrifying thought to even go to some of these places, let alone to do the job that you do. Did you never have a fear of like, do you not have the normal fear responses that most people have?
Dean: I think I do. I think the problem that we have in today's society is TV, is media. You know, it's very, you know, dramatised about these places. These places they go. I use Somalia as an example. I'll go there on my own and have a walk from the airport to the hotel, I won't– because that's where the business is. That's where I think things are happening. And then I've been, you know, yes, there's bad places and things go on. But it's no different from any city, you know. Yes, there's a bit of a terrorist threat and things. But I've been sent on a mission, south of Mogadishu, and in some of the most beautiful waters. I see parts of the country that people don't see. Now, I'm not naive to think there is no threat at all. You know, the success of a lot of my projects is having the right fixers and local influence. The world's very quick to tarnish certain societies with one brush because of what they've seen on TV. For me, they’re the most hospitable people. You know, the Canadian Embassy, the KCA Deutag and a few others, they wouldn't have been successful if it wasn't for the locals.
Lisa: The local people. Yeah.
Dean: And I think that's where somebody's security companies or individuals who think they can just come in with weapons and guys like me, very arrogant, they think they're going to do, to get away with it. And, and it's just showing respect, and humility. And that's my approach to it. So I am obviously conscious there is there is a friend, you know, I have friends who–
Lisa: And you can handle yourself there as well.
Dean: –things that, but yeah, I think that as long as–
Lisa: Yeah, I know what you'd be like when you go to some of these places, you have these preconceived ideas. And some of the places I've been to, like Niger. I went to Niger and you know, Niger, I don’t even know how to say it properly, Niger. Never got that right. That was one place where I landed there. And we were doing a 333k race through there. And I didn’t like go, ‘Holy shit, this place is pretty damn scary’. And you know, you're running across the desert on your own, and there was a lot of military, sort of oil problems. Chinese doing exploration in the desert against the wishes of the tribal people. So there was lots of military convoys coming through with all the arms and things. And you're a little girl running across the frickin’ desert on your own. It's pretty, pretty hairy moments here where you think you can just disappear, you know. But generally speaking, most of the places that you go to where you think are gonna be terrifying, aren't that terrifying. And the people are pretty amazing, too. And you've got to be aware of yourself and, you know.
Dean: Yeah. Having the responsibility, you know, those sort of places as well if they're running an event like that, and, you know, these countries want, you know, it's all about tourism and try and promote and put the country in a good light, you know, they'll do this. Yeah.
Lisa: This one was a bit out there, though. Like this was a French Foreign Legion guy who was running it. He didn't give a shit about anything except making money, right? We went into it naively. These particular ones thinking it was gonna be like the marathon on Saturdays or something. You know what I mean? And it wasn't. It was like 17 runners, nothing was organised. It was like, we ran out of water, we ran out of food, we, you know, I ended up getting food poisoning on top of it all. So that was a really– that's when I realised that most of the races are really super well run, but then there are the cowboys out there. And, you know, we were in their very hands really, you know, and we were lucky to get out the other side on that one. But so how do you like, for your wife? What's it like having your husband off doing God knows what, and having to keep the, you know, the business going, and the life going, and that fear of you being away?
Dean: Yeah. And I'm very fortunate. I've got a, my wife is part of the business anyway, the scoop is anyway, so she would always be doing intelligence bits anyway. So having her being part of that helps. Yeah. Well, rather, you just go in, and she's not knowing what's going on. Yeah. I mean, a part of that. And when we talk about the bike ride, you know, she was the campaign director that so–
Lisa: Sounds amazing.
Dean: –but gets involved in everything. Because then it's very easy to explain why you're doing something or why you're going away because, yeah, the full picture. But no, very, very fortunate to have an understanding– and she, you know, Alana's got a book coming out soon as she talks about why she fell in love with me, because I showed a world that she hadn't seen before. I mean, I was very, we had very similar mindsets, and like, achieve whatever goals you want. So for her to then say, ‘I couldn't do something,’ or you know, would go against, you know, what she believes in, and why we got into it. So obviously, now I'm a bit older and we've got kids and obviously I need to be a bit you know, she needs a little bit more. Yeah.
Lisa: She sounds like an amazing lady. I'll have to get her on.
Dean: Yeah, yeah, she is. She's got a cracking story herself.
Lisa: Yeah, she sounds like it. So I want to transition now into going into life after this chapter of your life, if you like, in becoming this professional adventurer. Because in what you're doing now, what you've got coming up, and the whole world record that you have. Tell us about that.
Dean: Yeah, so we actually stem from coming back from that Canadian Embassy job. You know, something had to change. In chapter 16 in the book, it’s called ‘Dead or Divorce’, so that's the stage we're talking about. Obviously, it's been five years since my leaving the military. I’ve sort of neglected my own sort of physical and mental well-being. I’ve been so fixated on work and bringing in money, and I take like a TRX with me around, just throw it in the suitcase. And I haven’t done any sort of cardiovascular stuff. My injured leg like now was two kilos lighter than my good leg, which is an awful wastage.
So I just that’s when for Alana said, “Come do property development.’ And that's what I did. I hung up my security boots and just bought a pushbike of farmers, and just cycled to and from the office. There's only about eight miles there and eight miles back. You know, nothing big but straightaway being physically active again, you know, I felt like there was a big, big weight off my shoulders, and that's what I did. I cycled to and from the office. But you can imagine my story, you know, sat in these architects and planners meet. So it’s about a month for my 40th birthday. So I was getting a midlife crisis around. What have I done with my life? I'm going to have a legacy and things. So I said, well, ‘I've always fancied doing a world record.’ And Alana said, ‘Well, what in?’ And I said, ‘Well, cycling is good, because it's not impacted– well, you need to consider my knee injury.’ And something that wasn't the knee injury wasn't going to compromise it.
So I said, ‘Well, what about cycling?’ And you know, being in Scotland, I was thinking maybe Aberdeen to Glasgow or something. And my wife then found the world's longest road, which runs in southern Argentina to northern Alaska. So for the listeners, it's probably equivalent to say it's the equivalent of cycling from London to Sydney. Yeah, 30,000 miles.
Lisa: And then another.
Dean: Yeah. Because of the curvature of the earth. So having only cycled 20 miles, this is what I did: I applied for the world record in it. We had looked at Cairo to Cape Town. But I– majority of my security work was in Africa. So I'd be in those days anyway. So for me, I wanted to, as part of the challenge, I wanted to see places that I am– someplace that I hadn't been to before and also because of where you started, and when you're finishing, you're going through all different temperatures and climates and things like that. And so Guinness came back. And the world record when I apply for it was 125 days. Six weeks later when it came back, and said you were successful with the application. And we've been beaten by eight days, the new world record was 117 days.
So that was my target. And my wife and I do a lot charity work. We have been doing since I met her really and, you know, do a lot of stuff with the military. You know, it's part of a special boat service, ambassador for Scotland. Legion, which is the oldest military charity in the UK. But I’m gonna name drop now massively. So Prince Harry and I are good friends, and we've known each other.
Lisa: Is he though?
Dean: Yeah. And as you’ve seen. And I've been friends about 14 years, met each other on a community training course. And, you know, he’d come to some of my events; I've been to some of his events. You know, I– in Mozambique, Tanzania had an intelligence fusion sale, which would identify smuggling routes for the ivory, you know, which I could then relay back to him. So he's doing a lot of stuff in the background. So I rang him up, and I said, ‘Look, I’m gonna cycle, the world's longest road, you know, what campaigns should we do it for?’ And this is back in 2016. So him and his brother and Kate, were just about to launch a mental health campaign called Heads Together in 2017. And he said, would I do it for that campaign? And I said, ‘Yes, of course’. So I now have the challenge of the campaign. And in the end, I set a target of a million pounds.
Lisa: Wow, that’s a big-ass target!
Dean: For me it had to be the enormity of the challenge to reflect how much you're trying to raise. You know, you couldn't– you know, you can't go– can’t say I'm going to raise a million pounds and run the London Marathon because it just doesn't add up. The size of the challenge and the size of the ask here, you know, was balanced. And also to add to that I'd never cycled before as well, which is even more of a–
Lisa: Mental.
Dean: Yes, yeah. So I did a train for a year, you can imagine what it is like trying to get sponsorship at the beginning.
Lisa: What the hell!
Dean: I will perform, break a record, and we'll record and raise a million pounds in mental health and a lot of them thought had mental health problems themselves.
Lisa: But you had a track record of what you've done? I mean, I would have taken you seriously, as far as the–
Dean: A lot of people say to me, ‘How do you get sponsorship?’ You know, I got– and it was just, it was the right messaging at the right time. You know, the Heads Together campaign is launched in the UK, and it's very much the topic of conversation. So a lot of these big corporates wanted to get behind.
Lisa: Wonderful. Yep, yeah.
Dean: So it was the right message at the right time. And, yeah, I got a great sponsor. And, you know, that was only about two months before setting off. You know, I funded it, funded 50,000 of my own money up until that. I had to believe in it
Lisa: And put something on the line?
Dean: Yep. Yeah. So. So that's what I did. Yeah, I mean, I set off on the first of February 2018, the– when I was doing all the early stages when I was doing the planning, and I'd never cycled with I just took a military set of orders, put it on there and just crossed out ammunition. And then as I started learning about saving, I then introduced that into the plan. But there's things that, you know, there are things that are out of my control, like natural disasters, coups, third party influence. So the world record was 117 days, but I was aiming for 110. And it wasn’t– I was going to beat it by a week.
Lisa: You’re in that buffer.
Dean: Yeah that buffer. The buffer, the fudge they call it. Encounter that is eating into the fudge and not your challenge. So that's why, where I set off aiming for 110 days. You know, I was very fortunate to, being in the military and worked in the desert, the Arctic, and the jungle, and things that I've never done on the bike. I had to then simulate those situations. So the Atacama Desert in Chile is the driest non popular desert in the world. It's 47 degrees. What I decided to do so, I went out to Dubai and did two weeks heat training in Dubai. The altitude in Ecuador, of cycling. You know, the biggest climbs in Tour de France ranges in 21, 23 kilometers, minus 67 kilometers and sea level to four and a half thousand meters. So I had to train altitude. So I know that on the day of the event, you know, you do 8 to 10 hours on the bike.
Lisa: Altitude. Yeah.
Dean: So, yeah, I did that. And there's a famous bike ride in the UK called Land's End to John O'Groats.
Lisa: Yes, I know that one.
Dean: Yeah, so I did that twice. I never mean to sound arrogant, but for me, it was a training ride and actually it’s training ride because the challenge was 15 Land's End to John O'Groats back to back. So if I couldn't do one, how was I going to do 15?
Lisa: Yes. It's funny how your perception changes, the bigger your current goal that you're going for, the other stuff becomes small, but what I've learned too is that it goes the other way as well. When you stop doing the big stuff, your horizon comes back in pretty quickly. And then you know, it can be gone the other way.
Dean: You can never replicate what you're going to do with some of the ultra marathons, you won’t go run the exact distance.
Lisa: No, no, you're running near it.
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Dean: Yeah, what I got from doing those Land's End to John O'Groats, you know, I did about nine days, is the fact that the first four or five days are always whether you're at your peak, or wherever you're below peak is always going to be hard and then by the end of the first week, your body then knows what you're asking of it.
Lisa: I found that like too, when I did– because I ran through New Zealand, and I did you know, 2250ks in 42 days, which I was aiming for 33 days, but I had again, I didn't add in the fudge, did I? And I got slower and slower and more injuries and so on. So it took me a bit longer than I was planning. But at the two-week point was when I was at that absolute, like I don't know how to take the next step point, you know. And somehow I had to drop the kilometers a little bit, but then I was able to– my body actually got better from that point on. And I would never have believed if I hadn't lived through it. I thought I was like, absolutely, I don't know the how I'm going to take the next step to then actually the end of the 42 days being like, ‘I could carry on now’. You know, it was quite a phenomenal thing to go through. And I've heard other expeditions that athletes go through the same sort of thing that it bottoms out at the worst point. I've got a couple of mates who ran across the Sahara, and I mean, right, right across the Sahara, 7,000 kilometers. And they said the same thing that they you know, two weeks, and they were thought, you know, ‘We're about to die here. We're not gonna make it.’ And then it's sort of you know, and you have the ups and downs. But if you can push through that mentally, that point you seem to come through it.
Dean: Yeah, you do. I think, you know, for me, I set off from sort of going back slightly when I was doing my research, I, you know, was reading books and magazines learning about cycling. You know, it evolved so much since I was a young boy in a BMX, and I wasn't getting the information I really wanted. So I spoke to the previous record holders, and they're very open, which was great, really, they're very receptive. but they– you know, one of the things we do in the military, especially in the special forces is, it's like a hot debrief. So when, as soon as you've done a job or operation, you come. Before you get, sort yourself out, you know, we'll sit down, and we'll ask three questions: ‘What worked? What didn't work? And if you're going to do it again, what would you do differently?’ So I just asked that question to the previous record holders, and all their issues were in South and Central America: bureaucracy, the borders, languages, first to the base. So they all started in North America, and it was the second half of the challenge which had the issues, right. So I turned on its head, start in the south and get those issues out the way early. So one thing I was quite proud of– just because everyone did it that way didn't mean it was the right way.
Lisa: Yeah.
Dean: But yeah, but I set off from Southern Argentina in the first week, you know, relentless winds, it was like 40 mile an hour, approximate speed. I've never known anything like it. But once that had– I had targets each day, you know what I had to hit each day and I was hitting those targets. I think by the end of the first week, I was 39 miles behind target, but my target is still a week ahead of the world record, right? Yeah, yeah. The weather sort of changed for the better and now the winds have abated. I got through Peru, I got tailwind all the way through Peru. That's 2500 kilometers of tailwind. We did you know, I crashed the bike in Chile, I got food poisoning in Peru, you know, coming out with issues and, you know, got to Ecuador, got the big climb-ins. But before they're gone on the challenge, I've never done more than 150 miles on the road, on the road. I've done 10 hours on a turbo trainer, but never done more than 150 miles. By the week four when I was in Peru, anything less than 150 miles wasn't enough for me. I was physically and mentally stronger as I went. I started at 90 kilos. I was too big.
Lisa: Yeah, but I but you needed it.
Dean: Yeah, but I knew from my time in the military that special forces selection six months long, you don't start day 1 100%. You carry that timber and weight, and then that will shed and you'll get fit. And that's what I did. And you know, when I finished I weighed 78 kilos. Almost 12 kilos. And you know you have to– it’s almost like a polar expedition, you're losing weight from the start. So you just need to try and try and keep it on. But I got to Cartagena on day 48 on March 21. That took 10 days off the previous world record for South America. But that wasn't the world record. And a lot of people called me said, ‘Oh,’ they said, ‘The pressure’s off.’ I said, ‘That's not world record. Call it Brucie bonus. That was a Brucie bonus or a marker to aim for rather than looking at the full challenge. As you know, you don't look at the– Right down into–
Lisa: You get overwhelmed pretty quick.
Dean: What do you do on the flight? So I did. I broke it into countries into days, and then broke the days into four stages. Food and hydration were paramount. So just have a big breakfast. And then just cycle as fast as I could for two hours. You know, I didn't then– just get off the bike for 30 minutes and have food and water and then I'm back on the bike. I was disciplined in my time into 30 minutes, 30 minutes and then chat to someone or the llama you know, he was like, ‘Back on the bike’.
Lisa: Okay.
Dean: That creepage thing gets bigger. And then it was just, look at the next two hours. Look at the next stage. I didn't look at the afternoon, didn’t look at the next day. And before you've done it, you've done a day, you've done a week, you've done a world record. And so that's how I did it. So I was just doing four training rides a day, I wasn't doing a world record.
Lisa: I love it. And you just chunked it down into bite sized pieces that you could make–
Dean: That you can manage. And then I– you see people when they do that– a lot of people do their challenges in the lab. Well, you know, 10 miles behind today, you know what, I'll catch you out tomorrow, but you don't know what's gonna happen tomorrow. You could have another bad day and then be 20 to 30 miles behind. So for me, to be in the right headspace, mentally, I made sure I hit my targets or I was ahead of targets. After that first week, I was 39 miles behind target. From then on, I was way ahead. So I was in a good headspace at the end of the day, knowing that I was where I should be. Because as you probably accounted with your New Zealand, when you know that you've set a target and you're not– may not get there. You can start messing–
Lisa: I did, yeah. Yeah, it does. Yep.
Dean: So for me, I always say to people, ‘Just stay on the bike or do those– run an extra two or three, just hit the target you set for the day because you, mentally you're going to be in the better.’
Lisa: You can get that nice dopamine hit, that neurotransmitter dopamine, it gives you that little reward and that motivates you to do the next round and keeps you going.
Dean: You know, next morning you know you're not right, I've got to do 30 miles before, your way should be all ahead.
Lisa: Overwhelming you away when you're certain to go backwards. It's yeah, I found that brilliant.
Dean: And then I used to trick myself in the fact that, or give myself a treat, so I had like four stages for South– North America we'll talk in a minute, that’s a different way of psyching, and but for South America because of the security issues, you know, I had a support team and a documentary team and we were very much risk averse, more risk averse than myself. We stay on but I had to consider their welfare. And so we were saying– I'd say go from first light to last light. So that was my depth. That was my cycling period. And the– sorry yeah, I broke it into four stages. So in the morning was fine because I just had a breakfast. So the first two hours, I'd be able to gauge how long I would be on the bike for the day. Because unlike when other people go for bike rides at home, they'll go for a ride and they'll do a loop and they'll come home. So at some point they'll have a headwind or a tailwind or a side wind. But on this ride, if I had a headwind, it was all day. So that would really gauge up to the rest of the day. So that was the first stage. The second stage I had lunch to look forward to. And the third stage– sorry, the fourth stage. I had the end of day to look forward to. The third stage I had nothing to look forward to. So I would make sure– so my look forward was a can of Coke or an ice cream. Yeah, just something simple. And something to look forward to after the two hours.
Lisa: Yeah, let's get reward thing. You just need it little, ‘Yeah, I’m going for something.’
Dean: ‘They’ll arrive in, oh, just another two hours after that.’
LisA: I'd find that sometimes my reward, and this is getting like pretty sad like, yeah, ‘I'm gonna be allowed to go to the toilet,’ you know, like, ‘I'm gonna have a wee’. Like shit! That’s pretty, pretty shit when you actually, when that's your reward.
Dean: It's probably looking with a bit more–
Lisa: What the hell. And so, you know, because I watched the little short. Can people watch the documentary? Is it out yet? is it available?
Dean: No. So we've got the footage, we've got all the footage together. We– the sort of plan is maybe because we're talking about the next challenge shortly here, rolling onto that and doing a double. And they do it through a series of them. Where we were sitting on that, which is good. But yeah, I took, you know, a broader South America record, which is great. From the cycling perspective, you know, it was a great decision going south-north. From a logistics perspective, it wasn't. We're having to change vehicles in every country in South America to slow me up. So we bought an RV and a 4x4, which was going to get shipped from Fort Lauderdale to Panama. And that would then take us all the way to Alaska, because I had to fly from Colombia to Panama, there’s a Darién gap, which you can't cross. This is the only bit you have to fly. And I was in Ecuador, two weeks before my wife Alana rang me, told me, the vehicles hadn't been loaded on the container in Florida. So my wife, my PA, and a couple my friends, I think it forced them, they flew out and they drove the vehicles 4000 miles in eight days from Florida through Mexico all the way from Central America to Panama.
Lisa: This location.
Dean: So when I broke the record in the morning, flew across, they came in an hour late and handed over the keys. So that then really helped us for the second part of the challenge. And I got to North America on day 70. And I was 14 days ahead of that. Perfect, you know? Okay, you know, i can take the foot off the gas, or I can have a day's rest here or there. Then my wife kept ringing me and you know, she's very good in keeping all those distractions away from me. So my initial thought was the children, or something wrong with the kids. And then she told me we've been kindly invited to Harry and Megan's wedding. Changed the dynamics completely of the challenge. So you get home, I had to be finished by day 102, which is 15 days ahead of the challenge. So going into the challenge, going into the phone call, I was 14 days ahead. 10 minutes later, I'm now a day behind.
Lisa: Oh my God.
Dean: It doesn’t matter what you've done, it's been taken from you. So yeah, mixed, mixed emotion cycling off from that phone call.
Lisa: Yeah, like excited for the wedding. Shit! I’ve got to go faster.
Dean: And then when I got to Lubbock in Texas next day, we have 60 mile an hour winds and tornadoes, so I was stuck for another 24 hours. So I was now two days behind and there was an app on your phone called Windy TV. I don't know if you've come across it. It gives you the strength and direction of the winds every hour for the next two weeks. But 95% accurate real time I stepped away from the challenge when looking at Windy TV, but unlike South America when I sit outside first light, last light, in North America we had the luxury of security. Cycle at night. So I took advantage of that and I just played. To get out at Lubbock, I just cycled 340 miles in 36 hours to miss the next weather window coming in and just play chess with Mother Nature through North America. I had 17 days planned, and I cycled in 11 and a half days in Canada. We also use it to my advantage: I picked up a tailwind in Cheyenne in Wyoming and did 260 miles in 11 hours and 10,000 feet of climbing because I had a 50 mile an hour tailwind.
Lisa: And some luck and some–
Dean: Yeah exactly. Though it’s not about having a plan but having to change the plan to the situation on the ground and then I got a week outside and I was that, right? This will record smashed. I'll be back in time for this wedding unless I get eaten by a grizzly; we’re in Canada and Alaska. And then I was made aware about this professional cyclist who's got three other endurance world records. He's about 26 years old, sponsored by old Red Bull, all the brands, and he come out on social media that day and said that he was going to do the Pan-American Highway in August and be the first man to do 100 days. Dynamic’s completely for me so I just cycled. You know, every time I thought I hit my objective, my objective then kept moving. So I am, I cycle with– for 22 hours in the last 30 hours in minus 18 to come in maybe nine days, 12 hours and 56 minutes. So it wasn't the original plan. It was so fast. Yeah. And I couldn't tell anyone I've been invited to the wedding. You can see friends comment that, ‘He's picked this right up, you know, he's now– he's going,’ and people said, ‘He's rushing back for his mate’s wedding.’ I couldn't tell them. Yeah, so I just had to do it. But my family were in line and the kids had flown into Prudhoe Bay, which is an oil field on the top of the Arctic Ocean. They'd come in with all these oil workers. They’d never seen kids there, so I knew they were there at the end. So that was that final bit of motivation.
Lisa: Oh yeah. And when you're in that last spurt before the thing, it's like, let’s just get this shit done. Get over the damn line.
Dean: Like the last day, last two days, I had 250 miles to do. And I thought well, I'll do 150 miles a day. I mean, and this leaves me 100 miles in the last day. And I'm well under the 100 days. So I did the first 50 miles and got to this roadblock at noon. And they were at, ‘No, you can't pass until eight o'clock tonight.’ So they took eight hours off my streak. So I got into the RV. And again, I just put pen to paper even on the last day. But thankfully because it landed at midnight sun, it doesn't get dark. And I said, ‘Well, it's eight o'clock tonight, I will cycle until I get there.’ And I cycled at seven o'clock the next evening. But doing about eight, nine mile an hour because the winds were so strong. I was taking in coffee every couple of hours to stay hydrated. So even to the very last day, the plan to get–
Lisa: That’s insane.
Dean: So yeah, we crossed the line, you know, from any cyclists out there, you know, it worked out 99 days. So ninety– five days off. Three to get where you’re into and two logistics. There's 94 days of cycling, which is 147 miles a day. And I burned– I lost 12 kilos in weight. And the app speed was 16.8 mile an hour, which is fast because it was just short, sharp sessions. And more and more impressively was the money we raised. We raised over $1.2 million, or ₤900,000.
Lisa: You’re kidding me! That is insane.
Dean: Mental. Yeah.
Lisa: Congratulations.
Dean: That was through corporate donors and sponsors. And I might seem like those guys, showing no emotion, they like, see people suffering, with their hands in their pockets. But for me, I was trying to promote, like the unrelenting pursuit of excellence if you're going to do something you do it to the best of your ability. So me crying on the camera wasn't gonna happen.
Lisa: There was a few tantrums on there, right?
Dean: But that was it, yeah. So I'd never looked, you know, we couldn't– we came back two days later, we had the royal wedding was sort of then for me, overshadowed everything I did you know, all the plan was like, ‘How was the wedding?’ I was that, ‘Really? I'm just–’
Lisa: That's a bit sad really, isn't it?
Dean: I wish I'd had a bit of time to sort of absorb what I've done and achieved. You know, I was still just getting used to being with my family. Never mind–
Lisa: Harry and Megan they kind of waited another week for you to get your shit together.
Dean: No press. No revenues. No ads, you know, we talked about, you know, as well, but you have depression when you come back, when things taper things like that. You know, for me, I had two highs in one week. And then it was like, pfft! We had a big fundraiser six weeks later and Harry came, you know, did a Q&A session on stage and we raised it.
Lisa: Oh, wow.
Dean: And that was my sort of short-term focus after the bike ride. You know, I was supposed to taper my training and I did a 10-mile bike ride to the coffee shop. And you know, when I came back, I'm very objective. I need to have a target or something to go for. So for, just to go cycling 10 miles wasn't– on the way back then these cyclists spotted me. I just needed to put on my PB for that strays, I knew I wasn't actually going to be taping. So I just put the bike in the garage.
Lisa: It's really either, like, if we can just touch on the mental health side of it afterwards. Because, that's something that I've found after every big thing that I've done, especially when it's been overseas environment and some out of place or something. You come back and you're like, you come back to your family, especially when your family not involved, and then like everybody else is just going about their normal business and you're like, just like, ‘Do you know what I just experienced?’ And everyone's like, ‘Oh, that's nice, darling.’ And you might, you know, that's really– I found that quite devastating at times, when your family just didn't get in, you feel like a fish out of water.
So I have this bit of a crisis of luck with– and you’re saying you also have a crisis of like, ‘W8hat is my, what is my role in life?’ Like when you got out of the army, it's like, ‘Well hang on, my whole bloody safety net of who the heck I am and the framework that I built is just suddenly been taken from me. Now, what the heck I am?’ And then you've gone and become this adventure athlete and doing this crazy sort of stuff. So you've filled that, that void, if you like, and in like, with my mum's story, now with the same book name that we've got, like that was Relentless it was– I was suddenly thrown into this new world of like, I'm no longer an F, you know, I couldn't be a full time more I was. I was always working, but I was an athlete at the same time.
And now it was just mum, you know, like, full bore to rehabilitate her or she's going to die. So, but you adapt. Everything becomes the ability of the human mind and body, you go through a transition phase, but then you learn to adapt. And some, you know, for a couple of years, I found it hard. It's like, ‘Who the heck am I if I'm not that anymore, and I'm not doing that anymore and I’m not doing that? But you have other priorities. You've got kids now and stuff, and you don't want to be in dangerous situations involving–
Dean: Yeah, I was probably used to that. Because at the time in the military, you know, when we were, it was the same sort of situation, you'd be away on tour, and you come back, and everyone's just going back there to their normal day to day business. And it's– there's no point in trying to talk. So I was used to that anyway, from the military, and in the private security. I think we're, um, I'm lucky with Alana and the kids is that they get fully immersed in it. They're part of that project as well, you know. Our daughter cut her hair, she had really long hair, cut her hair and raised ₤1000 for the charity. So they really go all in everything. Alana does the campaign and, and the fundraising. So it's not me and then the family, coming back to the family. They're in that with me. So I think I'm very lucky.
Lisa: You are pretty lucky, I reckon, with your family, you've got a pretty good combo with your wife. And–
Dean: Then I believe that anyone, and I don't mean to sound arrogant, anyone can break a world record if you take away all those distractions, the mortgage, and things like that. And then who's looking after the kids who's picking the kids up from the school and all you've got to concentrate on is your–
Lisa: I totally hear you, because I think that's the fix, the actual key to it, you know. when you've got the luxury and it is a luxury now not having that luxury to be able to be a you know, selfish athlete, who can do what, and can focus fully. And then you can, of course you can do crazy, amazing things. Unfortunately, life does come and chuck, you know, curveballs at you. And you have to go with the flow you know, but it doesn't negate what I've decided too is that I’m reaching an age now, you know, like my body started to break the pieces by about 48 things have gone pear-shaped. Is that you know, it doesn't negate what you did. And you know, because you know you sort of have this mentality ‘I’m a has-been I've been there, done it’. No, it's just like I could use a new stage in your life. And what is the challenge now? And there are some other big challenges that you're on. And you've got a big– speaking of big challenges, you've got some other crazy mission coming up. Tell us about that.
Dean: So my unique selling point in the athlete world is I take a sport or discipline I've never done before. So, you know, we're going to– we’re actually going back slightly when we- when our sponsored marketing team did the SWOT analysis on the lockdown. Right?
Lisa: There's mum ringing in the middle of my bloody podcast.
Dean: We’ll end this. The strengths, the weaknesses, the opportunities, and threats. And the only weakness it came out was my arrogance towards the cycling community. But, you know, thankfully, no one ever said that, you know, but I took that as a strength. You know, it's that fire in the belly to say, ‘Well, you know, that's what they think then’. But no, look, no one ever said that innovation was good. But then, you know, now, I've enjoyed cycling. Now I'm going to be arrogant towards the kayaking community. I just say that back. The kayaking community really, really great in coming around on this challenge. So I’ve cycled the world's longest road. The plan is now, or the plan is next year, first of February, I set off, is to kayak the world's longest river from source to sea, from Rwanda to Egypt, which has never been done before as in paddled from one end to the other. There’s been stages, but never completely. So 4,280 miles is that long. But unlike the last challenge which was promoting mental health, you know, will still always be an ambassador and push the importance of physical activity and mental health. You know, this one, my wife's very passionate on modern slavery, human trafficking and–
Lisa: Yeah, wow.
Dean: –doing a lot in that area. But I didn't want to channel myself down just that one topic. So I've left it open. And so we're going to talk about poverty, pollution, sustainability, conservation.
Lisa: Amazing.
Dean: Six-episode documentary, and really, for me, promote Africa. I, we talked about the security industry and how people see a continent from what they see on the TV. For me, it's my favorite continent. I love Africa. I know the people don't have two coins to rub together, but they're probably the most friendliest, happiest, and hospitable people.
Lisa: Totally.
Dean: I really want to promote that as well. And unlike the bike ride, which is mostly physical this is, you know, there's a lot more skill involved in this. You know, it’s everything from flatwater to grade six waterfalls.
Lisa: Yeah, isn't there some big waterfalls and stuff?
Dean: You got crocodiles, you got hippos, you got civil war in South Sudan. So it's gonna, it's gonna have it's gonna have some issues along the way.
Lisa: You're going to hit some more adventures, and I can't wait to hear about those. I have to actually connect you ahead on the podcast. Last week, a lady by the name of fellow countrywoman of yours, Laura Penhaul. And Laura is, she rode across the Pacific. And she's a bit like you. She didn't, she never rode before, when she took on this challenge. So she did it with three other ladies, she got a team together. You have to have a listen. I'd love to connect you guys because she might get I mean, it's a different rowing, quaking, but you know, pretty, pretty phenomenal. Lady is–
Dean: Amazing. Yeah, no, please do. Yeah, but I've left this one open if anyone wants to come join me at any stage, more than welcome. You know, we approached Guinness about being a world record and you know, Guinness, no one's ever done it before. So they just took the Amazon guidelines and dropped it on this, but Amazon's a different river. Amazon's quite flat and they said ‘Oh, you're allowed to use one boat.’ But if that was the case, you’re carrying the boat about halfway around so we then changed it to self propelled by paddle which means I can use either a ocean ski, a creek boat, or a raft. But actually then, in reflection, looking at you know, when you do Guinness World Records, there's so many guidelines you need to adhere to. Which is fine when you're cycling on a road or something. When you're paddling the river which has never been done before. I mean, there's Civil War, there's animals that are gonna eat you and things that, you don't want to be– you're gonna have to make some key decisions and you don't want your decisions to be blurred because you've got to stick to these guidelines. So actually, we just push that out and said ‘Well, we're not going to do it for world record.’ Not at first anyway. We'll collect the data, but I don't want that to sort of hinge long decision.
Lisa: And I think it stands on its own, Guinness World Record or not, you know, like that's not– I don't know, it's not important. This is about the actual beast you're gonna go on this crazy adventure.
Dean: Yeah.
Lisa: So we can– do you know– I'm you know– I'm just absolutely fascinated by your mindset and the way that you approach things and all the stuff that you do and I'd love to have you on at another stage in the future. And your wife. Because I think you need a double episode to find out what the hell makes a lady like that tick as well. But where can people follow you, get involved with your project, the next one that you've got coming out, your book, etcetera?
Dean: So I'm obviously on social media. You know, social media for me was a taboo when I did the last challenge because Special Forces. But I now understand it’s a platform where you need to be sort of promoting. So I am on Instagram as @deanstott and then I am on Twitter @DeanStottSBS, and I’m on Facebook. And so I'll start, you know later on in the year you will start seeing posts of me training and you know, talking about my nutrition and things I didn't really do before because I didn't think people were interested in that, and in the mindsets, we add that. And then the website www.deanstott.com.
Lisa: Dean Stott with two T’s.
Dean: We've got the frogman on there and then you can then– and we're going to be posting up there as well. You can buy the book from there or you can get the book from Amazon or audio.
Lisa: And it's got the same title as mine so buy both Relentless books, people, when you're on Amazon or wherever the heck you are, both buy Relentless. Buy Dean Stott’s one and my one, that would be really, really good. Dean, is there any last words that you want to share like to people out there listening, who are just over– like to look at someone like you and they just go, ‘Well, you know, he's amazing and I could never be like that.’ What's your words to them?
Dean: Yeah, you know, I always say don't compare yourself to other people. You know, the problem you have nowadays is social media and the people like, ‘Well, I can't do that’, you know, well you’re not that person. You're unique. And you know, I did it when I was doing the cycling. People out there, ‘Look at Mark Beaumont.’ I'm not Mark Beaumont and things like that. So don't worry about what other people are doing. Just focus on yourself. You know, I always say anticipation is worse than participation.
Lisa: Yeah, I love that. I've quoted that from you.
Dean: A lot of people will tell you why they can't do it. And, you know, just block out those out. And just take it in bite sizes, what I say. You know, if you're gonna, for example, a marathon 26 miles. You wouldn't go try and do 26 miles, you probably wouldn't achieve it. I mean, you'd be so deflated and your self-esteem is– but just set yourself a manageable target: five kilometers, hit that and then you just grow from there.
Lisa: Yeah. There's some fabulous advice. Dean, thank you so much for your time today. You're an absolute superstar. I, you know, or have your, you know what you've done. And thanks for, you know, raising so much money for charities and doing good in the world and being a positive force out there in the world. I think it's really, really important. So thanks.
Dean: Thank you. You’re more than welcome to come and join me anytime on the now.
Lisa: Oh, man. Now I would love to do that. Mum might have something to say.
That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate, review, and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.
The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.
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'I use the modalities of Japanese psychology and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and I also throw in a bit of Stoicism as well. Because all three of those modalities are just so intertwined. And it's just what I find incredible is what's relevant today is what was relevant back 2000 years ago.'
‘I then looked at life coaching, and it kind of didn't really resonate with me, then by the time I kind of was, you know, trying to figure out what direction I was going to go that my background is completely different.'
'I mean, we're all individuals. And we're productive, you know, from when we are born right up to our experiences, right up until this present moment.'
'But what makes us unique is that we're able to observe our thoughts. And if we can create that space between us and our thoughts, we can look at that thought more in an analytical way rather than in an emotional way.'
'So that's sort of the acceptance part of what's in our control, what's not in our control, and the big one is those thoughts and emotions.'
'Well, I mean, what other people think is a huge one for the majority of my clients, it is the number one fear if you want to call it or or anxiety or worry is what others think of them.'
'But it's that sort of everyday anxiety that we feel. And it's this, sort of focus on the discomfort and wanting to get rid of it. And when that's intense, this is not easy.'
Carly Taylor is a certified nutritionist, health trainer and personal coach. She is also a qualified Japanese Psychology therapist who applies Morita therapy and Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT).
She shares her tools and learnings through her Mindset Coaching. As a guarantee to her clients, Carly also uses the tools she teaches in her coaching sessions. Through her coaching, she helps people change their mindset and break barriers that used to hold them back. As a result, her clients develop skills and achieve success despite their situations.
With her passionate approach towards research, she continues to learn about new practices and tools to navigate life. Along with her husband, Paul, Carly also helps groups of people achieve peak performance through the Mind, Body, Brain Performance Institute.
If you want to learn more about Carly and her coaching approach, you can visit her website or Instagram.
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To pushing the limits,
Lisa
Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential. With your host, Lisa Tamati. Brought to you by lisatamati.com.
Lisa Tamati: Welcome back, everybody to Pushing the Limits. And this week, I have the lovely Carly Taylor to guest. Carly is the wife of Paul Taylor, who was also recently on this program, and who I absolutely loved. The amazing woman who is with Paul is Carly Taylor. Now Carly is an ACT therapist and a Morita psychology therapist. So what the heck is that all about, you might be thinking. Well, she's somebody that helps you if you have problems with anxiety, with depression, with overthinking, all of those things that many of us really deal with. So today's episode is all around giving you the tools to help with all those from the point of view of ACT therapy or Acceptance Commitment Therapy, as well as the Japanese psychology, Morita therapy. Now, Carly is also a qualified nutritionist, a certified personal trainer, and a certified health coach. She brings over 10 years’ experience in the area of behavior change. So I'm really hopeful that you're going to enjoy this episode with Carly. She's a very lovely lady, and she has a lot to give you. So enjoy that.
Before we head over to the show, make sure that you check out our epigenetics program. This is our flagship program that we use as a framework for all people that we're doing health coaching with, the people that we're doing running coaching with. And it's really helping you optimise your genes. So learning about what your genes are all about, who you are specifically, unique you, and then optimising you. So in all areas, we're looking at mood and behavior, we're looking at your dominant hormones. We look at the career path that may be right for you, we look at the way your brain thinks, at what time of the day you should be doing different activities. We're also, of course, looking at exercise and nutrition specific to your gene. So if you want to find out more about that program, head on over to lisatamati.com, hit the ‘Work With Us’ button, and you'll see our Peak Epigenetics program. Come and find out all about it, or drop me a line at support@lisatamati.com, and we'd love to help you with it. We do run webinars so we can send you some information on it. It takes a little bit to get your head around, but I tell you this is the future of personalised health. No longer is it a one size fits all approach. This is all specific to you. It's very scientific and very evidenced-based. So I hope you'll come and join us on that program. We've taken literally now hundreds and hundreds of people through this program, and it gives us fantastic results. We also have a course, our online run training system that's personalised, customised to your specific goals at runninghotcoaching.com. Find out all about the package and what's involved there. This is not, by no means, just for elite athletes. I don't want people to think that it's just for ultra-marathon runners or just for people that are doing crazy adventures. This is for you. If you're just getting off the couch, if you're doing your first K. It's also for you if you are doing your hundredth marathon, ultra-marathon or marathon. So find out all about that at runninghotcoaching.com. Right now, over to the show with the lovely Carly Taylor.
Hi, everyone, and welcome to Pushing the Limits. It's fantastic to have you back with me again. Today, I have the lovely Carly Taylor with me. Welcome to the show, Carly, it's fantastic to have you.
Carly Taylor: Oh, thanks for having me. It's good to be here.
Lisa: Super excited. Carly is the famous wife of Paul Taylor, who I've had recently on my podcast too, and who I really connected with. I think he's an absolute legend, your husband. What he's doing is absolutely—I think he's probably as crazy as me, if not worse.
Carly: And he’s passionate, I think.
Lisa: And is passionate, and silly, and crazy. So I thought, ‘Who is this amazing woman that is with Paul Taylor? Because she'd have to be probably something special.’ I started researching into what you do. And I thought, ‘Oh, I have to have you on the show as well.’ So welcome, Carly. It's really exciting to have you. Today, we're going to talk about Morita therapy, and ACT therapy. I'll let you explain what all that is and give us a bit of your background. But can you just tell us who you are, where you're from, and all that sort of jazz?
Carly: I do one-on-one coaching. I'm a mindset coach, but with a bit of a twist because I use the modalities of Japanese psychology, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and I also throw in a bit of Stoicism as well. Because all three of those modalities are just so intertwined. It's just—what I find incredible is what's relevant today is what was relevant back 2,000 years ago, and also in the Eastern, in the Japanese psychology as well. So with Morita—so the Japanese psychology there were three components to it. So it’s Morita therapy, which is also known as the Psychology of Action. Which is kind of unusual because you kind of think of Eastern philosophy and what you think of meditation and contemplation and all that sort of stuff. But Morita therapy is very much about purpose and action. Then there's Naikan, which is the self-reflection exercise that you can do, and then Kaizen as well, which is that sort of incremental things that you can do to improve over time. But my main focus is Morita therapy.
Lisa: So, how did you get into this? What was your background before you got into? How did you get into mindset coaching? What's your personal story?
Carly: It’s really evolved. I've always been someone who likes helping people. Over the years, I was kind of the go-to whenever friends had problems, and I looked at—
Lisa: The shoulder to cry on.
Carly: Yeah, exactly. I was always the shoulder. But, I started off looking into life coaching. I did when we're in Scotland, I did voluntary work with ChildLine Scotland. That was such a brilliant organisation, and they have really good training. So I kind of started my training with that, and counseling over the phone with young people. I really got a lot out of it. I then looked at life coaching and it kind of didn't really resonate with me. Then by the time I was trying to figure out what direction I was going to go - my background is completely different; my background is music and advertising - so I kind of did it and adapted then and tried to sort of play to my strengths, I guess. Had kids, and so, my focus was on the kids. Paul was building his business and doing a lot of traveling, doing a lot of extra educational stuff, just continually learning. And I was doing that, sort of in the background as well, but not with the intensity that he was doing because I was with the kids.
And then he was listening to the Art of Manliness podcast. Greg Krech, who is a Morita therapy expert, was on and talking about the Psychology of Action. Paul was just like ‘Oh, my God, this guy is amazing and so aligned with the stuff that we're doing,’ and looked into it a bit further. We worked out that he did this certification course over in the States. And Paul just said to me, ‘Right, it's your turn.’ It's like, ‘This is all you. If you don't do it, I'll do it, then it's your turn.’ So I was way out of my comfort zone. First time I left the kids, and that traveled over to Vermont, in the States. Did a 10-day residential component of the certification, and then came back, and then studied for a year and a half. That's how I got into it. It really, that 10 days at the ToDo Institute really completely changed my life. It was the first thing. Jumping to one of the components of Morita therapy is around attention and where your attention is. One of the first things Greg said in the course was, ‘Your life is not based on your life. Your life is based on what you pay attention to’. And I was just like, ‘Well, that's an—,’ and it kind of just took it from there. And then when I got back, I started just slowly getting clients with the Japanese psychology, and then I discovered ACT, which is Acceptance Commitment Therapy, which was started by Steven Hayes in the 1980s. It is more of a modern approach, but same principles. It's Japanese psychology. So I combined both of them, and I just loved them, and I use the tools myself every day.
Lisa: And you've turned it into the Carly therapy.
Carly: Yes, Carly therapy.
Lisa: Yeah. Because you do—you take, I do this too. Like bits of this, and a bit of that, and a bit of like your own recipe or what resonates with you. What you find is working and so—
Carly: Yeah, and what I actually love about it is it's not just about, it was started by Shoma Morita who was the Japanese psychiatrist in 1920. He started it for patients with anxiety, a form of neurosis. It started as an in-patient program. He had quite a strict protocol that they went through. But what I love is that you can apply these principles into just your daily life. So it's not just about emotional well-being. it's about living fully every day using these principles.
Lisa: So let's dive into it a little bit then. If someone comes to you with anxiety, depression, something like that, where would you start with them? So like we can—what I want to get to is how do we pull out some of the tools and some of the learnings that some people can take some value away from this conversation today? So where would you start? What's this type of thing that you're looking at? What sort of tools and processes do you go through?
Carly: One of the first exercises that I will do with them is to look at their life and identify what's in their control, and not what is not within their control. It's a really interesting exercise, because it gets the thinking process going. Because that list of what's not in your control becomes very, very long. And the things that are within your control is actually quite short. So you look at the things that aren't in your control, the obvious ones, like the weather, COVID, a lot of political decisions, that sort of stuff. But you drill it down, and you can't control what other people think. You can't control what other people think of you. You can certainly influence it, but you can't control it - what they do, what they say, how they behave. And you cannot control what you think, or the thoughts that come into your head.
Lisa: The automatic sort of thoughts that jump out of your head.
Carly: Yeah, the automatic thoughts and the automatic emotion that comes up. Of course, once those thoughts pop up, you can reframe and do all that sort of stuff, or positive affirmations, all that, all those sorts of things. But as soon as that thought pops up into your head, that's beyond your control. We have between 70 and 80 thousand thoughts per day.
Lisa: Yeah apparently. This is crazy! We’re just thought machines! We are just churning these things out all the time. Dr. Daniel Amen, who I follow, he talks about ANTs, automatic negative thoughts. And where do you think there's this, you’re saying that we're not in control of those, they're just coming through. Are they coming through from our programming or, subconsciously, or what?
Carly: Yeah, I mean, we're all individuals. And we're productive from when we are born right up to our experiences, right up until this present moment. But it's also good to have an understanding of how the mind works because those automatic negative thoughts, if we didn't, as humans, have a negative bias, we wouldn't see the human race today. So, back in caveman days, you probably heard this before, it's like, we had to have anxiety. We had to have that negative skew because otherwise we were going to get eaten by a saber toothed tiger. But in our modern world, it's those negative thoughts. It's like, ‘What's our boss thinking of us? So why do we get that many likes on our Instagram posts?’ It's not helpful. A lot of the stuff right now that's causing those negative thoughts. It’s not helpful for us to live fully. So in Morita therapy, the first step is the acceptance. First of all, it's awareness of thoughts. And that's where it's good to use that metacognition of observing your thoughts and something. So I love that I'm constantly observing my thoughts and I’m like, ‘Oh, there it is again’.
Lisa: Because I first heard that from Craig Harper, our mutual friend at the You Project. I've been using that a heck of a lot since I heard that. When you step outside your house, when you watch yourself, as if you were above, as if I was above looking down my spirit self or whatever you want to call it. Looking at my brain. Just tuning out this shit, basically. Bringing forth this. And then looking at it and go, ‘Hang on. Is it good? Is it serving me right now?’
Carly: Exactly. And that's the question to ask. It's like, if you can create space, because then Craig would have talked about the different cells and we are not our thoughts, and we're not our anxiety. So there's a part of us, as humans, animals can't do this, but what makes us unique is that we're able to observe our thoughts. And if we can create that space between us and our thoughts, we can look at that thought more in an analytical way, rather than in an emotional way. It's not about whether that thought is right or wrong. It's whether it's helpful.
Lisa: Yeah. And something right now.
Carly: Yeah, exactly. That's sort of the acceptance part of what's in our control, what's not in our control. The big one is those thoughts and emotions. And then have been aware of creating that space and observing them, that's kind of the first step. Any act, we call that diffusion or unhooking. When we get hooked by our thoughts, it's almost like they're pushing us around, and then they start dictating what we do without necessarily taking us towards the person that we really want to be. So if we can observe them and unhook from them, then that gives us that space to choose our behavior, and choose it aligned with our values or our purpose and takes us towards the person that we want to be.
Lisa: That's brilliant. So it's really getting the executive functioning part of our brain, our prefrontal cortex talking to our amygdala more or being more connected to them. This frontal area of the brain that only humans have really developed, and in some primates have to a certain degree. But because a lot of us go around being hijacked by our amygdala, all the time. So that's the reptilian part of the brain that’s sort of a more primitive part of the brain, that is responding very, very quickly, quicker than the prefrontal cortex, to dangers in your environment, or negative things happening in the environment. Was it here as a survival mechanism? Talking about this the other day, and I said, how fast my amygdala switches on when something in my environment happens? Say, someone cuts me off in traffic. Those automatic thoughts that come out from the amygdala before I switched my logical adult brain on, ‘I'm going to punch that dude in the face’.
Carly: Thank goodness, your prefrontal cortex switches in then and says, ‘Don't do that!’
Lisa: But when I was younger, I was less able to do that. And I was very fiery, very angry. Now as I've gotten older and understand that sort of process, I can go, ‘Okay, come on, take a couple of deep exhales here, and we're going to calm ourselves down and get a grip of it’. But it's also a very protective thing. Sometimes I catch a glass that's falling off the table before I've even registered it with my prefrontal cortex. And that’s also your reaction speed. Your amygdala is working at, I don't know what it is, thousands of a second faster than this. And so you're catching things. It can be a very positive thing, but it can also be - our jails and our justice system are full of people whose amygdala is more dominant and more able to control. And so they've done things in the spur of the moment without getting political on it, but it is something that we need to practice and work on. And it's something that you as a parent would know that the younger the child is, the less control that they have up there. So they just do whatever their emotional brain tells them to do - scream, yell, kick, whatever. As we get older, we learn to handle a bit more. But there's still this disconnect going on.
Carly: Yeah, our brains aren't fully developed until the age of 25. But, you look at that, and there's decisions being made by young people that are going to affect them for the rest of their life, and that their brains aren't fully developed to be able to make those long-term decisions. So, it's really interesting.
Lisa: So that's the awareness and stepping out and unhooking as you said, or diffusion, and looking at yourself. So that's the first thing that you can do. And looking at what is in your control and what is not in your control. So how do you approach the stuff that's not in your control, that makes you fearful, for example?
Carly: What other people think is a huge one. To the majority of my clients, it is the number one fear, if you want to call it anxiety or worry. It is what others think of them. Even that is a very normal thing. So the next step is about acceptance. It's not acceptance in a passive way, but it's an acceptance of what is a natural part of the human experience. Wiring what people think is actually quite normal because back when we were in a tribal setting, we had to care what others thought. We had to know that we were adding value to the tribe, and the survival of the tribe. Otherwise, we'd get kicked out. So it's just that now, there's too many people. We have so many connections. Not only our physical connection with people, but also through social media. So it's almost like this connection overdrive that we have, and this worry about what others think, this worry about the posts that young people post on social media, their appearance, and all that sort of stuff. So I guess I approach that, first of all, with my clients that this is just a natural part of being human. That looking at that thought of if they're worried about what somebody is thinking of them. Looking at that is not right or wrong. But is it helpful? If it's not helpful, then do that by observing self. Defuse or unhook from it. Create that space, and then redirect attention into what needs to be done in that moment. Acceptance isn't about that passive, “I’ve got to put up with it.” It's not about tolerating anything, but it's about making room for it, and making room for those thoughts and those emotions that come up. And using tools like the breath and exercise that manage it. But I think the main thing is about discomfort tolerance levels, because we don't, and I know you would talk about comfort zones a lot.
So Morita, he believed that in radiotherapy there were two sets of opposing forces. One was a desire to live fully, and the other one was this desire to be secure and comfortable. So they're opposing each other. But as you would know, any success, like all my achievements in my life has involved some level of discomfort. And sometimes we're willing to feel that discomfort. Even on your wedding day, you feel nervous and everything, but you still get married. But it's that everyday anxiety that we feel. It's this focus on the discomfort and wanting to get rid of it. And when that's intense, this is not easy. I don't want to lighten this because I know that these intense feelings can be quite debilitating to people. But using these tools, you make room for it, make space around it, and be able to do what's important to you, coexisting, bringing that discomfort with you, in the hope that it's going to turn down like the intensity. It's a bit like a radio playing in the background. If the radio is really loud, it's taking your attention, it's hard to focus. But using these tools of diffusing or unhooking, it's, slowly the radio just starts to turn down. And it might just be a little murmur in the background.
Lisa: And hanging with that tension long enough, so stepping, being brave enough to take something on. Say a challenge - you're going to America to learn this thing a bit. You're leaving your kids behind, and your husband behind, you're off to this new place. And you're like, ‘What the hell am I doing?’ All that sort of stuff. Me and my life going off to run like in the Himalayas, or the Sahara, and absolutely shitting myself. And it sounded good while he was signing up, and you'd had a glass of wine. And now, you’re like, ‘What am I doing? I'm in this so deep, there's no way out now, so I have to go through’.
So I know that tension very, very well. And I know that those are the times when the growth happens, isn't it? When you're pushing, but you are also risking failure, you are risking being, and this is the sort of dichotomy, or how it's contradictory. We, as human beings, seek comfort. We seek safe because that is our DNA programming. But because we live in such comfortable societies with comfortable couches and comfortable Netflix's to watch in houses that we live in and cars that we drive, we don't ever get out of that comfort zone if we don't want to. We can have our food delivered to our door and order our clothes online. And we can be very, very insular if that's the way that we decide to live, but we are never going to grow in that state. We are never going to challenge, we're never going to fulfill our potential. And so when you talk to people, they all want to change. They all want to be epic. They all want to do like, ‘I wish I could be like you and run ultra-marathons, or run a business, or whatever the case may be.’ But nobody’s wrong. But a lot of people just are not willing to put up with the pain, the discomfort, the fear, the financial investment, the time investment, the hard yards, in order to reap those rewards. So how do you teach yourself to be a little bit tougher? A little bit of, ‘I'm going to do this. I'm scared anyway. But I'm doing it.’ How do you teach yourself that sort of toughness or resilience?
Carly: Because if you try and avoid or suppress those strong, intense emotions, it's going to affect your life. You're not going to be able to live fully by staying in that comfort zone. And I love what I want to do. It just reminded me of the cold shower thing, I have my current shower this morning. So we're running this eight-week course with Jonah. We might talk about it later. But part of that is this ritual of the cold shower. Now I don't particularly like the cold. And I like being comfortable as well. It's like being anxious or nervous, it's not a nice feeling to have. But what you can do is practice getting uncomfortable. So deliberate practice. And I think Paul called it discomfort harvesting or harvesting discomfort.
Lisa: That's what I should do, a PhD in the weekend.
Carly: There you go, we've got your PhD. Cold shower is such a good tool to get out of your comfort zone. Because you have total control at the end of your nice warm shower, which is nice and comfortable. You have control whether you turn that to cold and spend a minimum of 30 seconds under that cold water, being uncomfortable. And if you can't do that, then the likelihood of when something goes wrong, and these intense emotions come up, then the likelihood of you being able to handle that could be low if you can't even handle having a cold shower. Cold showers, as you know, they have huge benefits on the immune system, and even emotional well-being. Everything that comes from me and my experience of them. It is about getting out of my comfort zone. Because I need to practice that as well.
Lisa: We all do, all the time. This is the misconception, too, that you've done it. In my case, I had done one ultramarathon, therefore you're tough for the rest of your life. Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. This is something you need to use it or lose it. So that's why that daily ritual stuff is very important.
Carly: Absolutely. And you were never exonerated, we'll count until the day we die, we'll keep doing this stuff. Because we're human. And that's the acceptance part of it, it’s that life is hard. I loved Matthew McConaughey. That speech that he did for the students who are graduating. But one of the things he just said, ‘Life is hard’. There's nothing original in that, but it's just the way he said it. It's like you need to get used to it, you need to prepare for it. Because life as humans, we will not stay in this comfortable environment, something will happen, somebody will get sick, jobs will be lost. Just like COVID happened and businesses, it's like stuff happens to us. So what we can do, while things are going well, is put ourselves out of our comfort zone on just small things on a daily basis. And then when the shit hits the fan, we can really cope with it.
Lisa Tamati: And this just summed up my entire books, really, in a mouthful, because it is about scaring the crap out of yourself, pushing the limits, and finding what you can do. Not all the time. We've spoken about this before about rest and recovery times and coming back so that you can recover from that big thing you just took on. You can't just go back to back to back, scary big, awesome, huge things all the time, because that leads to burnout and PTSD and goodness knows what else. So it is about everything that I study in biology and psychology and all the areas that I study, it seems to be this flow, life loves this even flow, right from our nutrition. So eating the same thing all the time, always being on keto is not good. It's about this up and down. With biology, you want to have a little bit of this, and then you want to pull back, you want a little bit of cold. And when it comes to hermetic stressors, doing things like saunas, like cold showers, like training and exercise. If you do too much, you're going to—if you look at those four phases of stress, where you've got the alert phase, and then the resistance phase, and then the recovery or exhaustion phase. If you're going overtraining, you're not going to get there. You're not going to get that response, that compensation.
It's the same thing here. You want to be going flowing in and out of tough times, come back, recover, see how that went, then have another crack at something else in a different area of your life perhaps. And that this even flow of life is, if we just stay in the static, then we're actually going backwards. What really matters for me and the stuff that I do is when it comes to health. Because if you're not in this willingness to put up with things like cold showers and going training when you don't feel like it, and eating good food and trying to have these stable fundamental health habits and working on them, I'm not perfect and no one's perfect, but working on these things, you are going to pay the price with your life, your health. Yes, we're all going to die one day, but I hope that I will live a healthy long lifespan, a very long one. I want to have health for as long as I possibly can. And so by studying all this, by learning all this, you can actually, hopefully hinder the worst things happening. I mean, a lot of things, you can't prevent everything because like I said, some things are outside of our control. And we have to acknowledge that. But what can I do to up the odds, then I'm going to live long. Up the odds that I'm going to be healthy until the end. All of those types of things because the price, and I've seen this in my own life and in my own family, unfortunately, when they didn't acknowledge all those things along the way and then the big freight train came in, and then you're pushing the proverbial uphill.
Carly: There's a reflection exercise that I do with my clients. And it's, imagine that you're 80, and you're reflecting back on your life, but it but it's your life today. So you don't go back in the past. It's like you're reflecting back on your life today. And one of the questions is, what would you do differently? And it's a really powerful question, because it gets you to look at your life in a more analytical way and go, ‘Well, actually things like I’d exercise more, or I’d drink less’. Spending more time with your family is a huge one, that's usually the number one thing I would spend more time with my kids or it's more time with my family. And once you've got that list, you can look at that, and then you have the power today to choose those things moving forward. So if you project yourself into the future, reflect back, you then are able to almost design your life how you want to live from this point onwards.
Lisa: I've heard what people that are on their deathbed are thinking, what are the greatest regrets that they wish they had done. And it is things like that, it's not, I wish I'd worked more. I wish I’d earned more money. We need a certain amount of work. And we need a certain amount of money, all of these sorts of things. But what are your highest priorities, and then aligning your values and what you're doing to those priorities. And there really isn't a dynamic thing, it changes a little bit and your values and all the things change over time. But being in alignment with your greatest priorities now is something that we need to keep reevaluating, and are we on track for that? I'm talking to myself here, because I'm definitely a workaholic. And I want to, ‘Oh, that sounds like a great idea’. Write another book, do a PhD and whatever dreams and things that you've got. And then you're like, ‘Hmm, that's going to take me away from my family’. Early in my life, I wouldn't even have thought that I would have just been so excited about the thing. And now I've got to stop and think about those things. Because you realise now, I'm 52 and I'm running out of time to do the things that I want. And when you lose a loved one, like I recently lost my dad, that's a real rough. Because otherwise, when there's no major thing like that has happened to you yet, you’re just bumbling along and everything's okay. When I talk to my family members and stuff about my father, it's like, ‘I wish I'd taken him fishing more. I wish he had more time. I wish I'd learned from him’. And we're all wishing we had done this together. So it is that wake-up call that is like, how do you want to be thinking in the next 20 years then?
Carly: And that's kind of a silver lining thing as well, isn't it? Even though something as sad, and the loss of a loved one, that silver lining is that you can learn from that and go, ‘Well, I wish I'd done that.’ And then is there an opportunity now to do that with somebody who's here and with you? Do you know, I was thinking, one of the things that I've started doing consistently now— with life, the modern world, the way it is, and its rush, rush, rush, rush. And we're getting out there almost, a lot of us are on autopilot. And I know I was. Even with it's like, ‘Right, I'll do my exercise. I'll go to my CrossFit class or my exercise class, and then I'm going to work. And I’m doing this’. It's like, go, go, go, go, go. For me inputs, like emails and text messages and social media, everything's kind of input. It's overwhelming.
So what I started doing, and it's actually Craig Harper was on his podcast last year, and right at the end of it was before Christmas, I totally walked into this. He was like, ‘So what's something that you want to achieve in 2021?’ And I said, ‘I want to get up earlier’, because I thought I was funny, even though I was still getting up at 6:30. But I was just fine. I was just going straight into it. And so he sent me his 100-day challenge to get up at 5:30 each day. And what I did was I started this pre-input routine, I don't know, do you do this. So I get up, and there's no phone. Do not touch my phone. I don't have my phone in my room. It's uncharged in the kitchen. So don't go near it. Don't go near a computer. What I started doing is the first thing I do is, I journal. It's not a journal where I'm writing paragraphs of stuff. It's all dot points. But the first thing I do a metric. So I just say, the alarm went off at 5:30, got up at 5:45. Or maybe I did get up at 5:30. Or maybe I got up at 6:00, but I measure it. Over time, I've kind of been able to say: well, what influenced me whether I didn't get up or whether I did get up. Most of it is what I did the night before. The morning starts the night before. So you can see patterns there. But the big thing that I found is that it gives me silence. And I think silence is something that we're missing in today's world, because of all these inputs. If you can sit with silence, that's when you can really think about things, you can observe your thoughts. You can start being creative when ideas come up. So before any inputs or journal, I look at what my wins were yesterday, and really celebrate those. Have you heard BJ Fogg?
Lisa: Yeah, Tiny Habits.
Carly: Tiny Habits. So, he says to celebrate the small things, and you get that little dopamine hit. And dopamine is also the neurotransmitter of motivation. I will journal even micro moments that I've had with people outside in the community that I thought that was really, just like my barista. She makes me a great coffee, and she has a chat and tells me my hair looks nice. It's those sort of little things that I think we need to have more focus on, and to celebrate those sort of moments in our life, because otherwise, they just pass up. They’re just fleeting, and we’re onto the next thing.
Lisa: And when we tend to just be looking at the big picture all the time, like the big goals - the program we are writing, or the book we're doing or the project at work, or whatever the case is. We don't celebrate those. I've started to, because I'm running three companies, I've got a disabled mom that I still look after 24/7, 7 days a week. It's full on. And a lot of the time, some days, I'm just like, ‘How the hell does any human brain do this?’ I'm just like, ‘I've got a pretty good brain, but I am not keeping up.’ When you drop the ball and you're like, ‘Oh.’ Like I said to my husband, ‘I dropped the ball on this appointment the other day and I'm such an idiot,’ and he said, ‘Stop, stop. You're not an idiot. You're telling yourself that.’ And of course I am. Thanks for pointing that out to me. And yet you're doing the best you bloody will can and in this very difficult situation. Give yourself a break. And we're all doing that, we are all trying to keep up because things seem to get faster and more.
And so taking moments out, like an appointment fell through this morning, ‘Oh, an opportunity.’ Now I can either get into some work, which has plenty to do. Or my husband comes out and he looks at he's looking all down on the dumps and exhausted, and I’m like, ‘Let's go for a walk, darling. It's a beautiful day. Let's go and just walk for 20 minutes. Get some sunshine on our eyes, wake ourselves up, have a talk about the day before,’ then come back and then ‘Wow, it's a different start to the day’. Because usually it's just back, back, back. And then you find yourself at 10 o'clock at night when you finally sit down for the first time. Turn the telly on or something to just zone out, to compensate for this whirlwind. Building into your day, those little micro times we say, ‘Oh it’s a beautiful flower’. Being in the, ‘Oh, what beautiful sunshine,’ and all this, ‘Someone’s smiling at me.’ ‘Hi, how you doing?’ Just those little wee things that can help you get enough energy to get through to the next—
Carly: And that's where attention comes in too, which is part of Morita therapy, is that we can pay attention internally to our problems and our thoughts or feelings or our pain. Or even with all that going on, we can still pay attention to a beautiful flower. It's about one of the most simple, and it sounds crazy, but using your senses can get you out of your head and into the present moment. And we were talking about, I think Paul may have mentioned this, I don't know. One of the exercises is looking for the color blue. So if you find you're ruminating in thoughts, or if you're driving in the car, I find that that's when I started, all the thoughts come up when I'm driving, because it's such an automatic thing that you do. So I really try and redirect my attention. There's a metaphor of a torch. So the beam of light is your attention. And you have control over where you shine that. It's so effective. So am I shining that torch in my internal world? Or can I redirect it with all this going on, redirect it to the outside world? And I'll just look for things for color blue. Look for tiny things for color blue look for, obviously, the sky hopefully will be blue. Look, they're different shades of blue. And what that does, it doesn't get rid of what's going on internally, but it just redirects your attention.
Lisa: Distracts you from the internal looping that goes on in your brain, when you start to just, those thoughts just keep going around in circles. And there's actually no solution coming out of it. And this is the sort of thinking that goes on at two o'clock in the morning when you wake up. Cortisol has gone up and you've got some project that you're struggling with or something and it's just a loop, loop, loop, loop. And you've got to break that loop.
Carly: That's the hardest time, because at two o'clock in the morning, you can't really look for the color blue. You can ask yourself a question, ‘Is this happening now? Oh, no, this is not it's a statement. This isn't happening now’. Because you're thinking about the future or you’re thinking about the past. But it's not happening now. And what's happening now is that you need to sleep.
Lisa: I focus on my breath doing breath work. And apart from that, it doesn't happen so much to me. Now that does on occasion. But do some breath work where you're concentrating on the exhale. And there's lots of different breaths - box breathing or 4-7-8 breathing. I like to do what you're doing this massively long exhale. And that really slows down the parasympathetic nervous system, and can actually help you fall back to sleep. And I find that very, very powerful. But it's just breaking that cycling in your head, when you find yourself with a specific problem, that you're just not getting the answers to, going round and round, that's when you need to go either meditate, breathe, go for a walk, go for a run, do something that actually changes your mood. You're allowing space, because a lot of the time people think, ‘I have to stay here and not solve this problem right now. Otherwise, it's going to get worse’. Actually, when you let go, and you let it have time and space, that's when the answers come to you.
Carly: Yeah, that's right. And looking at what's within your control at that moment. It's not within your control that those ruminating thoughts keep coming up. But what is within your control is how you respond to them. So what you do in that moment, and a really good question to ask is, what needs to be done now? We’re only at a series of moments. It's that we only have the present moment. And most of the time, the anxiety or the ruminating thoughts are not related to the present moment. They're about the future or the past. So getting back.
Actually, that reminds me, there was a study done. I don't know if you've heard of it by Matt Killingsworth. He's done this study on the wandering mind, and how it relates to happiness. He created this app, and there were 35,000 people involved in this study. And what he did is throughout the day, people just getting on with their day and throughout the day, these questions that pop up like ‘What are you doing now?’ I had that list of 50 things I might be doing. Like, I'm on the train, or I'm at work or whatever. And then it was, ‘What are you—are you thinking about what you're doing? Or are you thinking about something else?’ So it was measuring their wandering mind, and then measuring their happiness levels. And it showed that even if you are stuck in traffic, which is a very frustrating thing, especially if you're running late, if your mind was wandering, you were less happy than if you were in the present moment, just observing your surroundings. You are even happier being in the present moment stuck in traffic than if you were in a pleasant moment but having a wandering mind, if that makes sense. So being in the present moment, and I think we need to practice it. It is a skill. Attention is a skill. And being aware that our attention is constantly being robbed, just like advertising, and social media. It's just constant attention. So if we can take control of our attention and get into the present moment, then that can have such a huge impact on our well-being.
Lisa: Yeah, absolutely. And this is one of the things that I love about a podcast like this. I am fully focused on you in this conversation. Nothing is pulling at me right now. Whereas when I'm working on the computer, and there's a hundred windows open, and I'm back and like, ‘I'm just going to jump on messenger so that I can do this task, send a message to so and so’. I get on to messenger, this is an example. And then, ‘Oh, there's another message coming. Oh, who was it from? Oh, I'll answer that’. And then you're off, and you're over here, and you're over there. And that original thing that you were actually meant to be doing in that moment is gone. And this is the difficulty. Even though I know that this happens, and I'm trying to control it. Shutting those windows down is not always an option, because you have to have the windows open, otherwise, re-find the bloody websites every time. But having the control to go, ‘No, I'll work on that later’. I'm working with a guy at the moment who I'm sure I'm driving insane on systems and processes, because this is a thing that my brain does not do well. And it's driving my business partner mental, because I am constantly like chasing shiny objects, super excited about science, running here and there, learning everything, wanting to do a hundred courses, not focusing on the things that need, the systems and the processes, and they're boring.
And so this poor guy is trying to help me. Shout out to Mike Drone. Get my calendar sorted, get my scheduling sorted, get my inbox under control, get these basic systems. It was an interesting, the Calendly thing, that you have to have, all professional people have. I have, ‘I can’t do it, I can’t work it out. All I have is a fare overseas. And I don't get it.’ And then there was this resistance to it because I didn't want to waste my time learning something that I'm not interested in, or the outside take care of that. I tried to get my assistant to take care of it, and tried to get my husband to take care of it, and nobody would take care of it. They kick me back on my lap. And then Mike said, ‘You have to do it’. And so I actually spent yesterday, a good two three hours setting it up. And I was so proud of myself. Stuff I hate, but I did it.
Carly: Did you do this? Did you just focus on that task that you did anything else come in?
Lisa: Yeah, I had things coming in. But I keep bringing my focus back and I actually managed it for the first time in history. On a thing that I'm not interested in. Because if it's a thing that I'm interested in, if it's science, man, I know, I kind of watch or listen to stuff and learn stuff and read stuff for Africa hours every day. That's what I love. That's my happy place. But when it comes to doing the admin, the text, the accounting, the learner, and learning that software, oh God. But it's not because I thought, ‘Oh, I've always thought, are you just too dumb for that. You just don't get it. Your brain doesn't work’. That was an excuse really. Because I can, I know I have a good brain that can cope with it. It's just that I never gave it the attention because I didn't want to be there. And it is still going to be a battle.
Carly: It reminds me too, that this morning, the sort of pre-input routine that a lot of people do is deep work at that time. So if there's something really important that you need to work on. Like if you're writing a book or like whatever it is that you want to spend two hours on or however many hours on without any inputs. Do that first thing in the morning. And don't have your email open or don't have those. But if you can, turn off your notifications, but have that as your deep work and get that done. And then you get on with the day with all the other stuff that you need to do. There's a lot of...
Lisa: [50:42 unintelligible]
Carly: Yeah, exactly. And it's that Stephen Covey thing that, the important not urgent stuff, do that first.
Lisa: That's really hard to do. In prioritising those lists, and having, and this is where the systems and processes coming in, as I'm finding out now, as I'm working on this, as this is urgent and important, you have to do that right away. And if it's just urgent, but not important that can wait, I’ve forgotten all the whole list of things that you sort of - but doing that in an automatic fashion, so that you actually know what then. If a free space comes into your life, like a cancellation or something, “Okay, what is the thing that I can grab out of my to-do list?” That should be filling that space. And I'm still working on that one, instead of getting dragged any which way, which I still tend to do, which is easier to do. And there's a billion things when you got your own company, and you're working, there is a billion hits you have to wear every day. And that becomes just, you can work 24/7 and still be behind.
Carly: Yeah, it's crazy. And that's why, what you were saying before, when you had that opportunity, when you had that space because you missed an appointment. You had that supposed to choose where you were going to go, and you chose a walk with your husband, which is just such a good recovery thing today and a time to be present, and a time to spend time with somebody that you love and grasp those opportunities.
Lisa: Yeah, and not feel guilty, which is what I do. I really should have picked that other project up. I really should have given my husband the time when he needed it, or my mum, or whatever the case may be. In that moment, and take those little opportunities that come up.
Carly: Yeah, so important.
Lisa: Carly, this has been such an interesting conversation, I feel like we could go for another couple of hours. And maybe I'll get you back on. Because we get into the rest of the ACT therapy and the different areas. But is there anything, as we start to wrap up now, anything else that you think that we haven't covered that we should that would really help people out there listening?
Carly: I think the sort of the overarching thing with this approach is having a purpose-driven life rather than an emotional-driven life. And what I mean by purpose is that it's not the sort of big goal, what's my purpose of life, but the purpose of the moment. So even with worry, or anxiety, or ruminating thoughts, just looking at what is my purpose in this moment. It could be as simple as “I need to clean up the kitchen.” Because that's having your house in order, it's something as important to me. And so it's those sort of small things that we do every day, that kind of creates purpose in our lives. I think that's an important thing to— because it's so easy to have our emotions drive us and respond depending on how we're feeling. But if we can look at the purpose of the moment, then we can make those choices that are going to help us live more fully.
Lisa: And not relying on motivation all the time, but taking action and doing the things that are on your highest priority. You and Paul have an eight-week program. So you're doing an eight-week program, which is all around. Will you tell us a little bit about that, what you're doing at the moment?
Carly: So we're running an eight-week program. We've got about 93 on it, which, it’s our first one. So we're really, really pleased. So we do a weekly zoom session, every Tuesday night for about an hour and a half. It's basically, we go through all the different domains of our lives and the different areas - nutrition, mindset is a big one, exercise. So each week, we have sort of a different topic. And then there's an app that goes with that. So there's like a ritual board, everybody has daily rituals that they can tick off. Culture is one of them. And they get points to that. So it's a bit of healthy competition going on. There's a leaderboard on who's doing what. We've had such good response from people. It's been amazing. So yeah, we're hoping to do another one soon after this one’s finished. We're halfway through now.
Lisa: Brilliant, brilliant. I think this is the sort of stuff I love and I eat for breakfast. Love the stuff. I think it's so important that we're working on this sort of thing. So where can people find you and reach out to you and to Paul and what you're doing? What's your website and your social media handles and so on?
Carly: Yeah, so mine is carlytaylorcoaching.com.au and Instagram is Carly Taylor Coaching. And then mindbodybrain.com.au, which you'll find more about the Better You course, which is the behaviour change course. So that's the eight-week program.
Lisa: Put all those notes in the show notes.
Carly: And then Instagram is Mind Body Brain, which was right.
Lisa: Look, Carly, you've been fantastic today. Thank you so much for your time and your input and your passion that you bring to the stuff.
Carly: Thank you so much for having me. It's been great to meet you.
Lisa: It's just been epic. I've really, really enjoyed a conversation and I think a lot of people will have got a lot of practical tips to take away from this conversation as well.
Carly: Yeah, they'll be looking for the color blue today.
Lisa: Exactly.
Outro: That's it this week for pushing the limits. Be sure to rate, review, and share with your friends. And head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.
The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.
Vitamin C is a potent vitamin with many benefits to our body. Although many studies prove it can cure diseases and prolong lifespan, many doctors are still wary of this unconventional treatment. In hospitals, it is not a protocol to deliver IV vitamin C therapy to critically ill patients.
Dr Ron Hunninghake of the Riordan Institute joins us in this episode to explain the uses of IV and oral vitamin C in several chronic, life-threatening diseases. He also talks about the different studies and trials conducted to explore the mechanism of vitamin C in action.
If you want to take control of your health and dive deeper into IV vitamin C therapy, then this episode is for you.
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For our epigenetics health program all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/.
You can also join our free live webinar on epigenetics.
Online Coaching for Runners
Go to www.runninghotcoaching.com for our online run training coaching.
Consult with Me
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Order My Books
My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within 3 years. Get your copy here: http://relentlessbook.lisatamati.com/
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Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:
Resources
Episode Highlights
[05:16] Dr Ron’s Background
[11:56] IV Vitamin C Therapy for Cancer
[16:55] Humans’ Inability to Produce Vitamin C
[21:53] Oxygen Deficiency in Cancer
[28:33] Finding a Doctor Who Knows the Protocol
[34:46] Use of Vitamin C in Chronic Illness Care
[38:29] Liposomal vs Normal Vitamin C
[34:46] Why Is Vitamin C Given at Low Doses?
[52:51] Oxidative Basis of Disease
[54:55] Vitamin C in Redox Medicine
[59:33] When Can Endurance Athletes Take Vitamin C?
7 Powerful Quotes from This Episode
‘Vitamin C is probably, as one friend of Dr Riordan said, the most interesting molecule in the world and does things that no other molecule can do’.
‘This is why we're seeing these incredible death tolls is because, once again, vitamin C has not been recognised even though the International Orthomolecular Association has put out several studies and protocols that would work and would really solve the crisis very quickly if they would start using vitamin C’.
‘Science is not about belief. Science is about trying things and trying to see how things work and what we can do, especially in the field of medicine. If it can save a life, do it’.
‘I don't want people to think that if you don't have access to intravenous vitamin C, you're out of luck. I think it's just a matter of learning to dose yourself more frequently if you've got a chronic illness’.
‘All progress in medicine is met with resistance. It's not just vitamin C. Anything new, unless it's a big profit maker in the realm of something that people already know, then it can weave through fairly quickly. But if it's something that's really original and unique in the realm of medical thought, it's a huge, huge battle to get something new in’.
‘We cannot win politically; we cannot win economically. The only way we can win is if we completely show that the science does play out accurately and people do live better, longer. They get better faster’.
‘It's not that all oxidation is bad and all antioxidants is good. It's the cycles that occur within the body that are part of life and you just need to learn how to nuance your supplementation so that you get the best results’.
About Dr Ron
Dr Ron Hunninghake or Dr Ron, as patients fondly refer to him, is a family medicine doctor. He began his career as a small-town doc in Minneapolis, Kansas, where he first started teaching clinic-based wellness. Later, he joined nearby Salina Family Physicians and was instrumental in founding WellPlan, a comprehensive lifestyle modification program.
Seeking even greater involvement in helping patients learn innovative ways to rebuild and maintain their health, he joined the Riordan Clinic in 1989 as its medical doctor.
Following in the footsteps of Dr Hugh Riordan after the clinic founder’s untimely death in 2005, Dr Ron set about articulating the Riordan approach in seven core precepts:
In addition to his full-time practice as a holistic medical doctor at the Riordan Clinic, Dr Ron has made multiple trips to Japan, Spain, Ecuador, Columbia, New Zealand, Canada and South Korea to lecture on the Riordan IVC protocol for cancer.
Here at the Riordan Clinic, he has presented more than 300 lectures dealing with all facets of nutrition, lifestyle and optimal health. He has co-authored three books on subjects including inflammation, energy-boosting supplements and how to stop pre-diabetes.
You may contact Dr Ron through Riordan Clinic or contact him at +1 316-682-3100 on Mondays, 4:30 to 5 PM, CST.
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To pushing the limits,
Lisa
The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.
It’s common to hear that a good diet and exercise can significantly improve our health. But health is more than that. Your thoughts and beliefs can change your genes and brain structure! 85% of our genes are malleable, and you can change them for the better with good practices.
In this episode, Dr Dawson Church joins us to talk about the benefits of meditation and EFT tapping. He shares that changing our mental states can significantly impact our bodies and even our environment. The key to happiness and calm is in our hands; we just need to invest time to achieve it.
If you want to know more about the benefits of meditation and the science behind EFT tapping, then this episode is for you.
CUSTOMISED RUN COACHING PLANS — How to Run Faster, Be Stronger, Run Longer Without Burnout & Injuries
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Do you want to beat last year’s time or finish at the front of the pack? Want to run your first 5-km or run a 100-miler?
Do you want a holistic programme that is personalised & customised to your ability, your goals and your lifestyle?
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If you are struggling with a health issue and need people who look outside the square and are connected to some of the greatest science and health minds in the world, then reach out to us at support@lisatamati.com, we can jump on a call to see if we are a good fit for you.
If you have a big challenge ahead, are dealing with adversity or are wanting to take your performance to the next level and want to learn how to increase your mental toughness, emotional resilience, foundational health and more, then contact us at support@lisatamati.com.
My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within 3 years. Get your copy here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books/products/relentless.
For my other two best-selling books Running Hot and Running to Extremes chronicling my ultrarunning adventures and expeditions all around the world, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books.
NMN: Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, a NAD+ precursor
Researchers have found that Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide or NAD+, a master regulator of metabolism and a molecule essential for the functionality of all human cells, is being dramatically decreased over time.
What is NMN?
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For my gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection ‘Fierce’, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection.
‘I just said, “You know, universe, what is your purpose for me in the coming year?” And the universe, I heard these words, they said, “We've given you the gift of happiness. Now, go give it to everyone else, too.” So that's really what I see myself doing now and where I came from originally and where I am today.’
‘It's [EFT] like pushing the reset button for your emotions. So you're upset, you're angry or you're stressed whatever way, then you simply tap on these points very, very quickly.’
‘You cannot afford not to meditate. The gains in productivity, problem solving ability, and creativity is so enormous that if you don't spend that hour or that half hour, you are missing out on your biggest single leverage point for success in your life.’
‘In meditation for a little while, you let go of local reality, and you simply identify with the field of consciousness that is the cosmos. There's this huge information field in which we swim in it. We're like fish looking for water when we're looking for God or spirituality.’
‘I wrote in my journal, “My heart is just burning with love and bursting with gratitude”. Because you come down in the states of such ecstasy and the rest of the world in your life, and it is a world of magic. You then create that magic all around you.’
‘Athletes, first of all, when they're in the zone, when they're in flow, they injure themselves less and their performance goes up. It's that old Yerkes-Dodson law, currently referred to a little bit of stress is fine.’
‘Jesus said, “Love your enemies,” to go to them that hate you. Yeah, very good advice, even though it's 2,000 years old. And when you do this, you're producing emotional contagion around you. You have no idea how far it's going.’
Dr Dawson Church is a leading health writer and researcher whose principal work includes The Genie In Your Genes, Mind To Matter and Bliss Brain. His research linked the connection of consciousness, emotion and gene expression. Moreover, he has looked into the science of peak mental states, flow states and happiness.
With his research, Dr Dawson conducted clinical trials and founded The Institute for Integrative Healthcare to promote groundbreaking new treatments. To date, his largest program is the Veterans Stress Projects which has offered free treatment to over 20,000 veterans with PTSD.
Dr Dawson further shares his research through EFT Universe, one of the largest alternative medicine websites. In addition, he is the science columnist for Unity magazine and has written blog posts for the Huffington Post.
In his undergraduate and graduate courses at Baylor University, Dr Dawson was the first student to graduate from the University Scholar’s program in 1979. He earned his doctorate from the Integrative Healthcare at Holos University under the famed neurosurgeon Norman Shealy, MD, PhD, the American Holistic Medical Association founder.
Are you interested to know more about Dr Dawson’s work? Check out his website and EFT Universe.
You can also reach Dr Dawson on Twitter and Facebook.
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To pushing the limits,
Lisa.
Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.
Lisa Tamati: Welcome back to Pushing the Limits. Your host, Lisa Tamati, here with you and today I have another very, very special guest for you that is perhaps going to change your life. A really very interesting man. Dr Dawson Church, PhD, who is an award winning science writer with three bestselling books to his credit. The Genie in Your Genes was the first book to demonstrate that emotions drive gene expression. So that's all-around epigenetics, epigenetics and how your emotions can actually change the way your genes are expressing. The second book Mind to Matter, which is really something that you must read, shows that the brain creates much of what we think of as objective reality. And his third book, Bliss Brain demonstrates that peak mental states rapidly remodel the brain for happiness.
Now, Dawson has conducted dozens of clinical trials and founded the National Institute for Integrative Healthcare to promote ground-breaking new treatments. Its largest program, the Veteran Stress Project has offered over free treatment to over 20,000 veterans who are suffering from PTSD. All for love, no money involved, an absolute amazing project. Dawson now shares how to apply these health and performance breakthroughs through his EFT universe. It was just an absolutely fascinating conversation with him. I'm very, very interested always in neuroplasticity because I was told, with my mum story, as you all know, that there was no hope that her brain would not be able to remodel and not be able to learn again and that is so far from the truth. In his new book, A Bliss Brain, award winning science writer Dawson Church focuses on the positive and negative mood and negative thinking and how it's associated with activation of brain regions like the prefrontal cortex - the state of yourself, and positive emotions such as altruism and compassion.
He blends cutting edge neuroscience with the stories of people who've had first-hand experience or brain change. And Bliss Brain really examines the effects of emotional states on brain structure. Suffice to say, you have to listen to this episode. I think if you're struggling with anxiety, struggling with stress, feeling the effects of ongoing long-term stress on your body and with illnesses and sicknesses and depression and all of these things that hamper just so many of us, so many of the people that I work with, and certainly I struggle with it on occasion, as well, then this is a book for you.
Dr. Dawson really emanates happiness and joy. But that wasn't always the case, he was someone who had suffered from depression quite badly in his early years. And this is what sent him down this great path. He manages to marry the science with the traditional things like Chinese medicine and Meridians and energy medicine. He's been able to quantify it so that people like me who love science in general open minded sceptics, I like to call myself, can actually understand why these things work. And that's really, really important.
Before we head over to Dr. Dawson. I just like to remind you, we have now our Patron membership for the podcast. If you'd like to get involved with the podcast, if you'd like to support what we do here at Pushing the Limits. We've been doing it now for five and a half years, and near on 200 episodes. I can tell you, into each episode goes a heck of a lot of work and a lot of research, and a lot of book reading, a lot of time. And we really need — to keep this on air — we really need your help. So if you'd like to come and support us and get a whole lot of extra member benefits, then head on over to patron.lisatamati.com, that's patron.lisatamati.com. You can join us in our tribe there. I would really, really appreciate you doing that. And as always, please give us a rating and review for the show because that really does help us as well and share it with your family and friends if you get benefit from us. I'd also love to hear from you, if you've got a question about one of the guests. If you want to dive deeper into one of the topics, please reach out to me, support@lisatamati.com.
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Now over to Dr. Dawson Church.
Lisa: Hi everyone, and welcome to Pushing the Limits. I'm super excited to have you here with me today. I have an absolute legend, a man who has done so much research and so much good in the world, Dr. Dawson Church with me. Welcome to the show. Dawson, it's really, really exciting to have you with us today. Thanks for taking the time.
Dr. Dawson Church: For me, too, Lisa. We have had such fun now and the next hour. We just had off the air, this would be a fabulous time for you and me and everyone else combined.
Lisa: Exactly. We already had a couple of really good connections. That’s fantastic.
So, Dawson, well, you are an incredible man with a number of books. You have your research, you're an expert on the brain and the mind and body connection. Can you give us a little bit of background about how did you get into the space and what you've been studying? I mean, it's a big question, but we'll start there anyway.
Dr. Dawson: Well, let’s start right in the middle. I worked at a book about five years ago called Mind to Matter. It was really off the cuff project — I was interviewing scientists, I was trying to trace all of the scientific pieces, the links, the chain between having a thought and a thing. And I thought, “Well, I'll find some links to the chain, not others.” But I found all of them. It was so interesting to see how our thoughts literally become things, how our brains function like transducers, from the universal field of information and we then manifest those things all around us. While I was doing that I got into — so I've been meditating everyday for like 20 years plus — but I own some really esoteric forums, our meditation practice by masters who've done it like 10,000 hours. By the end, I find myself getting really, really, really, really happy. I was already a really happy person. But at the end, I had to find myself getting super happy, no matter what the circumstances. But we had to look at all why people who do certain styles of meditation gets so happy. That's why I wrote the book, Bliss Brain. I began the process, 50 years before that, as a teenager, when I was so toxically depressed and anxious and miserable. I was suicidal, I mean, I want to just kill myself when I was 12, 13, 14 years old. And I looked into my own eyes, walked past a full-length mirror one day when I was 15, looked into my own eyes, and I said to myself, those are the saddest eyes I've ever seen. I realised I was so messed up inside. So, I went to live on a spiritual community for many years. I learned meditation, learned energy healing, studied psychology. Wanted to figure out how I could make myself happier, and got a little bit happier over the years. And then when I began to meditate every single day, I didn't have to use energy therapies like EFT tapping, suddenly I got a lot happier. After Mind to Matter, doing these esoteric meditations, got super happy, I want to then just tell it to the world. So I had this epiphany. But I don't want to retreat every New Year's Eve and spend about two, three weeks just really getting quiet meditating, asking the universe, “What are my marching orders for the coming year?”
I was walking the labyrinth with a group of about 40 people at a meditation centre in New Year's, couple of years ago. I stood at the centre of the labyrinth at the stroke of midnight. And I just said, “Universe, what is your purpose for me in the coming year?” And the universe, I heard these words, they said, “We've given you the gift of happiness. Now, go give it to everyone else, too.” So that's really what I see myself doing now and where I came from originally and where I am today.
Lisa: Oh, wow, that is beautifully put in. So, Bliss Brain because you’ve written a number of books. Mind to Matter was the last one and then Bliss Brain is this one. And when people are listening to this, a lot of people will think, “Well, yes.” But is this, especially a lot of the people that are scientifically, believe in the science and they want evidence. What I found so interesting with your work is that you've met managed to marry the science, the quantified effects of energy medicine, of meditation, of pressure points, of EFT, all of these things is energy, things and actually quantified those with science in very rigorous-based, evidence-based, which for me is always a fascinating thing. Because I'm very much an open minded person, but I like to have that rigor, that sceptical mind, that prefrontal cortex that often jumps in and goes, “But is this real?” And you said, on the cusp between, being open minded and being scientific and you've seem to marry these two, just beautifully in your work and being able to quantify some of the ancient traditions the Chinese medicine, the Meridians, these types of things that have been known for thousands of years, but are now actually being shown to be correct and with science. Can you tell us about that?
Dr. Dawson: What's amazing is if you're taking a pedal instrument, handheld instrument, called the galvanometer. It's battery powered, it picks up the electrical resistance on your skin. And so, at my live workshops, I will run this over people's skin, and the little muscle device makes beeping sound whenever it hits an acupuncture point. And it's because those points are very, very high conductance, low resistance. You'll run this little deal over the person's face, nothing's happening, it'll hit an acupuncture point like this over here is on the bladder meridian, this point over here, and suddenly the machine goes crazy and starts beeping and flashing only in this tiny point about a millimetre in diameter, and no other surrounding skin. That's the exact point shown in a 2400-year-old Chinese scroll.
These ancients knew about all these points, energy flows, the chakras, the meridians, and so on. Now, we have instrumentation to measure them. At least the cool thing about the measurement process is, as we're measuring the effects of energy therapies, energy treatments, we're finding that as we quantify them, the effects aren't tiny. They aren't 3%, 5%. Sometimes they're astronomical. Like for example, the EFT. So in meta-analysis, meta-analys-s gathered together 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 studies into a bundle. And then, they extract all the information on a scale of how effective a therapy is. An effective therapy gets a score of two. A really effective therapy gets a score of five, and an extremely effective therapy is a score of eight. So two, five, eight, those are the three points in a meta-analysis that tells you whether a therapy has some effect or a huge effect.
In studies in meta-analysis of EFT tapping for anxiety on that 2-5-8 scale, the effect of EFT is 12. It’s off the odds, off the scale, off the chart. Same thing for depression, same thing for PTSD. So now that we're quantifying these therapies, meditation, EFT, other kinds of therapies, we're applying some of them, have incredible results at the level of the genome, proteins, proteins expression, enzymes, all kinds of processes in our bodies.
Lisa: Wow, that is, okay, because you've written a book called The Genie in Your Genes. It was a marvellous title because I studied epigenetics and genetics. I know that you collaborated on the book with Dr. Bruce Lipton. I was like that’s one of my favourite books of all time, and actually got me down this rabbit hole of epigenetics. And so, I've looked at epigenetics in relation to the food and the nutrition and the social environment and your neurotransmitters and these sorts of things. But when I heard you talking about how it affects, like meditation — you're able to see, I think it was 72 genes or something, where it actually changes the expression of those genes in real time, when you're doing these meditations. And these were areas, I mean you know the areas better than me, perhaps you can talk about it. Because I think a lot of people don't understand that we have a DNA that we've inherited from mum and dad, that's our code if you like. But all throughout life and throughout every day and with everything that we do, we're turning genes on and off for the want of a better description, up regulating or down regulating certain genes with our environment. So what sort of things can we influence through meditation and through EFT, and so on?
Dr. Dawson: That is the key question to ask me, Lisa. We can influence our gene expression with things like diet. You eat certain foods and eat really healthy foods is to turn on certain genes and result and certain processes in your body. And so, the early after they studied and study, 1999, 2002, were all about introducing dietary factors usually in experimental subjects of rats, mice, and then seeing how that affected their gene expression. But what I am much more interested in than things like drugs and external factors like food, is I am super interested in what we can do with this thing behind our bars over here and our beliefs and our attitudes and our energy. It turns out, I mean, that's funny you just mentioned, by done by remarkable, insight-filled therapist called Beth Maharaj. And she found that in an EFT session, a one hour EFT session of psychotherapy using EFT acupuncture tapping, all those acupuncture points, 72 genes were changed. And again, about 15% of our genome is fixed, like I am two metres tall, I have grey eyes and brown hair, not very much of that anymore, and I just have certain physical characteristics that are what they are. Those are fixed genes, but those are only about 15% of the genome. The other 85% is changed. When I have a negative thought, I start producing cortisol, I send a signal down to the medulla on my adrenal glands, my adrenal gland starts producing cortisol, and adrenaline. Adrenaline is your fast-acting, stress hormone; cortisol is your slow acting, but still, it hasn't two minutes and two minutes is turning everything on and off all kinds of other processes off in your body.
And so I'm doing that with my mind alone. If I'm having high cortisol day after day because I'm worried, because I'm stressed, because I’m anxious. Now, what I'm doing is I'm driving my body into this fight or flight state over and over and over again, chronic stress. It's depleting everything else, my body, my immune system, it results in muscular wasting. It literally, over time, produces calcification of the brain's learning memory centres. And you want a lot of calcium in your teeth, a lot of calcium in your bones. You do not want calcium in your brain, but it does. It literally deposits calcium in your brain's memory centres. So that is the effect epigenetically of our thoughts and our beliefs. So, it's so important that we take control of this, like there's a saying in the biology of belief that has positively positive thoughts releasing the ones going our way as having a dramatic effect on our physical bodies.
Lisa: And this is like, because I've seen those scans where you have the shrunken brain that's been exposed to a lot of stress. The hippocampus shrinks and the prefrontal cortex and then you have the healthy brain that's nice and plump on the other side, if you like. It is a very good visual because this is very much like we tend to think, ‘Well, yes, I'm stressed and but that's neither here nor there, toughen up and get on with it’ type of attitude. I think that this, I think we need to distinguish between short term hermetic stressors, which are good for us - the things like going in the sauna, or going into cold water or going for a run and exercise and things like that, that are slightly outside the comfort zone. But not these long-term or even medium-term stressors that are going on day for day and week upon week, and month upon month. Those are the ones that really, when you are affecting the genes on a daily basis and your cortisol, and your adrenaline are just pumping all the time.
And this is something like with my genetic makeup, I have a deficiency in receptors of dopamine, so I'm constantly after dopamine. I'm always chasing the source that I can never reach, right? And I have a lot of adrenaline and I was exposed to a lot of testosterone in the womb. So I have that personality that take action, risk taking, jumping, still playing, no strategy, that type of a personality. And these things really affect us.
However, I can take control of that through practice. I can do things that can actually help me control my innate biology if you like. So, how can people, I wanted to ask, because I think a lot of people won't know what EFT is, per se. Would you explain what that particular type of energy work is?
Dr. Dawson: EFT is very popular. It's used by over 20 million people worldwide. It's grown purely by word of mouth, there is no drug company, there is no advertising campaign, people study each other on EFT. It is often called tapping because you simply tap like this on acupuncture points. There are about 13 W's, commonly they're linked to the 13 meridians of the body. It's amazing. I'm working on a video now where I have to describe EFT in two minutes. And it's like the body's reset switch. A therapist used that in a paper, in a peer-reviewed journal recently. It's like pushing the reset button for your emotions. So if you're upset, you're angry or you're stressed whatever way, then you simply tap on these points very, very quickly and it resets you.
So, there are several of these points. While you are thinking about the bad stuff in your life, you combine that reflection of ruminating on the stuff that bothers you with the tapping. And if you ruminate on the bad stuff, what happens normally, if you're just thinking about the bad stuff, is you're sending a signal through those neural bundles and they're getting bigger and bigger and faster. That's what we call re-traumatisation. That's when you re-traumatise yourself and we find over time, that shrinks the brain; the brains of people who are traumatised as children are on average 8% smaller than those who weren't traumatised as children. Traumatic stress is, it isn't psychological, it's physiological. So that's what you're doing if you're retraumatising yourself.
If you remember that bad thing at the same time you tap, then what we see in MRI EFT studies is that the emotional midbrain gets all upset, it's all aroused as a result of thinking about the bad things. When you start tapping, all that arousal just goes down. For example, one veteran I was working with, because we work with over 20,000 veterans, giving them free treatment free of charge. What one veteran was really bothered by a memory when he was in Iraq, he was a medic. And right in the beginning of his tour of duty, one of his friends was shot. And so, he had to deal with all the gruesomeness of that friend's death. One of the things he had to do was he had to clean the uniform of his dead friend to send back to his mum and dad back in the US. Cleaning the human remains and tissue out of the uniform was tremendously triggering for him. He remembers this event, he was cleaning them out in the medic’s hut. And then he'd have to run outside to take a breath of fresh air because the smell was so bad that he'd run back in a little more cleaning, run back out again. We tapped on this terrible traumatic memory. He just then had this complete sense of relaxation. He said, ‘I'm so glad I was the person who got to clean that uniform because it was my way of honouring my friend’. And as his emotional midbrain calmed down, his story changed to where it was no longer one of tragedy, but one of honouring and one of love and one affection with his friend, and you do this act of service. So if he shifts brains function that way, and it shifts it in just a few seconds like that. There's no therapy, there's no elaborate attempt to understand how you are the way you are, you just tap while you're remembering the bad stuff, while all of those new neural pathways are fully engaged, that then calms the brain down immediately. And then I met this young man again, I saw him again, about three months later, talked about the uniform, talked about his dead friend, he was still totally calm about it. And we find in long-term studies, that once you break the association in the brain between that traumatic memory and going into fight or flight, the association stays broken, and people find later on down the road.
Lisa: That is absolutely amazing because I think, the longer we all live, we all end up with traumatic, hopefully not as horrific experiences as that. Are you aware I had last week on the show Dr. Don Wood, who I'd love to introduce you actually to. He is also a trauma expert who works with vets and PTSD and everything, addiction and so on. He has a four-hour program that he takes people into the, out of beta into alpha brainwave states and takes that high definition sort of movie that's playing in people's heads around this event or events. And he says, as a description, puts it into black and white, and it's no longer triggering. So probably a different direction to get to a similar result. But you think we can do this actually, in minutes with EFT, where you can actually take away the power of that memory. Because I mean, I've been through, unfortunately, my listeners know, I lost my dad, just seven months ago, eight months ago. It was a very traumatic event and process that we went through. The intruding memories, the recurrent nightmares, all of the horror that surrounds that event is very powerful, how much it drains your daily life and your energy. I've found, since that event, I've been doing various things, but it's still very, very raw and very real to me. You are triggered a hundred times a day, and it's just draining your power to be able to work fully in the world, and to be the best version of you that you can be. I sort of know that and I'm trying to work out ways. So this is definitely one that I'm going to jump into.
Dr. Dawson: Sorry, you lost your dad and what you'll find is that you don't have to let go at the normal sense. In fact, we encourage people to really grieve, really get into their feelings, that and then do the tapping as well. What happens is you process them very quickly. So we aren’t telling these veteran, ‘Don't think about the bad thing. Don't think about the death. Don't think about all the trauma’. We say, ‘Do think about it, but tap while you're doing it’. And then that breaks the association in the brain between that traumatic memory and going into that stress response.
So I really encourage you to do that because we've seen so many people do this now. We work with examples, with kids who lost their parents in the Rwandan genocide. Many of them, still 25 years later, have severe PTSD. We work with victims of school shootings in the US and various places. And again, mothers and fathers who've lost their kids in school shootings. We work with them successfully with EFT. So it's not like we're just working on superficial stuff, but it is that we're trying to work on what you’re being worried about in the report you have to turn it into your boss next week, and it also works on severe psychological trauma.
Lisa: This is so exciting. And it is like resetting the brain. I mean, Dr. Woods mentions that it's sort of like a error glitch, and you're just going round and round and you can't get out of this sort of pattern of things.
Dr. Dawson: Yes. The trauma loop, we call it the trauma loop. The trauma loop, it's literally a loop between the thymus, thalamus, hypothalamus, the hippocampus, the amygdala in the centre of the brain. What's supposed to be happening is that input associated be referred to the prefrontal cortex and other regions to moderate emotions. And it isn't; it's stuck in an emotional midbrain, looping and looping and looping. Here’s the thing is, you can't talk yourself out of it. Like I was worried about a situation at work a few weeks ago, and I would say to myself, ‘It's time to meditate now. It’s 6am in the morning, I'm meditating. I will not think about that thing at work’. Well, of course, within nervous sighs, obsessed with a theory, I say that ‘Dawson, I'm going to let that go. It's meditation time now. I'm not thinking about thing at work, I’m going to return my mind to the meditative state’. Now, the thing at work, we cannot talk ourselves out of it, our conscious minds hard, because our brains didn't evolve that way. Our brains evolved to be extremely attuned to the tiger in the grass, or the remotest possibility, the tiger in the grass. And if you had an ancestor who took her mind off the potential threat to focus on smelling the flowers —
Lisa: You wouldn't be here.
So it makes sense that we have this hyper vigilance. When you've got a PTSD situation going on, you're really hyper vigilant, and you're in this constant state. But it is even all the little things, like in preparation for this interview yesterday, I was just so into researching and stuff. And then all night, my brains just going about Dr. Dawson and what he's doing. Like at three o'clock in the morning, I had to get up and read, keep reading one of your books because it was just, it's not leaving my brain. And then I did my breathing exercises, I did my meditation and eventually went back to sleep. So, you gave me a bit of a sleepless night last night.
Dr. Dawson: I’m so sorry about that.
Lisa: But in a good way.
Dr. Dawson: At least you’re reading something good.
Lisa: Yeah, well in a good way, because I was excited about all this stuff. I think it's very powerful. As a health coach, and I work with people on a daily basis. Probably the first thing that people come to me with is depression and anxiety. And then all the health problems and in follow on from that, and that seems to be what so many people are dealing with on an absolute day to day basis. In our modern world, I think that a lot of these things, not that our ancestors didn't have stressors, because they obviously did. But we have perhaps, a hundred tigers coming at us a day in the form of grumpy emails from our bosses or whatever. The amount we have to process in a day for many of us, especially people working on computers and all that sort of stuff with a thousand things coming at you all the time. And it can feel like and so, often, I say when I say to people, ‘You need to do some meditation, and you need to calm the mind. You need to get out in nature’. But they go, ‘I haven't got time. I haven't got time. I'm working 17 hours a day, and I’m a mom of three, how the hell am I going to find time to meditate?’ What's your answer to that?
Dr. Dawson: Actually, you don't have time to meditate. In one piece of research, I talked about several of these in my book, Bliss Brain. One piece of research done by really forward thinking US agency called the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, they've been at the forefront of all kinds of parts of the human potential movement for the last 50 years. They did a study of complex decision-making. Now, this isn't whether I should have grilled cheese or macaroni for lunch, this is when you have to do a scenario that’s meant to solve global warming, or reduce the deficit or solve racial violence in a city. It's the really complicated problems. What they found was that when you're in a kind of flow state, generated by meditation, that people are 490 times better, percent better at solving complex problems; five times is good. Another study by the McKinsey Consulting Group found a 10 year study of high performance executives found that they are five times as productive when they're in these flow states. We're measuring flow now as people meditate, we're finding the same thing. So that even 15 minutes, 20 minutes spent at the end of the day will literally pay dividends. Another series of studies done by Harvard University found that if you do that for only an hour, meditate for an hour, you are more productive and more creative for 48 hours in the future. So you cannot afford not to meditate. The gains in productivity, problem solving ability and creativity are so enormous that if you don't spend that hour or that half hour, you are missing out on your biggest single leverage point for success in your life.
Lisa: Well, that's a really good argument for it. Have you read the book, we’re talking about Steven Kotler, have you read Stealing Fire?
Dr. Dawson: I love Stealing Fire, I’ve seen Steven Kotler several times on that and I use — and I have five books, in Bliss Brain and the acknowledgments say, ‘This book, Bliss Brain, was based, there five people really influenced me’. As Steven Kotler’s Stealing Fire was one of those five.
Lisa: His book really influenced me, too. It was like, ‘Wow, this is incredible stuff, understanding how to get into the flow state’. As an athlete and my background as a ultra-endurance athlete, we did stupid distances. I would sometimes get into that flow state, and I still can't do it at will, unfortunately. Maybe I need to meditate more. But the performance that you could bring when you were in that state was far beyond what you normally could bring, and understanding how to tap into that on an actual day to day basis. I find it, too, in a previous life, I was a jeweller as well, so I was a goldsmith in head shops, retail shops. And that I would get into the flow state making jewellery when I was creative, now in painting. So when I get time, do those types of things like painting and making something, do they qualify as meditation? I mean, what actually qualifies as meditation because a lot of people seem to think you have to be sitting on your floor or with your legs crossed and humming or something, doing a chant. Is that the only way to meditate?
Dr. Dawson: After World War II, there was a British engineer who worked on the radar system in the defence of Britain and his name is Maxwell Cade. And he put together a simple EG, and they had hook up spiritual masters. This EG, he was reading the five basic brainwaves — now, we know there are more than that — but he was reading the simple brainwaves. What he discovered is that he took up a Pentecostal faith healer, or a Taoist healer from China, or he hooked up a Confucian or in like a Buddhist or a Hindu or kabbalistic Jewish mystic. What he found was that even though their religious backgrounds and religious practices were totally different, they all have the same brainwave pattern. So that was the pattern of the mystics, we now knew what it was.
I talked about this in Bliss Brain, this void of discovery, as Maxwell Cade was doing this in the 50s and 60s. And then he had a student, at a wise he had hooked out. They said, ‘Well, let's hook up other people. Let's hook up Louie Armstrong. Let's look up jazz musicians in flow’. And they found same bliss brain pattern in them. They said, ‘Well, let's hook up some high performing executives and business people who are at their peaks and scientists’. So they found that regardless of the profession, whether in flow, they all have this characteristic brainwave state. The next thing that we had to realise over the last 20 years of MRI research is, now this is crucial, we used to think that it was just one of those happy accidents. There are only a few Louis Armstrong's. There are only a few Hussein Bolts. There only are a few Swami Vivekananda’s. We used to think these were special people. Once we discovered the brainwave state, some smart scientists then said, ‘Let's reverse engineer this. Let's train ordinary people to attain the same brainwave state’. And lo and behold, bliss brain, they could. We now like — I do seven, eight retreats sometimes. I'm doing virtual retreats now, but we do live retreats, usually once or twice a year. And the first day, it's going to take people, maybe we can induce that state, usually within 30 minutes. By the end of the retreat, start four minutes, they have learned to hit the state of a 10,000-hour meditation master. And they're doing it in under four minutes at the end by the end of the retreat.
So they're trainable now that we're reverse engineering them. And so one state, one way into the flow state is through meditation like the mystics do. The second way is through peak performance. Either way, you can get to that same state and be ignited by flow triggers that put you into that state, and they're reliable. They put you in that state every single time. And once you hit that state, Lisa, over and over and over again, the cool thing in bliss brain is all about addiction. For example, the one molecule that you generate in your brain in these deep states is called anandamide. It has the same chemical structure as THC, the active molecule in marijuana, docks the same receptor sites in your brain.
So you're flooding what are called your endocannabinoid receptors in your body and your brain, with natural THC, just generated by your own brain. It's a very big boost of serotonin. You're mentioning dopamine earlier, and I'm going to send you a meditation that, I've just been playing with this recently. This isn't available to the public and won’t be for about two years. But Mind Valley is working on a huge new program, and we're training people in this one meditation. They literally feel the rush of dopamine they get because dopamine is the same reward system as engaged by cocaine and heroin. So they're sitting there doing this meditation. They're getting serotonin, which is the same as suicide and magic mushrooms. Same Lego structure, they're getting anandamide, THC. They're getting the same molecules that are getting in ayahuasca cocaine and heroin and alcohol, all in one meditation. And so what we're now having to do, it's so crazy, we're bringing people to these ecstatic states, when you read Rumi and St. Catherine of Sienna. I mean, these people were in absolute bliss. Essentially their brains were full of these endogenous drugs. And so, we’re actually learning to generate these in people's brains. What we now have to do at the end of my meditations is you have to spend a few minutes, talk people down, talking them down off this high. They are so spaced out, they can't drive a car, they open their eyes off meditation, they don't know what planet we’re on. So we spend some time doing some orienting. ‘By the way, your name is what's the name again? What time of day, is it? Which country do you live in? What's your job?’ So we have to help them back into reality because they get so far out there, in just a few minutes of meditation. We’re now able to do that.
Lisa: Without any extraneous sort of, chemicals and things that can damage your impulse?
Dr. Dawson: No, none whatsoever.
Lisa: I have to ask this — because and this maybe outside the wheelhouse a little bit — when you're in those sorts of states, do you think you can connect? Is there a spiritual, wouldn’t you know? Do you believe that there's a spiritual dimension to what's on the other side, when people pass away, when we die? Is that what the mystics and some of the spiritual healers are tapping into something higher? I mean, I know we probably can't measure this, although I've just read some books on NDEs like near death experiences and the scientific rigor that a couple of these amazing scientists have spent years studying. What's your take, just your personal take on these higher states and being able to connect perhaps, to something beyond us?
Dr. Dawson: Albert Einstein wrote in the 1930s, he wrote that also the big discoveries have been made in that altered state of oneness with the universe. In chapter 15 of his book Think and Grow Rich, people think that Napoleon Hill's book from the 1930s Think and Grow Rich is about money, but it's actually about spirituality. It's about letting go. Napoleon Hill says, ‘I let go of my ordinary states, I enter an altered reality. And there I commune with St. Francis of Assisi, and Thomas Edison, and Napoleon Bonaparte, and all these great figures from the past. And that's where I download all of my answers, these questions from’.
So throughout history, people have been letting go of — what I call, now in my books, I call this local reality and non-local reality. And so in meditation, for a little while, you let go of local reality, and you simply identify with the field of consciousness that is the cosmos. There's this huge information field in which we swim in it. We're like fish looking for water. When we're looking for God or spirituality, we're like the fish looking for water. We're swimming in consciousness, and our brains are not generating consciousness. Our brains are transceivers of consciousness from this universal field. They then translate this universal appeal information into what we think of as local reality. But we're making up or making it up and we change our minds. When we shift our belief systems, when we orient ourselves deliberately to non-local reality, our local reality shifts dramatically and super quickly. Our brain shift, Lisa, in one of the examples I give in Mind to Matter, I talk about a TV reporter called Graham Phillips, who has a show called Catalyst. He went on an eight-week meditation retreat. They took his whole TV crew into a lab. They did a whole work up on his brain, his body. They use the high resolution MRI to measure the volume of neurons in each part of his brain. He then learned to meditate over the next eight weeks, and they brought him back to the lab after eight weeks ran the MRI scans again and the piece of his brain that is responsible for coordinating emotional regulation across different brain regions called the dentate gyrus — it's really tiny, it's about the size of a little fingernail, but it's right in the centre of your brain. It has tentacles going all over the brain and helps regulate being upset, being irritable, being angry, being annoyed, being stressed. That, the hardware of his dentate gyrus grew 22.8% in eight weeks. When you enter a non-local reality, it's changing the hardware of your brain, and it's not taking 10,000 hours, it's doing it in just a few hours. And he then started to see very different as your transceiver, transducer changes, then it is very different results outside of yourself.
So we are pure consciousness, we happen to be the body for a little while. We won't have a body forever. What you can do is every morning meditation. You can simply let go of local reality, you become one with non-local reality. The other cool thing there is when you come down from that space, Lisa, you are so full of love. I mean, I just cry when I come down. I walked on the beach the other day after meditation, I was just weeping with gratitude. I wrote in my journal, ‘My heart is just burning with love and bursting with gratitude’. Because you come down in the states of such ecstasy and the rest of the world in your life, and it is a world of magic. You then create that magic all around you. That's how I write my books. That's how I live my life, how I do my marriage and children and friends and everything. Well, I just can’t tell you how let's call this brain. It isn't like I'm feeling a little bit of hay brain, it is an ecstatic brain. I mean, in this exciting state, and becomes your new normal. Every day, it starts to change your physical brain. It starts to change the hardware of your brain, and then that starts to change your entire life.
Lisa: That sounds like a piece of something that I want. And I think, everybody who is listening will be like, ‘I want what that guy's got’. Because you emanate this. I've listened to many of your lectures and your talks and your podcasts and stuff, and you emanate this beautifulness — for want of a better description — it just seems to pour out of you. That is obviously the work that you've done. What I find, I was listening on Ben Pakulski, my amazing man. You're on his podcast, that was one of the ones that I listened to. He was talking about, as an athlete, and I've had an athletic background. As a young athlete, especially, and he said he was the same, we're actually running from stuff and we were fighting and we were forcing and actually probably brutalising our bodies in order to deal with something that was going on in our brains and trying to prove things. I think a lot of athletes live in that state and it's actually encouraged to live in that state, if you have a burning and I've even propagated the state and others. Where you're using the fire of anger, of being put down, of being let down to fuel your performance. And into a certain degree that works. I mean, being obviously, an incredible bodybuilder in my life that turned into running ridiculous kilometres and across deserts and so on. I don't run any more though stupidly long distances. One of the reasons is, I don't have the massive issues in my brain anymore. I have not needing to run away from something, prove something. I'm not saying that all athletes are doing this. But I do think that there is a large number of people who are handling things through expression of this sports, and how do you change that mindset? Because I still very much have that mindset. When I go to the gym, I'm there to smash myself, I'm going to punish myself, I'm going to work hard. I'm going to push through the pain barriers because that is the culture we've grown up as athletes. You work hard. If it's not hurting, then you're probably not doing it enough. How do we change that conversation and reach still these very elite levels without having that type of a mentality? Sorry for that.
Dr. Dawson: If you aren't in flow, you will injure yourself. I remember interviewing members of American football players and these are usually very large men. They’re very large men and they're very athletic, and they can jump like a metre share, vertical jump, and they reach remarkable speeds. They can start running and running really, really, really quickly, the catching. I remember this one young man said, ‘This is my million-dollar hand’. He was going to pay a lot of money as an American football star and he said ‘I've broken my fingers, at least one sometimes two or three times every season. And I can't afford to have this happen to my million-dollar hand’. After he learned EFT, after he learned to meditate, after he learned centring, getting into flow each game, he never broke another finger. He had one injury when he was just learning to meditate and do EFT. And they said, ‘Oh, it's the Achilles tendon injuries. You'll be out of the game for at least 12 weeks or maybe 16 weeks.’ Three weeks later, he was fine. And so, athletes, first of all, when they're in the zone, when they're in flow, they injure themselves less and their performance goes up. It's that old Yerkes-Dodson law, currently referred to a little bit of stress is fine. Anyone has a little bit of stress. Now what I'm what I'm getting at right now, I mean, to you and me, if I didn't have a fair amount of cortisol and adrenaline, I'd be a really boring guest.
Lisa: To some degree, we want that when we’re ready.
Dr. Dawson: We want that. Absolutely, but not too much of it.
Lisa: And like we're in a flow state, I'm in a flow state right now. Because I feel like I am because I just love learning from people like you. I'm just, give me more, all the heroes and stuff, because I'm learning and that is for me, one of my flow states studying and science. That really helps me. But how do we change that conversation for athletes? So that they're not going out to deliberately hurt themselves, but still able to reach those. I remember one story if you don't mind sharing, I think it was with your niece? Was it Jessica or something?
Dr. Dawson: Yes, Jessica.
Lisa: Do you mind sharing that story?
Dr. Dawson: Yeah, she is the national champion at rhythmic gymnastics. She meets me out there after the rank every year. So four years in a row, she was the US national champion. But again, she was pushing herself, she was collapsing inside. She was not doing it all well. On the outside, her performances look great. On the inside, she was just suffering and she eventually just couldn't go anymore, and just had withdrawn from the sport and collapsed. So that's not sustainable. What you find for the athletes who have a long-term career usually is they've learned to pace themselves. They've learned to reach that state of flow and stay there over time, they aren’t pushing themselves.
The other cool thing that happens, I've done a lot of work with women who are overweight or obese. They are often at war with their bodies, they have been ignoring their bodies, turning their bodies out, hating their bodies for over four decades. They don't like exercise on the whole. And it's hard for them to exercise. Like if you're heavy, there’s strain on your joints and your muscles. It's difficult to exercise, there's no great reward for exercising. So what we try to do, we don't even call that module of our program exercise, we call it joyful movement. Joyful movement. And so I say, ‘Go to the gym. Grab that maybe a 10-pound weight. And if you're just doing dumbbells and doing 10-pound weight, that's fine. If you have a goal of doing 10 reps, do as many reps as you feel good doing. Wait for the endorphin rush to kick in when you feel good. And the moment you feel bad, stop’. Now what they do is they then do eight and then they start to feel bad or stray, they stop at eight. Now they’re feeling an endorphin rush today. And maybe in the next week they feel the endorphin rush, and they're doing 11. But what has then happened is that they are associating going to the gym with pleasure neurochemicals, not with pain. And then you can't keep away from exercise. I mean, once you've learned to rejig your neurochemistry, to re-associate those exercise bands, or that piece of exercise equipment, or your kayak or your mountain bike with pleasure, rather than with compulsion and pain, then you find people are highly motivated to exercise. So we retrain them to do this. It also has the effect of listening and listening to their bodies. No longer is your body a threat and a problem. It's now something to listen to. It's a signal, ‘Hey, this doesn't feel good’. You stopped right away. So in my own workouts, if I decided to do 20 reps or something, and after 17, I'm no longer feeling good. I stopped at 17, then my body is saying, ‘Wow, 17 feels wonderful’. And then you completely change your conditioning to make that exercise a joy and a pleasure. After a while, you can't stop people going to the gym, if you use your own neurochemistry in an intelligent way like that.
Lisa: Well and you don't limit your performance when you do that? Because like, as an athlete you know that you have to endure a certain amount of pain to reach the next level, or that's what we've been told at least. You have to high intensity interval training and better back in CrossFit and rah, rah rah. The gentle approach, I can see being super good for somebody who's never exercised and just wants to break into this field, does the same apply for elite athletes wanting to get to the best that they can be? Because you're up against the competition that are training in this way of brute force training type of way. Is that as well?
Dr. Dawson: Yeah that too is a way of training, one way of training is the brute way of training. The other way is the supported way of training. That's a very good question. So that way works great for people who are getting into exercise for the first time. But what about people who are at that elite level?
There is a time to push yourself and there’s a time to back off. Only you know that. No one else can really tell you what that point is. But you know yourself. Like me, for example, I do a lot of mountain biking. There are sometimes where there's a long, steep hill. I’m exhausted and I think, ‘I'm exhausted, there's a steep hill ahead. I am just kind of go for it’. And it feels so exciting to do that. But if I had a coach saying, ‘Go for it’. If I was riding with somebody, and they would say, ‘Go for it’. I was trying to keep up with them. And I wasn't listening to my body, then probably I'd injured myself. That's what I have injured myself actually, in the past. So, you tune into yourself, and no one else is something no coach knew for you.
Are you meant to just put in that extra burst of effort? And then transcend yourself. We don't know for another person, we only know for ourselves. So it's really an interesting meditation. And again, it means being sensitive to yourself to know when to do that. The other thing is, it's not the same every day, we have by rhythm. Sometimes, we are just so in rhythm. That's the time to say, ‘I was planning on this 35-minute routine, I need to do the 55 minute routine instead.’ And you just know that day, ‘I’m so in-sync, my body wants to do that.’ You get good at reading your body and you know. I think the best lead athletes and how are some football players, the average football player in the National Football League in the US has about a 4-year career. How does someone like Tom Brady have a career that spans decades? You want these great athletes often, or great musicians or great scientists. They aren't a flash in the pan, they’re sustaining peak performance over time. I think they're the ones who are pacing themselves.
Lisa: Yeah. And are the ones that are listening to the body. I think, with training athletes, I often say, ‘If you start, you have to sort of look at how has your day been? How much sleep did you get? Did you hydrate? Have you had a lot of stress?’ Before you decide what your training is today. Even if we've put it on your plan to do a big, hard long training session, but you had a very bad night or something went wrong yesterday, then maybe today, we want to shift that out. And it's learning to be that sort of intuitive and rather than rigid, ‘This is what coaches said, and this is what I'm doing because I have to do that.’ The give and take means that you will eventually have more performance. I think, while others also, is in the recovery phase is where you actually get the benefit, not on the training phase. Contrary to people think that when we’re actually doing the weights is when we’re getting the strength. No, it's actually in recovery. So if you're not recovering properly, and you're just smashing yourself again the next day, then you're not going to get there with those wins anyway.
That’s just a new perspective for me to take on and maybe I'll be a little bit more gentler on mum in the gym today. She might be thanking you later, Dawson. I had her yesterday in the gym and we were doing weights. She doesn't like weight. She doesn't mind the treadmill and the bike and so on but when it comes to weights, I'm pushing her quite hard, “Come on, mom. You can do it.” Maybe I need to be a little bit more, how shall we say, sensitive.
Dr. Dawson: Yeah, also, if somebody you trust, like for example, a teacher will challenge you. A teacher will, we mentor people, we train people in EFT, in meditation and we train trainers, we train practitioners and that certified what's called clinical EFT, using EFT with other people. We push them. We definitely say that that's a challenge and we recommend you go for it. And sometimes your coach will see a possibility in you, you don’t see in yourself. Well very often we see that this person could be a brilliant healer, they might be a bus driver or a hairdresser, and we’ll say, ‘You can do this’. And we’re experts, we know that they can. So it does take an extra lie sometimes.
Also on the spiritual journey, take somebody that you talk to. I train thousands of EFT practitioners. I wrote the book EFT Manual, the most recent edition of the book. I've written about EFT and have done more research than anybody else in EFT and I have my own practitioner who may say to me, ‘Dawson, you need to sharpen up in this area. I think you can make a shift over here’. So we are living past the point of needing a trainer, of needing a coach, of needing extra eyes to look at us and to guide us, very, very useful at every stage of our development. We require even people who've been doing this for 50 years, they'd love to have their own therapist and do their own inner work. Because if you think you're past needing a therapist or doing your own inner work and alluded, there's always stuff to work on.
Lisa: That's a brilliant way of looking at it, and a very humbling approach to life. Now, I wanted to just shift gears a little bit, if I may, and talk about the bigger ramifications of changing our brain. Because when we change ourselves personally, we are also affecting our environment, our family, and then our community, and then our country, and then the world. If we're looking at the bigger picture, our world has some big major problems in it that we, and I think, we're not always focusing on the positives that are happening in our society because our media very much concentrates on just the negative. But if we all started to meditate today, and we all really adopted Dawson's approach and these other great researchers and scientists, and these people’s approach, to changing our own brains and how they're functioning in our own lives, and we're happy and nicer people, what sort of effect can we have on the environment do you think?
Dr. Dawson: I have a whole chapter in my book Mind to Matter on this. This is a phenomenon that's been studied over the past since the 1970s, called emotional contagion. And it began when one person noticed that in her workspace, in her office environment, there are good days and bad days. There are generally days when everything seemed to flow, people were nice to each other, the work flows smoothly. And then there were a lot of bad days as well. When people were grumpy and things didn't work. She realised that the good days were when one particular person was sick and took a day off. That one person was removed to the equation, everyone functioned better. And she realised that this was a phenomenon and she named it emotional contagion. We’ve now, have applied the — epidemiology is the study of infectious disease — we've now applied this in various research studies, to emotions, and we find that emotions are contagious.
So in one long-running studies, from guys since the 1950s called the Framingham Heart Study in Framingham, Massachusetts. And now includes five generations of inhabitants at Framingham. The researchers have found that a happy person is highly contagious, and actually produces contagion in her neighbour, and her neighbour’s neighbour, and her neighbour’s neighbour’s neighbour, who she's never even met. So when we are happy, you will literally — there’s this old saying Frank Sinatra in 1950 saying — ‘When you smile, the whole world smiles with you’. And it does, happiness is contagious. So when we do that, we're going to see a therapist, use EFT, take care of our physical bodies, love ourselves, tune into the infinite, tune into a non-local mind. It floods our hearts and our bodies, we feel so much better and we're just nicer to everyone around us. And they're nice people around them, that effect travels a long way.
In one study, I talked about in Mind to Matter, the researchers tweak the feeds of Facebook users, just a few dozen Facebook users, for a few days to make them either a little more positive or a little more negative. Just a tiny touch, more positive, more negative. And those people then pass those certain stories along in their feeds, and others and passed further stories along in their feeds. Within two weeks, they produce emotional contagion in 600,000 other people. So we are highly contagious, our positive energy.
I'll give you one example. Donald Trump is the previous president of the US and a tremendously polarising a triggering figure. And so, people talk about Donald Trump and I've been told so that we just lie or done something really harmful to other people, they get so offended. And so I really counsel people to stay in your heart and just hold Donald Trump and everyone in his party, in compassion, just hold. Take the people who offend you the most and hold them in compassion. Tune into their suffering and hold them in that way. When we do this, when we are as Jesus said, ‘Love your enemies,’ to go to them that hate you. Very good advice, even though it's 2,000 years old. When you do this, you're producing emotional contagion around you. You have no idea how far it's going. But as the Facebook study found, just a few people could produce emotional contagion in hundreds of thousands. So by becoming happy yourself, you walk around happy.
During the pandemic, we all like to wear masks all the time. One study found that when I talk behind the mask, so no one can see whether I’m smiling or frowning. People can hear by the tone of your voice, if you're smiling or frowning. They can tell with a very thin slice of information, what it is. So you're just talking to somebody kindly and nicely, that's using emotional contagion. There’s one story I tell in one of my books, Lisa, that just touched me was this guy who was having a really difficult time. His wife had left him taking with him, their two kids, he couldn't see the kids and missed the kids terribly. And then he lost his job. He just spiralled downward and decided to commit suicide. He’d been suicidal for a few months, but that was the day he decided he was going to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. He literally drove to the Golden Gate Bridge. There's a parking lot there, he parked his car, that he had to cross the serious bester and crossings to get to the bridge. And as he was having chills, I tell the story because such an emotional impact. But I just think of this guy. And so he was stopped at a light waiting for the traffic light to change. He looked at the car next to him. There was a woman, an elderly woman with long grey hair in the car, also stopped at the light. As he looked at her, she happened to look at him. And she smiled, she smiled at him. Suddenly he realised life was worth living. He turned around went back to stop with suicide. You have no idea of the effect you're having on other people. We're reducing emotional contagion and other people all the time. It might be your smile that stops somebody from doing something harmful, or gives them a sense of hope about their lives. So, we support each other, we love each other. And after a while you just live in this world where there is so much love, your sensitised love. You attract loving people into your life, you attract time people into your life, compassionate people. And so now suddenly, you're in this environment that is beautiful.
Are you struggling to deal with people who are homicidal and suicidal and nasty and mean and angry and stressed? Absolutely. And when I drive down the road, sometimes they'll be, maybe a young man and a pickup truck. And he'll be weaving in and out of traffic. They'll be angry. It'll be having episodes of road rage, and maybe have a finger. And that used to really trigger me. And now I say, ‘That guy is probably having a terrible day. He probably does not have a very good life. And I need to just love it.’ So I will just drive in my car in the slow lane. I shower him with love. Now, is that affecting him? Who knows? Is it bringing my cortisols down? Oh, yeah, absolutely. My cortisol is going down. I am now a better driver. I am now making waves to the people around me. So, we are agents of emotional contagion. I urge people in my books, go out and be an agent of conscious, positive emotional contagion with every thought you have, every word you say, you have no idea who might be affecting, and you will certainly be lowering your cortisol. But the other cool thing is, in one study I did recently, we show that when you lower your cortisol, this is people tapping and meditating for a week, they were doing this and they lower the cortisol. The cortisol went down by a huge amount, 37% drop in stat and baseline cortisol in only one week. Their immunoglobulins, which are these molecules are antibodies that attack coronaviruses, emitted lobules globulin is a y-shaped molecule that attach to the spike protein on the coronavirus and neutralise it. Those molecules in those people's mucous membranes went up 113%, more than double, in one week of tapping and meditation intensity in the retreat center. So we now know that, am I affecting the young man? I have no idea. Am I driving my own cortisol down and my own immunoglobulins up? Absolutely. I'm much healthier and I'm able to exert that influence on the world around me. So it is powerful to practice these things and be the agent of positive emotional contagion.
Lisa: That is so powerful. I've been guilty of this in the past when someone's cut me off in traffic, before I've even thought, before my prefrontal cortex is actually turned on the amygdala has gone, roar. And you're doing the bird out the window at this person, swearing at them. And then you can like now. When I was younger, I was a lot more volatile, and I come from a family of very strong people and a warrior background, if you like, from my native population. We tend to be quite, warrior-orientated. And now I am very much like that, I'm like, ‘I'm going to damage myself, if I react to this situation then I'm just hitting my cortisol up’. And one of the things, when I was studying our blood sugars and what happens with the blood sugars, how the cortisol sends your blood sugar's up and you actually put on weight — well, that was a very good deterrent from getting angry.
Dr. Dawson: Absolutely, weight gain.
Lisa: Weight gain because I got angry in traffic.
Dr. Dawson: One study found that optimists live on average, 10 years longer than pessimists. This was a 30-year study, both men and women over the course of three decades. The optimists live 10 years longer than the pessimists. So negative emotion, its battery acid inside your body, it's corrosive, it's really damaging your organs, gives you a much shorter and much more disease-filled life than optimism. So be optimistic, be altruistic. I mean, you feel good doing all those things, you feel much better. And of course, your health is dramatically better. Your longevity is at least a decade more than otherwise.
Lisa: And you do this through not just through positive thinking, because we all know I think that just, ‘I'm going to be positive today and the network's for five minutes’. The Positive Psychology thing. What he says, right? But through meditation, through connection, through being out in nature, and through all these things, that we've just talked about the last event is the way to get us more positive responses. That's what I'm hearing. And that's where it becomes more seen.
Dr. Dawson: Yes. Well, yes and no. There are two kinds of focuses that I've found are necessary. And I'm just putting a level playing field on the surface plane over here. One of those is being into the subconscious healing trauma. If you try and go for positive thinking, without healing trauma, it becomes the dark side, becomes repressed anger, repressed rage, and it actually will surface the subway and make itself known often as self-sabotaging behaviour, or repetitive negative thinking. So you have to do both. My initial — all my initial research for more than 10 years was with veterans with people who are traumatised, dealing with trauma. And that's great. So you need to go and deal with all that's holding you back. Then you want to go not just be at a neutral point where you don't have trauma, you’d want to explore peak states. Like imagine being in ecstasy every day, having those need and that serotonin that anonymise, that oxytocin, all these wonderful neuro chemicals flowing through your brain. And now you're hitting a peak state, you're starting your day in flow, and then you just go on from there and have a wonderful creative day. So you want to be doing both of those things simultaneously. This isn't the work of a week. This is the work of a lifetime, but it is so worth doing. Both the trauma, healing through EFT, EMDR, all these other wonderful energy therapies, and then cultivating these elevated states, bliss brain. And again, people reach these states, and they feel wonderful, as well as they're incredibly creative. And of course, their health improves as well. So both of those things.
Lisa: Yeah. Dawson, we’re going to have to wrap it up in a moment and I want to be respectful of your time. But I would love to have you back on because I don't think we've really covered everything.
Would you do me the honour of coming back in a month or two months, whenever your schedule, your crazy schedule allows. But I think we need to dig deeper. And I would like to actually put into practice some of these things that I've learned today and to go a little bit deeper into these things and see. And then be able to have that discussion with you and how our progress. So I think that would be a nice way to come back and actually look at a case study if you like.
Dr. Dawson: Yes, absolutely. Love to do it.
Lisa: Oh, so Dawson, how can people reach you? How can they find out more about your work? Obviously, your books, Mind to Matter, Genie —
Dr. Dawson: Genie in Your Genes.
Lisa: Genie in Your Genes and Bliss Brain, your main books that you have. Where can people find you online, find out about EFT, maybe start training with you, all that sort of stuff?
Dr. Dawson: Yeah, there are three places that you can go to. To get Bliss Brain, you can go to blissbrain.com and you get the book there, you'll see eight meditations that accompany each of the chapters of the book. And these are brief, they're under 20 minutes each, but they really help you get to those elevated emotional states. Mind to Matter is all about manifestation, about the link between thoughts and things, that’s mindtomatter.com. Then the Immunity Meditation I mentioned earlier is at dawsongift.com. So that's worth doing. We actually once, we got the results of two studies in showing these big rises in immunoglobulins and a special meditation to actually help people hit those peak states. And those are at dawsongift.com. So the two books mindtomatter.com and blissbrain.com and then the meditation is at dawsongift.com, those are the three best places. You also get a portal there for example, because we have practitioners who work with people 24/7 live video sessions in real time. We do a lot of workshops. I do Bliss Brain workshops, we have a big one coming up that's going to be in German, French, Spanish, as well as English. Lisa, I'm just obsessed with getting people this material. And also I'm so moved by people suffering. When I see people suffering, and I realise wow, if only they had this little piece of information, their lives would be so much better. So I just,
Lisa: You're beautiful. You’re amazing.
Dr. Dawson: Everyday obsessed with how to do that.
Lisa: Thank you so much for your service to everybody. I think this is incredibly important work. This is changing lives and I really thank you for digging really deep into the sciences and bringing this all to us. Because I'm seeing everyday people who are just completely – and in my own life. I've experienced my own traumas and so on, who have so much anxiety, so much trauma, so much PTSD, and being able to elevate a few people in your environment and change the way that you're living your life would just be absolutely fantastic. So thank you very much for your time today, Dawson.
Dr. Dawson: Oh, it's been a joy. Thank you. I look forward to our next get together.
That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate, review and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.
The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.
There's a stigma associated with unresolved trauma. Many people don't talk about their traumatic experiences. Unfortunately, we're only taught short-term solutions like coping with stress and managing our emotions. With these short-term solutions, the root cause remains unresolved. The trauma is still present and can affect our everyday lives.
In this episode, Dr Don Wood joins us to talk about how unresolved trauma can directly affect our health. He aims to remove the stigma around unresolved trauma, and the first step towards healing is understanding the pain we've gone through. He also talks about the power of our minds from the different stories of his past patients.
Tune in to this episode if you want to learn more about how unresolved trauma can affect your health and life.
For our epigenetics health program all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/.
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‘I really started the Inspired Performance Institute because of my wife and daughter more. Mostly my daughter than anything else.’
‘So if I had been a little frustrated with something that worked that day, or is, you know, some other thing that was nothing related to her, she could pick up on that tone change. And then, in her mind, what her mind would be doing is saying, “What do we know about men when they start to get angry?” And a whole bunch of data and information about her father would come flooding in and overstimulate her nervous system.’
‘And so when my daughter was 14, she was diagnosed with Crohn's. And they just told us that you just kind of have to, you know, learn to live with this.’
‘And that's really what led me to develop the program, is I realised that when my daughter was 16, she disclosed to us some sexual abuse that she had had when she was like six years of age that we had no idea. So my wife was, obviously both of us were devastated, but my wife was extremely, she had experienced, you know, sexual abuse as a child and thought she would never let that happen to her child.’
‘How could the body crave a substance that it doesn't know? It doesn't regulate heroin. How could it crave something that doesn't regulate? I believe it's the mind has made a connection between the heroin and survival.’
‘What's happened is your mind has been calling for an action for many, many years, that was impossible to accomplish. But your mind doesn't know that and it keeps putting pressure on you. “Do it, do it, do it.” And because you don't do it, it's using these emotions to call for the action, it stops calling for the action, it shuts off the emotions. And so now depression is the absence of emotion.’
‘I believe in a lot of cases, that's what they're doing, are trying to desensitise you to it. You know, talk about it enough, maybe it doesn't feel as dramatic. And talk therapy has its place so I'm not against it. I think where talk therapy is really good is when you're dealing with a current problem. Where I think the difference between what we do is we're able to get the talk therapy much more effective when you take out all the old stuff that keeps aggravating the new stuff.’
Dr Don Wood, Ph.D., developed the TIPP method after researching how atmospheric conditions affect our minds and impact our lives. In his search for answers for them, Dr Wood connected trauma and their health issues. He also recognised the daily stress they lived with. The only solutions provided came from medications. His experience with his family provided the determination required to develop a cutting-edge neuroscience approach.
The program has benefited individuals all over the world. The results have been impressive. Dr Wood has helped trauma survivors from the Boston Marathon bombing attack and the Las Vegas shooting. He has also helped highly successful executives and world-class athletes. Marko Cheseto, a double amputee marathon runner, broke the world record after completing TIPP. Chris Nikic worked with Dr Wood and made world news by becoming the first person with Downs Syndrome to complete an Ironman competition.
The Inspire Performance Institute was built on this simple phrase, ‘There's nothing wrong with you, there's nothing wrong with your mind’. Some events and experiences have created some glitches and error messages for your mind during your lifetime, and all you need is a reboot.
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To pushing the limits,
Lisa
Lisa Tamati: Welcome back, everybody to Pushing the Limits. Today I have Dr Don Wood, who is sitting in Florida. And Dr Don is a wonderful man. He is a trauma expert. He is someone who had a problem in his own family and sought about finding a solution. He is the developer of the TIPP method, T-I-P-P method. He spent years researching, and to understand how our minds affect our bodies. Dr Wood made the connection between trauma and health issues. In addition, he recognised the daily stress that people live with when they've been through trauma, and that the only solutions provided in the normal conventional world and medications. But his experience with his family provided the determination required to develop a cutting-edge neuroscience approach, a real holistic solution that provides immediate and long lasting relief for people who have been through trauma of any sort, whether it's small or large. The TIPP program developed by Dr Wood has benefited individuals all over the world. And he really wanted to create a solution that removed the stigma of trauma. Too many people are afraid to ask for help because of that stigma. And that's why he named the program around increasing performance levels. The name of his institute is the Inspired Performance Institute.
I really love this episode with Dr Don Wood, he is a lovely, amazing person with a way of helping people get rid of PTSD, get rid of trauma out of their lives. So that they can get on with being the best versions of themselves. And that's what we're all about here. He's worked with everyone, from soldiers coming back from wars to victims of the Boston Marathon bombing campaign, to highly successful executives and world-class athletes. He's been there, done that. So I really hope that you enjoy this conversation with Dr Wood.
Before we head over to the show, just want to remind you, we have our new premium membership for the podcast Pushing the Limits. Now out there. It's a Patron page so you can be involved with the program, with the podcast. We've been doing this now for five and a half years; it is a labor of love. And we need your help to keep this great content coming to you, and so that we can get the best experts in the world and deliver this information direct to your ears. It's a passion that's been mine now for five and a half years and you can get involved with it, you get a whole lot of premium member benefits. And you get to support this cause which we're really, really grateful for. For all those who have joined us on the Patron program. Thank you very, very much. You know, pretty much for the price of a cup of coffee a month, you can get involved. So check that out at patron.lisatamati.com. That's patron P-A-T-R-O-N dot lisatamati.com.
And just reminding you too, we still have our Epigenetics Program going. And this, we have now taken hundreds and hundreds of people through this program. It's a game-changing program that really gives you insights into your genetics, and how to optimise your lifestyle to optimise your genes basically. So everything from your fitness, what types of exercise to do, what times of the day to do it. What, whether you're good at the long distance stuff or whether you be a bit more as a power base athlete, whether you need more agility, whether you need more work through the spine, all these are just information that's just so personalised to you. But it doesn't just look at your fitness, it looks at your food, the exact foods that are right for you. And it goes way beyond that as well as to what are the dominant neurotransmitters in your brain, how they affect your mood and behaviour, what your dominant hormones are, the implications of those, your predispositions for any disorders and the future so that we can hit all those off at the past. It’s not deterministic, that is really giving you a heads up, ‘Hey, this could be a direction that you need to be concerned about in the future. And here's what you can do about it.’ So come and check out our program. Go to lisatamati.com. And under the button ‘Work With Us’, you will find our Peak Epigenetics program. Check that out today. And maybe you can come and join us on one of our live webinars or one of our pre-recorded webinars if you want to you can reach out to me, lisa@lisatamati.com, and I can send you more information about their Epigenetics Program. Right, now over to the show with Dr Don Wood.
Hello, everyone and welcome back to Pushing the Limits. This week, I have another amazing guest for you. I've found some pretty big superstars over the years, and this one is going to be very important to listen to. I have Dr Don Wood, welcome to the show, Dr Don.
Dr Don Wood: Thank you, Lisa. I'm excited to be here.
Lisa: This is gonna be a very interesting, and it's a long-anticipated interview for me, and Dr Don is sitting in Florida, and you've got a very nice temperature of the day, isn’t it?
Dr Don: Oh, absolutely gorgeous- low 80s, no humidity. I mean, you just like I said, you couldn't pick a better day, it's very fast. I would have tried to sit outside and do this. But I was afraid somebody would start up a lawn mower.
Lisa: Podcast life. I’ve just got the cat wandering, and so he's probably start meowing in a moment. Now, Dr Don, you are an author, a speaker, a trauma expert, the founder of the Inspired Performance Institute. Can you give us a little bit of background of how did you get to where you are today, and what you do?
Dr Don: Well it’s sort of an interesting story. I really started the Inspired Performance Institute because of my wife and daughter more. Mostly my daughter than anything else. I talked about this, is that I led this very, very quiet, idyllic kind of childhood with no trauma. Never had anything ever really happen to me. You know, bumps along the way, but nothing kind of that would be considered trauma. And I lived in a home that was so loving and nurturing, that even if I got bumped a little bit during the day, you know, was I, when I was a kid, I'm coming home to this beautiful environment that would just regulate my nervous system again.
Lisa: Wow.
Dr Don: So I believe that that was critical in terms of having my nervous system always feeling safe. And that really resulted in amazing health. I mean, I've been healthy all my life. And as an adult, when things would happen, I could automatically go back into that nervous system regulation, because I had trained it without even knowing it.
Lisa: Yeah.
Dr Don: that I was able to get back into that. Well. And so when I met my wife, I realised she was not living in that world. And amazingly enough, Lisa, I thought everybody lived like, because I had no idea that a lot of my friends were being traumatised at home. That I had no idea, because everybody's on their best behaviour. If I come over, everybody's behaving themselves and you don't see it. My friends, a lot of times wouldn't share it because of either shame or guilt. I mean, my wife, nobody knew what was going on in their home.
Lisa: Yeah.
Dr Don: And she had one best friend that knew, that was about it. And if you met her father, who was really the bad guy in this whole thing, everybody thought he was the greatest guy. Because outwardly, he came across as this generous, hard-working, loving kind of guy. Loved his family, but he just ran his home with terror.
Lisa: Wow. Terrible.
Dr Don: And so, oh, it was terrible. So when I met my wife, I realised, wow, this, because we got close very quickly, because I had the chance to play professional hockey in Sweden when I was 18. So we got married at 19. So very quickly, I was around her a lot, while we were sort of getting ready for that. So I got to see the family dynamic up close very quickly. And that's when I realised, boy, she's not living in that world, which is living in fear all the time. And that's why I sat down with her one day, and I just said, ‘Tell me what's going on here. Because I can sense this tension in here. I could sense that there was a lot of fear going on. What's going on?’ And she started sharing it with me, but swore me to secrecy. Like I could never tell anybody because of all that shame and guilt, because nobody really outside the home would have been aware of it.
Lisa: Or probably believed it.
Dr Don: Or believed it. Right.
Lisa: Yeah.
Dr Don: And then it was again, that ‘What will people think about me? What do they think about my family?’ That's really common, when you have people who have experienced trauma like that. And so, I sort of follow along and said, ‘Okay, this will be our secret,’ but I thought to myself, ‘Well, this will be great now, because I'm going to get her out of that home’.
Lisa: Yeah.
Dr Don: And she's going to be living in my world. So everything will just calm down, and she'll be feeling that peace that I've experienced all my life.
Lisa: Not quite so simple.
Dr Don: I was like, Well, how is this not helping? Like, why now? She's living in the world that I grew up in because I was very much like my father. I wasn't gonna yell at her, scream at her, do anything that would have made her feel fearful. But she was still living in fear.
Lisa: Yeah.
Dr Don: And if, yeah, and if I said something like, ‘No, I don't like that.’ She could tear up and start going, why are you mad at me? Yeah. And I would be like, ‘Oh my God, like where did you get I was mad at you for?’ I just said. That made no sense to me at the time. Now I understand it perfectly. What I didn't realise at the time was that people who have been traumatised are highly sensitive to sound—
Lisa: Hypervigilant and hyperaware of noise and people raising their voice.
Dr Don: Any kind of noise. And what she also, as a child, she had learned to listen very carefully to the way her father spoke, so that she could then recognise any kind of the slightest little change in my vocal tone. So if I had been a little frustrated with something at work that day, or, you know, some other thing that was nothing related to her, she could pick up on that tone change. And then, in her mind, what her mind would be doing is saying, ‘What do we know about men when they start to get angry?’ And a whole bunch of data and information about her father would come flooding in and overstimulate her nervous system.
Lisa: So then it's like they Google search, doing a Google search and going, ‘Hey, have I had this experience before?’
Dr Don: Yeah.
Lisa: And picking out, ‘Yeah, we've been here before. This is not good. This is dangerous. This is scary.’
Dr Don: Yep. And that's actually what led me to the research that I did, mainly because of my daughter, though. So my wife lived with that, she developed Hashimoto’s. So she had this thyroid issue with, because she was constantly in a fight or flight state.
Lisa: Yeah, the cortisol.
Dr Don: More flight than anything. Yeah, cortisol. And so when my daughter was 14, she was diagnosed with Crohn's. And they just told us that you just kind of have to learn to live with this. And she's going to be on medication for the rest of her life. And we'll just continue to cut out pieces of her intestines until she has nothing left and she’d have a colostomy bag. That's just the way it is.
Lisa: Oh. And she’s 14 years old.
Dr Don: She was 14. Yeah. She ended up having for resections done, she would go down to you know, 90, 85 pounds. She’d get so sick, the poor thing. No, because she just couldn't eat. Yeah. And she couldn't hold anything down. And they just told us to have no answers. My wife did unbelievable research, trying to come up with answers and really couldn't come up with anything except this management system that they've been given her. And so, I was adopted. So we didn't know my family history. Yeah. So our family doctor was my grandfather. And I didn't know this until I was 18.
Lisa: Oh wow.
Dr Don: I always knew I was adopted. But my mother shared the story with me when I was 18. That he came to my parents and said, I have a special child I want you to adopt, right. Now. I guess you just knew that my parents were just amazing people. And you know, at that time, you know, unwed mothers, that was considered a shame. Right? You didn't talk about that. So that was a quiet adoption.
Lisa: Wow.
Dr Don: In fact, his wife didn't even know about it.
Lisa: Wow.
Dr Don: Could be my grandmother. And that's, it's interesting, the story, because I should share this too. Because what happened was, is I never understood why my birth certificate was dated two years after my birthday. And what happened was, is that my parents adopted me, like immediately upon birth. But my grandmother found out about it, his wife found out about and sued my parents to get me back.
Lisa: Oh.
Dr Don: And so they had to go into this legal battle for two years.
Lisa: Oh, wow.
Dr Don: Now I remember when I was really, really young, I used to get these really bad stomach pains. And I, and they took me, I remember going to doctors, I was really young. I remember going to doctors, but my grandfather was very holistic at the time for an MD. So you know, I was on cod liver oil, and you know, all these different things like, and so what he said to me, he says, No, he's just stressed out because of the stress in the home. You have to take the stress out of this home. He's feeling it.’
Lisa: Yep.
Dr Don: Right. So it's not that my parents were yelling, screaming.
Lisa: He’s ahead of his time.
Dr Don: Oh, way ahead. But what he realised was that, because it was so hard financially for them, that had a major effect on their life. So I guess I was feeling it. And so they went out of their way to take all the stress out.
Lisa: Wow. What lovely parents.
Dr Don: Oh yeah. So it created this unbelievable, unusual home life. And so I never had any real tension in the home.
Lisa: Wow.
Dr Don: Well, that was, I guess, as my wife said, we were the perfect petri dishes for this because I was living what we want to be, and she was living in the opposite world of what a lot of people do live in. And so at least I knew what the model was, what we were going for.
Lisa: And when we're exposed to trauma very early in life, it has a much bigger impact on your health and everything then when it happens later in life. Is that right?
Dr Don: Absolutely. Because we've never learned how to balance our systems, so then it stays, you know, in dysregulation a lot more than it did. And that's really what sort of led me to develop the program, is I realised that when my daughter was 16, she disclosed to us some sexual abuse that she had had when she was like six years of age that we had no idea. So my wife was, obviously both of us were devastated, but my wife was extremely, she had experienced, you know, sexual abuse as a child and thought she would never let that happen to her child.
Lisa: Yeah.
Dr Don: So now my poor wife has also got a new, you know, trauma onto her. And so that's where it really came down to, is, you know, she said to me, ‘You could research this and find out what's going on, because I have no answers.’ And that's when I started to research and I made the connection between trauma and these autoimmune issues, for example, that my wife had, and my daughter. And so what I discovered is that I believe that unresolved trauma creates inflammation in the body. The inflammation compromises the immune system and your neurotransmitters. So we start getting sick, and we start feeling bad because our neurotransmitter, serotonin is produced mostly in the gut. So the serotonin is affected by the inflammation, which was from my daughter, right? She's not going to feel good.
Lisa: Nope.
Dr Don: And then that just leads to a host of other problems. And it's, it's really, really sad that the only solution that we currently are using is to teach people to live and manage and cope with it.
Lisa: I think, yeah, so we, we know, which is, which is good. You know, we're learning things, how to cope with anxieties, and breath work and all that sort of good stuff. But it's not getting to the root cause of the problem and being able to to deal with it. So when we're in a heightened state of stress and cortisol, and when we’re taking energy away from our immune system, and blood literally away from the gut, and and from a neurotransmitter production, and all that sort of thing, so is that what's going on, and why it actually affects the body? Because this mind body connection, which we're really only in the last maybe decade, or 15 years or something, really starting to dig into, isn't it? Like there's and there's still a massive disconnect in the conventional medical world where this is the mind, and this is the body. And you know, from here, up and here, and it's separate.
Dr Don: And so on and so forth? Yeah.
Lisa: Yeah. And it we’re one thing, you know. And so this has a massive effect on our health, and it can lead to all sorts of autoimmune diseases, or even cancers, and so on. So you were at this time, so you didn't have the Inspired Performance Institute at this stage? What were you doing professionally? And then, did you go back and do a PhD? And in...? Wow.
Dr Don: I've always been an entrepreneur all my life. So I was in financial services, we did a number of different things. We, my son and I, still have an energy business, we do solar energy and stuff like that.
Lisa: Oh wow.
Dr Don: I decided if I was going to do this, I needed to go back and really study. So I went back and got by, went back to school, got my PhD.
Lisa: Wow.
Dr Don: And, you know, to truly, to try to add credibility, number one, to what I was doing. Because, you know, people are gonna say, ‘Well, who are you? Yeah, you know, why should we listen to you? You never had any trauma and you're supposed to be an expert? Like, how does that work?’ You know, it's the same thing with addiction. You know, I help people with addiction. I've never had a drink in my life, never touched a drug in my life. Now that I say, but I know what addiction is.
Lisa: Yeah.
Dr Don: I don't believe addiction is a disease. I believe it's a code that gets built from pain.
Lisa: Yeah, let's dig into that a little bit. And then we'll go back to your daughter's story. Because addiction, you know, it's something I know from a genetic perspective. I have a tendency towards, towards having addictive nature, personality traits. I chase dopamine a lot. I have a deficit of dopamine receptors. And so I'm constantly going after that reward. Now that's worked itself out in my life, and in running ridiculous kilometres and working ridiculous hours, and not always in negative things. Luckily, I've never had problems with drinking or drugs, but I know that if I had started down that road, I would have ended up probably doing it, you know, very well.
Dr Don: You’d be a star as well.
Lisa: I’d be a star in that as well. And luckily, I was sort of a little bit aware of that and my parents never drank and they, you know, made sure that we had a good relationship with things like that, and not a bad one. Have struggled with food, though. That's definitely one of the emotional sort of things. And I think a lot of people have some sort of bad relationship with food in some sort of way, shape, or form on the spectrum, so to speak. What is it that causes addiction? And is it a physical dependency? Or is there something more to it?
Dr Don: Yeah, that's why I don't believe it's a physical dependency. Because here's the way I look at it is, people will say to me, ‘Well, if I stopped this heroin, the body's going to crave the heroin, and I'm going to go into withdrawal.’ And my response to that is, ‘How could the body crave a substance that it doesn't know? It doesn't regulate heroin. How could it crave something that doesn't regulate?’ I believe it's the mind, has made a connection between the heroin and survival. Because you have felt bad, right? Because of trauma, or whatever it is, whenever you took the heroin, you felt better.
So I had a lady come in who had been on heroin. And she said to me, she's, ‘Well, I told my therapist, I'm coming to see you. And he told me, I had to let you know upfront and be honest and tell you I have self-destructive behaviour.’ And I just smiled at her. And I said, ‘Really? What would make you think you're self destructive?’ And she looked at me, because this is what she's been told for a year.
Lisa: Brilliant.
Dr Don: She says, ‘Well, I'm sticking a needle in my arm with heroin, don't you think that's self destructive?’ And I said to her, I said, ‘No, I don't think it was self destructive. I think you're trying to feel better. And I bet you, when you stuck the needle in your arm, you felt better.’ That nobody had ever said that to her before. And so I said, ‘Now, the substance you're using is destructive, but you're not destructive? What if I could show you another way to feel better, that didn't require you having to take a drug?’
Lisa: Wow.
Dr Don: And I said, ‘You're designed to feel better. And I believe that the brain, what happened is, is it because you felt bad, you found a resource that temporarily stopped that pain.’ And you see your subconscious mind is fully present in the moment. So when does it want pain to stop? Right now. And if that heroin stops the pain right now, then what happened was, is that system, you have two memory systems, you have explicit memory system that records all the information in real time. So it records all the data, and stores. No other animal does that. We’re the only animal that stores explicit details about events and experiences. We also have an associative procedural memory that we learned through association and repetition over time. So, because the explicit memory kept creating the pain, because we kept thinking about it, and looping through this pain cycle, you started taking heroin, then you engage your second associative memory, which learns through repetition and builds, codes, habits, and behaviours.
Lisa: Wow.
Dr Don: Because you kept repeating it your mind built a code and connected up the pain being relieved by the substance.
Lisa: Wow.
Dr Don: Now, your subconscious mind is literal. So it doesn't understand negation. It only understands what's happening now. And so if your mind says that substance stops the pain, it doesn't look at the future and consequences of it. It only looks at what's happening. It's only our conscious mind that can think of consequences. Your subconscious mind, which is survival-based only understands. That's why people at 911 would jump out of the buildings. They weren't jumping to die, they would jumping to stop from dying. Yeah, if they didn’t jump, they would have died right now. So even if they went another two seconds, they weren't dying now.
Lisa: Right? So it’s really in the right now, there's really no right now. It's really in the seconds.
Dr Don: And the very, very milliseconds of what's happening now. And there's no such thing as consequences, it’s basically survival. So now, if you keep repeating that cycle over and over using heroin, and then somebody comes along and says, ‘Lisa, you can't do that. That's bad for you. I'm going to take that away from you.’ Your survival brain will fight to keep it because it thinks it'll die without it.
Lisa: Yeah. Makes a glitch.
Dr Don: It's an error message.
Lisa: Have you heard of Dr Austin Perlmutter on the show last week, David Perlmutter’s son and they're both written a book called Brain Wash. And there they talk about disconnection syndrome. So the disconnection between the prefrontal cortex in the amygdala and the amygdala can be more powerful when we have inflammation in the brain. For example, like inflammation through bad foods, or toxins, or mercury, or whatever the case may be. And that this can also have an effect on our ability to make good long-term decisions. It makes us live in the here and now. So I want that here and fixed now; I want that chocolate bar now. And I know my logical thinking brain is going, ‘But that's not good for you. And you shouldn't be doing that.’ And you, you're trying to overcome it. But you're there's this disconnect between your prefrontal cortex and your amygdala. And I've probably butchered that scenario a little bit.
Dr Don: No, you got it. But 95% of your mind is working on that subconscious survival base. It's only about 5% that's logical. That logical part of your brain is brilliant, because it's been able to use reason and logic to figure stuff out. So it created the world we live in: automobiles, airplanes, right, computers, all of that was created by that 5%, part of the brain 5%. However, if there is a survival threat, survival will always override reason and logic. 100% of the time.
Lisa: Wow.
Dr Don: So you can't stop it. And it's what I talked about was that time slice theory. Did I mention that when we were going?
Lisa: No.
Dr Don: When I did my research, one of the things that I found was something called the time slice theory. And what that is, is that two scientists at the University of Zurich asked the question— is consciousness streaming? So this logical conscious part of our mind that prefrontal cortex, is that information that we’re, as you and I are talking now, is that real, coming in real time? And what they discovered is, it’s not.
Lisa: Oh.
Dr Don: The 95% subconscious part of your mind, it's streaming. While let's say your survival brain churns in everything in real time, processes that information, and then only sends pieces or time slices, because your conscious mind cannot handle that detail.
Lisa: Oh, wow. So they’re filtering it.
Dr Don: Filtering it. And yeah, so as it takes it in, processes it, and then sends time slices or some of that information to your conscious mind. Right? But there's a 400 millionth of a second gap in between your subconscious seeing it, processing it, and sending it. And when I read that, that's when I came up with the idea that what's it doing in that 400 millionth of a second? It's doing a Google search, see? And so in that 400 millionth of a second, your survival brain has already calculated a response to this information before you're consciously aware of it.
Lisa: Wow.
Dr Don: And so the prefrontal cortex has got a filter on there to be able to stop an impulse, right? So it's the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex is sort of the gatekeeper to say, ‘Okay, let's not go into a rage and get into trouble. Let's try to stop that.’ So we have that part of our brain. However, here's where the problem comes in— You're driving and traffic and somebody cuts you off. And so your first response is, you get angry, because this person is like, ‘Oh, I want to chase that guy down and give him a piece of my mind.’ But that part of your brain can say, ‘Let's think about this. Hold on,’ you know, even though it's 400 millionth of a second later, the first anger response, then it should be able to pull that back. Here's where the problem comes in. If getting cut off in traffic looked like you had been just disrespected. During that Google search, your now, your subconscious mind has filtered through every experience of being disrespected. And so much information comes in that it cannot stop the response. It overrides it, because now it feels threatened. And our prisons are full of people who had been so badly hurt, that that part of their brain can't do that. You and I can probably do that. Right?
Lisa: Sometimes.
Dr Don: Because we can say, sometimes? You know, you can run them down. You can leave the car. But that's where the problem comes in. Yeah, can't stop that, then that rage and all those things come in. And that affects your relationships could affect all kinds of things. And people would say, ‘Oh, you got an anger management problem. We're going to teach you to live with, you know, and manage that anger.’ What I'm saying is ‘No, it's a glitch. We don't need all that data coming in.’ Right, good response, a Google search is creating the problem.
Lisa: Like there's so many questions while hearing what you just said that, and I've experienced in my own life where with my family, where the initial response is so quick, that someone's punched someone else before they've even thought about what the heck they are doing. In the, when you said that, disrespected like this is, you know, I think when I've gotten really really angry and overreacted to something, when I think about it logically later, and a couple of times were of, like, in my early adult years, I was in a very abusive relationship. Thereafter, when I would get into another relationship, and that person tried to stop me doing something, I would just go like, into an absolute fit of rage. Because I was fighting what had happened to me previously, and this poor person, who may have not even been too bad, got the full barrels of verbal assault. Because I just reacted to what had happened to me 10 years previously. And that's the sort of thing where I felt like I was being controlled, disrespected when he went in. So that Google search is happening in a millisecond.
Dr Don: 400 millionths of a second. you couldn't have stopped, impossible for you to stop. And then people would say, ‘What's wrong with Lisa? She's just normally a great person, but where is that coming from?’ Up until now, you may not have known that. But that's what it is. And it's impossible for you to have stopped. It was the same thing when my wife and I would say, ‘No, I don't like that.’ And she would start to cry. I'd be saying, ‘Gosh, what am I doing to make this woman cry?’ It wasn't what I said. It was what I said that activated her Google search, which then flooded into data about her father. She was responding to her father, not to me. We both didn’t know that; we all thought that she was responding to what I just said.
Lisa: Isn't this always just such complex— and if you start to dissect this, and start to think about the implications of all this, and our behaviour, and our communication and our relationships, so much pain and suffering is happening because we're not understanding, we're not, we're angry at people, we’re disappointed with people, we’re ashamed of things that we've done. And a lot of this is happening on a level that none of you know, none of us are actually aware of. I mean, I liken it to, like, I know that my reactions can sometimes be so quick. Like before, my, just in a positive sense, like effect glasses falling off the beach, I would have caught it with my bare hand before my brain has even registered it. I have always had a really fast reaction to things like that. That's a clear example of, like, that permanent brain that's in the here and now, has caught it before I've even realised that's happening.
Dr Don: You know, and that's why I always say to people, ‘Did you choose to do that?’ And they'll say, ‘Well, I guess I did.’ I go, ‘No, you didn’t.’ Didn’t just happen that happened before you could actually use the logical part of your brain. And because it was so much information, right? Even though the logical part of your brain would say, ‘Well, you know, don't lash out at this person. They didn't mean that.’ It would already have happened. Yeah, I worked with a professional athlete. He was a baseball player playing in the major leagues. And I explained that concept to him. And then we were at a, one of his practice workouts, and his pitcher was throwing batting practice behind a screen. And so as he threw the ball, this guy, my client hit the ball right back at the screen, and the coach, like, hit the ground. Right? And I stopped right there. And I said, ‘Great example.’ I said, Did your coach just choose to duck?
Lisa: Or did he automatically do it?
Dr Don: He had no, he had no time to use exactly. The logic. If you use the logical part of your brain, what would you have said? ‘This ball can hit me; there's a screen in front of me.’
Lisa: Yeah, yeah. But you know—
Dr Don: No way logic is going to prevail, when there's a threat like that coming at you. Yeah.
Lisa: This is why it's important because we need to be able to react in that split second, if there really is a danger and there's a bullet flying in ahead or something like that or something, somebody is coming at us from, to do us harm, then we need to be able to react with split second timing.
Dr Don: But you don’t want that logic coming into it.
Lisa: No, but we do want the logic coming in when it's an emotional response. Do you think like, when people have had repeated brain injuries, they are more likely to have problems with this, you know, the prefrontal cortex not functioning properly and even being slower to respond or not getting enough blood flow to that prefrontal cortex in order to make these good decisions?
Dr Don: Yeah, absolutely. And if you look at SPECT scans or brain scans of people who have had those kinds of injuries, you'll see that that part of the brain, that frontal part of the brain, the blood flow will drop when they get into those situations.
Lisa: Wow. And then they can't make a good decision. And here we are blaming them for being—
Dr Don: Blaming them for being—
Lisa: —and they end up in prisons, and they end up with hurt broken lives and terrible trauma. And, you know, it's not good if they react and hit somebody or kill somebody or whatever. But how can we fix this? And that one of my go-tos is the hyperbaric oxygen therapy. And I've heard you talk about that on a podcast with Mark Divine in regards to your son. And that is one way we can actually help our brains if we've had had a traumatic brain injury or PTSD or anything like that, is that right?
Dr Don: Yeah, my, like I said, my son had three head injuries, one in elementary school, one in middle school, one in high school. And the first one, we didn't see as big an effect. But he did have a problem. The second one, he ended up with retrograde amnesia. And then the third one, we just saw him go downhill and just really couldn't communicate very well, didn't have any energy, had a lot of anger issues and they just kept saying he's got major depression, you need to medicate them. And I was like, ‘No, I believe we've got traumatic brain injury.’ But I could not get them to give me a script for a SPECT scan or an fMRI. It was impossible. And I wasn't looking for the structure, because they'd look at an MRI and they'd say, ‘We don't see any damage.’ Well, it wasn't the physical damage we're looking for, it was a functional damage that we were looking for.
Lisa: Yeah, the blood flow. Yeah.
Dr Don: And once we discovered that that's what it was, we got him into hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and he started getting the blood flow into the areas that he needed to process what he was experiencing. And so if you can, you can imagine how difficult that would be, somebody saying, well just go over there and do that. And you don't have the ability to process it.
Lisa: Yeah.
Dr Don: And so that frustration there is anger would be coming from just complete frustration.
Lisa: Yeah.
Dr Don: That he just couldn't do it's like, you know, you ran in somebody and you couldn't lift your right leg.
Lisa: Yeah.
Dr Don: Right. And somebody said, ‘Just start running.’ ‘I'm trying.’
Lisa: Yeah, yeah.
Dr Don: It would be very, very frustrating.
Lisa: Yeah, I mean, having worked with, you know, my mum with the brain injury for five and a half years, and I will tell you, man, that is so frustrating. And still, even though she's had well, you know, must be close to 280 or something hyperbaric sessions, and gone from being not much over a vegetative state to being now incredibly high functioning. But there are still some pieces missing that I cannot get to. Because obviously damage in the brain where parts of the brain cells are, have been killed off. And we, you know, I'm really having trouble with things like vestibular systems, so, or initiation of motivation, and things like that. And hyperbaric can do a heck of a lot, it can't fix areas of the brain that is actually dead. So I, you know, and we don't have SPECT scans over here, this is not available. We don't do them.
Dr Don: Yeah. And they’re hard to get here. I just don’t understand them.
Lisa: They're very frustrating, because they just are so powerful to understand. Because when you see you've got a problem in your head, that it's actual physical problem, then, you know, it takes away the blame the guilt, and you know, like, I was having this conversation with my brother, and I'm, you know, talking about Mum, and why isn't she doing this, that and the other end. And I said, ‘Because she's got brain damage, and we can't get her to do that thing.’ ‘But she's normal now. She should be doing that now.’ And I'm like, ‘She's much, much better. But in that part of the brain, I haven't been able to recover.’ It is still a thing. That is the year. That is, I am, not that I'm giving up on it, but you know, there are just certain things that we haven't quite got the full thing back.
Dr Don: The SPECT scan would show that. And you'd probably see it, or do they do fMRIs there?
Lisa: I haven't checked out fMRI because yeah.
Dr Don: Check out the fMRI.
Lisa: I only heard you say that the other day, and I didn't, I knew about SPECT scans and I knew about. Dr Hearts and all the SPECT scans that he's done, and Dr Daniel Amen and the brilliant work on it all and I've searched the country for it. And New Zealand there's, they've got one that does research stuff down in New Zealand and I think but it's it's nobody can get access to it. And it's just, oh gosh, this is just such a tragedy because then we can actually see what's going on. Because people have been put on antidepressants. They've been put on, you know, antipsychotic drugs. Some things that are perhaps not necessary. We could have, we could have dealt with it with other other ways, like hyperbaric and like with, you know, good nutrients, and even like your program that you do that would perhaps be the first line of defense before we grab to those types of things. But—
Dr Don: The fMRI would definitely probably help you. So it's, you know, a functional MRI. Yeah. So it's going to give you blood flow. I just had a young boy come in, nine years, nine years old, having real issues. And anyway, his mum's gone everywhere, tried everything. And I said, have you done an fMRI? She says, oh we’ve done the MRIs. But, and I said, ‘’No, you need an fMRI.’ She'd never heard of it. No, I was telling her about it.
Lisa: I hadn’t even heard about it either.
Dr Don: She didn’t want to do SPECT scans, because SPECT scans are going to put something into your system, right? So she didn't want any kind of dyes, or any kind of those, you know, radioisotopes and stuff like that. So the fMRI is the other answer to try to get that.
Lisa: Oh, okay. I'll see whether they've got that, they probably haven't got that either. I'd say, probably having Dark Ages with a lot of things.
Dr Don: There's so many things like that, that would give you answers that they just don't do, which is surprising to me. Because when you think research, I mean, you find out how effective they are, why wouldn't they do it? You know, they just won't.
Lisa: Oh, yeah, like one of those doctors who was on my podcast, and we're talking about intravenous vitamin C. And he said, I said, ‘Why is it taking so long when there's thousands of studies proving that it's really powerful when there’s critical care conditions like sepsis, what I lost my father to?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, because it's like turning a supertanker. There’s just 20 years between what they know in the clinical studies to what's actually happening in the hospitals.’ He says at least a 20-year lag. And this is just, when you live in New Zealand, probably a 30-year lag. We’re just just behind the eight ball all the time, and all of these areas of what's actually currently happening.
I wanted to go back to your story with your daughter. Because she's got Crohn's disease, 14 years old, diagnosed, having to hit all these restrictions, and that she's going to have to manage it for the rest of her life. And she will never be well. What actually happened? Because we didn't actually finish that story.
Dr Don: Well, like I said, so she had, you know, suffered for many years with that, and she's an actress, so any kind of stress would just aggravate it. So she would constantly be getting sick, because, you know, the more stress she has, the more inflammation she's creating, and then she would just get sick and go back to the hospital. So it has really affected her career. So that's when my wife said, ‘You've got to come up with some answers.’ And so I did the research. And I really believe that it was a trauma as a child that continued. Because this is when I made the connection between unresolved trauma and inflammation. Inflammation is the response to trauma, whether it's physical or emotional. And the purpose of the inflammation is to protect the integrity of the cell. So the cell gets into an enlarged space. So it sort of puffs out, gets enlarged and hardened to protect it from getting penetrated from any kind of foreign invader.
Lisa: Wow.
Dr Don: So the idea behind it is, it's a temporary pause, because there's been an injury. So the idea is, we need to protect this area. So let's protect it and not let anything get into the cells while, until the danger has passed. So this temporary pause in the system, temporarily suspends the immune system, temporarily suspends the processing of the cell until the danger passes, and then the immune system can come in and clean up, right and take care of everything. The problem was, is that my daughter's trauma was never resolved. So those cells in her intestinal area stayed in an active cell danger response, in an inflamed response, because as far as it was concerned, she was continually being assaulted.
Lisa: Wow.
Dr Don: Because it kept looping through the trauma. Yeah. So once we took her through this program, and we resolved it so that we were able to stop her mind from constantly trying to protect her from this threat as a six year old, because your subconscious doesn't have any relationship to time. So if you think about something that happened to you when you were six, that's happening now. So in her mind, she was being hurt now. And until we got that updated, so it’s like a computer, I say your brain is a computer. Your body is the printer.
Lisa: Oh, wow. That’s a good analogy.
Dr Don: And so if the brain has an error message, it’s going to affect the printer.
Lisa: Yes.
Dr Don: So in her mind, that trauma kept on looping. As soon as we got that corrected, and her mind understood that there was no memory— the memory was still there, but the activation of our nervous system stopped, the inflammation went down.
Lisa: See, that's it, like your body's calling for action. I've heard you say—
Dr Don: That’s when it processes the emotion.
Lisa: Yeah. So when you think back to a traumatic event in your life, and you start crying and you're reacting as if you were right there in the in, which, you know, I can do in a split second with some of the trauma that you know, been through. That means that there is a high-definition in your brain, that those moments in time are just locked in there, and causing this, the stress response, still now. And that's why you’re crying years later, for something that happened. And it's actually calling for action. It's telling you to do something. But of course, it's a memory you can't do something.
Dr Don: So action required, you know I think that’s the glitch, the error message that I talked about. So if you think about something that happened to you five years ago, and you start to feel fear, or cry, your heart starts pounding in your chest, your mind is saying ‘Run,’ five years ago, because it's seen it in real time. Now, it's impossible to run five years ago, but your mind doesn't know that. So it's going to continue to try to get you to run. And so a lot of times when I talk to people who have depression, one of the things I asked, I'll ask them is, ‘What are you angry about?’ And they'll go, ‘Well, no, I'm not angry, I'm depressed.’ And I'll say, ‘What's happened is your mind has been calling for an action for many, many years, that was impossible to accomplish. But your mind doesn't know that and it keeps putting pressure on you. Do it, do it, do it. And because you don't do it, it's using these emotions to call for the action, it stops calling for the action, it shuts off the emotions.’
Lisa: Wow.
Dr Don: And so now depression is the absence of emotion.
Lisa: Right.
Dr Don: And so what is done is to protect you, it's shut down the request.
Lisa: Everything down. So you go sort of numb, numb and apathetic and just—
Dr Don: Because you can't do what it’s been asking you to do. And so it's been calling for that action for many, many years. You don't do it. And so it says, ‘Well, this isn't working. So let's just shut the system off for a while. We won't ask for the action anymore.’ And so that's why the people are depressed. And as soon as you get to the cause of it, what has your mind been asking you to do and you resolve it, then your mind stops calling for the action. And then the depression will lift.
Lisa: You had a great example of a lady that you worked with. Rebecca Gregory, was it from the Boston— can you tell us that story? Because that was a real clear example of this exact thing.
Dr Don: Yeah. So Rebecca came to see me five years after the Boston Marathon. She was three feet from the first bomb that went off. And so her son was sitting at her feet. So when the bomb went off, luckily she shielded him, but she took the brunt of the blast. She lost her left leg. And five years later, she's having post-traumatic stress, right? And she says, ‘I have nightmares every night. I heard about your program. I heard that you can clear this in four hours.’ She says, ‘Iy sounds too good to be true.’ But she says, ‘I'm completely desperate. So I'll try anything.’ And so she came in and sat down. And what I explained to her as she started to talk is, I said, ‘Rebecca, do you know why you're shaking and crying as you're talking to me right now?’ And she says, ‘Well, because I'm talking about what happened to me.’ And I said, ‘That's right. But your mind thinks a bomb is about to go off. And it's trying to get you to run.’ And I said, ‘But there's no bomb going off. It's just information about a bomb that went off. But your mind doesn't know that.’ And that, she'd never heard before. And so what we did is over the next four hours, we got her mind to reset that high-definition data that had been stored about the bombing into a regular alpha brainwave state, right, where it's very safe and peaceful.
So she could recall it and she could talk about it without the emotion. Why? Because, now we're not going for happy, right? You know, it's still sad that it happened. But what we're trying to stop is that dysregulation of the fear, the call for the run. That stopped. And you can watch your testimonial on her on our site, and she just talked about, she goes, ‘I just couldn't believe that you could stop that.’
Lisa: But in four hours.
Dr Don: And then now she can go out and she spoke all over the country. You know, she was a very high-profile lady who did a lot of great work in trying to help people. But she was still suffering with post-traumatic stress. Yeah, trying to help people who were experiencing post-traumatic stress.
Lisa: She knew what it was like.
Dr Don: She was living it. Same thing. I tell the story, it’s another dramatic one was a US Army sniper who had to shoot and kill a 12 year old boy.
Lisa: Oh, gosh.
Dr Don: And when I first sat down and talked to him, he was just sobbing. And he said, ‘I just can't live like this anymore.’ And by the time we were finished, he could then describe everything that happened that day, including shooting. And he said to me, goes, ‘How the bleep did you do this? Like, how am I able to talk about it now? And I said, ‘For eight years, your mind's been trying to get you not to pull the trigger.’
Lisa: And you can't go back in time.
Dr Don: But your mind knows you're not pulling the trigger now. So it stopped calling for the action. It's just information now.
Lisa: And so, is this similar to EMDR? I did a few sessions of EMDR when we lost our little baby boy a couple of years ago. And in that time, when I was doing it, I thought, this isn't working. But when I look back on that traumatic event, I no longer have the response, really, to— it’s sad, but I don't, but I'm not like I was in the months after that. And I don't, I wouldn't say I'm completely, you know, out the other end of that particular trauma, there's been more since that I'm still dealing with. But it definitely did something. And I don't know what, it was a lot of eyeshifting and going home. What was it? Is it similar to what you do? Or is it different?
Dr Don: Yeah, I studied EMDR. So what we do, so that's a technique some of the techniques I use in EMDR I'll use. But I think what we've done is enhance it even more. I've made it even quicker and even more comprehensive.
Lisa: Yep.
Dr Don: And EMDR. How many sessions did you do in EMDR?
Lisa: I think I did four.
Dr Don: So yeah, so they're gonna be between 4, 8, 10? Right. We're doing one.
Lisa: Yeah. Yeah. And I wasn't sure immediately after it had done anything. But I must admit, yeah.
Dr Don: And it does, because what it's doing is getting that memory reprocessed, which is what we're doing. But we do it much simpler, like I don't need much detail at all. In fact, I've sat with people, you know, a person said, if a woman had been raped or sexually assaulted. The last issue was to sit there and do is start describing what happened to her. So what I do is I say, we got a, we got three different ways of doing this one, you can talk about it if you'd like to, and I'm going to take you through the techniques, right, to get your mind to reprocess it. Or two, I'm just going to do strictly visually. So I have no idea what you experienced. I'm not going to know any of the details, which feels very safe.
Lisa: Yeah.
Dr Don: Or third, what I say is I'm going to teach you a new language, and it's called flowing. There's only one word and the flowing language, it’s flowing. So instead of saying, I walked into the room, you're gonna say flowing, flowing, flowing, every word is flowing. The advantage to that is she has to go into memory to see it and bring up the images.
Lisa: Yeah.
Dr Don: But I have no idea what it is.
Lisa: Yeah. You don’t need to hear it.
Dr Don: I don't need to hear it. And then I take her through basically a two to three minute technique. That's all. And at the end of that, it's updated.
Lisa: That's incredible.
Dr Don: And my wife used flowing with me, right? Because it was some things that were, for me, she didn't want to share.
Lisa: Fair enough.
Dr Don: Right? Yeah. And that was fine. And so I tell them, whichever way you want to do it. I said, ‘If I needed to know, I would ask.’ I said, ‘But if I'm asking, it's just from curiosity.’
Lisa: Yeah.
Dr Don: But it's not necessary. That is radically different. Right? For people who have experienced really severe trauma. And it's very, very, you know, safe and very pain free.
Lisa: And what, so what is it, what, we have talked therapies where we, you know, go to a counselor, and we spend years sometimes working through our childhood traumas and our, whatever traumas have happened since and we don't seem to get anywhere, which is a lot of time. It might feel good in the moment that you're sharing, and being able to express yourself, but it doesn't really work. In my experience, at least. What is the difference here? Are we just reliving and actually enhancing these memories when we just talk about them all the time, and not actually deal with them?
Dr Don: I believe in a lot of cases, that's what they're doing, are trying to desensitise you to it. You know, talk about it enough, maybe it doesn't feel as dramatic. Yeah. And talk therapy has its place so I'm not against it. I think where talk therapy is really good is when you're dealing with a current problem. Yeah, current stress maybe in your marriage, whatever, and learning how to handle what's going on right now. Where I think the difference between what we do is we're able to get the talk therapy much more effective when you take out all the old stuff that keeps aggravating the new stuff.
Lisa: Yep.
Dr Don: So if you're in a current stressful situation, and it's been aggravated, because every time you talk about it is bringing in all the data of the old stuff, then it's very difficult to deal with. So that's, I think what we do, which is really different, and makes everything much more effective.
Lisa: Yeah, absolutely. That makes sense to me. And with, going back to your daughter, because we so we, she is now managed to get on top of her Crohn’s. I mean, Crohn’s is an incurable disease, apparently.
Dr Don: That’s what we were told, yeah, that there’s no cure for Crohn's.
Lisa: What did you do with her to actually because it's that physical thing, and there are a lot of people out there listening probably have Crohn's or IBS, or something like an autoimmune disease, or can, how did that work out with her? And, you know, why is that sort of a really amazing story?
Dr Don: Well, all I know is that after we took her to the program, she hasn't had a Crohn's flare up. So I'm not saying that we can cure Crohn's with our program. Exactly. What I do know is that after she went through the program, she hasn’t had a Crohn's flare up. So to me, there's a correlation between her nervous system and the activation of her Crohn’s. And so once we got that settled down, so Crohn's could be, may not be just from that. There could be other reasons for it. So you never know. So somebody could do our program and not have that same reaction. But what we do see is a lot of different, because when we talk about, I believe that there's imagine more like a cell phone, you plug in your cell phone at night, right? We go to sleep, we charge up, we wake up with 100% of our energy. Then how much of that energy do you have available to do maintenance. So if you've got a lot of maintenance and repair issues, you're draining a lot of energy.
Lisa: Oh, yeah.
Dr Don: And if your mind is looping through a lot of trauma that's pulling a lot of energy away from your ability to do maintenance and repairs. Yep. And so I talked about when I played hockey, which is a pretty brutal sport, I had six concussions, 60 stitches, and I never missed a hockey game. Now at the time, they just said, ‘You just heal fast, faster than most people.’ What I didn't realise is, I believe the reason I healed fast was because I was getting much more maintenance done.
Lisa: Yeah.
Dr Don: At nighttime when I slept. Because I didn't have a lot of trauma that my mind was constantly looping through. So it wasn't pulling energy away. So if I'm getting two or three times the maintenance and restorative sleep, of course, I'm going to heal faster. How could I not?
Lisa: Gosh. Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense. Really. Yeah.
Dr Don: And that's why I've been healthy all my life, I just don't get sick.
Lisa: So super immune system.
Dr Don: Very powerful immune system that can fight whatever comes at me. And again, we talked about vitamin C, if ever, I feel a little tickle in my throat, or I start to feel that, I just pound in vitamin C, you know, 4000, 5000 milligrams, vitamin C, and it’s gone.
Lisa: Immune system jumps into gear, because you don't have these stressors. So when we talk about stress being so detrimental, you know, we talk about it all the time, stress is bad for us, and what you know, excessive stress, there are good hormetic stressors, where we go for exercise, or we get in a sauna, or we do cold therapy, and these are short, temporary stressors that cause cascades of changes in the body that make us stronger. But when we're exposed to chronic stress, which is like what we're talking about, traumatic events, and you know, like I also wanted to say there's not just, somebody died, someone's legs been blown off, someone's you know, been to war. These are not just those big, big, traumatic things. These are these daily little things that start to add up as well that can be traumatic stressors, can't they? It's not just the big ones.
Dr Don: That's what I wrote my second book called Emotional Concussions. So they're those bumps, right? That little concussion that you feel like, ‘Oh, I'm okay, right. Yeah, I had a bump on my head. But now I seem to be okay.’ Those add up, those little emotional concussions can add up, or can also get connected to other ones. And so you don't realise how they're affecting you.
So I've had people come in who will say, you know, ‘I've never had any real trauma in my life, I've been fine. There's nothing wrong.’ And then all of a sudden waterworks will start when they start thinking about something that happened to them when they were a child. As an example I had a lady come in. She had been adopted by the stepfather, her mother got pregnant at 18, didn't marry the father, then married another gentleman who then ended up adopting her and having two other children. And so when she was about six years of age, the original, her natural father wanted to meet her. And her stepfather said something to the effect that ‘You were a mistake.’ And she said, ‘I hated my stepfather. I made his life agony for him.’ She'd never connected up that event. She just said, ‘I just never liked him. I gave him such a hard time all the time.’ She goes, ‘My brother and sister loved him.’ She says, ‘I just hated him.’ And it came down to that event. And so in her mind, right, once we got and we got that event resolved, and here's how we resolved it. I said, ‘Is it possible—’ So once I've got you in this very, very peaceful restorative mindset, right, then we start looking at some of this information. So when we looked at it, she was crying when she talked about she's, ‘I remember my stepfather saying that I'm, I was a mistake.’ When we look at it, when she's in this very restorative mindset, I said, ‘Is it possible that what he said, isn't what he meant? Is it possible that's a saying that people say, “Oh, that was a mistake.” But they didn't mean you're the mistake.’
Lisa: Yeah.
Dr Don: Right. It probably wasn't the best thing for your mother to have a baby at 18 out of wedlock, right. However, that that had never really occurred to her that that could, because a six year old child doesn't have enough life experience to understand that statement. In her mind, ‘I was a mistake. He thought I was a mistake.’ And so as we're going through this, all of a sudden, she said to me, she says, ‘I just had this flood of energy coming into my chest right now.’ And she says, ‘You know, what just came into my mind? him sitting there braiding my hair when I was little.’ She said, ‘He was a good man, I just never gave him a break. And now I sort of see what my brother and sister saw. He really was a good guy.’ Right? So this in her mind—
Lisa: Just one event. Just that one event. One slip of the tongue, so to speak, or, you know, taken the wrong way, or, you know, an adult conversation that a child’s misconstrued, it doesn't even have to have bad intent behind it.
Dr Don: With sometimes no ill intent. My wife had a similar situation where when she was really little. She's living in this dramatic household and gets invited to when she was like, six, seven years of age to a tea party by the mothers in the neighbourhood. And the grandmother dresses her all up nice and pretty. And she goes there. And I remember her telling me the story and crying. And she says, when she got there, the mothers as she walked in, looked at her and one of the mothers said, ‘Oh, look at this one, this is going to be a real heartbreaker. Oh, yes, this is going to be a real heartbreaker.’ My wife as a child has been so hurt already. What she hears is they see something bad in her. She grows up and hurts people. And she says she felt sick to her stomach, she just wanted to go home.
Lisa: Wow, completely at the wrong—
Dr Don: As an adult, still had that impact on her until we got it resolved.
Lisa: And so these little things that as parents that makes you go, ‘Oh, my God, what damage have I done? Just because I yelled at the kids the other day because they couldn’t have any lollies or something if I did, it’ll damage them.’ It does make you feel a bit panicky about you know, all that all the trauma that you could be causing to your kids.
Dr Don: So I'm working on a third book, like for just talking about that, on how those kinds of things after studying our program, saying, ‘How can we help parents be able to understand the impact those words?’ Because again, with the best of intentions, right, you could be saying a particular phrase or saying or action that is being misinterpreted by somebody who doesn't have any kind of experience.
Lisa: Yeah, absolutely. And it can have far-reaching effects that was way beyond what should have been.
Dr Don: Another great example, I had a lady who again, same thing, uh, no trauma in my life, great childhood, you know, and I said, ‘Can you come up with any kind of an event that you remember that was upsetting or disturbing.’ And so she says, then she had to think about it. And then she says, ‘Yeah, I remember one day she said, I was in church since I was about six years old.’ And she says, and all of a sudden, I see her eyes starting to fill up as she started to talk and she started to choke up, and she says, ‘I was talking and my grandmother took out the brush from her purse and hit me on the head with it and said, ‘Stop talking. You're in church.’ And then the waterworks came. And she says, ‘I just realised I lost my voice that day.’
Lisa: Oh, wow.
Dr Don: She says, ‘I don't speak up for myself. I don't.’ Yeah. And that had never connected to her. And she realises, ‘I just let people tell me what to do.’ She says, ‘I don't ever speak up for myself.’ And that was a revelation to her that she had never connected.
Lisa: And it was such a minor thing.
Dr Don: Did her grandmother decide to do that? No, it was just like, ‘Stop talking, you're in church,’ right? Yeah, just a little thing.
Lisa: You're like, wow.
Dr Don: Another one, which is really fascinating, just to show you how the subtlety of it. A gentleman telling me that his father who never really was an angry person or whatever. But there was one particular time, he says, ‘My father really hurt me. And it was shocking to me.’ He started to tear up. And as he explained it, what he said is his father hit him on the back, tapped him on the back of the head, he says, but he felt like he just whacked him like full speed. Until he realised, he said, ‘I'm thinking about it now, my father wore this big ring.’ And so when he, his father probably meant to tap. But the ring was like a shock, like a big hit. So the child, ‘You really unloaded on me?’ But he probably didn't mean to, right, and probably couldn't understand why his son was overreacting to this little tap on the head. Right? But then again, that was a situation that affected the way it was a an event that he said, his father overreacted. And he realised he probably didn't mean to do it the way he did it, but had an effect on on him.
Lisa: And then you add to that whole works, your genetic predisposition to either having you know, the warrior gene or the worrier gene, you know, in the, whether you hold on to adrenaline and anxiety and have more anxiousness. And in general, you know, and, like, I remember, as a kid, my mum saying to me, ‘You were just such a sensitive kid. You would cry at the movies if Bambi got,’ you know, she just couldn't take me to any movie, or anything, because I was just very sensitive, always-trying-to-rescue-the-world kid, you know. And trying to atone for everybody else's misdemeanors that they did, and you know, I probably still am. And that, you know, so you have this genetic thing that you come in with, and then you add on some of these things. So while somebody may have had a much more traumatic childhood, you can still react with that, those, you know, if you've got the disposition much more violently, or much more strongly to those as well. So we're very complex, little, little beings. It's a wonder any of us managed to do anything really.
Dr Don: Well, what do I refer to that when I start talking is your atmospheric conditions. Your atmospheric conditions, your Joe Polish, who there’s that saying is he goes, ‘I love the way you say that because your atmospheric conditions are different than my atmospheric conditions.’ So if you grew up in very dark, stormy atmospheric conditions, and I didn't, but then, of course, I'm going to see the world differently, because I'm going to filter through those.
Lisa: And you know, what Joe talks about too, as a mutual friend of ours is an incredible guy. Addiction and taking away the shame and the guilt and all of that that's associated, then the blame for and seeing people for actually what's happening instead of apportioning blame. And that stuck with me what he said about that. I think it was a film that I watched that he made. Like, let's remove some of the judgments that we have on people who are dealing with drug addictions or alcohol addictions. We may not like their behaviour, we may want to help them get out of that situation. But judging people when we never walked in their shoes, when we never had any of those experiences that that person has, how the hell are we, any of us really, able to judge other people?
Dr Don: And that's what I talked about in the program too, because what I get to, as I say, think about it, if our brain is a filter, right, and we take water, which are our thoughts and we pour the water through the filter, and it comes out clear, right? But if we pack mud into that filter, and we pour the water through it and it comes out, muddy, we say, well, what's wrong with that water? There's nothing wrong with the water, it filtered through the mud. How is it not going to be muddy, which is your thoughts? Yeah. And so if you've had a lot of packed mud into your filter, right, and your thoughts come out very dark, right and very muddy. Right? How could you not do it?
Lisa: Yeah.
Dr Don: So when I sit down with somebody who's in addiction, what I say to them is I said, ‘It's impossible for you to not have done what you did, based on the way your mind filters. So that doesn't— there's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with your mind. All you've done is you've had a certain set of experiences and your mind filters through those.’ And I said, ‘I've never had a drink of alcohol in my life. I've never had a drug in my life, but I've never experienced your pain. So if I had experienced your pain, and you had experienced my life, you would be sitting where I am. And I'd be sitting where you are.’
Lisa: Yeah.
Dr Don: How could I have done it differently? Yeah, it's not what I say is addiction is not about character, willpower, morals, or ethics. Right. And so you take that that's what Joe and I've talked about, you take away that shame and guilt, because shame and guilt is what got them into it, and probably keeps you there. And so you take away that. So there's a young lady, Michelle, who, when I met her, she's 33, 17 years since she was 16 in active addiction. I mean, everything you can imagine. And the first thing I sit down with her, and as I say, ‘Michelle, there's nothing wrong with you. You don't have a disease. You've built up a series of codes to protect you from the pain.’ And I said, ‘You've had a lot of trauma.’ She goes, ‘Well, how do you know I’ve got a lot of trauma?’ And I said, ‘I can it in hear your voice. Your voice is shaky. And so I can hear the trauma in your voice.’ And I said, ‘What I'm going to do is show you how we're going to update and reset that so that you now can then filter properly. And then that's going to stop the need to feel better, so that's the only reason that you wanted to feel better.’ So she was smoking cigarettes as well, as well as the drugs within four days, she completely stopped smoking. She hasn't smoked, since. It's over two years, has never touched the drug since.
Lisa: Wow.
Dr Don: She had zero withdrawal. When I said the withdrawal is coming from the mind saying, ‘You better get it or we're going to die.’ So I believe the mind creates the physical pain, which they call withdrawal. Because it's saying, ‘If you don't get this, we're going to die.’ So it's going to create physical pain to make you— it’s like bending your arm up your back. Because I've talked to drug addicts who will tell me that as soon as your dealer says they're on their way to bring the drug, the withdrawal stops. Because they know they're gonna get it.
Lisa: So the brain just shuts up because you're going, you're getting it.
Dr Don: That's in the mind, because how could the mind crave heroin? I said, if the mind could crave anything, what would it crave? Water. Or if the body could crave anything, what would it crave? Water. But we don't have waterholics, we don't have water rehab centres. That’s what people would be craving. And with you running, right?
Lisa: You’re only craving water.
Dr Don: But you didn't have a problem drinking too much water.
Lisa: No. And when you're, when you're in the sands, like a desert, like across lots of deserts. And there was one day that we only had two liters of water a day, you're not hungry. You're not anything else but thirsty. That's the only thing you can think about, and it's the only thing that you want. And then you know, the addiction to chocolate that I had in my normal life is gone.
Dr Don: Sure. Survival-based, your brain is survival-based, and it wants more. And so if somebody says, ‘I'm going to take away your drug.’ Your mind says, ‘But we'll die.’ It's an error message. And so that's why we'll create the physical pain to get you to go get it. And then as soon as you get it, you feel better. Right? That says nothing about your character, willpower or morals or ethics, that’s just biology and chemistry, right? And the brain is so powerful to survive, it will do amazing things to stay out of pain.
Lisa: Yeah. And this is why the evolution of how we've evolved in, you know, where our DNA has come from. And then you stick us in this artificial environment that we've made for ourselves, you know, like looking at food addictions, for example, you know, you're going to McDonald's on every street corner and fast food everywhere and ultra-processed and with our old DNA, we’re programmed to go and look for fat and salt and sugar. And that's what we’re wanting to get.
Dr Don: It makes us feel good.
Lisa: It makes us feel good. It stops the pain, it stops temporarily, you know, unfortunately, and it's available now everywhere. And this is where, you know, we get into this whole problem with you know, obesity and all sorts of degenerative diseases and the follow on from that. And we're really just fighting against our biology, you know?
Dr Don: And when does it stop the pain? Right now—
Lisa: For five minutes.
Dr Don: When I eat that Big Mac, I feel better right now.
Lisa: And afterwards I feel like—
Dr Don: Logically thinking about, if I continue to do this, I'm going to destroy my gut? No, because all I want to do is stop the pain.
Lisa: Yeah.
Dr Don: So I'm working on a smoking cessation program. And this is really, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it explained this way. But this is how I explained smoking. I'll say to somebody, ‘What do you think you're addicted to?’ Most people will say it's nicotine. And you know, nicotine is harder to get off of than heroin. Right? And I'll say ‘So you think you're addicted to nicotine?’ That's a yes. And so what if I tell you you're not addicted to nicotine? ‘I'm not?’ And I said, ‘No, you're not addicted to nicotine.’ I said, ‘What happens is that when you smoke a cigarette, the nicotine enters your bloodstream and goes to your brain.’ I said, ‘Now nicotine has almost the exact chemical compound of a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine.’
Lisa: Oh.
Dr Don: So when that nicotine hits your brain, your brain thinks it's acetylcholine. Acetylcholine is the neurotransmitter that's the precursor to the release of dopamine.
Lisa: Oh, wow.
Dr Don: So what happens is your brain then starts releasing more acetylcholine to start releasing dopamine. I said what you're addicted to is feeling better.
Lisa: Yep. So God has some eggs instead because that’s a—
Dr Don: But you've trained your brain, to recognise, to associate the associative memory is what's creating the addiction. And it says, ‘When we take that, we feel better.’ It doesn't understand the chemistry that's involved. That's all you're doing. So now, you're, that your best friend that you sit with all by yourself right outside that building because nobody wants to sit with you while you're smoking, right? Now, this cigarette becomes your best friend and somebody says, ‘Well, you can't hang out with your best friend anymore.’ Right? It's like, ‘Oh, no, I'm not giving that up.’ So what you have to do is we have to create a replacement for your best friend. The reason why it's so hard to quit, is because somebody is coming along and saying, ‘Lisa, you just can't hang around with Debbie anymore. Debbie is not good for you.’ And you say, ‘But I don't have any other friends. I feel better when I hang out with Debbie.’ Yep, we've got to find a replacement for Debbie. And another way to do it. And then your brain will then create another way, right, to feel better. Wow. Which is healthier. That's how you break addiction.
Lisa: That is fascinating. So how do you do that with something like heroin though? What do you replace it with? You can't, you know, there isn't, was there—
Dr Don: Here’s the best thing is once we get that unresolved trauma cleared, you automatically start feeling better.
Lisa: because you don't have the pain and therefore you don't need them.
Dr Don: Then we work on the associative memory. So you have to go through our four hour program, we have a series of audio. So if you are an addiction, I have a 30-day addiction audio series that is basically getting your mind to reset the neural pathways of the behaviour. But it's a lot easier to do that when we don't have the pain activated.
Lisa: Wow. Okay, and now you’re establishing new rituals.
Dr Don: Now all we have to do is work on the pathways, new pathways and start questioning, ‘Why did I use to do that? I remember I used to do that, but it didn't make any sense.’ Now your logical part of your brain can get involved and help because there's no pain involved.
Lisa: Yeah.
Dr Don: And now you can use that intellectual part of your brain to say, this doesn't make any sense, let's come up with a better way of doing it. It couldn't do that before when the pain said, ‘Shut up, get out of the way, we're gonna die.’
Lisa: So you're taking that whole piece of the puzzle layer away and then retraining the brain after the fact, after the four hour program. But so that is an essential part of it as well to reestablish new neural pathways and grooves in the brain to do, have behaviours that change. But without that first piece of the puzzle, all of that—
Dr Don: A variety of very, very difficult system to override.
Lisa: Yeah, we—
Dr Don: And almost sometimes impossible.
Lisa: Yeah, I’d say impossible for him for many, many people in many different situations and people are dying left, right, and centre of addictions and you know, the follow-on effects. And they, yeah, we can't stop them.
Dr Don: And they're told that they're broken.
Lisa: And they're useless.
Dr Don: And they just surrender, and then understand that they will never ever be better. And you're, you know, you're a world-class supreme athlete. Can you imagine, with all the training that you did, if I was your coach, and I said to you, ‘Lisa, you're gonna have to put in this tremendous amount of hard work, but you will never win a race. You'll never accomplish anything. But you've just got to put up the hard work.’ No, I'm looking for the little medal at the end of this. I'm looking for some reward at the end of this. Yeah. And what they're telling you is ‘No, you'll never be able to get it.’
Lisa: You’ll never get it, and they take away all your power. You know, they take away all you’re disempowered, and you're like, ‘Oh, well, you're never gonna, you're never gonna do this.’ See, I mean, I never listened to any of that rubbish.
Dr Don: I don’t believe you’ve trained any human being to accomplish any goal by telling them that they can surrender to it.
Lisa: Yeah.
Dr Don: That they're going to just have to accept the fact that this has control of them.
Lisa: Yeah.
Dr Don: I, no, I'm not going to argue that they haven't helped people because they have. So, but I just say, wouldn't it be better to take the approach of, that you can defeat this?
Lisa: Yeah.
Dr Don: And you can overpower it. And you can take back control, because now you understand the science behind it.
Lisa: Exactly.
Dr Don: And why it happened.
Lisa: I love it. That's my approach, you're singing from the same core sheet there. Because I, you know, like, in, whether this is an addiction, or whether this is a diagnosis for something, and you're told, there's no chance, and there's no hope, the amount of people that I get writing to me, because of my story with my mum, telling me I was written off, I was told I'd never do this. Oh, my loved one was, and now look at us go. You know, how many times have people been written off when they didn't need to be written off? Because some expert has told them that there is no hope? No, that means that you don't know. Somebody in the world that doesn't, that knows. And that approach I think, in you know, whether it's addiction, or whether it's dealing with a big health crisis or problems, you know, we've got to take this approach.
Somebody out there, like Dr Don would, might have a solution for my problem. And it's the whole point of the show is to be able to bring those people and the messages to, to people who need it, so they can connect with those people and maybe get help with a problem. And I certainly want to get help with some of the trauma that I've been through recently, and hope to get over it. Because, you know, no matter how many, like I've always, have had a strong mindset. In some ways, I'm incredibly strong when it comes to sport and overcoming obstacles and taking on big challenges. But I am completely weak in other areas, and I know, my own weaknesses, and my own, you know, I'm very self-aware of my limitations and stuff. And we're all working on different areas of our lives. And I might be a black belt at doing this, but I'm very much a white belt at doing that, you know. And finding new information and new things that can help you improve different areas in life, I think it's just, you know, just absolutely gold.
So Dr Don, can you tell us where can people find you? What courses do you have? What books do you have? And you know, how do people reach out to you and work with you?
Dr Don: Well, I know, I think we were gonna do something for the listeners who are listening to your show. So if you go to get G-E-T tipp T-I-P-P, that's the name of our program, T-I-P-P dot com slash Lisa, I think you'll get all the information. So it's www.gettipp.com/lisa, and then all the information on how to get the program, learn more, I think there's some offers, I think that you're doing in there as well for information.
Lisa: So that's absolutely brilliant. So gettipp.com, with two Ps, all the information about Dr Don's work, his courses, books, you know, we'll make sure that people can get access to that. Dr Don, thank you very much for your time today. It's been very, very valuable over the last few weeks of, you know, really been enjoying studying some of your work. And it's given me a little bit of a hope for my horizon after you know, going through some pretty traumatic things in the last five years that I need to sort of work through and you know, realising that on a day-to-day basis are half of my energy now. Like I often look back because I'm no longer doing the ultramarathons, and I don't have the energy to do them anymore. Not because of my age or anything else, I think because a lot of my energy is just going into you know, fighting a lot of demons. Yes, the trauma of losing my dad, going through what I did with my mum, losing the babies. There's a heck of a lot of stuff that's gone on in that time. And all of us are facing these types of situations. Your situation may be different than mine. But at some time in life, life's gonna come along and give you bang over the head.
Dr Don: Your mind is not okay with some of those things and it wants to— And so when people say to me, ‘Oh, I sabotage myself,’ right, or, ‘I'm doing these things and it's, it's interfering.. I say ‘You can't sabotage yourself. The brain is not designed to do anything but survive.’ And so it, some people say, ‘Well, why would I go and do this crazy thing over here that would sabotage my career or sabotage my relationship?’ And it's not trying to sabotage; it’s trying to protect you from pain. So it will go into crazy areas to protect you from the pain that looks like sabotage. And that's how people describe it. I say it's impossible. That, your brain cannot sabotage yourself. Even when people say, ‘Well, how do you explain somebody taking their own life or committing suicide?’ I said, ‘They're not trying to die. They're trying to stop the pain.’ The pain is more powerful than death. That's the way— did I tell you the story about the German sniper?
Lisa: No, do tell me that.
Dr Don: This, I know, we're trying to wrap up here.
Lisa: Oh no.
Dr Don: This was fascinating when I read this story. It was about the German sniper from World War II, that when they fought against the Russians, he said the Russians had almost no weapons, but they had a lot of people. So their plan was to charge at the German stations, right, and try to overwhelm them with people. You know, they were carrying sticks and shovels or whatever they had. And he says, ‘And they would—’ I remember, somebody I knew, told me about that they were a German during the war. And they said the Russians would just overwhelm them, get into the bunkers, and then just, you know, take their weapons and try to kill them. He says, so this sniper, for the Germans, he said his job was to shoot them. And he said, ‘But every time they would shoot them, another wave would come.’ He says, ‘And it was just endless, endless.’ He says, ‘And then I figured out how to stop them.’ He says, ‘I shot them in the stomach.’ He says, ‘Then what happened was, is when the next wave would come, they would see all the comrades lying on the ground screaming in pain.’ And he says, ‘And that was the bigger deterrent than to actually dying.’ And he says, ‘And that’s what slowed it down.’ This shows you the power of the mind not wanting to be in pain, what it will do to go to avoid pain.
Lisa: And this is the desperation that some poor people get into. And that's what they're trying to do when they commit suicide is just stop the pain.
Dr Don: Stop the pain is so overwhelming that they would rather stop the pain. They're not thinking about dying, they're thinking about stopping the pain. Because the brain won't try to die, it will try to stop the pain before that.
Lisa: Wow. And this is where the biology is just too simple in the fact that it doesn't think through the logical stuff. It just works in the here and the now.
Dr Don: None of that stuff is logical.
Lisa: Like you see the future prediction. Yeah, there's no, the consequences of me doing this are X, Y, Z is they don't think that far.
Dr Don: They can't, because the reason logic are overwritten every time by survival. Yeah, by the survival in this exact millisecond.
Lisa: This knowledge is just powerful on so many levels. And it's just given me a new dimension of how powerful this is. And again, it's about taking the blame off people, and let's find ways to fix this. And to work through that and to help people so that we don't, so just apportion blame and you’re a person lacking willpower, you’re a person with addictions, and you are lesser than me. We all have biology, and we are all struggling on some level. You know, most of us are just better at, you know, doing the day-to-day stuff. But, yeah, I think you're a humanitarian, and the work that you're doing is really, really helping people, Dr Don. So thank you very much for the work you do.
Dr Don: Thank you. When I first met you and Joe introduced us, I saw the work you're doing, you're doing phenomenal stuff. So I was so excited to meet you and get an opportunity to share with you, you know, and work together because we’re better, have our message out there.
Lisa: Absolutely. We're both going to get messages out there. We're both got to help spread this to a few more people around the world. And this is what this episode’s done. So thank you very much for your time today. Dr Don Wood.
Dr Don: Thank you. I enjoyed it.
That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate, review and share with your friends, and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.
The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.
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‘I'm an educator, a researcher, a writer. I do a lot of interviews and filming for documentaries. I've been spending 48 years now on doing anything I can to help human beings maximise their potential.’
‘I love studying and learning anything I can from those people that have done extraordinary things and then passing that on.”
“I love anybody who's done something extraordinary on the planet in any field. I love devouring their journey.’
‘No matter what the teacher was trying to do, I just couldn't read. And my teacher and my parents come to the school and said, ‘You know, your son's not able to read. He's not going to be able to write effectively’ because I wrote kind of backwards.’
‘Well, I'm surfing the cosmic waves now. And in surfing big cosmic waves, radio waves that are big waves. Yes, that's the move from water waves into electromagnetic waves.’
‘And so the Breakthrough Experience is about accessing that state. And breaking through the limitations that we make up in our mind and transforming whatever experiences you have into “on the way” not “in the way”.’
‘She said that there was something that took over me, I can't describe it. It was like a very powerful feeling — like I had a power of a Mack truck. And me? I don't know how to describe it.’
Dr John Demartini is an author, researcher, global educator and world-renowned human behaviour specialist. Making self-development programs and relationship solutions is part of his job. Among his most popular programs is the Breakthrough Experience. It is a personal development course that aims to help individuals achieve whatever goal they have.
As a child, Dr John had learning challenges and could not read and write well until 18 years old. He has now distilled information from over 30,000 books across all academic disciplines and shares them online and on stage in over 100 countries.
Interested in knowing more about Dr John and his work? You may visit his website or follow him on Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube and Instagram.
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To pushing the limits,
Lisa
Welcome to Pushing The Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host, Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.
Lisa Tamati: Welcome back to Welcome back to Pushing the Limits. This week, I have Dr John Demartini. He is a world renowned speaker, teacher, educator, researcher, medical doctor. He's written I don't know how many books, countless, countless books. He's an incredible, incredible man who teaches literally thousands and thousands of people every year in his breakthrough experience. The information that you're going to get in this podcast could change your life. So I've given you a fair warning. He's an amazing, incredible man that, and I've talked to a lot of incredible people but this one is really next level, he started out as a big wave surfer in Hawaii, way back in the day. Even knew Laird Hamilton and people like that. Had learning disabilities and could hardly read or write, and yet managed to overcome all these things to become one of the greatest scholars that there is. He's read over 30,000 books. He has distilled the knowledge from people right through the ages, through leaders and philosophers and stoics and scientists. He's an expert in so many different areas. He teaches people in business, he teaches people how to overcome massive challenges in their life. So I really hope that you enjoy this episode. It is going to get uncomfortable in places because we’ll talk about really being accountable, really understanding our own physiology, and just so much more. An absolutely amazing interview. So I hope you enjoy it.
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Now over to the show with Dr John Demartini. Well, Hi everyone and welcome to Pushing The Limits. Today, I am super excited for my guest. My guest is an absolute superstar. Welcome to the show. Firstly and foremostly, thank you very much for taking the time out today. Dr John, I'm just really excited to have you. Whereabouts are you sitting in the world?
Dr John: I am in Houston, Texas. I'm in a hotel room in Houston, Texas, even though it shows that I've got a library.
Lisa: Yeah,I love that background. That is a fantastic background. Really great. Well, greetings to Texas and I hope that everything is going well over there for you. Today, I wanted to talk about you, your work, the breakthrough experience. Some of the learnings and the exciting mission that you've been on for now. For 47 years, I believe. Something crazy like that. So Dr John, can you just give us a little bit of a background on you and your life and what you do on a day to day basis? Big question.
Dr John: I'm an educator, a researcher, a writer. I do a lot of interviews and filming for documentaries. I've been spending 48 years now, over 48 years, on doing anything I can to help human beings maximise their potential, their awareness potential, and achieve whatever it is that they're inspired to achieve. So that could be raising a beautiful family to building a massive business to becoming fortunate or celebrity, doesn't matter. It's whatever it is that inspires them. I've been studying human behaviour and anything and everything I can get my hands on for the last 48 years to assist people in mastering a lot. That's what I love doing. I do it every day. I can't think of any else I'd rather be doing. So I just do it.
Lisa: It's a bit of a role model for me, Dr John, because I think what you have achieved in this time, the way you've distilled information, I mean, you've studied, last time I looked on one of your podcasts, that was over 30,000 books, probably more now. And you've distilled the information from great masters throughout history into practical things that humans today can actually benefit from. Is that a good assessment of what you basically have done?
Dr John: I'm writing right now a 1200 page textbook on philosophers and great minds through the ages. I summarise it. I love studying and learning anything I can from those people that have done extraordinary things, and then passing that on. So yes. Right now, I'm actually, I just finished, I’m just finishing up Albert Einstein, which is one of my heroes. I had a dream when I was young. When I saw that E = mc² drawn on that board, I wanted to find out where that board was. I went to Princeton, and met with Freeman Dyson, who took over his position at Princeton in 1955. Spent part of the day with him and we're talking on cosmology. I wrote my formula on that same board, exactly the same place, because that was a dream that I had since I was probably 18, 19.
Lisa: Wow, and you got to fulfill it and actually love it.
Dr John: Yeah. Took me a bit of time. So what? But yeah, I love anybody who's done something extraordinary on the planet in any field. I love devouring their journey and their thinking. That's every Nobel Prize winner I've gone through and every great philosopher and thinker and business leader and financially or spiritually, to try to find out and distill out what is the very essence that drives human beings? And what is it that allows them to do extraordinary things? So I wanted to do that with my life. Most of the people I get in front of want to feel like they want to make a massive difference. They want to make a difference in the world. They want to do something that’s deeply meaningful, inspiring. And so yeah, we're not 'put your head in the product glue and let the glue stick' and then pass it on.
Lisa: Instead of having to reinvent the world, why not? So Dr John, can you give us a little bit of history though, because you're obviously an incredible scholar,have an incredible mind. But as a child, you struggled with learning and with reading and writing.Can you give us a little, how the heck did you go from being this kid that struggled with all of that to where you are today? One of the greatest minds out there.
Dr John: Yeah, I definitely had some learning challenges. I had a speech challenge when I was a year and a half old to four, I had to wear buttons in my mouth and put strings in my mouth and practice using all kinds of muscles. Went to a speech pathologist. When I was in first grade. No matter what the teacher was trying to do, I just couldn't read. My teacher, and my parents would come to the school and said, 'You know, your son's not able to read. He's not going to be able to write effectively,' because I wrote kind of backwards. 'I don't think he's going to mountain and go very far in life, put him into sport.' Because I like to run. And I did sports there for a while. But then I went from baseball to surfing. I hitchhiked out to California and down Mexico and then made it over to Hawaii so I could ride big waves and I was doing big wave and stuff when I was a teenager. So I didn't have academics. I dropped out of school. I was a street kid from 13 to 18. But then right before 18 I nearly died. That's when I met Paul Bragg, who inspired me one night in a presentation. That night I got so inspired that I thought, 'Maybe I could overcome my learning problems by applying what this man just taught me. And maybe someday I could learn to read and write and speak properly.' That was such an inspiration, such a moment of inspiration that it changed the course of my life. I had to go back. And with the help of my mum, I went and got a dictionary out, started to read a dictionary and memorise 30 words a day until my vocabulary. I had to spell the word, pronounce the word, use it with a meaningful sentence, and develop a vocabulary. Eventually doing that 30 we would, we wouldn't go to bed. I didn't go to bed until I had 30 new words, really inculcated. My vocabulary grew. And I started to learn how to do the reading. It was not an easy project. But, man, once I got a hold of it, I never stopped.
Lisa: And once you started to read, you didn’t stop.
Dr John: I've never stopped. I've been a voluminous reader now. You know, 48 years.
Lisa: That’s just incredible.
Dr John: I can’t complain.
Lisa: So was it a dyslexia or learning disability? I just asked because my mum was a teacher of children with dyslexia and things like that. Was there specific ways that you were able to overcome the disability so to speak?
Dr John: Yeah, I just, sheer persistence and determination to want to read and learn. I remember, I took my first, I took a GED test, a general education high school equivalency test. And I guessed, literally guessed, I close my eyes. I said this little affirmation that Paul Bragg gave me that, 'I'm a genius, and I apply my wisdom.' And some miraculous thing made me pass that test. I didn't know how to read half the stuff that was on it. I just went with my intuition and guessed. And I tried to go to college, after taking that test and had the test. I failed. And I remember driving home crying because I had this idea that I was going to learn how to teach and become intelligent. Then when I got a 27, everybody else got 75 and above. I got a 27 and I thought, 'Well, there's no way it's going to work.' But then I sat there and I cried and my mum came home from shopping, and she saw me crying on the living room floor. She said, ‘Son, what happened? What's wrong?’ I said, ‘Mum, I failed the test. I guess I don't have what it takes.’ And I repeated what the first grade teacher said, 'I guess I'll never read or write or communicate effectively, or amount too much. I guess I'll go back to Hawaii and make surfboards and surf. Because I was pretty good at that.' And she said to me something that was a real mind bender. She put her hand on me and she said, ‘Son, whether you become a great teacher, philosopher and travel the world like your dream, whether return to Hawaii and ride giant waves like you've done, return to the streets and panhandle like you've done. I just want to let you know that your father and I are going to love you no matter what you do.’
Lisa: Wow, what a mum.
Dr John: That was an amazing moment. When she said that, my hand went into a fist of determination. And I said to myself, ‘I'm gonna match this thing called reading and studying and learning. I'm gonna match this thing called teaching and philosophy. And I'm going to do whatever it takes, I'm going to travel whatever distance, I'm gonna pay whatever price, to give my source of love across this planet.’ I got up and I hugged her. And I said to myself, ‘I'm not gonna let any human being on the face of the earth stop me, not even myself.’ I got out of my room. And that's when I decided with her help to do the dictionary. That was an amazing turning point.
Lisa: And I can feel it, the emotion and what a wonderful mum you had. I mean, what a perfect thing to say when someone's down.
Dr John: It was the most. If she hadn't said that, I might’ve come back to surfing. I might be a surfer today.
Lisa: Which would have been a good thing as well, probably because surfing is great.
Dr John: It didn’t make money in those days. I'm in the mid 60s and 70s, early 70s. But,, now, the guys I served with, Laird Hamilton and-
Lisa: Wow. He's a hero is amazing.
Dr John: Both Ben Aipa, Gerry Lopez, and these guys, those are the guys I served with. And so those guys went on to be incredible.
Lisa: I wasn't aware of that.
Dr John: I lived at the same beach park in Haleiwa, where Ehukai Beach Park is, near Pipeline, between Rocky Point and Pipeline. Laird Hamilton was dropped off by his mother there and lived there on the beach. I lived up on where the park bench was. We lived right there and I saw him on the beach each morning. He was seven, I was 16. He was going on seven, I was almost 17. We live there at the same place and Bill Hamilton saw him out there and grabbed him and took him in and trained them on surfing and found his mum and then married the mum. That's how I became. I hung out with those characters.
Lisa: Legends. You became a legend in this direction and they have become a legend in a different direction.
Dr John: Well, there's a book out called The High Surf by Tim Baker. That’s from Australia. He wrote a book on people that rode big waves. And he said, 'I'd like to put you in there.' I said, 'Well, I didn't go on to be the superstar in that area like these other guys.' He said, 'But I want you in there because you became a legend.
Lisa: Became a superstar.
Dr John: Yeah
Lisa: Do you think that there's, you know, I come from a surfing family. My brother's a big wave surfer in New Zealand. I've tried and failed miserably, stuck to running. I was better at it. But do you think there's a correlation between the mindset that you developed as a surfer? Because going in those big waves is scary. It's daunting. It's frightening. It's challenging. It's teaching you a lot. Is there a lot that you took from that for this journey that you've been on?
Dr John: Yeah, I didn't surf anything more than 40-foot waves. So I think that was about as good as about as big as you get back in the 70s. At 70s is when I was-
Lisa: Oh, just a mere 40, it’s okay.
Dr John: Well, 40-foot waves was the biggest thing out in outer reef pipeline was the big thing. They hadn't had tow-in surfing yet. That was just, that wasn't begun yet. So there was that idea, we had to catch those waves. That was not easy because they're too big to catch. you got to have big long boards, and you got to really paddle to get into those waves, and it's usually too late. But I think some of those, I used to surf 11 hours a day sometimes. When you're really, really committed to doing something, that's... Einstein said perseverance is the key to making things happen and if you just stay with something. So, if you're not inspired to do something, enough to put in the hours and put in the effort, and you don't have somebody that you can bounce ideas off of, kind of mentoring you, you probably are not going to excel as much. But I did that. And then I just converted that over into breeding 18 to 20 hours a day, feeding once I learned to read, so I just and I still voluminously read I mean, I read every single day.
Lisa: That is incredible. And so you've taken that big wave mindset a little bit over into something else. So obviously, everything you, do you do to the nth degree, we can probably agree on that one.
Dr John: I'm surfing the cosmic waves now. And in surfing big cosmic waves, radio waves that are big waves. I move from water waves into electromagnetic waves.
Lisa: Wow. Now, you run something called The Breakthrough Experience, which you've been doing now for 40 something years. This is a philosophy and a system and a program that really changes lives and has changed lives all over the planet. Can you tell us a little bit about what you've distilled from all this information that you have in your incredible mind? And what you teach in this course, and how this can actually help people? Today, right now listening to this?
Dr John: Well, the breakthrough experiences, sort of my attempt to do with what that gentleman did to me when I was 17. I've done it 1121 times into that course. I keep records, and I'm a metric freak. Every human being lives by a set of priorities, a set of values, things that are most important.
Lisa: Podcast life.
Dr John: Welcome to it. I thought that was off, but I didn't quite get it off. But whatever is highest on the person's values, priorities, whatever is truly deeply meaningful to them, the thing that is spontaneously inspiring for them to that they can't wait to get up the morning and do.If they identify that and structure their life by priority, delegating the lower priority things and getting on with doing that, they will build momentum, incremental momentum and start to excel and build what we could say is a legacy in the world. And so, the breakthrough experience is about accessing that state, and breaking through the limitations that we make up in our mind, transforming whatever experiences you have into 'on the way' not 'in the way.' So no matter what goes on in your life, you can use it to catalyse a transformation and movement towards what it is that you're committed to. And if you're not clear about it, we'll show you how to do it because many people subordinate to people around them. Cloud the clarity of what's really really inspiring from within them, and they let the herd instinct stop them from being heard.
I think that The Breakthrough Experiences is my attempt to do whatever I can, with all the tools that I've been blessed to gather to assist people in creating a life that is extraordinary, inspiring and amazing for them. And if I don't do whatever it takes in the program, I don't know when it's going to be. I've seen six year olds in there write books afterwards. I've seen nine year olds go on to get a deal with Disney for $2.2 million dollars. I've seen people in business break through plateaus. I’ve people have major issues with relationships break, too. I don't know what's gonna be. I've seen celebrities go to new levels. I've seen people that have health issues that heal. I mean, every imaginable thing, I’ve breaking through. I've seen it in that course. And it's the same principles applied now into different areas of life. In any other area of our life, if we don't empower, the world's going to overpower something. And I'm showing I want to show people how to not let anything on the outside world interfere with what's inside.
Lisa: And you talk about, it's on the way, the challenges that we have to look at the challenges that we have and ask how is this going to actually help me get wherever I am. And this is something that I've managed to do a couple of times in my life really well, other times not so good. But where I've taken a really massive challenge, I had my own listeners, I had a mum who had a massive aneurysm five years ago, and we were told she would never have any quality of life again, massive brain damage. We know that's not happening on my watch. I'm going to, there is somebody in something in the world that can help with her. And this became my mantra that I was going to get back or die trying. That was that total dedication that I brought to her because of love. When you love someone, you're able to mobilise for the last resources that you have. And that nearly bloody killed me as far as the whole effort that went on to it, and the cost and the emotional costs, and the physical and the health and all the rest of it. It took me three years to get it back to health, full health. She's now got a full driver's license back and a full independent life back and as my wonderful mum again. And that was coming from a state of being in a vegetative state, not much over a vegetative state at least. Hardly any higher function, no speech, no move, be able to move anything.
Dr John: That’s a book there. That's a book or a movie.
Lisa: It's the book.
Dr John: That's a book and a movie for sure.
Lisa: Exactly. And this is very powerful. Because I saw this and when you're in the darkness, everybody is telling you there is no hope, there is no chance. And these are medical professionals who have been to medical school, who have a hell of a lot more authority than you. You just go, ‘No, I am not accepting it because that alternative means death, basically, decline and death in being in an institution. And that is not what I'm going to answer. I'm going to find somebody who can help me’ and I did. I found hundreds of people, actually, and this is what tipped me into doing what I'm doing now, is finding world leading experts to give me the next piece of the puzzle for her and for the people now that are following me so that I can help empower people, not to be limited by the people who tell us we can't do something. It's because that means basically they don't have the answer. Not that there is no answer, is my understanding. And they were right. It was the hardest thing I've ever done. But I did it and my mum is alive and she's well, and that book. I really want to empower people with a story. I see that same like they're obviously your passion. What you went through with your learning problems when you were young and your mum standing beside you has actually propelled you into this lifelong journey that I find absolutely fascinating because that passion, and I can see that passion in you, is still very much alive 48 years later because you're doing what your priority is.
Dr John: I'm definitely doing what I love doing. It's interesting that your story reminded me of something that happened to me when I was 27. If you don't mind, I'd like to share this. So I graduated from my professional school. I had a bit of a reputation there of being kind of the taking the cream of the crop clients, patients that were turned down everywhere else. I just tackled it, see what we can do with it. And I got a family from Mexico, with a son that fell three stories off an apartment complex onto the ground on his head. He went into a coma, been in a coma for three and a half years. And the mother, they assumed he was dead a few times, but there was still a breath. There were still something. It wasn't a strong breath. You couldn't see it but you could put a mirror in front of you and get a little bit of breath out there. So he wasn't dead. And he had decerebrate rigidity. So his whole body was so rigid that when I saw him, you could lift up his feet and his whole body would rock. It was so stiff. His hands are like this. A classical decerebrate rigidity. And he had gone to, throughout different hospitals in Mexico, where he was from, and nobody checked them. They came to America, they went to the Medical Center in Houston, which is the largest Medical Center America. And they got rejected. No one would accept it. There's nothing we can do. They went out to the professional school that I'd gone to. And they said, ‘We can't do anything.’ But we know this interesting character. West Houston, if there's anybody that would try something this guy might try, who knows? And they sent him to my office. I remember when they came in, they carried him wrapped up in a white sheet, and laid him on the armrest of the chairs on my office. I looked out there and I saw this Mexican man and woman and seven or eight other kids in a family. I'm in this. At first, I didn't know what this was, this thing wrapped up in this sheet. They came down my hallway and I saw him going down the hallway. And like, ‘What on earth is this?’ Then they unveiled him in my exam room. And there was this 58 pound tube in his nose, coma case that was so stiff. It was ridiculous. I mean, he had gauze on his chin and his hand was rubbing on it and to protect the chin from having an ulcer. It had an odor to him in the head. It was just nothing. Just stare. He just sat there. But the mother and father said, ‘No, he's still alive. Please help.’ So I didn't really have much to do an exam with. So I got him, we took him in and did a film of his spine and his skull from the history. We found his foramen magnum, his skull was jammed down on a spinal cord and his spinal cord is up in his foramen magnum. This opening in the bottom of the skull. And I thought that night, when I was developing those films, and I looked at that I thought, 'I wonder what happened if I lifted that skull? If I've got that off? It could? Could something happen?' And I was scared because you just don't do that. He could die just instantly. I sent them over to this health food store to get him some liquid vitamins and minerals and amino acids to try to get nutrients in him because they're feeding him beans and rice with liquid. It was just crazy. So the next day came in. We had four doctors on a preceptorship visiting my office, one doctor that was working for me, one assistant, the seven or eight kids plus him and the mother and father in this little room. It was packed. And I said to him that I saw that on the film something that might have make him, help. I don't know, I can't guarantee it. But if we, if I did a particular manoeuvre, it might open up the brain function. And the little woman held on to her husband and she said, 'If he dies, he dies. If he lives, we rejoice. But please help us. We have nowhere else to go.'
Lisa: Yeah. Wow.
Dr John: She said that there was something that took over me, I can't describe it. It was like a very powerful feeling, like I had a power of a Mack truck in me. I don't know how to describe it. And I had this manoeuvre that we could do this, what they call the Chrane Condyle Lift, that can actually lift the skull up the spine. And I said to myself, if I'm not willing to have him die in my hands, I can't raise the dead with my hands as a little quote that I learned from an ancient healing philosopher. And I thought, 'Okay, we're, I'm going to take the risk, and just see what happens.' Because, I mean, I don't know what to do. I'm just gonna do it. Because I mean, they've got no place to go and I only took a rip. As I lifted that skull with this powerful movement. He came out of his coma. He came right out of the coma. He screamed, and this whining noise you couldn't. It was not coherent. It was just this whining sound.
The whole family went on their knees, they were Catholic. They just went to their knees and prayed. I was blown away. I saw the four doctors one of them ran down the hallway and vomited, couldn't handle it. The other just stared. And here's this boy squirming on the table. I walked out to let the family be with the child for a minute and just sat with one of my doctors. We sat there and just cried. Because we knew that the spinal cord expressed life in the body. But we didn't know what would happen if we took the spinal cord, it just scanned off. Theoretically, it could kill you. But there was some still life in the spinal cord. Anyway, this boy went on to gain 20 pounds up to 78 pounds. We took him off the tube, we got him to move, we had everybody in the family take a joint in his body and move his joints to remobilise him. Sometimes I think we probably tore some ligaments doing it. But we got mobility. And this boy came out of it. And I have a picture here with me of the boy actually graduating from high school.
Lisa: You’re kidding me? Why is this not an? What is not? Why have I never heard the story?
Dr John: I don’t get to share it too often. I didn't many years ago. I haven't practised in a long time. But all I know is that that was a moment that you just, it's probably like you had with your mum when you saw incremental progress.
Lisa: Yeah. Just grind.
Dr John: And I think that that's a metaphor. That's a metaphor. It doesn't matter where you've come from, doesn't matter what you're going through, doesn't matter what you've been through. What matters is you have something that you're striving for. And are you willing to do some incremental movement towards that? What else just said is, he's got a diagnosis. Diagnosis means through knowledge, supposedly, but it could also mean die to an agnosis. You don't know. Even the doctors don't know. But the reality is, he came out of the coma. And I had over the next few months, I had some amazing cases of a boy that was blind and couldn't walk, and all of a sudden see and walked again. I had a boy that was paralysed quadriplegic, was able to walk. I mean, I had some amazing stuff happen. When you're willing to do what other people aren't willing to do, you're willing to experience when other people don't get to experience.
Lisa: Yep, it is just so powerful. And I'm just absolutely blown away from that story. Because, I mean, I know with my mum who was only in a coma for three weeks, and had stroke and so on, and in the specificity and the things that I've had to deal with. The whole vestibular system being completely offline, she has like a rag doll, having to read, programming her from being a baby, basically, to being an adult, within that three year period with a body that is now like 79 years old. And the doctors going like, your brain can't change that much. And in just going, I'm going to keep going. I'm only listening to people who tell me I can do something, I'm not listening to anybody who tells me I can't do something. And this is something that I've really integrated into my entire life like as an athlete, doing stupidly long ultramarathon distances. I was always told you can't do this, and you can't do that. It's impossible. And I was like, 'We'll see.' I'm going to throw everything in it. And that was my passion at the time have now retired from doing the stupid distances because I've got other missions on in life. But whatever it is, is always the big mission. And then everybody comes up against people who tell you, you can't do it. This is one of the biggest limiting things that I see.
Dr John: That's what Einstein said, greatness is automatically pounded by mediocre minds.
Lisa: Wow.
Dr John: I had a boy, a boy attend my breakthrough experience, who had a surfing accident and became arms and legs not working, He could move his neck. He got a little bit of function slowly into the hand that was about it, just a tiny bit. And I remember a man wheeling him in and having them kind of strapped to a wheelchair. I knew the father and I knew his brother. There were doctors who were colleagues of mine. And they brought him, they flew him literally from Los Angeles over to Texas to come to the breakthrough experience. I remember him looking straight down really depressed, suicidal, because he was a surfer and he was on his way to being a great surfer. If he couldn't surf, he didn't want to live kind of. I remember getting on my knees and looking up at him at this chair, and I said, 'It all determines inside you what you decide. I don't know what the limit you have in your body. I don't know what you can repair. I don't know what you can do. I don't want to say you can't. But all I know is that if you're going to, you're going to have to put everything into it. You're gonna have to have no turning back kind of attitude. There's got to be a relentless pursuit of your master plan to serve.'
His name is Jesse Billauer. He made a decision at the Breakthrough Experience that nothing was going to stop him from surfing again, nothing. He is really, in the room was absolutely applauding him. The before and after in that weekend was so astonishing that it was tear jerking. Well, about 17 years ago, 16 half years ago, I had the opportunity to get, I was living on the Gold Coast of Australia. I had many homes in New York and different places. But I had one in the Gold Coast of Australia in Aria, lived in the penthouse of Aria. And all of a sudden, I found in my entrance of my penthouse, which you only can get into with my key somebody from downstairs, put it in there like mail, a DVD video of a surfing movie, called Stepping Into Liquid. And when I pulled that up and put that in there, there was Jesse Billauer, surfing.
He found a way of using his head muscles, and designing a special vehicle, a transport system, a surfboard. He had to have somebody take them out into the water and push him. But once he got on a wave his head movements were able to ride and he was riding like 12 foot waves, which is 20 foot face waves. He was doing that. And he was an inspiration. He became friends with Superman who had quadriplegia and they became friends and he created a foundation to do something but he taught people how to go surfing as a quadriplegic. So when the wise big enough to house take care of themselves, you've proven that in your book. What little I've done in my life compared to some of these kind of stories is just astonishing what I see sometimes people do. I mean, mind blowing stuff that people, that determination to overcome that are absolute inspirations. Inspiration is a byproduct of pursuing something that's deeply inspiring and deeply meaningful, through a challenge that people believe is not possible. That's inspiration.
Lisa: That's how we grow as a human race. We have these amazing people that do incredible things. And these stories, I mean, these are stories that aren't even out there in the world, in a huge way. There are hundreds of these stories and thousands of these stories and miraculous stories. These are the things that we should be talking about. Because why are we not studying the outliers? Why are we not? When I look at my book, or my story, which I share publicly and not a single doctor that had anything to do with my mum ever asked me, 'Well, how did you do it?' Nobody is interested in why she has not taken the normal path as long gone. Nobody has asked me what did you do? People do. My audience want to know why. The people that follow me, etc. But nobody that was involved in that case. And I see that over and over again.
Dr John: It's forcing him to face their own, you might say, belief systems about what they've been taught. There's an educated awareness by the herd and then there's an innate yearning by the master. The master transcends the herd, if you will. You can be a sheep or a shepherd. The shepherd is the one that goes out and does things that the sheep are not willing to do. But then once they do it, they'll rally around it. They are there watching you to be the hero instead of becoming the hero.
Lisa: Wow. And why is it in the medical fraternity that there seems to be a very big herd mentality, like no one is scared to step outside of their norms, and they get slammed. I see this in academia and in science as well, where people who have brilliant ideas and hypotheses and studies and so on, they just get slammed because it's outside of the current paradigm.
Dr John: William James, one of the founders of modern psychology, said 'To be great…' And Emerson followed in suit, 'To be greatest, to be misunderstood.’ William James basically said that the majority of people fear rejection from the multitudes because that was survival. People that are into survival follow the multitude. People that are in thrival create a new paradigm. At first they're going to be ridiculed. They're going to be violently opposed to Schopenhauer and Gandhi said, but eventually becomes self-evident. And you're either following a culture or building one. The people that do that build a new culture. They build a new culture of idea. Emerson said in his essays on circles, 'We rise up and we create a new circle of possibility. And then that becomes the new norm until somebody comes up and breaks through that concentric sphere with another circle.' It's like the four minute mile. I had a gentleman on my program the other day who is striving to be the fastest runner in the world. He's got bronze and silver medals, but he hadn't got the fastest running. And he's not stopping. He's working sometimes eight to 13 hours a day on this project. I believe that the way he's so determined to do it, and how he works on it, and he doesn't need a coach telling him what to do. He just does it. He's inspired to do it. He'll be the fastest runner, he won't stop till he's the fastest runner in the world. And that’s determination, that to be great at that one thing, find that one thing that you really target like a magnifying glass, on that you become the greatest at that thing.
Mine was human development, human behaviour. I want to have the broadest and greatest width of information about that. That's my one thing. But each individual has something that they can excel in, if they just define it, and give themselves permission at it, and say, thank you but no thank you to the opinions. The opinions are the cheapest commodities on Earth that would circulate the most as a use value. There’s ton of those. But those opinions aren’t what matter. It's not you comparing yourself to other people, it's you comparing your daily actions to what's deeply meaningful to you, and the highest priority actions daily, that’s what it is.
Lisa: How do you, this is a problem that I face, get to a certain level of success and achievement, and then you start getting lots of offers and opportunities and so on, and you start to lose the focus. You get distracted from the things that are happening in this day and age where the internet and everything that ends up like I get the shiny object syndrome. And say, 'Oh, this is an extremely interesting area of study, and I should go down that path. And then I go down that path, and then I go down that path.' It is adding to the whole picture of a general education. as someone who studied as much as you have, you've obviously encompassed all of these areas. But I think what I'm asking is, how do you find out what your highest priority is? And how do you get a team around you, so that you're not limited? I think there's a lot of business people that are listening to this, me included in this, who has struggling to get past a certain ceiling because the area of genius is one thing that they love and excelling at, and you'd like to spend all of your time doing that. But you're stuck in the groundhog day of admin and technology in the stuff that you hate. And not busting through because financially, you can't delegate to people. You also got to find people that are a good fit for you who can do the jobs, and then also have the finances to be able to break through to that near next level. Can you talk to that about?
Dr John: Yes, absolutely. When I was 27 years old, I was just starting my practice. I was doing a little of everything, anything and everything, just to get the thing cranking. I had one assistant that I hired. But I realised I was doing way too many trivial things. And that'll burn you out after a while if you're doing stuff that's not really what your specialty is. I went to the bookstore and I got a book by Alec McKinsey called The Time Trap. I read this book. As I read it, I underlined it and extracted notes like I do. I decided to put together a little sheet for it. I'll share that because it was a goldmine. I made a list of every single thing that I do in a day, over a three month period, because each day I had sometimes different things to do. But I wrote down everything I might be doing in those three months in a day. I just wrote them all down. And I don't mean broad generalities like marketing or this type of thing or radiographs or whatever. I mean, the actual actions. The actual moment by moment actions I do in those categories. I made a list of those and it was a big list. And I looked at it. Then right next that list, every single thing I did from the time I woke up to the time I went to bed, everything — home, personal, professional. I wanted to know what my day looked. I want to be an honest, objective view of what am I actually doing with my day. Because if I want to create my life the way I want, I've got to take a look at what I'm actually doing because if I'm not doing things that give me the results, no wonder I'm not getting there.
I made that list, and right next to it, in column number two of six columns is how much does it produce per hour. Which is a measure of actually meeting somebody's need as a service and people willing to pay. How much is that produced per hour? And that was humbling because there are whole lot of stuff that I will do without pay. I was minoring in majors and majoring in minors. I was doing all kinds of stuff that was just cost, no return. I stopped and I looked at that, and that was humbling, and frustrating, and a bunch of stuff went through my mind. I mean, I just, but I had to be honest to myself, what does it actually produce? I extrapolate. If I spent two hours on it, what is it per hour? Cut it in half. If I spent 30 minutes, I’d double the number to get an idea what it is per hour. There's a lot of stuff that was not making anything and there was a few things that were making a lot.
The third column I wrote down, how much meaning does it have? How much is it that makes me inspired to get up and do it? I can't wait to do what people can't wait to get. Those are the things I want to target. So I looked at it on a one to ten scale, how much meaning it was. I made a list on a one to ten scale of every one of those items, how inspired am I to do that? And there's a lot of stuff on there that was not inspiring, that I didn't want to do. I thought, 'Hell. I went to ten years of college for this?' I made this list and I put this one to ten thing. And then I prioritised the tens down to the ones. I prioritise productivity down from the ones that made thousands of dollars an hour to nothing an hour. I just prioritise them. And then I looked. There were some that were overlapped, where the thing that was most meaningful and inspiring match where it’s most productive. I prioritise that based on the two together. And that was really eye opening. Then I went to the next one because I realised that if I don't delegate, I'm trapped. Then I put what does it cost? Every cost. Not just salary, but training costs, no hiring costs, parking costs, insurance costs, everything. What is the cost of somebody excelling at doing what it is I'm doing at a greater job than me? What would it cost? On every one of those items? The best I could do? I had to just guess on something, but I definitely did the best I could.
And then I prioritise that based on spread, how much it produced versus how much it cost. Then I put another column. How much time am I actually spending on average? The final column, I wrote down, what are my final priorities with all these variables? I did a very thorough prioritisation system there. I sliced those into ten layers. I put a job description, I put a job description on that bottom layer, and hired somebody to do that but bottom layer. It took me three people to get the right person because I had to learn about hiring. I didn't know how about, hiring. I finally got the first person there, and that was free. That allowed me to go up a notch. And then I hired the next layer. What I did is it allowed me to go and put more time into the thing to produce the most, which was actually sharing a message of what I was doing publicly, with speaking. Public speaking was my door opener. I just kept knocking out layers.In the next 18 months, my business tenfold in increase in income and business. I had 12 staff members and five doctors working for me in a 5000 square foot office from under 1000 square foot original office in 18 months. Because I said goodbye to anything that weighed me down. Anytime you do something that's lower on your values, and anytime something hone your value value yourself and the world values you when you value. It's waiting for you just to get authentic and live by the highest values, which is your ideological identity. The thing you really revolve around you. Mine was teaching, so I call myself a teacher, right? So whatever that highest value is, if you prioritise your day and fill your day with high priority actions that inspire you, it doesn't fill up with low party distractions that don't, because it's now you're allowing yourself to be authentic. And it doesn't cost to properly delegate if you get the right people, and you go on and do what produces more per hour, it doesn't cost it makes sense.
Lisa: That's the hard part, isn't it? As is growing.
Dr John: You do your responsibilities. Go do the thing that knocks down the doors and goes and does the deals and then go and let them do all the crazy work. Like when I was 27, that's the last time I ever wrote a check or did payroll or looked at bills. I never looked at that again. Because that's a $20 an hour job and I could make way more speaking and doing my doctrine. So I thought, 'I'm not doing anything that's going to devalue me ever again in my life.' I've never gone back. 38 years, I've never gone back.
Lisa: So systematise. This is a thing here, where I have a bit of a problem, a bit of a chaos, right?
Dr John: I'm an ignoramus when it comes to anything other than research, write, travel, and teach. I'm useless. I'm not. I do jokes and say when I'm having I want to make love with my girlfriend. I tell her. I put my arms around I said, 'If I was to organise and have Hugh Jackman or Brad Pitt take care of lovemaking for you on my behalf and things like that, would you still love me?' One time if she said, 'No, I will still love you more.' I'm joking. That’s a joke. But the point is that if you're not delegating lower priority things, you're trapped.
Lisa: And this is the dilemma, I think, of small businesses is giving that mix right and not taking on people before you can go to that next level.
Dr John: But you go. You go to the next level by taking them on if it's done properly.
Lisa: If it's done properly, because I've-
Dr John: You want to make sure. That's why I have a value determination process on my website to determine the values of people I hire because if they're not inspired to do what I need to delegate, that's not the right person.You gotta have the right people on the bus, this column says. I have to be clear about what I can produce if I go and do these other things. And me speaking it, and doing the doctoring on the highest priority patients was way more productive financially than me doing those other things. So once I got on to that, I put somebody in place just to book speeches, and just to make sure that I was scheduled and filled my day with schedules with patients, it was a updated day and night. I've never gone back to that. I only research, write, travel, teach. That's it.
Lisa: That's my dream. I'm gonna get there.
Dr John: I don't do it. What's interesting is I became financially independent doing that because of that. I learned that if I don't value myself, and I don't pay myself, other people aren't going to pay me. If they're waiting for you to value you add when you value you, the world values you. You pay yourself first, other people pay you first. It's a reflection, economically, there. And that's what allowed me to do it. Because financial independence isn't for debauchery and for the fun life, in my opinion. It's for making sure that you get to do what you love because you love it not because you have to do it.
Lisa: And having an impact on the world. But if you're stuck doing the admin and the technical, logical stuff, and the crap that goes along with the business. You're not impacting the world like you want to be impacting.
Dr John: Weel, the individual that does the administration is impacting the world through the ripple effect by giving you the freedom to do it.
Lisa: Exactly.
Dr John: If that's what they love doing. That’s not what I love doing. But there are people that love administration, they love that stuff and love behind the scenes, I love doing that. Finding those people. That's the key.
Lisa: Finding those people. I's given me a bit of encouragement because I've been in that sort of groundhog days I had to get through the ceiling and get to the next level of reach.
Dr John: I finally realised that the cost of hiring somebody is insignificant compared to the freedom that it provides if you do your priority.
Lisa: If you get your stuff right, and know what you…
Dr John: Because the energy, your energy goes up the second you're doing what you love doing. And that draws business to you.
Lisa: Absolutely. I mean, like doing what we're doing. Now, this is my happy place.
Dr John: We’re both in our element. This is why we're probably going to slow down. The point is, when you're doing something you love to do, when you're on fire, with kind of an enthusiasm, people come around to watch you burn. They want to see you on fire.
Lisa: I mean, they do, they do. And I've seen that in times in my life where I've been preparing for a big race or something, and I need sponsors. I just go out there. At the start, I didn't know how to do a sponsored proposal, I didn't know how to do any of that fancy stuff. I just went out there and told the story. And by sharing the story, people were like, 'I want to get on board with this. That's exciting.' People would come on in and and when you don't know, one of the things that I've found in life is the less you know, sometimes the more audacious you are. When you actually have too much knowledge sometimes about the implications of what you're doing is when you can actually limit yourself.
Dr John: Yeah. Because you get in the herd instinct running on all the limitations. When you're inspired by something and there's no turning back. Everybody deep inside wants to be like that. So when they see something like that they want to engage. But you want to invest in inspiration, not rescue desperation. That's a basic law. Invest in inspiration, not rescue desperation. Nobody wants to rescue desperation unless they're compassionately in desperation and they're feeling hurt themselves. But if you take somebody and you show them what's possible, when Elon Musk goes out there and he has three explosions in a month on the way to Mars, they don't make any. He doesn't give up, he just goes, 'We're going to build another one.' There's no, 'Okay. It's a billion dollars. Let's spin 5 billion if we have to, but we're going to Mars.' Setbacks are nothing more feedback. That's the person who's inspired.
Lisa: Yeah. And that perseverance. I’m thinking that. You know the title of my book there is Relentless for a reason because you have to be like, no matter what, in that journey, there were months without progress. There would be months when we would see absolute nothing. And that was with all day every day working on it then seeing nothing. People would come to me and they'd say, 'Why are you putting her through this torturous regime every day? Why don't you just leave her be? Make her comfortable.' I don't do comfortable. Comfortable is not part of my vocabulary. Comfortable is 'We're going to die.' We can be comfortable for an hour in the evening, while I'm watching Netflix. That's the rest of the day.
Dr John: That's what I say about breaks. I say my job is to make you feel comfortable being uncomfortable.
Lisa: That's comfortable being uncomfortable.
Dr John: I’m gonna make you comfortable being uncomfortable. Because unless you are outside your comfort zone, it's not gonna, there's no stretch. there's no stretch. Just like in bodybuilding, if you don't push yourself a little further. I started out doing this year. The last year I started out doing 25 push ups, I went to 50 push ups, went to 75 push ups, went 200 broke 100. And I just kept adding another one. Just doing, trying to go and get my push ups up.
Lisa: And on that point, how have you stayed looking still like a teenager? What is it that? Is this the knowledge that you have that you just don't seem to age for a while?
Dr John: I was 17 when I started, I'm almost 67 now. All I did is that, means I only added 5. 1-2-3-4-5. So every decade was just one number. So I've only added five, five numbers to my age, since I was 17. That's the way I look at it.
Lisa: Well it looks like that. Are there some secrets to that? What is it that keeps you looking in?
Dr John: I don't live to eat. I eat to live. I don't pig out, I don't binge. I don't eat junk, I make sure that I'm eating performance. If you have something deeply meaningful that you want to do on a daily basis, you refine your diet into something that gives you performance. That's that's it, and I drink a lot of water. I haven't had coffee my whole life. I don't, I haven't had alcohol in 48 plus years. I've got a pretty simple life.
Lisa: Pretty simple life.
Dr John: And I’m doing what I love every day, I love what I'm doing. And that makes a difference. You don't age as much. Your cytokines, your inflammatory responses are down. You don't have distress. You have your stress, you have armies, and you move forward when you're doing something you really love to do every day.
Lisa: Wow. So no stress, good diet, none of the bad stuff.
Dr John: I’ve delegated all my stress to other people. You know, Hugh Jackman, they got the stress. They're the ones that gonna have to go through all that gyration and make love. I'm joking. I delegate stress to other people who would love to take it.
Lisa: Yep. And that's, oh, man, there's just so much gold in that. So what are some of the stuff as that you do, you talk about in the breakthrough experience? Talk me through a little bit of the process that you get people to take and so in a way, how can help people can join the breakthrough?
Dr John: One of those is owning the traits of the greats. I always say at the level, the essence of the soul, which is the real authentic self, you might think. Nothing's missing in you. But the level of your senses, things appear to be missing in you. And sometimes we compare ourselves to others. We put them on pedestals, we put them in pits, we put them above us or below is greater or lesser than us. We don't have an equal sign. So there's no equanimity and equity in there. Well, and as long as we do, we're going to inject their values and try to live in their values, which is futile, or project our values and try to get them to live in our values, which is futile. And all that futility, energy is what drains people. When you actually start to do something that is authentic to you, and are more objective, filling your day with high priorities. Think about when you really got, really knocked it out of the ballpark, and you stuck to priorities in the day you come home, you're resilient, you can handle anything. But if you put out fire and just had nothing but low priority stuff during the day, and you felt like 'Man, I never got to what was important today. What a day.' You're a bear when you come home, and that runs your immune system down. So,owning the traits of the greats finding out what it is around you, the heroes and villains around you own them. So you're not thinking, 'Oh, I need to be like them, or they need to be like me.' Just own it all. Give yourself to realise that if you're admiring somebody it's because you're too humble to admit what you see in them inside you, it's not missing, it's there. You haven't seen it. Become aware of it in your own form in your own value system. Don't compare yourself to them. Compare your daily actions to what you value most and stick to priority.
Lisa: And so when you start to think that someone else, because we do this all the time. We're comparing ourselves, you meet someone on the street and you're like, 'Oh, they're better looking than me either. They're richer than me. This or that.' Doing that act actually diminishes what you feel.
Dr John: But they don’t have a better life than you. That's what's so funny. I've met a lot of celebrities, a lot of impacting people, probably three or four thousand of them now. They're just human beings. And we think, 'Oh, my God. They got this great glitzy life.' No, they don't. I know some celebrities that can go outside without the paparazzi. They have to go flying into an island to hide somewhere. They have challenges that you probably don't want. But the reality is, they're not better. They're just different. And that's the realisation. They have a different set of values. They have a different set of 'successes and failures.' And if you compare yourself to them, you're going to minimise yourself. But if you actually go and find out what you see in them inside you in your own form. Otherwise, you're going to do what Einstein said. You're going to be a cat trying to swim like a fish and beating yourself up or a fish trying to climb a tree like a cat beating yourself up. Honour that you're a cat. I'm a professional speaker, I honour that I don't try to waver from what I know I'm here for.
Lisa: Yes, I love that. It's like understanding your genetics. I teach genetics and epigenetics, and that's a part of it. Understanding who you are owning who you are, instead of trying to be someone that you're not. Looking at the bad and the good, and the ugly, it is what it is, and how do we make the best of us.
Dr John: No matter what, no matter how ugly you are in the world, there's somebody out there that is going to love to look at you. That’s what’s funny. I was in Antarctica, I live on a ship as you know. We sailed down to Antarctica. There were penguins along I mean, as far as you can see is penguins. And I've watched the penguins. There were some really gimpy looking penguins that weren't that attractive. But I found if I waited there and watch long enough, another gimpy penguin found them and they made it with them. It was lovely. And then there was this really flaring debonair penguin, right? There's that perfect tuxedo on. There's this beautiful penguin, there was a penguin for everybody. I could see all my friends and their personalities in these penguins. It was quite interesting. So it's in the eye of the beholder, beauty. The same thing, we tend to think, 'Well, they've got a better deal.' No, they don't, they have a different deal.
Lisa: They have a different deal. Yeah. It's about you finding your priority, living your best life, living your optimal performance, and not getting yourself in the way and not letting other people control.
Dr John: What that is. If you don't empower your own life, people overpower you. Rose Kennedy had a mission statement. I actually was given a book by a woman who was a patient that her father gave her the book and her father got that book from the Kennedy family. So this was handed down from the Kennedy family to a father to a daughter to me. And in there, I was going through this book, and it was on magnetism. It's amazing book. In there was a handwritten note by Rose Kennedy. It was our mission statement. And it said, 'I dedicate my life to raising a family of world leaders.' That's her mission.There's a mother. And I've had mothers come up to me and said, 'Well, is that enough?' And I go, I read that to them. Anytime I have a mother that's thinking, 'Oh, I should be a businesswoman. I should be this. I should be that.' They really, really want to raise kids. But they're comparing themselves, and think that's not enough. I read that to them. Because she created world leaders as a mother.
Lisa: And that’s a ripple effect, isn’t it? That's the ripple effect that…
Dr John: Because her heart was there. Her heart was a way to be a mother. And we sometimes go, 'Oh, well, they're doing this so I should be doing this.' Anytime you hear yourself saying I should, I ought to, I'm supposed to, I got to, I have to, I must, or I need to, you're living under the imperatives of other people that you've subordinated to. You're injecting values, which is clouding the clarity of your own mission. Giving yourself permission to get your mission back and saying thank you, but no, thank you to options, who you are, and give you no truth to who you are. That's what’s liberating. Being unborrowed visionary, not a borrowed visionary.
Lisa: One valuable bomb after the other I think and this conversation, and it's just so empowering. Because you as human beings, we have this imposter in the head that's telling us we're not good enough. We aren't this, we aren't that. And we also have the subconscious that's running the ship. So we downloaded a whole lot of stuff when we were young that we didn't. When did you choose your beliefs? When did you choose your value system? When did you choose that you are going to be limited in this way or that way? Was probably before you even were able to understand how the people get into that subconscious and start to reprogram. Because a lot of people listen to this guy, 'Yes, yes, yes, I want to be like that.' And then …
Dr John: The thing is they set up a fantasy. Saying that as long as you have a fantasy your life becomes a nightmare. You got to set a real objective, something you're willing to embrace pain and pleasure in the pursuit of. If you're not willing to embrace both pain and pleasure, support and challenge, ease and difficulty in the pursuit of it, it isn't your mission because that's the sign of the mission. You're willing to do whatever it takes. Travel whatever distance, pay whatever price is, as that happened to me. So if you're looking, if you're in your amygdala, you're going to want to avoid predator and seek prey. Avoid pain, seek pleasure in the hedonistic pursuit, which is immediate gratification and short term outcomes. Person attend the executive centre has an executive vision. And they have a strategic planning, they want to think it through. When you go and run massive marathons, you sit down and go, 'Okay, what's the diet? What am I? What's my workout? What are the obstacles? What happens if I get too hot? What happens?' You think of everything and prepare. You have foresight and people with foresight get ahead. And people that live in hindsight, are always reacting. Number one thing to stops that is giving power to other people that you put on pedestals. We're not here to put people on pedestals, we're not here to live in their shadows. We're here to stand on their shoulders, as Newton did. So our job is to whatever we see, and other people own the traits of great. That's what I do in the breakthrough experience. What is it I admire about them? And where do I have it until it's quantitatively and qualitatively equal. So they're no longer up on this pedestal, and I'm no longer minimising because if I set a goal that matches their values, I'm going to beat myself up. You have self critical statements inside your head. That's not a bad thing. That's letting you know you're pursuing something that's not you. That's a feedback. The second you get on to what the navigation you, you don't have that. I've demonstrated that on thousands of people, the second they get on to them, they get tears of gratitude, they know what it is, that disappears. That's a homing device to try to get you to set real goals with real objectives that are deeply meaningful and quit trying to be somebody you’re not.
Lisa: Wow. So what about things like your amygdala you talked about the amygdala and your prefrontal cortex and your view executive function. What happens with people who have, I had Dr Austin Perlmutter on the show, Dr David Perlmutter. He's written a book called Brainwash. He talks about the separation between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex of the connection that the conversation isn't going backwards and forwards. And in people with brain injuries, for example, or with a lot of inflammation because they've been eating wrong foods are exposed to toxins. So there's an actual physical thing. How can people get their amygdala under control? Because we have so many people, whether it's from a brain injury or from bad foods, or whatever, living in this amygdala state where they're in a reactive, immediate gratification, make the short term decisions not looking at. This is affecting us worldwide. This is not only on the individual level, but also…
Dr John: Even some leadership levels. People are doing it. We have neuroplasticity, you know that. Neuroplasticity allows neurogenesis. They can reactivate neurogenesis and we can remyelinate with our oligodendrocytes, we can remyelinate that internal system. They ask them sites and oligodendrocytes are sitting there building and destroying he seems remodelling his house. Yeah, yeah. Now, every time we live by the highest priority, the highest value, the prefrontal cortex starts getting mileage and the neurogenesis and the neurons going from the prefrontal cortex with glutamate and GABA, the regulators of the amygdala, calm down the impulses and instincts, the amygdala they cause us to have these fantasies and nightmare states, these distractions.
So the second we start to go back to priority, the blood glucose and oxygen starts going up in the forebrain and starts myelinating that air, the brain, and we can neuro plastic to do if we stick to priority. But what we do is we're subordinating and fearing rejection and holding on to fantasies as a result of that, that aren't matching what we really are committed to. And we think we know ourselves, but we don't. Getting clear about that's why I have on my website, the value determination process to get clear about what you really value. Because most people, if I ask people, how many want to be financially independent, every hand goes up. And then I say, Well, how many are financially dependent? All the hands go down. I said, you really don't have a desire for financial empowerment you think you do, you have a desire to spend money on immediate gratifying, you know, consumables that depreciate in value, that's what your life's demonstrating.
You need to face the fact about what your values are, and know what those values are, if you want to really achieve what you say you're going to achieve. So a lot of people don't really have that they say they want something, but that's not really what their life's demonstrating. I want to know what their life's demonstrating they're committed to and structure their life around that. That's what upgrades the myelinisation on the forebrain.
Lisa: Wow. And so it's not just the foods that we’re eating.
Dr John: Food’s part of it! Inflammatory responses, but a lot of the inflammatory responses are associations made in the brain on things that are supportive or challenging of your body. So if you perceive something challenging you, you'll have a kind of an anti effect on it you'll have a you know, I always say that if you've got shame and guilt or whatever you're going to literally have an autoimmune response attacking parts of your body. Your body And brain is doing that it has this capacity to do that and, and the little microglial cells are actually part of the immune system, they're actually doing that to help apotosis to destroy cells in the brain that are being used if you don't usually lose it. And if you're looking for immediate gratification, you get a quick fix, because you're unfulfilled, you'll, you're not going to spend the energy on glucose and oxygen, and blood up in the forebrain, because you don't need it. That's why you have to set the priority, fill your day with the highest priority actions on a daily basis and rebuild your brain.
Lisa: Well, and that filters down onto all of these other levels, the physical levels, the order of many systems.
Dr John: Self-image changes. your momentum starts to build up, your confidence goes up, your self worth goes up your space and time horizons expand, you automatically start walking your talk instead of limping your life and your amygdala calms down. It's myelinisation and the forebrain pick it up. Welcome to the executive.
Lisa: Welcome to the executive the one that the adults back in the room and the kids.
Dr John: The adults are not the wild animal. Yeah, what's interesting is, is the executive function that forebrain has fibres ago to V-5, V-6 in the visual cortex and activate vision. And he goes down into the decision makings for strategic planning, and it goes to the associative motor functions to get spontaneous action. And it calms down the amygdala, the nucleus accumbens and the palate, and that calms them down and gets them ready for an inspired action.
Lisa: Wow, I'm not I'm just absolutely mind blowing and your knowledge of the brain and how that all that all works. Because this is the I mean, I've been, you know, deep in the study, obviously, with brain injuries and repair and in the short term thinking problem that we have in society in general. And in my own life, I've seen it, you know, I see, you know, when I go and do things that I don't want to be doing, because I'm looking at it out of balance state, I’m stressed for some reason, and so you go and do something that you go, ‘Why did I do this?’ You know, and it's understanding this whole interplay of the body and the mind, that is just so powerful. And for people who have diseases or autoimmune diseases, or, you know, cancers, and what is your take on how much the mind actually affects your bodily systems in given what we've just talked about?
Dr John: I wrote 1000 page text on the mind body connection, which is a, you know, what the messages of the body kind of thing. And through perception, the ratios of perception, impact through perception going into autonomics, the autonomic nervous system, if you have a perception, you've got more support and challenge your parasympathetic comes online, you get more challenges where your synthetic comes online. Yeah, those create neurotransmitter ratios, those create epigenetic impacts, because they literally cause kinase and phosphatase, responses and acetylation and methylation. Yep. And these, these are basically changing our physiology creating symptoms in our body. And most people don't take the time to look at applied physiology. I've been focusing on applied physiology since I was 23. Wow, and studying exactly what exactly is that cell? Do? Yeah. So I take a cell and I look at every receptor, and I look at every neurotransmitter and every modulator and hormone and and you know, and I look at those neuro regulators. And I look at what triggers those what parts of the brain what what autonomic component, what hypothalamus component, you know, what, what transmitters are involved in that. And I look at that, and I look at what are the symptoms that are coming out of that. And then I look at the combination of symptoms that we call a condition. And there's no doubt in my mind, there's psychology sitting inside there, no doubt in my mind, watching that and paying close attention that I wrote this big textbook on that just for that reason. And then what happens is people are so used to not wanting to take accountability for their own thing. They want to blame some outside source, and they want to look for some sort of solution, the bug and the antibiotic, right? The evil spirit and the Saviour kind of thing. And they're all dissociated, they're not taking accountability for their perception, decisions and actions in life. And I'm more about educating people on what their physiology is doing. Yeah, for instance, if a person goes in binges and pigs out which most everybody's done at least once. When they do, they wake up with kind of puffy eyes, nasal congestion, a little bit of a headache, a little nausea, stomach cramps, maybe some diarrhea the next day. Well, you go to the the allopathic physician, and he's gonna say, Well, you've got an antacid, you need. They give you six pills, and I and all your body was doing is creating the normal physiological response when you pigged out.
Lisa: And then you're going to add all of these problems to it.
Dr John: But the thing is that those symptoms are health. That's a healthy response to a pig. If you're a pig, you're gonna get that response. Yeah, if you don't eat that way, you don't have those symptoms. So the symptoms are feedback mechanisms. guiding us to an authentic life where we have self governance. That's the mission.
Lisa: And when we get when people get into this downward spiral of eating the wrong stuff, and then they have more cravings for the wrong stuff and you know becomes a mess. And they don't, when you don't understand the whole how the physiology works, and they don't even link together that the headache today was the headache last night.
Dr John: They're looking for the immediate gratification pill, wherever you're at, and the pharmaceutical industry loves to make the cash. Their medical reps are out there selling it. And you know what, I it's not bad or good. It's just that if you educate yourself, and you have options, and you're aware, you now realise you have the power to make a difference in your own life. That's the last resort. I haven't had a medication in my body for 49 years. Wow. No aspirin, no drugs, nothing. I don't take anything. I drink water. I haven't needed it. I don't have a headache. The only time I ever had a headache when I was doing bark mulch one day spreading bark mulch and I then got inhaled all this dust, and I got a headache. But my body let me know that. But if you listen to your body, it's guiding you very wisely. Eat wisely and fill it with wise things. And think about how you want to feel your life. If you feel it prioritise your life and do something you really love doing with the people you love doing it and make a career doing it and get paid for it. And eat wisely to live, not live to eat. You'd be surprised what your body is capable of doing.
Lisa: Yeah, and how long it can live and how well it can live and you're living proof of that.
Dr John: I’m still cranking. When it happened to me tomorrow, but I'm still cranking it out. I still got more energy than most people and 30 year olds that can't keep up with me.
Lisa: No. In the brain power is not diminished. You know, because this is what a lot of us fear. I don't fear it because I know what to do with it.
Dr John: The purpose of losing the purpose of losing your mind with Alzheimer's is just to be able to say that I don't know my kids anymore because you want them to move out.
Lisa: That might be a good point. You got it. You got it. You gotta laugh.
Dr John: That's a strategy to go. I don't remember my kids. No, no, no, no.
Lisa: Unfortunately, it's not. And we can see this coming 20 years out and you still talk to people on a daily basis who are facing this and their family and they don't think they have any power except the drugs.
Dr John: I was contacted by Bronnie Ware, who's out there in Australia, on the Byron Bay Area. And she wrote a beautiful book on you know, the five regrets that people have as they're getting ready to die. And most of them are because people weren't authentic. They did a job they didn't want to do with people they didn't want to do. And were afraid of people rejecting them. And their whole life was basically living and learning and excelling. And that's what that's what kills people. And then what happens? They got Monday morning blues, Wednesday, hump days, Thank-God-it's-Fridays and week friggin ends. And then they go in and they do and then blow it on some vacation to escape. And then they're in poverty. And then they're distressed and then their life went by. If you're not doing something you love doing and getting remunerated and handsomely paid doing what you love you missed out on your life.
Lisa: Yeah, absolutely. And there is nothing evil about having money. I think this is another thing that we subconsciously think people who are wealthy must be bad. They must have done it in a way. And we think that on a subconscious level.
Dr John: I've been a bad person my whole life.
Lisa: You must be terrible.
Dr John: I was 27. I'm a bad person. No, what I found is that I made a commitment that I was going to master finance just like any other field. And I, you know, I read about 1400 books on that topic. And so I'd learned how to do it. And I started to save and invest and started doing things. And then I worked my butt off, I got a little ass because I worked. Yeah, and I've been serving and serving and serving and serving seven days a week. So I have no problem doing that. And I'm a believer that, you know, if you can be a slave to money, or you can be a master of it. If you're slave to you're gonna work your whole life for it. The people that say, well, all you I don't want money, it's bad and evil. They work their whole life for it. Yeah, I want it working for me, I make more money off my investments, than I do working doing anything else. I'd rather have it working for me. And so I can then decide what philanthropic thing I can do with that. I can do a lot with that.
Lisa: This is the power of having financial independence. Not that I've got there yet. But it's been able to have a bigger impact. You've been able to do more with your life. And this is the frustrating thing that so much talent in the world and so much people with big visions and skills are limited because they didn't have the resources to do it. And that’s it.
Dr John: Are any of you like, 'You don't empower somebody to overpower you.' I made a commitment to empower. I'm working on ideas that serve people and wake up genius. Yeah, I wanted to create a new national business globally, which I've done. I wanted to be able to have financial independence, which I've achieved. I want to have a global family. My partner lives in Turkey. Yeah. Wow. Right now. She just left. Just the other day just left. She's on her way to Turkey right now flying. Yeah. And she's magnificent. She's one of the top singers, actresses and models in the world. So I mean, you can have exactly what you set your mind to do. And I'm a believer that you can have influence and you can have a vital body and you can be inspired and create an inspiring movement for people. There's nothing stopping us from doing what it is that we would really love to do, except us not willing to do the actions to get there.
Lisa: Yeah. And getting the knowledge and getting the teachers and getting the books and getting the mentors and, and we have access to it all now. We have the damn internet. Like, why? Well, we just have access to anybody who says to me, 'Well, I can't go and how did you do that with your mother, you're not a doctor? I don't need a doctor, I don't need to be in here.'
Dr John: Mere onlining. You start digging and start researching.
Lisa: Exactly. And you can become an expert on your particular field pretty quickly. If you're really dedicated to doing that.
Dr John: I learned a long time ago when I was in my 20s that if you spend 30 minutes a day on a particular field, studying it intensely, at the end of seven years, you can be at the cutting edge. Wow. If you do an hour, no, an hour a day, you could do it in four years. If you did it two hours a day, two and a half years if you did three hours a day and do it under two years. Wow. And I did I demonstrated that in astronomy. I demonstrated that in dentistry in my field of neurology. I demonstrate I prove that. And so I'm absolutely certain you can intensify time sometimes intensity gives results.If you intensify your actions in a shorter period of time, you can get the same results quicker than most people think
Lisa: How do you retain that information? Because that was one of the problems that I've been you know dealing with I'm processing so many books, so much information, so many podcasts, so many things all the time then in a lot of it keeps falling out the other side of my I like to say it goes in on ear and comes out the other.
Dr John: I give it out as fast as I could. The sooner you give it out, the moment you get it, give it out, teach it the faster the faster output with input, the more the retention. It’s a basic law. So if I'm reading something I, I used to get up at two o'clock in the morning, do yoga up till two thirty speed read four to seven books by six thirty. I used to just read, read, read. And then I would go to jog and I go and clean up and I go to class and I go to clinic. And then I come back home at seven and I taught from 7 to 10 PM. 10 PM I went to bed and got up at two and I did it again. Wow. Each night. Each night that night, I would teach what I read that morning. And I planned out like what I was going to read I planned out my teaching. And I had classes every night people came to there and paid me. You know, while I was a student I was 23 years old made over $100,000 a year just teaching every night. And now that is a result of just the faster I get it, the faster I give it out. And that catalysed a retention and an integration of information. And so keep using it, you use it you don’t lose it.
Lisa: Don't wait till you're an expert. And you know, don't wait two years before you start teaching. Just get an idea right now.
Dr John: Teaching is the fastest way to learn it. It organises your mind and present in order to present it to you. You have an accountability, like put a deadline on it and teach it that's that's how you learned.
Lisa: Yeah. And that's forcing yourself to retain it.
Dr John: It's like saying, if you just saved money, you'll get ahead if you wait until you have extra money you won't. You never wait for you just you always pay yourself first I learned a long time ago. Don't wait until you have extra money. Just pay it. And watch how more money comes to you. When you manage money wisely you get more money to manage. That's the law.
Lisa: Dr John Demartini, you are a legend. I've learned so much today. And in this one hour session with you. It went to places that I wasn't expecting because you know I've studied your work. I know what you do. And yet this absolutely blew me away, actually meeting you face to face to feel your energy, your passion, your compassion for humanity is just next level, it's really made my day. In fact, I'm gonna go and change some things up I think because you spoke to me with some of my frustrations that I'm dealing with in my personal life. And I know that people that are listening to this will be like putting this on repeat. So thank you so much for your dedication to, to the work that you do. I know you could just sit back and relax now and not do anything, but you haven't. And then you never will, I don't think because you just have a passion for humanity in helping with their suffering in changing people's lives. So thank you so much for doing all that.
Dr John: Thank you for but some people think I caused the suffering.
Lisa: Well, I do I agree you probably do in the short term while we're getting the change.
Dr John: I have people they go, 'You’re going to make me accountable?' I said, 'Yeah, you want me to punish you, I'm making you accountable. Let's go, that's the suffering.'
Lisa: You haven't done a little one pill for me?
Dr John: If you feel that your life was suffering that you love, it's inspiring
Lisa: It is absolutely. Strength comes from struggle that's on my boxing club wall. You know and that is the more you have to fight against something the more challenged you are by something the more you are forcing yourself to learn, to grow, to develop, get stronger. That is one of the roles of the world, so you better be comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Dr John: That's it. Thank you.
Lisa: Brilliant.
That's it this week for Pushing The Limits. Be sure to rate, review, and share with your friends. And head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.
The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.
Have you ever tried to copy a role model before? Chances are, results didn't align with your goals. Our bodies are different on so many levels and in so many different ways. The path to optimising your body and health varies from person to person. Our health type is crucial when it comes to learning how to manage stress and building our immunity!
In this episode, Dr Cam McDonald joins us to talk about how different health types deal with the different phases of the stress model. He notes that certain classes need to focus on different stages. When building immunity, people also need to listen to their bodies' needs.
If you want to know more about how to manage stress and build immunity based on your body type, then this episode is for you.
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‘And so if you prolong that, or put the wrong kind of stress on somebody, then it creates damage. But then the really cool thing about the stress cycle is that if you recover, then that your body learns.’
‘What happens in your resistance phase? It essentially assumes that you are being chased by something very urgently. You need to get away from like a saber-toothed tiger essentially.’
‘And one of the biggest problems just to expand this to one final timeline is that you do this for 10 years. Yeah. And your body says I need you to stop completely. And that's a heart attack.’
‘So what's so fascinating about how we develop and how we grow as individuals from the womb, and we've discussed this on previous podcasts as well, is that we have certain stresses that will be more stressful for us than for other people.’
‘And so what we know is the type of things that stress this person is cold. Firstly, if they're very, very cold, their body doesn't have the muscle or the fat tissue to stay warm. And that really drains their energy levels.’
‘So this individual, they have more hormones like prolactin, and they are more likely to be insulin resistant. They have a slightly slower thyroid as well.’
‘So those leaner, more delicate bodies will go within themselves, they'll try and be alone, so that they can create certainty, because certainty in their future creates safety for them and warmth as well.’
Dr Cam McDonald has spent the last decade furthering his knowledge and skills to promote accessible health. He's a dietitian and exercise physiologist. He has a long-standing personal passion for health, genetics, and environmental influences. His goal is to support all people to live up to their full physical potential.
Cam has a firm focus on people becoming more aware of themselves. He wants them to know their natural strengths and optimal behaviours for the best health. He is an informed speaker who has a passion for fitness and the inspiration to do something about it.
Want to know more about Dr Cam's work? Check out his website or follow him on Instagram and Linkedin. You can also reach him through email (drcam@yourgeneius.com) or phone (0411380566).
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To pushing the limits,
Lisa
Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential. With your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.
Lisa Tamati: Welcome back to Pushing the Limits. Today I have another super interview with Dr Cam McDonald, who you may recognise from previous episodes that we've done. Now, Cam McDonald is the ph360 CEO in Australia. And he's one of the world's leading experts in personalised health and the use of genetics and epigenetics. He really understands when it comes to individuals being able to understand the strengths of the unique biology, and how it gives them an exact pathway to better health in a way that makes it easy for them. He's a leader and educator, a scientist, motivator, and he is a crusader on a mission is what Dr Cam is. And he is a wonderful guy.
Now today we are going to be talking about the stress response, what happens in the body when you are under stress. We're also going to be talking about how that pertains to your specific health type or your body type with your specific genetics, and how different people react in different ways to stressors, and how genetics actually makes a 50% contribution to this whole thing. We're also going to be looking at resilience and stress management and how to build a better, more resilient, stronger you. So I hope you enjoy this episode with Dr Cam McDonald.
If after listening to this episode, you're keen to do the epigenetics program, which were steeped in and have been using for a number of years now with our athletes and with corporates and with individuals wanting high-performance people dealing with very difficult health journeys, then we'd love you to check out what we do here on over to lisatamati.com and push the button ‘Work With Us’ and you'll see our Peak Epigenetics program here, you can either jump on a live webinar with us, we have one every couple of weeks, or just reach out to us or just sign up for the program, it will be life changing for you. It will help you optimise every aspect of your life: not only your your food, and your exercise, which everybody wants to know about and what's right for you, but also everything to do with your mood, behaviour, the brain function, what social environments you'll do well and what physical environments you do well, and we touch on some of these topics in today's episode. So head on over to lisatamati.com, under the ‘Work With Us’ button, you'll see that there.
Before we head over to Dr Cam, just reminder that we have our premium membership for the podcast Pushing the Limits open now, we would love you to come and join our VIP tribe. We've been going now for five and a half years with this podcast and it is an absolute labour of love. And we really need your support to keep us on air, to help us spread the information from these world leading experts to you. So if you like what the whole podcast is about, if you can spare just a few dollars a month, that's really a cup of coffee or two a month, depending on what level you want to join us at. We would really appreciate that, and for your troubles, of course we have a lot of premium member benefits for you there over on that www.patron.lisatamati.com URL. So that's patron, P-A-T-R-O-N dot lisatamati.com.
And lastly, before I head over to Dr Cam, please check out my new longevity and anti-ageing supplement. I've co-founded a company here that is doing NMN supplements with Dr Elena Seranova, a molecular biologist. And this is a, NMN is a very powerful compound that some vitamin D, vitamin B3 sorry, derivative that helps upregulate the sirtuin genes and improve longevity and autophagy and lots of great things in the shell. So if you want to know a little bit more about the science behind the NMN and why you should have it, then please check out our website at www.nmnbio.nz That's N-M-N bio.nz.
Right, over to the show with Dr Cam McDonald.
Hi, everybody and welcome to Pushing the Limits. Super excited to have you with me here again today. I have a repeat offender on the show Dr Cam McDonald, who's coming on for how many times is this? Number three, I think, Dr Cam?
Dr Cam McDonald: I think yeah, it is number three. Yeah, we've done a combo, we've done a solo and now another solo.
Lisa: Yeah. Today we're going to be talking about resilience, stress and immunity, and how to personalise your protocols and your lifestyle interventions for your particular genetic type to increase your resilience and immunity. So Dr Cam, where should we start with this big topic? It's a big, it's something that everyone's talking about at the moment as immunity and lowering stress levels.B ecause when we're stressed when we got lots of stress hormones running through us all the time, which I think you and I probably both do, to a certain degree with our jobs and our lifestyle and our genetics. How do we manage that on a day to day basis? And how do we personalise that and understand that in regards to our own sort of body make-up and health types?
Dr Cam: That's a great opening question, Lisa, that is as broad as your life. So probably, I reckon the best way that we would start with this is, is just by defining these things like stress and resilience and even immunity. So I guess stress can be defined as anything that takes our body away from homeostasis. So we're calm, we're cool, we're collected, we're lying in bed. Waking up and putting your feet on the floor actually creates a stress on our vascular system. Our blood has to start moving harder, because it's now moving against gravity, that creates a little bit of a stress that's taken us away from that resting state. And so if you prolong that, or put the wrong kind of stress on somebody, then it creates damage. But then the really cool thing about the stress cycle is that if you recover, then that, your body learns. So it goes, alright, I've got damaged here. And I'm now going to learn about that, and in my recovery, I'm going to get stronger so that that same stress, when I get exposed to it again, doesn't affect me as much.
And so I guess some examples of stress might be, exercise is a stress. We don't think about it that way, we think what's positive exercise is positive. Yeah, but exercise is actually a stress. It makes us feel, it actually puts a demand on our body. And you will know, running your ultramarathons, that your body is not in its best health at the 90 kilometre mark. It is at its best, they'll probably before the race starts, and then your body is exposed to a prolonged period of stress. But then you do that your body then rests and recovers and you get stronger so that you can get up and do it again.
But then there's other stresses, you know, like our workload, and being underslept, and eating the wrong food, and being in relationships, that great stress. All of these things put a demand on our body and our mind. And this tells the body that there's some sort of emergency. And so in that emergency, we have to take action, we have to cope, which we can expand on. And then we have, then we get very tired and we get exhausted. And then that's when we need to recover. So for me, a stress is really anything that takes us away from that rested state.
Lisa: Yep.
Dr Cam: If it's short, and the right kind of thing, and then we recover, we get stronger. If it's prolonged, and there's no recovery, then it can help us deteriorate and lead to very poor health and lowers our immune system as well. And then when it comes to resilience, resilience is about being exposed to stress, but being able to handle it.
Lisa: Yeah.
Dr Cam: And so, when, it's different to recovery in that you're getting stronger resilience, as in you are in the stress. And generally if you have, I like to think of resilience as having resilience juice. You've got a certain amount based on your capacity to tolerate stress. And so you know, the training that you've put in, the mindset that you have, gives you more juice so than in any given stress, you can tolerate a better and push forward. And I'd have to say that resilience, or stress is essential. And so we have to have stress to grow. Therefore, we must have resilience to be able to tolerate that stress so that we can continue growing. If we run out of resilience, we don't want to expose ourselves to stress ever. But this doesn't allow us to grow then. So this is where I see those two things into playing. And then the immune system is one of those things that you can have an underactive immune system that isn't mounting a good response. Or you can have an overactive immune system, which has actually been attacking your own body, autoimmune conditions. And so we're really looking when we're talking about immune health, we're talking about that sweet spot right in the middle where we're aggressively fighting things from the outside, but protecting our own tissues and organs at the same time. So I reckon that's a place to start. We can go from there.
Lisa: Yeah, that's, he just done, he did that so well. So I think so stress, resilience and immunity are all interlinked. And we need a certain amount of stress. And we talk about hormetic stresses, and how good they are for our bodies because they cause a cascade of events. When I hop into the sauna, it's hot and I'm sweating, and that's causing a response in the body. I don't want to be in there for three hours, though, because that's going to kill me, probably. But a small, short, sharp shock can often be helpful in creating a hormetic stress. So what we're trying to do is avoid the chronic stressors, the sort of stuff, excuse me, that builds up over time and the stuff that's going to be negative for our mindset, and our ability to cope.
So when we have our stress response, Dr Cam, what actually happens in the body? So—I don't know—someone cuts you off in traffic, or you get a nasty email from your boss or something like that, or you have a fight with your spouse or, what's actually going on on a physiological level?
Dr Cam: Yeah, awesome. So there's a really beautiful model that talks about the stages of stress and design by Hans Selye. And this has stood the test of time, and it's definitely the way that we need to understand stress. So we have our—it's a four-stage model, with the first stage being homeostasis, when you just chill out, like you're sitting in the car, there's no real stress, you're just driving along. What happens when you get cut off, or the boss yells at you, or says', I want to see you in’... probably the boss saying, ‘I want to see you in my office in 10 minutes in an hour, even better’.
And so what happens in that first stage of stress is you become neurally alert. Alarm stage, it's called. Essentially, all of your senses will become more alert to say, ‘What's going on here? And what kind of information do I need to pick up from the environment to make sure that I'm going to be okay'? So you go to alarm phase, it's like, ‘What's going on? what's happening’? And so that's where we get anxious, which is worrying about the future, it's like what could possibly be coming in our future. And so that alarm stage, and another way to think about it is you're standing on the start of a 800-metre race. So you've got that, that nervous energy, the gun hasn't gone off yet, all in your brain. Yeah. So that's alarm stage one.
Alarms, sorry, and then we go into resistance stage two. Resistance stage is where we are now in the fight. We're now in the boss's office, defending ourselves. We are 500 metres through the race, where our body, it's now no longer a matter of ‘I've got to be alert to the environment', but rather, ‘I've now got to get in and fight. And I've got to cope'. And so this coping thing is something that we're doing all of the time. So, and in the, the great example, obviously, would be yourself in a long-distance run. Your body has to cope with all of the stress of continuing, when your body wants to stop. And genuinely it says, ‘I want to stop. This stress is not fun, I want to stop, please'.
The same thing goes for your—you've had a bad night's sleep for five nights in a row. And now you've got a front up at work. And you have to cope with the tiredness. And so that coping is resistance stage two. What your body does to cope in stage one, our nervous system becomes aware in stage two, our blood pressure goes up, our blood sugar levels go up. Now, blood fats go up. Everything that's going to support energy release in the body, and making sure that we can maintain a very high level of energy, they are going to be the systems that go up. And so you know, because when you're 500 minutes to a ratio of blood pressure, if it drops, you won't have enough blood to pump around your body.
So in order to cope, it has to keep your blood pressure up. If you're tired and underslept your body in order to cope with the workload, it needs to have a blood pressure that's going to allow you to stay awake, you need to have blood sugars that give you fuel, you need to have blood fats that give you fuel.
And so in stress, your body breaks down muscle.
Lisa: Can’t avoid.
Dr Cam: And turns that into carbohydrates for your brain, and it breaks down fat tissue and turns it into fats for your body, your blood pressure goes up. And so now we have this. Essentially, if you have a 500-metre race, it would look, I haven't made the race, it would look like you have sort of diabetes and high blood pressure if you want to take a snapshot of that race.
Lisa: And I'm done that in the middle of things. And it’s like, the individual training sessions and I took, I remember taking my blood sugar. I've been fasting for 18 hours, did an interval training session, took my blood sugar and it was at 9.5 and I had a heart attack. Like, what the hell!
Dr Cam: Exactly. Hopefully you didn't have a heart attack.
Lisa: No, I don’t.
Dr Cam: But you know, looking like a profile, your profile would have. So this is what's so important is that exercise, that under sleep, it makes your body cope. And blood pressure isn't bad, blood pressure is keeping you awake. High blood sugars aren't bad. They are providing fuel for your brain. Blood fats are bad, high triglycerides aren't bad, they are keeping your body fuelled. And so we see these things as bad things but in fact, they are our coping mechanisms. Without them we wouldn't be able to get through the day.
Lisa: Right, in the short term.
Dr Cam: in the short term. And this is the problem is that you'll then persist with this. But before we get there, what happens in your resistance phase? It essentially assumes that you are being chased by something very urgently you need to get away from, like a sabre-toothed tiger, essentially. Yeah, and so on. Your immune system goes, ‘Well, I don't have the energy to tackle these bacteria, to mess with this virus. I just need to make sure that I can supply as much fuel down to my bones and my muscles as I can so that we can get out of here. And then I'll worry about my bacterial infections later’.
And so while we're in this coping phase, your immune system gets suppressed, it goes down. And this is why, in some autoimmune conditions, they actually use very strong immune suppressants and reduce the immune system because the immune system, in stress, depresses. And so in coping phase, if it's really short happy days, because your body can tolerate that, that's what it's designed for. But then it's been 12 weeks of low sleep, lots of coffee, which increases your alarm stage, pushes your blood pressure up, you're working really hard so you’ve got that mental stress as well. And then, over a prolonged period of time, your body hasn't had a chance to recover. And so then you then go on holidays.
Lisa: And what happens? Yeah, you get sick.
Dr Cam: You get sick! And you think that this is your body being even more sick, we think I'm sick. So therefore my body is even worse than it was at work. But what's happened is that you've just delayed your immune system to turn on, even though your body was just as sick, probably more sick. What happens now in stage three is exhaustion phase or recovery phase.
Lisa: Right.
Dr Cam: And so your body, in order to gain growth, like get stronger from a workout, you know, you take a muscle to temporary fatigue when you're lifting weights. And what happens? Your muscle gets exhausted, can't lift another weight, it then rests for 48 hours, and it comes back stronger. So this exhaustion phase is actually really important. But what happens when you get sick, your body, your brain, it's like, as you turn off work, your brain finally dials down that internal stress, that reason to cope. And so now you don't have to cope anymore. And so all of your recovery mechanisms now increase.
And one of the best ways for your body to recuperate as quickly as possible is to lie flat on your back for a week. So I'm gonna make you incredibly sick. I'm going to tackle all these bacterial, these viral infections. I'm going to recover your body; I'm going to try and replenish your nervous system. And I'm going to do that as quickly as possible. And so I'm going to drive a lot of symptoms that help our bodies slow down, so that you do take some rest. Because our body is speaking to us!
Lisa: ‘I’m gonna knock the crap out of you!’
Dr Cam: Saying, ‘Hey, you've been going too fast for too long, you need to rest and recover. I'm going to make that happen now, I'm going to make it hard for you to get up'. Your body is actually on your side. And we see this even at a day to day level where if you get tired throughout the day, so you wake up in the morning, you've got some really important stuff on, you have some coffee that puts you even more alert and coping your system. You’re then pushing hard all day long. You're on your best behaviour at work. Yeah, you then get home and your brain switches off. Yep. And you're not yet sick. But your brain is so exhausted that it switches off, at least the prefrontal cortex does.
Lisa: Yeah, and then you become a horrible person.
Dr Cam: Your control, you become this person who hates their family, all of us don't understand why.
Lisa: Irritable, shifting. Hey, guys last night–
Dr Cam: Exactly. We all do, I think I've stepped out of a few of those myself. And so we have this short-term experience of stress, and then recovery, which is exercise. Short-term stress, recover, get stronger. Short term stress of day to day, you know, but it's probably a bit longer than what our body would like. We get stressed, we have to recover, we have to recover with rest. And if we don't get that rest, then it'll express itself through shortness, we won't have that tolerance that we had at work. Because we don't have that as much cope on, we're exhausted. Yes.
Lisa: Wow, that's just really, that’s so pertinent to what I did last night. Got very shitty, had to go for a very long walk. And because I had a hard, stressful day, and this exactly what happened, you know. I had a bit of a meltdown, and then came home and got my shit together. But I know I should do, I know I should go for a walk.
Dr Cam: Exactly, exactly. And one of the biggest problems just to expand this to one final timeline is that you do this for 10 years.
Lisa: Yeah.
Dr Cam: And your body says I need you to stop completely. And that's a heart attack. You know, it's like you've been coping for long enough, your blood pressure has been high enough for long enough, your cholesterol has been high enough for long enough, so much that it has created damage because there's been no recovery. So now I'm going to stop you for six months.
Lisa: Yeah.
Dr Cam: Because it's been so long since we stopped last time. And so the key part of this stress piece is you can expect any stress, but it's about the recovery that is most important. If you recover appropriately, you get stronger, and then you repeat that stress again. And this is where the resilience comes in is because if you see stress as a positive, even stress at work, and you have like a really tough day at work, you go, ‘Whoa! I've learned how my body responds in stress. I'm gonna learn, or I now know how to deal with that situation better’. That resilience mindset right there, that allows you to actually lean into those lessons, recover, and actually get a lesson for next time as well.
But if you've got a mindset that this stress is killing me, then you don't fully recover, and your mind will actually create more stress on top the next time you experience the same thing as well. And so this is where that resilience base in that mindset is not just physical, is how much can you tolerate? How much can you cope physically before your body cops in? But also, how much—how you’re shaping your thoughts around this stressful experience as well. So and just having a better mindset and more presence and more awareness and more mindfulness, essentially, will actually improve your immune system, because you don't go into the same level of stress, because you've got a mindset that is able to… Yeah, exactly.
Lisa: You can see things coming sort of thing and in trying to try to hit it off in the past sort of thing before that, because we you know, we all, I think for years and years, I hear people say, ‘Oh, stress, you know, stress is bad for you, or you're going to have a heart attack'. If you keep going at that rate, that type of talk that you hear, but you don't understand, really, the mechanisms that are at play in this game, and what's actually happening. And the situation with our lives at, presently, you know, what we've got, you know, COVID in the world, which has caused, as a society, a huge amount of stress, and uncertainty and all these sorts of things. So now is a particularly important time to work on these tools and to be able to, you know, build our resilience.
And one of the things I wanted to mention there was that, if you're, as you know, hard charging type A personalities, got a lot of stress hormones anyway. You have, you know, when I was younger, this especially was like, just toughen up, just go harder and just deal with it. And if you're tired, work bloody harder instead of going the opposite. And that works for a certain amount of time, until it doesn't, and then you burn out. And, you know, so let's look at now, how different health types you know, because Dr Cam, as everyone knows, hopefully you listened to the podcast is the CEO of ph360. This is a genetic program that we look at the epigenetics and how your environment is affecting your life and your health. So let's look at how do, and why do, different people react differently to the same stressor? You know, why can somebody have something horrible happen to them, and get up the next day and carry on, and the other person's down for the count? You know, what were the realisation coming in?
Dr Cam: Yeah so, what's so fascinating about how we develop and how we grow as individuals from the womb, and we've discussed this on previous podcasts as well, is that we have certain stressors that will be more stressful for us than for other people. For example, you look at a sumo wrestler, right? A sumo wrestler, if they get pushed by a 60-kilogramme, 15-year-old boy, they're gonna go, ‘Oh. That's not a stress at all. In fact, it tickles a little bit'. Versus then you look at him that 15 year old boy push an infant, that's very, very different to the experience of stress. And so obviously, that's a quite an extreme example, but I wanted to make the point or even if another 60 kilos, 15 year old person, they push them, it creates a different type of stress. So physically, we're different. Mentally, we are also different as well. And behaviourally, we genetics determine over 50% of our personality, or at least 50% of our personality. And so how we respond to different things is built into our biology as well, and into our genetics.
And so what we see is that different people will actually appear in these phases of stress differently as well. And so a person like us, so we've got, we've got Crusaders on the census in the pH360 model. Essentially, the wedges are a quick background. So how we develop in the womb determines which organs and hormones are going to be dominant in our body. Those then contribute to how our body shape and size actually develop.
Lisa: Yep.
Dr Cam: So we have some individuals that develop from the layer of the embryo that is more predominant in the nervous system, so the nervous system gets more fuel, the musculoskeletal system and the digestive organs, they get less fuel. And so we end up with a body that has less muscle, less fat, less bone, generally a very fine delicate structure, and hormones that make them—and our nervous system that's very heightened, and hormones that make them very heightened as well, lots of noradrenaline, dopamine.
And so when we look at a very lean, delicate individual. When we think about how they're going to tolerate stress, if they get left out in the jungle, we know that their ability to tolerate that stress is going to be lower because they have less reserves on their body. They have not as much time before they starve because they're fat tissue and muscle tissue just isn't as great as somebody with a much more substantial body. And so these things are being determined very early on in their life.
And so when we talk about stress for this individual, their nervous system is the thing that protects them from stress, because they don't have big, strong muscles that are gonna help them fight. They don't have a big reserve. They have a very hot nervous system. And so they spend a lot of their time in stage one stress. When they go into stress, they immediately start thinking about the future, and where is my certainty in the future coming from. So they're much more prone to be anxious in a stress, because as soon as their environment gets disrupted, they, they start processing neurally to escape. They have to think their way out of trouble. And the things that stress them...
Lisa: They can't fight their way out, so they have to use their brain.
Dr Cam: They have to make a sweet recovery station up in a tree somewhere where they're safe from predators, and set some traps because they don't want to be in hand to hand combat, like they need, really need to be strategic about it. And so what we know is the types of things that stress this person is cold. Firstly, if they're very, very cold, their body doesn't have the muscle or the fat tissue to stay warm. And that really drains their energy levels. And so temperature is huge. So if you put this person in lots of air conditioning, it actually makes them stressed. This is why we have so many people in offices, stressed by sitting in air conditioning, or while wearing three or four scarves. Because temperature is so important to be controlled, but they can't control it, they actually need external heat to control their temperature.
We also know that their nervous system is more heightened, because the way that they protect themselves is to be in stage one most of the time. So they need to essentially be on high alert. So any noise, people doing random things. And when I say random things, lots of people around them, people are a little bit unpredictable. So their brain is alert to unpredictableness or unpredictability I should say. And so we have cold, we have lots of noise, we have lots of people, people touching them, watch all of these things is going to overload their nervous system, which is the thing that they need to be safe. Yeah, and this creates an enormous amount of stress. As a result, this person is going to need to spend more time in the warm by themselves. And this is because that allows them to dial their senses down and come out of stage one. Because any noise, any cold is like an alert to their body saying this environment is not safe.
And when it comes to how they can manage stress, their mind is very, very important. If they can calm their mind, and also have very, very clear dot points on what they're trying to achieve, and very clear outcomes and guidelines, that brings a whole lot of peace to their brain. Because if they're working with known rules, ‘I have my rules. And if I apply this rule, then my future is now certain. And I don't have to worry about the future anymore, because I'm following the rules'. And so everything for their body is very neural inside, how do I create certainty? How do I reduce the amount of mental alertness that I have? And you need to reduce the amount of mental stimulation.
So this will often come along with long, slender bodies with less muscle tissue, less fat tissue. And in order for them to feel best, they need to have a very clear mind, a calm mind with a very calm environment. And so, you can see though, they would spend a lot of time in stage one constantly checking out the environment.
Lisa: Yeah.
Dr Cam: And that itself can be very exhausting. And so if they're in an environment where they're constantly on like in a really crowded place, or in a nightclub or a festival where there's lots of people and lots of noise, it will, they'll be in cope, just trying to manage all of the nervous stimulation and they'll become exhausted quite quickly because their physical resilience is not as great. They get drained very easily because their nervous system gets tired very easily. Whereas it's very different for other people.
Lisa: So let's for the slender, slight built, not much muscle person, let's go to the opposite end of the scale and look at someone like a Guardian or a Connector, who has a lot of muscle mass, a lot more predisposition to having more adipose tissue and so on. And they've developed in the womb with a lot of energy going into the digestive system.
Dr Cam: Yes, that's right.
Lisa: Yeah. Can you explain the opposite end of the wheel? So what are these people going to, when is it going to be stressful for them? And how do they cope with stressors?
Dr Cam: Yeah, perfect. So this individual, they have more hormones like prolactin, and they are more likely to be insulin resistant. They have a slightly slower thyroid as well. We know subclinical hypothyroidism is very common for these individuals. These are bodies, which are much more like a sumo wrestler, they are bigger, stronger, the most amount of muscle, the most amount of fat tissue, they can accumulate it, they don't have to. They have the strongest bone structure. And essentially, all of these hormones set up, and these metabolic environment sets up for conservation of energy and to protect other people. Prolactin is actually a very protective hormone, it's I need to protect other people. And they respond very well to connection. And so when you've got a body, so the first body that we spoke about is actually quite selfish, I need to look after myself first.
Lisa: Yep.
Dr Cam: Versus this body, the way that it's built psychologically, and behaviourally, due to the hormones and it has in the genes that are playing out, they will be very protective and very nurturing of the people around them. Why are they able to do that? It’s because they have this capacity, they have prolactin and insulin and growth hormone, and IGF 1, all of these hormones actually help you become bigger. For any given circumstance, if this person has more fuel, they will put on more weight as a result of that same amount of fuel. They will conserve better, they will add mass better. And so when you've got this really strong body, very substantial body, you are able to protect others and not be at risk of draining your own energy levels, because you have so much more. And so what happens here is, when this person goes into stress, it's when other people look like they're in stress, the people that they care about them closely. If those people are in stress, their nurturing protective hormones fire up and go up, and they go into a worry state. And then they start worrying about everybody else.
And so, but what's really interesting about this, evolutionarily, this body, when the community experienced stress, their body would go into conservation. Because if everybody was experiencing stress, it means the food supply was about to run short, or we're about to go to war, or about to move camp, and we're not certain about our food supply. So the way that I'm going to manage this is I'm going to gain as much weight as possible, so that when the famine does come, I'm going to be able to support everyone and not have to wait. So it becomes this incredible famine protection.
And so what we see when this person goes into stress, they want the opposite. They conserve energy, they actually go into exhaustion phase, they rest and recover more, they eat more food, which puts them into rest and recovery. They do less exercise, because if they use energy when they're stressed, they think, oh but what is everybody else going to have. And so their body instead of going into hyper-alertness and hyperactivity, and use all of your energy to think this through, this body actually goes into laziness, into cravings of food.
And often the stresses that are created, it's not the temperature, this person is very well-insulated. It's not the nervous system, because this body can really tolerate a lot of physical stress, stress and strain, and mental strain, for that matter. It is disconnection from the family. If they feel disconnected from the people that they’re close, if they see stress in their family, they will feel like the community is threatened. And that will create stress for them. If they're eating very high sugar foods in fact, it represents a stressful result all if my blood sugars are high, then I must be stressed and therefore I need to conserve more. And so the body is able, so that actually creates a stress as well. Doing very, very high intensity exercise in the morning can be a stress for them.
Lisa: Yeah.
Dr Cam: Because this is when prolactin levels are highest when nurturing is going to be most well executed by this person. I guess you wake up in the morning and you nurture the people around you. If you're out there burning all of this very high intensity energy. It actually sends the stress levels, the cortisol levels higher, which is a coping hormone. Yeah, that's stage two. And then this person—they will actually experience a higher level of cortisol for the next few hours, which then makes them insulin resistant and helps them store weight. It's like, ‘I’m spending all my energy and running around in the morning, then there must be something wrong with my family because I'm not looking after them’.
Lisa: And so he put on weight when they do high intensity.
Dr Cam: And it's so fascinating. We'll notice we have people all the time who do 12 weeks of a boot camp first thing in the morning, exactly what they're told, and they don't lose weight, or they gain a little bit of weight.
Lisa: Yep.
Dr Cam: And so this person gets stressed from that social disconnection, first and foremost. And then they can actually live faster to quite well, they're very, very good at it. But when they do get stressed, instead of going into stage one, and more alertness, they don't have to be alert, because they've got resilience. They go into late stage two, they go on to cope. But they also crave, and they use less energy, and they conserve. And so without late stage two and stage three is where they enter into the stress cycle. It's, they don't go through this big worry of the future. They go more into reflecting on the past and feeling down, and their energy levels come down as well, which is the recovery state.
And this is why they're able to gain and grow. Because in recovery, you grow and you gain. In stress you spend and you wither. But as these guys grow and gain in stress, and that's because they enter the stress stages at a different place.
Lisa: And they so that's why for the slighter build person actually will lose weight when they're under stress and...
Dr Cam: And bone. Osteoporosis is... Exactly, yes.
Lisa: And the heavier person will actually put on weight when they're under stress, because the same stress hormones, but they come in in different stages, and for different reasons in that person's life. And so the person who's of a heavier build and a heavier bone structure, they are going to be craving more of those bad foods when they're in a stressed out site. So they'll be searching out for the, you know, the deep fried. Because from an evolutionary perspective, that's what's happening, isn't it? We’re driven to find those high caloric, high GI foods, which were very scarce back in the day, and unfortunately, they're not so scarce now. And so that becomes a real problem for this group of people.
Dr Cam: Yes.
Lisa: And then let's look at the third one. The mesomorphs. I’m sort of, I'm a little bit of mesomorph, a little bit ectomorph. But more muscular, high intensity people who do well under that. What's happening in their bodies?
Dr Cam: Yeah, cool. So just to give a bit of a summary right now, essentially, what we've got is different bodies in stress will go towards their safe zone. So those leaner, more delicate bodies will go within themselves, they'll try and be alone, so that they can create certainty. Because certainty in their future creates safety for them, and warmth as well. Versus and so they will crave to provide warmth, they'll go for warm foods, and for high sugar foods that supply their nervous system. Versus the Guardian will go towards safety in, the heavier that I am, the safer my community is. Because I'll be able to protect them for longer. And so if I go for these low end, like if I don't do much exercise, and if I eat lots of food, the brain will actually motivate them to do exercise and eat lots of food. That then creates weight, weight creates stability, stability, creates safety for the community.
And so when we go to the activator, the activator is that the pure, the body that's developed predominantly with their muscular skeletal system, their adrenal glands are very, and their sex organs are developed. And so they are higher in adrenaline. And it's very sensitive to testosterone. And this makes them, when they are thinking about their best form, it’s uncertainty, is high adrenaline, which makes them feel good also, a competition, and winning. Variety also creates uncertainty as well.
So this body is searching for variety, uncertainty, competition, a bit of risk in order to feel normal, which is very different to the other bodies as well. And so with the things that create stress for them, is the feeling of being trapped. The feeling of being limited, because they like to break out, they like to be free, they like to be in charge. And they don't like to be told what to do. They don't like rules. So anytime that there's a rule in place, they'll be irritated by that look to break it out. And they have to, they have because I have this big adrenal outflow, they get all of this energy just generate very, very quickly and it must come out. And so the thing that creates stress for them is when that energy can't get out, so why don't have someone that I can express with. Or I can't move my body. Movement is actually the way that they can use a lot of this energy as well, because their musculoskeletal system is all tied into their dominant development.
And so when we're talking about this body in stress, it actually kind of likes a bit of stress, because adrenaline is there. And winning is kind of stressful as well, the thing that's going to create problems for them is that if they can't step into this space, they can't step into competition, they can't step into a bit of risk, they are told exactly what to do. They also have more oxidative stress as well, when they do things. They do things at high intensity. And so the body that gets developed out of this is shorter, more muscular than typical. If you look at the top 10 crossfitters on the planet, particularly in the guys, that's a really good depiction of a shorter, muscular, fiery, short and... Exactly. That body is exactly what we're talking about right here. Love a bit of challenge, love a bit of competition, CrossFit is made for this environment, made for this body.
And so what we need to do for this body is not stop it from experiencing stress, because it actually will move towards that in order to get its adrenaline, we actually need to make sure that it recovers appropriately. And so what happens for this body is like it'll be walking around in their day. And they'll say, ‘Oh, hey, we've got this new thing over here, do you want to do that'? They go, ‘Yes, I'm gonna do that'. And then they're at work, and they got all these new projects. ‘Oh, yes, I'll be part of that. Yes, I'll be part of that'. Because their adrenaline is–
Lisa: It’s starting things.
Dr Cam: …’I’m gonna do this, I love this!’ Exactly. So they go high intensity into action, because they've now got so many things stacked up, and they're happy to drop one thing and then move straight to the next. That means that they never get a break from their adrenaline.
Lisa: Yeah.
Dr Cam: And so when that happens, they get more oxidative stress, their joints start getting very sore, they get pent up and frustrated, and they can just become quite exhausted. And so they enter into stage two with their stress response. So they don't, they don't think about the stress, they don't think about worry, and what's going to happen in the future, they don't go through that alarm phase, they go straight into fight, like I'm going to cope with this, I'm going to get into a fight, I'm just going to take action. And so immediately, they go from doing nothing to doing everything very, very quickly, very high intensity change.
And so when that happens, they need to expel their energy. And they, the way that they can expel their energy is by verbalising it and just talking it out. And they've got to have someone who doesn't argue back. And I'm at fault with this many times with my partner, she's an activator, and to express and I want to just sit there and listen like I should, but rather I fight back. But this, essentially, these bodies generally, they need to expel energy. It can be verbal, but the best is physical exertion. If they do really high intensity physical exercise, it will make them feel a whole lot better. But it only goes for 20 to 30 minutes, and then they have to stop. Then they have to stop completely and turn their adrenals off. And one way that you can do that is by lying on your back for 15 minutes, which actually turns off the outflow of ACTH, which is your adrenocorticotropic hormone. It's the one that comes from your brainstem. It says, ‘You should release adrenaline'.
And so if you lie flat on your back, it allows this body to fully recover. So this body is going to naturally step into stress, it's actually a timebase, is to be in a bit of stress. But what they miss out on is recovery spending time with fun people, calm people. Spending time light, like just absolutely resting, stopping throughout the day, and just allowing their body to calm down. That's actually what this body needs.
And so when we're talking about managing stress, the first thing we need to do for this body is not make sure that everyone's okay like and make sure their social circles, okay, it's not make sure you've got all the rules and the processes of time alone, while you have for the other couple of bodies. Now for this body, we need to make sure that they exert their energy and then eat regularly. So because what eating does is it puts them into a stage three of recovery. And so if they're eating six meals per day, they're putting themselves into many recovery sessions throughout the day because their body has to digest. And what happens to this body when they don't eat is they get very hangry. This is the hangriest body. And so we have this situation where they're acting frustrated or intolerant. And it's not because they're not a good person. It's because they haven’t eaten. And if they eat, then all of a sudden they feel so much better. And they deal with things in such a different way. The same thing goes after exercise. And so we have very, very different strategies. We've only spoken about three type generals, where there are six and then everybody's individual within that. But these give you the major, major types of variations that you see based on how we develop and how our genes work.
Lisa: Just a quick question on that, and the activator, on the mesomorph ther. In regards to autophagy, because we—I think we briefly talked on this last week, but I did a whole session on autophagy with Dr Seranova. And, you know, intermittent fasting is a big thing. But how do we—how does an activator do it then? If they want to get the benefits of autophagy, but they can't go without food for long periods of time when they need six meals a day, which is the opposite of what you would advise for someone on the endomorph side of the wheel?
Dr Cam: Yeah.
Lisa: How are we getting—do autophagy going without causing the hangries? And without...
Dr Cam: Yeah, great question. So the first thing and I guess you can apply this question to all of the groups, like the longest, leanest group are going to do the least well with lots of fasting because they've got a metabolism that just needs lots of fuel to stay up and about. And if you make them fast, for too long, they actually get very, very tired, which is a little bit destructive. The, but short fasts, no problem, you know, like a meal or a day.
But generally, it's still providing some carbohydrates is going to be important throughout their day. But they can get away with it. But it's just going to be for a shorter period of time. The more substantial body can deal with fasting for extended periods of time. And so their body is actually set up to benefit significantly from fasting. Yeah, the third version that we've spoken about the high intensity, high oxidative stress type individual, if they are going to be engaging in using lower food intake or fasting to stimulate autophagy, then they want to be reducing their activity at the same time. And they want to be practising some really calming activities, because they need to make sure that they can dispel the energy or not dispel the energy through like a calm activity, as opposed to relying on the high intensity activity or not be stressed in the first place.
So they need to get themselves into a very calm place, environment, with less competition with less things that they can say yes to, with things that allow them to essentially not use their adrenaline energy to jump into things. They need to kind of create a fairly blank environment so that they don't get stimulated by things so that they don't have this requirement for extra energy. So that's essentially we just need to consider the other components to it.
Lisa: Yeah, that really sort of puts it into picture because you want the autophagy you want the cleaning out of the broken proteins and the stuff that you know, that makes us live longer when we do that on a regular basis. And you know, stopping in tour and upregulating your ANPK and all of that sort of stuff. But I was still a bit of a mystery in my head. But how do I do that when I'm an activator, activator Crusader, I'm on that cusp. So for you know, I get it that people on the Guardian side, they can go without. But for me, you know, that's always been. So if I'm going to do a fast, I need to make sure that I'm in a really non-stressed out situation and calm, which doesn't happen very often. Let's move now just briefly, we will wrap it up shortly. But immunity, we're in, in relation to all of this stress responses and so on. What's happening on a biochemistry level when, when we're under the stress in, right now with COVID. And all the other winter coming down here in the Southern Hemisphere, we don't want to get sick, we want to make sure our immune system’s on fire. What can we do to improve our immune system in regards to these different body types?
Dr cam: Yeah, perfect. So, and the most important thing here is in order for our immune system to come on, then we have to get into stage three and homeostasis. That may—the stages that we need to be in in order to stimulate our immune system. And so what that means, we have to put ourselves into recovery. And so one of the most profound things that we can do straightaway where all of, most of our recovery happens from the day, our mental recovery and our physical recovery is sleep. We need to make sure that we get enough sleep. There are different things that create sleep for different people. But seven to nine hours is recommended for everybody. And it's very, very important that we get that sleep to stop it. So that's the first piece.
The second piece then is every part of our environment is creating stress. And so we need to make sure that we understand what's happening in the environment and how that's going to affect different people so that we can recover from that stress appropriately. And so if we were to go to the three groups once again, and I'll just preface this by saying that every single person's journey to an improved immune system is actually fully personalised. And it needs to be tailored specifically to you. And this is something obviously—that we work with you on Lisa with ph360, we got personalised immune protocols that actually allow you to do that and get all of this stuff that I'm about to address in principle, but for you specifically.
So we have—if we were talking about the donor, reverse, or from last time, we talked about the activator, and the activator connectors versus a bit of Crusader in there too, that top left of the circle. Essentially, we're going to be looking at what are the things that remind—bring safety to this body movement will support that. So if we do exercise, a high intensity exercise for this individual, and then we have full recovery, what we know from one bout of exercise, you can get increased immunosurveillance, that is your immune system is now more alert to the environment, rather than waiting for bacteria and virus and ready to pounce on them stronger.
We also know that if you're exercising regularly for eight to 12 weeks, you will see less chance of getting an infection, less chance or lower amounts of severity and lower amounts of time sick. So just being physically fitter, has a profound effect on that. However, if you're a Guardian or a Diplomat, and you're doing high intensity exercise in the morning, it actually adds to your stress load. Yeah, so but if you do it in the afternoon, then that's going to really improve your immune function and your recovery throughout the night. So exercise is a stress, it is a particularly potent way of enhancing your immune system. And the same goes to sleep as well. Sleep, just one poor night's sleep can ruin 70% of your immune response. And so having enough sleep, really important. Making sure that you're moving in a way that's appropriate for your body at the right time, very important.
And it's even more important for the activators. Because they're their body is so requiring the release of that pent up stress. Then when we start talking about, if we start talking about guardians, then just to talk about a couple of different sort of topics, the Guardians and the diplomats or even the Guardian, specifically here, they need a really connected social environment. And if they're experiencing a lot of stress socially, like they're isolated from their family, they disconnected from the people that they really believe are very close. Or if there's a lot of infighting and arguments and all that sort of stuff in the family home while they're in lockdown, for example, yeah, that social stress is going to create a whole lot of stress for this individual, put them into cope and then downregulate their immune system.
And you'll know this as well is that if you're in a, you know, stressful work, relationship or social relationship, you don't feel at your best and your immune system is actually being decreased with time. But it's even more for the guardians and the connectors key. And we have, you know, that the senses and the Crusaders, they're very neural in the way that they stress. And so body type. Yeah, exactly the lot of bodies often more delicate. And so some movement is going to be great. But ultimately, sleep is going to be important. Social is not going to be as important for this individual, what's going to be really important is that they can actually calm their nervous system to bring them out of stage one stress, if they're doing meditation regularly, if they're going for slow jobs, either have an evening or have a morning, or they're doing stretches and yoga, that actually calms the nervous system very well, which then takes them out of stress one at stage one and stage two, which allows their immune system to come back on. And so we have these different priorities. We've got, you know, movement for the more mesomorphic bodies, we've got social connectedness, movements also going to be very important here too, as is food.
And then we have the neural calmness and environmental calmness of warmth is going to be very important, but then we get into food, food, you know, it has all of these incredible little compounds that specifically drive your immune system to pick up or push down or to be able to, melylike, you need enough protein to build your immune system. Generally, you need, you need your you know, the right fats to control inflammation, you need the antioxidants to help reduce some of the damage that's going on when we're finding all of these bugs from the oxidative stress. And so activators are going to need lots and lots of antioxidants for that reason because they experienced more oxidative stress.
Guardians are going to be better served to do some fasting and the fasting will really support them in bringing their blood sugar levels down, helping them go into recovery, really supporting their digestive system, controlling their blood pressure in many cases as well versus—and so, versus the the sensors and Crusaders are going to actually need a bit of carbohydrate. I’m going because the carbohydrates provide mental calm for them. Because if they don't have carbohydrates, their brain can go into a stress state to provide fuel breaking down protein turning into carbohydrates, with lots of cortisol. And so the compounds that you need specifically are individual. But we have these general principles that govern what different people need. And this is why, if you know, you say ‘I'm going to improve our immune system through this generic program, right here’, there's a very good chance, it's not going to be appropriate for you. And so you really need to understand what your body needs so that you can get the best benefit.
And most people will benefit from low calorie intake for a few days, at least, you know, activators, any five days of no protein, no fats, fats versus guardians will actually do very well on broth only, fluids only, non-caloric fluids only for 10 days. Whereas the diplomat will need 10 days of just fruits and vegetables, but very little protein, very little fat as well. So there's a different protocol for different individuals. But the lower calorie really helps to reset the immune system in many ways. And there's been some lovely research by Professor Longo on that stuff around fasting and how it stimulates stem cell production of your immune cells.
So if you're taking care of the whole body, you're understanding, you know, what kind of environment you need to be, what kind of movement is going to be appropriate, what kind of social environment is essential, then you put the right types of foods in as well, you're going to see a whole system wide increase in your immune system. And then the studies that we ran last year, we looked at very detailed immune markers. And we saw significant change applying the protocols that are found in pH 360. We show significant change in the immune aggressivity and readiness in 10 days. So you can really change these markers very, very quickly. And really, the only thing that we have is a strong immune system. That's that's the thing. That's what vaccines lean on as well. Yeah. It leans on your ability as a non response. Yeah. And this is why vaccines are effective as effective in some individuals with suppressed immunity. So we definitely, we need a strong immune system, irrespective of what path you take with this.
Lisa: Yes, absolutely. And that's just so important right now, and to understand the nuance between the different types of detoxes, and the different types of ways of dealing with the different body types is just so, so crucial. And autophagy and cleaning out, and it's like taking out the garbage regularly. I can put in all my antioxidants and all my good vitamins and all my good nutrients. But if I'm not taking the garbage out on a regular basis, and doing that appropriately for my body type, and then you know, you're going to have suboptimal performance and suboptimal immune system. And yes, so stress, resilience, immunity, huge pieces of this giant puzzle that we're all trying to put together. And we're very complex. It's not, it's not easy, it's not easy. But giving this framework to the whole thing with the different body types. I've never seen this in any other system that that I have learned and or researched or read about where it's actually personalised, you know.
And that's why I think it's so powerful, because you can read a book on fasting and go, Well, I'm going to do that. But you need to know how to do it best for your body. And that's, you know, and how to detox for your body, and how to do all this. Dr Cam you’ve been brilliant today, again, as usual, a mine of information, and just brilliance. So thank you very much for jumping on again, I really appreciate your time, and the work that you do. And if anybody wants help with understanding what health type you have understanding this specifically to you, then that's what we do, please reach out to us. I'll have all the links in the show notes. But just head on over to lisatamati.com, hit the ‘Work With Us’ button, you'll see our peak epigenetics program. And this is the sort of people that we're working with Dr Cam, the CEO of ph 360, in Australia, and he's one of our great teachers. And this program is really, really beneficial for people who are wanting to optimise the genes, not just for stress and immunity and resilience, but also an optimal performance in every area of your life.
So thanks very much, Dr Cam, anything to add today before we hop off?
Dr Cam: Yeah, I will say one thing and that is your body is always on your side. Som and the thing that we think is that our body is fighting us or not cooperating with us or essentially our response to stress, whatever we think in our brain doesn't really matter what's going on in our body. And the information we take from that is very, very Very important. So when your body is genuinely tired, it's saying, ‘Hey, I don't have quite as much energy as what this activity requires, I need rest’, it's actually speaking to you and saying, ‘I need rest’, I'm saying, ‘Oh, my body sucks, I'm going to get better at not being tired’. Yeah, and I'm just going to have more coffee'. Your body is not deficient in caffeine, it's, it's actually deficient in the appropriate recovery for it.
And the biggest realisation that I had is that your body is always trying to do the best for you. And if you start listening, you'll find that that stress-recovery cycle is far easier to manage. And we didn't even get into resilience, which I'd love to talk about another time. Yeah, know how—when you're in that state of that balance between stress and recovery, you are able to mount an attack on anything that you want, from a very, very strong place. And so the—know that your body is always, always on your side, start listening to it more. Because you'll start getting keys into when you need rest, when you can push. There's a bunch of things that you can do around that. But I just want to really get you to start listening a lot more, because that's where this can, this can all start.
Lisa: And I think you know, especially for some of the audience, who are athletes and hard charges, and people that you know, go go go, it's all very well and good. But just remember, you still made of flesh and blood. And you need to respect the biology. And there are times when we can push outside the norms and do crazy things and amazing things. But then afterwards, you need to go into that recovery phase, and you're not bulletproof like you think you are. And there was one a good analogy, you know. Your body will give you a little tap on the head saying, ‘Hey, I need a raise, or I need something from you, and if you ignore it', then it will be a real hit on the shoulder, ‘Hey, I need a rest'. And next time it will be a mech truck that comes in flattened shoe. And it will be something major. And we don't want that. So listen to the little tests. Before you have to get a mech track to put you on your back.
Dr Cam: Absolutely. Just being a little bit fatigued after two hours of work is a little whisper in your ear. It's Yeah, very, very good to listen at that point. Absolutely.
Lisa: Yeah. And I'm going to do that just now go and go out for a walk in nature for 15 minutes and digest this wonderful information that you've given us today. So thank you, Dr Cam, really appreciate it.
Dr Cam: Thanks for having me on. It's great to be able to talk about this stuff.
Lisa: Well, I hope you enjoyed that episode with Dr Cam McDonald. He really is a mine of information. He is brilliant at the way he brings things across. He does it far better than I ever could. So I hope you enjoyed that session. If you're interested in doing the epigenetics program, we will discuss everything and learn everything about your specific set of genes and how they can be optimised through the right lifestyle interventions, the right diet, the right exercise, and everything that we've just talked about in this interview, then please head on over to lisatamati.com. Hit the ‘Work With Us button and you'll see our Peak Epigenetics program. Go over there, check it out. If you've got any questions, please reach out to our support@lisatamati.com. Happy to jump on a call with you want me, or one of my colleagues can jump on a call, explain more about what it's all about and how it all works. So make sure you do that.
And thanks very much for listening again, we really do appreciate your time and attention. We don't take it for granted. And we love you. Thank you very much for all the help you've given this podcast.
That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate, review, and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com
The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.
As the powerhouse of the cell, mitochondria are associated with producing energy. However, studies regarding the function of mitochondria suggest that it does way more than powering the cell.
In this episode, Dr Elizabeth Yurth discusses the function of the mitochondria in our overall health. For instance, it signals the nucleus to repair the damage done by oxidative stress. Furthermore, the role of mitochondria is also to facilitate improvement in metabolism. Dr Elizabeth also explains how increasing butyrate levels in your gut microbiome is beneficial. This stimulates your mitochondria to release PGC-1α and NPK. As a result, it will have a greater capacity to eliminate waste and harmful substances in the cell. Additionally, we discuss fat tissue, blood sugar levels and metabolism.
If you want to know more about the function of mitochondria and how it informs your overall health, this episode is for you. Listening to this podcast will also help you understand your digestive health.
For our epigenetics health program all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/.
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‘I'm gonna make the case that actually every single disease, from cancer, to cardiovascular disease, everything related to ageing, osteoporosis, everything comes down to mitochondrial dysfunction.’
‘I’m just a big advocate with diet, and with exercise, with everything, everything's done cyclically. Because we want to go through phases all the time where we're getting rid of bad stuff and then regrowing.’
‘We’re able to use the butyrate for fatty acid oxidation and actually improve aerobic metabolism.’
’As you're learning, the gut is everything. And now we're learning it may even be imperative to the mitochondria.’
‘I think what it's going to come down to when we look at this mitochondria, it's not going to be trying to figure out what is my perfect dose of antioxidants. It's gonna be figuring out how do I get that mitochondria with the pores, letting the good stuff in and letting the bad stuff out?’
‘What it's really trying to get across is just, you know, sensible stuff, we just did a thing you know, about just taking a walk after dinner, right?’
‘That little bit of stress, like I said, what you know, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.’
Elizabeth Yurth, MD, is the Medical Director and co-founder of the Boulder Longevity Institute. This institute was established in 2006. Dr Yurth is double board-certified in Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation and Anti-Ageing/Regenerative Medicine.
She also has a Stanford-affiliated Fellowship in Sports and Spine Medicine. Here, Dr Yurth specialises in Sports, Spine, and Regenerative Medicine. Additionally, she also has a dual-Fellowship in Anti-Aging and Regenerative Medicine (FAARM) and Anti-Aging, Regenerative and Functional Medicine (FAARFM) through the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (A4M).
Dr Yurth serves as a faculty member in SSRP (Seeds Scientific Research and Performance) with 25 mastermind physician fellows. Here, she allows herself to stay abreast and teach others in the emerging field of cellular medicine.
An active athlete herself, Dr Yurth has worked with numerous sports teams at both the collegiate and professional levels. At present, she works as a consultant for high-level athletes from across the country. She aims to aid them in recovery and optimise performance.
Dr Yurth resides in Boulder, Colorado, with her husband and five children.
To know more about Dr Yurth’s work, visit Boulder Longevity Institute and connect with her on Instagram.
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To pushing the limits,
Lisa
Welcome to Pushing The Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host, Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.
Lisa Tamati: Lisa Tamati your host here at Pushing The Limits. Super excited that you're here with me again today. Thanks for tuning in. I do love and appreciate your loyalty. And I would love to hear from you. If you've got something to say about the podcast, you’ve got some comments and questions about some of the topics that we have raised, please do reach out to us. We love hearing from our listeners. And if you can give us a rating and review if you're enjoying the content, that really really helps the show.
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Now today's superstar is Dr Elizabeth Yurth. And if you follow the podcast, you might have remember that name because she was on just a few weeks ago. And she is now one of my favorite teachers. I have been learning from her at the Bone Longevity Institute of Human Optimization Academy. And she is a brilliant teacher, and a brilliant orthopaedic surgeon and longevity expert. And she offers the world's most advanced research-based health care. And it's all customised to you. And the information that we're going to share with you today—today's topic if you like, is all around mitochondrial health. Now we do deviate a little bit because as we do in these conversations, we go off on a few tangents. But it is really all about understanding what your mitochondria are, why you need to know about it, how to keep them healthy, because these little bacteria if you like, and these little powerhouses of our cells are absolutely crucial to health and longevity.
And Dr Yurth says that the mitochondria, she thinks, are at the very basis of all diseases. So when these little guys go awry, that's when diseases come into play. And everything from cancer, chronic fatigue, to all of the diseases right across the spectrum can be affected by mitochondrial health. So we do a bit of a deep dive into that today. So I hope you enjoy this session with Dr Elizabeth Yurth. She's a lady who walks the talk. She's an incredibly amazing person, athlete, orthopaedic surgeon. She loves this. She breathes it the way she loves, as you know, in complete alignment with what she also teaches, so make sure you check out all her links in the show notes. Right.
Now before we go over to the show. Just want to also let you know about our NMN, our supplements. They’re longevity and anti-ageing supplement. We are into longevity. We are into health span. We are into increasing our lifespan and healthspan. So if you want to get into having—to boosting your NAD levels in your body, we've recently done a couple of episodes with Dr Elena Seranova on this topic, then head over to nmnbio.nz. And grab your NMN supplements over there to get your longevity regime underway.
And in today's podcast, we talk a little bit about this. We talk also about spermidine, which we've also mentioned in other podcasts. There are some amazing compounds out there that are going to help us stay healthier and longer. And there's a lot of techniques and things that we can actually engage in. We don't have to be passive bystanders to our ageing, we can do things about it, we can slow it down, and even reverse it in some places. So I hope you enjoy this episode. So do check out my Longevity Supplement over at nmnbio.nz. And enjoy today's show with Dr Elizabeth Yurth.
Lisa: Well, hi everyone and welcome back to Pushing The Limits. Super excited to have another wonderful guest that we've actually had on before and back by popular demand. That was a very, very popular episode. So I have Dr Elizabeth Yurth with me. Hi, Dr Yurth, how are you doing?
Dr Elizabeth Yurth: Lisa, thank you for having me again. I love being with you.
Lisa: Oh, it's just that, our last episode was just so full of information that I've had it on repeat going, for me, because there's so much in there and so many people have written and have been asking questions. So I want to get started by saying if after this interview, you want to talk to Dr Yurth and one of her team at the Border Longevity Institute, you can do that even when you're in New Zealand or Australia, you can do teleconsults. And yeah, so if you are facing some difficult health problem, and you really want some help, make sure you do that. And we'll have all the links in the show notes and so on. And before we get underway, there is a Bold Longevity of—what is it called, optimisation?
Dr Yurth: Human Optimization Academy, right? Yeah, from the Border Longevity site, or just go to bliacademy.com and sign up. But you guys have definitely signed up for that we actually are trying to really put together tons—and all the information you guys need to try. And you'll have one place where you can go get all of these things that we talked about, and all the things that Lisa talks about, and really be able to learn about them. Because as we know, doctors don't really learn this stuff very well. So you guys have to do it yourself. And so we're trying to give you a place to do. It's coming from a very experienced...
Lisa: Yeah, and if you want on the latest, so make sure bli.academy.com. And I'll put that in the show notes too guys, so you can find it.
Now today's subject is mitochondria, one of Dr Yurth’s favorite subjects. Okay, for starters, what is a mitochondria?
Dr Yurth: What's really so cool about mitochondria, right, is they're actually they were actually their own little bacteria. So they invaded us back when we were threatened to kind of moving from an anaerobic to an aerobic environment. So when we went from sort of anaerobic organisms to actually living in air, we couldn't do it. And so these little bacteria got into the cells, and they formed a symbiotic relationship, so that we could survive outside of water and air. And so they were responsible for us being able to move out of the ocean and into an air or an aerobic environment. Well, they're actually their own little organism. Right? I mean, that that is weird, right? That we have this essential part of our cell. Now our essential part of survival is actually its own organism.
And it was a one celled organism, it gone to formed a symbiotic relationship, it allowed the bacteria to survive living inside ourselves. And if we allowed ourselves to survive, so amazing. And that's why they're so unique is that they actually contain a whole genome that is separate from your nuclear genome, right? So they have a mitochondrial genome that's completely different. And it's only inherited from your mother. So that mitochondrial genome is not inherited from your father at all. It's probably one of the reasons your mother's health at the time, because even though the mitochondria has its own genome, that genome is impacted by things you do. So if I have a baby, and I'm super unhealthy, I've altered that mitochondrial genome. And then I've transferred that mitochondrial genome only from me—the dad was great and doing everything right—to my children. So that's one of the...
Lisa: So that’s the epigenetic…. Because I'm just about to go through IVF, as I said before, very interesting for me. So even though I'm going to have an egg donor...
Dr Yurth: You wanna make sure she’s healthy, right?
Lisa: Yeah, she's just—she is, and we've got her on everything. Her DNA is coming into the egg, but actually, my mitochondria will be a part of this baby, if we have one.
Dr Yurth: So you will alter—so basically, she's, you're going to be, the baby will have her mitochondrial DNA. But because you will be growing this baby, you will be altering that mitochondrial DNA by epigenetic influences that you're doing, right. So now you're going to be changing some of that DNA structure, or the genome of that mitochondria by things you're doing. The mitochondria, so even though it's coming in, and again, you want her to come in with this great mitochondrial DNA in the first place. Right? So we want this good genome in the first place, which is why you do want her to be healthy and fit and all those things. And younger.
But then you know all about the epigenetics, and so you're going to be potentially altering some of that, too. So that's one of the really amazing things. Now, what we used to think is, all the mitochondria did was do oxidative phosphorylation, and make energy, make ATP. And that's what they did. They were our energy powerhouse. That's all we ever learned, right? High school was like, ‘Oh, the powerhouse of the cell’.
So we now know, they do a whole lot more than that. So they're not just responsible for aerobic metabolism, and making ATP. So they're not just energy production. And in fact, there's the communication back and forth between the nucleus of ourselves and these mitochondrial DNA that's imperative to health. Well, I'm gonna make the case that actually every single disease, from cancer, to cardiovascular disease, everything related to ageing, osteoporosis, everything comes down to mitochondrial dysfunction.
Lisa: Wow. So this is pretty–
Dr Yurth: It's imperative and, and you're gonna start reading more about this, is that the key to fixing our health is going to be fixing the mitochondria. And we've already figured out like, you know, you I know you're big into NAD that, improving NAD and I know you have a product that does that. And that is— that's critical, right? To mitochondrial health. We know that's critical to mitochondrial health. But there's more to that story. And the big thing is that is that piece of communication, that mitochondria sends messages out to the nucleus, and the nucleus sends messages back to the mitochondria.
Lisa: Okay, so what are these messages that they’re sending backwards and forwards? And why does this have to do with the function of the mitochondria itself?
Dr Yurth: Well, there's, as the body goes through the oxidative phosphorylation pathway, that Krebs cycle, that cycle that makes energy, right. And we know that we create these free radicals. And that's been one of the big theories of ageing is this free radical theory of ageing, that mitochondria produce all these free radicals, as free radicals overwhelm the body, they damage cells, and we get damaged tore into our DNA? Hmm.
Lisa: So we all thought that antioxidants would be the answer, recommended…
Dr Yurth: Right. We just take a bunch of antioxidants into the mix, and you're going to be great, because now, all those free radicals, you're not going to have any damage. The problem is that we know that there's been this—the mitochondria has a very, has a way to handle this oxidative stress. So there's a few things that happen. Obviously, stress is really critical to the mitochondria’s health. So as it creates these free radicals, and and it's rust by things, it actually produces what are called mitochondrial peptides. So it has its own genome, right, that's now been activated by this stress. And it creates these—its own peptides that no other structure in your body can produce. So it's producing these little chains of amino acids.
And there's quite a few being developed now or that or that we were learning about, but the sort of the three main ones that we kind of have a pretty good knowledge about right now are something called MOTS-c. There's another one called humanin, and another one called SS-31. And those are what—the SS-31s, and a group of them are called small humanin-like peptides or SHLPs. Those peptides, so once the mitochondria is stressed, it encodes this DNA to say, ‘Oh, you need to go out there and tell the nucleus to do some good stuff’.
So these mitochondrial peptides now go outside of the mitochondria, and they tell the nucleus to to heal things and get stronger and do better. And then that sends messages back to the mitochondria. So that stress, that oxidative stress actually, it's just like, you know, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
Lisa: And actually it’s a fact on this.
Dr Yurth: It’s really a fact that mitochondria health, that these medical peptides are imperative to health. In fact, humanin which were first developed actually was looking like a cure for Alzheimer's. And it may be really—well, it may be actually very, very baffling here, but very, very helpful in dementias and a lot of other diseases. We know that higher levels of humanin, people who live to be a hundred and above have much higher levels of humanin, so we know that these mitochondrial peptides, the higher they are, the healthier you are. No mitochondrial stress. If I just impound my body with antioxidants all the time, then I'm actually probably doing some damage. So cancer, right, so where—now again there, I can also overwhelm, right?
There's also another response, the mitochondria have, it's called the UPR, unfolded protein response. So as the mitochondria are stressed, and these damaged proteins that are produced when we're under stress, right, we get damaged or proteins, that's where we're kind of linking that to Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and some of the plaques that form...
Lisa: The tau proteins and things.
Dr Yurth: Yeah, yep. When the mitochondria is stressed, it actually sends messages out to the nucleus to activate what's called the UPR, the unfolded protein response. A little protein response actually takes these bad proteins and it strings them back out and makes them normal. Or it says, ‘These guys are so damaged. Let's just get rid of that mitochondria and initiate basically autophagy or mitophagy, eliminates the bad mitochondria that are too damaged. There's too many damaged proteins. We've overwhelmed the unfolded protein response’. Now it initiates this response to kill off the bad mitochondria.
See, if I'm just now taking a ton of antioxidants. Maybe I've blocked this response to get rid of all these bad proteins. Right. And I'm actually inducing more of these bad, abnormal proteins that are going to cause damage.
Lisa: I've talked on a couple of episodes with Dr Elena Seranova about—who is a molecular biologist on autophagy. And I think we talked about it too last time. So that's getting rid of the damaged proteins in the cells or in the mitochondria itself, getting rid of it. And we talked about fasting last time and how critical fasting is for autophagy in getting rid of these bad proteins and clearing things out.
So if we—so you're saying we can overwhelm this protein, and what do you call unfolding...
Dr Yurth: Unfolded protein response, UPR.
Lisa: Yeah, we can overwhelm it with too many antioxidants and actually stop it...
Dr Yurth: Stop the UPR from being activated. So now we don't actually kill it, we don't actually—either fix the damaged protein or get rid of the cells that are too damaged.
Lisa: Wow, okay. And so in this is this two-way communication between the mitochondria and the DNA, this is the nucleus of the cell. This is all within the—if we picture a big, nice fat round cell, and inside, you've got thousands of mitochondria per cell. And you've got the actual nucleus, which has that nice double helix, you see in the graph–
Dr Yurth: Where all the DNA is.
Lisa: –where the DNA, your code for life is–
Dr Yurth: Right.
Lisa: And these are talking backwards and forwards to each other to keep the health of the cell good. And then when we do autophagy, or mitophagy, we're getting rid of the damaged parts of the proteins that have been damaged through—is this through, so the damage that occurs in the cells is happening because of DNA breaks? And what are toxins and things like that, right?
Dr Yurth: Exactly, these reactive oxygen species that you know, they're starting to damage the DNA too much inside the mitochondria and creating abnormal proteins. Right? So now we've created these dysfunctional proteins that are going to do damage, so the body tries to get rid of them. And it's not, I'm not gonna say there's no place for antioxidants, right? But what you have to be careful of, is sort of cycling through phases where you're off of your antioxidants, and maybe inducing more autophagy, right. So we now want a little more oxidative stress to induce this healing response to give the cell some stress, and then maybe going on antioxidants for a little while to make sure that we don't ever have too many.
Lisa: Yeah, if you've gotten a lot of antioxidants, or sorry, or oxidative stress, because maybe you're exercising a heck of a lot or you've had an infection, or you've got something other high stress...
Dr Yurth: You eat like crap, or you're fat or… Then you might need extra antioxidants. And just to support the baseline of your functional health. But even those people, right, need them off and on, they should not be constantly. They should do phases, right? They should cycle it. I'm just a big advocate with diet, with exercise with everything, everything's done so quickly. Because we want to go through phases all the time, where we're getting rid of bad stuff, and then regrowing and getting rid of bad stuff and regrowing. Right?
It’s just like cleaning your house. You got to get rid of all the crap, but then you're gonna…
Lisa: Bring the new groceries.
Dr Yurth: Yeah, right. It's get cluttered again. And then you got to go clean it all out again, and things get cluttered again. Yeah, I mean, that's the world's clutter wouldn't happen, but it does, right. Even the most pristine non hoarder person, there's still clutter that happens, and you still have to do your spring clean outs.
And that's—so I like to think about the body in the same way, you know, going into the spring clean outs where you go through a big autophagy phase where you're fasting, we're using hydro spermidine, where you're using things that will help to really clear out all the bad cells, all these damage, mitochondria that are producing too many reactive oxygen species, right? And then going through growth phases, where where I'm now maybe I'm inducing a little bit more toxic stress, I'm exercising harder, I'm lifting more weights, I'm running more, right, I'm inducing more oxidative stress. Maybe I'm eating more calories during that time. Now there's more oxidative stress cells a little bit stressed that actually initiate some growth and some healing. Right. And then I can do the same thing over and over again.
But there's really interesting new research leads when you kind of look at ‘Okay, well, how does this all make sense’? So it's probably going to come down more to this. This is what's called the MPTP or mitochondrial permeability transition pore. And what they've now found is that that's probably where we need to focus is this little pore is letting stuff in back and forth through the mitochondria. So the right amount of things get through. So we know this little pore opens and closes. As we're in worse health, or older, it stays open longer, allowing more bad things to go In and out. So it's designed to open periodically, closed periodically. So for brief periods.
So what a lot of focus now is on anti-ageing. And mitochondrial health is focusing a little bit on this mitochondrial transition pore. In fact, there's a really cool study just came out where they're actually taking out these mitochondria and actually changing the pore structure for treating cancer. So they can actually make the pores in these cancer cells more permeable, so they can get drugs with a little nanobot that's poking holes in the mitochondria.
But on our home base, is what we really would rather do is keep these little mitochondrial transition pores closed most of the time, let them open periodically. So there's some interesting things that do that, melatonin does that? Oh, so higher dose melatonin seems to work primarily on this pore to actually regulate keeping it closed more often. So it’s spermidine, that's one way spermidine induces cellular or mitochondrial biogenesis is by restoring this pore structure.
Lisa: And we're big into augmenting spermidine. I've just got my first shipment, I'm working on getting that down here guys.
Dr Yurth: Spermidine is kind of amazing. Because it really is so good for mitophagy, getting rid of bad mitochondria, but also mitochondrial biogenesis probably because it does focus a little bit more on this pore. Making more mitochondria, right. Right, make more mitochondria, we need more mitochondria.
The other thing interesting, I don't know how many of—how you or your listeners have looked at things like minocycline, right? Antibiotic, we always think antibiotics are bad, right? Yeah. Well, interestingly, minocycline and doxycycline. And minocycline is a little bit better, probably actually has a very nice anti-ageing effect, used periodically, to actually close off these pores, and let the cell kind of develop and grow more than mitochondria grow more. So minocycline has a really distinct effect on the mitochondrial transition pore as well, for this permeability pore. So there are a few simple things that you can use, and I like.
Lisa: And it doesn't want your good microbes and stuff when you take them.
Dr Yurth: You know, definitely antibiotics have the downside of changing the gut microbiome. And we know that there's downsides to that, which is why you're not going to stem minocycline all the time. But like anything, it appears to have some very significant benefits in our cell health. So by doing that, maybe twice a year, doing like a 10-day course of minocycline, you can actually restore cell health. Now, after that, do you have to really work on gut health? Probably depends on how bad your gut is. So if my gut is super healthy, it's probably gonna regenerate, divide, right? Otherwise, it would, I have a lot and I know you're really interested in some gut microbiome stuff. Because you're gonna be a really—you're gonna see a really big connection coming up here soon between the gut microbiome and mitochondria even. But we know the gut microbiome is most affected by butyrate.
So using tributyrate, which is sort of pre-butyrate that can turn to be right in your intestine. So if I had somebody on an antibiotic, do I throw—I'm just gonna throw probiotics into the mix? Well, no, because the probiotics aren't gonna survive. So what you have to do is first throw butyrate into the mix. Remember what the good bacteria in our gut do that we eat fiber? The anaerobic bacteria. Turn that fiber into butyrate. Butyrate has all these far reaching effects. Number one, it's imperative for the colonocytes, the colon cells to be healthy, that's what they—that's what they use for energy is butyrate. So they're different from your other cells, they use butyrate for energy. So when they use butyrate, for energy, I have these nice healthy colonocytes, they create a nice anaerobic environment where my anaerobes can thrive. And they can make more butyrate. And you have this nice cycle.
But butyrate has some really interesting effects. There was a great study for your distance runners using butyrate to increase performance. Because higher levels of gut butyrate also seemed to help the cell, the mitochondria, and actually produce you actually, were able to use the butyrate for fatty acid oxidation and actually improve aerobic metabolism by having higher levels of butyrate.
Lisa: Was it like yeah, the athletes with keto. Yeah, because butyrate is like, isn't butter got butyrate in it? Or am I? Butyrate, butter.
Dr Yurth: Oh, butter. So butter does have butyrate in it, yes. So you can even increase butyrate by eating a whole lot of butter. You'd be—so your medium chain triglycerides, the short chain fatty acids do have butyric acid in them. The problem with when you eat butyric acid, when you eat butyrate, it doesn't really reach this lower intestine very well. Okay, and so even though it has some benefits, probably some other places, you really have to get the gut bacteria. And so the only way to really get butyrate to the lower intestine is either to take a pre-butyrate form, which is I like tributyrin, one has research behind it, or to use it rectally. So that's the other thing you can do is use it rectally.
Lisa: Okay, then that gets direct into the colon and then can get the right to the cells there.
Dr Yurth: Yeah, and this actually has a genetic—do you remember your PGC alpha gene? So when you get hired to get butyrate, you actually upregulate PGC alpha. And that's one of the things that improves aerobic endurance in your long distance athletes. You can actually—they did a study with butyrate on improving endurance in sort of your distance runners, your higher level endurance athletes, and besides, it's significant improvements. Also in race horses. Same thing.
So butyrate does affect mitochondria in other places, including skeletal muscle, and around that. So there is this big connection that we're just learning about between the gut microbiome and mitochondria. So if I'm going to put somebody into minocycline. I'm going to also make sure I have them on tributyrate so I'm keeping that nice anaerobic metabolism going. I'm making sure I'm getting butyrate to myself. Now I've repaired the mitochondria. I've given it another source to work better. And I'm going to have overall better endurance, better health, better aerobic metabolism. Better Vo2max.
Lisa: Yeah, wow, that's just crazy. So butyrate—but if we just taking butyric acid or in through butter or that type of thing. Brother just arrived in the background. It’s all good. Podcast life. At least the cat’s not running from down as well.
So butyric acid, when I take it in the form of say medium chain triglycerides or butter and stuff, it's not going to help my colonocytes and my colon, but I still get through to the mitochondria and help.
Dr Yurth: Yeah. I mean, there's significant benefits to it, but you really want to replenish the butyrate in the lower intestine, where you really need that for overall health. You really have to either do it rectally, or take it as a pro butyrate or a pre-butyrate form or tributyrin–
Lisa: Tributyrin. I'll put that in the links.
Dr Yurth: You know what is interesting, my patients who have the worst, now are the sickest, like I take care tributyrate. I have no problems with it. I'm fine. I feel good and most people. But if you're sick or not well or have a bad gut and you take it, you'll feel pretty miserable. Because you actually can't turn it into butyrate very well and it actually causes a lot of GI distress. So some of those really sick people the only way to replenish butyrate first is to do a rectal suppository. So you can get rectal suppositories of butyrate right. You do like a high dose, like two grams of a rectal suppository, butyrate, replenish the butyrate then you throw like a spore probiotic or probiotic and now I've created this nice anaerobic environment I've replaced the good bacteria. Now actually they do fine as a maintenance with the tributyrate now that I've restored the gut health.
For people who are not well, and I'll tell you, if any of you patients or your people, you talk to your clients, you talk to them use him take tributyrin, and they get they're like, ‘Oh, I'm nauseous, I can't take it’, or ‘Gives me diarrhea’, but it's because they have a bad gut and you've got to work, you know, right? Yeah. So tells you, right, that you need to replenish the butyrate. And again, the only way to do is rectally.
Lisa: Can you buy that as a consumer without a doctor who's until….
Dr Yurth: But there is a company and I don't know that, here in the US that's called MitoZen. That does make a pro-butyrate, it's a suppository. It's a two-week course, you have a high dose butyrate and it's actually pretty cool as a spore biotic mixed in. So I use that product a lot. It's on the pricey side like all this stuff. But I really find like a two week course of it. People do pretty well. All you do is two weeks of it, and then you can get them into the oral much less expensive form. The rectal butyrate smells bad. One of my patients, like ‘All my dogs are following me everywhere’. Other people—when you're doing I don't think other people can smell it on you but you can kinda smell it when you do it. It’s kind of like urine. Some people don't like the smell of, I don't mind the smell of that, but some people say they don't like the smell of that either.
Lisa: Okay, men and tributyrate, so if he’s not really sick, so if they’re really sick. So if you've got something like Crohn's disease, or IBS, or something–
Dr Yurth: Those people you wanna do the rectal, and they do amazing. I will tell you, they do amazing. There's a big stage just coming out with Crohn's being a mitochondrial disorder, too. It's got mitochondrial disorder, but IBS, your SIBO patients, you put them on the rectal butyrate, two weeks so that they do absolutely amazing. Honestly, it's incredible how well they do in a lot of illnesses. I mean, it's been our go to for a whole lot of different disorders. And it's amazing how well it works. As you're learning the gut is everything. And now we're learning it may even be imperative to the mitochondria.
Lisa: So how does it connect with mitochondria? So that piece here I've sort of like, haven't quite got in my head. How does—like you said, mitochondria are the basis of health, because they are the ones that are producing the energy for the cell, talking to the nucleus, they're causing this cascade of different events in the cell. They're actually producing ATP, which is our energy. So if you look at things like say, as you get older, your EGFR goes down, your function of your kidneys, in other words, starts to deteriorate. And this is, as an ultra endurance athlete, we smash the crap out of my kidneys with rhabdomyolysis a hundred times. I've had real battles getting my EGFR back up and managed it to quite a good degree, but it's still a problem. And as we get older, we sort of lose about 1% a year they say, of kidney function.
So then it’s just another example of it's actually the mitochondria that in this case, and the kidney cells that are not able to do their energy production to do what the kidney cells should be doing. So how can we reverse that train and get our kidneys working in this case, or our brain or in another case, or heart cells? All of these areas are affected by the mitochondrial function. And how does that link connect to the gut situation?
Dr Yurth: So it connects to the butyrate because what butyrate does, at the mitochondrial level, is increases PGC-1 alpha and AMPK. And so you're, you're inducing on a genetic basis, a better oxidative capacity, right? So you're restoring the oxidative capacity to the cell, the mitochondria healthier. And so it's really working—the butyrate and searching fatty acids are really working on a genetic level, probably primarily at PGC-1alpha, I think we'll probably find more and more because this is very new. But it looks like that PGC-1 alpha is where it's happening is a very distinct effect on mitochondria. And then the AMPK through the ACC pathway.
So basically, I think, if you think about it, probably from your training and everything, think about it as an epigenetic influence changing genetic output, right. So that's probably where the short term fatty acids are working in terms of mitochondrial health, I think there's going to be more to that story. You're right, kidney disease brain to these, everything comes down to we have to have mitochondrial health. So exactly what you said, first, have a healthy gut, let's replace the butyrate. Because we know that that's important for those pathways, then, what we have to do is go through phases where we really induce mitophagy. That's where you're fasting and your spermidine comes in, right. So we've got to basically induce, get rid of all the bad mitochondria. So that's gonna induce mitophagy right. So get rid of all the bad stuff.
And then we want to do more of a build up phase. So what I'll do is all patients go through different courses, 6-12 weeks of really kind of more real time food restrictions, and using spermidine at a higher dose, and I'll get them sort of clean slate right. Now I want to regrow and that's where I want to actually regrow in. So I'm gonna have them now, get a little bit less out of eat a little bit more a little less calorie deficit, I want to create a little bit of oxidative stress because now I'm going to induce those humanin-like peptides, those mitochondrial peptides, my MOTS-c, SS-31, the small humanin-like peptides, humanin itself. So we know that those are so imperative for ageing, and that when those peptides are released, they induce your nucleus to have a healthier genome. So now I'm going to have everything else be healthier, because it's going to send messages back to the mitochondria, mitochondria is going to be healthy, but then that's gonna get overwhelmed after a while. So then we go back into our, you know.
So when you think of things that way, always that sort of breakdown-cleanup, breakdown-cleanup, kind of an easier way to live right? Don't get bored. Always live in this super restricted capacity.
Lisa: Especially with calorie restriction and things.
Dr Yurth: Yeah, like caloric restriction and right eating very low calories. Yeah.
Lisa: It makes you miserable too.
Dr Yurth: That’s right. And so when you can tell—when you tell people listen, I want you to do this for 12 weeks, and then we're gonna let you kind of, you know, have a little me, I'm not gonna tell them go eat cake, but we're gonna be able to, you know, do a little bit more and go through growth phases. And people feel better, and they look better and they have more muscle mass, if you're always in that AMPK state right, that break down, but not really break down state but that more longevity stat, more catabolic state more, yeah. Which is good for longevity, right? But when you look at those people, they always look so healthy. I'll look at someone's people. And you're like, I mean, sometimes they don't have much muscle mass, their hair is thinner. So we do want to go through these phases where we allow the body to kind of grow a little bit, right, especially if you want some muscle, we know that muscle is imperative to health.
And thenI think we're sort of in the long term now they've got the mitochondria in this good homeostatic balance state where I've gotten it, but how do I keep that reactive oxygen species as low as possible? That's going to be where you look at them. That mitochondrial transitional pore, where, how do I keep that balance? And I think that's where maybe a lower dose spermidine every day, like one or two tablets every day of spermidine but I love melatonin for that purpose.
Lisa: I wanted to come back to melatonin. So I understood like melatonin—I was a little bit hesitant to take melatonin because it can change or can fix your circadian rhythms and so on. But after listening to you a couple of times talking about melatonin, why is it not a problem then? Do we take it at nighttime? And what sort of dosages do we need to take?
Dr Yurth: It’s interesting. I mean, we will dose—so for my osteoarthritis patients who have, for instance, high levels, most patients who have diffuse arthritis, or degenerative discs have very high levels of a cytokine called interleukin 1 beta. Interleukin 1 beta is very damaging in mitochondria, that's probably one of the reasons you get cell death and, and your chondrocytes all die off. So one of the things we know blocks interleukin 1 beta is higher dose melatonin. We also know that that's very anti-cancer, right? Probably for the same reason it's creating this balance, this homeostatic reaction in the mitochondria. So I actually like, in those patients, high dose melatonin, a high dose melatonin sounds interesting. Unlike the lower dose melatonin, it sometimes actually has more of a stimulating effect. But it actually does help restore your own circadian balance at a higher dose.
I have a lot of people who take it in the morning, because if they take it at night, they actually are stimulated by it. If you take in the morning, they're sleepy at bedtime, and they sleep through the night. While I'm working with your own. Your super charismatic nucleus and tinea, we're kind of brain level, a kind of balance you back out.
Lisa: So what sort of level is like, I'm at the moment, just me personally, anecdotally, I'm taking a five milligram dose of melatonin at night time to optimise my sleep. And is that a low dose? Is that or is that a high? Yeah, what is the high dose?
Dr Yurth: So high dose is like 20 milligrams. We use the high doses in our people who have osteoarthritis primarily, cancer, we use high dose melatonin, especially your breast cancer patients will use high dose melatonin. So we'll use that, you know, as a trigger adjunct. Not always, you really have to kind of work with people, there's people who do great take in at night. One of my sons does great, it's 20 milligrams of melatonin at night. Sleeps through the night and wake up early in the morning. Me, I actually take it in the morning. If I take it at night, I'm wide awake all night. But if I take in the morning, I have a really nice, good sleep with good deep sleep on my Oura ring. I get a good hour and a half of deep sleep. So it seems very different in different people and how it's interacted. And I'm sure that has to do a lot with kind of genetic, what are your clock genes? So I think that that probably has a little bit of a genetic influence. And I do have people who just don't follow—can only tolerate very low dose. You know, but we're finding more and more reasons to be very cautious with oh, you don't really want to take more than three to five milligrams of melatonin. Yeah, really finding that the higher doses seem to have a very advantageous effect on...
Lisa: Without putting your body clock out. You're super right.
Dr Yurth: Actually, potentially really benefiting your body clock, your circadian rhythm, which is critically important. And right now, that's one of the sort of easy things we can do that we know is going to be working. And as I said, I think what—it's going to come down to when we look at this mitochondria, it's not going to be trying to figure out what is my perfect dose of antioxidants. It's gonna be figuring out how do I get that mitochondria with the pores, letting the good stuff in, letting the bad stuff out?
Yeah, in the right sequence because we know that, for instance, cancer cells that port stays open all the time. There's this very imbalance in this other mitochondria are really getting all this stuff all the time. So we know that a huge factor to health is trying to restore this normal port. I think that we're—there's a drug that's coming out. I can't remember the name of it. Yeah, I can't remember the name of it, but that will probably be actually really, if we can get it will be actually really interesting. It's actually coming out for the treatment of ALS. But that looks like it might be really helpful for that pore.
Lisa: They’re shutting the mitochondrial pore.
Dr Yurth: Yeah, I mean, if that will be something we can get. I don't know. But we'll find more things. Like I said, I think minocycline is a really nice thing to go to, like twice a year, I'll use a 10-day minocycline course, really benign.
Lisa: Minocycline. How do you spell it?
Dr Yurth: So, minocycline, M-I-N-O-C-Y-C-L-I-N-E. Cheap antibiotics. I mean, it's like a $10 antibiotic. Right. And that has, but it has really—and it's been looked at in the anti-ageing field for a while, but we kind of weren't so clear of its effect on the mitochondria. Well, now we actually have found it's actually working on this pore, to actually balance out and keep the pore closed more, which is what you really want. When we're young, the pore is not open as much as it does when we’re old, there's less bad stuff coming through the mitochondria.
Lisa: So itis getting porous, isn't it? So basically, the membrane is getting porous.
Dr Yurth: Exactly, that's probably where—like some of the mitochondria peptides like SS-31, which was the cardia lipid membrane, which helps them that endoplasmic reticulum inside the mitochondria to be healthy. So that's why peptides like that are so beneficial.
Lisa: Yeah, yeah. And there's lots of, you know, we can't get these fancy peptides, unfortunately, that easily. The caveolae pan is an enzyme that is a very important enzyme for us. It's a stabilising enzyme, isn't it? So, we want more of this and this is what one of these peptides is right. And so hopefully, there's going to be more research around that and more drugs even coming out around that.
Dr Yurth: Yeah, and remember that one of the ways we induce some of these mitochondrial peptides is exercise. Right? MOTS-c is a little bit of stress for our body, right and so it reduces the mitochondria to produce some of these mitochondrial peptides. MOTS-c which is kind of considered exercise in a bottle because you can actually give at least mice you can give them MOTS-c— basically this mitochondrial peptide and it acts just like exercise.
Lisa: Exercise hermetic.
Dr Yurth: Yeah. So it's very cool. Of course, it's very expensive and... But way cheaper to go exercise, but it's a nice thing to offer people who can't exercise for some reason. Like, you'll have an injury or elderly people who are just so sarcopenic and trying to get them to do anything until you build a little bit of muscle is almost impossible. So things like that are going to be really nice in that realm as peptides like MOTS-c.
There's a whole company here that is actually just working on these mitochondrial peptides as drugs for treating things like this. Right now, we know that one of the best ways to produce MOTS-c is to exercise, stimulates your mitochondria to be a little stressed. Mitochondria produces more MOTS-c. MOTS-c helps with glucose metabolism, it helps with fat loss, it helps with turning white fat into brown fat helps. It helps with kind of overall aero metabolism.
Lisa: Just briefly on that. What is white fat versus brown adipose tissue, you know, brown fat? And why is brown metabolically active?
Dr Yurth: Yeah, so you know, white fats what—that fat we get as we get older and you know, it's really doing nothing beneficial. Brown fat is what little kids have, right? Brown fats—we look at babies or you look at little kids and they have that little chubbiness. Well, that's usually brown fat. Why? You know, maybe boys made fun because I'm always cold and so I'm way overdressed. My kids, but little kids don't get nearly as cool. We don't have to like them quite so bundled up as we do, because they're really covered with brown fat, which is metabolically active, that's what it was designed for. And when you're born you have this brown fat, you can stay warm. I mean, really, we were meant for survival, right? These babies who are born, they need something to keep them you know. Also there when you were caveman and you were just laying there in the cave, you survived.
So brown fat is metabolically active, it's helping for warmth and heat production. It's actually burning calories. White fat is what we get as we get older and we just eat too much and we sit around too much. And all it does is coat our organs and do nothing beneficial. So brown fat actually you can convert white adipose to brown adipose, so you can turn it into metabolically active tissue. Then you're actually going to be able to burn more calories and you'll be way more metabolically active. You actually want brown fat. You can convert white fat to brown fat. You know, and that's probably does come down to—that's one of the things that when you looked at butyrate it was one of the places that butyrate actually worked was actually helping to convert more brown fat and white fat. So there was a big problem putting people on butyrate can really help with fat loss using butyrate and if you're overweight people who are all have metabolic their guts are horrible. Yeah, uterine those patients can really help with fat loss.
Lisa: I just had Dr Austin Perlmutter on you know, probably… And he was talking about the white fat cells, the visceral fat cells having not a consciousness but they have an ulterior motive to keep themselves alive. So they seem that all these—make you hungrier, send out inflammatory compounds and so on to make sure that they stay alive. They end up killing the host in the end. But like a cancer cell, they although they have their own agenda independent of what was actually healthy for your body. So they don't want you to do fasting. They don't want you to do any of these things, because they're not going to get knocked
off.
Dr Yurth: Yeah, I mean, fat is metabolically active too. Remember it converts—fat cells have—they convert testosterone to estrogen. So men who are fatter will start converting all their testosterone into estrogen. So it's one of the places that that we have, you know, aromatase is inside fat cells. White men tend to have bigger breasts, and you know, is that fat cells actually are converting very mostly into this bad estrogen. So even your testosterone, you put them on testosterone, a lot of them just convert it to estrogen.
Lisa: Wow. So that's independent of your innate genetic pathway for your hormones.
Dr Yurth: Fat cells have aromatase. Fat cells have aromatase.
Lisa: Oh, wow, that's—I didn't realise that. I mean, I thought your genetic pathway was your genetic pathway. And you'll be converting your testosterone to estrogen is more if you have that genetic predisposition.
Dr Yurth: It's certainly genetic there. But yes, that fat guys have breasts, right? You look at breasts because they're very estrogenic. And so if you try and get—if you take some of your overweight males, and you put them on testosterone without using things to block estrogen or getting rid of fat first, then you just keep making more estrogen, making more fat. They’re making it worse, right?
Lisa: So okay, so it's not just to do with your genetic pathway, but also to do with how much fat you have. And the more fat tissue the more estrogenised you’ll be. That's in the new—okay. So that's why. Because you see, a lot of young people nowadays are thinking over probably growing up with less quality food than what we grew up with in our generation, seem to be more estrogenised and have more of these issues, and the actual body shape, the phenotype, the way it secretes, is this more estrogenised than past generations?
Dr Yurth: We're seeing a lot of twenty-year olds who come in, who have high estrogen levels, low testosterone levels. I think drugs have to do with that, too. I mean, here in Colorado, we have legal marijuana, which is unfortunately not very good for testosterone.
Lisa: Oh, wow. I didn’t know that either. Marijuana is not good for testosterone.
Dr Yurth: It's not good for testosterone levels at all. And then our food, right, bisphosphonates all these things that are so we're seeing this you know, these really young guys with testosterone levels that that you're a god awful.
Lisa: And then estrogen levels higher than the...
Dr Yurth: Estrogen levels that are high, right?
Lisa: Yeah, I just did my estrogen levels and my—I know mine are low because I'm going through menopause and so on. And I was looking at my husband's and I was thinking, ‘Oh, it was about…’
Dr Yurth: You do start good to see that right. You start to see that these men—these older man look like woman, it switches. Yeah. You know, and they start taking on more female build, right? They get the bigger breasts and bigger bellies and they start getting this more female build to them.
Lisa: I mean, I've had lots of things so that it's not it's you, going the other way and there's testosterone is good and bad. Yeah, that is what you see in older and older men is that tendency to go and eat. It's really really hard to get testosterone replacement therapy or hormone replacement therapy for men or—for woman a little bit easier. They've seen you know, the doctor seems... I am willing to give it to woman but well, this integrated medical fraternity for bioidentical hormone replacement? And, you know, it's so easy...
Dr Yurth: It kind of kills me because I get this—we're putting together this course called what to fix for us to kind of help people. In this journey of getting healthy, what do I do? Because I'm overwhelmed. And as I was putting together, I was like, ‘Okay, well, you start with exercise’. And that's it. No, actually, you kind of have to start with hormones. Because if I take somebody who has no testosterone, and no hormones, they have no progesterone, so they can't sleep, they have no testosterone, this is both men and women. So you know that their joints hurt, because there's progesterone receptors on joints, they've no testosterone. So trying to get them to go into the gym, and is impossible.
So for me to say, follow a good diet, do exercise without replacing hormones. It's really kind of not right, right. I mean, as I was putting together a talk, I said, you know, actually, the first thing I do is get these people hormone stabilised, because then I'm going to go to motivate another, their testosterone levels are good, they feel more motivated, they're going to build muscle, they're going to lose fat, they're going to feel like they can actually exercise, you know, they’re making progress, they can sleep. And that starts young.
And so to listen to, you know, your story of people not being able to get access to these things, and just, you know, it is almost criminal in my mind. To just say, you know, well just eat better and go exercise. Well, you can’t get it like that, right. You can't, right. You can't get out of bed much less go to the gym.
Lisa: And I know you'd like in my life, you know, when I was doing ultra marathon running and doing absolutely ridiculous amounts of training, I got fatter, because my hormones were going out of whack and my adrenals were totally, yeah, and fluid retention, and so on. And so, it's so counterintuitive, and now I train, it’s still hard, but it's short. And I'm not knocking the crap out of my hormones, and I'm on hormone replacement therapy. And, and I can get leaner on a 10th of what I was doing. So it's not all about exercise. In that case, I should have been skinny before and I shouldn't be so now.
Dr Yurth: Yeah, it's not, you know, I mean, obviously, exercise is critical, but not—you don't have to be doing extreme exercise. What I’m really trying to get across is just sensible stuff. We just did a thing about just taking a walk after dinner, right? The metabolic control of taking a walk after... Nobody does it. But it makes a huge difference in fat storage. And so there's some simple things you can do. You know, we always talked about all these big, you know, cool things and that are amazing. Yeah, peptides and hyperbaric and all that cool stuff. But there's some really simple things that cost nothing.
Lisa: So let's talk about that briefly. Because the blood sugar levels we're talking about in this case. So regulating your blood sugar is absolutely crucial. And nobody like—when I talk to the average person around me and clients and so on, that I'm working with, none of them have even ever taken their blood sugar once. Or maybe the doctors done at once every year and they don't understand the—and this is what I take constant glucose monitors. I mean, I want to get one, one year.
Dr Yurth: Pricey. But they're cool.
Lisa: Exactly. Yeah. Again, it's always a matter of where to put my results first. Constant glucose monitors give you that feedback of where your blood sugars are, what's causing them to go up and it's not just food by the way, it can be your emotions and your stress levels and so on and get like—I've been taking—I you know, prick my finger 10 times a day just to see where I'm at and to keep an eye on it.
Funny story: I thought I was getting, I was becoming diabetic, right? Because I was getting up in the morning and my blood sugar levels were very high. And I was like, ‘What the hell you know, I'm really slim’. What's going on? And I've been through a very stressful time and I thought maybe that's it. I've been doing in the morning cold showers and then Wim Hof sort of breathing. I was getting my blood sugar levels high, which is fine for the…
Dr Yurth: ...short periods. Fine, right. And again, those of those little stresses mean is that what about the mitochondria? Right? That's one of the things that causes mitochondrial biogenesis is that cold shower for the same reason. That little bit of stress, like I said, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And that's what that cold shower, the cryo does or you know, just taking that two minute cold shower. It creates that little shock response to mitochondria like ‘Shit!’, and they start producing more mitochondrial peptides which creates more mitochondrial biogenesis. So, you are right and just like the blood glucose going up, these little temporary stressors are good for us. It's the big long stressors that aren't.
Lisa: Yeah, and so regulating our blood sugar is really porting and understanding what does that and I just found out that doing that tumor breathing in the morning and stuff does. And that's fine. It's a great old story. So that's for a specific reason. And for my cortisol levels to go up in the morning isn't a bad thing, because that helps… etcetera, etc. But I did panic thinking that I was hitting towards diabetes. ‘I don’t want to see peptide tiers? Because I must have type one because I can't even type two’. And it's just a funny story.
But when you're measuring these things, you can actually see what things are doing. Yeah, like you might eat a banana thinking a banana is a healthy food, but it seems your blood sugars right through the roof. And when you know that you're going to avoid bananas. You know?
Dr Yurth: I mean, I think they're going to be sort of a critical piece to understand because, you know, it is hard to figure that out. I mean, there are things that like, in certain people, you can't figure out why their blood sugar is out of control. It could be very specific activity or something like that. That's doing it. So I do love the CGM. I wish they weren't so expensive. I wish there was some access to them. You know, it was not so pricey, because, you know, again, that's like $400 a month for the CGM.
Lisa: You can't afford it, and so many people.... And we could be like, this is like, for me from a regulatory perspective wouldn't that be great if we did this prevention stuff. And then we wouldn't have so many people with diabetes, because diabetes is the entranceway to cardiovascular problems, and urine, and all the rest of it. This is why blood sugar levels are really, really important.
So one of the things that Dr Yurth did recently was to challenge everybody listening out there on Instagram, when you've had your evening meal, or your big, big meal at lunch is big, to go for a 20 minute walk after, a 10 minute walk even. And that will actually slow the release, so you won't get that big sugar spike. And so I've started instigating that as well.
Dr Yurth: It’s so easy, right? And it's really nice and peaceful. My family took everything to drag them out. But you know, it was like, because of COVID, my kids are done at home. And you know, and but we don't talk, we don't see each other. And actually these little walks at night, were such a nice thing. I say that I got them to do for the week, and then we're done.
Lisa: But there are a couple of other things that we can do to lower our blood sugar levels. What do you think about things like Vanadyl and cinnamon and chromium and these sorts of things that can actually lower blood sugar levels as well, just to help you….
Dr Yurth: They can work really—honestly I used them a ton. I tell people just to use you liberally you can use it until, you know. I think chromium works on some people really well. And some people not so well, there's probably a bit of a genetic basis, or just if you're depleted it kind of basis to that. So that can be really helpful for glucose maintenance too. I do think people forget about cinnamon, put some on your coffee, put some on your oatmeal, but you know, you know it.
And then I just did a little Instagram thing yesterday, because there's a very interesting study that came out from American Diabetes Association of eating your protein before your carbs. So if you've got a plate with broccoli, and a little piece of bread, and some grilled chicken, what they did was they took people and they had them for one week, eat the protein first, actually at the car person, their salad and their bread first and then the protein. And then they measured blood glucose and insulin levels at 30-60-120 minutes. The next week, they did the opposite. They ate the chicken first. So the protein first and then the carb, the impact was 40% difference in blood glucose and insulin levels at 120 minutes. And the people went just by eating the protein…
Lisa: That makes sense, right? Proteins a little harder to break down.
Dr Yurth: So you start the digestive process and you know, yeah. Very simple, right? So if you're going to eat some carbs, if you're eating and remember carbs, even your vegetables, that you're gonna have lot less glucose impact and insulin impacts simply by eating the protein first and then in the carb. Or if you want to have something—I mean, what do we do right here in the US, at least we eat our salad first and then you know, hey, then we're eating the breadbasket. And then we eat our chicken last. Switching that around, so even if you're gonna have your little bread, your little ciabatta roll or something, you eat that after you finished your protein, and eat that last there was much less glucose in that.
Lisa: Wow. And then this is also true for fat and sugars. And I mean, not that we're advocating but if you having Coca Cola or some terrible drink my bed versus—which you shouldn't, I'm not saying that but—versus having an ice cream. Because the fat is in the ice cream, it will slow the response to the sugar compared...
Dr Yurth: Exactly, right. You’re actually, right. You're better off eating something like fatty sugar loaf than you are just eating a Coke. Which is why Coke is so bad for you. It's just so bad. Yeah, those are just easy things, right?
Lisa: Oh, yeah. I'm never—I'd sort of—what about enzymes like a lot of people are dealing with not having enough betaine, hydrochloric acid. Not enough digestive enzymes from the pancreas. And some of this is genetic. And some of this is age related, not breaking the proteins down and so on. Is there a rule of thumb without having tests and testing for all your pancreatic enzymes and so on.
Dr Yurth: There's some evidence that—maybe like the gut, a lot of things start with dysfunction and bile acids. In fact, one of my friends who's a physician, or medical practitioner, that takes care of a lot of very sick ALS patients, really has a belief that things really begin with the dysfunction of the bile level, you know, the bile acid level, and that we really do need to focus on that more. And I love betaine, you know, and I will—in any of my patients who are sick, or who have kind of more neuromuscular weakness, things like that, or I'm building muscle, I will always focus a little bit on, even if you're not testing digestive enzymes, I'll focus on actually having them use a digestive enzyme. So using just the sort of mass proteases and lipases and using that with their meals, because I do think there's a piece of that we are way overlooking in a lot of people. And that may be the start up of a whole lot of diseases. Is that that level?
Lisa: Yeah, yeah. That makes sense to me. Because when you look at the protein levels, a lot of people or you know, working with a lot of athletes, of course, you're stressing yourself—a lot of repair and so on, having enough protein in the body…
Dr Yurth: Having it low in a lot of people, right.
Lisa: And you're given a new globe and are very important for longevity. And it's not always related just to what you've eaten, but the right function. But having optimised protein breakdown, so the amino acids, so a lot of—I think I've mentioned this before, but I had Dr David Minkoff on the show who's a really amazing doctor. And he has a product called Perfect Aminos that I've got a lot of my athletes on. And that just breaks down within 20 minutes into the body into the amino acid. So if they've got problems with absorption, they can't digest steak very well, they can at least get these perfect tomatoes, and they can get through and do their jobs specifically within a 20 minute time period. The recoveries that I've seen from injuries just from taking the Perfect Aminos blend has been fantastic.
I had a ripped hamstring performance and just your injury for five years and couldn't—oh, we have to have surgery and so on. I was on the Perfect Amino for a few weeks, and it was gone. So this is a big piece. Because if you're not absorbing your proteins, you're not going to be repairing a heck of a lot.
Dr Yurth: Curious to see how many people to—if you actually just went back that butyrate gut microbiome level, how much then that would sort of downplay into the—I think you probably want to tap on both—but I do wonder how many people you might, if you if you get the gut, the microbiome healthy again. And again, you guys are just throwing probiotics in the mix is not gonna work, you've got to get the colonocyte healthy. The only way that I do that is to fix butyrate. For please remember that remember nothing else. I see all people throwing tons of probiotics, I see doctors all the time say, ‘Oh, just take a probiotic’, the good bacteria, the anaerobes can't survive. Unless there's butyric acid, that for the colonocytes to have a nice healthy colon. So you're just throwing things in that aren't going to survive. You've got to fix butyrate and then you can throw the probiotics in if you want. But I do wonder how much—if you fix that how much the digestive process would correct or not? I don't know.
Lisa: Exactly. probably Yeah. Right. Make sense? And you know, the probiotics just as a last thing before we wrap up, so now we have to go. But the probiotics, they can have a histamine response, can't they? I’ve compared to a couple of clients who have put on probiotics. And then I've actually had an adverse reaction to probiotics, because they're histamine levels of…. What's going on there? Is our spore based probiotics in that case, better?
Dr Yurth: Yeah, that's probably a little bit better. But I think what you're doing again, is if you don't have this healthy gut lining, right, and you're now throwing a bunch of bacteria into an immune system, remember that all your immune systems are in the gut, serotonin levels are off, everything's off. The anything you put in is going to be being seen as a foreign thing and you're going to create an immune response or histamine response but not immune, basically an autoimmune response. Just because your body's seeing this stuff right now is a foreign invader because you don't have any—it's not it's not a normal environment for it yet. So you gotta quit. environment for it so that you know you have this nice—you don't want this where you want that gut bacteria in the, in the gut. So if I have bad claws, sides and it's leaking out of my gut into my bloodstream, not where they belong, right? They create this histamine immune response, right?
Just think of your colonocytes as you want this nice thick layer of cells, they're all bound together really tight. And the only way you can have healthy colonocytes is to have high butyrate levels, right? Wow, it's a really interesting study that came out that people who had good butyrate levels actually were more popular. So even came from a pheromone perspective. We can sense that those people are healthier. So you actually are actually liked better if you have higher butyrate levels?
Lisa: Wow. Okay, another reason to take butyrate inhibitors. So butyrate either, as tributyrin, as a pre-butyrate, right? Or rectally would be really better for two for two weeks if you can afford it, and you can get that. Which I'm gonna do…
Dr Yurth: A good way of doing it. It's just people don't like suppositories. But it is a better way of getting it there initially.
Lisa: Hey, whatever it takes, you know? Gonna stick something up your bum? Do it. I do use ozone every couple of days. So for me it doesn't work.
Dr Yurth: You’re used to it.
Lisa: Yeah. Dr Yurth has been absolutely amazing again today. This conversation went in directions I had no idea and I'm…
Dr Yurth: That's right, Lisa. We just go here, there. But that's kind of—but that's a cool thing.
Lisa: Yeah, that's a really cool thing. And people please go to bli.academy.com or the Boulder Longevity Institute. You will also find the direction there. And that's the education arm of the Boulder Longevity Institute. And it's free at the moment so go and hurry up, get in there, get the courses, get the information from Dr Yurth. She is really, I mean I've come, I've worked in, had on my podcast, hundreds of doctors and scientists. You are one of my favourites. I just have to say, because I just learned so so much from the academy and the work that you're doing and even on your Instagram and stuff. I just love watching that every day.
Dr Yurth: I appreciate that. Thanks, Lisa. You know what you're doing because you're amazing too. I love being on your show. Thanks.
Lisa: We'll have you back again and we'll keep people coming with this great information. So thank you very much, Dr Yurth.
Dr Yurth: All right. Stay well. Bye.
That's it this week for Pushing The Limits. Be sure to rate, review, and share with your friends. And head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.
The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.
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In this episode, Robert Joseph Cappuccio, widely known as Bobby, joins us to share his inspiring story of defying hardships and helping others. It’s easier to succumb to self-sabotage and addiction. But you have the power to make your experiences an opportunity for change and hope. Bobby also shares the importance of helping others, especially as a business owner and leader.
If you want to learn how to rise above trauma and be inspired to become a force of good to the world, then this episode is for you!
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‘When you know that there's somewhere you want to go, but you don't know exactly where that is. And you don't have complete confidence in your ability to get there. And what a good guy does is they help you go just as far as you can see.’
‘We form and calibrate and shape our sense of identity in the context in which we navigate through the world off of one another. And when you're isolated with a distorted sense of reality, and you lose your sense of self, you become highly incapacitated to take action in this situation.’
‘So I started focusing on things and a mission and people outside of myself. Who's going through something similar to what I have gone through, even if it's not precisely the same situation? How do I help them find their way out? And by helping them find their way out, I found my way up.’
‘I never saved anyone; you can't change anyone but yourself. But the reason why he called me that is anytime someone would think about joining the gym...I approached it from a transformational perspective.’
‘And your job is to create and keep your internal customer by serving them with at the very least with the same tenacity, sincerity and intention that you are serving your external customer. If you don't do that, you're going to be shit as a leader.’
‘I think the only people who don't have impostor syndrome are imposters. Because if you're fraudulent, you wouldn't engage in the level of self-honesty, and humility, and conscientiousness, to go, “Am I fraudulent; is there something that I’m missing?”’
‘Anything I've ever accomplished, it's totally through other people. It's because I hired people that were a lot smarter than me.’
Robert Joseph Cappuccio, or Bobby, is a behaviour change coach, author, consultant, speaker and fitness professional. He is a trainer of trainers and at the forefront of the life-altering and ever-evolving industry of coaching.
For over two decades, he has been advocating and pushing the industry-wide and individual shift of perspective in development. Behaviour change is rooted in a holistic approach, not just goals to health and fitness. With his vision, he co-founded PTA Global. It has now become a leader in professional fitness development.
No matter how successful Bobby seems, it didn't start this way. His childhood was filled with neglect, abuse and traumas that could lead anyone on the path to drinking and addiction. Bobby is no stranger to hardship and challenges, but he uses these experiences to connect and relate to others, using his past hardship as a way to help others. Bobby is also the former head of training and development at David Barton Gym, former director of professional development at the National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM), content curator for PTontheNet, development consultant for various companies including Hilton Hotels, Virgin Active, Equinox, David Lloyd Leisure and multiple businesses nationally and abroad.
With his forward-thinking mindset and work ethic, Bobby champions practical programs that help both corporate and industry personnel, including individuals, get what they truly want. He advocates the process of change mixed in with the mantra of ‘you can be free to play’.
Interested in Bobby’s work? You can check out his website and listen to his Self-Help Antidote Podcast!
Reach out to Bobby on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.
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Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends to offer them one way to rise above their trauma.
Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts.
To pushing the limits,
Lisa
Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host, Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.
Lisa Tamati: Welcome back to Pushing the Limits, your host Lisa Tamati here, and today I have a fantastic guest all the way from America again, this man goes by the name of Bobby Cappuccio. And he is a world-famous fitness professional. He trains a lot of the trainers that are out there. But Bobby has an incredible story that I really want to share with you today. So, Bobby was born with a severe facial deformity. And he also had deformed legs, and he was given up for adoption. His mother couldn't care for him, and he ended up being adopted by another man. But he had a very, very abusive rough childhood. He also developed Tourette Syndrome at the age of nine. In all this adversity you'd think like ‘oh my gosh, what sort of a life is this guy going to live’? But Bobby has had an incredible life. He's a fitness professional, as I said, he's worked in many gyms. He was the founder and co-owner of PTA Global, which does a lot of the professional fitness development. And he has devised his own strategies and ways of educating people. And his programs are just second to none. When I told my business partner, Neil, that I just interviewed Bobby Cappuccio, he's like, ‘Oh, my God, he's a legend in the space.’ So yeah, he was really a bit jealous that I got to speak to him. So I hope you enjoy this interview. It's some rough topics in there. But there's also some really great gems of wisdom. And the funny thing is what Bobby is just absolutely hilarious as well. So I do hope you enjoy it.
Before we head over to the show, though, just want to let you know that we've launched a premium membership for the podcast. This is a patron membership so that you can become a VIP member of our tribe, help support the podcast. This podcast has been going now for five and a half years. It's a labour of love, I can tell you. It takes up a huge amount of my time and resources in both getting these world-class gifts for you, and also in study and research so that I can talk really, and interview very well all these crazy, amazing doctors, scientists, elite athletes and performers. So if you want to support us in keeping the show going, and like what we do in the world, and you want to keep those valuable content being able to be put out into the world, we'd love your support. And for that, we're going to give you lots of member, premium member, benefits. So, check it out at patron.lisatamati.com. That’s patron.lisatamati.com. That’s P-A-T-R-O-N dot Lisa Tamati dot com.
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So if that's something that interests you, and you want high performance, you want help with cardiovascular health, with neuro protection, with metabolic disorders, then this is something that you should look into as well. So check that out at nmnbio.nz, that’s nmnbio.nz, and go and check that out. The supplements have been so popular that I haven't been able to keep up with orders. So on some of the orders, there is a bit of a backorder. But bear with me while we will scale up production. But go over and check that out at nmnbio.nz. Right over to the show with Bobby Cappuccio.
Lisa: Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Pushing the Limits. Today I have another very, very special guest and I was recently on this gentleman's show and now we're doing a reverse interview. I have Robert Cappuccio with me. Robert, welcome to the show.
Robert Cappuccio: Oh, thank you. When you say you had a very special guest, I thought you were bringing someone else on.
Lisa: You are a really special guest.
Robert: Had a lot of anticipation like who is this person? What a surprise!
Lisa: Well, you're a bit of an interesting character. Let's say that, throw that.
Robert: Just the microphone.
Lisa: No, I'm really, really interested to hear your story and to share your story with my audience, and to give a bit more of a background on you. And share gems of wisdom from your learnings from your life, because you've done some pretty cool stuff. You've had some pretty hard times and I'd like to share those learnings with my audience today. So Robert, whereabouts are you sitting at the moment, whereabouts are you in the States?
Robert: Okay, so at the moment, I'm in a place called Normal Heights, which is probably a misnomer. It's not normal at all. But it's a really cool, funky neighbourhood in San Diego.
Lisa: San Diego, awesome. And how’s lockdown going over there, and all of that sort of carry on?
Robert: Oh, it’s great. I mean, on St. Patty's day, I've got my skull from our own green. I've just had a few whiskies. So far, so good.
Lisa: This is a very interesting interview.
So can you give us a little bit of background? Because you've had a very interesting, shall we say, difficult upbringing and childhood. And I wanted to perhaps start there and then see where this conversation goes a little.
Robert: Is there any place you want to start, in particular? How far back do you want to go? Do you want to start from the very beginning?
Lisa: Please go right at the very beginning, because you're intro to your backstory is quite interesting from the beginning, really isn't that?
Robert: Okay, so I was born, which is obvious, in Manhattan, and I moved to Brooklyn early. So I was born, rather deformed. I was born with a significant facial deformity. And my lower extremities, my legs, quite never— like, if you saw my legs now, they're great. I have a great pair of legs at this moment. I'm not going to show you that because that would be a little bit rude. But my legs were kind of deformed and contorted. I had to walk with braces for the first couple of years of my life.
I was given up for adoption. I'm not exactly sure, I have the paperwork on why I was given up for adoption, but I'm not really certain about the authenticity of that story. And I wasn't adopted for a while. So as an infant, I was parentless and homeless and really not well-tended to. I'm not going to get into why I say that because it's pretty disgusting. And then I was adopted. And then my adoptive father, this is kind of interesting, he had cancer, and he knew during the adoption process that he was probably not going to make it. He wanted to make sure that I found a home because nobody wanted to adopt me. Because when they came in, I was physically deformed. It's like, ‘Oh, this baby’s, it's broken. Something's wrong. Do you have a better baby’? And when he saw that, he thought, ‘Right, I've got to give this kid a home.’ So he passed.
He passed when I was two. I didn't know him for more than a few months. And I hardly have any memory of him at all. My mother who adopted me, to be fair, she's developmentally disabled, and so she was a single uom with not a lot of skills, not a lot of prospects, terrified. And she basically, I think she met a guy when I was five, who I don't know if there's a diagnosis for him. He was mentally disturbed. He was a psychopath. I don't know if clinically he’s a psychopath, but that's pretty much how it felt.
Lisa: You were a child experiencing this. Yeah.
Robert: Yeah, I'm not like, I'm never sure in what direction to go with stuff like this. Never sure what’s valid, what's relevant. I spent my childhood in stressed positions, being woken up in the middle of the night with a pillow over my face, having bones broken consistently, and a series of rape, emotional abuse, physical abuse, and just every sort of trauma. Like imagine when I was nine years old, I was diagnosed, on top of that, with Tourette Syndrome. So I was physically deformed, going through shit like that at home. And then on top of it, I started losing control of my bodily functions. I started exhibiting tics, I started exhibiting obsessive compulsive behaviour. At some point, it was uncontrollable, like lack of control of my impulses, of the things that I would say, vulgarity. At some point, the doctors just thought that perhaps I was Scottish.
Lisa: And you’re funny as well.
Robert: And they put me on Haldol, which damaged my brain. That and the fact that, it's estimated, I've had at least over a half a dozen major concussions within my childhood —
Lisa: From the abuse.
Robert: — half a dozen to a dozen massive concussions. Yeah.
Lisa: Absolute horrific start into life.
Robert: When I was 10, I started binge drinking. And I thought this will help, this is a solution. But you know what? It's not. It's a little bit weird when you start a story off like this, because in some sense, it's not me being delusional, or Pollyanna, because I tend to think that I'm a little bit of a realist, sometimes too much, sometimes to the point of walking a fine edge between being hopeful and being a cynic. But I have to say that a lot of things that I experienced when I was growing up, turned out to be quite beneficial. It’s shaped me in a way and it helped me engage in certain career paths and certain activities that I don't think I really would have sought out, had this stuff not happened. So it's not like me, delusionally trying to create like all silver lining about stuff, it was shit. I understand the severity of what I went through. But I also understand where that led me. And I understand the good fortune that I had of running into certain people that resonated with me, and I resonated with them, largely in part because of my history. I don't think I would have related to these people had I not come from where I came from.
Lisa: So you’re talking like people along the way that were, ended up being mentors, or teachers or friends or helping you out and through these horrific situations? Is that what you're meaning, sort of thing that would actually helped you? Because I mean, given a background like that, if you were a complete disaster and drug addict, and whatever, nobody would blame you. You didn't have a good start in life, whatsoever. I mean, look at you now. Obviously you don't have any facial deformities, and you don't exhibit, right now, any of that stuff that actually you were and have been through. So how the hell did you get to where you are today? Because you're a very successful person, you have a very successful and a very strong influence in the world. What, how the heck do you go from being that kid, with brain problems and concussions and Tourette’s and abuse and rape and all of that, to being the person who comes across as one, number one, hilarious, very crazy and very cool? How the heck do you get from there to there?
Lisa: Just listening to, I can tell that you're someone who's highly intelligent, perceptive and an amazing judge of humour. So thank you for that. I think a lot of it was quite accidental.
So I had thought when I was younger, that I wanted to be a police officer, originally. And I wanted to be involved with special victims, even before that was a TV show. Brilliant show, by the way, one of my favourite shows on TV. But even before that was the TV show, I thought, if I'm going through what I went through, and it's very hard because I had Child Services in New York City, they were called ACS. They were at my house consistently. But the problem is, I believed at a young age that my stepfather was nearly invincible, like nobody could touch him.
Lisa: You were powerless against him. Yeah.
Robert: And when they came to the house and like, look, I had broken bones, my arm was in a sling. A lot of times, I broke my tibia. They won't take me to the hospital because they thought they would suspect stepdad of doing it. I couldn't even walk. And these people were sitting down, said, ‘Well just tell us what happened.’ And I somehow knew that, at a critical moment, my adopted mother would falter. She would not have my back. She would rescind on everything she says.
Lisa: She was frightened too, no doubt.
Robert: She was frightened. I don't think she had the emotional or intellectual capacity to deal with the situation. That's all I'll say on that. But I knew once they left, I just knew they couldn't do anything, unless I was all-in. And if anything went wrong, he would kill me. So I would have to just say that, ‘Well, I fell.’ And it’s like, there's no way a fork, like I would go into camp and I would have stab wounds in the shape of a fork. And people are like, ‘What happened?’ And I said, ‘I was walking, and I tripped, and I fell onto a fork that went through my thigh and hit my femur.’ It's like, okay, that's just not possible. But I kind of knew. And I kind of felt like nobody's coming to the rescue. And I thought, if I was a police officer, and I was worked with special victims, maybe I could be the person that I always wished would show up for me. But then, there were issues with that. So I think I got like, out of a possible 100 on the police test. I did fairly well. I think I got 103, there were master credit questions. And I thought, right, yeah, I'm going. And then I took the psychological and by some weird measure, I passed, that seems crazy to me now. It kind of seems problematic. I think they need to revisit that. But then when I took the medical, and with Tourette's, it was kind of like, ‘Ah, yeah.’ It was a sticking point. So I had to petition because otherwise I would be disqualified from the employment police department.
And during that time, I started working in the gyms. And when I was working the gyms, I kind of thought, there's no way I'll ever be as intelligent as some of these other trainers here. I'm just going to make up with work ethic what I lack in intellect. I would run around and just tried to do everything I could. I would try to clean all the equipment, make sure that the gym was spotless. But again, kind of like not like having all my wits about me, I would be spraying down a machine with WD-40. And what I didn't account for is, the person who was on the machine next to me, I'd be spraying him in the face with WD-40 when he was exercising.
Lisa: They still do that today, by the way. The other day in the gym and the girl next to me, she was blind, and she was just spraying it everywhere. I had to go and shift to the other end of the gym, is that right, cause I don't like that stuff.
Robert: I mean, in my defence, the members were very well-lubricated. And so, people would go upstairs, and like there is this fucking trainer just sprayed me in the face. And the owner would say, ‘All right, let me see who this guy is. What do you talk? This doesn’t even make sense? Who hired this guy?’ We kind of had like the old bowl, the pin. And like you could walk up top and look down into the weight room, and there I was just running around. And there was something about someone running around and hustling on the gym floor that made him interested. He's like, ‘Get this kid up into my office. Let me talk to him.’ And that forged a friendship. I spoke to him yesterday, by the way. So we've been friends for like three decades. And the owner of the gym became kind of like a surrogate dad. And he did for me what most guides do and that is when you know that there's somewhere you want to go, but you don't know exactly where that is, and you don't have complete confidence in your ability to get there. And what a good guy does is they help you go just as far as you can see, because when you get there, you'll see further. And that's what Mitchell did for me. And he was different because I have a lot of adults.
So I grew up with not only extreme violence in the home, but I grew up in Coney Island. I grew up living on the corner of Shit Street and Depressing. And there was a constant violence outside the home and in school and I got picked on. And I got bullied until I started fighting, and then I got into a lot of fights. And you just have these adults trying to talk to you and it's like, you don't fucking know me. You have no idea where I come from. You can't relate to me. When you were growing up, you had a home, you were being fed. You were kind of safe, don't even pretend to relate to me. And he was this guy, who, he was arrested over a dozen times by age 30, which was not why I chose him as a mentor. But he had gone through some serious shit. And when he came out on the other end of it, he wanted to be somebody other than his history would suggest he was going to be, and he tried harder at life than anybody I had ever met. So one, I could relate to him, I didn't think he was one of these adults who are just full of shit. I was impressed at how hard he tried to be the person he wanted to be. So there was this mutual respect and affinity, instantly.
Lisa: Wow. And he had a massive influence. And we all need these great coaches, mentors, guides, surrogate dads, whatever the case may be, to come along, sometimes in our lives. And when they do, how wonderful and special that is, and someone that you could respect because like you say, I've had a wonderful childhood. In comparison to you, it was bloody Disneyland, and so I cannot relate to some of those things. And I have my own little wee dramas, but they were minor in comparison to what you experienced in the world. So how the heck can I really help you out if you're a young kid that I'm trying to influence. And not that you have to go through everything in order to be of help to anybody, but just having that understanding that your view, your worldview is a limited, privileged background. Compared to you, my background is privileged.
Robert: Well, I don't think there's any ‘compared to you’. I think a lot of my reaction to adults around me who tried to intercede — one, if your intercession doesn't work, it's going to get me hurt, bad, or it's going to get me killed. There have been times where I was hung out of an 18-storey window by my ankles.
Lisa: You have got to be kidding me.
Robert: Like grabbing onto the brick on the side of the building. I can't even say terrified. I don't even know if that encapsulates that experience as a kid. But it's like you don't understand what you can walk away from once you feel good about interceding with this poor, unfortunate kid. I cannot walk away from the situation that you're going to create. So it was defensive mechanism, because pain is relative. I mean, like, you go through a divorce, and you lose this love and this promise, and somebody comes along, ‘Oh there are some people in the world who never had love, so you should feel grateful’. You should fuck off because that's disgusting. And that is totally void of context. I don't think somebody's pain needs to compare to another person's pain in order to be relevant. I think that was just my attitude back then because I was protecting my existence. I've really changed that perspective because, like, my existence isn't threatened day to day anymore.
Lisa: Thank goodness.
Robert: So I have a different take on that. And I understand that these adults were well meaning, because I also had adults around me, who could have probably done something, but did nothing. And I don't even blame them because my stepfather was a terrifying person. And the amount of work and energy, and the way the laws, the structure, and how threatening he was, I don't blame them. And me? I’ll probably go to prison. But I don't blame them for their inaction.
Lisa: Yeah, and this is a problem. Just from my own experiences, like I said, this is not even in childhood, this is in young adulthood, being in an abusive relationship. The dynamic of the stuff that's going on there, you're frightened to leave. You know you are going to be in physical danger if you try and leave. So, I've been in that sort of a position but not as a child. But still in a position where people will think, ‘Well, why don't you just go?’ And I’m just like, ‘Have you ever tried to leave someone who's abusive? Because it's a very dangerous thing to do.’ And you sometimes you’re like, just, you can't, if there's children involved, even, then that's even worse. And there's complicated financial matters. And then there's, whatever the case may be or the circumstances that you're facing, it's not cut and dried. And as an adult, as a powerful woman now, I wouldn't let myself be in a position like that. But I wasn't that back then. And you weren't because well, you were a child. See, you're even more.
Robert: I just want to comment on that a little bit. And this is not coming from clinical expertise. This is just coming from my own interpretation experience. I think, obviously, that when a child goes through this, you would think, ‘Okay, if this started at age five, what could you have done?’ But a lot of times we do look at, let's say, women who are in severe domestic violence situations, and we say, ‘Well, how could you have done that? How could you have let somebody do that to you’? And I think we need to really examine that perspective. Because powerful, confident, intelligent women might be especially susceptible.
Lisa: Apparently, that’s the case.
Robert: Because you have a track record, and you have evidence to support that you are capable, and you're intelligent, and you find yourself in a situation that you didn't anticipate. And I think it's easier to gaslight someone like that. Because it's like, ‘How could I have had a lapse — is it me?’ And it creeps up on you, little by little, where you doubt yourself a little bit more, a little bit more, and then you become more controlled and more controlled. And then your perspective on reality becomes more and more distorted. So I think we have to be very careful when an adult finds themselves, yes, in that position, saying, ‘Well, why didn't you just leave? How could you have let yourself very easily?’
It can happen to anyone, especially if you have a strong sense of confidence and you are intelligent, and because it becomes unfathomable to you, how you got into that situation.
Lisa: Looking back on my situation, which is years and years ago now, and have no consequences to the gentleman that I was involved with, because I'm sure he's moved on and hopefully, not the same. But the fact that it shifted over many years, and the control shifted, and the more isolated you became. I was living in a foreign country, foreign language, unable to communicate with my family, etc., etc. back then. And you just got more and more isolated, and the behaviour’s become more and more, more radical ways as time goes on. It doesn't stop there. Everybody's always lovely at the beginning. And then, as the power starts to shift in the relationship — and I've listened to a psychologist, I’ve forgotten her name right now, but she was talking about, she works with these highly intelligent, educated women who are going through this and trying to get out of situations where they shouldn't be in. And she said, ‘This is some of the common traits. They're the types of people who want to fix things, they are the types of people who are strong and they will never give up.’ And that is actually to their detriment, in this case. And I'm a very tenacious type of person. So, if I fall in love with someone, which you do at the beginning, then you're like, ‘Well, I'm not giving up on this person. They might need some help, and some, whatever’. And when you're young, you think you can change people, and you can fix them. And it took me a number of years to work out and ‘Hang on a minute, I haven't fixed them, I’ve screwed myself over. And I've lost who I am in the process.’ And you have to rebuild yourself. And like you and like your case is really a quite exceptionally extreme. But like you, you've rebuilt yourself, and you've created this person who is exceptional, resilient, powerful, educated, influential —
Robert: And dysfunctional.
Lisa: And dysfunctional at the same time. Hey, me, too.
Robert: And fucked up in 10 different ways.
Lisa: Yeah. Hey, none of us have got it right. As our mutual friend, Craig Harper would say, ‘We're just differing degrees of fucked-up-ness’.
Robert: That would be spot on.
Lisa: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And totally, some of the most high functioning people that I get to meet, I get to meet some pretty cool people. There's hardly any of them that don't have some area in their life where they've got that fucked-up-ness that's going on, and are working on it, because we're all works in progress. And that's okay.
Robert: The thing you said that I really caught is you lost your sense of self, and the isolation. And that is what abusers do, is progressively they start to isolate, and create enemies out of strong alliances and allies. And when you lose your sense of self, and you're so isolated — because as much as we want to be strong and independent, we are highly interdependent, tribal people. We form and calibrate, we shape our sense of identity and the context in which we navigate through the world off of one another. And when you're isolated with a distance sense of reality and you lose your sense of self, you become highly incapacitated to take action in this situation. And you develop, I think what Martin Seligman, called learned helplessness. And I think assigning fault or blame or accusation either to yourself or doing that to somebody else, not only does that not help, it stops people from coming forward. Because it reinforces the mental state that makes them susceptible to perpetual abuse in the first place.
Lisa: Yeah, it's so true. So how did you start to turn around? So you meet Mitchell, Mitchell was his name, and he started to be a bit of a guiding light for you and mentor you, and you're in the gym at this phase stage. So, what sort of happened from there on and? So what age were you at this point, like, your teenage years, like teenagers or?
Robert: I met Mitchell when I was like 19 years old. And what he allowed me to do, and it wasn't strategies, he allowed me to focus outside of myself. Because every emotion, every strong emotion you're feeling, especially in a painful way, resides within you. So if you feel a sense of despair, or you feel disgust, or loneliness, or isolation, or any type of pain, and you would look around your room and go, ‘Well, where's that located? Where's my despair? I searched my whole desk, I can't find it’. It's not there. It's not in your outer world. It's your inner world. And what he gave me the ability to do is say, ‘Okay. I grew up physically deformed. And despite everything I was going through, my physical deformities were one of the most painful things’. But the irony, more painful than anything else because you could see me out in the shops and go, ‘Okay, this is a person who has been severely physically sexually abused, who's suffered emotional trauma’. You could see that as I walk through the aisles, because you say, ‘Okay, this is someone who doesn't look right. This is someone who —', and I can see the look of disgust on people's face when they saw me physically. And then there’s nowhere to hide, you couldn’t mask that. I started thinking, ‘Well, what about people who feel that about their physical appearance and they don't require surgery? What are they going through? And how do I focus more on them? How do I take a stand for that person? What's the areas of knowledge? What are the insights? What are the resources that I can give these people to be more resourceful in finding a sense of self and finding their own way forward?’
Lisa: Being okay with the way that they are, because it must be just—
Robert: People are okay with the way they are, seeing an ideal version of themselves in the future. And engaging the behaviours that helps them eventually bridge that gap, where their future vision, at some point, becomes their current reality. So I started focusing on things and a mission and people outside of myself, who's going through something similar to what I have gone through, even if it's not precisely the same situation? How do I help them find their way out? And by helping them find their way out, I found my way up.
Lisa: Wow, it's gold. And that's what you ended up doing then, and within the gym setting, or how did that sort of work out from there?
Robert: Well, I became a trainer. And in the beginning, I was like an average trainer. But I became, what Mitchell called, like the person who saved people. I never saved anyone; you can't change anyone but yourself. But the reason why he called me that is, anytime someone would think about joining the gym, if they would sit down with someone, they approached it from, ‘Well, what can we do? Can we give you a couple of extra months? Can we give you a guest pass to invite some —‘. They approached it from a transactional perspective, where when I sat down with these people, I approached it from a transformational perspective. ‘What did you want most? What do you want most in your life in this moment? And what hasn't happened? What missed? What was the disconnect? Where have we failed? What did you need that was not fulfilled in your experience here and how do we give you those resources? How do we support you going forward?’ And it was also like, ‘Look, if you want to leave, we totally respect that. You've given us a chance to help you. And obviously, the fault was ours. I never blamed anyone. But if you had the chance to do it again, what would have made the difference? And give us that opportunity’. It’s like, ‘Oh, this person is like a retention master’. It's not that, my focus wasn't in retention, it was the intention rather, to relate to the individual in front of me.
Lisa: I’m hearing about the actual person and their actual situation and their actual wishes and goals, rather than, how can I sweeten the deal so you don't leave?
Robert: Precisely, and that had some unintended consequences, because it put me in a bad situation, because I got promoted against my will. And I didn’t want to get promoted. And I thought, ‘I'm just getting a reputation for being somewhat good in my current job. And now they're going to promote it to my level of incompetence. And now I'm going to disappoint Mitchell, he's going to find out this kid's actually an idiot, he's a fraud — ‘I was wrong.’ And the one person who believed in me, I'm going to lose his trust and his faith, and that's going to be damaging.’ So me being promoted into management led to a series of unpredictable events that shaped my entire career.
Lisa: Okay, tell us about that. Tell us about it. So you were pushed out of your comfort zone, because you just got a grip on this thing, the crazy worker.
Robert: So Mitchell had a consultant, and his name was Ray. His name still is Ray, coincidentally. And he said, ‘Yeah, I think you should promote Bobby, just a small promotion to head trainer. Not like fitness manager, just head trainer’. And when they approached me, it was almost like they told me like, I had to euthanise my pet. It was horrible. I was not excited about this. I was like, ‘Oh, thanks. But no, thanks. I love where I'm at.’
Lisa: Yep. ‘I didn’t want to grow.’
Robert: Well, they had a response to that. They said, ‘There’s two directions you can go in this company, you could go up, or you can go out’. And they fired me that day.
Lisa: Wow! Because you wouldn’t go up?
Robert: They’re like, ‘You've chosen out. And that's okay. That's your decision’. And I was devastated. Like that my identity is connected to that place. And on my way out the door, Mitchell's like, ‘Come into my office.’ And he’s sitting across from me, and he kind of looked like a very muscular, like an extremely muscular version of Burt Reynolds at the time, which was very intimidating, by the way. And he puts his feet up on the desk, and he's leaning back, and he's eating an apple. He says, ‘You know, I heard a rumour that you're recently unemployed. And so I would imagine, your schedules opened up quite a bit this week. You know, coincidentally, we're interviewing for a head trainer position. You might want to come in and apply because you've got nothing to lose’. What a complete and total cock. And I say that, with love, gratitude, gratitude, and love. So I showed up —
Lisa: Knew what you needed.
Robert: I remember, I showed up in a wrinkly button-down shirt, that is not properly ironed, which was brought to my attention. And I got the job. And I was the worst manager you've ever met in your life because first of all, my motivation was not to serve my team. My motivation was not to disappoint Mitchell. And that was the wrong place for your head to be in, if you have the audacity to step into a leadership position. Whether you tell yourself you were forced into it or not, fact of the matter is ‘No, I could have chosen unemployment, I would have done something else. I chose this. Your team is your major responsibility.’ And that that perspective has served me in my career, but it well, it's also been problematic. So I had people quitting because for me, I was in the gym at 5am. And I took two-hour breaks during the afternoon and then I was in the gym till 10 o'clock at night, 11 o'clock at night. I expected you to do the same thing. So, I didn't understand the worldview and the needs and the aspirations and the limitations and the people on my team. So people started quitting.
I started doing horribly within my position. And then Mitchell brought in another consultant, and he gave me some advice. I didn't take it as advice at the time, but it changed everything. And it changed rapidly. This guy's name is Jamie, I don’t remember his surname. But he sat me down and he said, ‘So I understand you have a little bit of trouble’. Yeah, no shit, man. Really perceptive. ‘So, just tell me, who do you work for?’ So, ‘I work for Mitchell’. He said, ‘No, no, but who do you really work for?’ I thought, ‘Oh. Oh, right. Yeah. The general manager of the gym. Brian, I work for Brian’. So nope, who do you really work for? I thought it must be the fitness manager, Will. So, ‘I work for Will’. He’s like, ‘But who do you work for?’ And now I'm starting to get really irritated. I'm like, yeah, this guy's a bit thick. I don't know how many ways I can explain, I've just pretty much named everybody. Who do you reckon I work for? He said, ‘No, you just named everyone who should be working for you?’
Lisa: Yeah, you got that one down.
Robert: ‘Have a single person you work for? Who are your trainers?’ He said, ‘Here, let me help you out. Imagine for a second, all of your trainers got together, and they pooled their life savings. They scraped up every bit of resource that they could to open up a gym. Problem is, they're not very experienced. And if they don't get help, they're going to lose everything. They're going to go out of business. They go out and they hire you as a consultant. In that scenario, who do you think you'd work for?’ I was like, ‘Oh, I'm the one that's thick. I've worked for them’. Because in every interaction you have, it made such a dip because it sounds counterintuitive. But he said, ‘In every meeting and every interaction, whether it's a one-on-one meeting, team meeting, every time you approach someone on the floor to try to help them, or you think you're going to correct them, come from that perspective and deliver it through that lens’. And things started to change rapidly. That was one of two things that changed.
The second thing that changed is Mitchell believed, because he would listen to self-help tapes, it inspired him. So he would have me listen to self-help tapes. And he believed that oration in front of a group public speaking was culturally galvanising. And in a massive team meeting where we had three facilities at the time, where he brought in a couple of hundred people for a quarterly meeting. He had me stand up and speak. Oh, man. I know you've done a lot of podcasting and you do a lot of public speaking in front of audiences. You know that experience where you get up to speak but your brain sits right back down?
Lisa: Yeah. And you're like, as Craig was saying the other day, ‘It doesn't matter how many times you do it, you're still absolutely pecking yourself.’ Because you want to do a really good job and you go, ‘This is the day I'm going to screw it up. I'm going to screw it up, even though I've done it 10,000 times. And I’ve done a brilliant job. Then it’s coming off.’
Robert: If you’re not nervous in front of an audience, you've got no business being there. That is very disrespectful. I agree with that. I mean, this is coming from, in my opinion, one of the greatest speakers in the world. And I'm not just saying that because Craig's my mate, and he gives me oatmeal every time I come out to Melbourne. I'm saying that because he's just phenomenal and authentic in front of a room. But I had that experience and I'm standing up brainless in front of the room. And as I start to realize that I am choking. I'm getting so nervous. Now this is back in the 1990s, and I was wearing this boat neck muscle shirt that said Gold's Gym, and these pair of workout pants that were called T-Michaels, they were tapered at the ankles, but they ballooned out. You know the ones I’m talking about? And I had a lot of change in my pocket. And all you hear in the room, as my knees were shaking, you can hear the change rattling, which wasn't doing anything for my self-confidence. And just instantly I was like, ‘Right, you're either going to epically fail at your job right here. Or you are going to verbatim with intensity, recite word for word, like everything you remember from Dennis Waitley’s Psychology of Winning track for positive self-determination’. Sorry, Dennis, I did plagiarize a bit. And I said it with passion. Not because I'm passionate, because I knew if I didn't say it with fierce intensity, nothing but a squeak will come out of my mouth,
Lisa: And the jingle in the pocket
Robert: And the jingle in the pocket. And at the end of that, I got a standing ovation. And that’s not what moved me.
Lisa: No?
Robert: What moved me was weeks ago, I was clueless in my job. I got this advice from Jamie on, ‘You work for them. They are your responsibility. They are entrusted to you. Don’t treat people like they work for you.’ Now I had this, this situation happened. And my trainers avoided me a month ago when I got promoted. But now they were knocking on my office door, ‘Hey, can I talk to you? Would you help me’? And it just clicked. The key to pulling yourself out of pain and suffering and despair is to focus on lifting up others.
Lisa: Being of service.
Robert: That was it. I thought I could be good at something. And what I'm good at is not only, it's terrifying before you engage in it, but it's euphoric after, and it can help other people. I can generate value by developing and working through others.
Lisa: This is like gold for management and team leaders and people that are in charge of teams and people is, and I see this around me and some of the corporations where get to work and consultants stuff is this was very much this top-down mentality. ‘I'm the boss. You’re doing what I say because I'm the boss’. And that doesn't work. It might work with 19-year-olds who have no idea in the world.
Robert: It reeks of inexperience. You think you're the boss because you've had certain qualities, and that's why you got promoted — do what I say. You are a detriment to the company — and I know how many people are fucked off and calling bullshit. I don't care. I mean, not to toot my own horn. Like anything I've ever accomplished, I've learned I have accomplished through hiring the right people and having a team that's better than me. But I’ve been in so many management positions, from the very bottom to the very top of multiple organizations I've consulted all over the world, you are only as good as your team. And to borrow from the late great Peter Drucker, ‘The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer. And your most valuable customer’s your internal customer, the team that you hire. Because unless you are speaking to every customer, unless you are engaging with every customer complaint, unless you are engaging in every act of customer service on your own —' which means your business is small, which is fine. But if it's a lot, you're not ‘— you could scale that, it is always your team. And your job is to create and keep your internal customer by serving them with, at the very least, with the same tenacity, sincerity and intention that you are serving your external customer. If you don't do that, you're going to be shit as a leader. And honestly, I don't give a fuck what anybody thinks about that. Because I have heard so many opinions from people who are absolute — they've got a ton of bravado, they beat their chest, but they are ineffective. And it's extraordinary what you can accomplish when you know how to be, number one, hire the right person. Number two set expectations clearly — clearly, specifically. Number three, understand what motivates each individual, as an individual person and as a team, and then develop that team's capacity individually and collectively to channel that capability towards the achievement of a common vision, of a common monthly target. Period.
Lisa: Wow. So that's just, that’s one whole lot going on in one.
Robert: That is leadership in a nutshell.
Lisa: Yeah. And this is the tough stuff because it's easier said than done. I mean, I'm trying to scale our businesses and grow teams and stuff. And number one, hiring the right people is a very big minefield. And number two, I've started to realize in my world that there's not enough for me to go around. I can't be in 10 places and 10 seats at once. You're getting overwhelmed. You're trying to help the universe and you're one person, so you're trying to replicate yourself in the team that you have, and provide the structure. And then you also need those people where you're weak, like I'm weak at certain aspects. I'm weak at technology, I'm hopeless at systems. I know my weaknesses. I know my strengths, so.
Robert: I resemble that comment.
Lisa: Yeah, In trying to get those people where you, that are better than you. Not as good, but better than you. And never to be intimidated because someone is brilliant at something. They're the ones you want on your team, because they are going to help with your deficits. And we've all got deficits and blind spots and things that we're not good over we don't love doing. And then trying to develop those team members so that you're providing them and treating them respectfully, looking after them, educating them. And that takes a lot of time too, and it's really hard as a smallish business that's trying to scale to go from there wearing a thousand hats. And a lot of people out there listening will be in similar boats as ours, like, wearing a hundred hats and trying to do multitasking, getting completely overwhelmed, not quite sure how to scale to that next level, where you've got a great team doing a whole lot of cool stuff. And then realizing the impact that you can have as tenfold or a hundredfold.
Robert: Absolutely. And I'm not really a good business person, per se, like I've owned a few businesses myself, I've worked within quite a few businesses. And I think what I'm good at, and this goes back to another person that I worked for shortly after Gold's Gym. So Gold's Gym was sold, that's a whole story you don't need to get into. This is an interesting guy. I was doing consulting, I was just going out and doing public speaking, I had independent clients. And I crossed paths with an individual named David Barton. This is someone you should get on your podcast. Talk about an interesting individual. And David Barton had the one of the most unique and sexy edgy brands in New York City. And that's when you had a lot of competition with other highly unique, sexy, edgy brands. And he was the first person — he coined the phrase, ‘Look better naked,’ it was actually him. That's the guy. It was on the cover of New York Magazine. I mean, he was constantly, like his club in Vogue, at Harper's Bazaar, he ended up hiring me as his head of training. And his company at that time in the 1990s, which is quite the opposite of the mentality, the highest position you could ever achieve in his company was trainer. It was all about the training, and it made a difference culturally, and it made a difference in terms of like we were probably producing more revenue per club and personal training at that point than almost anyone else in the world, with the exception of maybe Harpers in Melbourne. So this is how far me and Craig go back actually.
Lisa: Wow. It’s that right.
Robert: Yeah, because we had found out about each other just a few years after that.
Lisa: Some of that Craig Harper.
Robert: Craig Harper, yeah, when he had his gyms. So we were introduced by a guy named Richard Boyd, a mutual friend who's like, you got to meet this guy, because he's doing what you were doing. And it all started when I went into David Barton gym, and I just thought, this is a different world. This is another level. Am I in over my head? So again, it was that doubt, it was that uncertainty.
Lisa: The imposter syndrome.
Robert: But I did. Yeah, and I think we all have, and I think the only people who don't have imposter syndrome are imposters. Because if you're fraudulent, you wouldn't engage in the level of self-honesty, and humility and conscientiousness, to go ‘Am I fraudulent, is there something that I’m missing’? Only a con artist never considers whether or not they're fraudulent, it's ‘Does that keep you stuck? Or does that help you to get better and more authentic, more sincere?’
So I had the presence of mind to ask David a very important question. And I said, ‘David, if there was like two things, or three things that I can do in this company, exceedingly well, what two or three things would best serve the member, the company as a whole, and of course, my career here with you?’ And David leaned back and he did one of these dozens of things he gave me, literally. And he sat there for — it must have been like five seconds — it felt like an eternity and I'm thinking, ‘Oh my god, that that was the stupidest question I could possibly ask. He probably thinks I should have this whole, like sorted out. After all, he hired me, or am I going to get sacked today?’ And then I was like, ‘I can't get sacked. My house just got ransacked by the FBI’. That was a totally different story. He comes, he leans forward. And he says, ‘Two things. Two things you got to do. Number one,’ and a paraphrase, but it was something very similar to, ‘I want you to be a connoisseur of talent, like a sommelier is a connoisseur of wine. I want you to hire interesting, and great trainers. That's number one.’ And he just sat there again. And I'm like, I think it was a power move. Looking back, it was a power move.
Lisa: Using the silence.
Robert: What’s number two, David? And he said, ‘Train the shit out of them. And when you're done with that, here's number three, train them again. Number four, train them again. Number five, train them again.’ And that stuck with me. And a year later, I wound up leaving David Barton, and I come back to work with him periodically over the course of many years, and I personally loved the experience every time. We’re still good friends today. And I went to NASM, and I became a presenter, senior presenter, and eventually I became the director of professional development for the National Academy of Sports Medicine. And I brought that with me. And trust me, there was times when I was quite a weirdo, because I thought quite differently than then a team of educators and clinicians. But it helped, and it served me well, and served me throughout my life. So I am shit at so many aspects of business. But I am really good, and probably because I'm very committed to recruiting people with the same level of insight, precision, intuition and sophistication that a sommelier would approach a bottle of wine.
Lisa: Oh, I need to talk to you about my business at some point. I need the right people because I keep getting the wrong one.
Robert: That, I'm very confident I can help. When it comes to recruiting and selection and hiring and training and development, that is my world.
Lisa: That’s your jam.
Robert: And because anything I've ever accomplished, it's totally through other people. It's because I hired people that were a lot smarter than me. It's funny because that's another piece of advice I got way back in my Gold Gym days, where one of the consultants was in the room and said, ‘You'll be successful to the degree that you're able and willing to hire people that are more intelligent than you’. And Mitchell quipped, ‘That shouldn’t be too hard for you, Bob’. Okay, yeah. Thanks, Mitchell. Yeah.
Lisa: Oh, yeah, nice, friend. You need those ones, don’t you? Hard case ones.
Hey, Bobby, this has been a really interesting and I feel like we probably need a part two because we haven't even touched on everything because you've had an incredible career. And I just look at you and how you how far you've come and there must have been so much that you haven't even talked about, have been all the really deep stuff that you went through as a child —
Robert: No, I've told you everything. There's nothing else.
Lisa: But how the hell did you actually turn your mindset around and how did you fix yourself and get yourself to the point you know where you are today, but I think we've run out of time for today. So, where can people engage with what you do and where can people find you and all of that sort of good stuff?
Robert: Okay, well, I just started my own podcast. It's decent.
Lisa: Which is awesome because I've been on.
Robert: So if you are looking for, like one of the most dynamic, interesting and inspiring podcasts you've ever encountered, go to The You Project by Craig Harper. If you still have time after that, and you're looking for some decent podcast material, go to The Self Help Antidote, that is my podcast. And I'm on Facebook. Social media is not really where I live. It's not where I want to live. It's not where I like to live, but I'm there. I'm on Facebook. I mean the rest of the older generation, yeah, piss off kids. And I'm on Instagram. I'm occasionally on LinkedIn, but not really. I will be on Clubhouse because I got to find the time
Lisa: What the hell is Clubhouse? I'll never come along.
Robert: Clubhouse — you know, it’s funny, I'm going around talking about Clubhouse. I'm promoting Clubhouse. I don't even know exactly how to use it. I don't know what it is. But I've been invited on it a couple of times to join in and to speak in a seminar. I'm like, “This is amazing. This is a game changer. I love it.” I don't even really talk about, but I'm intending to get on Clubhouse. It's one of those things where, it's like you see someone across the room. It's like, I don't know who she is or what she's about, but there's chemistry.
Lisa: We'll have to look in the Clubhouse.
Robert: I just realized, I'm way too excited about Clubhouse but anyway yeah.
Lisa: It's the beginning of a love affair, you always get over excited at the beginning.
Robert: It’s going to burn out quickly. I will wind up using all the social media platforms.
Lisa: So Bobby, so The Self Help Antidote is your podcast. It's the best way to connect to you. You’ve got a website, too, that people can go to?
Robert: Okay, I'm constructing a Self-Help Antidote website. My website developer is moving a lot more slowly than I thought. I'd have to sack them.
Lisa: Welcome to my world. Everything moves slower in the world of, the new world today.
Hey, Bobby, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for sharing so openly and vulnerably about your past, your childhood, some of the dramas that you went through, and I love your sense of humour. I love what you stand for and how you help people, and you help teams be the best that they can be. And I really appreciate you and I'm very glad that Craig has connected us and Tiffany. Thanks, guys. You guys rock. And we'll get you back again, alright then.
Robert: Thank you so much, Lisa.
That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate, review, and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com
The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.
Sleep is the time for our mind and bodies to reset, regenerate and repair damages that may have accumulated during the day. Undoubtedly, this is a part of our daily routine that is important and can impact our health. Sleep affects our emotional well-being and mental ability, as well as our physical health and energy levels. If you want to face the day with your best self, a good night’s rest is what you need. Thus, we need to learn how to optimise our sleep.
Unfortunately, millions of people worldwide suffer from sleep problems, including snoring and sleep apnoea. These disturbances in your nightly rest prevent you from making the most out of your sleep. Furthermore, you most likely don’t have the tools or knowledge on how to optimise sleep. Frances Anderson is with us today to share her story on how she decided to create a solution for sleep problems after not being able to find one for her snoring.
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‘So it's opening up their whole airway. Because when we’re snoring, you know, we have a normal pillow [and] we’re snoring, what's actually going on [is]—there we are tipping our chin forward onto the chest and blocking off these airways.’
‘And so what often happens is people get woken up by their own lack of breathing, and they've been constantly pulled out getting into that deep sleep phase, which is just absolutely crucial if you want to avoid neurodegeneration.’
‘If you're not sleeping well and getting good quality sleep, you're really going to age quicker. You're really going to damage your cognitive abilities, your memory. And you know, neurodegeneration is a likely chance of it happening further on down the road.’
‘But it's also a relationship issue too. You know, you've got the clinical issues with habitual snoring and sleep apnoea. But you've got relationship issues, too, that there's more than one person involved with this.’
‘But we knew we had a product that was going to solve a problem. And that problem was habitual snoring and mild to medium sleep apnoea.’
‘Without good sleep—all of those things: you can be eating perfect, you can be exercising perfect. But if you’re sleep’s out, you're not going to get the optimum out of your body.’
‘So it’s a wellness product, absolutely… While it was developed for snoring, you don’t have to be a snorer to use it.’
Frances Anderson, the founder and Managing Director of Patney, had suffered from snoring for most of her life.
She has experienced the negative effects caused by interrupted sleep and consequent fatigue. Frances could see the detrimental impact snoring was having on her health and her relationships. But it wasn’t until Frances’s husband told her one morning that she had scared the life out of him during the night because she had stopped breathing; this comment meant she was heading for sleep apnoea.
She had tried various anti-snoring products, including surgery, without success. So she decided to take things into her own hands. She set out to solve a problem that she and millions of other people experience.
Fast forward to today, the Patney Sleep Positioner pillow is no longer a dream. With the product being non-invasive, comfortable, and individualised, it is proven to control snoring for thousands of customers.
Connect with Frances and learn more about the Patney Sleep Positioner on her website. You can also send her an email at goodnight@patney.com or find her on Instagram.
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To pushing the limits,
Lisa
Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host, Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.
Lisa Tamati: Lisa Tamati, your host of Pushing the Limits. Welcome back again for another excellent episode. I hope you're going to enjoy this one. I have Frances Anderson, who is the founder of Patney pillows, to guest today. You may think, ‘What? Sounds really weird’. But this is a very important topic. This is all about sleep optimisation, how to stop snoring, looking at sleep apnea and helping improve your health through correct sleep.
So, Frances is the founder of a company called Patney pillows that has sleep positioners. And this has all been clinically tested to help people with snoring, and this is an episode around sleep optimisation basically. So I do hope you enjoy this. If at the end of this interview, you're interested in trying out one of Frances's pillows, you can use the code ‘Lisa’ at checkout for a 5% discount on the actual product too. I don't usually do episodes where it's all based around a particular product. But this invention is pretty unique in the world. And it is helping people with their health and their sleep. So I'd really like you to listen to this and get some good information if you're dealing with anyone who has snoring, anyone who has sleep apnea, if you want to optimise your sleep, then this is the episode for you.
I'd also like to refer you back to a couple of other episodes that I've done around these topics. One are with James Nestor, one with Patrick McKeown and one with James Morris: two on breathing, and one on sleep apnea. If you're interested in further finding out more about optimising your sleep. There's also one with Dave Liow, on the science of light and how that affects your sleep. So make sure you go and check out all those podcasts as well in the back catalogue.
Before we head over to the show a reminder we have launched our premium membership group, our VIP group. If you want to come and join us at the pushing the limits podcast if you want to support us getting this great content out and we would love you to come and join our membership group, our patron group. It's only a few dollars a month. You know, really is a cup of coffee a month to be involved, and we have a lot of member benefits and we would love you to check it all out. You can go to patron, P-A-T-R-O-N patron.lisatamati.com for all the information on that.
And another reminder to check out my latest and greatest longevity and anti-ageing supplement NMN, which stands for nicotinamide mononucleotide. Now this is a supplement that helps upregulate the sirtuin genes which are longevity genes in the body. Without going into all the science. If you want to check out the episodes that I've done on this with Dr. Elena Seranova, a molecular biologist, then check those out on the podcast as well. And if you want to find out about this longevity and anti-ageing supplement if you're like me and you're getting on in, but long in the tooth, and you want to make sure that you slow the ageing process down and that you optimise your your health and your vitality and your lifespan then head over to nmnbio.nz, nmnbio.nz. And I highly recommend going and reading the book Lifespan by Dr. David Sinclair, a Harvard Medical School researcher. That is why I got into this. So if you want to know and do a deep dive into the science behind NMN and upregulating the sirtuin genes in autophagy, and know all about the sort of stuff that's going to help you live a longer, healthier life, then please go and check out all those resources. Right, now over to the show with Frances Anderson.
Lisa: Welcome back to Pushing the Limits today. And I have an amazing, lovely guest. And we've actually got a bit of a backstory. We already recorded this interview and then I went and lost it all on my computer somehow. Don't ask me how.
So Frances Anderson, thank you very much for joining me again. Very embarrassing situation when you go and delete an entire interview. So I know you probably want to throttle me but, today we're going to be talking a little bit about your story and this amazing invention. I want to call it invention that you've made. Now Frances is the founder of the Patney pillow or sleep positioner. And this is going to be an episode all about optimising his sleep and why snoring is bad for you and all of that sort of good stuff.
So welcome to the show, Frances again. So I think we'll start with a little bit of a backstory. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and then why you got into this, making this invention?
Frances Anderson: Well I'm the snorer, it's as simple as that. I had tried all sorts of things, including surgery, and that lasted about as long as it took the swelling to go down, so that wasn't effective. And I've tried most things and they just didn't solve the problem. And it got to the stage where I was beginning to get sleep apnea, so stopping breathing and my husband, one morning said to me, ‘You frightened the living daylights out of me last night, you stopped breathing. You got to do something about this.’ And so I sort of walked away and thought, ‘I don't know,’ What am I going to do, I’ve tried everything’.
And so I set about trying to find a solution for my snoring. And that took a little bit of time. I have to say it's not a great thing to try and invent something to sleep on, at two o'clock in the morning you're busy trying to design this thing, how the hell do you stop snoring. So eventually I did and then I felt that I'd solved my problem and carried on working like everybody else in my normal job and then a couple of friends said, ‘Can I have one’? And at that stage I thought I was the only female that snored.
Lisa: Let's dig into that little bit for a second. A lot of people have issues with snoring and for me that's sort of acceptable. Sort of it's like one of those things, I mean sort of, ‘Yeah, you snore, so who cares’? For women it's a little bit more embarrassing and like you thought you were the only woman who snored, and you're a tiny lady, very slim and, you said you struggled with snoring even in your young years, like in your teenage years. How did that make you feel?
Frances: Well I first knew that I snored at 13 when I went to boarding school. And of course you're in dormitories, and got horribly ostracised, and found I found that incredibly embarrassing. But also incredibly stressful because I didn't know how to solve it. And you know it's fine for people to say, ‘Stop snoring’, but how? So I went to the boarding school years and but still the snoring was a problem, but as I got older it became kind of a more of a problem and but I inherited from my mother, so it's probably not quite right that I thought I was the only female that there was that snored. My mother did and she was a chronic snore and with the knowledge we have now, obviously she had sleep apnea or really bad sleep apnea. And my problem, she died of dementia, and they are now looking at links between dementia with—sorry, with chronic snoring or sleep apnea, you're starving your brain of oxygen. Because it can stop breathing as much as 100 times an hour. So sleep apnea is huge.
Lisa: And we've done a—I've got a backstory with us too with my mom having sleep apnea after her stroke and I think she probably had it before it even, and doing a sleep assessment and realising that her SpO2 levels were down at around 70% at their worst time in the night, and that she was stopping breathing hundreds of times a night and actually knocking off her brain cells at a point we you know after the aneurysm which he didn't have a heck of a lot left.
And so this work came on my radar then and getting a sleep apnea assessment and realising that she was in deep trouble and having to have a CPAP machine and this is a problem that, as you know, not really well understood people sort of think snoring is just annoying. It's not just annoying, it's disrupting the sleep of the partner, obviously, in the bed which has its own health consequences for that person as well, or the other people in the dormitory in your case. But it is also really damangeling your health and there is a huge correlation now between Alzheimer's and dementia and neurodegenerative diseases and sleep apnea. This is—hence doing this podcast because it is a very important health topic.
Snoring is not just a pleasant thing and it's not just overweight old men that snore, Which is the common sort of perception. And we had a couple of experts on the show breathing experts, James Nestor and Patrick McKeown have both best-selling authors of breathing books, Breath and The Oxygen Advantage. And they talk about, you know, just how important the breathing is to the whole health and, you know, nasal breathing and in the talk of how important that piece of the puzzle is. And, you know, they go so far as to tape the mouth shut at night, which I do, actually, in order to help with the nasal breathing, which is optimising my breathing. I don't have sleep apnea, I don't snore. But that helps optimise if you like.
So you managed though, without doing, having a CPAP machine, to get on top of your snoring. And I think a lot of people would be interested in this because having a CPAP machine is brilliant. And thank goodness for them as I don't think my mum would be here now. But they're also very intrusive. A lot of people just won't comply with them. You've got this big mask over your face. And it's a very important machine. And the invention that you've made, the sleep positioner that you've made, doesn't replace CPAP. CPAP has its place. We need those. But for certain people this can help.
So you managed to—what is the sleep positioner? What is the special pillow that we're talking about?
Frances: Yeah, well, it's interesting. It took me four years to actually bring it to fruition. While I solved my own snoring within a few months, I had only just made it out of retail materials. So to commercialise that I needed to have a molded product. And so that took even more time to be able to then move it into latex. And we chose latex because of the properties. Because it's antibacterial, antifungal, anti-dust mite, it's temperature neutral, and it’s got a long life to always make from the rubber from the rubber trees, it’s close to memory foam which is made from petroleum.
Lisa: Yeah, I didn't know that. That's amazing.
Frances: So we wanted a natural product. And when I got in touch with the manufacturer, I thought I could just show them the drawings, and they could whip me up a mold, and hey, we'd have our pillows. But no, I had to say instead about trying to cut latex and build it into a shape that could be molded. And I learned that I could only do that with a scalpel. And I saw—I had made about 60 of these and my trialists would have a gallery session and let me know, said there are wedges on all sorts of exotic and make it the right shape. So eventually then we went and got the bulk made.
So the pillow is about—we call it a pillow because—sorry, we call it a sleep positioner. But in pillow is short for your life. So it looks nothing like your normal pillow. And some people get a bit of a surprise when they see it because it's a slightly different shape. But then your normal pillow doesn't solve snoring. So obviously has to be a particular shape and design. If I said to stand up straight, you find your chest comes up and out a little bit when you do that. And so there's a shoulder pad. And so the shoulder pad lifts your chest so that you can breathe right through your nasal cavity right down and into your lungs. So it's opening up your airways, like you do when you stand up straight. And then the main body of the pillow has a magic spotlight, if you like, called the sweet spot. And by positioning yourself here, in this shoulder pad, we can control the snoring.
Lisa: So it's opening up their whole airway so—because when we’re snoring, you know we have a normal pillow and we’re snoring, what's actually going on there? Are we tipping our chin forward onto the chest and rocking off the airways? There's probably a number of reasons, people who are overweight or have a big circumference of the neck, bodybuilders and so on. They have a lot of pressure going on to the airway just from the size of their necks. So is there you know is this is this really just it's repositioning that whole airway so that it's opened up. That's the whole premise behind it.
Frances: Yes, it is. It's about good sleep posture, and about opening up your airway and it's for both back and side sleepers, and sort of half tummy sleep on it. But it's not for pure tummy sleepers. And so the shape of the pillow supports the jaw when you sleep on your side, and on your back. And of course, keeping yourself in that nice position so that you can’t easily drop your feet down. The whole thing is to prevent the feet from dropping down and cutting off your airway. And getting—ike people who wake themselves up in the night. They sometimes hear themselves snore. Yeah, but they've actually stopped breathing, and they’re hearing themselves actually gasping for a breath..
Lisa: Wow. So they've actually been working out and saying, well, you know, on the podcast that I've done around sleep and breathing, when we, when we sleep, we need to get into this deep sleep phase, which as we get older, gets more and more difficult. We have not, you know, non-REM sleep and REM sleep. And we have different levels where we're in a deep, deep sleep where we're actually paralysed and unable to move, and their body does it in order to, we have all these dreams, otherwise we'd be living them out. But when we're in this really deep unconscious state, we're completely unaware of the position of our body and what we're actually doing and what's actually happening with our circulation and our breathing and, and so what often happens is people get woken up by their own lack of breathing, and they've been constantly pulled out of or getting into that deep sleep phase, which is just absolutely crucial. If you want to avoid neurodegeneration, you need that deep sleep.
So when you're being pulled out, and you're in only getting into a shallow state of sleep, and then being pulled out again, as you have to gasp for air and wake yourself up, the body is waking yourself up, so you don't bloody suffocate, basically. And it does it very well, but it is stopping you getting that really restorative, important deep sleep happening, which is really going to have effects on things like your emotional state, your ability to deal with stressors, your ability to function properly, basically, during the day.
And as time goes on, then it can affect your memory. And then it can affect, you know, the whole neurodegeneration side of things where you're not cleaning out the tau proteins that they talk about in relation to Alzheimer's. And we're doing this, there's something called glymphatic cleaning at night. And you know, I'm not an expert on sleep, I'm going to get Dr. Matthew Walker, I hope, on who can explain this way better than me. But there is this brainwashing effect that's going on when we're in certain levels of sleep, and it's the glymphatic system. And if we're not getting that really deep, you know, continuous sleep, we're not getting that. And so we're not cleaning out these damaged proteins, if you like, and they start to accumulate in the brain. And these can lead into neurodegenerative diseases. And I've probably butchered that from a science perspective. So, but you get the whole point.
If you're not sleeping well and getting good quality sleep, you're really going to age quicker, you're really going to damage your cognitive abilities, your memory, and you know, neurodegeneration is you know, unlikely chance of it happening further on down the road as you experienced with your dear mum. So this was really crucial for you because you didn't want to go down that same path having seen your mum go down there.
Frances: No, absolutely not. But it's also a relationship issue too. You got the clinical issues with habitual snoring and sleep apnea. But you've got relationship issues, too. There's more than one person involved with this. There’s generally two people involved with this.
Lisa: The one is the sufferer.
Frances: Oh it’s the sufferer. And so it's really important to try and resolve this for your partner's sake. Because while you're not sleeping well, and you will find that he'll be tired in the daytime, really tired sort of mid-afternoon, falling asleep at night,before bedtime, if you like. And it also, just that general well-being that fuzziness in the head and and such like. But your partner is also suffering from sleep deprivation. They're the ones that have been woken on a regular basis while you supposedly sleep through.
And you know, there's that lock in the morning that says, ‘Here's your star rating from a’... Generally the partner that has to go to the spare room, because they're the one that's being disturbed. So they're having to go and get into a cold bed somewhere else in the house. And or, you know, people don't necessarily have a spare bedroom and they're sleeping on a couch to try and just actually get some sleep. So it is, it's a social problem within your own home. And, you know, it creates arguments.
Lisa: It definitely does.
Frances: It’s very disturbing and, and you've got two people feeling very tired during the day. So it is important to get both parties to get a good night's sleep. And so now and again, you may store a little, but just turn over and you know, reposition yourself on the pillow and you're satisfied again. And so we have an 86% success rate, which we're really proud of.
Lisa: Yeah, absolutely.
Frances: And you know, we've sold thousands of these now. So we know our statistics are right, because we give a 30-night money back guarantee if somebody is not happy. So we know for a fact that we have the same 86% success rate. But also we didn't go into this blindly there and just you know, hit the back with a second session. We put it through the Otago University, the WellSleep Center, at Berlin Hospital in Wellington. And a wonderful lady, Dr Angela Campbell who was in charge of that study. And it came out really, really well there too. In fact, we wouldn't have commercialised it if we didn't put all these resources into it, if we didn't believe in our product. But we knew we had a product that was going to solve a problem, and that problem was habitual snoring and mild to medium sleep apnea. We don't advertise it as a product that's going to solve serious sleep apnea because those people do have a serious condition,
Lisa: It can be a neurological thing. So in the case of mum, it's actually brain switching off in the wrong times in the night. Yeah, you know, so we can’t affect that. However, you know, like, even in a situation like with mum, I get up at four in the morning to check on her. And often she's taken the mask off, because she's had enough of it. And her argument to me is ‘Well, I'm not sleeping properly. You know, like, I'm not in the deep sleep at that hour. So it's okay.’ I’m like, ‘Mum, when you're asleep, have no idea what level of sleep you're in. And why would you think that in the early morning, you are not going to have sleep apnea, whereas at midnight, you are? This will be an extra backup system for me.
Frances: We do, we get people that buy the pillow because they know that they whip off this CPAP machine during the night. And so some people sleep with the CPAP machine and the Patney when they whip that CPAP off, they still have some protection for the rest of the night,
Lisa: Because neither—you know, like, even the CPAP machine isn't 100% coverage, you know, like it's blowing air down into your lungs, which you know, has its own certain amount of problems. You can't nasal breathe really when you've got a sleep apnea machine or at least mum can’t. And it dries your mouth out, and it does all these, it's not very nice having this you can't turn over very easily et cetera, et cetera. So it's, it is a little bit difficult having one of these. But in combination, and this is the perfect, you know, situation to be able to have it as a backup. If she does take it off in at least hopefully her chest is more open. Hopefully she'll breathe better, if not 100% perfect.
Frances: I mean, we talked before about big people being the snorers. Yeah. That's a bit of a fallacy. I believed that too. But no, I'm 58 kgs. Yeah. So I'm not a big person. And probably 25% to 30% of the sales that I make to a woman in that size bracket. So our problem is narrow airways.
Lisa: Yes.
Frances: But then if I look at it, the male, my male customers, majority of them would be five foot nine up to six foot and be in that 80 to 100 kg bracket. So they're not huge. They're not huge men. And they’re not overweight. You know, the big fellas, I don't see that much of.
Lisa: Really?
Frances: Yeah. But also, you know, if you're looking at females in particular, 42% of my customers are female, and 58% male. So that's quite a big number of females.. And also, after menopause, about 60% of women snore. But yeah, something else to look forward to ladies here.
Lisa: Yeah, we're in the middle of it. Thanks very much. It's awesome fun, this menopausal thing. So when your estrogen levels drop, and there's a big correlation between menopause and then worsening cardiovascular outcomes and so on. I wonder if part of that has to do with the sleep issues that come along with that, or whether it's because of the drop in the estrogen, which is particular for the heart. It's probably a combination of many things. But as your health starts to deteriorate because you're not getting good sleep, then you get things like, when you're not sleeping well, like shift workers for a start.
For example, you know, I've been dealing with this issue with my husband as well, he's doing shift work, shift workers die earlier. But that's pretty much a given. They are more prone to diabetes and cardiovascular, metabolic disorders and cardiac neurodegenerative disorders. If they're doing shift work where they have to be awake at night, they tend to be more overweight, they have problems with their appetite regulation, their hormone situations, all of these things are affected by sleep. So okay, that's for shift workers. And we need our shift workers because they keep the country going when we need them to be. But they need extra help. And then they also—we need to realise that, okay, so that's what's happening if you have to stay up all night, and your Circadian rhythms are all out of whack. And the rest of us get to sleep normal sort of hours. But if we're not sleeping well, again, this is going to have all of those knock-on effects.
And this is why I think this episode is really important. I don't usually do an episode with something on a particular product. But I think that this is a product that I've found that is actually going to help change people's lives. And therefore, it's really worth doing a whole episode on this because it's something that's easy to try out and see whether it works for you and see if it improves your thing, because it's the basis of all health is sleep.
As a health coach, as a running coach, before I deal with what exercise I'm going to get you to do or what nutrition I'm going to get you to eat or what times a day and all that sort of thing. I have to look at your sleep first. Your sleep is the basis. Without good sleep, all of those things, you can be eating perfect, you can be excising perfect, but if your sleep’s out, you're not going to get the optimum out of your body. So I think this is actually at the base. This is the thing we need to sort out first is your sleep. And a part of that is making sure that you're not snoring. And so I think trying their Patney pillow is a really good thing to have a go ahead if you are dealing with this.
And I haven't seen this type of product anywhere else in the world. I mean, I haven't searched the world. I'm sure there's somebody else maybe in the world has come up with something similar. But is this pretty unique?
Frances: Yeah, it is. We have actually paid into it and several countries and the major countries, because it is quite unique. I suppose the other thing I should tell your listeners about or your viewers about is that it's actually individualised. As far as we know, we are one of only three commercialised individualised pillows in the world. And so the pillow is unique to the user. And so we have an algorithm and we're developing that further and further all the time to determine what weight and size, well the size doesn't change. But what weight the pillow is, in the depths of it. So we compression test them, we know exactly what height it is. And so we measure that to the customer.
So we ask our customers some basic questions like, do they have a broad, very broad, average narrow shoulder. And if you cut them other questions like that, they don't need to measure themselves, all they have to do is compare themselves to their peers who are their height, roughly their height or weight. So we've been able to do that. And that is incredibly unique.
So our biggest customers being two meters tall and 170 kgs, so a fairly big boy. But we can cater for bigger still. And for everybody underneath that they're smaller, slightly about 4 foot 6 and about 45 kgs. So from the teeny, tiniest little lady who did snore, and through to the biggest fellows so we can cope with any body shape. In particular, we get a lot of tradies, strummers, sportspeople in particular, who have built up a lot of muscle around the necks or shoulders.
Lisa: Bodybuilders have issues with this.
Frances: We can deal with that though. So it's quite a unique product.
Lisa: Now I want to dive into a little bit the story of the name because this was a very cute story. It's called the Patney pillow. When I first talked to her I thought your name was Patney. You said it, but it's not quite right is it? Tell us about the story behind this.
Frances: My surname is Anderson, so very Scottish surname. Patney is a made-up name. My mum's—because my mum was a major snorer, and I inherited it from her. We were trying to think of what we would call the pillow. And so one day, one of my grandson—not my grandson, my mum's grandsons—walked into the house. Her name was Patch and he called ‘How you going Patneyneckers’? And she grabbed hold on for calling her that. The Patney stuck. And the grandkids used to call her Patney, and so we thought well what better name for the company and the product. We’ll call it Patney.
Lisa: What a lovely tribute to your mum. It's a cute name so the Patney pillow and it sort of sticks, rolls off the tongue quite nicely. And you know, this is the thing like you lost your mum to dementia. You were fearful that that was the track that you were going to be going on, and therefore you came up—and this is what I love the number eight wire mentality of you like, ‘Okay I've got a problem no one else can fix this for me I've had surgery I've tried every other thing there is around, I'm gonna fix it myself’. Are you very much like that, is that your approach to life?
Frances: Well I get all the things yeah. It has to be non-invasive, that was the other thing that was really important to me. Because I had tried a lot of invasive products like surgery and found that that didn't work. And so for me, it was really important that it was non-invasive.
It’s interesting we did a survey before we commercialised and asked people what was the most important thing about a product that could stop snoring and the partner said, ‘Stop snoring’, that was the most important thing, that they would stop snoring. We had a list, then it was ‘Comfort and such’ like. The snorers said ‘Well comfort is the most important thing’. For the partner, they didn't give a toss about comfort. They just wanted it away and if it's a torture chamber, I don't care you know. It's non-invasive, it's very comfortable and it has to be both for me that was for sure.
Lisa: Yeah and you know I sent you a photo of my husband using his one and you know he's loving it. He stopped snoring and that's you know improved my sleep knowing and improved the marriage because I'm not hitting him in the middle of the night waking him up because he's snoring like a trooper. And I'm worried, like your husband like when he would be snoring in and he would stop breathing and that would terrify me because I'm like, you know ‘When are you going to take a breath, are you gonna take a breath?’ And then you're like this the whole night you know worried that they're not gonna breathe. So I think it's just fantastic. I don't have to worry about that now. Now he just does the occasional sort of *snoring noises* and then when he's turning over and that's about it and then he goes back and he's good.
And he's very much like, because I, you can imagine in my household I'm the biohacking queen, right. I've got every gadget known to man. And I come home with all of these things for him to try and he's like, ‘Okay here we go again another thing that I'm going to have to add to my daily routine and regime of what Lisa is telling me I've got to do, you know whether it's from hyperbaric to ozone to you know shaking machines and all sorts of infrared light things that you stick up your nose’. And he's always like my guinea pig but he's taken to this like a duck to water.
So I was stoked because I did think he might go, ‘Nah, not doing that’ because you know very much he does that on occasion and ‘I'm not doing it’ you know. I tried to get into the mouth taping thing, that was never in a bar of that. But this is at least something that he's actually adopted. So sorry poor husband he's not here...
Frances: Yeah it reminds me of a story when I had trials when I was back in the prototype stage, and so I've given out these prototypes to the testers and I thought back about four days later to follow them to see how they were, how he was going. And he wasn't there but his wife was there and she said, ‘Oh’ she said ‘I had a terrible night's sleep the first part’. I said ‘What didn't work?’ She said, ‘No I've listened to him snore for 20 years and I thought he was dead’. So I was like, ‘What’s happened?’ ‘He's not doing it!’ Yeah, that upset you.
Lisa: Because you can get actually quite used to that sound a little bit it becomes quite comforting in a weird strange way. It's a bit like that white noise apps that you have. You turn on the white noise to help you sleep sometimes, a little bit like that. But yeah, you slept pretty quite, quickly if they’re not snoring.
So Frances, where to from here for your company? We're going to share the links and so on in the show notes. But can you tell everybody, where can they find out? Where can they reach you, there is a 30-day money back guarantee on this sleep positioner if people want to try it out, where can they find you?
Frances: They can find me on www.patney.com. That's P-A-T-N-E-Y dot com. And there's a wealth of information on our website about how to use. There’s not a lot of testimonials, there's blogs. And there's the story there too. But obviously, we will be offering some special through Lisa as well, too.
Lisa: Yes, we're gonna have a discount code. And we will organise that afterwards. And I'll put that in the show notes too, guys. So if you want to try this out, if you're dealing with snoring, if you're dealing with someone who is snoring, try it out, it's risk-free. Give it a go, it might change your life.
Frances: I think the other important thing too, is you don't have to snore to use it.
Lisa: This is the point.
Frances: Absolutely not. And we get a lot of people who their partner has one. And they've come back to us for one for themselves simply because it just opens up your airways, gives you good sleep posture and breathe easily through the night. And so a lot of people buy it because for more about wellness, as opposed to just snoring. So it’s a wellness product. Absolutely. As well as, while it was developed for snoring, you don't have to be a snorer to use it.
Lisa: A question, and this may be outside the remit of it, but would it help with people with asthma? Because when I was severe asthmatics, especially as a child, I used to sleep like half up, because it would take—would be less pressure on the lungs. Have you had any experience in that realm with asthma at all?
Frances: We've had people with different medical ailments, if you like, like reflux and aspirin and things like that. But we haven't done a study on that to say, ultimately, we get a lot of anecdotal evidence of it. But also people where they've got a really big cold or flu, they find it helps open up their airways as well too, during those years. So I can't say you know, from a medical perspective, that it's going to help. But because it does put you in that very good sleep position, and it does maintain an open airway, it may well help with. Like I said, we have anecdotal evidence.
Lisa: And I think, when you're trying out new things, especially when it's you know, something like a pillow, it takes a little bit of getting used to, isn't it? You'd need a couple of nights for sort of I know with Haisley, he—the first night he was like, ‘Not sure not sure’. And then after that, after a couple of nights he got used to it. And it's the same with mum’s CPAP machine. I've tried to change the mask that she wears so that it's less invasive, but she actually just wants to go back to the thing that she knows, you know, so it is very much a habit-forming thing. And once you push through that initial sort of pushback that you get when you try anything new that can help.
So what do you think—I mean, I think an 86% success rate is huge. And the 14% would just be people who aren't willing to push through that little difficult phase or just don't, you know, aren’t willing to try it. I bet you get a lot of partners buying them and then the person won't even try it out.
Frances: Yeah, the odd one. I mean, there's a myriad of reasons why, you know, that 14%. If I said it was 100% nobody would believe me. Yeah. Nothing, nothing is 100%. So we believe that you know, 86 is pretty good.
Some people have quite complex health issues. And there's more going on than just just the snoring. Some people will, they just can't get used to it. And some of the perhaps the older folks, you know, find that a little bit. But majority of people, it's fine. And we can’t solve everybody's problems. Sometimes plain doesn't solve the snoring problems. And they get their money back, and so there's no loss. We've tried it and for some reason, it doesn't work. There's some people who I believe have got serious sleep apnea. And I advise them to go to a sleep clinic and actually get there what's causing their problem, their snoring to be actually diagnosed and and sorted.
Lisa: Especially if it’s neurological—absolutely obstructive sleep apnea, and then there's neurological reasons for it like mum’s. Like where the brain’s been actually damaged, the brain stem’s damaged, and we can't fix it. And I've just had mum at the sleep clinic last week assessing her data because they record her data every weekend. Unfortunately, she hasn't improved everything else and your brain sort of come right but that aspect hasn't. So she can't ever get off that machine. We need it for life. And thank goodness we have access to that. So there is things, but she can still benefit from this pillow, especially when she takes it off in the middle of the night.
So I think all of these aspects—I really encourage people to go and listen to the episodes with Patrick McKeown and James Nestor. To understand more the whole, ‘Why our jaws even have developed differently than our ancestors, the different reasons for that the foods, the breathing, the nasal breathing, all of those aspects are also very crucial, important pieces of this particular puzzle. And I also did a episode on sleep apnea with James Morris, who used to own all the eating clinics throughout New Zealand and was very instrumental with us and with mum’s situation. So those are—if you're interested in this topic, make sure you go and check out those episodes as well. And try out the Patney pillow just go and order one find out. See if it works for you. If it doesn't send it back.
Frances: Well, you talk to us first.
Lisa: Yeah, find out, ask Frances all about it. See if it's going to be for you. Try it out. And then yeah, see how it goes and give us some feedback.
Frances: But the other thing is too, that if somebody does have a question, we’re only fire ways to telephone. And we've got lots of tips and tricks anyway. Because of course, we don't know what your bedroom environment is like, we don't know how old your mattress is, things like that. But we can overcome those problems as well.
Lisa: Yeah, brilliant. Thank you so much, Frances, for being somebody who thinks outside the box. And, one number eight wire mentality. I've got a problem. I'm gonna fix it. Now I'm going to fix it for everybody else, because this is exactly how I am too, and that's how I've come to do when I do. Have a problem, fix that. Okay, now I can help other people with it. So thank you very much for your time.
Frances: Thank you, Lisa. Thank you.
Lisa: Hi, again, it's me. I hope you enjoyed that interview with Frances. I actually got the code wrong. It's actually a 10% discount. If you want a 10% discount on the Patney pillow, then use the code ‘Lisa’ at checkout. I said 5% in the intro, but I got it wrong. It's actually 10%. So thank you very much Frances for the discount, and go over there and try it out now.
That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate, review, and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.
The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.
Failure happens to everyone; we will experience it at some point in our lives. Despite our sacrifices and hard work, we may not achieve what we set out to do. It is, however, important to approach failure not as the end of a journey but as a crucial lesson. And it doesn’t matter how many times you fail—physical, emotional and mental resilience will take us one step forward towards our eventual success and victory.
Laura Penhaul joins us in this episode to share the story of her expedition across the Pacific Ocean. She describes the preparations she undertook, from planning the expedition to gaining financial support. Laura also talks about the importance of breaking down the journey and being clear with team dynamics in the expedition’s success.
If you want to know more about the makings of strength and mental resilience in a person, then this episode is for you.
For our epigenetics health programme all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/.
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My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within 3 years. Get your copy here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books/products/relentless.
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‘There's people that can go through the same type of thing. And yet one person wakes up, being so thankful that they're alive’ they're now going to make the most of life. And then somebody else that wakes up and they're like, they wish they didn't wake up’.
‘How can I put myself in a situation which is completely unknown, that's kind of gonna make me want to give up? And I want to understand what it is we draw on when we can't give up [and] we've only got one option’.
‘It's all about perspective, isn't it? And it's all about the context that you're in. And this is the thing that I get really passionate about is, I want to optimise people's own elite performance’.
‘It is not a failure unless you don’t learn from it. And leaping sometimes is exactly what you need to do, and it's just not being scared to fall, like just knowing that, you know what, if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. It's got you one step further. And one step closer to finding what the next thing might be’.
‘You kind of just got to crack on and then there's no going back, you can't row backwards, sort of, it's only about having the confidence to step into taking on the Pacific’.
‘You've got to understand that there are things you can't control. So you've done everything you can control. And now the rest is up to the gods, basically. And you're going to have to be able to be adaptable and flexible’.
‘The girls hated confrontation. They weren't used to giving and receiving feedback. That was always felt like a personal threat. I just had to put myself in the barrier first. I be like, “Right, cool, okay, if you're not going to give it and you're going to say everything's rosy when it's not, I’ll pull it out”’.
Laura Penhaul is one of the world's most respected physiotherapists. She helps train many of the top athletes in Olympic sailing and the Paralympics.
Laura is known for her nine-month, 9000-mile crossing of the Pacific in a rowboat. She managed a team of four women known as the Coxless Crew; she was the expedition's team leader and organiser. The expedition is featured in a documentary called Losing Sight of Shore.
Connect with Laura through Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.
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To pushing the limits,
Lisa
Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.
Lisa Tamati: Hi everyone, and welcome back to Pushing the Limits once again. Today, I have another world-leading, actually world-record-holding, superwoman. Now, this lady is Laura Penhaul from England, and Laura is one of the world's most respected physiotherapists. She helps train many of the top athletes in Olympic sailing and in Paralympics with people with disabilities. She's done an awful lot in high-performance sport. But what Laura is really known for is that Laura did a 9,000-mile crossing of the Pacific in a rowboat, you heard that right. Right across the Pacific. Nine months it took and she was the team leader and organiser of this whole expedition. She got four women together to do this epic event. And there is a documentary out called Losing Sight of Shore.
And today we discuss this mammoth expedition that Laura undertook. The funny thing is that Laura hadn't even been a rower before she took this on. But because she had worked so much with high-performance athletes, people pushing the limits of endurance, and people with disabilities doing crazy things. She wanted to understand what is it that makes some people so resilient and strong, and other ones want to give up when they're faced with a trauma. And she thought, 'I don't need to wait until something drastic happens in my life, and my health has taken off me or my mobility, or I have an accident or I have something to wake up. I can actually take on some mammoth task so that I can start to understand what it actually takes and what resilience and strength is all about'. And she felt like she didn't have the right to be leading and guiding other people if she didn't have that experience herself. So she set off on a mission, what she thought would take them a year to do for a status to organise this expedition across the Pacific.
And they knew that taking it four years of preparation, we go into the, all the details of putting together such a high-performance team, it's a fantastic interview. She really is a superwoman. I'm in awe over here, I can't imagine being in a 29-foot boat for anything more than about two hours, I reckon, before I'd start going nuts, so she's pretty impressive, this lady. And before we head over to the show, just want to remind you, we've launched now, our patron program for the podcast. So if you want to become a premium member of our podcast tribe, if you like, we'd love you to come and join us here on over to patron.lisatamati.com. And we'd love to see you over, the, it's all about keeping the show going. We've been doing it now for five and a half years each and every episode takes me a long time to put together to chase these world-leading experts, to do the research that I need to do, especially when it's dealing with scientific topics, and a test takes an awful amount of time.
And to keep it going we need your help. And we wanted to give you lots of benefits too so people who do get in behind the podcast and help us provide this super valuable content to everybody get a whole lot of exclusive member benefits. So we'd love you to check it out. Go to patron.lisatamati.com for more information on that. And on that note before we just hit over to Laura, I just want to remind you about my new longevity and anti-ageing supplement NMN Nicotinamide Mononucleotide. You would have heard a couple of times in the podcast I had Dr Elena Seranova and we're going to have her on more often. She's a molecular biologist and tells us all about the ways that we can help with anti-ageing. And one of those things is by taking Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, which is a very, very powerful supplement. It's an NAD precursor that helps up-regulate the sirtuin genes, helps provide a bigger pool of NAD to every cell in the body and helps on a very, very deep level. The ageing working against the ageing process and who doesn't want to know about them if you want to find out all about it and all the science behind it, please go to nmnbio.nz. Right, now over to the show with Laura Penhaul.
Lisa: Well, hi everyone, and welcome to Pushing the Limits. Today I'm super excited. I have an amazing, amazing guest for you. I really do find the most incredible people and this lady is a superwoman. So welcome to the show. It's really, really nice to have you Laura. Laura Penhaul is sitting in Cornwall in England. Laura, how's your day going? Well, you're not going.
Laura Penhaul: Oh I was gonna say yeah no, it's been great. Do it. Yeah, it's now eight o'clock in the evening. So yeah, no, it's all good. It's been a beautiful sunny day.
Lisa: Oh lovely, lovely. So Laura is an amazing person who does expeditions and as a physio, Laura, can you give us a little bit of background? I want you to tell your story in your words, give us a bit of a synopsis about what you do and what the critical things. I mean I've done a bit in the intro so, but I really want your words, if you like.
Laura: Yeah, no props well, firstly, yes. Thanks, Lisa for having me on the show. It's been an honour because I think you're a superwoman more than me.
Lisa: Hell no.
Laura: But no I mean yeah, my background is I worked in elite sport, in Olympic and Paralympic sport for over 14 years. Sort of went to Vancouver, London, Rio, Tokyo cycles. And yeah during that kind of journey, and that was as lead physio in different sports, whether that was downhill skiing, whether it was with British Athletics Paralympic team. And more recently, I was with the British sailing team. And during that sort of journey as a physio like, the role that we have, as physios, physical therapists are very much kind of, you know, you're seeing somebody through a journey. And like when I worked with them and we've worked with patients in trauma, worked versus kind of, you know, in spinal cord injuries, and then straight to Paralympic sport, I've been surrounded by people that have been faced with significant adversity.
And it's sort of, it's always along my journey of my career, have I been fascinated by understanding the person in front of me and kind of going, there's usually two types of people when they've been thrown a massive curveball, like an RTA or road traffic accident, or something horrendous, that is completely changed their life for the rest of their life. Those two, there's people that can go through the same type of thing. And yet one person wakes up, being so thankful that they're alive, they're now going to make the most of life. And then somebody else that wakes up and they're like, they wish they didn't wake up.
And as a physio dealing with those two people, you've got to have a very different approach. And in the, kind of—to me, understanding that person that wants to give up and actually being able to change their mindset and facilitate, go shoulder to shoulder with them is really powerful. And then those people that do wake up and want to thrive, like they're the ones that have inspired me to do more stuff, because I'm like, why do we wait for adversity? Why do we wait for something to be a curveball before we then, like, start to go, ‘Oh, my God, I need to make the most of life like I’m fit. And I'm healthy. I need to make the most of life because clearly stuff could happen in an hour’s time.
Lisa: At any time.
Laura: Exactly. So that's kind of what then drove me to start to do more and more personally, and kind of a bit of exploratory expedition space. And then the real, so that led me to ride the Pacific Ocean, which is kind of you know what, we're talking about.
Lisa: You said it again, you just rode the Pacific Ocean is, I just dropped it as a, to yeah, and then I rode the Pacific Ocean. So you were into sailing and into rowing and into all of that sport, as prior, this was your thing?
Laura: No. Well, that's the thing, no wasn't in all honesty. I was, I'm kind of a jack of all trades like I love anybody, any athletes, anybody that I work with, I want to understand them. And I want to understand the sport, the environment that they're in. So when I was working with skiers, I went off and did a ski season. I learned to ski when I, and I'm somebody that, yeah, I love to do different sports and outdoors, the sort of outdoor environments. And if I was working with marathon runners, I was like, I can't fully treat them if I don't understand, if I haven't run a marathon like, to me, I need to experience what they've experienced, even in a small way to kind of get a glimpse of the environment.
So I would run a marathon, same with triathletes, and, you know, not to the extent of your, sort of did a half Ironman, and then the point was the Paralympic cohort when I was working with them. I was like, this is an area that I can't untap you know, yeah.
Lisa: Yeah.
Laura: I can do it, but I can't understand what it is to be a Paralympian.
Lisa: Yep.
Laura: However, how can I put myself in a situation which is completely unknown, that's kind of gonna make me want to give up. And I want to understand what it is we draw on when we can't give up you know, we've only got one option.
Lisa: Yep.
Laura: So I kind of, that's what I was searching for, for a couple of years of searching for something that was going to be out of my comfort zone completely and was going to be a challenge on multiple levels.
Lisa: Sure must have been.
Laura: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I guess at the time, I was doing, sort of, triathlons. I was enjoying them. But anything that was cycling, running, swimming, I felt like this would be expected and I kind of would already be a bit familiar with it. So when I suddenly heard about ocean rowing, I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is ideal'. I've always wanted to row but never did it. Then never got a chance to, so I'd never rode before. I've never lost sight of shore. Like, you know, I've never been out at sea properly, never sailed or any of that stuff. Well, a bar like going on a few trips. But yeah, not a sailor by anyway, shape or form.
So it was, I was, and that just connected, you know, when something, an opportunity comes up and you're like, ‘This is exactly what I've been looking for'. And it was a proper light bulb moment. And the thing for me, it's the one time in my whole life that I've been so focused, like, ‘I have to make this happen'. Because I know, in my heart of hearts, I know what I'm going to get out of this is going to be huge.
Lisa: Wow.
Laura: And that basically is why starting point with it, it was kind of, I didn't know how to row, I went from being a marathon weight of like, something stupid, like 58 kilos up to, I had to go up to 72 kilos to grow on mass, you know, to be not skinny, because we lose a lot of weight out there. I had to put a team together, whereas, in my personal sport, I was doing quite individual sports. So, you know, I had to work out the team cohesion, the whole team dynamics, and recruitment. I had to figure out what the boat was, get it built, like then set up this as a business, you know, so. So yeah, so the whole journey it was, I mean, now on reflection, there's so many learnings from it. But I absolutely thrive from the self-awareness piece, how much I've learned about myself, and the different perspectives. And you know, approaching that row, my approach is very much like, this is all brand spanking new. So if I can approach it with a blank canvas, if I can have a real adaptive mindset, and if I surround, if I've now gone on the other side of the table, rather than surrounding athletes, if I surround myself with the relevant expertise, how far can I get? And how far can I really experience that athlete?
Lisa: Yeah, sorry, just my brother's just come in the middle of the podcast it’s all right. There. Come on Mitch, get around the other side. Yeah, this is podcast life for you. Didn't tell your brother you’re recording.
There was so much here that I wanted to unpack. Because there was like, you just skipped over a ton of stuff. Number one, you had no idea. So what gave you the confidence, what was the little voice inside you saying, ‘I can do this’, when you're in a completely unknown sport? Like what was it that made you think, ‘Oh, yeah, I can ride across the Pacific on a row across the Pacific, you know, for nine months, and that all worked out well'. You know, how did you even come up with a concept for something so audacious?
Laura: Well, I mean, it's all about small pieces, isn't it, and kind of reaching out to those that have done stuff and those that you respect and have the expertise. So it was basically breaking it, breaking the journey down. First of all, one is that route even possible? So initially, somebody had asked me to be part of the Indian Ocean, and they were putting a team together and then I evolved it into the Pacific. And then somebody, I was like, well, actually, originally, it might have been the new ocean wave race, which just goes from San Fran to Hawaii. And I was like, well, that's not the Pacific. That's a third of it, like so if I'm going to say I'm going to row the Pacific. I want to row, can I row all of it?
Yeah. So it was then reaching out to somebody from a logistical point of view and a support structure point of view saying, ‘Is this even feasible? And what would it look like?’ And when they said, 'Yes'. I was like, right, okay. So that's route can get involved, this is what it's going to look like. We're going to need to start, we're going to need to replenish, but it's doable. But it's going to take this time frame. And then it was kind of like right, in order for me to get prepped and the team to get prepped, what's the time frame that it's going to take to do that? Let's be realistic. And I wasn't realistic. I was naive, I thought it would only take us about a year to get to the start line. And hell no. It took four years to get to start, like four years.
Lisa: Four years. That’s massive.
Laura: Yeah, so it was. But interestingly, there's so many parallels, you know, like working in Olympic sport, everything's in four-year cycles for the Olympic cycle. And so there's so much that I learned through that process of, I thought I was only going to go in a year's time. That didn't happen. We didn't have the funding. I didn't got the team, the boat wasn't finished, you know, it was like, right, I need to go again. I need to reset. I need to sort of keep the ball rolling. But I need to learn from what failures have had here. And how do I overcome them?
Lisa: Wow.
Laura: The second year, I didn’t quite have to win I thought it was but it's all that sort of stuff. You go, yeah, you can give up why it's such a clear vision with it. And the question in my head was, ‘There's going to be an all-female team that is going to do this at some point. Like, why can't it be me? And I'm sure that will happen in my lifetime'. So what am I missing? What are the things that I can't see? That's in my blind spots. And that's where I started to reach out, to pull in different people to say, right, ‘This is the problem I've got, how can you help me’? How can you see and it was that reaching out for help with the right expertise that got us to the start line? It wasn't me. It was the collective bigger support team around us.
Lisa: How did you even, like the resources and the money in the financial and the sponsorship, when you didn't have a—I mean, you had a backstory as a high-performance expert, and helping other people in training and so on. But, you know you didn't have, you weren't—there were no huge amount of resources behind you. How did you—I know what I had to go through to get to the races that I did. And that was probably a heck of a lot less than what you had to go through. How did you face that? And what did you learn on the business side of the journey, the marketing, all of that sort of stuff?
Laura: Yeah, I mean–
Lisa: Selling the idea to people.
Laura: Yeah, the money. It kind of—it’s exactly that. I think it's showing the belief, like the absolute dogged determinedness, that this is going to happen, and you know, like, I put in my own swag to it. I paid for the boat built in the first place. So I'm like, I'm gonna do this, like, do you want to be part of it or not? But I want to do this regardless. Yeah.
Lisa: So basically, how I did too.
Laura: This is not my approach. But you know, I mean, I say that, but let's face it, I was useless at kind of asking for money, like, you know, it's great, you're doing it for charities. But to ask to support me, and like our journey. I was crap. You know, I'm a physio, I like to help people. I don't like asking for help. You know, at the time, I was very much in that poor sort of leadership style. And that's a big, that was a big learning point. But then reaching out to people that do work in business and do work in sponsorship. And they were the people that then helped me to shape sort of your sponsorship deck and how you need to brand it, what's your, you know, the colours, the language, all of that type of stuff.
Lisa: Wow.
Laura: And I loved it because I mean, I love learning. So suddenly, I was entering a snippet of a different world that I knew nothing about previously. Same with like the PR side of it, I had no idea but that was great fun, and, and the business model itself, like yeah became a business and I thought it was all about the physical and that was totally not it was 10% of like the project. And then yeah, so like you say, setting up a business no Scooby-Doo about and so simplicity was reaching out to people that had been successful had done it before. And the likes of, you know, Mark Beaumont, that we've talked about before like Mark. Mark is somebody that's an elite athlete, expedition athlete, he'd actually at the time rode the Atlantic, and unfortunately, they nearly died at sea. So I'd reached out to him to learn from his experiences from the actual failures, more, I don't want necessarily the successes, but, and he then was great at providing me with a bit more of the structure for you know, the timeline, the budget that this, that in the other room.
Lisa: Wow.
Laura: How you sort of need to get the sponsorship. And yeah, so I think to me, it's about as you know, if you hold, if this is a new space and you hold an ego thinking you're going to, then you're never gonna get anywhere.
Lisa: You’re gonna get your ass kicked.
Laura: Yeah, basically, just whereas for me, yeah, well, I don't mind. I don't mind saying I don't know something. I'm happy to ask why and how and who can help…
Lisa: You can be very humble, we can tell that five minutes of talking to you, you know.
Laura: Thank you very much.
Lisa: And how did you get a team together? Because you get four ladies, you rode the Pacific and people were talking like nine months and a rowboat unsupported, like from California to Cairns, wasn’t it? It's great. Yeah. There's a documentary out on it. If people want to find out we'll work out with it with the link sir. And how they can get hold of it perhaps afterwards. Four ladies in a rowboat, rowing across the lake. I mean, to the average person who doesn't know anything about rowing? It sounds absolutely insane. And I, like, I said to my husband, I was interviewing this morning and I said I couldn't last 24 hours in a rowboat. I probably couldn't last four hours in a rowboat. How do you comprehend nine months like that for me? Is, I mean, I've never done anything on that scale, of that long. You know, like, the longest thing I ever did was run through New Zealand which was a sustained effort over 42 days. And that well nearly bloody killed me, you know. But that's not nine months, you know, little logistics and all that. Wow.
Laura: Yeah, but you know what, I've been, flipping heck, you know. 40 odd days that you're running the lengths of New Zealand, like that is insane. So you could have...
Lisa: That’s a hell lot easier than rowing.
Laura: It’s not though! I mean, it's all about perspective, isn't it? And it's all about the context that you're in. And this is the thing that I get really passionate about is, I want to optimise people's own elite performance, like, not comparative to anybody else, like, what's your—so what you're really is your achievement of like, 42 days and everything else you've achieved is huge. Whereas somebody else's 42 days of running, will be running a marathon like that will be—it's about that gap analysis, like, where you'd got yourself to, to then be able to take on the 42-day sort of challenge. Like that was a big old leap, but you're already like, sort of—your experiences, and you'd prepped yourself for that.
Lisa: Yes, years and years.
Laura: Yeah, and where is somebody who's on a couch, but then is setting their sights of running a marathon. That's their 42 days, like, that's their elite performance for them. And the row for us? Yeah, it was a big old leap, but it was fundamentally, it was broken down. Like I think sometimes you must have found this with the run, you're talking about there and everything else. You've got to break it down, like you certainly in the preparation phase, you've got to plan every inch and every sort of crook of it within its life so that you don't leave any stone left unturned. You feel like you're best prepared, that gives you confidence, to then have capacity to deal with the unknown when you're faced with it. So to me, that sort of, I always wanted to leave, like, at least 30% of capacity in my headspace to make sure I can react to when I need to.
Lisa: You can handle it.
Laura: Exactly, and deal with the unknown. If I mean, if we'd gone on that row in that first year, Jesus Christ, like most of it was unknown, like that. I was so naive, it was ridiculous. But by the time you know, it's four years down the line, I felt so confident in actually we've trialed the boat, we've done 72 hours, we've done a couple of weeks. We've done team testing, we've done routines, we've done steep depot, we've done the training, we've done the site support, you know, all of those, every aspect of it. I feel like we took out and then it was a case of right, well, then we just need to do this on a day and day out. And then however long that's gonna last for it's just sticking to routines, which you know, the same in whatever you do.
Lisa: The more you do the more it becomes normal.
Laura: Exactly. And then it's kind of like, Well, actually, once you lose sight of shore, whether you're out there for five days, five weeks, five months, actually doesn't make much difference.
Lisa: You’re in this shit anyway. Too far from home anyway, you've lost sight of shore!
Laura: Yeah, you kind of just got to crack on and then, you know, there's no going back, you can't row backwards, sort of, it's only about, you know, having the confidence to step into taking on the Pacific. And for us, you know, yes, we rowed the Pacific literally, but to me, it was the essence of everybody's got their own Pacifics to cross like...
Lisa: Yes.
Laura: ...our film’s called Losing Sight of Shore because it's about having the courage to lose sight of shore, like, have that sort of courage to just step away from the comfort, step away from the knowns. And like, Oh, my God, you know, that's where life just opens up and expose.
Lisa: Because you know, I had Paul Taylor, who's a neuroscientist, and ex-British Navy guy, and exercise physiologist on the show last week, and he's talking about the small bubble where you can live in or the big bubble. And the big bubble is where we all want to be, you know, where we’re reaching our potential and we are filling and where are all these amazing things that we could do. We know that that bubble was there. But we're all scared living in this little comfort zone. And how do you push outside because that outside is risk of failure, and in your case risk of dying. You know, there was so much that you put on the line physically, mentally, financially, emotionally, relationships, you know. You name it, you put it on the line for this one thing, and that is living in that big bubble and scaring the crap out of yourself and doing it anyway.
Most people have this tendency to want to be comfortable in and I see this as a massive problem in our society today is that we are all cozy and comfortable and sitting on the couch watching Netflix and we are warm and we don't push ourselves for the gloom we don't push yourself. And this leads to disaster when it comes to resilience and being able to cope because you're been through this amazing adventure and expedition and you've risked everything, you must have an inner confidence that is just—and I know that you won't have it in all areas of life because this is certainly specific. And I know how that works because I'm really good and some things and really crap in others and I'm still working on my mindset in this area and that area or whatever, we're work in progress but you when you've lifted up your horizons to that big, nothing must daunt you in a way. Like he must be like, ‘Okay, whatever is coming at me, I can probably handle it'. Because you know, inside you have that resilience, which is so important.
Laura: Yeah. I mean, I think you're right. It's about context, isn't it? Like I—you know, I'm a risk-taker, but I'm a really calculated risk-taker, right.
Lisa: Yeah.
Laura: Exactly. So kind of the Pacific seems like it's ridiculous, and it's life threatening. I mean, I didn't leave any stone left unturned. I had military guys helping us to make sure we'd sort of not left stuff unturned. We went through survival practice. We, I mean, there was everything and the amount of sort of, you know, routines we had on the boat, leashes, and kind of safety equipment was next to none. Because I was like, the risk we've got is getting separated from the boat. So I'm risk-aware, really risk-aware. And, and kind of, and make sure that sort of don't leave any stone unturned so then I feel confident to go forwards. I wouldn't just leap into it like blindly.
Lisa: Yep, you shouldn’t.
Laura: Yeah exactly.
Lisa: Because you will die.
Laura: Yeah. But I mean, it's no different if you watch, I don't think like, you know, you watch Alex Honnold, climbing free solo, you know, the El Cap, sort of the climb, if anybody’s seen that film. I mean, it's phenomenal. And anybody would, you know, you watch it. You're like, ‘Oh, my God, that's insane. He’s free climbing that like, what if he just slipped’? What if this? What if that? But look at his meticulous approach to it.
Lisa: Yeah, one hand wrong.
Laura: Exactly. But then his meticulous approach, he hasn't just woken up that day one, right. So I'm going to climb up, you know, sort of freestyle at this thing. He's like, he's been off top-roping with it, he is kind of lead climbed it. He's, kind of, known every single holding place he's written it, he’s drawn it, he’s visualising it. And he's only done it when he feels completely ready, prepped. And that actually, there's no move in that that is going to be a risk. So, therefore, he's a calculated risk-taker. And it is extreme when you watch it, but the preparedness is totally there.
Lisa: I couldn't do it. I didn't put the parachute on as I'm halfway down. You know, you do learn from that, you know. I remember going out into the race in Niger, which was 353Ks across one of the most dangerous landscapes in you know, places on Earth, countries on Earth. And we were meant to have food come from France, and it didn't arrive. And I wasn't prepared. I didn't have my own stash, I didn't, my husband at the time, my ex-husband there. He did, you know, like, and when you're doing things like that, and you end up with food poisoning, and you're, you know, vomiting and shitting your way across the Sahara. And you realise, you know, you could have avoided that. That’s sort of a big lesson and do your preparation better, you know. Don't be so cavalier with your, ‘I am going to go and, you know, run 100 miles, and I haven't even trained for a marathon yet'. No, no, you know, and I had to learn those things the hard way because I had a tendency just to dive in. And this is all exciting. And let's do it.
Laura: But then you learned that didn’t you?
Lisa: Yeah, but it's not a good way to learn in the middle of the Sahara. It’s better to learn previously.
Laura: Yeah, that is sure. But yeah, I mean, you still but you learn and I think that's one of the biggest takeaways, of whenever we talk about failure and stuff. It is not a failure, if you, unless you don’t learn from it. And leaping sometimes is exactly what you need to do, and it's just not being scared to fall, like just knowing that, you know what, if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. It's got you one step further. And one step closer to finding what the next thing might be.
Lisa: Yeah.
Laura: So yeah, just it's having that like you say, that the sort of the robustness, the resilience or whatever it is to bounce back to kind of jump back up to ask the questions. ‘Well, why didn't that work? And let's try it a different way', or learn from it and do something.
Lisa: Yeah, like you said, You reached out to Mark and he'd had, you know, nearly died and had actually failed in that particular expedition, done lots of other crazy stuff, but you know, and that one and it is those things like you are risking failure and you have to understand it from the outset. That you can take care of all the things you can prepare. You can get everything and you're still risking because, if this was easy, everyone would be doing it. And you have to be okay with the—this is something I try and get my athletes to understand. When you're actually done the work, you've done the boulder, you've done the—all the hard stuff that you knew now standing at the start line, that's actually to have time to celebrate and go, you know, ‘I've done the hard work. Now it's up to whatever's going to come my way'. And like you say, being able to adapt and to have the flexibility to take whatever's coming at you, which isn't always easy, but you have to sort of give up those—I think the consequences of what if, what if, what if, because if you’re constantly asking yourself, for ‘What if I don't make that time?’ You know, say you're running a marathon, or I want to do it in under three and a half hours, or whatever the case may be, and then you're so like, ‘Oh, no’, and then it takes you three hours and thirty-two and you know, ‘I'm a failure’, you know, like, hang on a minute, no, hang on. That's not how it works.
Laura: Yeah.
Lisa: Yeah, you've got to understand that there are things you can't control. So you've done everything you can control. And now the rest is up to the gods, basically. And you're going to have to be able to be adaptable and flexible. And that was one of the things in your website, talking about adaptive, being adaptive in your performance. And I think that's a really good thing because we cannot control like… You can be having a bad day at the office and get up and you feel sick and your immune system’s down and you've got your period and you've, you know, whatever the case may be. And you weren't bargaining with that, you know, so you have to be able to work, ‘I need to still go because there's no way back. How do I deal with it’? You know?
Laura: Yeah, and I think it's a really valid point. Because I mean, even in the row halfway through, and it's in the films, it's not kind of confidential stuff. One of the girls, like, she just completely changed her personality, right, because that was exactly the problem. She thought she could control the boat. She thought, you know, she was a rower. Out of all of us, she was somebody that actually had rowed since she was a kid and stuff. She thought ocean rowing was, you know. She didn't want to lose the passion. Unfortunately, yeah, it killed her passion. She didn't know then, she lost the sense of identity, all of that stuff.
Lisa: Oh yeah, real tough.
Laura: Yeah, awful. And, but because she was trying to control the boat, you know, like, the current, the wind was against us, like, those are things you cannot control. It’s a one ton boat, not one person is going to be able to control moving that in the direction you want it to go in. And so, but it was the collective of the team that enabled us to be able to rally around and understand, first of all, recognise the change in personality, it was a behaviour, it was yeah, there was something underlying. It was not her—well, it was, but there was something emotional that she couldn't verbalise straightaway. So hence, she just changed her personality type.
Lisa: Wow.
Laura: And then it was like the strength of the team to be able to rally together to support that. So kind of come at it from the right approach that she was able to share it, to then collectively go, we just need to see a different perspective on this stuff. And I think that's where, you know, a vast dynamic sort of team, you know, a diverse team sorry is what I meant, has got so much strength in it, because you know, what, when you see it through your own lens, there's only sort of one way. Whereas if you've got some diversity there, I just think it brings a different perspective. And suddenly, you're able to see, you can't control the uncontrollable, you know, you can only control the controllables. You can't control what's out of control.
And those things are the weather that is, you know, yes will prevent being ill or injured. But that might well happen. That, you know, is what it is. And if the boat sort of fails, but you whatever, then those are only three things that are going to be out of our control. And if anything happened there, then I wouldn't be. I would have been upset, I would be upset, but I wouldn't be throwing my toys out the pram because it isn't something we could control. And if the row didn't happen, we didn't finish because one of those three things, that is what it is.
Lisa: Yeah, it is what it is. And you've done your utmost. And I mean, I've failed on different expeditions and things that I’ve done, like really fallen on my face, you know, with, you know, documentary crews there have captured all on film as you just absolutely completely faceplant. And, you know, and it takes a long time to get up again, and it knocks the crap out of you. And, you know, but it's part of that, okay, well, this is the game wherein, you know, we’re pushing the limits, and sometimes, you know, you are human and you don't have the resources or one of the things that I find really, really I'd love to and I think this probably needs its own podcast is the whole team dynamic thing. I mean, it's one thing to be a solo athlete that does things, you know, but it's a—couple of times when I've had to be in a team situation. I find it really, really tough because you were reliant...
I did one in the Himalayas, and we're trying to do the world's highest marathon ever done. And I was with a guy who was a mountaineer and used to altitude and very at home in that space. And I wasn't. And I don't—I've done a couple of things at altitude and sort of survive by the skin of my teeth. I'm an asthamtic and I don't really do well on the mountains. So take on, you know, the world's highest mountain. Good idea. And we'd be in shape. And I got sick. I got altitude sickness, and I couldn't even start my body. I couldn't even tie my shoelaces.
But the worst thing was that he changed. The person that he was down here was not the person that he was up there, and, it ended up being quite nasty, and quite, detrimental. And he's not here to defend himself. So I'm not gonna say anything too much. But it wasn't a nice situation to be in — I did not trust that if I was in the shutout there, that we would work together as a team to get through it. I felt like, now, he wouldn't do that.
And then so now I'm like, very, very always aware of if I'm teaming up with people like we've got at the moment, this weekend in my hometown, that Oxfam 100, it's 100-kilometre event where lots of just normal everyday people are doing 100Ks, which is like amazing, walking, and they're doing it in, you know, teams of four, and the staff are going to go through... And there'll be people that are, you know, expeditions bring out the worst and bring out the best in people. And you don't know until you're in the situation with them, which way are they going to go, and which way you're going to go. I mean, I can become, I've been a really horrible person on some of my, you know, with my crew on different occasions where I've just lost my shit because I'm in so much pain, sleep deprivation, motions are up the wazoo. And you just, you know, you're snappy, irritable, you know, just horrible. Afterwards, I’m heading to go and say, ‘I'm very sorry'. You know?
So how did you deal with that over nine months like that on steroids? Like the dynamic—four women—everybody's having their highs and lows at different points in there. How did you cope with that? I mean, you're obviously, you've mentioned the one person and how you helped pull together, it takes incredible leadership to keep a team like that together for nine months, no matter how wonderful you all are.
Laura: Yeah, that I mean, don't get me wrong, you still have arguments and stuff, but it was all in the preparation. And it was, we knew I mean, so it is a 29th version rowing boat, right. So it's kind of the size of Greg Rutherford's, it's got the world record for the long jump, right? So it is, kind of, his long jump is the size of our boat. So it's a really small space. And then when you're cramped into the cabin, there's two of you. And if it's stormy, then all four of you are either in that or two in each cabin. So it's a tight, confined space. So it was really clear from the outset that this team had to be, we had to be cohesive, we had to be really transparent. And something I was particularly pedantic about was, I never want to leave a permanent issue. Like if there's an issue, we need to confront it, we will have to step forward into it. We can't, I don't want any bitchiness like, there was, that was always been, sort of my approach to most things. Like, I can't stand the whole talking to other people, rather than talking to the individual that you've got an issue with. You just need to step into that as much as it might feel uncomfortable.
And I guess, working in a performance context, we're scrutinised on a daily basis, you know. We're kind of everybody's asking you why what are you doing, you know, type stuff, you've got to justify, you feel like you're under a spotlight all the time. So you start to feel this kind of separation, you know, look kind of right. No, this is they're asking me that because of the person in front of us or the, you know, the end goal, that's what it's about. It's got nothing to do with me personally. We're just trying to optimise what we need to do. So when, my, I pulled this, the sort of the team came together, a lot of it, I was like, how do we stress test this, like, we have to stress test it because–
Lisa: Hell yeah.
Laura: –exactly. And that's where I, you know, I started working with Keith, the performance psychologist. I reached out to him so I was like, there's got to be more depth to this, you know, we need tools we need to I need to know what I'm going to draw on when I'm wanting to give up like, what's going to be my go-to’s, I'm going to, I need to know how I can respond and react to different personalities and stuff and how they're going to react to each other.
So Keith was the absolute rock to the success of our journey, in all honesty. I worked with him for four years and I still worked with him. I still work with him, sorry, to this day. And Keith, sort o—he enabled us to sort of understand the differences in our personalities from the basics of just doing psychometrics and stuff, but pretty in-depth ones. And then analyzing that a little bit more and playing it out in different scenarios, and then really forcing us to kind of do the round table. Yeah, because—and the girls hated confrontation. They weren't used to giving and receiving feedback. That was always felt like a personal threat. Yeah. So I just had to put myself in the barrier first. So I be like, ‘Right, cool, okay, if you're not going to give it and you're going to say everything's rosy when it's not, I’ll pull it out'. ‘So this is what's not going so well. And this is not going so well. Right now give it back to me, hit me’, like because then as soon as I've given it they're happy to give it back to me because I think I'm being—yeah exactly. That's fine.
And then I would show them that I was learning from it because I was. And there was— I— they would call me, I would have Laura number one, Laura number two, my personalities. And they—I didn't realise that until sort of, you know, going through the row and they're like, ‘Oh my god, it's Laura number two'. And Laura number two is somebody that when she starts getting, like, tired, hungry, all of that gubbins and, and sort of just a bit over it, I start getting really assertive. I'm very tunnel vision, and my empathy just goes. Whereas normal time, like I've got heaps of the empathy, until it gets to a point…
Lisa: Yeah, yeah. So like me.
Laura: And so they’d be like, all right, Laura number two. Because we then had a language that was a little bit disconnected to the personal and it made a bit of fun of it, then we sort of were able to sort of take a pause, hear it and stuff.
But we had loads of loads of methodologies that we built, we'd worked on to try and get to that point. And that was sort of to the point with there, though, is that is not to say we didn't have any arguments, because we did like, I mean Nat and I, in particular, completely different personalities. She is like a, she's a beautiful character. She is Miss Mindful, she is in the moment, and she is just totally there. She's talking about the sky and the sea and the colours. Whereas I'm Miss Planner. Like I'm already in Cannes, I'm thinking about fear, I’m planning, and what do we need to do, what do we need to sort out? So, you know, when we did the team testing before, this was during selection of the team. I remember when I met Nat, I was like, ‘Oh, god, no, we are poles apart. There's just no way', you know because I was trying to see it through. I was only seeing it through my own lens of who I was getting a rapport with.
But I brought her onto the team testing weekend, which was, I'd gone to some ex-military guys. And I said, ‘Look, we need to be tested. I need to see what we're like when we're cold, we’re hungry, really sore, in pain. You need to physically push us. You need to mentally push us'. Well. And so we did like a 72-hour sleep depot type thing, you know, in the Brackens in Wales, yeah. On reflection that was like, yeah, that was it was great fun and obviously hated it during. I remember, like during it, sort of Nat in particular, as a personality that stood miles out because when she came on to it, I was thinking oh she can come along. But she's, I don't think that I’m going to be selecting her. And then Nat was the one that, you know, she might not have been the fittest. But even when she was struggling, and she was in pain, she had a sense of humour. When I was starting to struggle, she made me laugh. And I was like, ‘Oh my god, there's not many people that can do that while I'm in that space'.
Lisa: Yeah.
Laura: And I'm like, this isn't just about me. But for the comfort of the team, like we need that. Because otherwise, I will make this too serious. I will. When it gets into it, it will be too boring and serious. I need a sense of humour in this. And she is, she's got it in abundance. And she kept us at the moment.
Lisa: Wow, yep.
Laura: As well. Like, I needed that mindfulness when we're out to sea because otherwise, I wouldn't have remembered half the things that went on and I wouldn't have recognised and seen it.
Lisa: Isn't that amazing? So looking at the strengths and differences can actually end up being the thing that holds you together rather than pulls you apart.
Laura: A hundred percent.
Lisa: And I just think in this space I have to connect you with Paul Taylor, he will love you. He's a resilience expert that I was mentioning before and yeah, I think it when you have characters and I've started to do this just with for myself even now I have these different characters, you know, there's the good me and there's bad me and the good means like Wonder Woman, she can do anything and she's amazing.
And he has all these character traits that you know I aspire to and want to have and that side of me and then the other side's a real bitch, you know, she's a horrible, cynical, selfish person and those are both of me. And I know when you put this on—Paul talks about doing like cartoon characters and putting speech bubbles on them and actually giving them life and because it puts you outside of these characters that are fighting in your head, and you're trying to be that good one you want to be, but when you're hungry and cold and freezing, and you haven't slept in three days, and you're struggling somewhere, and God knows where. And you just want to go home and cry and hide under the covers and get mummy to give you a chicken soup. Well, you—it puts it outside of you, and it helps you see what you're doing.
And even in daily things like, you know, I've been rehabilitating my mum now for five years, seven days a week. And you know, beginning first three years, it was like eight hours a day. So it was just, it was full, full-on. And then even longer than that in the first year. And I catch myself sometimes being so short and irritable because I'm like trying to multitask and trying to run my businesses and she's waiting for me and you know, like, you just find yourself snapping at somebody when you just feel like, you know, that asshole is sure is present, you know, and you're just like listening to yourself going, ‘How the hell do I get a grip on this?’
We're all human. And we're all working on this. And, you know, I go to my mum and I put her in bed at night time and a cuddle. And tell her, I say, 'You know, I'm sorry for being a bitch today, Ma. I’m sorry for snapping at you'. And she's so lovely. She's like, 'Oh, that's all right'. Like, you know. But we have moments where we're just not nice, and when you're in these extreme circumstances fad, the ones that come out, and this is a part of the dynamic thing that I find really, really fascinating in that whole resilience and teamwork, and how do you bring it all together? So, you know, we're going to have to wrap up this one, because I've really enjoyed talking to you, Laura. But I really would like to have you on a couple of times, because I think there's much more to this actual story because we haven't even got to talking about well, what was it actually like to row? How did you, you know, do, what did you actually do on a daily basis? And how do you plan for such a thing? And how do you have such a big project and deal with it? And so I'm really glad that we've made this connection, and I'm very, very keen to have you on the show again, if you, because we've really just been part one, I think.
Laura: Let's see… No, I’ll be honoured to come back on. There’s so much I think we connect with in, and we can talk about for sure, especially in that headspace how we can be… What we've both learned from the experiences that we faced and continue to learn, I think is always an exciting journey.
Lisa: Yeah.
Laura: Yeah, I'd be honoured to come back on it. It’s been great.
Lisa: That would be fantastic because I think also the work that you've done with Paralympians and, you know, people that have worked with disabilities and trauma, we haven't even unpacked that either. Because I think that, you know, we can learn a heck of a lot from people that have gone through, you know, all these dramas and so on, me, I learn every day from Mum, like, her mindset is just like, incredibly strong, resilient. And so I'd like to unpack some of that stuff as well. So Laura, thank you very much for your time today. I think you're a rock star, where can people find you? And where can they get involved in what you're doing? And, you know, do whatever you got available? Because you've got some really good lessons to share with people. So tell us where we can find you.
Laura: Yeah, I mean, on usual social media, sort of, the Instagram or Twitter or LinkedIn, just @laurapenhaul. And that sort of, you know, P-E-N-H-A-U-L is my surname. So yeah, reach out to that we've also got our endurance book. So where we've sort of added science behind, kind of some of the endurance sort of focus is on GCN, which is a Global Cycling Network website, or our podcast is Endurance as well, which is where's Mark Beaumont, which I co-author on.
Lisa: So I'm very keen to meet and hopefully get on the show as well. Yeah, hook me up there.
Laura: Yeah, Keith will get you on that as well. I think you've got a lot to add and share their experiences for sure.
Lisa: I'd love to. That would be an absolute honor. Laura, you're one hell of a strong woman. I can't wait to see where you go and in the future in what you know, what you take on. God forbid is probably going to be big, and thank you for sharing. I think you have such great knowledge to share with people and you have a duty to get that information out there because this is the sort of stuff that helps people. So thank you very much for your time today Laura.
That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate, review, and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.
The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.
When people think about today’s guest, tenacity is probably the first word that comes to mind. Everything she accomplished today stems from her unwavering self-belief and deep understanding that you must also take care of yourself. Through this perspective, she has taught herself and countless others how to overcome challenges. And like her, we’ve encountered countless adversities. We’ve all been in a place of anger, frustration, guilt or sadness.
How do we begin to accept and love ourselves and learn to grow from it?
In this week’s episode, Kim Morrison joins us to teach us all about self-love. She shares how she questioned human existence and purpose after a life-changing event and what we should be asking ourselves whenever we go through intense emotions. Kim also tells us how to overcome challenges and trauma, and discusses different helpful processes like hypnosis.
If you want to find out how to overcome challenges, achieve self-love and accomplish your goals, then tune in to this episode!
For our epigenetics health program all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/.
CUSTOMISED RUN COACHING PLANS — How to Run Faster, Be Stronger, Run Longer Without Burnout & Injuries
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‘And the thing I love about it is that when you realise it and have an awareness around who you are and what you've been doing, the world becomes your oyster, and we stop blaming; we stop becoming the victim, we stop being in denial, we stop making excuses for our life. And we actually take accountability, responsibility and ownership for every single thing.’
‘And I say that with a disclaimer, that it's really important that in these times of worry and fear and stress and overwhelm, that you seek help. If you're feeling like your world is closing in, you're not your own coach; you’re not your own best coach; your partner's not necessarily the best coach or mentor for you through these times, neither are your parents. So sometimes we need professional help.’
‘Often, as we talk it to someone that's listening, truly listening without trying to fix us. When you're listening, we often talk through the process out loud because I believe all humans have all traits. And all humans have all resources within them to help heal themselves. But sometimes we just need to hear it.’
‘And if we could just understand that it's at our darkest times, we actually are revealed. Your strength comes through your courage, your determination, your tenacity, your resilience is what shows up.’
‘So we know that life is ebb and flow, high and low, in and out, dark and light. If we can come to accept that, then that is self-love.’
‘So the important thing to realise is that you have to have your goal aligned with your top three values. And if it's not aligned with any of your top three values, you're going to need some integration work to bring it up there if it's something you really want. Because otherwise, that's where the excuses come in.’
‘Just keep your mind stimulated with possibility. Because it's through the possibility we have grown, and through the growth we become way more powerful individuals. And with that, we start to then look at our higher purpose, and what legacy are we going to leave in this life.’
Kim Morrison is a speaker, author, facilitator, health and lifestyle educator, self-love expert and entrepreneur. She set the world record as the youngest female to run 100 miles in less than 24 hours in 1983.
Kim has been an Aromatherapist for 27 years. She has diplomas in Holistic Aromatherapy, Sport and Remedial Therapies, Fitness Leadership and Homeobotanical Therapies in Melbourne and New Zealand. She is also a qualified Personality Trainer and completed studies in nutrition, reflexology and counselling. In 2009, Kim launched her company, Twenty8 Essentials.
To learn more about Kim, visit her website. Check out her podcast and connect with her on Instagram as well!
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To pushing the limits,
Lisa
Welcome to Pushing The Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential, with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.
Lisa Tamati: Welcome back to Pushing The Limits with your host Lisa Tamati. Today I have the lovely, dear friend, Kim Morrison, to guest. Kim is an absolute sweetheart. She's a speaker. She's a six-times author, a facilitator, health and lifestyle educator, podcaster herself. She is a self-love expert. And there's so much more to come than meets the eye. She's an absolute gorgeous woman inside and out. Tenacity is probably the first word that comes to mind. In her journey and all she’s accomplished today have all stemmed from her unwavering self-belief and her deep understanding that you must also take care of yourself first and foremost. She recently wrote a book called The Art of Self-Love, which I encourage you to check out after you've listened to this podcast. Kim is also, she’s an entrepreneur, she owns the company Twenty8 Essentials with essential oils. She does a lot of mentoring, especially with women's empowerment. She has her own podcast. She's also a world record holder as the youngest female to run 100 miles in less than, in 24 hours. So she's a very amazing athlete and mother. She's also the wife of Danny Morrison, the famous cricketer, and she's just an absolute legend. She's been through a lot in her life, and she shares in this episode a lot of her learnings along the way so I do hope you enjoy the episode with Kim.
Before I head over to the show, just want to let you guys know we've just launched our premium membership for the podcast. If you love Pushing the Limits, if you love what we stand for, if you'd like to support the show and get a whole lot of extra benefits as premium members, and the list is long on the extra benefits, then I would love you to hop on over to patron.lisatamati.com. That's patron.lisatamati.com and become one of our VIP members. One of our premium members that supports the podcast and the work that we do, and helps us keep getting this great content out there and get a whole lot of benefits, as you know to be a part of this exclusive club. So we're really, really stoked to get that up off the ground and we really appreciate your support. Of course, if you give us a rating and review for the shows too, that would be absolutely fabulous, and share it with your family and friends. We put a lot of effort into this. Sometimes some of the guests we have, top scientists, top doctors and researchers. It takes often many weeks to prepare for an interview and a lot of study, a lot of reading, a lot of books and also chasing celebrity guests and people that are of note that are hard to get hold of. So if you want me to be able to keep doing this work, I’d really appreciate your support over at patron.lisatamati.com.
And while we're on that note, if you're into interesting reads, please check out my three books I have Running Hot, Running To Extremes which both chronicle my adventures running around the world doing lots of crazy stuff, succeeding, failing, having lots of fun and experiences and disasters along the way. So if you like a good novel, well, not a novel, they're actually autobiographies. But if you'd like good running stories and adventures then please check those out. And my latest book, Relentless: How a Mother and Daughter Defied the Odds is available on my website as well as on Amazon and IngramSpark and all the audiobooks and all of those sorts of places as well as Book Depository. You name it, it's out there. That one’s called Relentless and it's the story of bringing my mum back after a massive aneurysm left her with hardly any higher brain function, in a diagnosis where the medical professionals were telling me there was no way back for her at the age of 74, the brain damage was just too massive. They were wrong. This book is about empowering people. This is what this whole podcast is about. And what my whole life is about is taking control of your health, being preventative, educating yourself, and looking outside the square and connecting with the right people and, doing all that sort of stuff. So I'd love you to go and grab that book. And please share it too with your friends. If you like the book, get them to buy a copy too and help support the book. Getting it out there, and reviews and ratings for the book are really helpful too on either goodreads.com or you can just email me. I'd also love to hear from you if you are enjoying the podcast. Reach out to us if you've got any questions around any of the topics that we've brought up. We'd love to engage with you on support@lisatamati.com. Right well, now we'll go over to the lovely Kim who I absolutely treasure. She's a wonderful woman. I do hope You enjoy this podcast with Kim Morrison.
Lisa: Well, hi everyone and welcome back to pushing the limits. Today I have one of my very dear friends Kim Morrison back on the show. Kim, welcome to Pushing the Limits again.
Kim Morrison: Such a treat to be with you, my friend.
Lisa: We're just being ravishing. We couldn't stop talking to actually get the recording done, because we just got so much to like, (blah blah noise).
Kim: We almost should have recorded what we just created.
Lisa: All the cool people we've got to meet. I've got to introduce you to this person and this person. So yeah, we love swapping and collaborating and doing lots of crazy things.
So Kim, for those of you who don't know, you and most people should because you're world-famous and you're the author of six books. You're a mum, you're—you have your own amazing company. But tell us a little bit about Kim Morrison. Who’s Kim Morrison? Where are you sitting at the moment?
Kim: On the Sunshine Coast. World-famous and world tellers is what I’d say. I'm here on the Sunshine Coast. Obviously a kiwi, grew up in New Zealand, married Danny Morrison, a former New Zealand cricketer, fast-paced bowler and we had an incredible life. Then our world got turned upside down when sadly we lost a sister to suicide. And then Danny went through his own world of emotions. And as you can imagine being a top international athlete, to now a father of two, a mortgage, losing a sister, and then we lost our house. Then we lost a whole lot of money that we'd invested. All of a sudden, I think Danny started to question who the frick he was.
To watch that as a wife, a partner and someone that you love kept pushing me further down the rabbit hole and understanding what makes us tick. Why do people struggle? Why do people go through tough times? What is the meaning of it? So that took me on a journey after writing a number of books around essential oils. My passion was plants and aromatherapy and our connection to nature. And I've really, I've dabbled in a whole lot of things like nutrition and home-botanical therapy. And then lately, in the last few years, probably since writing my book, The Art of Self-Love, it's really been a quest, the last, six to ten years on, again, why do we have to go through tough times? And what does it actually mean?
So lately, I've been doing a whole lot of mind work around things like neuro-linguistic programming, hypnosis, and really getting to understand how we tick and what makes us put meaning into life situations which then can calibrate into our physiology, which then calibrates into our immunology, which then calibrates into our health and wellness.
It's been a really cool journey. Lots of ups, lots of downs. I'm not sitting here saying my life's been easy. I've been through a lot of downs myself. And knowing that often hitting the rock bottom parts of life, whilst you're in it, the worst thing is to think that there's a lesson in this. ‘Oh, my gosh, I'm going to be coming out so amazing’ when you're in the throes of it. If someone even suggests that you're going to have come out of–
Lisa: Both!
Kim: Yeah, exactly. But we all know when we look back on our lives, dear Lisa, there is always a learning, there is always an opportunity for growth. But you can take it one of two ways you can turn it into a power part of your life or a petty part of your life. You can become the victor or the victim. And that's where I love working with people who choose the victor strategy. How do I learn from this?
Lisa: Wow, the victor strategy. You either become a victim or a victor. I love it. It's just so beautifully put. We've both been through rocky roads and most people have, if you get to our age. You've had some shit thrown at you. Some of your own doing some not your own doing. And okay, what can we learn out of this? And how can we grow from this so that we just are able to carry on and we were talking before about the journey I've been on with losing my dad six months ago or seven months ago and how, trying to stand back up from that. Trying to make something positive out of the horrific situation which is still too fresh to fully have that formed. But it will be his legacy. He will have a legacy because of this. And I believe that he's helping me on the other side. I'm pretty damn sure of that. That he's making things happen and the good time. But we all go through these things and we all go through times where we think ‘I can't get up again'.
So you've written a book called The Art of Self-Love. You do a heck of a lot. You have a podcast all around the space of loving yourself. And this isn't just whoo-whoo stuff. This is real stuff. This is like, how do I accept myself? Love myself? Learn from this? Grow from this? You've had some amazing people on your show, some amazing guests. What are some of the things that you've learned just in the last year working on your podcasts and so on?
Kim: It's been phenomenal. I think the biggest thing that I love is you are the result of the five people you spend your most time with. So that includes family, and sometimes that can be tough. Therefore, the most important thing of all is—look, we can have a significant event happen in our lives that can bring us to our knees, which causes a whole lot of emotional trauma. Then we perceive that event. Then depending on our upbringing, our circumstances, our values, our beliefs, our meta-programs. How we generalize, distort and delete things. How we actually filter for what we're thinking of that meaning. Then creates a physiology within the body, which then creates a state, and then our emotions come out, which then drives our behaviour.
So it's fascinating, and the way I can explain this is if you grew up with siblings, and you had the privilege of having, say, the same mom and dad the whole way through. If you asked each of the siblings what they thought of their childhood, you may find a very different perception or meaning of what they've put onto that. And that's based on the filter system.
We all know that between the ages of naught and seven is pretty much the imprinting stage. So whatever happens usually in those naught to seven years, we create meaning. We're an absorber of information. So if you grew up with a mom that was frantic and full-on and was doing the best she could. Let's face it, everybody's done the best they could with the resources they have or don't have. But let's say that you heard, as a little four-year-old girl, your mom and dad fighting one night. They were having an argument, and let's say it was about money. Maybe your dad just lost his job. But as a four-year-old, you don't understand all of this. But you come to the door because you're worried you can hear and it doesn't feel real. And then your dad says to you, ‘Go away. This is not to do with you’. Or says something that you've heard it in a way that now means you'd now go into your room, you calibrate that into your physiology, that the next time a male or a man shouts, you've taken it to mean, perhaps you're not good enough, or it's your fault.
Now you can imagine throughout your life now, you start building scenarios. Your reticular activation system is now on alert. That now every time you hear a man or a male, argue, or fight, or scream, or yell or have anger, you’re now drawn to it. So you're now filtering for it. Because on the other side of that, because to have a problem, you also have to not have a problem. Or to have heat, you also have to have cold to understand the polarities of that. You now also know that to look for love in your life, you're now going to look for the polarity opposite of that, which is mean yelling. Or maybe it could be in the form of your boss. It could be in the form of a teacher. It could be in the form of a friend.
Lisa: You're going to be a travel expert.
Kim: So it fascinates me, Lisa, that the meaning we put into our early childhood can then become what our life becomes or doesn't become. Now the cool thing about that is when you have awareness around it, you can also undo this. If you've had the physiology or a life of not having great relationships, and you've never. If we could take you back through hypnosis or through different timeline strategies, and we can get you back to the place where you first put meaning and had a limiting belief around that, then we can easily take the lessons from it, learn it, and undo everything. And it's not about unwinding or stopping those memories. It's not about that. It's just realizing why you've created a certain behaviour to have that result. And the thing I love about it is that when you realize it and have an awareness around who you are and what you've been doing, the world becomes your oyster. And we stop blaming, we stop becoming the victim, we stop being in denial, we stop making excuses for our life. And we actually take accountability, responsibility and ownership for every single thing.
Now that means we're things that happened to us like you just said. So again, it doesn't matter what happens to you. It's your reaction to it that matters. It's how you perceive it that matters. Because we can't control their outside world as much as we've tried to change partners and kids and parents and families and friends. As much as we've tried to change people, do any of us want to be changed or told we're doing it wrong? Probably not. So it actually teaches you a way on how to perceive it in a way that you do it with love. And as far as I'm concerned, I can speak to the biggest scientists on the planet. I can speak to the most intelligent humans on this planet. And ultimately it all comes back to us desiring the ability to love and be loved.
Lisa: There is a whole purpose of us being here, I'm pretty damn sure of it. But if, without getting into the whole spiritual silence, what I've been looking at—wWhen you lose a loved one, you start looking at what's on the other side, and what is the reason of life. And I do think it is all connected to love. That is so fascinating.
I just met a Dr Don Ward, who I'm going to introduce you to, who works with trauma, and people who have been through trauma. And he said we have this like—talks about the reticular activating system and how we filter for things. I can so relate to that analogy that you gave there. And he gave a story in his life with his wife who'd had a difficult childhood and a dad who would do a lot of yelling. So then he said his wife was hyper-vigilant to that in his voice, even if he just said, ‘Oh, I don't like that’, and she would immediately be filtering for that. ‘What have I doing wrong’? because of that fear response that was already programmed into her.
He talks about taking these memories. It could be a minor trauma, but it ends up being a big thing that you frame yourself for and limit your beliefs. And I think, like, when you're a child, you don't have that understanding of, mum might have been just a bit stressed and told you ‘you're just a naughty little girl', And then you've just taken that away, and I'm a bad person. Forever and a day, now it's in my life. It can be that simple. And yet it was just mum having a bad day and was a bit stressed and yelled at you, which really shouldn't have had that impact. And as an adult, you wouldn't have taken that. But as a child, you've not been able to filter that.
So what he does, and also with big trauma, he's worked with lots of vets and people that have been blown up and bombs and lost legs and horrible things. He says, you have this memory that is in High Definition movie. And it's trauma, right? And it’s so real and vivid in your memory banks. And anything can trigger it. So it might be a song or smell, a person, an event, and it will just, you're immediately back there in that trauma, and you're reliving it. That creates an emotional response in the body. And what he does through his program is similar to what the hypnosis, I imagine, is take that high definition movie and turn it into a black-and-white picture that's still in your brain, but no longer causes a physiological response because we get stuck in this loop. We're looping around those thoughts and that experience and experiencing it in real-time because your brain doesn't differentiate if this was 20 years ago or it's now. If you think back to a horrible event in your life, that was really traumatic feeling for you, you will have all of those physiological responses in real-time right now because the brain doesn't know. You're actually bringing it out into your body.
And this is where the whole thing about psycho-neuro-immunology comes into it. Where everything that's going on in our brain is fixed and is stuck in our biology and expresses through our biology. And you've obviously been deeper into this world than I have of late. I'm really just scratching the surface. But how do you think that affects us from a health perspective?
Kim: If you think we are made up of 50 trillion cells, and every one of those cells is communicating and it's got a whole incredible unconscious way of sustaining life. And when we think about it consciously, I mean, you're not thinking about your left finger now growing right now, although you might be now because I brought attention to it. But unconsciously so much is happening because of the programming, because of the ability of the body to do what it does and create what we call homeostasis.
So if you have a traumatic experience, and you get triggered by that, let's say, well, I've got a girlfriend who was in—sadly, her story's amazing, I'll get you to get her on your podcast. But basically, she lost her fiance to suicide. She was so traumatized, but within a year, she just couldn't get over it so she decided, on his one year anniversary, she'd go to Bali to take her life.
She had two girl friends who knew that she wasn't right so they went with her. That night, they went out to the Sari Club, and we all may be aware of the Bali bombings that went off. Now, one minute Karen's thinking of going to Bali to take her life. The next minute she is pushed through a burning wall and running for her life. So her physiology—and by the way, she lost her two friends out of that experience so now she feels responsible for three people stiff.
So you can imagine for her what that meant, and her story is phenomenal as she goes into a world of six years of depression. Now what brings her out of it is obviously a lot of self-work. But her dad talking about, his nickname for her as Buffy. And he says to her, he had her on his knee, she's a woman in her late 30s at this point, and he has her sitting on her knee and says ‘Buffy, we've all got to—some time, the caterpillar has got to go through a transformational process to come out the other side and become the butterfly’. And, for some reason, maybe he’s been saying it for those six years, but for some reason, on that day, she heard it. And she has gone on this exploratory path of what is it that has us physiologically turned into this thing called depression. And these are her words, not mine. She believes depression is a choice. So she says you go to sleep every night, you fall asleep, you might be depressed as you fall asleep but as you go to sleep into the unconscious part of sleep, you are no longer depressed. But the minute, not the minute, the moment you wake up, you're not depressed, until the memory kicks in, of who you are, your story in your life, and now all of a sudden, you're living depression.
I'm not undermining depression for anyone listening. And I'm certainly not an expert in that field. But I found it interesting that she feels depression is a choice. So when you think about that, your biology, and what's happening at a physiological level like you say, at a cell level, if you are believing—and by the way, the reason why I said that is if a balloon popped, or champagne cork went off, the explosion of that triggered her exactly into that time and place. So it takes time, effort and energy and real work on self to overcome these traumas.
Now we're not born with a rulebook or a guide book. And our parents aren’t born with a book on how to help us psychologically. We're all traversing this pathway with the best that we possibly can. And so I share that in the hope and realisation that for many of us, suicide is not the answer. And I say that with a disclaimer, that it's really important that in these times of worry and fear and stress and overwhelm, that you seek help if you're feeling like your world is closing in. You're not your own coach. You're not your own best coach. Your partner's not necessarily the best coach or mentor for you through these times. Neither are your parents. So sometimes we need professional help.
And what I love about these days is, if you're seeing a psychologist, in my mom's day, you're seen as a little bit weak. Whereas today, I think you're seen as profoundly intelligent, emotionally intelligent to get that support. So whether it's hypnosis, aroma-therapy, psychology, NLP, getting a coach, getting a mentor, it doesn't matter what it is. And there's a lot of free help out there. If you search it in podcasts like this, that really dive into one realm if you go down the science link, but my real passion sits in the heart space. And if you love who you are, then I believe you have awareness when you're not in love with yourself. And if you take care of yourself, then we know that that helps you one step, one moment, one breath at a time. You're better off, doing something nice for yourself making a green smoothie than you are drinking a bottle of wine. I'm not saying that a bottle of wine with a girl friend and pouring your heart out and having a good cry isn't healthy. But it’s not your crutch. Anything can become a crutch too.
Lisa: It’s not to become your crutch, right? Anything can become an addiction.
Kim: An addiction is not a great place to be either. So we know that if you can find a way one step, one breath at a time. Whether it's free, or if you have the money to invest. And let's face it, most people's biggest excuses for why they don't work on themselves is time and money. And I'm here to tell you that I think it's absolute bullshit, that it's not time and money. It's about whether or not you make yourself a priority because we all know if you, let me say this to your listeners. If someone that you loved was hanging off a cliff, and that means that in order to save them you had to have a weekly message until the end of this year. To save them you would find the time and the money to do it. Now that might seem a bit extreme. But I promise you when you are faced like you have been with your mum and your dad, everything goes aside until you put that at the forefront. So it's about prioritization and the moment you–.
Lisa: And I’m not even feeling guilty for it.
Kim: Except when we look at guilt, sometimes that, even that emotion of guilt is an interesting one. So we feel guilt because we're doing something for ourselves, which is taking away from something else perhaps. And even that's interesting.
So when I look at the emotion of guilt, it's because we're doing something maybe selfishly. Well, what if we could reframe that into investing in ourselves. As a mum, putting a child into daycare, or having a babysitter every now and again so that you can go out or going for a weekly massage? If we look at that as guilt, if you really look at this—this is something interesting and I just want you to think about this. That lot of guilt is it that we're using that as a frame to hide the fact that some days being a mother is fricking hard work. And some days, we actually may hate it. And some days, maybe we are so exhausted, so mentally, physically, emotionally exhausted that we hate it so much. That we then feel bad because we've yelled, we've screamed, we've not been the best version of ourselves. And then we put it into mother guilt. We frame it in that where some days, we just fricking—we don't like it.
I think if we could own those emotions more and own the fact that it doesn't feel great some days, own up but with power, not victim mentality, then I think we would actually be more honest. And we would actually say, that's when I always say, have a bestie that you can call who's not going to go into the gossip-victim mentality, but the ‘I'm hearing you girlfriend’. And then at the end of that, you say, ‘What do you want to do about it? And what's your purpose for this belief, or this feeling right now? And what can you learn from it’? To have a girlfriend or a mate or partner or a friend who says ‘What can we learn from this’? is one of the best friends you could have in your corner. That is psychotherapy and psychology at its best.
What can you learn from this? And sometimes it's very hard to look at the lessons when you're in the throes of it and when emotions are high, intelligence is very low. So that might not be the question that we ask when someone's highly volatile and emotional. But to be a good listener, to hear someone pour their heart out. Often as we talk it to someone that's listening, truly listening without trying to fix us. When you're listening, we often talk through the process out loud, because I believe all humans have all traits and all humans have all resources within them to help heal themselves. But sometimes we just need to hear it. And I don't know about you, Lisa, but sometimes as I'm talking through my problem, I realize how stupid it is, or how benign it sounds. Or how relatively benign it is compared to what someone else is going through. So to have a good listening friend, or to be that listening friend, is sometimes one of the best fast track pathways into self-care which motorizes you right into the heart of self-love.
Here's my third thing. I'm gonna put a caveat on that. That takes discipline. Without discipline, you can care for yourself and go on to the airy fairy land of woe and spirituality, and, oh, my gosh, this is all teaching me lots without responsibility, then that is not serving you. The discipline of waking up every day and physically doing something with that beautiful vehicle of yours with 50 trillion cells. Whether it's five minutes of tricep dips and push-ups just in your bedroom before you get dressed. Whether it's going for a 30-minute walk. Whether it's push and pushing yourself. We know the physiology of pushing the body actually puts you out of your comfort zone, which changes your cell structure. And when you change that, you get more clarity. And when you have more clarity, you make better decisions.
As you get to know yourself more and understand the triggers in your life, your responses, the victim mentality, you start to realize that you don't stop having problems, you just have bigger problems, Lisa. So you might be having a problem that's, ‘I'm not sure whether I should run in the Gold Coast hinterland this weekend because I've got the weekend off’ or whether your problem is trying to emotionally deal with the fact that your father never told you he loved you. Well, they're both problems. But I can tell you which problem I'd rather be traversing and working out. Because I've worked out the fact that maybe, and this isn't me personally, but my dad didn't tell me he loved me or maybe I experienced a very significant abuse. Or maybe I had a traumatic experience that now I'm working on to understand what it means to me.
I think you'd agree with me. Every person you've had on your podcast or every person you've ever met, the ones we admire and love the most are the ones that have actually gone to hell and back. But they've found a way out. It's the comeback story. Google and The Hero’s Journey by Joseph Campbell. It's a six minute video to watch. We all go through The Hero's Journey where we want adventure, we want to go out on a limb, we want to do things. But then we find dragons and people putting us down or pulling us out. And then we traverse through that hardship, and we come out battered and beaten and torn and spat out.
But as we come through that we realize the adventure becomes amazing treasure. And through the treasures we find, we expand and evolve. And as we expand and evolve, we become a better human. And we then go on a new adventure. There’s more dragons. There's more people spitting on us and things. But that is the circle of life, right. If we could just understand that it's at our darkest times, we actually are revealed. Your strength comes through, your courage, your determination, your tenacity, your resilience is what shows up. Or you have the potential to discover when we go through it. Because when life's great, it's great. We don't tend to push ourselves so much when it's great. And that's the cool thing, we get to have a rest when life's great.
Lisa: I always say this to people when I'm speaking.
Kim: I say this with hand on heart, to those of you going through a tough time I have something for you—this too shall pass.
Lisa: One of my favourite sayings of the world.
Kim: Absolutely. And then I also say to those of you in a really good place in your life, I've got some advice for you—this too shall pass. So we know that life is ebb and flow, high and low, in and out, dark and light. If we could come to accept that, then that is self-love. That is realising that actually when life's good, I'm going to learn more. I'm going to listen to different podcasts. I'm going to maybe study something. I'm going to read something. And I say read, not on a technology thing, I mean read a book. I’m going to immerse myself. I'm going to go to a retreat or a breakthrough. I'm going to take on coaching and mentoring. Because we don't want to just be great versions of ourselves, we want to be exceptional versions of ourselves.
And to do that, it's great to work on ourselves when life's great. Because then when the life hits us or the storm, or I'll say you either get a tap, a whack or a Mack. You'll get a tap when someone taps you or something upsets you. You'll get a whack when maybe you're thrown off guard or you've lost your job or your relationships over. We get a Mack Truck, major illness, losing someone, and it sideswipes you to the point where you're on your knees and you can't breathe. But if you've got those tools of resilience inside of you, or you know where to go as you breathe through each moment.
And let's face it, in order to heal it, you truly have to feel it. So that means we can't hide the emotions from any of these. Or that we say ‘Oh, everything's great’ when it's fricking not. Owning it with power and not telling your story as a victim is painful. But owning it and then saying but you know what I'm seeing someone or I'm doing this or I'm using my oils or listening to this podcast with Lisa Tamati. And I've literally met this amazing supplement that I think is actually going to work for me right now. Whatever you hear, don't take it for granted. And always trust that what you're hearing in the moment is a beautiful sign. There's always signs and opportunity of growth, passion, love and development. It just means that what your reticular activation system is filtering for. And whether you're looking for the good or more of the shit that you've just been through.
Lisa: Explain that RAS, Kim. What is it?
Kim: Well, we know there's a part of the brain that has memories. It has filters. It has this whole belief system. But let's look at it this way. What's your favourite car? Or what's a car you dream to own if you don't have it right now?
Lisa: Probably…
Kim: You’re not really probably not that materialistic.
Lisa: I drive around in a 20-year-old car. Let's just say a Ferrari just for the sake of… A red Ferrari.
Kim: A red Ferrari. Sometimes we could call that a penis extinction or a mid-life crisis awakening. But anyway, what's a nice car you like?
Lisa: Oh, I like Jaguars.
Kim: Jaguars. Let’s go with that. And what colour?
Lisa: A wine-coloured one.
Kim: Ah, wine-coloured. So that beautiful burgundy wine-coloured Jaguar?
Lisa: Yeah, not very common, probably. So probably not a good example. But you know what I mean?
Kim: However, it's now in your mindset. It's now in your memory. It's now in your reticular activation system. It's now a part—it’s become out of the 2 million bits of information we receive each day, we actually only have access to 136 bits. So I want you to think about that 2 million bits of information that is coming at you. But we are actually only able to process 136 in our consciousness. Because if you think about it, to access and process 2 million bits we'd be in constant burnout and overwhelm. So those 136 bits now we've just been spoken about a burgundy coloured Jaguar. That's come really close into the forefront of your reticular activation system. So you may find over the next 24 - 48 hours, you might just happen to see one. That's because you're now filtering for it.
You've got 136 bits of that seed. And particularly if we put it to the front of our values, and it became a value. Let's say, car’s not necessarily a high value. But being able to transport yourself or take people to and from places or you love adventure, and travelling. You have a real high value for adventure, a car is part of that. And so now, adventure is one of the highest values on your list of life values. Within that, if we dig deeper is the burgundy-coloured Jaguar. Now you're actually going to see it every time you're thinking of adventure. You might think now, actually ‘Bloody dammit, I've worked really hard, I deserve this’. And now all of a sudden, you start seeing ads for Jaguars or you start thinking. That's what we mean about pulling in the 136 bits of information into the reticular activation system. And now you're seeing it, now you're proving it.
Lisa: And this is why goal setting works, isn't it. Because you've set a goal. You've made that as a priority. So it's a scary one. And then everything that will help you get towards your goal, your subconscious is picking up those things and then saying, ‘hey, be aware of this’. So if you decide you want to run a marathon, it's probably a good example with us two crazy runners. Or ex-crazy runners. You start seeing articles about running and videos on running. You'll be aware of runners running around your neighbourhood that you might have ignored before because suddenly this has become a goal.
So your brain is going, ‘Oh, you wanted this? Well, I'm just making you aware. Here's some tools to get there’. So that's a really good example of the RAS selection really.
Kim: You got to remember too, and I want to make this really clear, it's something that I've learned just lately. If you have a goal to run a marathon, and it's really high in your priorities. You start off in the first week, and you're doing the pro there's maybe a 12-week program. Maybe they're doing one of your the Neal's program. Maybe they've got one of these things. And they’re in week one. They're highly enthusiastic and excited. Week two, they’re a bit sore. It’s hurting a bit, and they have DOMS setting in and now it's like it's not getting easier. In fact, the more you train, the more you realize that even though you don't realize you're getting better and stronger, you're pushing yourself more. And, so you're feeling worse. So by week three, usually within those 21 days, we're starting to go maybe a marathon isn't the goal at all. Or you still keep saying it's a marathon but now you're not going out for the longer run. Now what's happened is your goal is not matching your value.
Now, this is the real essence of the work. How do we make running a marathon one of your highest values? If I listed all your values, you may find health or adventure or pushing the limits or expanding yourself is number 10 on the list.
Lisa: And therefore won't get–
Kim: It's not gonna get done. Which is why so many of us, we set New Year's goals. We join a gym, we go along. And then we basically make a donation to that gym for the rest of the year. So the important thing to realize is that you have to have your goal aligned with your top three values. And if it's not aligned with any of your top three values, you're going to need some integration work to bring it up there if it's something you really want. Because otherwise, that's where the excuses come in or you get an injury. Was it an injury? Or was your subconscious mind delivering you the possibilities that you didn't have to do it? I find health and injuries and disease, and all of those things.
I think if you've read Bruce Lipton's book, The Biology of Belief, you'll know that what we believe we perceive. Where focus goes, energy flows. So if you have all of these things in your mind, if your focus is now on all sore and injury and it's too hard, I don't want to do it. Bang! You're going to find your energy goes that way. It flows that way. And hello, now you've got a reason, an excuse to physically pull out of the marathon. So you know, people would say ‘oh, no, I didn't mean to trip over the washing basket'. Well, how come for the last 365 days, the washing basket could have been there but you never–
The unconscious mind is one of the most powerful places to work, which is why I love hypnosis. Which is why I love timeline therapy. Which is why I love getting into. If you look at a mountain, the snow part on the top is your conscious mind. But in fact, everything underneath which is driving your behaviour, is driving your feelings, your beliefs and your values is actually the tip of the iceberg. That's right 95% of it is definitely coming from the unconscious mind.
Lisa: Yeah, and this is why we need to do the deep work. You just reminded me of a couple of things. Everytime that I do a big mess of a race in the past, I would get sick, or I'd have an injury or something would happen. And usually in the week or two weeks before the actual event. It was like my body's going, ‘I'm gonna stop you because I want you’... A part of me doesn't want to do it’. So you’re going to chuck a few obstacles.
You have to understand that when you override that, and you keep going, often that injure or that niggle, whatever that was, disappears. I saw that, firsthand, time and time again. And even when I was running through New Zealand, and I was doing 70Ks a day, and I was getting weaker and sicker and really, just absolutely blown apart after two weeks. And I didn't stop though, because I had an amazing team and I had a big why. Why I was doing this: charities and big responsibilities, so I keep going despite horrific pain and all the rest of it. Then my body went, ‘Oh, it's just not stopping, we better get on board with this’. And it got stronger and stronger. From the two-week point up until the six-week point, I actually got stronger and stronger. And I thought that it's all over. I could have a walking stick. I was walking, I wasn't running. I was having to go down sideways downhills, because my shins were so bad. And when I still kept going, then the brain went, ‘Well, we better get on with it because she's not going to stop, obviously’. And that's a really good example.
One of the other things I wanted to bring up because motivation follows action, not the other way around. So like when you don't feel like going training today, which is pretty much me every day. I don't feel like it, but I take action, I do something I might be just putting on my gym gear. And I've said this before, put on your gear, walk out the door, go to the letterbox and then see. Often, when you've just taken that couple of steps of action, then you're in the movement and you're like, ‘Oh, well, I'm out here, now muscle go’. Then it gets easier and easier and then you're in the flow of it.
It's the anticipation, sometimes, that stops you. And when you just get up, doing the press-ups in the morning, before I do anything else. I go and have a cold shower or do my heart rate monitoring my HRV. All the breath-hold techniques, and then I come out of the shower. Then I often do like my press-ups and stuff before I sit down at the computer. Because I've done it and if you have little tiny habits that you build in. It might be just teeny press-ups or teeny sit-ups. Every time you go to the loo. Whatever the case maybe you set these little wee micro-goals that you can't fail it. And that action creates motivation. Because you've actually done a little bit and you're pleased with yourself and that creates its own reward loop type of thing.
A lot of what you were saying was just lots. That's exactly what Paul Taylor, I've just had on my show. I'm gonna do Dr Don, would you know. All of this is very, very similar.
So, Kim, I want to go now into hypnosis because this is something that fascinates me. I haven't studied it. I want to, it's on my to-do list at some point in time. Tell me how the heck does that work and what's involved with the hypnosis process?
Kim: It's pretty cool. It's tapping directly into the unconscious mind. And I could use language with us right here and now where I could get us all into a very relaxed state. And every breath that you're taking, we're getting more and more relaxed. And as we relax more, we learn more. And the more we learn, the more we hear. And as we’re hearing new thoughts and opportunities, the more we realize we're capable of everything and anything. That's because we're extraordinary. So as I talk like that, and as I speak to you like that, it's almost putting you into a subconscious trance, which is kind of has your mind scrambling and not having to consciously think.
Your mind kind of goes on this beautiful journey. It's in that space, where you, I believe, we tap into the heart space. And when we tap into the heart or the unconscious space, we can put new meanings past the critical factor, past that critical person who knocks you or puts you down all the time. Here’s another question. If you hear yourself knocking yourself, who's talking? If you're listening, who's talking? And if it's you're saying it, who's listening? So I love the rabbit hole of the unconscious mind because it gets you realizing that everything is about programming. Everything is programmed. And so we want to program excellent computers.
Which is why when we watch people who do amazing things, we want to model ourselves off them or we want to learn how they did it. Which is why I love NLP and hypnosis together. But hypnosis really is the ability to tap into the unconscious mind, bypassing the critical factor so that we can get to the heart, the juice, the unconscious mind to create change. So that when you come out the other side, you see possibility and opportunity. Not all the negative shite that you were saying before, we may have had the session.
And I think it's just accessing it. We spend most of our time consciously thinking. Yet as I said at the beginning when was the last time you gave thanks to your fingernail for growing or your digestive juices for doing what they're doing or your hair growing or those bald maybe not growing, but it's a really beautiful thing. And I think things like flotation tank massage. Times when you get to deeply truly relax, when we let go of the physiology of tension around us actually allows the cells to almost breathe. If we breathe, if you followed Wim Hof or any of the amazing work with breath or James Nestor whose book I just—I love James Nestor’s book.
Lisa: I’ll introduce you.
Kim: Who, James or Wim?
Lisa: James. And Patrick McKeown as well.
Kim: I love that book Breathe, changed the way I looked at my breathing. I’ve been taping my mouth at night because we can go without food for a month. I've heard of people go a year without food. We can go weeks without water. But we can't go many seconds or many minutes without breath.
Breath is the essence of life. And when we go into a state of hypnosis, we are really letting go of the breath. And as we let go of the breath, we actually are able to access the intelligence of the cells. Intelligence of the higher vibration. Without going too wacky, I guess the other way to look at it is that we operate, we're aware that we can measure the speed of light. And I can't remember the exact measurement of it right now but it's bloody fast. But everything below that is all measurable. And from a conscious level, we understand it, you know, we've got vibrational frequency of plants, of oils, of food. We understand that there's a vibrational frequency to all things. But above the speed of light, where we go into the zero point field of quantum physics and true possibility and infinity. That's where the mind just– . It's so big and so bizarre, that you actually can't do anything but surrender to it and feel all possibility.
I guess the way to look at that, to try and bring it into some realm, is if we put one of our blood cells, if we put blood under a microscope, we would go down, and we'd see there's a whole lot of cells. Then we'd go further into the cell and then we'd see a whole cell and within the cell is a whole lot of stuff and life. Proteins and cytoplasm, DNA and RNA. But then if we go right into the DNA and RNA, we go further into that you'll see there's even more microcosms of cells and systems and structure. And if you keep going, the more you go, the more you see. There is nothing but space.
Lisa: There is only vibration.
Kim: And space. And then there's just the vibration.
Lisa: And this is science. There is nothing there. They’re just energy.
Kim: And we could do it to the chair you're sitting on. We could slice through a piece of that. And when the more we go into each of the wooden chairs, or this chair that you're sitting on structure, you'll see that that becomes nothing. And we can go the other way where we go up into us, here right now. From our cells into our blood systems, to our body, to our human system, to our environment, to our community, the place we live, into the planet, then we go beyond the planet into the galaxy, and then we realize the galaxies beyond the galaxies, all of a sudden, we're back to nothing. So we can go macro or micro. but the joy of this ride into quantum physics is that it means that everything means nothing, and nothing is no thing and no thing is everything and everything is something.
When I start doing that with my mind, it makes you realize that actually, if I bring it right back into that significant emotional event that occurred when I was a five-year-old girl. I just, through my own filter systems, through my own values, beliefs and upbringing, my personality, all of those meta-programs going on, I made it mean something. And I love this idea. What if life had no meaning? And it had no meaning that it had no meaning. What if we could actually realize that everything we think is true is actually just a limiting belief of perception of our idea of reality. That in fact, the only reality, the only truth I could actually give you right here right now, is that you and I both know, there's two truths, probably. One truth is that the sun will come up tomorrow. Whether we see it or not is another thing but we do know it’s the truth, the sun will come up tomorrow. And the other truth is we will all die at some point. But even that's up for debate because do we die? Or do we go to another realm in which we didn’t have past and future lives and soul journey? So I don't know.
Lisa: We could go like a huge, and I’ll be– no, I'm fascinated by quantum physics. And most of it, to be honest, is beyond my grasp, it’s a little brainy. But I know that there’s these bigger things out there and I'd love to riff with you for a couple hours on this subject. But we'd probably, people will be getting ‘what the hell are they talking about’?
Kim: What I'd love to say though, is just to finish off there, is just to realize that everything you've ever experienced is just a belief. It's not truth, it's just your perception. So it's never the truth. It's always up for bid, based on how you believe and see and perceive the world. Which is why there's conflict, which is why we have arguments.
But wouldn't it be beautiful, if I could just for a minute, put my shoe, try because I never could. But if I put my shoes and feet into your shoes just for a moment, and imagine it from your perception, your beliefs and your reality, I actually have more understanding.
Lisa: And more empathy.
Kim: I may not agree with it, I may not like it. But, my gosh, it's interesting that it's from your perspective. So every time we feel ourselves triggered, or every time we feel ourselves going into a place of anger or frustration or guilt or sadness or whatever that driving emotion is. Rather than sitting in the whirlpool of mud pit of it, ask yourself this question: For what purpose am I feeling this? Why? Or even just the question why? Why am I sad? Well, I'm sad, because he said that. Why does what he says make you sad? Well, because it's not fear? Why is not fear, not fear? Well, because I don't feel like I'm listened to. Why is it important that you're listened to? Because I feel so alone. Why are you feeling alone? Because I don't love myself.
If you really go to the core of all of it, I promise you, it almost gets back to the fear of not being loved or the fear of not being accepted. That's what everything that drives these emotions in our behaviours comes from.
Lisa: Wow, that is just absolutely amazing. And it's all automatic. Like we had these, Dr Daniel Amen talks about these automatic negative thoughts that just pop up all the time. And if we can separate ourselves out from our own brain, our own subconscious, our own programming, and just observe how these automatic thoughts just keep coming at you all the time. And then if you let them go, they'll go again.
Kim: Or know that those negative thoughts are part of the human experience. They are actually from an evolutionary, anthropological development point of view. We had to be on alert for the sabre-toothed tiger, we had to be watching our tribe or our kids, we had to be there. But we actually spiked ourselves into sympathetic dominants very quickly with that. Years gone by we also pushed ourselves very quickly back down into parasympathetic place. We had peace just to digest. Years today, we're living in the sympathetic dominant’s world.
So I just say with you, as the negative thought comes in, even ask that question, why am I thinking that and keep doing that? I always say our seven why's, and be really honest with yourself. Ask seven why's: Why didI feel that? Why am I thinking that?
I remember my grandmother. Here's another nice way of saying it. I was driving down the freeway once. This is years ago when she was still alive. She emigrated from New Zealand to Australia at 90 years of age. So I always say to people, if you think you’re too old for anything. I always say no. That's a limiting belief, right? So anyway, we're driving down the freeway, I was driving back to King’s Row which she was living over here. And she always used to put her hand on my knee and she'd say, penny for your thoughts. And this particular doubt, obviously had my jaw was clenched. I tell Grandma, ‘I can't talk about this one'. And she said, ‘Oh, Sweetheart, come on. A problem shared is a problem half solved’. So I turned the music up. So the children couldn't hear behind me. They were in their car seats. And I leaned over and said, ‘Grandma, I had this terrible thought, I'm going to have a car accident. A hit on car accident’. And the awful thing about that is that I've just read a book called The Secret which is all about the law of attraction. The more you think it, the more you might attract it. ‘Darling, that must be awful. Terrible’, she goes. ‘Oh, darling, you know, sometimes when we have a thought like that, did you ever stop to think that maybe it's your angels just asking you to drive more carefully’.
So ever since she said that whenever I've had a negative thought come in, like ‘Oh, I don't feel like going for a run God, you're useless. Might you go for a run’? I then go ‘Maybe my angels are asking me to go for a walk today instead'. Or maybe it's just important that I go outside on earth on sand or the grass and just take three deep breaths. Maybe the angels are just saying to me, ‘Your body just don't feel like a good run today, but do something more gentle, be more gentle’. And I think having that reframe ability is one of the most powerful things we can do as humans on the planet.
Lisa: Wow, what a wise Nana you had. Especially since you have a history, you've got a world record as being the youngest to do 24-hour racing.
Kim: Well, it's nothing to these days now. I ran 100 miles in less than 24 hours and I was the youngest woman.
Lisa: It’s not nothing and it’s crazy. I know what they take...
Kim: On a 400-meter track.
Lisa: Yes, I know exactly what it takes. You're not coming from a place of laziness, You’re coming from this place of being sensible and listening to your body and tuning into that. And I love what your Nana said, your grandma said, ‘What an amazing lady’.
There's another thing I just said, we'll wrap it up in a second because I have to go and pick up my mummy. But Paul Taylor talked, who I'm gonna introduce you to, who's doing all this crazy stuff. And he's been on the podcast. He talks about these two characters that you have in your head and he gets you to draw them. Your epic, uber you and your not so great, you. The one that's negative, or the one that's always pulling it down. And they actually put them into figures that you actually draw little cartoon bubbles, and what they are saying to you? And by doing this you're creating the distance to make it real. It puts it into a cartoon perspective of what's actually going on in your brain and this fight because otherwise, it's very ethereal. You know that you are, part of you wants to be this amazing, good person doing these amazing, incredible things and pushing outside your boundaries and being brave. And the other part of you just wants to crawl up and be negative and horrible.
Kim: And the beautiful thing of that, just on that note, is we could call that shadow or golden shadow. And if you ask the seven why's to each of those characters, you will be amazed. And this is why I love the work that I do, is that they both actually have the same purpose.
Lisa: Wow, to protect you.
Kim: They’re both to protect you, to guide you, to love you.
Lisa: They just don’t know the best way.
Kim: Exactly. And sometimes, it’s beautiful to actually integrate the two together as well. I just wanted to add that.
Lisa: I think that’s great. Because there’s what’s that negative one. If you think about it, why is it telling you something negative? Because it's scared?.‘You can't run a marathon? Who do you think you are? You're not good enough to do that’. That's the negative voice speaking. It's a negative little Lisa that didn't go. And then the other ones. ‘Yes, you can. I know you can make it. Come on, keep going’. And then when you put that into the perspective of why is that negative voice saying that? Because it doesn't want you to fail, it doesn't want you to get hurt. It's like your overprotective mother, who's actually holding you back from what you can achieve. And then you've got the other one on the other side, the mum that's going ‘Come on, you can do that. I'm cheering for you!’ And just understanding that this process is going on in our heads.
As runners we know that voice very, very well. Because when you’ve been 100 miles out there, it's screaming. That negative voice is screaming that you just stop.
Kim: You know what’s so funny with it. I just finished with this one. I remember running this world record race and I remember this voice inside of my head for the first probably, I'll be honest, 14 hours of the race. It was saying ‘You’re a dork. What a stupid thing to do. Who does this? You're never gonna do this. What? You're a dork’. All of these things. And then I go ‘Oh shut up’, and I carry on.
Anyway, finally at about we call the graveyard shift, between 12 and 6 am. And the doctor comes out puts me on the scales and I was looking terrible. I'm dragging my sorry back around the track. He puts me on the scales and he goes, ‘I'm sorry, Kim, you've lost seven kilos, nearly seven kilos. We're going to take you out of the race. It would be wrong with me to let you race’. And in that moment this voice went, ‘You can't tell me I can’t run. You can't tell me’. I begged him to let me stay in the race. So for 14 hours, I've been fighting it then someone tells me I can't do it. This voice turns around and goes you can't tell me what to do. And then he said to me, ‘Listen to your team. You're gonna eat all this stuff. You're gonna have to take these supplements’. Then I ended up rising above it and then setting a world record and then when they said tom me I set a world record, I turned around and I was receiving the trophy I sat there and I thought, ‘Imagine what I could have done if I hadn’t spent fourteen hours on the track whinging’.
Lisa: All that energy being sucked into that negativity and I still haven't worked out how to shut it up completely. But it's a rebellious nature that comes out when anybody tells me I can't do something. It's like a red rag to a bull.
Kim: I think that's why I love so much with my–. I have a mentorship program where I have women every week coming into this. Every Tuesday night they show up with me and I pull their minds apart and I give them and I dance with it because now I have such a love. Whoo. We do that.
And then I'm super pumped that we now have live events happening, which are the essential self, key weekend, which then are the immersion events. Because for many of us to learn this, it really takes a process. But imagine immersing yourself into it for a whole weekend. And sometimes I think we make greater shifts in it by immersion rather than week by week or month by month.
And I'm only sharing this because I know that a lot of your listeners around the world, the ones on the Sunshine Coast, and ones going to be down in Victoria and Melbourne. But I just want people to know that it doesn't have to be my event. But look at something around you. What's going on? Even if it's someone doing a library talk, someone's offering something at the local—YouTube. Just keep your mind stimulated with possibility because it's through the possibility we have grown. It’s through the growth we become way more powerful individuals. And with that, we start to then look at our higher purpose, and what legacy are we going to leave in this life.
Lisa: Keep being curious. And I really encourage anyone who wants to reach out, to come on, maybe join her mentorship program where you’re doing that every week, and that's ridiculously good price like, it's super good value. So if you want to reach out to Kim and join her mentorship program there or join her in one of your retreats, we will give all the details in the show notes. But just briefly, Kim, where can people find out about you, contact you, ask you about all your own work that you do, your books and so on.
Kim: So two places. Thank you so much. I so appreciate you asking because I just really want this to work out. I really want people to know, the more love they have for themselves, the more they have to offer. But really to look it up kimmorisontraining.com is where you'll find the mentorship stuff. But also my beautiful products and oils, which I use throughout the whole time is twenty8.com. You can find me on Instagram, Kim Morrison and the number 28.
I love Instagram, I love being there. But I really, even if you just wanted to have a chat or to see the work that I do. Even the one-on-one mentoring that I offer. There's some breakthrough sessions that I now do that is a real 8-hour deep. You book me for eight hours straight, or we break it up into two-four hours, but do we have breakthroughs. But there's a whole lot of stuff. Plus I do international retreats and I'm launching later this year my spa, immersion and integration which is success, purpose, alignment, immersion. So that will be later this year, which I'm super pumped and excited for. It’s the goals I really live. I just, I'm so pumped.
Lisa: When do you ever have a rest?
Kim: You speak for yourself! Oh my god. Talk about you see what you see in another isn't totally present in yourself. So I see you and I go, well. And I see and realize and appreciate and respect. It's because we have this beautiful duality of love for one another.
Lisa: We do, we definitely do. You're a very special person. And I've got that little negative voice in my head gang. ‘You're not as good as Kim because she's doing all of that'. And the other one’s going ‘Yeah exactly’. And the other side's going ‘You should figure it out. You're also, you're doing amazing stuff too'. This is a classic example. I had to give that example because it's quite funny. And when you when you're self-aware enough to care crap, you're stupid busy.
But I really encourage people, kimmorrisontraining.com and 20, the word twenty8.com. Word twenty and the number 8 dot com. Check out what Kim does.
Thank you so much, my dear friend.
Kim: I love you and thank you for all the work you do. And I'm going to talk to that beautiful little inner critic right now. And she's just protecting you because she knows how much work it takes to do all of this work. She's just saying to you maybe not right now. Launching all those other ideas you've got in your head because I know we talked about our fear. Stop.
Lisa: Yeah, stop over. Thank you so much for your time today. You've been absolutely epic.
Kim: I love you lots.
That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate, review and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.
The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.
From our physical appearance to our body's mechanical functions, our whole being is encoded into our genes and kept in each cell that makes us. These basic biological units have their system to keep everything functioning and our body alive and moving. They have housekeeping functions: cells perform autophagy to get rid of accumulated waste materials. Maximising the effects of these processes can help in increasing your longevity.
When the autophagic processes fail, it can damage important parts of the cell such as the DNA and accelerate ageing. In this episode, Dr Elena Seranova explains the science behind autophagy and how it connects to NAD and sirtuin genes. She also shares her own experience and research on using this knowledge to live a longer, fuller life.
Join us in this episode to learn more about autophagy and how this process is useful in increasing your longevity and giving you a boost in life.
For our epigenetics health program that is all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/.
You can also join our free live webinar on epigenetics.
Go to www.runninghotcoaching.com for our online run training coaching.
If you would like to work with me one to one on anything from your mindset, to head injuries, to biohacking your health, to optimal performance or executive coaching, please book a consultation here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/consultations.
My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research, and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within 3 years. Get your copy here: http://relentlessbook.lisatamati.com/
For my other two best-selling books Running Hot and Running to Extremes, chronicling my ultrarunning adventures and expeditions all around the world, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books.
‘Lysosome is another acidic organelle that contains acid hydrolases that are able to digest this cargo...and if it doesn't work, well, the cell is basically in trouble because you have all this garbage floating around, and there is nothing to remove them. So this is why autophagy is important.
‘When things are preserved across species, then that gives a scientist an indication that this is probably a very important biological function’.
‘I think that in order for your body to function properly, you really need to have a kind of a healthy routine in general’.
‘So I think that when it comes to being healthy, and activating your autophagy levels, and having a healthy lifestyle in general, you need to start with the basics first.’
‘Another small tip that I can give is to actually avoid sunlight, which is something that people don't really consider. What happens when we're exposed to sunlight, when our skin is exposed to sunlight for prolonged periods of time, we start getting the DNA damage’.
“The important part is not to just increase your age, it’s to increase your healthspan.”
‘And if you have if your mitochondria are not healthy, and they're dying, and you're not having enough mitochondria in your cells, then you are going to be sick.’
Dr Elena Seranova is a scientist, serial entrepreneur and business mentor who has founded multiple innovative biotechnological businesses.
She first studied at the University of Ioannina with a major in Psychology. She started a private practice before developing an interest in neuroscience. She continued her studies and earned her Master’s Degree in Translational Neuroscience at the University of Sheffield. She now also holds a Doctorate Degree in Stem Cell Biology and Autophagy from the University of Birmingham.
Her expertise in these fields has led her to become the co-founder of a biotech start-up, SkyLab Bio. She has written a number of peer-reviewed articles and multiple research articles on autophagy throughout her career.
Aside from these accomplishments, she started her own business, NMN Bio. Her own experiences with the use of supplements have inspired her to expand the market to supply the public with cutting-edge anti-ageing supplements. NMN Bio reaches New Zealand, UK, and Europe.
Dr Elena found her passion for drug discovery and autophagy. She has endeavoured to share this with the public through her research and work as an entrepreneur.
To learn more about Dr Elena and her work, visit her website.
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Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends, especially those interested in increasing their longevity, so that they can practice the activation of autophagy in their lifestyle.
Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts.
To pushing the limits,
Lisa
Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential, with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.
Lisa Tamati: Well, hi everyone and welcome back to Pushing the Limits. This week I have Dr. Elena Seranova, who has already been a guest on the show. And today, we're talking about autophagy and NAD, and the interplay between these two. Now that might sound extremely boring, but it isn't. It's all about longevity and anti-aging. So, we're going to be talking about the science between about NAD precursors and the sirtuin genes, and how to upregulate the sirtuin genes, and all about autophagy, which is really the recycling of old and damaged parts and proteins of a cell that need to be gotten rid of. So, it's a bit like having a good garbage disposal unit happening. And there are many ways to activate autophagy, which we go into in this episode. We talk about intermittent fasting, we talk about cold and hot and hormetic stressors like exercise and yes, of course fasting. But also, mTOR independent pathways to activate autophagy, it'll all be revealed in this interview.
Now this does get a little bit technical in the first 20 minutes or so. But hang in there and listen to this a couple of times. Because if you want to slow down aging, if you want to slow down the generative decline of your body and you want to have a long and healthy lifestyle, then this stuff is really, really worth paying attention to and trying to understand.
We talk about NMN, which is nicotinamide mononucleotide, which is a supplement that is now available, is a longevity compound to upregulate the sirtuin genes. And we're really lucky to check that out. You can go and find that supplement, which has been made and produced by Dr. Elena Seranova and her company, NMN Bio. So if you head hop over to nmnbio.nz, we're now importing this into the country. So, this is one way that you can really fight aging and degenerative decline that we all fear and don't want.
And when you listen to this episode and really listen to it a couple of times, you'll understand some of the incredible anti-aging things that are coming down. This is not pseudoscience. Dr. Elena is one of the most amazing neuroscientists out there. So please listen to this episode, enjoy it, get a lot out of it and get the takeaway. So, if you don't understand some of the terminology, don't worry, keep going. And by the end, you'll start to pick up certain bits and pieces. And if you listen to it again, you'll be able to pick up a little bit more and a little bit more. And at the end of the day, it's about the takeaways, what can you do to slow aging down and all that information is in there. So, I hope you enjoy this episode with Dr. Elena.
Before we go over to that we are all about health optimisation, high performance, athletic performance. So, if you need any help with any of those areas of your life, please reach out to us, Support at lisatamati.com. Go and check out our website, lisatamati.com. You'll find all our programs, our Epigenetics Programs, our online run training system that's customised and personalised totally to you, and check out what we do. We love helping you be the best version of yourself that you can be. Now over to the show with Dr. Elena Servanova.
Lisa: Well, hi everyone. Lisa Tamati here and very excited to have you hopefully join us this morning. It's 7:30am in the morning here in New Zealand. And where Dr. Elena Seranova is, it's very late at night. How are you doing, Dr. Elena?
Dr Elena Seranova: Good, good. How are you? Happy to be here again.
Lisa: Yeah, very excited for today's topic. So, we're going to be doing a discussion around autophagy and NAD boosters and sirtuin genes. So it’s going to be a really interesting discussion that is really beneficial for you if you want to know how to live longer, live healthier, and optimise your body and your mind and your potential. So, Dr. Elena, can you just tell us briefly a little bit about yourself?
Dr Elena: Sure. So, I started my journey as a psychologist. So I'm an interdisciplinary scientist. I majored in psychology at first and then I had my own private practise for five years which turned out to be a successful wellness centre. And I really got fascinated by neuroscience and the brain. And for this reason, at first I started studying the brain myself and then I found an amazing master's degree at the University of Sheffield in Translational Neuroscience, which basically combined the research and neurodegeneration with applications that could translate into therapeutics. So, this is what translational neuroscience means, is basically the combination and the outcome of the research—the hardcore biology research that can be utilised for therapeutic approaches and patients.
I really enjoyed that. So that was quite cool, being in the lab and doing molecular biology experiments and so on. So, I kind of fell in love with the lab, and I decided to do a PhD as well. I continued my studies in autophagy and stem cell biology and it was quite challenging, but at the same time, I really enjoyed it. And I can definitely say that science is a big part of my life.
Lisa: Definitely your thing. Okay, so autophagy and stem cells. So in relation to neurodegenerative diseases in that case? Okay, but what is autophagy? Because a lot of people will be listening to it and go, ‘What the heck is that big word, autophagy’? It's sort of big word in biohacking circles, but perhaps not in the general public. Can you explain what autophagy is exactly?
Dr Elena: Yes, sure. So, autophagy is a catabolic pathway that degrades dysfunctional organelles in the cell or protein pro aggregates. So, any material that is basically unwanted in the cell, autophagy can degrade. It's like the stomach of the cell.
Lisa: So, it’s like eating it? It's eating, sort of...
Dr Elena: Yeah, exactly. And what happens when autophagy is activated, we actually have the formation of the so-called phagophore, which is a membrane structure that basically engulfs different organelles and materials that need to be degraded to form the so called autophagosome, which is a round organelle that basically has this cargo that needs to be digested. That eventually fuses with lysosome.
And lysosome is another acidic organelle that contains acidic hydrolases that are able to digest this cargo. And this process is very essential for the cell, it’s very vital. It's evolutionary conserved in all species, from yeast to models. And if it doesn't work well, the cell is basically in trouble because you have all this garbage...
Lisa: Floating around.
Dr Elena: ...floating around and there is nothing to remove them. So, this is why autophagy is important. And we have different pathways that autophagy can be activated through as well. So, one of those pathways is mTOR, mechanistic target of rapamycin. And then we have other pathways that can activate this process such as AMPK, GSK3, and so on.
Lisa: So is this like, sorry to interrupt, but like because I know that people out there might be like, ‘Wow, that's a lot of big words and a lot of information’. So, is it like that the cell has to do a housecleaning, and it's got stuff inside the cell that is not working optimally, and needs to be gotten rid of, or is it the whole cell? So, it's not apoptosis. So it's not where the host is disintegrating?
Dr Elena: No. Yeah, it's actually a—it's a pre-apoptotic pathway. So, before apoptosis is activated, we have autophagy. And if autophagy fails in what it needs to do, then we have activation of some apoptotic pathways. So, it's one step before that. And if everything goes well, and autophagy is functional—and by the way, in different diseases, we might be having different autophagy impairments at different stages of autophagy. So, it's either the initial phagophore formation, for instance, that it's not working well, and it can’t engulf the cargo, or it's insulator stages of autophagy, such as the acidic hydrolysis and the lysosomes that are actually not that acidic. So their pH is not acidic enough to digest the cargo. So, we might be having different defects in the autophagy pathway in different diseases.
Lisa: That leads to apoptosis. Am I right?
Dr Elena: And yeah, if autophagy is not doing its work correctly, then eventually we will have apoptosis. And actually, this is what we're seeing in in vitro models of neurodegenerative diseases as well. So, for instance, if autophagy is not working well.
And we have, let's say, dysfunctional organelles, such as mitochondria—dysfunctional mitochondria that are not working well. Let's say they are depolarised. And there is an excess production of reactive oxygen species going on. Now, if nothing can degrade these dysfunctional mitochondria, you'll keep on having this accumulation of reactive oxygen species, which eventually will lead to DNA damage and deactivation of PARPs. And it's basically a death spiral that will keep on leading the cell towards death.
Lisa: Okay, so what is a PARP? You mentioned PARP there. And just for the listeners, too. So, apoptosis is basically cell death, programmed cell death. So, this is not—what's the other one necrotic or something?
Dr Elena: Necrosis?
Lisa: Yeah, necrosis, where the cell dies for—necrosis. But this is sort of a natural programmed cell death. But we only want that if we're actually renewing the cells and we are wanting new stuff. So, before that, the body tries to do this autophagy process, is that how it works? And then what so what is PARP? What is PARP, because that’s the word again...
Dr Elena: PARPs are a class of enzymes, and in order for them to function, they need a molecule called NAD, so nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. And they're actually competing for NAD in the cell. And whenever we have increased DNA damage, we would have the PARP activation as well. And this would lead to NAD depletion, which kind of brings me to my next point about what other enzymes consume NAD. And one of those enzymes are sirtuins, which are the so-called longevity genes that are basically responsible for multiple processes in the cell, including epigenetic regulation of gene expression.
So, they do—because sirtuins are a class of enzymes that are also dependent on NAD, and they're all the deacetylase enzymes, meaning that they remove acetyl groups from the DNA. And as a result, they control which genes will be expressed in which tissues, which is very crucial for the cellular identity and for the proper function of different cells.
So, sirtuins in a healthy cell, so sirtuin should be upregulated and they should be having this housekeeping gene—housekeeping function where they basically control what's going on with the DNA repair and also with the gene expression as well. And if we do have—when we do start having impaired autophagy, and let's say there is increased reactive oxygen species, because there are increased dysfunctional mitochondria in the cell, you will have in more activation of PARPs, and all of the NAD will start being drained from... And sirtuin will not have enough energy to function. So, those are actually quite an elegant interplay between autophagy and NAD and sirtuins.
Lisa: Okay. Okay, can I just want to like put that back to you, so that we can slow down because we are going technical quite fast. And I think a lot of people might be like, ‘What the heck are they talking about’? So, the sirtuin genes, basically longevity genes, and then one of the jobs is DNA repair. And another of the jobs is to say which genes are actually being activated right now. And these sirtuin genes are also responsible, I think, for cell replication, is that correct?
Dr Elena: The sirtuins are responsible for multiple functions, directly or indirectly. So, for instance, the sirtuin 3 gene is also responsible for mitochondrial biogenesis. And it's implicated in the amount of mitochondria that are being produced by the cell, which is related to cell replication eventually, because you do need to have enough ATP levels to replicate.
Lisa: Right. Yeah. So, this has definitely to do with ATP production as well and mitochondrial health. So, these are doing all of these jobs, the sirtuin genes, they're very, very crucial genes in our genome. And these are preserved across every species, I believe? Every species on the planet?
Dr Elena: Yeah. Also from yeast to humans, it's also—sirtuin genes are preserved very well.
Lisa: And when things are preserved across species, then that gives a scientist an indication that this is probably a very important biological function and we need to have a look at this one because it's—from what I understand.
Okay, so when you have activated PARP because you're not doing autophagy well and there's things going wrong, it's taking the NAD. So NAD is basically like a fuel source that both the sirtuin genes. And when PARP is activated, it's using to fuel its job. And so, this is competition for competing fuel sources. So, like if you imagine, you've only got one tank of fuel for your car, but you've got to go in two different directions and do two different jobs. You go, ‘How am I going to divide up my energy’? So, then it becomes important as to how much NAD we have in the body? So, what is NAD again? That says nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide? But what is that and how does it work?
Dr Elena: Yeah, it does serve as a substrate for all of these enzymes, including sirtuins and PARPS and is basically a master regulator of metabolism. So, it's a very important molecule and it serves as—without NAD, the cell is not able to function properly just because this crucial molecule is implicated in so many different reactions. So, NAD is found in all living cells and organisms. This is also evolutionary conserved across species. And it exists in two forms, NADH and NAD+, which is the reduced and the oxidised form, respectively. And both of them are important. And both of them are implicated in multiple cellular reactions.
Lisa: Is it going backwards and forwards in a cycle, NADH, NAD+, by donating electrons back and forth, sort of thing?
Dr Elena: Yeah. Through electron transport chain in the mitochondria, yeah. So, this is why it's so important. And so, what we're seeing now in the latest advancements in longevity research is that we actually can supplement with different precursors of NAD, such as nicotinamide mononucleotide, for instance, NMN. And this is the supplement that my company...
Lisa: See, you've now got that available on the market because this is such a crucial thing.
Dr Elena: Exactly. And I think that it's really interesting to also say that when it comes to the interaction between autophagy and sirtuins, there is also another regulation of autophagy there. So sirtuin 1 is actually responsible for activating some transcription factors such as TFEB and FoxO3 that have to do with initiation of the autophagy process.
So, for this reason, when we do have dropping levels of NAD, decreasing levels of NAD, and there is not enough NAD for sirtuins to do their job. And let's say again—let's talk about that previous example in neurodegeneration when you have increased reactive oxygen species, and you have increased the level of stress and oxidative stress and decreased activity of sirtuins.
And not only the situation is already bad, but because sirtuin 1 doesn't have enough energy to function and to activate the TFEB and the FoxO3 transcription factors to initiate autophagy, now you have all of this dysfunctional mitochondria floating around and autophagy starts being impaired as well because we activated enough. So, it's a negative feedback loop which actually accelerates the scenario where the cell is going towards cell death, basically.
Lisa: So that means like, if you don't have enough NAD, then your sirtuin 1 gene is not going to be able to initiate autophagy and clean up the cell and you're going to have dysfunctional mitochondria. Is that independent of the mTOR pathway? Or is that—am I getting confused?
Dr Elena: So, okay. So, good question. So, what happens is there are some molecules that activates sirtuins. So, for instance, sirtuin 1 is activated by resveratrol, and this is something that has been demonstrated many years ago. So, when you have sirtuin 1 dependent activation of autophagy, you will be having it through an mTOR independent pathway.
Lisa: So it's a fasting mimetic resveratrol.
Dr Elena: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So, because we now know that the mTOR activity is not affected by intake of resveratrol. And this is quite crucial because actually, even if we want to activate autophagy, we shouldn’t do it through the mTOR pathway, this is not the preferred way, because mTOR is also responsible for growth and translation in the cell. So, this is not—it's also quite a key player in the cell. So it's a serine threonine kinase, and you actually don't want it to be activated at all times because this may lead other conditions. So, what we're focusing on at the moment is to find molecules that can activate autophagy in an mTOR independent manner.
Lisa: Okay, so. So if the mTOR—cause MTOR is usually what's for growth it’s anabolic, it's causing growth. So for example, a bodybuilder goes to the gym, they're in an anabolic state, they are in an mTOR growth state. And when you have autophagy, that's sort of the opposite. So, it's a catabolic state where it's starting to eat itself. So, it’s mTOR, most people like do fasting for that reason to activate autophagy?
Dr Elena: Yeah, this is another good point there. So, when we're fasting, and there is actually conflicting evidence out there as to when autophagy is fully activated. Usually, people say that around 24 hours, you start having the autophagy activation. There are others that swear by the ketogenic diet, and say that if you don't consume any carbs, you will get autophagy activation anyway. However, from what other researchers have found is that, if you are in a ketogenic diet, and you do consume meat, it depends on what kind of meat you consume that will either activate autophagy or not. And it all has to do with levels of different amino acids in the cell because autophagy is quite sensitive to nutrients and to nutrient starvation to be activated. If you have an abundance of amino acids, again, it will not be activated.
So, for instance, one amino acid that activates autophagy very well is leucine. And if you're eating certain meat that are rich in leucine, this is probably not good for your autophagic state. Something else to keep in mind, and I've heard, I think it was Dave Asprey saying that if you can manage to be on under 15 grams of protein per day, you will probably keep the autophagy going.
Lisa: Because a lot of people on keto think I can eat a lot of protein, which is a mistake, really. It isn't about having—that's interesting, because I had Dr. David Minkoff on my podcast, Pushing the Limits a while ago, and he has a product called PerfectAmino, which is really a 99% usable form of amino acids and combination. And I was interested, ‘Well hang on, if I'm heading there, which is going a lot of good things in the body. But is that going to inhibit my mTOR, or autophagy’? Sorry, because I've got too much leucine in there?
Dr Elena: This is a very good point for all of this process food as well. So, for instance, there are some ready meals you can get or some protein bars that claim to have all the low carb and everything. And then they slam a badge on their pack saying that it's vegan as well. But then, why is it vegan if it has all the amino acids because that's one of the selling points when you're actually on a vegan diet, or you have some days where you are on a vegan diet. You want to get yourself in a state of partial amino acid depletion to get this beneficial effect of enhanced autophagy. And on intercellular toxins and so on.
Lisa: Right, so for certain periods of time, you want to do this, and it's a cycling thing, you don't want to be completely deficient of aminos for too long because then your body will start to break down.
Dr Elena: This is what I do personally as well. So, during the week, so I am a fan of cattle/carnivore diet. So, this diet is quite comfortable for me and I enjoyed it quite a lot. But then during my week I try to have some days where I'm either vegetarian or vegan, just because I want to have those benefits.
Lisa: Yeah. Up and down. And then this seems to be a theme in biology all the time is that it's not one thing. It's not staying on keto for ever and ever, amen. It's about doing cyclic keto or cyclic vegan and it’s cyclic. And our body loves this push and pull—when there’s recovery and there’s growth and then clean up phase, growth clean up. So autophagy can be activated through fasting. It can also be active through having resveratrol and upregulating the sirtuin 1 gene, how else can we activate autophagy?
Dr Elena: So there are different ways, there are different things you can really implement in order to activate autophagy. And I think that it all has to do with how you build your lifestyle in general. So, I think that in order for your body to function properly, you really need to have a kind of a healthy routine in general. And an analogy that I can give you there is that there are people that would buy a couple of supplements, and then they would be so proud of it. And then they would say, ‘Oh, yeah, but I'm taking those supplements now, and I'm so healthy’. And then their biorhythms are all off. They sleep at 5am every day. And they're eating crappy foods or super processed foods.
Lisa: Yeah, it’s not going to work.
Dr Elena: It’s all good. So, I think that when it comes to being healthy and activating your autophagy levels and having a healthy lifestyle in general, you need to start with the basics first.
So, the intermittent fasting is definitely the first step to take in order to become a bit healthier. And from the research that I'm reading, and from the things that I'm implementing, I definitely believe that both anecdotal and scientific evidence point towards the fact that intermittent fasting is actually the way to go. I mean, there are conflicting opinions out there and there are pros and cons in every diet, and so on. And I get that. But I personally believe that with intermittent fasting, if you try to narrow down the window where you're uptaking food, this is very, very good for you. So, this is step number one.
But then again, so either you're trying to raise your NAD levels, or you're trying to activate your autophagy, because those pathways are quite intertwined. And what you eventually want to do is you want to have increased levels of sirtuin, and sirtuin 1 in particular, and sirtuin 3, of course, and so on. And for this reason, in order to preserve this pool of NAD that is available for the sirtuin 1 to activate itself and activate the autophagy pathway.
Another small tip that I can give is to actually avoid sunlight, which is something that people don't really consider. But what happens when we're exposed to sunlight, when our skin is exposed to sunlight for prolonged periods of time, we start getting the DNA damage. And when you get the DNA damage, you have PARP activation, and then again, you NAD pool...
Lisa: Wow. I never connected those dots. That's really interesting. So, because—I mean, we need sun. We need sun for vitamin D and for our mood and all that sort of stuff. So, you're not saying don't have any sun.
Dr Elena: Yeah, sure.
Lisa: But because the sun is causing DNA damage, it's going to cause more PARP activation, it’s going to have the sirtuin genes going to repair the DNA, that's going to use up the body's resources is what you're saying.
Okay, wow, that makes sense. Makes sense. And then by the same token, like things like smoking that breaks DNA, like no tomorrow. This is why smoking ages you is because of all the DNA breaks. And this is why, when you're in the sun for hours every day, you get wrinkly skin and you get collagen lost and all the rest of the things that are happening. So, anything that's going to be causing DNA breaks is going to cause you to age quicker.
Dr Elena: Exactly.
Lisa: Using up the resources basically. Wow, okay.
Dr Elena: So it's obviously—you don't have to become a vampire and dissipate walk in the sun when you want to go somewhere. But sunbathing for hours is definitely not something you want to do with—to get your body go through, basically. So that's another tip.
And then something else, really, really simple that can be implemented on a daily basis in order to maintain your sirtuin levels, and as a result, your autophagy levels, and your NAD levels is also to take a tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil, which contains oleic acid. And it basically does the same job as resveratrol. And it's interesting—I think that there's been a recent research article out that shows that like oleic acid might even be more efficient than resveratrol, in terms of activating sirtuin 1, which I think it's really, really cool.
Lisa: So yeah. Well, combine the two. I do.
Dr Elena: Yeah, absolutely. You can do that. And then, you need to make sure that the extra virgin olive oil is actually of a very good quality because there is a bunch of...
Lisa: There is a bunch of rubbish out there. So, make sure it's from an orchard that you know, it's cold pressed, it's all those extra virgin, it's all that sort of good stuff. And not—how do they do it with solvents and stuff? Or that it's come from multiple orchards and being cut with other oils. It's a really, really important point. And then oleic acid does so much good things in the body. But isn’t that fat, Elena? Like lots of people are like, in their minds are going, ‘But oil is fat. It’s the same with MCT oil. Isn’t that going to make you fat when you eat fat’? Just going to put that around.
Dr Elena: There are good fats and there are bad fats. So, olive oil is good fat. MCT oil is a good fat. Avocado is a good fat. So, not all thoughts are made equal. So, this is definitely something important to keep in mind, especially with a good quality extra virgin olive oil.
Lisa: Because each one of our cells is a membrane that has a phospholipid, isn't it? So we need that, actually, this building of ourselves into the integrity.
Dr Elena: We have a phospholipid layer in the brain as well. And this is why we actually supplement with omega 3 fatty acids, because this is what it does. So, this is what omega 3 fatty acids do. They go into the phospholipid membrane, and then they basically...
Lisa: Make the integrity of that membrane better.
Dr Elena: Yeah, they contribute to the healthy phospholipid layer in the brain.
Lisa: So that's why it's very important for neurodegeneration to have omega 3s going in and again, people get quality omega 3s. Not your cheap supermarket ones that are perhaps oxidised and have been sitting on the shelves for six months. So really important to get a reputable source here. And omega 3 is of course in fishes as well, and krill, and so on.
Okay, so but is there a downside to fat? Because I studied epigenetics and a lot of people's profiles come back with don't have too many fats. And it's been one of those things in my head is like ‘Why would some people not come back with you shouldn't have too much fat’? I mean, there are things like gall bladders been removed. That's a pretty specific thing. But is there a genetic component? And probably not your wheelhouse, really, but is there a genetic component to your ability to process fat?
Dr Elena: There is a genetic component, and I've actually seen this with a family that has a history of very problematic digestion of fat, and so on. Absolutely. But yeah, again, not all fats are made the same. And when you cut off the bad fats from your life, things change and everything changes really.
Lisa: Yeah, it really is very satiating, too to have a little bit of fat and that can really help with cravings and blood sugar spikes—we're getting off topic.
So you have a company, NMN Bio, which produces nicotinamide mononucleotide supplement. And you've got a whole range of other stuff coming as well. Why did you decide like, you need to get this out there on the market? Based on your research and your knowledge around this area, why is it important that people take NMN if they're serious about slowing aging?
Dr Elena: So first of all, I came across the biology of NAD and NMN during my PhD studies and my research kind of led me into this field because I was studying autophagy neurodegeneration. And actually, I still cannot disclose my research.
Lisa: Yeah, it’s not published yet.
Dr Elena: My research paper from my PhD is not published yet, but hopefully soon, so we're about to submit it quite soon actually. So for this reason, I started studying the biology of NAD and I actually saw how important and how crucial NAD is to the cell and what happens when we have a lack of NAD and depletion of NAD pools in the cell. And I've been supplementing with different kinds of vitamins and supplements my whole life really. So, I was watching closely this space for a while, and I was taking different supplements myself for a while.
And so, when I came across NMN and I realised that actually there is this strategy where we can supplement with a precursor in order to increase our energy levels, I found it really, really interesting. And I thought to give it a go myself and try it out and see the results. And then what shocked me was that the immediate effect of the supplement—so within a few days, you can already feel a difference in your energy levels and your focus. And this comes from the fact that sirtuins are responsible for so many molecular processes in the cell. And this is why you have this effect, including the mitochondrial biogenesis, which gives you basically increased ATP, consequently.
Lisa: You get actually more mitochondria. So, like, if you got heart disease...
Dr Elena: The production of more mitochondria, and then they produce more ATP as a result. And then you have this magic energy, yeah. This is why I thought to bring this product into the market. And the other reason was that there was not enough reliable suppliers on the market, which is crazy, because it's actually quite a popular supplement. It's been on the rise, the interest was rising for the past couple of years, but what we're seeing is there is a lot of white labelling companies that don't offer any certificates of analysis and so on. And also, you have even big companies not offering proper certificates of analysis, which was me like, it was…
Yeah, I don't understand. You have a big company, and you have just the purity report from like, 18 months ago, and you don't have any other analysis, such as heavy metals, or pH or microorganisms. So, the consumer is actually not confident in buying from you. And I wanted to deliver the best quality for myself and my family. And then I said, ‘Wait a minute. This is not done, right’. And this is why I launched the company because I wanted a company that was completely transparent. And I even say it on the website, that if you're interested in finding out who our suppliers are, and so on, and have any questions about our supply chain, just feel free to reach out to me. And I would be happy to disclose all of those things.
There are other companies that you can't find any registration number, or who the founder is, and so on. And it's quite confusing, really, because like you— you don't know who you deal with.
Lisa: This is the same with the whole supplement industry. On the one hand, it's good that it's not regulated by the FDA, and whoever else, there are authorities around the world. Because like, then—they are turned into the pharmaceutical industry, which don't get me started. But on the other hand, there's not enough regulation around the quality control.
And one of the things when I was searching for NMNs, searching the world for it, I had to go overseas and import it to friends in America and get it out of there. And this is why I like—was super excited to discover your work. And then, we've since now made it available down here. So, we're going to branch down here in New Zealand for New Zealand, Australia. And I wanted someone who I could trust, who has all the scientific knowledge behind it, there's all lab tests, etc. And that was really important for me for quality.
Just on a side note. So I've been taking NMN now for—I think—so five, close to six months. I've had a massive weight loss and so as my mum. Why would that be? Like, I didn't take it for weight loss. I wasn't overweight, per se. But I had a couple of kilos that I was quite clear to get rid of. And what I've noticed—because I'm an athlete, that's my background—I haven't lost an ounce of muscle, which has been really awesome because most people are struggling to keep muscle mass, lose fat mass. My mum has lost 11 kilos. And she is of a genetic body type that really struggles with weight loss. She's conservation metabolism, from a genetic point of view, very, very hard for her to lose weight. So, I've never seen this in the history of her entire life, since I've been around. The weights just dropped off her.
Is this some sort of upregulation in the metabolic pathways? Is it improving the insulin resistance? What's it doing there to cause such weight loss without muscle loss?
Dr Elena: Well, in my study so far, there's definitely evidence that it does improve insulin sensitivity, and it also improves the lipid metabolism profile. So those two are very important. And unfortunately, we don't have those studies in humans yet. But more clinical studies are on the way, and hopefully we'll have very good results this year with the NMN besides the safety studies that we already have in humans.
So in mice, what we're seeing is that there is basically a reverse of type two diabetes, which is really impressive. And if you want to correlate this data into humans somehow, I would say that, obviously, I'm not a medical doctor, and this is not a medical advice, but I would say that it does have to do something with the metabolism, and it basically improves the way your body metabolises everything. And...
Lisa: Worth trying and there's no downside to NMN. There's no, it's a vitamin B derivative, well then you will say to me, ‘Well, can I just take B3 and be done’? and it's like, no, it doesn't work like that, which should be a lot cheaper.
Dr Elena: That’s the other impressive thing about this compound is that it actually doesn't have, if any, side effects at all. So even in studies with mice, where the dosage that they use in mice is actually much higher than it is in the one that we usually have in humans. So, for instance, if someone would take 500 mg, or one gram of NMN per day in humans. And then in mice studies, they use something like 200 mg per kilogram of weight, which is much, much more, and it still doesn't have any side effects.
Lisa: Does it mean that we need higher dosages? Like in the human, or has it only been tested to one gram and why has it not been tested higher, if that's the case?
Dr Elena: No, I think that there are studies underway for this as well. So eventually, we will find what is the ideal dosage for humans. I think that from anecdotal evidence, people can already see results from 500 mg or one gram and so on. There are people that take more. So, some biohackers say that they take two grams or four grams, and is still very well tolerated. But yeah, so far, it does not produce any side effects in terms of…
Lisa: Any downside.
Dr Elena: Basically. And, for instance, for myself, my stomach is quite sensitive. So, when I'm on an empty stomach, I can't take vitamin C or caffeine and I get nauseous and so on. And this is not the case with an NMN. So, I can take it first. It is very well tolerated on an empty stomach, very mild. I really love it. There’s so many reasons to love it.
Lisa: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have my morning and night. So, I'm on a gram a day. And is there any reason not to take it at night? So I split the dose—reasoning, thinking, keeping the levels up?
Dr Elena: I mean, I would probably take it all in the morning, I think. There's been a study out that it can affect the circadian rhythms as well. And interestingly, it actually affects NMN—sorry—NAD levels affects the circadian rhythm. But it's not the other way around. So, NAD actually dictates the circadian rhythm in the body. So, for this reason, I would suggest to take it in the morning because then your whole body synchronise, then you wake up and you tell to your body that look, it's the morning now, and we're going to have increased NAD level.
Lisa: Increase. Ohh okay. So, okay, I got that wrong. I haven't noticed that I've had worse sleep or anything like that, or any rhythm has been out. But I would definitely swap to doing—my thinking process around that was keeping the tissue saturated over a 24-hour period, as opposed to all at once and then perhaps dropping, but I don't know. What is the half-life of it? Do you know? Is there any sort of evidence around that?
Dr Elena: I actually, not sure. No, no.
Lisa: There’s no evidence yet. And so yeah, there's a ton of studies still being done that are currently, like this year, like going to be coming out, which is going to be really exciting. So that we're going to get more evidence. I mean, there's this stuff that I've been reading around fertility in animal studies, and they're starting to do human studies, which I personally am very interested in, in reversing aging of the ovaries and even with... I mean, the mice study was incredible around fertility, where the mice were postmenopausal, they actually knocked off any existing eggs with chemotherapy. And then gave them NMN and the mice went on to have babies. And there was a whole study.
Dr Elena: This is why I get so excited about NMN and this is why it's my first product because frankly speaking as a scientist, I've never seen results like that with a natural compound.
Lisa: No?
Dr Elena: Because there is a bunch of natural compounds out there, there is a bunch of other supplements. And what we're talking about spermidine the other day...
Lisa: Yeah, yeah, it's interesting.
Dr Elena: ...another autophagy activator. Quite an interesting supplement, yes. By the way, it's also an mTOR, independent autophagy activator, which is good.
Lisa: Another very good reason to take that as well. And we were looking into that aren’t we, Elena about adding that?
Dr Elena: Yeah, absolutely. We will look into this, but again, you don't see results, like the ones that you see with NMN in multiple studies from other compounds, it's really fascinating.
Lisa: Wow, so yeah, so there are other products that are going to... And this is a super exciting thing, like were our grandparents or our parents even didn't get the chance, like, with aging was aging, and there was nothing that you really could do to influence how fast you aged. They weren't aware of it. And later on, it's become well, if you eat better and you exercise a little bit more and you stop smoking and, and stuff, you’ll age slower. But now we're taking exponential leaps in our knowledge.
I mean, I fell into this realm when I was reading Dr David Sinclair's book, who is a very prominent scientist at Harvard Medical School, and made his book, Lifespan, which I totally recommend people reading. I was just like, ‘Oh my gosh, if I can stay healthy now’, because I'm 52, ‘if I can stay like, really, in top shape for another 10 years, by then we're going to have stuff that will help me live really long’. And that really excites me. And not just live long, but live healthier.
Dr Elena: That’s the important part. The important part is not to just increase your age, it’s to increase your health span. So, the time that you're spending being healthy. And what you're referring to is actually called the aging escape velocity, where basically we’ll have more advanced research coming in every year of our lives. And this will eventually expand our lifespan, which is amazing. And I also think that if we preserve ourselves well, we might as well see this in our lifetimes, which will be amazing.
Lisa: Absolutely. And I want another few decades, please. Listening to Dave Asprey, who by far, got...
Dr Elena: I want another like, few hundreds.
Lisa: Yeah, well, I mean, I know it sounds ridiculous right now. But if you listen to Dave Asprey saying conservatively, and Dr. David Sinclair, too, like, conservatively, we could live to 150, 180, and beyond. Then once they crack the code, and they're actually able to turn the cells back to which they are working on right now. And which they can actually go in the petri dish, from what I understand like with skin cells and make them immortal. And they can't do it in humans because it's too risky, they could turn you into a tumour and stuff. But with the Yamanaka factors that were discovered a decade or so ago, they're actually able to turn the clock back to the point of you being a 20-year-old again. And this is like, ‘Wow, this is pretty exciting. Being able to regrow nerves, spinal injuries, people who have gone blind from macular degeneration’ — all of these things are coming down the line. This is very, very exciting.
Dr Elena: There are several advancements in this field. So, as I said, my PhD is also in stem cell biology. So, I was working with human embryonic stem cells in the lab, and what they can do on a dish is just mind blowing. Because what I was able to do was to take human embryonic stem cells, and then dictate their fate, basically, with different growth factors, and then differentiate them into neural precursors at first. And then to push them further in order to become terminally differentiated neurons. And like four weeks later, you basically have a human brain in a dish and it's a primary human cells. And it's an amazing, physiological irrelevant human platform as well to study disease. And this is what I was doing during my PhD.
So, I’ve seen it with my own eyes. And every time I would do, I would go through this process, I would differentiate the human embryonic stem cells into neurons. It would be as exciting as the first time because of what it represents, because it does represent the progress that we've made so far. And I personally started human embryonic stem cells for the sake of drug discovery. So, I wasn't interested—my project was not focusing on different therapeutic applications. However, I know that there are many advancements in this field as well. So, we do have clinics in America, where you can have a total body rejuvenation, stem cells, and so on. And this technology is definitely advancing.
And I've been actually thinking about the application of this for myself. So as you know, I recently had a dental injury. This is something to keep in mind for the future. So perhaps in the near future, I can just inject myself with a bit of a stem cells there...
Lisa: And that’s already happening to a degree. I mean, I've got a doctor friend up north, who's doing stem cell replacement for joints, and so on, for degenerative joints. Because stem cells, basically, for people who don't understand why this is important. The stem cell is the original like cell, but before it decides, ‘Am I going to become a skin cell, or a neuron or a liver cell’, it differentiates. So, it's a pluripotent stem cell, it can become anything. And so, in the lab setting, you're going to be able to say, ‘Well I want your cell to become a liver cell’. Will we eventually be able to grow organs that can be used for transplantation? Is that sort of one of the end goals?
Dr Elena: Absolutely. And it's already been done with some organs. So for instance, I've heard that there is a research group that basically 3D-printed a functional thyroid gland from stem cells.
Lisa: Wow. 3D-printed. So, the printer gets these differentiated cells somehow, and then makes it into a functioning organ that they will eventually—they're going to be able to actually transplant this into people and save the whole organ donation, horrific troubles that we have currently.
Dr Elena: Yeah, exactly and I think that we're not too far away from this from whole organs being recreated in the lab. We already are able to actually do a 3D culture in the lab and create the so called organoids. So for instance, from stem cells, you can do a brain organoid, where you have a liposphere and it basically consists of different kinds of cells that you see in the brain. So it would have neurons, it would have glial, it will have astrocytes, and then it would have this brain organoid and then you can study it.
So, we're already getting there. We’re close, we’re much closer than we thought we were 20 years ago. And I think that we're not far away from having different kinds of organs being grown in the lab for transplants and so on.
Lisa: Hopefully not our brains because it's the seed of who we are. Honestly reading Dr Sinclair's book, I was like, ‘Am I in a Star Trek movie or something’? because it is pretty, pretty amazing. But when you do this, you also ask that to understand the whole process and how the whole thing functions, and then you can actually really slow down neurodegeneration and optimise things.
And so the NMN that we're talking about right now is the beginning of this really exciting road, which we're going to be staying abreast of. And hopefully adding to what we have available to the consumer right now for prices that are not moon money, that it's out of anybody's reach, but actually what you can do today so that you can preserve your health. So that in 10 years’ time, when the real crazy stuff starts coming on line, you'll be able to live longer and healthier lives. And that's the whole goal of it.
So before we just wrap up, I just wanted to reiterate again, so how is autophagy—can you just put that—how is autophagy related to NAD and sirtuin genes? Can you just put that two pieces together again, just repeat that a little bit?
Dr Elena: Sure. So basically, what happens is that you do need autophagy to recycle different damaged organelles in the cell when something goes wrong. So, and this is quite prominent in neurodegeneration because the reason we have—let's say, aggregate from proteins in neurons and dysfunctional mitochondria and so on is because neurons are terminally differentiated cells. This means that they don't divide anymore. So, they rely on autophagy in order to have their housekeeping function because they can't divide the junk away. Okay. So that's the reason why autophagy is important in terminally differentiated cells such as neurons.
Lisa: So there's no hay flick limit for a neuron. There is just only one—when a neuron becomes a neuron, that's a neuron. Okay.
Dr Elena: Yeah, yeah. And then that's it. And what happens with the activation of autophagy, one of the signals is—comes through sirtuin 1, which basically can activate the transcription factors that are related to autophagy activation, which is the TFEB transcription factor, EB and FOXO, which are basically influenced the activation of autophagy. And more specifically, the mitophagy as well. So, mitophagy is the arm of autophagy that is responsible for the mitochondrial clearance in the cell.
Lisa: Yep, so mitochondria, just for people, are the powerhouses of the cell. This is where a lot of—so all of the energy is produced, if you like. And so, this is why mitophagy, as opposed to autophagy, so mitophagy is doing the same process, but within the mitochondria to keep your mitochondria healthy. And if your mitochondria are not healthy, and they're dying, and you're not having enough mitochondria in your cells, then you are going to be sick. And that could be heart disease, it could be neurodegeneration, that could be anything. So, keeping your mitochondria healthy is the basis of all bloody disease, blatantly.
Dr Elena: Yeah, exactly. So then, if you have impaired autophagy in the cell, and then you also have some sort of DNA damage going on, such as the one from reactive oxygen species, for example. And then what you have is the activation of the PARP enzymes. And PARP enzymes heavily rely on NAD levels in the cell in order to function. And NAD is also a substrate for the sirtuin genes that are responsible for also regulating a bunch of very healthy, a bunch of processes in the healthy cell. And for this reason, if you do have increased activation of PARPS, you will eventually get this NAD drain out of the cell. And this will not be enough in order for the sirtuins to function properly. And this will also deplete your autophagy. So, both NAD levels and autophagy are important to the cell. And fortunately for us, we can actually replenish the levels of NAD by supplementing with an ad precursor such as an NMN.
Lisa: Okay, and so NMN has been proven to be by most of our bio available, because there's also like nicotinamide riboside which is used in a number of supplement companies that I know have nicotinamide riboside, but not many, there are some now, but have nicotinamide mononucleotide. Nicotinamide riboside is also a great molecule, but it's two steps away from becoming NAD. As long as it’s available.
Dr Elena: Yeah, so nicotinamide riboside needs to be phosphorylated and fast converted to nicotinamide mononucleotide first. And then this will enter the cell and then this will increase the levels of NAD in the cell. And for this reason—so first, this area of research was focusing on the NR molecule, the nicotinamide riboside. But then when they started studying NMN, they actually saw that there is increased bioavailability and there is increased levels of energy that come after supplementation with NMN.
Lisa: Can you take—because NAD is a molecule, you cannot just take it as a capsule, and then it's all good to go. Can you take it as an infusion because I have heard of NAD infusions. I mean, it’s not available here.
Dr Elena: Well, and I'm curious myself about this, and I haven't done it, I haven't tested it. And from what I've seen—so the concentration of NAD in those intravenous injections is quite low. And I think that the same way that we have many opportunistic companies in the supplement field, we also have many opportunistic clinics that offer this kind of treatments. So, again, this is not something that I have studied in depth, and I actually don't know how much will it help. But yeah, I mean, this is another way to boost NAD, I guess, and you can try it out.
But with oral administration of NMN, we do have evidence that it can boost the levels of NAD in the tissue and in liver tissue and muscle tissue, and so on. And also, it's much easier to do and it's obviously much cheaper because those injections cost a lot.
Lisa: Yes, yeah. Just one last question in relation to antioxidants, because I mean 10 years ago or so we used to think our reactive oxygen species ,oxidative stress happens through the electron transport chain. When we're metabolising, and so on, we get all these oxidative stresses and free radicals running around. And if we take antioxidants, we're going to be counterbalancing that. Does supplementing with antioxidants, like vitamin D, like glutathione, like vitamin C, and so on, alpha lipoic acid, is that going to contribute, too, to the slowing of aging, because it's going to down regulate the PARP enzymes?
Dr Elena: People were very optimistic about antioxidants, something like 20 years ago. And everyone was talking about it and so on. But actually, the big studies that have been done, have shown that by taking antioxidants, you actually do not suppress aging. And there are some biomarkers that might have changed in those studies. But most of the biomarkers that they measure stay the same. Basically, saying that antioxidant is not the...
Lisa: Not the holy grail.
Dr Elena: ...that everyone was thinking about.
Lisa: Was hoping, yeah. Not to say that antioxidants don't have their place because they definitely do. Especially if you have a lot of oxidative stress, and you need to, like with vitamin C, if you're infected, or—I've done a whole series on vitamin C. But then it's not the holy grail for stopping the aging process, but it probably does help with not having so much PARP activation. I don't know, as a non-scientific brain, I'm just connecting dots.
Okay, so I think it's probably we've— so from a lifestyle intervention, apart from taking NMN and resveratrol, and oleic acid or olive oil, intermittent fasting, is there anything else that we can add to our anti-aging regime on a lifestyle intervention side?
Dr Elena: Intermittent fasting, and then avoid exposure to sunlight, as we said. And sirtuin genes are being activated from any kind of stress. And what we can do is we can also induce some sort of an artificial stress, which could be done, let's say with cryotherapy. This is what cryotherapy does. When you're exposed to cold, you also have this stress signal that activates sirtuins, or the other way around, so you can try out a sauna. And this will also have the same effect. So, I think this is also something to keep in mind.
Lisa: Breathing, breathing. So, sort of tumour breathing, or, like what one half does all of that sort of stuff. So, there’s hormetic stressors, there’s exercise obviously, that cause a cascade of changes and make you stronger. And yeah, it's sort of a balancing act. You don't want to be doing exercise for Africa or really freezing yourself to death, but you just want to have a little stress to cause a change in the body. So these hormetic stressors can be very, very helpful.
Okay, well, I think we've covered a very, very, very complex topic and I hope we didn't lose everybody on the way. But at the end of the day, take NMN, take resveratrol, take olive oil, do your exercise, get in the sauna, if you have a chance to do cold therapy, do that as well. Get your exercise, get your antioxidants in there as well, to a certain degree and you're going to be able to live long enough but until other things come online, and you'll be able to improve everything.
Dr Elena: Sounds good.
Lisa: Brilliant. So Dr. Elena, thank you very much. Dr. Elena has been on the show, NMN Bio. So we have nmnbio.co.uk in UK and in Europe, and nmnbio.nz if you're down at this end of the world. We'd love to help you over the air. If you've got any other questions, please reach out to us. And thanks very much for being here today. It's been really exciting.
Dr Elena: Thank you, Lisa, thank you so much for having me.
That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate review and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com
The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.
We're often told not to care too much about what other people think of us. However, understanding how others perceive us can play to our advantage. Sometimes we fail to see our own mistakes or flaws, and to overcome this, we need to develop self-awareness by looking at ourselves from a different perspective. Once we realise our flaws, we can do better and achieve high performance.
Craig Harper joins us in this episode to discuss how self-awareness can lead to high performance. He also explains the importance of external awareness or the ability to understand how others perceive us. We also talk about events that changed our life perspectives and how to live aligned with our values.
If you want to increase your self-awareness and achieve high performance, then this episode is for you.
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‘Firstly, I've got as many issues as anyone that I work with. And this is not self-loathing; this is me just going, "Okay, so how do I do better?" And this for me is the process of high performance’.
‘Nobody is totally objective or open-minded because the human experience is subjective’.
‘Real awareness and consciousness is to first be aware of your lack of awareness’.
‘The only person that can ever really get in my way is me, you know. But also, I'm the solution to me’.
‘So we get taught directly or indirectly that self-esteem and self-worth and identity is an outside-in process. My theory is that it is the other way around—it is an inside out journey’.
‘Of course, there's nothing wrong with building a great business... or whatever. That's not bad, but it's not healthy when that's the totality of who we are’.
‘I don't care what you get done when you're motivated; I care what you get done when you're not motivated because everyone's a champion when they're in the zone’.
Craig Harper is one of Australia's leading presenters, writers and educators in health, high performance, resilience, self-management, leadership, corporate change, communication, stress management, addiction and personal transformation.
Craig has been an integral part of the Australian health and fitness industry since 1982. He has worked as an Exercise Scientist, Corporate Speaker, Consultant, University Lecturer, AFL Conditioning Coach, Radio Host, TV Presenter, Writer and successful Business Owner. In 1990, Craig established Harper's Personal Training, which evolved into one of the most successful businesses of its kind.
Craig currently hosts a successful Podcast called 'The You Project'. He is also partnering with the Neuroscience Team at Monash University, where he's completing a neuropsychology PhD. There, he studies the spectrum of human thinking and behaviour.
Craig speaks on various radio stations around Australia weekly. He also hosted his weekly show on Melbourne radio called 'the Science of Sport' for a decade. Craig currently fills an on-air role as a presenter on a lifestyle show called 'Get a Life', airing on Foxtel.
As an Exercise Scientist, Craig has worked with many professional athletes and teams. While still working with groups and individuals regularly, Craig delivers more than one hundred corporate presentations annually.
Want to know more about Craig and his work? Check out his website, or follow him on Instagram and Linkedin!
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To pushing the limits,
Lisa
Welcome to Pushing The Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.
Lisa Tamati: Well, hi, everyone and welcome back to Pushing The Limits. This week I have Craig Harper to guest. Now, Craig is a very well-known media personality, exercise scientist, crazy fitness guru, owns some of the biggest personal training gyms in Australia, has a huge track record as a corporate speaker, motivational speaker, worked with Olympians, worked with all sorts of athletes across a number of different sports. And he's absolutely hilarious. I really enjoyed this interview, I was on Craig's show a couple of weeks ago, The You Project, you can go and check that one out as well. A great podcast. And today we sort of did a deep dive into everything around self-awareness and understanding your potential and realising your potential. And just it was a really interesting conversation with a very interesting man. He's doing a PhD in understanding the experience that people have when they meet you. So, understanding how people see you. So it's a really interesting conversation. So, I hope you enjoy that.
Before we go over to the show, please give us a rating and review. We really appreciate any ratings and reviews that you give us. It's really hugely helpful for the show. It is a labour of love. We are about to if we haven't already, by the time this podcast goes live, developing a way that you guys can get involved as audience members of Pushing The Limits if you want to support the show. So stay tuned for that. And in the meantime, if you need help with your running or you need help with your health, then please reach out to us. You can reach us at lisatamati.com. You can check out our programmes on lisatamati.com. We have our epigenetics programme and our running programmes where we do customised run training systems, video analysis, working out a plan customised fully for you and you get a consult with me. We also do health optimisation, coaching. So if you are needing help with a really difficult health journey, then please reach out to us as well. Right, over to the show with Craig Harper.
Lisa Tamati: Well, welcome back everybody to Pushing The Limits. Today I have an hilarious, amazing, crazy, awesome guest for you, Craig Harper. Who doesn't know Craig Harper? If you're in Australia, you definitely know who the heck Craig Harper is. If you're in New Zealand, you probably know who Craig Harper is. And if you don't, you're about to find out. Welcome to the show! Craig, how are you doing?
Craig Harper: Now I feel like I've got to live up to some kind of bloody pressure, some expectation. Nobody knows me in New Zealand. Let's start, you do and your mum. That's about it.
Lisa: Me and mum, you left quite an impression on my mum.
Craig: And my family, and relatives, and a few randoms over here, know who I am. But thank you, Lisa, for having me on. I'm really glad to be here.
Lisa: It's awesome. Now, this is gonna be a bit of a hilarious show because Craig is a bit of a character. I was on Craig's show in Australia, The You Project and it was one of the most fun podcast interviews I've had. I mean, I love getting into the science and deep with stuff, but it was really fun to just slip my hair down so to speak and rant and rave a little bit in here, but it’s fun, so today there'll be no doubt a bit of it. Craig, can you tell the ones who don't know about you? You're in Melbourne or just outside Melbourne in Hampton, Victoria in Australia. Can you tell us a little bit of your background, your crazy amazing career that you have had?
Craig: Sure. So I'll start with, well, maybe I'll go a little bit before my career because what happened before was a bit of a catalyst. So I had a pretty good childhood, all that stuff. I won't bore the listeners. But one of the things that was part of my growing up was being a fat kid, the fattest kid in my school. So that became a bit of a catalyst for me to explore getting in shape and all that stuff. So when I was 14, I lost a whole lot of weight. I was 90 something kilos, I went down to about 60 and I started training.
Lisa: Wow.
Craig: I started running and I started doing bodyweight stuff I lost about—I literally lost a third of my body weight in 15 weeks. And it wasn't like I had a horrible childhood, it was fine. But I was called jumbo all through school. That was my name so the kids called me that, parents, teachers all that but believe it or not, it wasn't really hostile, or horrible, it was I don't know it's because I was this big, fat, pretty happy kid, right? But anyway, so, I got in shape, and that led me into a lot of curiosity, and exploration, and investigation in fitness and nutrition. And so I started working in gyms when I was 18 and had no idea what I was doing. The qualifications and the barriers to entry then were very low. So, I started working in gyms, Lisa, when I was 18, which was 1982. I'm 57 and I ended up in 1989, I think, I set up the first Personal Training Center in Australia.
Lisa: Wow.
Craig: So, lots of other things around that. But I owned PT studios for 25 years at the biggest centre in the southern hemisphere in Brighton a few kilometres from where I'm sitting now, which was 10,000 square feet. It was bigger than lots of commercial gyms. But it was just a PT centre. Worked with elite athletes, work with the AFL over here Australian Football League with St Kilda footy club, Melbourne Vixens in the national and the Trans-Tasman League, it was then Netball League, Melbourne Phoenix, Nissan motorsport, a bunch of Olympians, blokes in prison, corporates, people with disability, normal people, abnormal people. I put me in the abnormal category.
Lisa: Yeah, definitely.
Craig: And later on when—I didn't go to uni until I was 36 for the first time.
Lisa: Wow.
Craig: Did a degree in exercise science. It was hilarious because I'd already been working with elite people as a conditioning coach and a strength coach. And yeah, lots of stuff. I did radio over here for about 20 years. I started my podcast a few years ago, I did television for a few years, three years on national telly. I wrote for the Herald Sun, which is the main paper in Melbourne for a while. Lots of magazines, I've written a bunch of books. I've written seven, I've written nine books, I think seven or eight of them are published. I'm looking at the books on my table, I should probably know that number.
Lisa: Can’t even remember, there's so many.
Craig: And, like, but really the thing that I guess where we might go today, but for me was, I realised by the time I was about 19 or 20 working in gyms, I realised that how much I knew about bodies wasn't nearly as important as how much I understood human beings. And so while my understanding of anatomy and physiology and biomechanics and movement and energy systems, and progressive overload, and adaptation and recovery, and all of those things wasn't great, to be honest, like I was 20.
Lisa: Yup.
Craig: But it was all right. And it improved over time. But what really mattered was how well I understood human behaviour. Because as you and I know, we can give someone a programme and direction and education and encouragement and support and resources, and not knowledge and awareness. But that doesn't mean they're going to go and do the work. And it definitely doesn't mean they're going to create the result. And it definitely doesn't mean they're going to explore their talent or their potential. And so yeah, it's been from when I was 18...
Lisa: So you've gone in it?
Craig: Yeah, from when I was 18 till now, it's just been lots of different roles and lots of different places. And I guess the other main bit before I shut up was I realised when I was about 20, that I didn't like having a boss much. And not that...
Lisa: We got that in common.
Craig: In my back, my boss was a good dude. But I thought I don't want to be, like, I could do this for me. I don't need to do this for you. And so the last time I had a boss was 32 years ago. So I've been working for myself since I was 25.
Lisa: Wow, that's freaking awesome. And what an amazing career and so many books, and I know that you're actually doing a PhD at the moment. So what's your PhD? And why did you choose this sort of a subject for your PhD?
Craig: Yeah, so my PhD is in neuropsychology/neuroscience. So, I'm at Monash over here, we have a facility called Bryan Park, which is cool. There's lots of cool stuff there. That's where I'm based. And my research is in a thing called external self-awareness, which is understanding the ‘you’ experience for others. So in other words, it's your ability to be able to understand how other people perceive and process and experience ‘you'.
Lisa: Wow, that is a fascinating subject.
Craig: Which is, very little research on it. So I'm, I've created a scale, which is to measure this component of psychology or communication or awareness. And so I'm doing—I'm putting that through the grill at the moment, getting that validated. I’m doing two studies. The first study is being run kind of soon. But yeah, the whole research is around this thing of ‘What's it like being around me and do I know what it's like being around me'? Not from an insecurity point of view, but from an awareness point of view because when I understand, for example, the Craig experience for Lisa or for an audience or in front of all for the person I'm coaching, or the athlete I'm working with, or the drug addict, the person with addictive issues that I'm sitting with, then if I understand what it's like being around me, I can create greater and deeper connection. But one of the mistakes that a lot of leaders, and coaches, and managers, and people in positions of authority make is that they assume that people just understand what they're saying. Or they assume that people think like them. When in reality, the only person who thinks exactly like me in the world is me.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: And the only person who thinks like Lisa Tamati exactly all the time, 24/7 is Lisa, right?
Lisa: Yep.
Craig: So when I go into a conversation, or a situation, or a process, or a negotiation, or an encounter with somebody, and I assume that they think like me or understand like me, or that my intention is their experience, which is rarely the case, I'm more likely to create problems and solutions.
Lisa: Yeah. And you're not going to hit the nail on the head and actually get the results for where that person that you are wanting to get.
Craig: Yeah, and that is...
Lisa: This is a real powerful thing because you know what I mean, just maybe as you were talking there, I was like, ‘Well, how do people perceive me?', that's an interesting thought because you just sort of go through your daily interactions with people, and you think you're a compassionate, empathetic person who gets everything in, you’re sort of picking up on different cues and so on. But then to actually think how is that person experiencing me, and I like, as a coach, as I develop as a coach, I've had problems when I'm doing one on one, and that I'm overwhelming people sometimes because I'm so passionate and so full of information. And I've had to, and I'm still learning to fit that to the person that I'm talking to. And because, for me, it's like, I've got so much information, I want to fix you and help you. And I was like, ‘Woohoo', and the person was like, ‘Heh'.
Craig: So you and I connect because we're kind of similar, right? And I love that, I love your craziness and your energy, and you're full-onness. But you and I, unless we are aware around some people, we will scare the fuck out of them.
Lisa: Yup.
Craig: So, that's why it's important that people like—all of us really not just you and I, but that we have an awareness of what is the leisure experience for this because like, let's say, for example, you've got five athletes, and you want to inspire them and get them in the zone, motivate them, and they're all in front of you. And so you give all of them in the same moment. And let's say they're five similar athletes in a similar, if not the same sport with a similar goal—doesn't matter—but the reality is they are five different human beings, right? They've got five different belief systems and backgrounds and sets of values and prejudices and like and emotional states, and so you're not talking to the same person. But when you deliver the same message to five different humans, and you expect the same connection? We're not thinking it through.
Lisa: Yep.
Craig: So and of course, you can't create optimal connection with everyone all the time. But this is just part of the, ‘What's it like? What's their experience of me like?' And again, it's not about ‘Oh, I'm insecure, and I want them to like me'. No, it's about, ‘I need to understand how they perceive and process me so that I can create connection'. And look, the other really interesting thing about psychology and the human experience, and metacognition, thinking about thinking more broadly, is that all of us think we're open-minded and objective, but none of us are. Nobody is totally objective or open-minded because the human experience is subjective.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: So, even me who understands this and is doing a PhD in it and teaches it. Well, people go back and you objective and I go, ‘No, I wish I was in it. I'd like to say I am because it sounds fucking great, but I'm not'. And the reason that I'm not is because wherever I go, my ego, my issues, my beliefs, my values, my limitations, my biases, go with me.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: And they are the window through which I view and process the world, right?
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: So, our ego wants us to say, ‘Of course, I'm objective. Of course, I'm open-minded'. But the truth is, and with some things, we will be more objective and open-minded because we don't really have a pre-existing idea about it. But on a global or a broad level, our stuff goes with us everywhere, and the beginning of, without getting too deep or philosophical, but awareness—real awareness and consciousness—is to first be aware of your lack of awareness.
Lisa: Love it. That is amazing. Yeah.
Craig: You can't overcome the thing you won't acknowledge, or you can't get good at the thing you won't do. Right? And so I have to go, 'Firstly, I'm flawed. Firstly, I've got as many issues as anyone that I work with.’ And this is not self-loathing, this is me just going, ‘Okay, so how do I do better?' And this for me, this is the process of performance, high performance, whether it's at sport, at life, at recovery, at relationships, at connection—doesn't matter—high performance is high performance. For me, high performance means getting the most out of you and your potential and your resources and your time.
Lisa: Yup.
Craig: And so the principles that work with becoming an elite athlete, most of those principles work with building a great business.
Lisa: Yep, they grow further.
Craig: Which is why physicians follow through, get uncomfortable, do the work, show up, don't give up, ask great questions, persevere, roll up your sleeves, pay attention to your results, improvise, adapt, overcome. Like, this is not new stuff.
Lisa: Know that it rolls off your tongue pretty damn well because you've been in this space for a long time. And a lot of us like to go into that whole, our bias and yell at the future that we see the world through the lens, which we look through. We're not aware like, we love the programming. And this is what I had done a lot of work on for myself, the programming that I got as a kid, that I downloaded into my subconscious is running the ship, basically, and I can, as an educated, hopefully, wiser woman now, go ‘Hang on a minute, that little voice that just popped up in my head and told me, ‘I'm not good enough to do that', is not me talking. That's the programme. That's the programme I downloaded when I was, I don't know, seven or eight or something. And it's a product of that conditioning.’ And I can actually go in, and then it's that to change that story. Because that, and I think a lot of us are just running on automatic, we're still playing.
I'll give you an example. So when my mum was a kid, she was up on stage and doing a speech at school when she froze, right? And she got laughed off the stage. And kids can be nasty. And so forever in a day, she was like, ‘I will not ever speak in public again'. Because she'd had this experience as a what, a seven or eight-year-old. And she was telling me the story as a 40-something, 50-something year-old. 'No, I'm not ever getting up in a public space because', and I'm like, 'But that's just—you are not that seven or eight year old now. And you can have a choice to make that changes', and she couldn't make that change until she had the aneurysm. And then she forgot all those memories, some of those memories were gone, and that inhibition was gone. And now she'll get up and talk on stage in front of like 500 doctors.
Craig: That's amazing. I love it. And what you just articulated beautifully. The core of a lot of what I do, which is recognising your programming and where does my stories, or my stories finish? And where do I start?
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: So, you think about it, from everyone listening to this from when we could reason anything, or process any data around us or understand anything from when we—I don't know, two, three months, really probably earlier but until listening to this podcast right now, all of us have been trained, and taught, and told, and programmed, and conditioned. And then, now here we are. And it's being aware of that and me to everyone is like, ‘Well, my beliefs', like think about when did you choose your beliefs?
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: Pretty much never. They’re just there, and they’re there as a byproduct of your journey. Now that's okay, that's not bad or good. That's normal. Well, the next question is, are all of your beliefs, do they serve you? Well, the answer is no. Do any of them sabotage you? Well, a shitload! Okay, so let's put them under the microscope. So you know that word that I used before metacognition is, in a nutshell, thinking about thinking where and this is where we go, hang on. Let's just step out of the groundhog-dayness of our existence which you also spoke of, like, and let's go hang on. Because what we do, on a level we live consciously that is I've got to think about where I'm driving, and I've got to figure out what I'm giving the kids for dinner or what I'm getting, what time I'm training or, but really, on a real fundamental macro level. We live largely unconsciously...
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: ...because we kind of do the same shit the same way...
Lisa: Everyday.
Craig: ...same conversations, even you and I know. Like, I've been training in the gym since I was 14, that's 43 years, I watch people go to the gym who always do the same fucking workout.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: Same rep, the same set, same treadmill, same speed, same inclines, same boxing, same everything, same intensity, same workload, same machines. And then they say, why isn't my body changing? Well because it doesn't need to.
Lisa: No. Given the status quo, you don’t.
Craig: Because you're stimulating it the same way.
Lisa: I was working in that for years.
Craig: And we can expand that to life. Whereas we, kind of, I was talking to a lady yesterday about this, and she was telling me about a conversation she has with her son who's got some issues, who's 17. And I will be really honest, ‘How many times have you had a version of that conversation with him?’ She goes, ‘1,000'.
Lisa: Wow.
Craig: I go, ‘And how's that going?’ Now, that might be an exaggeration. But the bottom line is, but nonetheless, despite the fact that it didn't work the first 999 times, she's doing it again.
Lisa: She’ll keep doing it.
Craig: So it's about, and again, it's not about beating ourselves up, it's about gamble, whatever I'm doing, whether or not it's with this relationship, or this training programme, or this habit, or behaviour, or this business, whatever I'm doing isn't working. So let's have a new conversation or no conversation, or let's try a different protocol, or let's change the way I sleep.
Lisa: Isn't that like the circuitry in the brain, when you do something for the first time that’s really hard. Because you're creating a new connection in the brain. And therefore, we go into these old routines and habits, even though we don't want to be doing them anymore, but the groove and the brain is so well-worn, that path is so—those synapses of connected or whatever they do in there, and that path is so well-worn, that it's the path of least resistance for our lazy brains, and our subconscious to do what it does all the time. So, when you're driving a car home, and you can have a conversation and be singing a song, and thinking about what you're cooking for dinner, and then you get to halfway into town, and you realise, ‘Hell, I can't even remember driving there', but you were doing it, and you were doing it safely. Because it was all on that subconscious, automated level. When you were first driving the car, it was a mission. And it was like, ‘Oh my god, I got to change the gears and steer and keep an eye on,' and it was all like overwhelmed, but then it got easier and easier and easier. And then with our rituals and habits that we develop, we make these well-worn grooves, don't we? And then we just follow the same old, same old even though it's not getting the results that we want. And when we try and step out of our comfort zone and start doing a new habit and developing a new way, there's a lot of resistance in the brain for the first few weeks, isn't there? Until you get that groove going. And then it gets easier and easier and easier once you've done it 100 times. Is that what you're sort of saying here?
Craig: Yeah. I mean, that's perfect. I mean, you nailed it. Look, the thing is that everything that we do for the first time, for most of us, nearly everything, unless we've done something very similar before, but it's hard.
Lisa: Very.
Craig: So I always say everyone starts as a white belt. In the dojo, you start as a white belt.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: When as an ultramarathon, if I went, Lisa, which I wouldn't, but if I went, ‘I'm gonna run an ultramarathon'. Well, if I started training today, metaphorically, today, I'm a white belt.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: I'm a black belt at other stuff.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: I'm a green belt. I'm a yellow belt. Depends what I'm doing. Depends what—I'm not bad at talking to audiences that's... I should be pretty good at it. I've done it a million times. But take me to yoga, and I'll hide in the corner because I'm as flexible as a fucking ceramic tile. I’m a white belt. Right? I bet, put me in the gym lifting weights, I go okay, right? And so, again, this is all just about awareness, and development, and ownership. And, but the thing too, is that you're right, everything is very—we do create not only neural grooves, patterns, but also behavioural, and emotional, and cognitive grooves too, where we’re very comfortable in this space. And one of the challenges for us, it's like, it's a dichotomy. Because if everyone listening to this could somehow be involved and put up a show of hands, and we said, ‘All right, everyone. How many of you want to change something about your life or your outcomes or your situation or your body? Or your operating system or your current life experience?’ Nearly everyone's going to put up their hand.
Lisa: Yes.
Craig: For something, right? Something. Then if you said, all right, ‘Now, at the same time, be brutally honest with yourself, how many of you like being comfortable?’, everyone's gonna put up their hand. So the problem is, on the one hand, we say I want to be strong, and resilient, and amazing, and produce great results, and do great shit, and grow, and develop my potential and fucking kill it, and but I don't want to get uncomfortable. Well, good luck, princess, that isn't working. It doesn't work.
Lisa: The world’s a bitch really, isn't it? I mean, like it is the way it works. You need resistance.
Craig: How can you get strong without working against resistance?
Lisa: Yeah, yeah.
Craig: Yes.
Lisa: This is just the… in my boxing gym, there was a saying on the wall, ‘Strength comes from struggle', and it's just like, ‘Oh damn, that's so right'. Like it's not what we always want. And I wish sometimes that the world was made another way. But we constantly need to be pushing up against what hurts, what is uncomfortable, it's painful just from a biology point of view being in the thermonuclear range, being nice and comfortably warm and cozy is really bad for us. And for you in that all the time, we need to go into an ice bath or cold water or go surfing or something and get cold, we need to be hot, go into a sauna. And when you do these things outside of those comfort zones, we need to lift weights in order to build stronger muscles, we need to do fasting in order to have autophagy, we need—all of these things are those stuff that is outside of pleasant. And you better get used to that idea. It's not because I want to be, like, masochistic in my approach to life. But it's just the way that the world works. If you sit on your ass being comfortable eating chips all day watching Netflix, you're not going to get the results that you're looking for.
Craig: That's right. And also there's this—because we only live in the moment. And because we are, and I'm generalising, and I'm sure a lot of your listeners are not what I'm about to describe. But because many of us are very instant gratification based.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: Right? It's like, the story is I'll eat this, I'll do this, I'll avoid that. But I'll start tomorrow, or I'll start Monday, or I'll start January 1. And that goes on for 15 years, right?
Lisa: Yep. We’ve all done it.
Craig: And now I've backed myself into an emotional, and a psychological, and physiological corner that's hard to get out of because now, I'm 49. And my body's kind of fucked. And I've got high blood pressure. And I've got all these issues because I've been avoiding, and denying, and delaying, and lying to myself for a long time. Again, this is not everyone, so please don't get offended.
Lisa: And It's not a judgment. It's just the way it goes.
Craig: No, because, I mean, this is what happens. Like, we live in this world where you can't say the truth.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: And I'm not talking about being insensitive or moral judgments on people. But the thing is, it's like, when I talk about being fat, I talk about myself because then no one could get injured, insulted...
Lisa: Insulted, yup.
Craig: ...or offended, right. So when I was fat, I wasn't thick-set, or full-figured or voluptuous or stocky? I was fucking fat. Right?
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: And, but I was fat because of my choices and behaviours.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: Now, there are lots of variables around that.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: But at some stage, we have to say, and again, there are people with genetics that make stuff difficult...
Lisa: Absolutely.
Craig: ...for medical conditions and all that we fully acknowledge that, but at some stage, we need to go, ‘Alright, well, I'm making decisions and doing things which are actually destroying me'.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: ‘They're actually hurting me'. And this is just about ownership and awareness and my, like, the biggest challenge in my life is me, the biggest problem in my life is me. Like, the only person that can ever really get in my way is me. But also, I'm the solution to me.
Lisa: I think it's a willingness to work on it. And like, I've looked into addictions and things quite a lot too, because I know that I have an addictive personality trait. I have genetics that are predisposed to that, and I do everything obsessively. So whether that's running for like a billion kilometres, or whether that's running five companies, or whether that's whatever I'm doing, I'm doing like an extreme version of that because it's just, like, I have that type of personality and it is genetics. And I find that that's one of the study of genetics for me, it's so interesting, there's a lot of predisposition in there. However, that does not negate the fact that I can still make choices, and I can turn the ship around. And I need to be aware of those predispositions, just like mum's got some predispositions towards cardiovascular disease and putting on weight very easily. That's just a fact of life for her, and it's not pleasant. And compared to other genetic types, it's a bit of a disadvantage. However, it is a fact. And therefore, she can still make the right choices for her body.
And this is why I like working in the genetic space is really, really powerful because then I can say, well, it's not my fault that my genes are like this, but they are what they are, and we can remove some of the judgment on ourselves because I think when we—if we're judging ourselves all the time, that's not helpful either, because that stuff we’re like, ‘Oh, well, I'm just useless. And then I'm never gonna do anything,’ rather than empowering and say, ‘Well, it is what it is, the genes that I've been given are these, the environment that I've exposed to is this, the advertising and all that sort of stuff that's coming at us with McDonald's on every street corner and all of that sort of stuff, I can't influence there. What I can influence is I can educate myself and I can start to make better choices from my particular body and start taking ownership of that process and not just going, well, it's not my fault that I'm bigger boned.’ You may be bigger-boned or bigger, have genetics that are all about conservation. Then you need to be doubly careful. And put in the education, and the time, and the work, and I think it's about taking ownership and not judging yourself by getting on with the job. Like I know, like, I know my own personal and—what did you say to me the first time I met you? Something that was real self-aware anyway, without self-deprecating, and it was self-aware? I can't remember what it was that you said, it is a man who knows his own weakness and is working on it. And I think that's really key. Like, I know what I'm shit at and...
Craig: And that’s not self-loathing, that's self-awareness. And here's the thing, we're all about learning and growing. And I love my life, and I'm aware that I've got some skills and gifts. I'm also aware that I've got lots of flaws and shit I need to work on. And for some people, that's part of just the journey for other people, they are in a bit of a groundhog day. I always say if you're in a bit of a groundhog day, but you're happy then stay there. Because don't change because this is how I—don't be like me, for God's sake be like you. But if being like you, if your normal operating system equals anxiety, and sleeplessness and a bit of depression, and a bit of disconnection, and I'm not talking purely about mental health, I'm just talking about that state that we all get in, which is a bit like, ‘Fuck, I don't love my life, this wasn't where I thought I would be.’
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: Then maybe start to work consciously on and acknowledge, there's some things that you can't change, some you can, and literally what you were talking about a minute ago, which is literally, ‘Okay, so there's what I've got, which is I've got these genetics, I've got 24 hours in a day. I'm 57. I've got this, these are the things I have, then there's what I do with it all.’ So I'm an endomorph. I walk past a doughnut, my ass gets bigger. That's my body type, right? So I need to go, ‘Alright, well with these, or with this disposition, how do I manage optimally with 24 hours in a day without them using the least?’
Lisa: You’ve done a lot by the little sea, Craig.
Craig: How do I manage my 24 hours optimally?
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: How do I? It's like, I eat two meals a day. I don't recommend anyone else does that.
Lisa: For even the most, it’s great.
Craig: But for me, I don't…
Lisa: For an endomorph, that’s great.
Craig: I’m an 85-kilo dude with a bit of muscle. I don't need much food. Like, I would love to eat all the fucking food because I love food. What happens when I eat what I want versus what I need is I get fat. So I differentiate between: what does my body need to be lean, strong, functional, healthy versus what does Craig the fucking ex-fat kid want to inhale?
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: Because, and the other thing too. And this is probably a bit irrelevant. Maybe relevant, though, for a lot of people. Like I would say, of the people that I've worked with closer over the years, which is thousands and thousands.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: I would say most people, including me, have a relationship with food that’s somewhere on the scale between a little bit disordered and an eating disorder, right?
Lisa: Yup.
Craig: And a little bit not always...
Lisa: I’ll cook my end up then. It’s always an issue.
Craig: At the other end of the scale, I'm a fucking lunatic around food, right? Now, you're educated, I'm educated, but I tell people all the time. So if I was an addict, and by the way, I've never drank, never smoked, never done drugs. But if I have started drugs or alcohol, I would have probably...
Lisa: Done it well.
Craig: ...a drunk and used for Australia, right? I probably would have been a champion because I'm like you. I'm addictive. Now my addiction is food. So you know people think, ‘But you're educated. But you're this, you're that.’ It doesn't matter. Like, I need to manage myself.
Lisa: Still won’t hit pie.
Craig: Yeah, I need to manage myself around food.
Lisa: Yeah, daily.
Craig: Because if I open the cheesecake door, get out of the fucking way.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: Right?
Lisa: I hear you.
Craig: If I open certain doors that derails me, so I need to know. And this is the same with everybody. And it's like, we all have a relationship with food. Okay. Is yours good or bad? healthy or unhealthy? Don't overthink it, just be real. We all have a relationship with our body. How’s that going? We all have a relationship with exercise, activity movement. How’s that going? We all have a relationship with money. We all have a relationship with our ego. It's like, this is opening the door on self-awareness and self-management law to a new level.
Lisa: Yeah, love it. Yeah, and this is going to be a fascinating PhD. I really—I can't wait to find out more about it. And I think just having that self-awareness, like I will freely say like, I've struggled with my body image, and who I am, and am I acceptable, and I was always trying to be the skinny little modern girl when I was young, and gymnast, and as a kid, and so struggled immensely with body image issues. And people will look at me now and they go, ‘Oh, whatever, you're lean and you're fit obviously and you don't ever—you wouldn't understand.’ Oh, you have no idea how much I understand. And there's still a constant daily battle: even though I'm educated, even though I know exactly what I should be and shouldn't be doing, I don't always succeed against my —that in a sort of drive that sometimes when you get out of balance, and this is why for me like keeping myself, when I say imbalance, I mean like keeping my neurotransmitters under wraps like in a nice, ordered fashion because I have a tendency to dopamine and adrenaline being my dominant hormones, right?
So I'm just like, go, go, go! Do your absolute blow, take a jump and risk, don't think about it, do go and then burn out, crash bang! And so I need to, I need to have constant movement, I need to do the meditation thing regularly. Like before this podcast, I took five minutes to get my brain back into this space because I wanted to do a good interview. And I wasn't going to do that in this stressed-out body, I'd been doing too much admin work for 10 hours. So, I know how to manage those things. And it's the management on an everyday basis that I think and having those tools in your toolkit so that you know how to pull it up, I can feel my adrenaline going, I can feel the anger rising, I better go for a sprint out to the letterbox and back. Whatever it takes. Does it resonate with you?
Craig: Yeah, 100%. What's interesting is I've been around—I worked, one of the things I didn't mention, I worked at a drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre for three years just as their kind of, what’s my title? Buddy health something, manager something, but I would only work there one day a week with them, but work with lots of addicts and alcoholics, and also athletes and all those things. But the thing is, especially with athletes, athletes tend to get their sense of self and their identity from their performances.
Lisa: Yep.
Craig: And not all, but a lot, and which is why I've known many athletes who got retired earlier than I thought.
Lisa: Broke down.
Craig: And well, they went into straightaway, most of them a depression or form of depression. And so this is a really interesting thing to just talk about briefly is—from a happiness and a wellness and a cognitive function, and a mental health, emotional health point of view, is to think about where you get your identity and sense of self from. Now, one of the challenges for us is, we live in a culture which is very much externally focused.
Lisa: Totally.
Craig: So who you are, Lisa, who you are is what you have, and what you own, and what you wear, and what you look like, and what people think of you, and your brand, and your performance, and your outcome. All things, your shit. And I grew up in that because I was an insecure, fucking fat kid who became an insecure, muscle-y bloke. And then I woke up one day, I was 30. And I was huge, and I had muscles on my eyelids and veins everywhere. And all I was was just a bigger, more insecure version of what I used to be. Because I was still a fuckwit just in a bigger body, right? Because I wasn't dealing with the issues. Because my problem wasn't my biceps or deltoids and being my problem is, I'm mentally and emotionally bankrupt, and perhaps spiritually depending on your belief system. And so, we get taught from an early age that who you are essentially is about all things external. So we get taught directly or indirectly that self-esteem and self-worth and identity is an outside-in process.
My theory is that it is the other way around. It is an inside-out journey. It is, it's differentiating between who I am and my stuff, and recognising that everything that I have and own, and earn, and do, and my profile, and my podcast, and my results, and my brand, and my house, and my biceps, and all those physical, external observable things don't matter nearly as much from a mental and emotional health point of view as what is happening internally.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: So, and I'll shut up after this.
Lisa: No, that’s brilliant.
Craig: But this is cool not because I'm sharing it, just this idea is cool, is that is the duality of the human experience. And what that means is that we live in two worlds. So where we do life is in this physical external place of situation, circumstance, environment, traffic lights, other humans, government, COVID, weather, runners, running, sport, all that external stuff, which is not bad. It's awesome, but that's where we do life. But where we do our living, where we do living is that inner space of feelings and ideas and creativity and passion and fear, and depression and anxiety and hope and joy, and overthinking and self doubt and self-loathing, and excitement and creativity.
Lisa: Wow.
Craig: It's trying to understand—because you and I know, at least a few people, maybe many who from the outside looking in their life is fucking amazing.
Lisa: Yeah, yeah.
Craig: It's the Hollywood life.
Lisa: It’s so nearly like that.
Craig: It's a life on the outside of shiny.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: But I've coached many of those people, trained them, worked with them, set with them. And not all, of course, some are great. But there are many people who from the outside looking in, you would go, they're really successful. That would be the label that we use in our culture.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: Why are they successful? Oh, look at all of their stuff.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: All of that stuff. Those outcomes, that house and that equals that money, that equals success. But when you sit in, you talk to that person, you go, ‘Oh, this successful person doesn't sleep much, this person needs to medicate to sleep, and also for anxiety, and also for depression. And also they hate themselves, and also they feel disconnected, and also they're lonely.’ And, or if not all of that, some of that, if not all the time, some of the time, and you got all the outside and the inside don’t match.
Lisa: Don’t unlatch. Yeah.
Craig: And so it's going. And by the way, of course, there's nothing wrong with building a great business and writing five books and being an awesome runner, or whatever, building an empire. That's not bad. But it's not healthy when that's the totality of who we are.
Lisa: Yeah, and spending time on the inside, and being okay with who you are. Because I often ask myself this question. What if it was all taken away from me again and I've lost—I went through my 30s, lost everything, hit start back from scratch. We've been there, done that. I've had to go through the wringer a couple of times. If everything was taken off me, my house, my achievements, my business, which could happen tomorrow, who am I? And would I be able to get back up again? And I reckon I would, because I've got tools to rebuild. And I know that resilience is the most important thing.
Craig: Yeah.
Lisa: The question I ask myself sometimes, so, is it whether, like, I lost my father this year, last year, sorry, six months ago, so that knocked the crap out of me...
Craig: 100%.
Lisa: ...out of my resilience because that was like, up until that point, it didn't matter. If I lost my job, my car, my career, and anything else, but my family were safe, and they were all alive, then that's all I needed. And then when the chief gets taken out, the cornerstone who'd been a rock, my mum was too, but that was a cornerstone, then it didn't, it was a bit of an existential bloody crisis for me because I was like, ‘And now, life is never going to be the same again.’ And that resilience, I really had to dig deep to stand back up again. And I think, so grief is one of those things. So I asked myself constantly, and one of the reasons I drive myself so hard is to protect my family, and to look after them, make sure I don't miss anything. And this one of the things I study so hard for. Just sharing a personal story there to sort of get people to understand, ‘If you lost everything, could you get back up? What would it take to break you?’ That nearly broke me, to be brutally honest.
Craig: Well, I say to people who are in a bit of a—and thanks for sharing that, and sorry about your dad. God bless him.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: Like, I say to people, ‘Okay, let's forget all the fucking KPIs and the deck and success mantras and all right, that's good.’ I can stand in front of people and motivate, and inspire, and make them laugh, and tell stories. And that's all good. But I go, ‘I've got three words for you one question three words. And the three words and the one question are, what really matters?’ Now, what really matters is not your fucking tally. It's not your bank balance. It's not your biceps. It's not your hair colour. It's not your fucking lippy, or it's in my case, it's not your abs or and none of those things of themselves are bad. But I've been really lucky that I've worked with people who are in a really bad way, people in prison who got themselves there, of course, but then probably more impact for me was people with really bad injuries.
Lisa: That’s amazing.
Craig: I work with a bloke at the moment, a mate of mine who got blown up in an accident. I trained him three days a week, and he was literally given zero chance of living like, or having any function similar to your mum.
Lisa: Wow.
Craig: And he started. He was in, like your mum, he was in a coma. I started, they said he'd be a quadriplegic. If he—firstly, they said he wouldn't live, and he lived in our luck out, mesmerised how that happened.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: Got through the operations, he got blown up by gas bottles, which were in the back of his unit while he was driving.
Lisa: Oh my god.
Craig: That blew the car apart, that blew the roof off, they shattered windows for 800 meters in the houses. And he was given zero chance of living. And he was in a coma for a long time. And I'll go in and talk to him. And when he obviously was not awakened, all the stuff that you did, and I just say to him, that I don't know, like, that'd be gone. I don't know. Like, I don’t be guessing. I don't know, I might just get well enough to get out of here. And I'll start training him. I started training him in a wheelchair, with a broomstick. And so and the broomstick literally weighed, I don't know, maybe 100 grams. And so I would put the broomstick in his hands. And I would pull his hands away. So his arm’s away from his body.
Lisa: Yep.
Craig: And I'd say now try and pull that towards you.
Lisa: Yep.
Craig: And that's where we started.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: With a 100-gram broomstick.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: Now it's three and a bit years later, I've trained him for three and a bit years.
Lisa: Wow.
Craig: He is now walking with sticks. He drives himself to the gym. His brain function is fucking amazing.
Lisa: Oh my god.
Craig: He’s still in constant pain. And he's got a lot of issues. But the bottom line is the dude who they went, you will never ever walk, you will never talk.
Lisa: You’ll never survive.
Craig: They'll never be any—you'll never have any function, right?
Lisa: Yep.
Craig: So my two big perspective givers. That's one and the other one is—so...
Lisa: What a dude.
Craig: What’s that?
Lisa: What a legend.
Craig: Yeah, he's amazing. He's amazing. So about 14 months ago, I was at the gym and I was training with my training partner, who's like me and he’s all buffed. He's in good shape. He’s fit. He doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, him and I are very similar. Anyway, one of the stupid things that he does is he takes I don't want to get in trouble. But he takes pre-workout, doesn't do drug. Don't do anything. I don't know. But anyway, he took a pre-workout. We're training and he's doing a set of chins. And he did 30 chins, Lisa, and he held his breath for the whole time because that's what he does. He thinks he gets more reps when he holds his breath. By the way, folks, not a great plan. Holds his breath for 30 reps.
Lisa: He’s training his chemoreceptors. This for sure.
Craig: Yeah, comes down, falls on his face on the floor. And I think he's having a seizure.
Lisa: Oh.
Craig: And it had an instant cardiac arrest.
Lisa: Oh my god.
Craig: So, not a heart attack, a cardiac arrest. So, his heart stopped. So it took me kind of 20 seconds to realise it was that, and not... And there was—I won't describe what was going on with him.
Lisa: Yep.
Craig: But as you can imagine, turning all kinds of colours...
Lisa: Yep.
Craig: ...stuff coming out of his mouth. It was messy, right?
Lisa: Yep.
Craig: So, he was dead for 17 minutes.
Lisa: Oh, my God.
Craig: I worked on him for 10 until the ambos got there or the paramedics and God bless him. fricking amazing. But what's interesting is in that, firstly, that 17 minutes could have been 17 days. That's how clearly I remember those minutes.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: And I'm on the floor, kneeling down next to one of my best friends in the world.
Lisa: Yep.
Craig: And I'm doing compressions and breathing, and I'm trying to save his life.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: And it's funny how in that moment, everything comes, without even trying, to everything comes screamingly into perspective about, ‘What is bullshit?’
Lisa: Yes.
Craig: What matters?
Lisa: Yes.
Craig: What fucking doesn't matter?
Lisa: Yes.
Craig: What I waste energy and attention on. And literally those seven, eight minutes. I mean, I think I had pretty good awareness but they really changed me.
Lisa: Yeah. I hear you.
Craig: Nothing matters except the people I love.
Lisa: Exactly.
Craig: I'll figure the rest out.
Lisa: Yep. It's an amazing story. Did he survive?
Craig: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's five-to-two here in Melbourne.
Lisa: And he's waiting for you?
Craig: We're training at five.
Lisa: Brilliant. Say hi for me.
Craig: He’s still an idiot.
Lisa: He’s awesome, he's lucky he got you.
Craig: He’s still an idiot, but at least he prays when he chins.
Lisa: Yeah, but like just the experience I went through with my dad. And I haven't done a whole podcast on it, and I tend to, because the two weeks fighting for his life in the hospital and fighting up against a system that wouldn't let me do intravenous vitamin C in that case that I was trying to because he had sepsis, and fighting with every ounce of my body and every ounce of my will, and in knowing that, and for those—it was 15 days that we were there, and they all blend into one because there was hardly any sleep happening in that time, a couple hours here and there and I'd fall over. But they changed me forever, in the fact that because I'm a fixer, I like to fix things and people.
And when we're in the fight, I’m the best person you want in your corner of the ring. If we're in a fight for your life, or not as an, like, I'm a paramedic, but if you want someone to fight for you, then I’m the biggest person to have in your corner. But when we lost that battle, man, I was broken. And to actually not to come out the other side and to have that win and to get him back and to save his life, especially knowing I had something that could have saved his life had I been able to give it to him from day one. And you said that about your friend who got blown up and you said, ‘Just get out of here, mate, no, take it from there.’ And that's what I was saying to my dad. And as he had, ‘You just get yourself—you just hang in there, dad, because I will do what I can do here, and I've got all my mates and my doctors and my scientists all lined up ready to go. As soon as I get you the hell out of this place, I will do whatever it takes to get you back.’ But I could not do anything in a critical care situation because I had no control over him, his body, what went into him. And it was a—he was on a ventilator and so on. And so that was out of my control, you know? And that's fricking devastating.
Craig: Yeah.
Lisa: To know that and to feel that.
Craig: How did that change you? Like, how did that change you in terms of...
Lisa: It's still an evolving process I think, Craig, and there's a burning desire in me to get that changed in our ICU for starters, to get recognition for intravenous vitamin C, which I've done like a five-part series on my podcast for status, but I'm working on other ideas and projects for that because we're talking thousands and thousands of doctors and scientists who have the proof that this helps with things like sepsis, like ADS, like pneumonia, and it's just being ignored. And it's, we’re just 20 years behind this is one of the reasons I do what I do, is because I know that the information, like going through that journey with my mum too, the information that latest in clinical studies, all of what the scientists are doing now and what's actually happening in clinical practice are just worlds apart. And with like a 20-year delay in from there to there, and the scientists are saying this, and the doctors at the cutting edge are saying this. And so things have to change. So that's changed me in a perspective because I've never been a political person. I don't want to really get—I love being in the positive world of change, and it's, do things. But I do feel myself going into this activism space in a little way because I need to get some changes happening and some systematic things and you know you're up against the big fight.
Craig: Yeah.
Lisa: This is a big base to take on. But I'll do what I can in my corner of the world, at least but it has changed. And all that matters to me now is my family and my friends, and then from a legacy perspective, is impacting the world massively with what I do know and the connections that I do have and bringing information like we've been hearing today and these very personal real stories to people's ears because it changes the way people have their own conversations and hence start to think.
Craig: Well, I think also, and thanks for sharing that. That's it. Somebody's got to step up, and you're stepping up and quite often the things that we need to do to live our values are not the things we want to do.
Lisa: No, scary.
Craig: Like, Fuck this. Yeah, I'd rather watch Netflix too. But that's not what I'm about. So it's good that you recognise that and you step into that, but I think what's encouraging about this conversation for everyone is that neither of us, well, I was gonna say, particularly special, you're quite special with what you do. But even with what you do, as an elite athlete, really, you've just put in an inordinate amount of work. Like, you've done all of the things required to become elite and to become an exception, but in many other ways, like with me, you've got issues and bullshit and flaws. And that's why I think—I'm not saying this is a great podcast by any means that or this is great conversation because that's very fucking self-indulgent. But what I mean is, I think people connect with podcasts, conversations that are just that.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: Where it's not like two people who are...
Lisa: Scripted.
Craig: ...just shooting off like experts. It's like, yeah, we're both figuring it out, too.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: And by the way, I'm a dickhead too. By the way, I don't know, I've got a lot of shit wrong. Don't worry about that. It's like, I'm just having my best guess. And I always say, even as a coach, I've never changed anyone. All I've done is influenced people, but I've never done the work for them. They've always done the work. So, everyone that I've coached that succeeded, it's because they did the work. Like I didn't run the race. I didn't lift the weight. I didn't play the sport. I didn't go to the Olympics. I didn't walk out onto the arena. I didn't do anything. I'm just the guy going, ‘Fuck, come on, you can do it.’ And like, here’s a plan and here’s—it's like, I'm just the theory guy. I don't put it into—the only life that I put it into practice in is my own.
Lisa: Yeah. And that's powerful. And as a role model, too. I mean the shape that you're in and the stuff that you do, and you walk the talk, and those are the people that I want to listen to. And those are the people I want to learn from.
Craig: Well, my dad, my dad used to say to me, a couple of it, my dad's like a cranky philosopher. But he used to say to me a couple of things. This is irrelevant. The first one but it's, ‘You can't go to university and get a personality', right. Which is funny because my dad's like, ‘And university, it's overrated'. I agree, dad.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: Second thing.
Lisa: For most things.
Craig: Second thing. He used to say, ‘I wouldn't trust accountants or financial planners who weren't rich'.
Lisa: Or trainers who are overweight.
Craig: It's like, I remember him saying to me, like a friend of his disrespect Toyota, but not a friend, but a dude he knew. He was a financial planner or an accountant. And he used to drive this old beaten up Corolla, and my dad's like, ‘Why would I listen to him?’ Like, look what he drives, like, if he knew anything about making money or maximising whatever.
Lisa: He’s got a point. He’s got a point.
Craig: So, yeah, I think the thing isn’t—when I listen to somebody like you, apart from being an elite athlete, what I know is that it's not like you've been given this gift, and you've just milked the gift. I know, you've obviously got a talent and a gift. But also what you've done is maximise everything around that from nutrition, and sleep, and supplements, and recovery, and decision making, and periodisation, and planning and prep.
Lisa: Yeah, I’ll swipe a stimulus for a long period of it.
Craig: And you've done all the work around, like, a lot of people are gifted, but don't do anything with it. Like a lot of people have got potential.
Lisa: Huge, huge and I have no potential, I had no talent, I really didn't, and I still don't but I did hear that just persistence. And I think one of the biggest things in life is persistence. And not expecting, like, how I hit a, so I'm doing this anti-ageing supplements that I've got coming in that I'm importing into the country called NMN, amazing. I've looked into science, I know what I'm talking about. I know these things are good, right? I get a client, they’re taking the supplements for three days. And then they're like, ‘Oh, it's not working.’ Like that sort of sums up a lot of people's approach to fitness and health.
Craig: Yeah.
Lisa: And looking for the pill that does it in three days. They're looking for that one workout that's going to change them and they're going to look like it's gonna happen, instead of the fact that it's a multi-pronged approach. You have to check a whole lot of other things to get some of it to stick, and you have to keep throwing it forever, not just one. It's a constant persistence set that sees success. I mean, that was definitely with your mate that had that got blown up and with mum, it wasn't one therapy that got them there. It wasn't one therapy that got mum where she is, it was this and plus that plus this plus that. And then we went backwards here. And then we tried that, and that was a dead end. And that wasn't too good. But overall, we kept going, and at the end of the day success and then ongoing work.
Craig: 100%. Well, I always say to people, I don't care what you get done when you're motivated, I get—I care what you get done when you're not motivated, because everyone's a fucking champion when they're in the zone.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: That it's about your ability to persevere, persist, do the work. It's how effective and proactive and productive you can be when you're not inspired. Because the problem is that a lot of us rely on this state of motivation. And in this sense, I'm talking about that emotional state, excitement, arousal, I mean, there's, whenever I heard Lisa, I heard Lisa talk, and I was pumped, but the next day, I wasn't pumped, so it didn't do it. So there's this. And it's interesting because I get pigeonholed in corporate as a motivational speaker.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: And one of the first things I say is that motivation doesn't work.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: And people look with dismay, but ‘Aren’t you a motivation...?’ I go, look, you might get inspired or motivated while I'm here. And if that's happens, that's cool. But what I actually care about is what you do, I care about your behaviours, your choices, and your ability to keep doing what success demands when you can't be stuffed. Because that's more important than me inspiring you for an hour or a day.
Lisa: Yep.
Craig: Because everyone can get it, which is why everyone makes the, not everyone, but a lot of people start a new year's resolution with this whole story and whatever and it’s like well, January one's the day. And that's just a story: January 3 is too late and December 28 too early. Because and it all, this is all bullshit psychology. But we think that magically, it's got something to do with a day or a date. Well, now it's got everything to do with you and nothing to do with the calendar.
Lisa: Yep.
Craig: Everything to do with: do you really want to do that thing? Because that thing you want to do is hard, and uncomfortable, and inconvenient, and uncertain. And it probably won't be fun, quick, easy or painless, the journey.
Lisa: And very expensive often as well along the way.
Craig: That's right. And so with all of that in mind, do you still want to do this thing?
Lisa: Yep.
Craig: And the answer is ‘Nah’ most of the time.
Lisa: And are you willing to put in the work? Every time you take on a project, every time you do something, it is going to set you, it's going to cost you somewhere else in your life. So you have to decide, yes, a lot of people say why aren't you doing ultras anymore because I've got other priorities. And I could be a selfish person and carry on doing the same old, same old and not be learning and developing anymore. Or I can be doing something that's actually going to benefit my family, my audience, my crew, me in another way, and it's more beneficial. ‘Oh, but don't you miss it?’ No, no, I don't. I've been there, done that. That was that time. And this is this time. And I think having that confidence to say that, took a couple of years to say that and to be okay with it. But I think that that's an important thing, too.
Craig: Well, for me, that's maturity and growth and so, what will work for you? What worked for me when I was 30, in terms of what I was doing lifestyle work, and it was awesome. But it didn't work for me when I was 40.
Lisa: No.
Craig: It doesn't work. And it's not good or bad. We just change and I've—what I do now, like, for example, what works for me, which is working independently, having a recording studio at home, I've got two offices at home, upstairs I've got an office, outside I've got an office called the Zen den–internal and external–and the way that I work which is no holiday pay, no sick pay, no guarantees. I don't know how much I'm gonna make this year. I don't know what bookings I'm gonna get. Fuck all that. There's so much uncertainty. Most people would hate my life, but I fucking love it. So, it's trying to figure out what's my best operating system based on me, life values, what I love, what I want to do, be, create and bring to the world. How do I want to serve? How do I want to show up? What do I want to be, and how do I live my truth and how do I live my purpose and how do I live my values and how do I walk the talk and yeah, I'm going to stuff up and but and then based on all of that what is my operating system need to be and once we start to get—we talk about this idea a lot in self-help and whatever about living in alignment, I get asked a lot what that means. And for me, all it means is living your values. That's it: what are your values? Create an operating system that reflects those values, you're in alignment.
Lisa: Yeah. And it is like this entrepreneurs were both in that same sort of space, we're creating our own world, doing this podcast, for example. It is, you have to be pretty brave and courageous, and sometimes stupid because it's a scary road out there, but I wouldn't have it any other way. And I can't work for anybody else. So I think it's a bit of a rebellious spirit in me, and it just doesn't want to be told what to do. And so I like to run my own ship. And sometimes that ship has sunk along the way. And sometimes it's been very successful. So you just have to pitch in living. Like, I just could not live in a corporate setting. Like my dad wanted me to be an accountant. Oh, my God, I would have died as an accountant. I would have been long dead because I would have just not wanted to live with that was my life and no, no offence to accountants. Great profession, we need them. But not for me, and I had to be my own person and run my own ship. And that's hard sometimes it would be—I sometimes think, God would be hell of a lot easier to go with someone else, and the hours I have to do and the amount of work I have to do and the mistakes that I've made, and the money I've lost and the education I've had to invest in, and the years and years of development, but oh man, I wouldn't have it any other way.
Craig: Yeah, that's because, for you, it's not about money. Money is one of the things but if someone said to me, ‘Craig, you can make twice the money, but you've got to drive to work, sit in a cubicle and do ABC, you'll make double the money.’ I'd be like, not only am I not interested, I wouldn't even give that one second of consideration. Because for me, it's about my life experience. If my costs are covered, other than that, I'm good.
Lisa: Yeah. As long as when it, yeah.
Craig: Like, I live the cheapest life of all time. I literally drive a $20,000 Suzuki, I spend 23 hours a day in bare feet. I walk around with $10 shorts, I go to the gym every day. All I do is talk to people and think about the meaning of life and do my research. And my life is fucking awesome.
Lisa: Yeah.
Craig: Like I don't need more stuff like, we tell ourselves this story about all the shit we need. You don't need it.
Lisa: Yeah, you don't need the fancy watches and the fancy clothes.
Craig: I used to do it, I tried it. I always say to people, I tried being selfish. I gave it a really good go for a long time. It didn't work.
Lisa: And in the simple life, I mean, somebody, if you if that's what floats your boat, then cool have all that stuff. But for me it's, I've got sponsored clothes, I've got a $2,000 car, I don't care. It skips me from A to B, as long as it doesn't break down. You know what I mean?
Craig: Yeah.
Lisa: It's not where my values lie. It's not who I am as a person. And if you are judging, you know how successful I am by the car I drive? Well, jeez, I’m not doing too well.
Craig: I mean, but exactly. But people know who you are beyond what you drive or what your own. It's like the prize is you, like, you're amazing. You're shit’s amazing. Your message, your inspiration, your energy. It is amazing. Like, you're great. And I'm not pissing in your pocket, you're great. I've told a hundred people about you, so.
Lisa: I really appreciate it.
Craig: No, you're awesome. I love it.
Lisa: And likewise, and I think the, like, being on your show, just what was it a week or week and a half ago, like, I've just had such a response from there because you have such a big following. And you have such a big following because you do an amazing job. And you're funny. And I could learn a bit on the funny side, I think that would be helpful.
Craig: Could you work on that a bit? [1:09:04 unintelligible]
Lisa: Yeah. I’m a bit serious. I'm really too serious. I like to be cheeky.
Craig: You know what I think is that I always think, like, if I'm going to go talk to an audience, and this, and all I've got is information and data and facts. I'm not going to create a whole lot of connection. But if there's stories and a bit of humour, as well as some quality information, if you can create an emotional connection with people, then the teaching and the sharing of thoughts and ideas is much easier. And I, no, don't set out to get a laugh or but it's like I know if I sit and listen to a speaker who to me, that person he or she is engaging. I mean, but if I listen to someone who's got three PhDs and a fucking Nobel Prize, but they're boring, I'm out. It doesn't matter, I'm like, fuck, dude. Come on. I'm nodding off. It's like because you want to, I mean, ultimately, we're still emotional, social creatures. And we want to be a bit amused and entertained.
Lisa: That’s true.
Craig: And we want to connect with the person who's in front of us.
Lisa: And that's a good teacher that can bring across the passion, and if it's through humour. If it’s through just a really engaging style, then that's fantastic. Hey, Craig, I know you got to get to another appointment. And I've really taken up a lot of your time today. But I just want to thank you, and I can't wait to do a few more things with you. I don't know what and we're in COVID, and all that sort of jazz account pops over and says, ‘Yeah, I'd love to'. But I hope we can do some more stuff together. I think what you're doing is fabulous. Your PhD sounds absolutely fascinating. And here, I'm going to go and read your books now. So we actually on that point, tell us where people can find you. Your books and all that sort of good things.
Craig: Probably just, so where to look at lots of stuff would just be craigharper.net. Where to—probably I mean, probably the easiest access just to follow my day to day stuff is Instagram, which is @whiteboardlessons.
Lisa: @whiteboardlessons. Yep.
Craig: @whiteboardlessons because I do a lot of, I write on the whiteboard.
Lisa: I shared one of them today. It was good.
Craig: I saw that, thank you. I incessantly write on whiteboards. And then I take pictures of what I write and post it which people seem to resonate with. So just Instagram, @whiteboardlessons, social media, sorry...
Lisa: And The You Podcast, The You Project.
Craig: And of course, The You Project fucking project.
Lisa: Project
Craig: Project. Right, the project or the project, is my podcast. So yeah, it's been great. Lisa, and I love what you do. And I think you ace in—I didn't know of you a couple of months ago, and I'm very impressed. And it's a privilege to come on your show. And it's great to meet you. And I'm looking forward to hanging out with you, one day.
Lisa: Absolutely. We’ll absolutely do that. You can teach me to do some better chin-ups because I'm not very good at them.
Craig: Well, we're definitely not going for a run. I'll give you that too.
Lisa: Oh, man. I’m not too long. I don't do so long anymore. So you'll be actually fine with me running.
Craig: All right.
Lisa: All right, matey, thank you so much for your time, and we look forward to having you on again at some stage.
Craig: Perfect. Thanks, Lisa. Thanks, everyone. Take care.
That's it this week for Pushing The Limits. Be sure to rate, review and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.
We all want good health and a long life. That's why we subscribe to health fads that offer promising benefits to our bodies. But, for this same reason, we tend to neglect foundational health principles. While these are easily accessible to us, there is still so much we can learn and get from them. By going back to the basics, we can take better care of our health, prevent diseases and boost longevity.
Dr Elizabeth Yurth joins us in this episode to talk about the importance of cellular health in longevity. She gives an overview of the benefits of foundational health principles in the disease process. Dr Yurth delves deeper into fasting, autophagy and the specifics of spermidine.
If you want to know more about slowing the ageing process and boosting longevity, this episode is for you.
For our epigenetics health program all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/.
You can also join their free live webinar on epigenetics.
Go to www.runninghotcoaching.com for our online run training coaching.
If you would like to work with me one to one on anything from your mindset, to head injuries, to biohacking your health, to optimal performance or executive coaching, please book a consultation here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/consultations
My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within 3 years. Get your copy here: http://relentlessbook.lisatamati.com/
For my other two best-selling books Running Hot and Running to Extremes chronicling my ultrarunning adventures and expeditions all around the world, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books.
For my gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection ‘Fierce’, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection.
‘It is not that you run too much; you wear your knees. It's that there is a disease process going on in your body that is now making your joints wear out, and so you have to treat it systemically, or you're not going to make any progress’.
‘The cool stuff is cool, and there's a place for it in all of us. But you still got to start at the basic stuff’.
‘There's so much information in these really simple lab studies that you've gotten from your primary care doctor’.
‘I think even the functional medicine space sort of went beyond the step of looking at some very basic things that are inherent to life’.
‘You're never going to train doctors; you've got to train people’.
‘There's not really anybody who has one disease that does not have something else wrong; it's just impacted lots of times in different ways’.
‘We want to go back and forth between different things. And we want to make sure we're cycling. Any of you are staying on the same patterns all the time, that's not serving you’.
Dr Elizabeth Yurth is the co-founder of the Medical Director of the Boulder Longevity Institute.
She is a faculty member and a mastermind physician fellow in Seeds Scientific Research and Performance (SSRP). She specialises in Sports, Spine, and Regenerative Medicine and has double board-certification in Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation and Anti-Aging/Regenerative Medicine.
She has a dual-Fellowship in Anti-Aging, Regenerative and Functional Medicine (FAARFM) and Anti-Aging and Regenerative Medicine (FAARM). Dr Yurth is also an active athlete and has worked with numerous sports teams at collegiate and professional levels. She does consultations with high-level athletes to optimise performance and aid recovery.
If you wish to connect with Dr Yurth, you may visit her Instagram.
If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends!
Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can include more amino acids in protein in their diet.
Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts.
To pushing the limits,
Lisa
Welcome to Pushing The Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati. Brought to you by lisatamati.com.
You’re listening to Pushing The Limits with Lisa Tamati. Fantastic to have you guys back with me again. I hope you're ready and buckled down for another great interview. I really do get some amazing people and this lady is no exception. So today I have Dr. Elizabeth Yurth, who I originally heard on the Bulletproof Radio Podcast with Dave Asprey, who I love and follow. And she is a longevity expert. But Dr. Yurth is also a medical director of the Boulder Longevity Institute, which she founded in 2006. And she's double board certified in physical medicine and rehabilitation and anti-ageing and regenerative medicine. So she's a specialist in sports, spine and regenerative medicine.
She's an orthopaedic surgeon, and she's also heavily into the whole regenerative stuff. So from stem cells to different supplements to working with the latest and technologies that are available to help us slow down the ageing process and to help people regain function. So it was a really super exciting episode and I'm going to have Dr. Elizabeth on a couple of times. She's also a faculty member of the 25 mastermind physicians fellows at the Seeds Scientific Research & Performance group, which allows you to stay abreast and teach others in the emerging cellular medicine field. She's also been an athlete herself and works with numerous sports teams and both of the collegiate and professional levels. She's a wonderful person and I'm really excited to share this interview with her.
Before we head over to talk to Dr. Yurth, I just want to let you know about my new anti-ageing supplement. Now this has been designed and developed by Dr. Elena Seranova, who is a molecular biologist who is also coming on the podcast very shortly. And this is an NMN. It has nicotinamide mononucleotide. I recently read the book Lifespan by Dr. David Sinclair, who's a Harvard Medical School researcher in longevity and anti-ageing. And he's been in this field for the last 30 years. And his book was an absolute mind blowing, real look into the future of what we're going to be able to do to stop ourselves ageing to slow the ageing process down. And very importantly, increase, not only our lifespan, but our health span so that we know we stay healthy for as long as possible and don't have this horrific decline into old age that most of us expect to have.
So Dr. Sinclair in this book talks about what he takes and one of these things is an NAD precursor called nicotinamide mononucleotide. I searched all over the place for this. I couldn't get it in New Zealand when I was searching for it. And so I went and found Dr. Elena Seranova, who has developed this product and I'm now importing that into New Zealand. So if you want to find out all the science behind it, please head on head over to nmnbio.nz. That's N-M-N bio dot N - Z and all the information is on there. And you can always reach out to me lisa@lisatamati.com, if you've got questions around that.
We've also updated our running coaching system. So the way that we are offering our online run training system is now on a complete new look. We are doing fully personalised, customised training plans for runners of all levels and abilities. So we will program you for your next goal doing a video analysis of the way you're running, improve your running form through drills and exercises. Build your plan out for you. You get a one-on-one consult time with me as well. And just really help you optimise your running performance and achieve those big goals that you've got. So head on over to runninghotcoaching.com to check that out. Right now over to the show with Dr Elizabeth Yurth in Boulder, Colorado.
Lisa Tamati: Well, hi, everyone, and welcome back to Pushing The Limits. Today, I have Dr. Elizabeth Yurth with me from Colorado—Boulder, Colorado, and she is a longevity and anti-ageing expert. She's an orthopaedic surgeon. She's a real overachiever. And I'm just super excited to have her on because I have been diving into Dr. Yurth’s world for the last couple of weeks since I heard about her on the Bulletproof radio show. So Dr. Yurth has kindly given up an hour of her time to come and share her great knowledge. I know we're only going to skim the surface, Dr. Yurth, but it would be fantastic if we can gain some amazing insights on how the heck do we slow down this ageing process. So, Dr. Yurth, welcome to the show.
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth: Thank you so much, Lisa. I've been actually stalking you ever since you asked me to do this. And I've been fascinated with all the things you've been doing and teaching and I love it. I love that there's people like you out there who are now getting the masses involved in this and interested in this because doctors aren't doing it and so it has to be that educate the public. And people like you are paramount to that, so thank you.
Lisa: Thank you very much. Yes, I think, yes, this is the beauty of podcasts and such things and will in the internet whenever we can go direct to the best minds on the planet, get the information direct to the consumer, cutting out all the middle people, so to speak, and really get this information out there. Because what I've found in my research in the last few years is that there is so much amazing, great science out there that has never seen the light of day and certainly not in local clinical practice being utilized.
So Dr. Yurth, can you tell us a little bit about the Boulder Longevity centre before we get underway and what your work there is all about and your background?
Dr. Elizabeth: Sure, I'd love to. So basically, I've been in the orthopaedic medicine world for 30 years. And about 15 years ago, I actually became very frustrated because I saw people coming in and they would get injured or just have arthritis, chronic pain and we would sort of patch them a little bit and nothing ever really got better, and then something else will get hurt. And it really was just this downhill process from square one. I mean, I tore my first anterior cruciate ligament in my knee at the age of 18 and subsequently, had torn two or three more times between the two knees, had four more surgeries and then it was just a downhill decline.
And so, we started looking at is there a way to stop this, because you don't learn it in medical school, and you don't learn in orthopaedic medicine. And when I started looking into—and this was a very early time in the whole functional medicine space, it was really early, there wasn't a lot. And so I went back to American Academy of Anti-ageing Medicine, which is really the only thing available at that time, and did a fellowship in functional medicine and regenerative medicine and tried to incorporate that into my orthopaedic practice as much as I could. But it's difficult in 10 to 15 minute appointments to do that. So we realized that you can't really do good medicine in that model, and so we opened Boulder Longevity Institute about 15 years ago now.
And I really sidelined did both practices, because what I found is that people are still looking for that insurance-based practice, and I try as much as I could to educate them there. And then some of them would transition over to here and over time for 15 years, Boulder Longevity Institute has really grown and developed, and subsequently is now my full-time practice. But we do a lot of orthopaedic regenerative care here, the targeting, taking care of people and getting them healthier in that realm.
But much like you, our focus is very much now on education and we have a whole, what we call, Human Optimization Academy. We're trying to bring the just like you said, the research to the people. Peter Diamandis, who runs Abundance360—is very well known, you probably know him — he has a great quote where he says, ‘Researchers don't do medicine. And doctors don't do the research and learn the research and use on their patients’. And so, there's a lag of about 15 to 20 years since when something is available to us that will make us better and ever getting to us.
Lisa: Exactly. I had the exact same conversation with another doctor, Dr. Berry Fowler and we were talking about intravenous vitamin C and I said, ‘Why is it taking so long and critical care to get this in?’ And he said ‘because it's like turning a supertanker’. He says, ‘It's just so slow’. And so people are not getting the benefit of the latest research. And for an orthopaedic surgeon to go down this anti-ageing functional medicine route is a very rare thing, or at least in my country, it would be a very rare thing.
Dr. Elizabeth: Yes, orthopaedics does not cross over this line at all. And ultimately, it's one of the reasons I had to leave my other practices because my partners were very much like, ‘Stop talking about medicine. That's not what we do here’. And you have to—even arthritis is a disease. It is not that you ran too much and wore out your knees. There is a disease process going on in your body that is now making your joints wear out. And so you have to systemically treat it or you're not going to make any progress.
Lisa: Oh man, people so need to hear that because it is an inflammatory process that's coming like out of the immune system. And I've heard you say a couple of times on some of your lectures, I listened to one on mitochondria. And mitochondria is sort of the basis of where a lot of other things are coming from, isn't it, and diseases are probably...
Dr. Elizabeth: Everything. Honestly, I think what we're going to find is that every single diseases—every single disease is going to come down to mitochondrial level. In fact, I was just reading a new research article on autism and mitochondrial dysfunction, that they're actually linking this mitochondrial dysregulation in even autism. I don't think that we're going to find any disease that is not linked first to mitochondrial dysfunction, which is fascinating because mitochondria are fascinating. So it's really my passion is, is how do we repair mitochondria. But that you start looking at—you can pretty much do that. You guys go out there and Google mitochondria and any disease you can think of and you will find research to support it.
So, in arthritis it is exactly the same, right, Lisa? You're right. It's damage to now the mitochondria and the chondrocytes. And that damage—you get these damage from chondrocytes, which then are actually spewing these reactive species that are damaging the next cell and the next cell. And simply sticking steroids in that joint is not going to help it.
Lisa: Wow. So we want to talk a little bit today, like we talked about our foundational health—a few foundational health principles so that we can then get on to some of the cooler, more sexier stuff that I want to talk about, like things like spermidine and peptides and NAD precursors, perhaps, and all of these sort of really cool things.
But what are you seeing in your practice—like you're seeing a lot of people who are becoming aware of their health, they're looking at everybody knows the basics about nutrition now, I think. Like, fried foods are not good for us, sugar is not good for us—the basics. But what are you seeing as missing in that foundational side of things?
Dr. Elizabeth: So I think this is the biggest thing I've seen over the past—probably a year. And as I've done more podcasts, and I've listened to more podcasts, and now you have all the bio hacker groups and the peptide group, so everybody is doing all this cool thing. So now, like, ‘Oh, I got to go do my hyperbaric and I have to go take my growth hormone, peptides’. And they come in to me, and I was just telling you about a patient I saw who literally had a worksheet, spreadsheet of all the things he was doing. And I said, ‘Well, are you taking testosterone’? And he was 56 years old, I said, ‘Are you taking testosterone’? ‘No’. And I said, ‘Have you ever looked at your nutrient pound’? ‘Nope’.
So, what I really want to encourage your listeners is the cool stuff is cool, and there's a place for it in all of us, but you still got to start at the basic stuff. So, when we look at people we have to go through and we have to fix—so we look at all the hormones and you just did a great podcast looking at hormone metabolism, right? Because people are so scared of hormones and they’re terrified that these hormones are going to cause cancer. And we know that's not true. It's how you metabolize the hormones that's important, which has genetic and environmental. You just gave an incredible podcast with your guests the other day on that.
Lisa: With Dr. Mansoor; he's wonderful.
Dr. Elizabeth: Right. And your epigenetic background, that the key is how these hormones are processed. So when we look at hormones, we actually do a urine metabolite test. So we know exactly where those hormones are going, and are they going down bad pathways or good pathways?
So you've got to repair all that, first, fix all the pathways, which you do, and you know your CYP genes and all that kind of stuff. How do you alter it? There's nutrients that you can use to do that. There's tons of things, exercise. So, fix all the hormones first. Men and women all need hormones. I think testosterone’s neglected in women all the time, right? They're on estrogen, progesterone, and I'm like, ‘You’re not on testosterone’? Like, ‘No’. And so even within the realm of our type of medicine, we are neglected in that realm. Right?
Testosterone is huge for women. If you want muscle, you need testosterone.
Lisa: I basically got good muscles.
Dr. Elizabeth: Right, that’s right. So, you've got your testosterone on board, and it has to be not alternating into estrogen—all that has to be involved. So you've got to fix that. And then, there's so much information in these really simple lab studies that you've gotten from your primary care doctor. So, a complete blood count, a CBC, a CMP. Everybody has them, and everybody's doctor looks at and goes, ‘Yep, looks good. There's no reds in there, everything's perfect’. You can actually take that—and Dr. Levine, anti-ageing expert, did a whole algorithm that just taking some of these blood work give you very comparable estimation of longevity as doing telomere length or doing methylation.
So, we have all these expensive tests to look at DNA methylation and telomere to look at age, and you could come up very close to the same number, simply by feeding some of these parameters, like your albumin level and your metabolic calculator that would...
Lisa: Wow! Is that available publicly, that calculator?
Dr. Elizabeth: I'm not sure how publicly available it is. We actually have access, and we utilize that in our patients to follow it. But it's great, because these other tests are expensive. And if I want to put you on a protocol and then see if I'm making headway, how do I follow that? So, I don't think people know that, for instance, what is one of the most valuable numbers on your CBC? It’s actually the size of your cells, the mean cell volume, and the rest of distribution?
Lisa: Yes, I'm just studying cell distribution.
Dr. Elizabeth: Isn’t that fascinating?
Lisa: We are completely unaware.
Dr. Elizabeth: And have any of your listeners have had the doctor ever mentioned what their MCV is? Or their RDW is? And those are very, very important. So is albumin. So albumin alone, which is not just dietary. There's a great study that you could predict who is going to get out of the hospital alive based on their albumin levels. And so simply looking at things like that. So if your albumin levels are low, maybe it's because you're not eating enough protein, but that doesn't—it tends to be something else wrong.
Lisa: Liver not doing something.
Dr. Elizabeth: Definitely. And sometimes that's the need for more beta carotene. Sometimes it's need for more copper. Copper has to help carry the albumin and copper deficiencies are super low. Nobody measures copper. So, you can look at a low albumin and try putting somebody on a little copper, it’s quite GHK copper as a peptide, I might get to the fancy stuff. Using copper as a peptide is an amazing peptide. It's very longevity promoting because copper is super vital to our health. And so sometimes just putting people on two milligrams of copper can markedly improve their health.
Lisa: But isn’t there copper’s also a toxicity problem? Isn't that quite a lot of people have high copper levels?
Dr. Elizabeth: Less than you think. So it's gotten a lot of market to that, right? It has to be that zinc copper balance has to be imbalanced. So that's one of the things. But actually, copper toxicity is pretty easy to tell. When people become copper—toxic on copper, you'll see the lunula, the fingernails start turning, a little discoloured, a little bluish in colour. So it is a little harder to get toxic in copper than people think. I use it a lot for wound healing in my patients. So, it really helps with wound healing. It's why it's in all skin, expensive skin creams, copper peptides are because it's so good for collagen function, it’s so good for wounds. So I think we may scare people a little bit from copper. But it actually has some value.
And a lot of times, it's not so much that you have too much coppers, you don't have enough zinc and that balance is not there. It has to be balanced between zinc and copper. So those are simple things that you can actually look at and measure. And you can—I don't have to do it on everybody.
So I see somebody who has a low albumin, I might say, ‘Hmm, we better look at your zinc and copper level’. So we take the CBC and CMP. And how about simply creatinine? If your creatinine is above point eight, that is not good for longevity. So, why is that?
Well, maybe you're eating way too much protein, right? We will erase any high protein diets, super high protein, the kidneys can only process so much protein and your kidneys depend on your genetics, maybe less. So that's all things I think you have to go back when you talk about foundational health.
I spend literally 30 minutes going through a CBC and a CMP with people. They’re so valuable, and those are $12 tests. Not these big, fancy, expensive tests, they don't cost $500 or $600. And by the end of that test, I can give them, this is what your biological age, your pheno age, this is where we really need to target and start with them some very basic, inexpensive things.
Lisa: Crikey dex, that's amazing. I didn't know we can get to that. I mean, I've only been studying blood chemistry for a couple of months and like it's a big topic isn't it?
Dr. Elizabeth: It has some really cool value to it that you can actually look at. Some ranges that—we have all gone from the normal range, right? All your listeners now know this the normal range, there's an optimal stage. Within that optimal range, right, there's one number above that you'll see you start to see a change in ageing. The curve on your projected longevity, you look at albumin levels, and you look at the curve on your projected longevity. If your albumin levels are less than 4.6, your projected longevity is five to 10 years less than somebody who's above 4.6.
Lisa: Crikey. No one's ever told me any of these things and I’ve been studying blood chemistry and from functional doctors, like that's all news to me.
Dr. Elizabeth: Yes, I think that that's the problem. I think even the functional medicine space sort of went beyond the step of looking at some very, very basic things that are inherent to life. And now start focusing, ‘Oh, let's look at hormones, right? Let's look at the gut microbiome’. All super important, but all going to be messed up, if the other stuffs messed up, right?
Lisa: You’re basically not in the right place.
Dr. Elizabeth: And so I—that's where I get a little frustrated. So now we're targeting back to that whole cellular health, it all comes back down to the cell, fix the cell. As the cell gets fixed, the mitochondria get fixed, everything else falls. So once you've refined that now, we can look at gut microbiomes, if the person is not doing well. We can look at things like micronutrient profiles, and I love micronutrient profiles because I don't know if how much vitamin D you need or how much vitamin B12 you need. Micronutrient profiles, particularly one that gives me intracellular and serum levels, as you know genetics plays a huge role in your micronutrients.
Lisa: Yes, vitamin D, for example. I mean, I know I have bad vitamin D genetics, so I need to supplement with vitamin D. Right?
Dr. Elizabeth: And B12, you've got the SUV people of B12. I’m one of those who need a lot of B12. It's all very genetically based. So, you can predict it from genetics. But then are you accomplishing your goal? I think you need some…
Lisa: Measurements. And this is where the combination of what I'm—like the combination of doing your genes and finding out your innate pathways and what they do, and then seeing actually where you are, getting that snapshot of ‘Okay, we are actually in their hormones and stuff’. And it's quite complicated.
And this is the problem is that you go to your local doctor, at least here where I live, and none of this is offered. And none of this is—and so you left as a lay person trying to work this stuff out yourself. And that's quite frustrating and quite difficult.
Dr. Elizabeth: It's hard. And it gets caught up again, in the glitz and glamour. I'm going to be attracted to my podcast that's talking all about the coolest, newest thing, it's just our nature is to want the coolest, newest thing. And we just talked about that. We want that cool new thing, because that is on the forefront. And we use those cool new things to help fix the basics. But you still got to know where you are in that standing, and that's really now become, I think, one of my frustrations as I'm seeing more and more people walk in my door, who are doing everything they’re thinking of.
And so we are trying to teach people this. We're trying to teach people how do you interpret your own blood work? How do you look at every one of those parameters and say, ‘What should my albumin be? Okay, it's too high, it's too low. What can I do to fix that’? Whereas, if my MCV is, mean cell volume. If your mean cell volume, and you look at your own. As we age, I look at my 19 year old son, he has a mean cell volume of 83. If I look at your average person who's in their 50s, and 60s, who's our age, it's going to be 97, 98. So the higher that number goes, the more your stem cells are wearing out, the more your bone marrow is wearing out, the more that whatever you're doing isn't working.
So we can use those things, like you can use your infrared, you can do all those great things. Me, I infrared, I cryo, I do all that. But I will tell you some very basic stuff that sometimes has been the things that made changes in those numbers. I want people to know, that's them that, honestly, is why we decided you're never going to train doctors, you've got to train people. But we've also got to get people back to understanding that you've got to sort of learn these things and kind of a fashion of can learn this, learn this, learn this. When I understand everything about how hyperbaric oxygen improves my cell function, have I really learned how to just look at the cell at that molecular level from looking at basic labs? And that's what we're trying to teach people. Start there, and then we give them tools.
Lisa: Fantastic. So people can join Dr Yurth, and get us some of this education. And I've started delving into it and I can't wait to see what else comes along because I mean, this sort of stuff, I'm like already going, ‘Oh my god, I didn't know that’. So I've learned something today already as well. And I'm very definitely guilty of going after the shiny object and love it.
Dr. Elizabeth: It’s human nature. That’s human nature.
Lisa: Yes. And so people can go to the Boulder Longevity website and I'll put the links in the show notes and there is a Human Optimization Academy, join up for that and it's actually free at the moment, isn't it, Dr. Yurth?
Dr. Elizabeth: Right. Right now, it's free. And we'll start putting together—so right before COVID hit, we actually had an in-person course. We're actually going to teach how to look at your own CBC and CMP. And COVID hit, and it all sort of fell apart. But we'll be putting that back into sort of a virtual course with people so you can actually get your bloods run. We will walk you through. So, here's how to interpret every one of those little numbers you see on there because I will tell you, every one of those little numbers is important. Everybody just looks at it as a piece of paper, and there's no red marks highs or lows, they sort of discard it. And we'll show you how to look at that and give huge value.
And just from those simple things, you can now say, ‘Maybe I better get a micronutrient panel’, or at least test a copper or zinc or a B12, or D based on some of those numbers that you see being off. And then take the tool, now fix the basics. ‘That's not working? Okay, now, maybe I need to add this, this, this’.
Lisa: And then now we can get fancy. Well sign me up for that course because I need it. And I'm already up on some of it, but I wasn't that familiar with some of the things you've just said. So like, that's just like, well.
Okay, so we're looking at foundational stuff. Now let's go and look at cellular health, per se, because it all comes down to the cell. The more I look into things, the more everything seems to be about mitochondria in the cell, and what they're doing. and when we're made up of what? 10 trillion cells or something ridiculous. So cellular health, can you give us a bit of a view—it's a big topic, isn't it? But where should we start?
Dr. Elizabeth: Yes, well, I'm going to start with first kind of explaining what that means. So, functional medicines, we went from a disease-focused medicine, right? And then we all got very savvy—well, not the doctors—but the rest of the world who got very savvy said, ‘Oh, this isn't working. It's making somebody money, but it's not working to make anybody happy’. So we went to a functional medicine part. Let's look at organ systems and let's start. So then we went to the organ system, let's look at the adrenal glands and let's look at the liver in this and let's now fix the organ system that's dysfunctional. we got to fix the thyroid, we got to fix the endocrine organs and we have to do all that.
And then now, and this is really super recent, we're realizing that every organ system comes back to a cellular dysfunction. And there's not really anybody who has one disease that is not have something else wrong. It's just impacted lots of times in different ways. So if I have osteoarthritis. So if you have osteoarthritis, your risk of dementia is about fivefold higher. So why is that? Right? Osteoarthritis... because I ran 800 miles a day. But that's not the case, I have patients who run 800 miles and they're fine.
Lisa: Oh, I'm fine. Like, my joints are fine, and I haven't got any osteo.
Dr. Elizabeth: And then you have people who are like, ‘Oh, yes, I just wore myself out because I ran too much’. No, not the case. So, there's something wrong. So now we have to go back and look at what is wrong in the cell. So if you think about what power, what is the cell all about? It is the mitochondria. Mitochondria, what gives the cell energy, right? And so as we start getting damaged to our mitochondria with time and life and environment and genetics, and we start getting damage at the mitochondrial level. So, now have these damaged mitochondria. And now we start getting these cells that are in this altered state of energy. And that's when you start getting that senescent cell—cells that are basically sitting there…
Dr. Elizabeth: They’re zombie cells.
Lisa: And there's zombie cells, right? And they're producing these reactive oxygen species. And that's why they're called zombie cells, it's because the things that are being spewed out, are now toxic to the cells around them and then toxic to those cells. And so, it truly is like a zombie takeover.
So that's where we look at when we're going back to a cell level. First thing we have to do to try and heal any disease is clean out the bad cells. Clean up the zombie cells. That’s why fasting has been utilized for years in every disease process because we know that fasting causes autophagy, causes bad cells to go away, and now we can rebuild. I think one of the biggest mistakes people make is that if I start throwing a lot of rebuilding things into my network, tons of NAD and I'm trying to always be in this state where I've got a lot of antioxidants going. I'm throwing a lot of NAD and well then, I'm actually contributing to that cell senescent state. I've got to get rid of that first.
Clear out the bad stuff and do that periodically. And we use things like rapamycin, you can use it for fasting. And most recently what my go-to has been this spermidine for that talk. And I fell in love with spermidine a few years ago, actually and couldn't get it here in the US. That basically—it came onto my radar because there it worked at a very sort of primal level. Every single organism has spermidine. Anything that every organism has, is vital to life. And so we know that—and then all these studies that show that well, if you have higher level spermidine, you live longer, so.
And it was only available in—I don't know if you guys could get it—but it was available in Europe.
Lisa: I’ve just got my first order on its way. But I had to get it via Colorado, and I've actually being in contact with the guys in Austria. So, working on that one, I'm getting it down here.
Dr. Elizabeth: We couldn't get it. And like six months or so ago, we finally could get it here in the US. And it works as an autophagy inducing agent. It basically tells the cells to get rid of the bad stuff, it helps to restore the good parts of the cell. And really, at a baseline level is probably the one supplement that I know of, and probably the only one I know of, that is going to be actually balancing cell health continuously.
Lisa: So it's homeostasis as opposed to...
Dr. Elizabeth: The homeostatic state. Right.
Lisa: So like, just to backtrack a little bit there because we covered a heck of a lot of ground in a very short time there. So, fasting, I mean, we've heard, like fasting and intermittent fasting and longer fasts are very, very good for us and all that. While a lot of us don't want to do it because it's not very nice... I do intermittent fasting, but I must admit, I don't enjoy it. And I certainly—when it comes to doing longer fasts, I struggle. So I'm always like, fasting mimetics, how can I get some fasting mimetics going? Because like you say, if I'm going to put in the antioxidants, the precursors, which I do as well, which are very important piece of the puzzle, but just that is not enough. So, this is like we've looked at in the past, like resveratrol as being a possible fasting mimetic. And wouldn't it be great if spermidine turns out, and it looks like it is going to be another fasting mimetic that's actually even more powerful. So, I know you do a lot of fasting, you're very disciplined, unlike myself.
Dr. Elizabeth: No extra weight, I still have extra weight so fasting’s easier for me.
Lisa: But yes, it is a difficult thing to do. So intermittent fasting is probably for me is the easiest go-to because I can sort of coke for it.
Dr. Elizabeth: Time-restricted eating. Really, yes, more doing a 16, 8, kind of thing as opposed to the longer fast. And there's a lot of questions, we don't really know, do you need to long fast? We actually don't know the answer to that. There's a lot of people who say, ‘Oh, you've got to be hit the 48 to 72 hours to really get the full autophagy phase’. There's not a lot of data that actually really says that. You may still be able to get the same benefits from doing time-restricted eating. So we don't know the answer to all these questions.
Lisa: But so what we're targeting with fasting is autophagy. So, autophagy, just to define what autophagy is, is getting rid of the bad stuff, basically. The bad proteins that are damaged, the mitochondria, or mitophagy, in that case. And recycling the parts that we can reuse and getting rid of it. Does the body sort of lock at it when you're fasting, and you haven't got anything coming and going up, ‘I've got no fuel supply, I better start recycling the old stuff’.
Dr. Elizabeth: Yes, exactly. Yes, autophagy is self-eating. And so basically, the cell basically says, ‘Oh, I need to preserve. I'm going to take the good things from the cell, get rid of the bad stuff I don't need. It’s a waste of energy. Getting rid of cells that shouldn't be utilizing my energy’. So and then really by going into a ketotic state, and that's, not utilizing glucose has a huge benefit.
Lisa: So ketosis and autophagy, are they hand in hand? Are they part of the same thing? Can you have autophagy without being in ketosis, or are they very much married together?
Dr. Elizabeth: No, you can actually have autophagy without being in ketosis. And you can basically be in ketosis and not necessarily have autophagy. So that all kind of depends on the cell, the state the cells in.
One of the problems with resveratrol as a fasting mimetic, you mentioned taking resveratrol continuously, is there's also very potent antioxidant. Remember, one of the benefits of fasting is oxidative stress. So, I want oxidative stress while I'm fasting. If I'm taking resveratrol, for instance, while I'm fasting, I'm actually not getting as much of the oxidative stress. So, it's working a little different level. That's why I like spermidine a little bit better as it doesn't have that same effect to sort of negate the oxidative stress.
Lisa: And for how long for people to get their heads around? I know because I mean, I've been struggling with this one, like the antioxidants sort of paradox. Yes, sorry, you carry on.
Dr. Elizabeth: I think the key to remember is you really don't want to be doing any protocol continuously. I was just talking to a guy and he said, ‘What do you do to look like you do’? because I have more muscle. And I said, ‘I don't do anything continuously’. There's nothing—workout, nothing continuously. My food, my eating is never continuously, my supplements are never continuously.
And I think it's a problem as people get in these patterns where they are taking all these antioxidants continuously. I always am going through build-up, breakdown phases. So there's only a few supplements that I will continuously take. One is, I will take spermidine at a baseline level. But if I'm doing a sort of a fast autophagy phase, where I really want to do a big tie up off of everything, I want a very high dose spermidine, much higher dose than just until that time of day.
Lisa: Because spermidine works at a level lower if you like, at the base level. So, when we're talking about antioxidants, what the job is in the cell is to basically scavenge and donate electrons to where you got oxidative stress, and reactive oxygen species and to get rid of it there. But we're actually going a step back and actually stopping the reactive oxygen species, or oxidative stress from happening in the first place. And this is why spermidine at that base level, seems to be one that you can take continuously. And it even builds up to some degree, perhaps in your body or upregulates some of the bacteria in the microbiome. And whereas, antioxidants, we want to sort of cycle in and out. It's like exercise, isn't it? Like when I go to the gym, I'm not going to have my vitamin C right next to when I go to the gym, because that's going to mitigate that cascade of effects that vitamin C has. Yes.
So I'm doing things. I'm taking my vitamin C away from that. And so there's, none of this is good or bad, it's cycling. And I think the more I've looked into things, the body likes this push and pull. It likes a medic stress. It likes to be cold. It likes to be hot. It likes to be pleasant, but it likes to be fasted. It likes to have a good amount of food. It's this whole—because that's how we've evolved, isn't it?
Dr. Elizabeth: That's the way life for it was, yes.
Lisa: We didn't come from this neutral environment where the temperature is the same all the time. And we're sitting on comfy couches, and we're not exercising and we're not cold, or we're not hungry, and we're not hot, and we're not not anything, and we've got an abundance of everything. And therefore, if we look at our evolution, and how we've come about that sort of a push and pull seems to go right through nature.
Dr. Elizabeth: Yes, you're exactly right. Remember, there's that balance between mTOR and AMPK, right? We know that AMPK is breakdown. And we know that when we block mTOR, our lives are longer, but we also don't build as much muscle and we don't have as much energy. And what you do is go through phases, build up mTOR, build up AMPK, build up and do that balance, so that you keep things in a very homeostatic state. And you said exactly right, there's great benefits to being hot. You have all the, how great being cold is and doing our cold showers in our cryo and everything. But there's a study that came out recently, I think I quote it in some podcasts I was in recently, that showed that in hotter environments, bone density is much better. So why is it that?
Lisa: Yes, I heard that.
Dr. Elizabeth: There's some effects from the warmth on our body too. So you're exactly right. We want to go back and forth between different things and we want to make sure we're cycling. Any of you who are staying on the same patterns all the time, that's not serving you. Your body needs to have this back-and-forth balance. And you're right, that is—whenever you give the quote of well, ‘That's how cavemen lived’. You're like, ‘Well, but cavemen died in 18 whatever’.
So how our evolution occurred, right? It's still what, what got us to survive. And it really is how our world is designed, and it's how our cells are designed.
So I think that the use of thinking about your body as ‘Okay, I'm going to go through a fast, autophagy phase, and then I'm going to build up and I’m going to build my muscles’. You can build muscle while you're in a fasted state, but it's not nearly as easy as it is when you're eating a lot of food.
Lisa: Yes. And but we're wanting to keep everything in balance so that it doesn't get just mTOR because, if we're in a state of like, activated mTOR all the time, then we are growing, but we were possibly growing things like cancer cells and things like.
Dr. Elizabeth: And we know that mTOR activation all the time is closer to death.
Lisa: But isn’t it weird, like there's nothing simple about...
Dr. Elizabeth: It actually, honestly, it makes very little sense to me, right? The things—the mTOR, everything's muscle building. Super high IGF all the time and it is muscle building. You would think it would be kind of pro longevity, right, and healthy, and yet, it's not. And the only way I can really—in my mind, reason that out is that if the zombie apocalypse hits, you're better designed to be able to survive without any food and without any—nothing just huddled away in your little house, right? And so maybe the evolution of our body that's for longevity, the genes have kind of stayed there are the ones that really make us survive through famine, right? And yet, that's probably not where we all want to be. We don't want to be huddled in the back of our houses not moving.
And so yes, if you look at Valter Longo and his research on—really low IGF people live longer, they don't have cancer. Yes but they actually don't necessarily feel great. And they don't necessarily see low IGF people all the time, who are fatigued, who don't have good energy, who can't build muscle, who don't exercise. So I think that the thing here is build your IGF, bring it back down, build it up, bring it back down. So, I think that that's where we really need to look at things, as this kind of waxing and waning of everything we do.
In our cellular medicine fellowship program, it's one of the things we're really, really focused on is that's what the cell needs, is a push and pull to it, to really help it become a healthier entity. And I think if we start doing that, we're going to start seeing that that's really where we're going to see that big focus to health and longevity occurrence. It's not going to be ‘Everybody eat this diet’.
Lisa: No, no. And this is like, even as a coach of athletes and stuff. And I did this in my athletic career where I didn't know all this stuff. I ran long, because that's what I do, it was ultra-marathon running. And that's all I did. I didn't train at the gym. I didn't do—and I was not fit. And I was not healthy. I could run long because I've trained that specific thing, but I wasn't healthy. I was overweight. I was hormonally imbalanced. I ended up with hypothyroid. I couldn't have sat on the couch and ate chips all day and probably come out better than I did. Because I'd been doing one thing and one thing that was actually not suited to my genetics either, ideally. And so understanding all of this is not as simple as well, ‘I'll go and do the same old thing, same old and then we'll be good’.
I want to sort of flip now and go a bit of a deep dive into spermidine because I think spermidine is the one thing that, this is going right down to the base level of before. Because we want anti-ageing. I mean. We compared ages before this podcast and I mean, I won't share your age, but I was shocked. You look amazing. And I'm like, ‘I want a piece of that’. What is it that you're doing? So spermidine is a part of your—that is one of the things you do take on a pretty much a daily basis. Can you dive into the research? There’s 10 years behind the spermidine and it's only just becoming available. Guys in New Zealand, it's not here yet. I'm working on it. Give me time, I'm getting, I'm working on it.
Dr. Elizabeth: So, what we know is as we talked about spermidine is on every single living organism. So, we know it's critical to life, it's what's called a polyamine. It's what a three poly means is spermidine, spermine, and putrescine. And they all have some value. Putrescine is what's in rotting meat. You're probably not going to go eat rotting meat. But there's actually some value to putrescine in our bodies, too. Spermidine appears to have—spermidine is converted typically this into spermidine. Spermidine is innately in our gut. So, it's made by our gut bacteria but it's also in some foods. It's in some a lot of fermented foods, in wheat germ extracts. It's in some peas and mushrooms. It's in some algae.
Probably the richest source of it is a specific type of wheat germ extract. It's apparently very difficult to extract, it's only a certain type of wheat germ that has it's difficult to extract a pure form of it. And so, there is companies that make it from algae as well. But you have to take—actually before we could get spermidine from spermidine life which is wheat germ extract, we actually bought an algae extract one. You really had to take 40 of these little green pills. I mean your hands are green, your teeth are green all the time. 40 of them, I mean, I did that because I wanted it but once we got spermidine.
I get the question all the time about well, it's wheat germ extract. Interestingly, I've celiac patients on spermidine and even though it's not advised for celiac patients, it probably actually is perfectly safe because it's actually working on one of the pathways, that's what makes the gluten exactly unsafe those patients. So, it's probably even if you're—I'm very gluten sensitive, I don't do gluten. I have no problems in spermidine. So, it tends to be pretty well-tolerated in those people.
Lisa: Yes, but I've got a brother who’s recently examined and she said, ‘Yes, I can’.
Dr. Elizabeth: Yes, I have two celiac patients on who've done fine. And again, the bio says not to take it if you're celiac, but I think cautiously, there is some research that supports it actually may be useful in treating some of the celiac patients.
So basically, the study is now—there's so many studies on it. In terms of preventing almost every disease in the book, and that's where you and I come back to that whole, is mitochondria the answer to everything? Because we've seen spermidine—you can Google spermidine. I do this. I mean, Google ‘spermidine and Alzheimer’, Google ‘spermidine and cancer’, there's not a disease that we don't have a study on where you can find some connection to higher or lower levels of spermidine being better.
Some of the major research has been on cardiovascular and its benefits and cardiovascular disease. It's one of the things we've been using when we see high inflammatory cardiovascular markers in our patients. We measure what's called myeloperoxidase, which is an inflammatory cardiovascular marker. It's interesting, we've seen it very high in our lot of our post-COVID patients. So patients who have had COVID recovered, coming for labs, we're seeing very high levels of myeloperoxidase. So, we think that's probably from some of the vascular damage that COVID seems to create in some people with certain genetics. And that’s very hard to bring it back down, and spermidine has been one of the things that's been really helpful there for us.
So, it's also any of your patients who have a high Lp little a. Yes, so by Lipoprotein little a, you'll know is basically genetic.
Lisa: Yes. And there's not much you can do.
Dr. Elizabeth: Nothing much you can do about it. You use high-dose niacin, but it's hard to take, the liver toxic. Spermidine actually has some research to support it in lowering Lp little a and we've seen that in our practice, it's one of the things we lower Lp little a. So the other place that's been really studied is an immune system support. So we've seen improvements in lymphocytes. So, one of the other labs that you want—when you're looking at that CBC is looking at your neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio.
Lisa: Yes, I've just like I've got a problem with my brother at the moment, lymphocytes, neutrophils down. No, sorry, your neutrophils down, lymphocytes, high.
Dr. Elizabeth: That's a little uncommon, that might indicate some kind of viral illness going on. Typically, what happens as we age is, we start to see the lymphocyte number go down and the neutrophil number go up. So that ratio, which should be around 1.3:1, 1:1, 1.3:1, starts climbing. If you look at the typical person our age is, 3:1. And so, it's hard to get—how do you get back lymphocyte function? You don't have thymus glands anymore. And so the two things that we've been able to utilize to really restore lymphocyte function in our patients who have ageing immune systems is spermidine. And then the other one is a peptide, thymosin alpha-1, which is a thymic peptide.
What our thymus gland does is it takes those two lymphocytes, it tells them what to do and, and once—your best immune function is at puberty. After that, your thymus gland starts getting smaller. And by the time you're 60, you don't really have much thymus gland. And so your immune system starts going a little haywire, it doesn't know what to do. And so what we can do, because really crazy people are trying to transplant thymus glands, or eat sweetbreads, which doesn't work. They do it in France, maybe they taste good, but I don't think it replaces your thyroid function. But you can get thymic peptides. So, two of the things that the thymus gland really makes is thymosin alpha-1 and thymosin beta-4. And thymosin alpha-1 is a very immune modulating peptide, and it really helps to restore normal immune function. So, the combination of spermidine and thymosin alpha-1 and your people who have immune dysregulation, autoimmune diseases. You could start normalising the immune function. So instead of attacking self they start attacking viruses.
Lisa: Wow. And autoimmune is just like, a huge, huge problem. I mean, it's just epidemic levels now.
Dr. Elizabeth: It is epidemic.
Lisa: Sorry, so this would help with that. Oh, my God. Okay. So that's another reason to take spermidine and the peptides. I mean, peptides are harder to get hold of like…
Dr. Elizabeth: It’s still harder to get hold of. Your people who are in Europe, thymosin alpha-1 is actually a drug. It's called Zadaxin. We can't get it here as a drug. We've made us a peptide but it actually is a drug. They use it in their chemotherapy patients in Europe and Asia. And so oddly, it's available as approved drug. Probably pricey.
Lisa: Most of these drugs are for some unknown reason.
Dr. Elizabeth: Yes. Spermidine—someone's early studies and where it actually sort of panned out, as people went after it initially was actually hair growth. And again, if you think about, the tissues, we're talking about, like cardiac here, those are all fast-growing tissues. And that's where spermidine sort of had its nice effect and sort of that whole regeneration process. And so even in guys with thinning hair, spermidine has huge benefits. Just taking on like a milligram a day dose will start the thickening of hair. I noticed when I first started, my nails grew really fast means, I mean, super fast. And so even in those basic things, like hair growth, nail growth, spermidine has some really marked effects.
Lisa: Fantastic. We’ve got to get it here.
Dr. Elizabeth: Yes, it is amazing. I mean, honestly, I feel a little—whenever I see my patients now and I see something wrong. I'm like, ‘Well, spermidine, oh’.
Lisa: Yes, yes, yes, yes. And this is all to confirm because it's such a wide panacea, and it works at base level of the ageing and pathologies and things…
Dr. Elizabeth: It’s too good to be true.
Lisa: It's too good to be true, but actually now, it makes sense. And so, it’s fantastic if we find something that is a panacea for many, many things. And also, I've got my first shipment coming from the States, and I'm super excited.
Dr. Elizabeth: One of the hard things in what we do, right, is it takes you awhile to feel better, and just starting from a low level, right. Or if you're like us, and you're at a high level, then making this little extra. And so, what I tell people to monitor, because one things I noticed was, when I started spermidine was a pretty—I don't sleep enough, I study too much. But I use my Oura ring, and I monitor my HRV. And so, I know a lot of your listeners have the Oura ring and HRV is very fluctuating. And so it's one of those things, it's very easy to see a change.
So, if I do something like start taking spermidine, I can say no, and you can look at the trend on your Oura ring. And you can say, you can take—started spermidine here, and I had about a 15 point jump in my HRV, which I won't say what it is because it’s just from starting spermidine. So I know it's doing something at a very basic level because HRV is predictive of almost every disease state; so low HRV, you know you have a higher incidence of all Alzheimer, we know we have a higher incidence of cancer. So I know if I'm affecting my HRV, I'm positively affecting my health.
So something really simple that you can do to say, okay, I started this here, and then look back in two weeks, go to your little trends thing and see ‘Wow, look, my trend is going this direction’.
Lisa: Wow, I can't wait to see that because yes, I mean, I haven't been able to move the needle on my HRV really.
Dr. Elizabeth: Yes, me neither. And mine's not good.
Lisa: Yes, and mine isn't great either.
Dr. Elizabeth: Yes, the downside of sometimes what we do is we're reading all the time and staying all the time and trying to do too much and…
Lisa: Brain doesn’t turn off.
Dr. Elizabeth: And that's not so good.
Lisa: Adrenaline driven.
Dr. Elizabeth: Yes, so it is really, honestly one of the first things I did that really made a dramatic change.
Lisa: Wow, I will let you know how I go.
Dr. Elizabeth: Yes, let me know.
Lisa: When mine comes, whether my HRV is now turning up.
Dr. Elizabeth: I will say sometimes you need a higher dose which gets pricey.
Lisa: And this is the problem with everything, it's the same with the deep precursors and all the stuff that's fantastic, it does cost. But you know what? I don't have money to burn but I would rather go without a fancy car, go without fancy clothes, go without cosmetics, go without all that to have supplements that work or to have biohacking technologies that work because that's my priority, it’s my health. Because what good does it do me if I have a fancy car, but I'm sick?
Dr. Elizabeth: I know. And it is funny, I was giving this lecture and this woman came in, she asked how much this program we do cost? And she said, ‘Well maybe when I pay off my Lexus, I'll be able to do that’. And I'm like, ‘You’re really willing to spend a lot of money, a $1,000 on an iPhone and’...
Lisa: Priorities.
Dr. Elizabeth: …and car and we just still have to keep putting this focus on your priority, absolutely has to be this your health? And it’s so hard to convince people of that.
Lisa: And I'm constantly shocked at people who expect to like, they take a supplement and they don't see anything change for three days and then they're like, ‘It didn't work’. And I'm like, ‘You've got to be kidding’. Like you know your hair is growing, right? But do you see it growing every day? No.
But if you keep going—and with my listeners have heard me rabbit on about my story with my mum and bringing her back from a mess of aneurysm. The reason I have been successful with her is, is not any one particular thing. I mean, yes, hyperbaric, yes, all of these things were a big part of the puzzle. But it was the fact that I keep going when there was no signs of improvement. And I keep going every single day for five years, and I still go. And that is the key is that persistence. And that just keep doing it and prioritizing this, even when you see no results. And that's a really hard sell because people want to see, how long will it take for this to kick in?
Dr. Elizabeth: I think it's one of the hardest things about our jobs is—listen, it is very hard. But this is stuff that I'm looking at a future that's 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years down the road, I know these things—I know that they do, they've been proven. So to say they're not working for you is why in every study did they work and oddly, they don't work for you? It just doesn't make sense. It's just that if you go back to that cell level, by the time my knee is arthritic, number one, I've already lost 25% my cartilage, that process started 30 years ago. Now I've got to go and fix the cells at the very base level and then start repairing that cartilage.
Lisa: And it takes time.
Dr. Elizabeth: A long time. Right?
Lisa: And you didn't wake up one day with wrinkles and grey hair, it happened as a process over time. But I know that if I'm doing all these things that I'm doing, in my anti-ageing strategies that in 10 years’ time, I'm going to look better, feel better than if I don't. And that's the bottom line, or hopefully still be alive and avoid cancers. Those are my goals.
Dr. Elizabeth: You have to trust the research to some degree, right? If something's—there's not research—and that's hard cause you have to weed through a lot of research, right? And you have to say ‘That study is trash, that study’s trash’. Well, actually, ‘Here is a good study. This, this, this, here's a good thing’, and then put it all together. And I do this. There’s a fresh article, I go, ‘Here's an article that says this, this, this’. And it's not until the articles that outweigh the articles that say that the negatives by a certain amount that I even say, ‘Okay, this is a reasonable thing to do’.
Lisa: And that's where you like your spermidine, there is 10 years now because it's 10 years of full-on research and in many places and in many different diseases, where like, now that you're willing to say, ‘Yes, this stuff is actually looking really bloody good’.
And we are learning all the time, the science is changing. And I think this is what frustrates people too, is that you can go on—I do this, go into PubMed, and I do a deep dive and then you end up like, ‘Whoa’. One contradicts the other one and some of them are poorly designed. And so, that's why we need people like you who can interface that for us and go, ‘Hang on. I've distilled down into the most important things. This is what you need to know, guys’.
Dr. Elizabeth: Yes, I'm involved with this group, it's called Seed Scientific Research & Performance among Faculty with it, and it's a group of really—we're doing a fellowship program in cellular medicine, but it's 25 mastermind doctors are kind of the group that we've been getting together and we meet quarterly. And we talk about the stuff and now you've got these brains, you have 25 brains of people who are not only reading and utilizing this stuff, and you can put it together and you can start weeding out what works, how does it work? Who doesn't work in? And that's what it takes. It takes people like that getting together and actually now meshing their minds and using their experience and all their knowledge and all their reading.
And so this group has been phenomenal for me because it's I'm forefront leading thinkers. Because even when you go to the conferences, if you go to my orthopaedic conferences, I just learned the same old stuff. So this fore group, but actually talking amongst ourselves.
Lisa: Such top-level people, I wish I could be a fly on the wall of such.
Dr. Elizabeth: Yes, I mean, it's amazing stuff. And that's where we're going to make a change. And then you have to trust that we will bring that to you guys, but you got to stay tuned to people like you, Lisa, and the people who are trying to bring this to you because if you rely on medicine to do it, and your doctor to tell you it, you're going to be dead before it happens.
Lisa: That’s exactly what’s going to be.
Dr. Elizabeth: Or feel horrible. I mean, I just lost both my parents in the past and also lost mum. They were in their 90s but my dad really kind of gave up. His arthritis has gotten so bad. He was a guy who at 80, he was climbing mountains, but at 90, he couldn't hardly walk because his arthritis was so bad. And none of us want to be that way.
Lisa: No, and this is why we're desperate.
Dr. Elizabeth: You've got to do this stuff now. Ideally, in your 20s.
Lisa: Yes, exactly. Oh, we've missed that boat. I’m so sorry, you lost your parents. I mean, I just lost my dad six months ago. And again, he was super fed, 81-year-old, but he smoked and I couldn't ever stop him smoking and had an aortic aneurysm. And then I was stopped in the hospital from giving him intravenous vitamin C because once again, they are way behind the eight ball in our local hospital, in our ICU unit, they'd have no idea of what vitamin C like they think it's an orange you take. And my dad died as a consequence of that.
And I can't say for sure, but I believe in my heart that if I had been able to give him the things that I wanted to give him from day one, ozone and intravenous vitamin C, and all the other stuff that I had up my sleeve, my dad will be with us still. And that just breaks my heart. And because I know that there's these things available, and we can't get it for our people?
Dr. Elizabeth: I know, it's horrible. And then you've got the doctors—I mean, like with hormones. I put patients on hormones, their doctor takes them off the hormones.
Lisa: Oh, my God. And you've looked at the genetic pathways, you're not doing this out of—you’ve looked at it all. Like you know the risk factors and stuff.
And so Dr. Yurth, do you do teleconsults? Because I think after listening to this, people are going to want to make sure...
Dr. Elizabeth: We do. In fact, I would say most of our—I'm licensed in a lot of places and we have a lot of people actually out of the country, too, Europe and Canada and Australia. And so we do almost everything now is telehealth. We have people come in because we do some procedural stuff, too. But we do tons. It's so easy now, because we can hook them up with labs that are close to them, they can get the labs, we can go through them and do these very detailed concepts. We can give you what is your biologic age, and then we can start following. You just follow that, every three months, you see, ‘Am I changing my biologic age’? We can help you look at parameters, like using the Oura ring or other devices to help look and see if what we're doing... But it does really come down to having somebody help you walk through some of the basic stuff. And once you learn some of it, there's a lot you can do on your own.
Lisa: Yes, yes. And this is why this is so exciting. So I'm sure there's going to be lots of people wanting to do that. And I know all this stuff costs, it will cost people. It costs but again, what do you want more? And what is more important to you? I would give away my house and my everything to get my dad back.
Dr. Elizabeth: Yes, to be healthy and live healthy.
Lisa: And I’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on my mum, and I...
Dr. Elizabeth: And there's nobody who is 60—once people get sick... I just lost one of my patients, I've been taking care for 15 years to cancer but we kept her alive for 15 years in stage four cancer. But she gave—I mean, she spent a lot of money on her cancer. The problem is, none of us think like that until we have the disease and we have to think like that ahead of that.
Lisa: And this is where like prevention, prevention, prevention is just worth a ton of cure. Because it's just you're pushing so much that uphill, really, once you've actually got the cancer or you got the whatever. So, if we can get a—even just a simple blood test and work out a few of the basics and then later on.
Dr. Elizabeth: And I will encourage that there is a lot of inexpensive things that you can do as well. I mean, intermittent fasting, obviously, that's really cheap. Saves you money. But the lab perspective, you can do—get a lot of information. Like I said, from a basic blood panel that cost 20 bucks, and you can get a lot of information. When you say, listen, the suspicion is this, let's try doing this and see if these parameters change. So there's a lot of actually things you can do that are on the more inexpensive realm. You have to understand them and know them.
And then when things don't respond, that's where you do have to kind of pull up the bigger stakes and pull out the bigger guns and do things. And for those people who do have—I do think you have to look at where are you spending your money. And we have to show our change, and you guys are in a different place in the US. But medicine here is so messed up by insurance companies, basically. Now everybody expects that their health insurance is covered, and when something's not covered, well, no one pays for spermidine, so I want my health insurance to pay for something. So we're really have messed the whole game up.
Lisa: Yes. And the whole insurance. Yesh, and let's not even go there because the whole political—the mess that has been created over time is just yes. And in the States, it's really bad. And here, it's not a heck of a lot better, slightly better, perhaps, but not a lot.
But yes, and you know what? I was listening to somebody, I can't remember who it was, and I said, Dr. Perlmutter, Dr. David Perlmutter, ‘Stop cursing the darkness and light a single candle’, or something to that effect. And I thought, that's the attitude. Instead of banging my head on the brick wall, because sometimes I do feel like that, just keep bringing this information out to the people.
Dr. Elizabeth: That's what we can do and the people, and you help more people listen. And so yes, and I do love that you've brought your stories to light and you're a real person. It's funny, most recently, when I did a five-day fast, I actually brought in two of the girls who I work with who had never fasted before. And actually, when I Instagram post, I Instagram with them in that post. And people we’re like, we love that because they were like real people.
Lisa: Yes. ‘They’re like me’, then I want to be doing this.
Dr. Elizabeth: Like, well, she's not human. She'd like to do all this cool stuff. But if you can bring this stuff to the real people and have them really start spreading that word, it makes a big difference.
Lisa: Oh, absolutely. So Dr. Yurth, we'll have to wrap up in a minute. And I can honestly, I really love to have you back on again, if I can impose on your time the next month or two, to do a part two, because I think we didn't go into—I would really love to dive a bit deeper into the whole mitochondria.
Dr. Elizabeth: Yes, let’s spend a whole talk just on mitochondria.
Lisa: That would be great.
Dr. Elizabeth: That's an amazing topic. Yes, there's just so much cancer perspective, I mean, probably going to come down to mitochondria are the basis for a lot of cancer, so.
Lisa: Yes, so the metabolic—this is something I've been studying lately is the whole bit metabolic nature of cancer, as opposed to the somatic—what's it called? I’ve forgotten the correct term, the somatic theory of cancer. Genetic mutation theory. So, I'd love to yes, maybe do an episode on that.
Meanwhile, Dr. Yurth, where can people join you and your Human Optimization Academy, get teleconsults, get help from you if they want to?
Dr. Elizabeth: So if you just go to boulderlongevity.com, that'll lead you—there's a click for the Academy, so you can join the Academy, please do because we really are trying to get this information to people. We bridge that gap between research and actually using it so we can save lives. And just on that realm, the insulin—by insulin took 20 years and time it was discovered, think of the lives that were lost, and we have a whole lot of things in our realm that are like that. So please learn about this stuff, so that you can spread the word.
So boulderlongevity.com, go to the Human Optimization Academy, follow me @dryurth on Instagram. So we try and keep people updated there as well a little bit, and on Facebook. So just go to Boulder Longevity. But the Boulder Longevity website will guide you along from a learning curve, sort of helps you—and we're working on kind of where do you fall into this pathway? Where should you start? Am I somebody who knows everything already? I'm going to start here versus the basics. So we're trying to go... Yes, we'll try and get it, so it's more easy—easily managed from all of your people who are watching. So they know, where do I fall into this curve?
Lisa: And that is a lot of work. I know. I do this sort of stuff, too. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. So thank you. Thank you for being so amazing.
Dr. Elizabeth: That’s why I charge Lisa.
Lisa: I think you're absolutely incredible. I think the passion that you bring to everything, I just love—absolutely love having guests on of your calibre that just—like I had Dr. Mansoor Mohammed last week, he’s another—must connect with him, he’s amazing. And people like yourself that just are at the cutting edge and passionate about it and actually try to disseminate the information so that nobody has to go through things that we've unfortunately both experienced with our families. So, thank you very much for your dedication to your job.
Dr. Elizabeth: You’re welcome.
Lisa: And I'm really looking forward to having you back on the show.
Dr. Elizabeth: I'd love to. Thanks, Lisa.
That's it this week for Pushing The Limits. Be sure to rate, review and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.
The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.
Athletes, especially long-distance runners, sustain a lot of injuries in their career. Their injuries mainly affect the lower extremities, like the calf or the foot. Wearing the appropriate gear and proper shoes, as well as using orthotics, can make a lot of difference.
Dr Colin Dombroski joins us in this episode to explain the benefit of orthotics to foot health. He also talks about common running injuries and how wearing the correct shoes can prevent these.
If you are a runner and want to know more about orthotics and the science behind shoes, then this episode is for you.
For our epigenetics health program all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/.
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My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within 3 years. Get your copy here: http://relentlessbook.lisatamati.com/
For my other two best-selling books Running Hot and Running to Extremes chronicling my ultrarunning adventures and expeditions all around the world, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books.
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‘If someone's not getting the right kind of results, it could be that they just need to be adjusted. But then some people don't believe that they need to be adjusted. They believe your foot functions best one particular way’.
‘I think that a lot of people have lost the ability to connect with their brain and their feet and they need to get that ability back’.
‘It's not putting everything into a box of good or bad, you know, but it's looking at it holistically’.
‘We get back to my point where [we do things in] moderation. There's a time to spend time in the sand, there's a time to spend time in the trail, and there's time to get on the road’.
‘If you can get that little bit of variability where you're lengthening some days, you're shortening some days, you're doing different things and your body is used to that, then you're going to be more adaptive. But if you lock into that one pattern, it's going to be so much harder to change’.
‘You also need to have a really good understanding of the whole anatomy of the body because you have to be holistic in your approach’.
‘You know your limits better than somebody else. But I think that there's also a time when you do need to respect the knowledge that someone's gone and spent time attaining.
Dr Colin Dombroski is a podiatrist and a foot specialist of 20 years; he is also an author and a researcher. He works in the world of shoes, orthotics, rehab, and range. He specialises in any feet issues, from plantar fasciitis to Achilles injuries.
Connect with Colin through his website. You may also reach out to him through email or Facebook.
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Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can know more about the proper shoes to use for running.
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To pushing the limits,
Lisa
Welcome to Pushing The Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.
Lisa Tamati: You're listening to Pushing The Limits with Lisa Tamati, your host. I have a fantastic gift again for you today. Gosh, I managed to come up with some amazing people. So I have the guest Dr Colin Dombroski, who is a podiatrist and expert on everything foot. He's known as the foot specialist. He is the author of two books, Healthy Strong Feet, and The Plantar Fasciitis Plan. He's a researcher, and also has a shoe—a specialist running shoe shop. He knows everything about the cutting edge of foot health.
So this is a topic that's really important, obviously, for all the runners listening out there. Or if you're having any sort of issues with your feet, maybe you're dealing with plantar fasciitis, maybe you have to have orthotics, or you've got arthritis, or you've got bunions, or you've got problems with your Achilles or further up the kinetic chain, then this is the episode for you because we're going to be talking about the cutting edge of science. Dr Colin is really up on the latest thing. He has all the fancy gadgets in his lab that he does. And so it's a really, really interesting conversation that I have with Dr Colin.
Now before we go over to the show. If you are also looking for—doing a running training plan that fits your life and without having to think about how to assemble the entire plan yourself, then please come and check out what we do at Running Hot Coaching. We have a brand new package that we now offer and there's a fully customised package to you, to your goals, to your injuries, your lifestyle, anything that's holding you back, and we can customise it to you. And you'll also get full video analysis done with this package and a one-on-one consult with me in a personalised plan for your next event. Whether that be a marathon, a half marathon, ultramarathon, 10K, it doesn't really matter that's up to you. And you get 12 months of access to Running Hot Coaching’s whole resource library and all the other plans that are available on me, so it’s a super, super deal.
You also get access to our community of over 700 runners from around the world that we get to coach nowadays and hang out with them. And also we do live events on occasion and do regular educational webinars and so on. So everything running. If you want help with it, then we would love to help you get in—make the best out of your running. Okay, so check that out at runninghotcoaching.com.
Right, over to the show now with Dr Colin Dombroski.
Lisa Tamati: Well, hello, everyone. Welcome back to Pushing The Limits. It's your host, Lisa Tamati here. And today I have Colin Dombroski with me, all the way from Ontario in Canada. So welcome to the show, Colin. Fantastic to have you.
Dr Colin Dombroski: Thanks so much for having me.
Lisa: It's really, really exciting. So I am going to be talking to you today about feet. You are the foot guy. You are known as the foot guy. Colin, can you give us a bit of a brief background, why are you known as the foot guy?
Dr Colin: Well, I mean, I'm a Canadian certified podiatrist first and foremost. So I'm trained in both the design and the manufacturer of custom foot orthotics, foot orthotics in general, footwear and lower extremity therapy care, and how those things interact to get people better. And so, we started that back in 2002. And since then, I've gone on to do PhD work in Health and Rehabilitation Science, and research and everything from the basic 3D printings of orthotics to how the foot’s actually moving in a shoe using things like a biplanar fluoroscopy and CT imaging to really understand what's actually going on, as opposed to just kind of guessing and thinking about it or looking at video without actually being able to see inside the shoe.
And so we've seen tens of thousands of patients. We've worked with people over the last 20 years, really working to get them back up and on their feet and doing the things that they want to do to stay healthy. And for some people, it's as simple as walking around the block and for other people it's going to the Olympics in Tokyo.
Lisa: Wow, fantastic. So you're deep into the science...
Dr Colin: Yes.
Lisa: ...of the absolute cutting edge of what we can do now for foot issues and optimising foot health. So tell us a little bit about some of the fancy stuff that you can do, like, how that—you said there you can look into the inside a shoe or...
Dr Colin: Yes.
Lisa: ...rather than just looking at video. How does that work?
Dr Colin: I'll tell you on the research side, there's all kinds of fancy stuff that we were able to do. And so, right now I have an academic appointment through Western University in the School of Physical Therapy. So, I'm lucky enough to be able to do research in what I do specifically. So—and we can do that in a couple of different ways. One is that we actually have a full 3D motion analysis lab at our main business in London Ontario. So it's seven Vicon cameras, much like the way you would see motion analysis for video games or for the movies.
Lisa: Wow.
Dr Colin: Well, we use that to study how the lower extremity works in the human body. And so we can either put markers on the foot and cut windows into the shoe, so we can see how things move. That's one way to do it. The other way that we've done it is working with another lab called the wobble lab, and they have two movie x-rays, or what's called biplanar fluoroscopy. And then what we can do is have a CT of somebody's foot, we can take those bones out, we can map them in three-dimensional space. And at 17 times per second, we can move that bone model on top of the actual movie x-ray model to understand what's happening to the foot and the bones in real-time in a shoe, under different circumstances, whether that's no orthotic, orthotic, and we can compare that to their walking barefoot as well.
Lisa: That is insane Colin. I have no idea.
Dr Colin: Yes. it's a cool thing. And if you go on the website, if you go on—I think we have a fluoroscopy video up on stuff about feet. But if we don't, there's certainly one up on the research section of SoleScience, and you're able to actually watch, you can see what we're looking at through this thing.
Lisa: Wow.
Dr Colin: And it's really cool to know. And what's really interesting when we look at this stuff is that we wanted to know when we make somebody an orthotic. What's the best way to do that for someone? There's different ways that we can capture somebody's foot, whether we use a foam or a wax method or a plaster mould of somebody's foot, we wanted to know kind of based on a couple of different styles, which one might actually control the motion of their foot a bit better. And we were able to show that one was more effective than another—made a small amount with a very specific foot type.
So, if you have a flatter foot, there are ways of making it that are more effective. But what was really interesting out of that was to look at what was actually happening with the foot when someone was just walking barefoot, when they were just walking in their shoe, or when we put an orthotic in there? Because you know if I can go on a bit of a tangent, there's lots of scary stuff on the internet these days about how, ‘Oh, you don't want to walk in shoes and orthotics because it makes you act like you're walking in a cast. And why would you want to do that'?
Well, what's really interesting is that when we looked at someone's foot walking barefoot, and we compared that to the most supportive thing that we use, they still kept up to 96% of their original motion.
Lisa: Wow.
Dr Colin: So, think about that for a second, 96% or one motion.
Lisa: Yes.
Dr Colin: So, you're really at that point, if someone's keeping that much of their original range of motion, you really have to wonder, ‘What are we actually doing with these things?’ And I'm going to argue that it's more than just the shoe on someone's foot. It's more than just the device in that shoe, that there could be a lot more actually going on with these things than we fully understand even though we have the best research methods to be able to look at it.
Lisa: That's amazing. I mean, I'm really, really interested because with orthotics, I've recently gone and got my mum an orthotic and you don't know my mum's story. But she had a massive aneurysm five years ago, has dropped foot on the right side, incredible rehabilitation journey, written a book on it. But we're not having such success with the orthotic yet. We are having success with a Dictus where it's helping lift her foot. And I've had in the past two experiences with orthotics when I've had different issues, like, I can't remember now what specifically, I think it was plantar fasciitis. And I've tried different things, admittedly a while ago, and things have obviously moved on. But I haven't had that much success.
So I'm like, as a running coach, I should know more about the latest in science as far as orthotics go. And whether they're my initial reaction back then was, ‘Well, I don't think orthotics are really working for a lot of people’. That's been the feedback from other people as well. So obviously, the science has moved forward and it is offering new insights and you can actually see in real-time what our bones are doing. I mean, it's just absolutely mental, that's crazy and cool. So do you think—isn't it like walking around with a cast on your foot? We've got this whole barefoot craze that's been in the last few years and then we've got brands like Hoka One One coming out with really cushions. So, I think people are a little bit confused as to what they should be doing.
Dr Colin: Yes, and rightfully so.
Lisa: Our orthotic is good. Our orthotics in general is—can we generalise when it's very specific.
Dr Colin: Nope. Not at all. We can’t generalise it all and that's the problem when it comes to this stuff is that people are trying to fit everybody into a box. And saying that either it's really good, or it's really bad. It’s either of those things? Like, to the end of the day, if you really need them, if you have rheumatoid arthritis, and you're unable to walk around the block, and I'm able to get you active again, they're really good for you.
Lisa: Yes, absolutely.
Dr Colin: Right? But if you have no risk factors, if you have no biomechanical abnormalities, if you have no foot deformities and no other issues, then what's the benefit of wearing them at the end of the day? And so to that end of things, a lot of the time, I feel as though we're missing the middle ground. We're missing the fact that people can use these things, either as a tool to help them with recovery and performance that we can then work to wean them off, if they so choose, or if they need to be, or we use them because there's a real thing where structure dictates function and injury.
But again, why are we looking to see whether or not people are either yes or no, off or on? It's more of a continuum. And I kind of like to look at people and the fact that over on this end of the spectrum, here, you've got people who are so gifted biomechanically that they can do anything they want to do, despite doing it wrong. They can go couch to marathon in old worn-out shoes with poor sleep with bad nutrition, and they can do it and they don't get hurt. And you've got people on the other end of the spectrum that can do everything, right, and work with the best coaches and get the best equipment and eat and sleep and everything else. But they're plagued with injury, right?
Most people are going to be somewhere in the middle, the question though, so, which side of the spectrum do you lie more towards? And that's where I feel my job comes in, is to figure out where that is, and then how to appropriately apply these things, whether or not you actually need them. And I build a business on telling people when they don't need them.
Lisa: That's brilliant.
Dr Colin: And when they don't need them anymore. So, it's actually quite shocking when someone comes into my office for their ninth orthotic, and I say, ‘Well, tell me about it'. And so they—we talk about stuff, and we come to the conclusion that they just don't need them anymore.
And they're shocked, they think that these things are like a lifelong sentence. And they're not. For some people, they are the difference between being able to be active or not. And for other people, there's simply a tool, and we use that tool appropriately, and we remove it.
Lisa: That is absolutely gold, Colin. And what a fantastic approach in, like, working with people with disabilities and stuff, I know there are definitely times when we do need them, and they're going to benefit and it is very much about the skill of the person who's fitting the orthotic and knows, obviously, what they're doing. And there’s a lot of advertising out there; rubbish sort of advertising that you see with different standard gum, pick it off the shelf type things, what's your opinion on those types of orthotics?
Dr Colin: Well, I mean, if those—so, if something like that, like if an over the counter device works for you, for—let's say you have a mild case of metatarsalgia. Let's say you have a small ache in the front part of your foot when you're active, and you've done all the rest of the conservative therapy things. You're strong, you're flexible, everything else is ticked off, and you're still not doing well. Sometimes removing that little bit of mechanical stress can be enough that allows the tissues to heal and you can move on. Right? So in those cases, yes, they work quite well.
But in some cases, if you have a foot type that doesn't match up with that shaped plastic that's pushing against your foot, it might not work so much. And kind of to your point where you were saying you had them for plantar fasciitis before, and they just didn't work for you, it could be a multitude of reasons why they didn't work for you. And we see that all the time.
And if someone's not getting the right kind of results, it could be that they just need to be adjusted. But then some people don't believe that they need to be adjusted. They believe your foot functions best, one particular way. And they say, ‘Here, this is for you. This is the way it should be, get used to it'.
Lisa: And then it's the whole side of: you should be doing strengthening exercises and rolling and stretching. What's your take on the whole on that side of it? So the rehabilitation side of it as opposed to the orthotic side of the equation?
Dr Colin: Well, so my—the way that we teach about orthotics is that orthotics for some conditions are not a first line treatment unless you have significant risk factors. If you're diabetic, then yes, 100% we're making you orthotics. But for a lot of people especially let's take plantar fasciitis for instance. If you come to me and you've had plantar fasciitis only for a few weeks, there is a whole host of other therapies that you can try before you even need to think about that. Is removing the stress off the tissue, the strain off the tissue with the device and footwear appropriate? Heck yes, it is. But there are other things that you need to look at first before you even go down the route of orthotics which is actually why I wrote my first book. And it's to tell people the things that they can do at home to be able to get themselves better for four to six weeks before they have to see somebody like me to think about orthotics.
Lisa: Okay, so what was the title of that book, Colin?
Dr Colin: Oh, it's called The Plantar Fasciitis Plan.
Lisa: The Plantar Fasciitis Plan and that is available on Amazon?
Dr Colin: Yes.
Lisa: Okay, so in New Zealand, we might struggle with Amazon, but we don't have Amazon down here, believe it or not.
Dr Colin: I have no idea.
Lisa: We can access it, but some things can ship from over the air and some not so. But we'll put the links in the show notes for sure for those listening who are overseas and want to read that book. Okay, so you mentioned...
Dr Colin: And to speak to your last question...
Lisa: Absolutely.
Dr Colin: ...which was, what do you think about the whole foot strengthening part of it?
Lisa: Yes.
Dr Colin: I think it's very important, I think that a lot of people have lost the ability to connect with their brain and their feet, and they need to get that ability back, it's shocking how many people I see that can do something as simple as move their toes, or lift their arch, or do some of the simple things that they need to do to make feet work as feet. Right? And so, getting them back to that foot connection is only a positive thing. Like, the only good things are going to come out of that.
Lisa: So, is this like, is this a problem of the modern human because we've walked around in shoes. Did humans, before shoes come along, did we all have great feet? Strong powerful feet because we were barefoot from the get go? So is this a problem of the modern human but like with—I've just done a couple of episodes on breathing and the way that we are chewing is affecting our structure of our mouth and therefore we're not having such good breathing and so on. Is that similar sort of case?
Dr Colin: I really think that when you talk to a question about that, it's really hard to compare those two things because we're just not there right now. You know what I mean? So, yes, if we didn't wear clothes, and we didn't drive cars, and we didn't eat the way that we did, yes, things would be different than where they are. But like, we drive our cars to go five blocks down the street to get to Starbucks, we don't walk. So, that alone is just as deleterious as footwear that doesn't fit you properly.
So when it comes to shoes, again, there's lots of scariness out there on the internet, talking about how these things, again, make you walk like your cast or is deforming your feet. And yes, I would agree that a poorly fit shoes that are way too tight cramming your toes, putting stress on nerves and tissues certainly can be a bad thing for you. But do I think that there's this gigantic conspiracy out there that's making the collective feet of the world less strong and everything else? No, I really don't, to that end. And again, as a recovery tool, they can be marvellous things if done correctly.
Lisa: Yes, it's a really good approach. I mean, it reminds me of my dad's feet. My dad who recently passed, unfortunately. But my dad had the most amazing, strong, powerful feet, he grew up in the first 13 years of life and not wearing shoes. Came from a very humble background with eight children, and they only had one pair of gumboots in the family. So he grew up with these incredibly powerful feet.
By the time he was in his 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, he could walk around barefoot all day, never have any sort of problems. The state of his heels weren't the best. But muscular feet, really strong powerful feet, because he didn't wear shoes until he was older and then still like to go barefoot whenever possible, actually connected to the earth, weed garden all day, and their feet at the most jungles. So I did see it in that. Quite the effects of having that real connection to Mother Earth if you like in developing those sort of strong muscles in our feet.
And then on the other side of the equation. I see people with diabetics or close to being pre-diabetic problems with extremely tender feet and poor circulation in the feet and their feet are just not moving well and have always been in shoes. So it's like opposite ends of the scale via. So, where was I going with this? There's a real broad range of where people are at. Another thing that I think is to consider is women in high heeled shoes, what's your take on that sort of a problem? Like, were lifting your heels up and having a shortened calf. And that's sort of a problem.
Dr Colin: Well, I mean, that for too long of a period of time just gives you a whole myriad of problems from metatarsalgia, and progressing bunion issues, and nerve problems, and chronically short Achilles because of that shortening specifically, yes. I mean, we see that all the time. I'm very much a fan of moderation when it comes to these things.
And so for a lot of my patients, if they want to spend an evening, every now and again, where they're primarily sitting in a pair of heels, then I feel as though the trade-off for what they get out of that is okay, comparatively. Again, it's not putting everything into a box of good or bad, but it's looking at it holistically.
Lisa: Brilliant. I think it's a really good approach.
Dr Colin: Yes, if you're a retail worker, and you're spending 10 hours a day, on your feet, heels are definitely not the thing you want to be wearing.
Lisa: Yes, you've got to sacrifice the elegance, ladies. Sometimes you help that little pushes.
Dr Colin: A little bit sometimes. And you know where I end up seeing that a lot? It’s in lawyers. A lot of my patients who are lawyers. There is definitely a culture of dress code and professionalism that comes from wearing heels. And I see a lot of injured lawyers because of that, specifically.
Lisa: Isn't that interesting? So yes, really take heed because I do think doing that on a daily basis, yes. The odd night out in a pair of heels to look elegant is fine, but not doing it every single day, were you really shortening, I mean, just, I'm always sort of relating things back to my life. But with mum having aneurysm, being bedridden pretty much for 18 months before we could get her standing. And I didn't understand at the beginning about drop foot, I missed the boat. And by the time I realised what drop foot was, that had happened very, very quickly, that her foot was now dropped until we're still working on that right through now, to be able to lift set front of the foot up and having to use a Dictus in her case, which lifts the front of the foot up. So it happens very—it happens quicker than what you think.
Dr Colin: It can, certainly. Yes. Now the brace that your mum's using, do you mind if I asked you a quick question? Is she using an over-the-counter one or a custom one?
Lisa: So it's an over-the-counter Dictus one as I didn't know there was such a thing as a customised Dictus. So it's just a leather strap that goes around with a rubber that goes over inside these two little hooks at the bottom of the shoes that pulls the shoe up. So is there something better, Colin?
Dr Colin: Well, so, take a look for something called an Allard ToeOff AFO. And we use them a lot in clinics for patients with drop foot and they're actually designed to be to run marathons and events and they're quite robust.
Lisa: Okay, I’ll take note of that.
Dr Colin: And it might be a great training tool too. They're very light. You should wear them under a pair of pants. A lot of people like the fact that they don't see the direct brace.
Lisa: Yes, yes. Yes, exactly. This one's quite ugly. So, is it Allard?
Dr Colin: A-L-L-A-R-D.
Lisa: Oh, brilliant.
Dr Colin: So as in Allard ToeOff.
Lisa: Allard ToeOff, I will check that out. See, this is a selfish reason why I get to talk to experts.
Dr Colin: There we go.
Lisa: Because you never know when it's gonna help somebody you know? It's fantastic. I'll check that one out. Yes, because that is a real problem. And there's so many—this is not a rare thing, drop foot. It's a very, very common thing with people with strokes and aneurysms and the like.
Dr Colin: It is.
Lisa: So, there's a lot of people dealing with it so going into the rehabilitation side of things. We have a shoe that has a rocker so she's able to toe-off slightly better in that rocker and keep her center of mass moving forward. Rather than sitting really back which she was doing. So yes, so I'm always looking for the next best thing for my mum from the show. So, appreciate that.
Dr Colin: No problem. And since you're a runner and all that stuff, the Asics Metaride is my favourite carbon shoe rocker. We've got so many people who really require surgery, fusions, things like that because of osteoarthritic toes or ankles or mid feet that can get into a shoe like that.
Lisa: Wow.
Dr Colin: And for people who are that age, they're not nearly as flashy looking as some of the other carbon rockered shoes that are available.
Lisa: Yes, but who cares as long as they function properly. Okay, Asics Metaride. Okay, we'll check those one out too. Now let's jump ship and change direction a little bit and go into running specific injuries. So we did touch briefly on playing to the shortest. But what are some of the common injuries that you see? And what are some of the ways that we can prevent? And how does it have a knock-on effect? Like what happens in your feet, knocks on the kinetic chain, doesn't it?
Dr Colin: Of course. Yes. So what I take a look at, the one of the biggest things are going to be mismatches between the style of foot that somebody has and their mechanics and the kind of shoe they wind up getting into. And so there's nothing like being able to mismatch the way that your foot wants to move, and then a shoe that's going to either work completely and pushing it in the same direction. So for instance, if you're a supinator, where your foot rolls to the outside, and then you get into an anti-pronation shoe, which a lot of people are—there's actually been research to show that runners are poor judges of their own foot type.
Lisa: Right.
Dr Colin: And if they get into that kind of footwear that makes them into more of a supinator. I can't tell you how many lateral column foot pain problems we see and perennial overuse problems and things like that. So simply mismatching your footwear to what your foot is doing can be one of them.
Lisa: Okay. Getting on and off the shelf is not, and diagnosing yourself is probably not a good idea if you're a serious runner who wants to do some serious racing.
Dr Colin: Well, maybe it's a good idea to run your findings by someone else who can take an objective third-party look at you. And so some people think, ‘Oh, my foot is so flat, I need to get into this kind of footwear'. And that might not always be the case when it comes down to it. So the footwear component of it is so big. Making sure that it actually fits the way that your foot is designed. So if you have a particularly wide forefoot and a narrower rear foot, looking for things that actually match up with that, so that you're not cramming your toes into a pair of shoes.
Lisa: As a run coach, if I can just pipe in there that has been one of the biggest mistakes that I've seen so many athletes buy. They go into a shoe shop that does foot analysis, and they proceed them on a treadmill and so on. So they may have the right type of shoe, but they're after buying the shoe in a cold state. So i.e., they've just walked into a shop, they haven't been on their feet all day, they haven't been running for 30K's, their feet are not swollen.
And then they go and if they do marathons, or especially ultramarathons, their feet are swelling. And especially I've seen this in women where we tend to swell tissues in my opinion, not scientifically-backed or anything but my observation is that women's feet swell more than men. And the size of the shoe is then way too small, especially in the toe box. And this often leads to pain on the top of the foot and the cutting off of circulation there. And I've seen problems with the shins and so on.
Have you—is it a thing? Have you seen this sort of a trend as well, where they're going into the shop, and it's fitting in the shop on the day that they buy it, but when they're long-distance runners, that becomes a problem, especially when they're running under heat?
Dr Colin: 100%. Yes, I mean, fatigue is one of those things that wrecks everything. But at the end of the day, when you're not fatigued, and you're ready to take a pair of shoes, and you're trying it on, you don't know how the inside of your ankle is gonna rub against that shoe until you've spent 30, 40, 50k in it to really understand what's happening there. So the idea that something is going to ‘break in’, in quotation marks is something that I like to try to shy away from as much as I possibly can.
The biggest issue that we see from most people is they just fit them incorrectly, right? They fit them too short. And so if things do swell, if there's movement or any of that stuff, you're going to get problems along with the feet, whether it's friction and blisters or black toenails, or what have you. The length of that, and then especially the curve of the toes, makes such a big difference.
And so, a lot of footwear stores these days might not carry the full breadth of width available. And so for instance, New Balance comes in ladies from a 2A to a 2E and everything else in between.
Lisa: Wow.
Dr Colin: So it comes in a 2A, and a B, and a D and then a 2E. So when you have to carry four widths of shoes from a size 5 to a size 13...
Lisa: That’s expensive.
Dr Colin: ...including half sizes, that's expensive. And that's only for one colour.
Lisa: Wow.
Dr Colin: Right? So when you think about that, you understand why you might not be able to find the full breadth of width in a lot of these things. Because shoe stores will have a hard time selling through and if they can't, they can't make money and stay open. So, but if you're one of those people that are on either end of the spectrum, then you need to find a place that will cater towards those kinds of things and that understand the nuances and the differences within brands. So, I mean I've seen people go up a full size in between different models of shoes within the same brand of a company.
Lisa: Wow.
Dr Colin: So, for instance, the New Balance 880 and the New Balance 840 fit completely different. The sock liner is three times as thick, the width is more, the toe spring is different, the heel drop is different, all of that stuff. And if you don't know how each one of those things interact with someone, then the potential for injury is just greater.
Lisa: Wow. And yes, I can definitely relate to that having had—I've had many different sponsorship agreements over my career. And some of the companies, a couple of them, I had to actually leave because I just could not wear their shoes and they were so different in other ones that I just absolutely loved and were able to stick with. And I've got a very wide foot. And so I have to be in a men’s shoe. But when I was doing desert races in extreme heat in Death Valley and the likes, I had shoes that were two sizes too big for me.
Dr Colin: Wow.
Lisa: So, that's what I worked out was the sweet spot. So at that point, I wouldn't get the blisters and I wouldn't get the black toenails, and I wouldn't get the foot just swelling so much that it's boosting out the sides of the shoes and putting pressure on top of the foot and causing—and I've had it all awful shin problems by having that circulation cut off at the top of the foot.
I remember a race I did in Germany 338 kilometres in five days. So, we're doing 70 kilometres a day. And after day one, my shoes were just way too tight. And by then the damage was done. And an old-timer, who was in the race, said to me, ‘Hey, you need to cut your socks and open your shoes right up'. And that was a piece of advice that I carried with me being from the norm because, and I ended up doing that very often. So even something like a pair of socks that is too tight around the ankle can cause shin problems. I mean, I've experienced that firsthand, and on the top of the funnel as well. So it really makes a heck of a difference, isn't it?
Dr Colin: Oh, it's so does and you know, when you're looking at the trail shoes and things like that, the choices become even more frustrating.
Lisa: Yes, yes, yes. Yes, let’s talk trail because what trail—we weren't as humans, like, we didn't evolve to run on concrete and pads. So what's your take on how bad is it to be running on roads and concrete versus the natural terrain of a trail so to speak?
Dr Colin: Well, I mean, certainly the natural trait of a trail is going to be easier for you to run on versus concrete and asphalts and those types of things. And when we looked at the literature, and some of the research said that it's—there's been a lot of fun running research that's come out in the last 15 years. But a lot of our initial contact strategies, so whether you stride on your heel, your midfoot or your forefoot, a lot of it has to do with mitigating the force of that initial contact. And so if you're running on an incredibly hard surface, you might adapt to changing your initial contact to be able to mitigate those loads of that initial load.
Whereas when you have a softer, spongier service to do on, you have a bit more leeway to be able to stride in a different pattern. And so for people who are rehabbing from injuries, yes, getting into something that's a little bit spongier is certainly going to be more forgiving. Now, you can take that all the way to running on the beach, and that causing some problems as well just from the increased biomechanics that that causes too. So to get back to my point where moderation.
Lisa: Yes.
Dr Colin: There's a time to spend time in the sand, and there's a time to spend time in the trail, and there's time to get on the road.
Lisa: And this trend it transition times, like when the barefoot craze hurt when my friend Chris McDougall’s book came out Born to Run and it sort of revolutionised everybody's thinking was like, ‘We gotta go barefoot because Barefoot Ted was doing it’. And we saw a lot of injuries come out of that. And no, no, no detriment on the book. It was a fantastic book. But people just went too fast, too far too fast. And we really need a transition time if we wanting to go barefoot. Would you agree with that?
Dr Colin: Oh, it's not a matter of me agreeing with it, that that's just a matter of scientific fact.
Lisa: Yes.
Dr Colin: I mean, if you want to go from—which so I do agree with it. To that end, yes. There's nothing that's going to increase your risk of getting hurt more than taking off your footwear and going for a barefoot run. If you're used to wearing a maximalist style of shoe, taking it off going barefoot for 21K, you'll be lucky if you don't come back with a stress fracture. And certainly, my practice has been a mirror of that, right? I mean, at the end of the day, I see injured runners all day every day. That's what I do.
So, I like to joke that the greatest predictor of running injuries is running. But to that end, if you want to make these changes, I think they're great for people. And I think that they're able to make these changes in a proper informed way. And so even looking to what some of the scientific literature says they talk about a transition shoe specifically, right? If you're going to go from a regular 10 or 12 mil heel drop shoe to 4, 0, having a 6 to 8 mil transition shoe wouldn't be a bad idea.
There's one company that will remain nameless that when they changed all their heel heights from 12 mil to 8 mil, and no one really understood what that meant. I can't tell you the number of Achilles problems and things that came into the clinic two years after that.
Lisa: Wow.
Dr Colin: Because making even that 4-millimetre change in someone who puts in 60 to 80 kilometres a week, and they're used to loading their tissues in a particular way when you all of a sudden change that with up to three times your bodyweight up to 10,000 steps, that's a huge change for your body all of a sudden.
Lisa: Wow, that is insane. Just from a very small change. And look we all—lots of people just swap different shoes ‘Oh try those ones, or this time, I'll buy those’.
Dr Colin: Yes, exactly.
Lisa: And so is it—and this is the other thing, brands keep changing.
Dr Colin: Yes, every season.
Lisa: ‘Ugh, damn. It's something new, it was perfect. And now it's gone again, I can't get it’.
Dr Colin: Yes.
Lisa: So by a couple of pieces, when you do get something that's right.
Dr Colin: 100%. But even that, don't let them sit on the shelves for more than two years.
Lisa: Oh, okay. Why is it? Do they degrade after that you sort of leave them?
Dr Colin: Actually the materials get stiff, the longer you leave them there. And so, that pair that felt really cushy a couple years ago, they let them sit for a couple of years, they're going to be harder...
Lisa: Oh, gosh.
Dr Colin: ...when you take them out of the box.
Lisa: Oh, okay.
Dr Colin: So you can't just let them sit for years on the shelf.
Lisa: And onto that note. How many kilometres? Like, how often should you be changing? I've always said between six and 800 kilometres max, what's your take on that? Is there a new science around that?
Dr Colin: Science is interesting when it comes to that. I mean, there isn't a lot of actual hard science on that. The soft science of it is to look at the bottoms of your shoes and see. If you're a heavier person, at your initial contact, and I don't mean heavy, like actually just a larger BMI. But some people, my wife is a light woman but she sounds like she's going to come through the floor, two floors down when she walks. And so she'll wear out the outsole of a shoe much faster than somebody who strikes the ground a little bit lighter. And so if you look at the bottoms of your footwear and let's say you're only 400K into a pair of shoes, but there's an angle now where the lugs are totally sheared off one side, that shoe was now forcing you to walk that way. And it's not helping your biomechanics at all.
And so yes, I think as it—as a general rule, 6 to 800 kilometres is okay. But if you're not, if you're training on consecutive days, and if you're training in one pair of shoes, you're going to break down the EVA material much faster because that material needs about 36 hours to rebound fully, before it's ready to go again. But if you're training 24 hours, you're going to break down your shoe much faster.
Lisa: Wow, that's a good point. I knew that. And I'd forgotten that fact. Thanks for reminding me of that because yes, alternating shoes on different days is something that I used to say, and I’ve forgotten completely about that one. So, that's a really good point. So, having a couple of pairs of shoes on the go, is a really, really good idea.
Dr Colin: Yes, 100%. And to that end too we were talking about, with transition shoes, and whatnot, having them even a different heel heights for different types of running would also be great. I mean, so while you're doing a fartlek training, or tempo run, or a long day might be different than what your ratio is, or the all day everyday shoe. And so that little bit of variability, I think, is a really positive thing.
When you get locked into one movement pattern all the time, then your body comes to predict that. And if you can get that little bit of variability where you're lengthening some days, you're shortening some days, you're doing different things, and your body is used to that, then you're going to be more adaptive. But if you lock into that one pattern, it's going to be so much harder to change.
Lisa: That seems to be the thing for everything in biology column. It seems to be a push and pull in a variety. You don't want to starve for too long, you don't want to eat too much for too long, you don't want to be too cold or in a thermoneutral zone for too long, you want—the body wants variety change. Not the same diet every day, not the same everything every day, and just by varying things up, we're giving our body a chance to get what it needs, and to have that variation—that push and pull that biology in all levels that I've been looking at seems to be cycling things. Cycling diet, cycling supplements, cycling shoes, cycling, changing in variety keeps the body guessing and keeps it changing, and keeps it so it doesn't go, ‘I've got this. And it's a piece of cake'.
Actually, I thought it just popped in my head. What do you think of Kipchoge shoes? The sub-two-hour marathon, the Nike shoes.
Dr Colin: Oh, yes. Yes, I mean, wow, there—this is a fun time to be alive for nerds like myself. So yes, I mean, there's some really cool stuff that Nike’s doing in some of their footwear. And they're—I mean, one of the leaders. But I mean, everyone now is coming out with a carbon plated shoe, and really aggressive rockers, and a lot of this stuff from a performance standpoint. And it'll be interesting to see how it's controlled and how it's covered. And to what lengths can we go to be able to increase the performance of humans? We developed things like oxygen deprivation to be able to increase your red blood cell counts, to be able to increase your performance. Changes in footwear like this are not that dissimilar from that. It's just a question of, how much can we use them? And how does it work with you?
Lisa: Yes.
Dr Colin: Yes, and what's gonna be legal.
Lisa: And at the moment, it is, isn't it? Like it's...
Dr Colin: It is.
Lisa: Yes. And I had a friend, who's a holistic movement coach, I had on the show, actually, a few weeks ago talking about feet as well, the health of feet. And he said, ‘I didn't want to like those Kipchoge shoes', but I— because he's very much into barefoot when possible and developing strength in the feet. He said, ‘But I put’...
Dr Colin: Well, that certainly is the opposite.
Lisa: He said, ‘I have to admit, I run a hell of a lot faster when I'm soaked’.
Dr Colin: Sure. Yes. But that comes back to the point of moderation, right? Is that there's a time for that shoe, just like there's a time to be barefoot. And it's using it in the appropriate fashion.
Lisa: Wow, that's brilliant. And okay, let's talk about the knock-on effect of how the feet which have and you know this 100 times better than me, there's just a ton of nerves, a ton of bones as most complex structure that we have, the proprioception, and the connection between the brain is just so important that we actually have that neurofeedback from our feet. So, what sort of a fix do—what sort of things can we expect to have happen on a good side from proprioception when we're doing lots of activity? And we're doing lots of different movement types and varieties of training? And how does it help our brain? The brain-foot connection, I think, is what I'm trying to ask you here.
Dr Colin: Well, I mean, anything that's going to make you more aware of what your foot’s doing in space is, again, only going to be a positive both from a balance and a performance perspective. It's striking to me that I can see some people perform incredible feats of athleticism, but then can't balance on one foot to do a pistol squat.
Lisa: Yes.
Dr Colin: Do you know what I mean?
Lisa: Yes.
Dr Colin: Because they just don't have control over their ankle. And so when people think of their feet, that's one thing. But I mean, the actual foot itself, though, those deep intrinsic layers of muscles are more stabilisers than they are prime movers, right? The prime movers are going to be higher up in the leg, and the tendons of those larger muscles in the leg support the ankle, right? They're the ones that are tibialis posterior, and the perennials and the things that actually wrap around the ankle. So it's a matter of looking at the lower leg holistically, not just the foot itself.
Yes, those little foot muscles are important. But I think oftentimes, some of the higher stuff up is overlooked as well as the actual prime movers and the actual real good stabilizers that way because those things are going to fatigue out relatively fast, and then you're left with the larger muscles to be able to do some of those things. But when you're not paying attention to one of those two, then you're going to get a mismatch in balance and performance. And so it's a matter of being able to look at more. It's about being able to use your abductor hallucis appropriately, being able to use all of those intrinsics to raise up your arch a bit and reduce some strain in your plantar fascia.
I would never go as far as saying you're going to change the structure of your foot by making your foot muscles strong, but certainly, you're going to get a better grip on the ground and you're going to be able to use your feet like feet and not just like a meat slab that hit the ground to be able to get to the next step.
Lisa: Yes, is it a bit like if I was to go around with gloves all day, and I wouldn't have the dexterity that I would need to do typing and learn to play an instrument or anything like that. Is that what's happening with our shoes, when we’re in shoes all day, every day, we're just taking away that connection to the brain and the brain's ability to be able to make those subtle adjustments with those little tiny muscles doing their thing?
Dr Colin: You can look at it two different ways, right? Because one might say that yes, if you're barefoot and you know you've got skin on the ground, you are going to get a different sensation than if you have sock and then something else between you and the ground. Right? There's just different feedback when it comes to it.
But to say that putting footwear on reduces your proprioception, or your sensation completely, is a bit of a misnomer. Because if you have something that's, let's say, a little bit squishier, and your foot’s moving around a bit more, well, that's also a signal to your brain too in terms of where to fire muscles, and how to fire muscles and using those muscles on top of it. So, I think we can go in both directions. And again, there is a time when it's going to be appropriate. And there's a time when you want to be barefoot and getting that sensory input in just a different fashion to say—because, at the end of the day, I just don't think it's realistic in the society that we live in that we're not going to be out of it completely.
Lisa: We don’t want to come from class, and you know...
Dr Colin: And so yes. So it's a matter of figuring out how to do that, in a fashion that's most appropriate, given the circumstances that you find yourself in.
Lisa: A bit of a left-field question and a bit of a non-scientific well, oh well, there's probably stuff coming out now. What's your take on having though the connection to Mother Earth and grounding? And that type of thing, and being in the dirt, so to speak, and having the actual contact with the earth? Is there anything to that side of things? Or is it just no scientific data really around that?
Dr Colin: There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, at the end of the day, and from a data and a science standpoint, I'm the first one to tell you that I'm not 100% up on that.
Lisa: Yes.
Dr Colin: But I was listening to another podcast. It was Ben Greenfield recently.
Lisa: Yes, I like him.
Dr Colin: Who was talking about some of—yes, yes, yes, same—as some of the science around that specifically. And I believe that there might be some science that has come out, I just haven't read it to be able to be up on it to be 100% honest with you.
Lisa: Yes. I mean, I've heard various things and even like getting your hands on the dirt and gardening and how much of a good effect that can have on your body and your mind and your mood and things like that.
Dr Colin: Yes.
Lisa: And I mean, we are in science starting to actually see why is it important to go out and have early morning sunlight and circadian rhythms and all of these sorts of things...
Dr Colin: True, true.
Lisa: ...and connection to the ground and the effects of the medicine, and I don't think we're there yet with all the science. But my take is—on that is yes, go out and spend 10 minutes a day with your hands and the dirt and connect with the ground. And if nothing, the being in nature is definitely going to calm you down and make you feel better.
Dr Colin: 100%.
Lisa: Yes, so that's already, I think—okay, so just looking at some most common running injuries before we sort of wrap up the call. If we can look at like plantar fasciitis and perhaps Achilles and calf muscle injuries and perhaps knees. It's a picture you will cover in a few minutes, isn't it? If we want, the second podcast, Dr Colin.
Dr Colin: Yes. We can do a podcast on each one of those actually.
Lisa: Well, actually, I think I will be getting you on because your knowledge is next level.
Dr Colin: Thank you.
Lisa: So let's talk a little bit about say Achilles.
Dr Colin: Sure.
Lisa: It's one of—it's a very common problem.
Dr Colin: It is. Yes, yes, it really, really is. And Achilles is a difficult one. Again, depending on where things are at and what we know, whether it's insertional, or midportion, there are definitely are two different protocols when it comes to it. So, from the physio side whether you do eccentric loading, which is raising up on two feet, lowering down on one or whether you're doing a different kind of strengthening programme that really is sort of the physio side of that end of it, where I tend to come in on that and where I tend to see a lot of Achilles injuries are people who wind up changing the drop of their shoe too quickly. And so they're used to running in something that's either too low or too high and then make it an abrupt sudden change, or they change their running style too quickly.
So, it's very common to see people who go—who are heel strikers who want to try forefoot running for the first time and if they do it improperly when you load the ground with your heel, I mean, yes, we know that if you overstride braking forces and everything else are really bad for you and smashing your heel into the ground might not be ideal for everybody.
But if you're running on your forefoot, you're striking, your initial contact is with your forefoot, then you touch your heel. Then you push off your forefoot again, right? So, one is heel midfoot toe, one is forefoot heel, forefoot. So, to that end, you're going through a much larger cycle of Achilles loading. And so for some people, especially who—if gene, you were talking about genetics earlier, we know that there is a genetic predisposition for some people, or Achilles issues specifically if you're one of those people, then that can certainly be a bad thing if you do it too quickly.
And so to that end, we talked about the very first thing we do is deload the Achilles. So using things like heel shoe, heel lifts, and footwear, to be able to, for a short period of time, take some of that load off the Achilles, allow it to heal and then gradually reloaded it as they've been working with their physio to be able to gain back strength and mobility and everything else. The one thing that I like to look at everybody who comes to my clinic because I think it's so incredibly important, is their ability to move their ankle appropriately because their calf musculature is flexible enough.
Lisa: Yes.
Dr Colin: And I'll get into trouble there because some people say, ‘It's not coming from your calf, it's coming from your hip'. It can be coming from your hip certainly if you have things that are changing your pelvic tilt, and it's lengthening your hamstring, and it's doing that, and then you're getting the effect of change that comes with it, it's a matter of just looking at it to understand where that change is coming from. But any ankle restriction in your range of motion can make you use your Achilles in a different way, the simplest way for your body to compensate for that is to out-toe and pronate more, well, you're going to get a rotational stress on your Achilles, for some people that's just going to be too much combined with the kind of running programme that they're doing. And so one thing to think about for sure.
Lisa: Wow, this is like, you're a foot specialist, but you also need to have a really good understanding of the whole anatomy of the body really, don't you? Because you have to be a holistic in your approach because, and then this is one of the issues that I have with the medical world in general, now speaking is that they’re so siloed. If you've got a lung problem, you go to the lung specialist, or the pulmonary, if you've got a heart and then the ear, nose and throat are separate, and yet it's to do with your lungs, like, we need to have a holistic ‘Look At It systems’ in the body or the—not even systems, but the entire body, so everybody has to have it.
Dr Colin: Yes.
Lisa: And it's difficult because you have to have a specialised education in feet, you can't be an expert in feet and an expert in hips.
Dr Colin: Yes.
Lisa: But you do need a general education to be able to understand: what the roles of the other therapists or doctors or whatever it is in order to have a good understanding. And I think that holistic approach were possible, into sort of disciplinary communication, is really, really important. Would you agree with it?
Dr Colin: Oh, that's the only way that I work is multi-disciplinary. And so if there's one specialist that thinks that they can fix everything, then that usually makes me want to run away screaming. And because there's just isn't enough flexibility in your thinking to understand that, maybe what you're doing won't be enough for somebody. And again, can't tell you the number of people that come in to say, ‘I've seen my ex-specialists who said, there's nothing else that can be done. We get them back running within six weeks'.
Lisa: Wow.
Dr Colin: You know what I mean? It's only because we were flexible enough in our thinking to be able to say, ‘Yes, we're gonna change this little thing over here. That might be the thing that's going to get you back to what you want to be doing'. So, it’s so...
Lisa: I could go in a rant on that, really. I could go on a rant about the amount of times that people have been told, ‘You can never run again'. I was told I would never run when I broke my back when I was a young lady. And that were wrong, 70,000 kilometres later.
Dr Colin: Yes.
Lisa: If I'd lifted up to so-called experts who, with my mother who had a massive brain aneurysm five years ago and who said that initial, ‘You’ll never have any quality of life again’. She's got massive brain damage. They were wrong. I spent five years rehabilitating her, but they were wrong, and she's completely normal again. So, it's not just accepting—what I think is important to realise is the limitations of your knowledge and saying, ‘Hey, I don't know, I'm at the end of my abilities'. You might have to look somewhere else, or outside the square, or try something else to talk, to so and so.
Dr Colin: Yes.
Lisa: And that's fine. That's good if we get there but not blanket saying, ‘Well, you can never run again because you've got a knee injury.’ The amount of times, amount of runners who have come on doctors said I should never run again because I've got some slight knee problems, and I was like, ‘Really?’
Dr Colin: Yes, no, I agree. So, a case in point in my own life, I have congenital arthritis. That's so bad. I had my first hip reconstruction at 17.
Lisa: Wow.
Dr Colin: That left me with a four-centimetre leg length discrepancy. So I've got some real orthopaedic problems. And was racing mountain bikes at almost the pro-level in Canada in downhill at the time, and wanted to pursue that. And I was told, ‘Never ride a bike again', this kind of stuff. And I'll be doing a half Ironman in Muskoka in July...
Lisa: Wow. I love it.
Dr Colin: ...25 years later.
Lisa: Exactly.
Dr Colin: So, yes. At the end of the day...
Lisa: And if we keep founding way round the problem. Yes.
Dr Colin: Yes, I mean, you know your limits better than somebody else. But I think that there's also a time when you do need to respect the knowledge that someone's done and spent time attaining. But if they'll put aside all of your own expectations and things, then they're not doing you a good service.
Lisa: No, no. And sometimes they're wrong, and they're just not up—what I'm also saying, and we're getting off on a tangent here, but it is a—if your life is different there's definitely a 20-year lag between what's actually the latest in science and what's actually happening in clinical practice.
Dr Colin: Yes, true.
Lisa: And not so much in the area like you have, but saying things like critical care and things like this, it's just so far behind the eight ball because there's so many hoops that they have to jump through in order to get anything changed, that the science can be saying, ‘Hey, this is what you need to be doing'. And they'll be like, ‘Yes, we need another 20 years before we got adopted'.
Dr Colin: Yes, knowledge translation is difficult.
Lisa: Yes, it just seems to be this huge lag, and in some areas of medicine but I've gotten completely off-topic. But I love talking with people that are on the cutting edge of stuff, and I find your knowledge is absolutely next level.
Colin, I think we're gonna have to get you back because we didn't even get to plantar fasciitis and hips and knees, and all the rest of it and...
Dr Colin: I'd love to.
Lisa: Yes, what you're doing... So, before we wrap it up, where can people find out your books and obviously, you've said on Amazon, but give us your websites, and where people can follow you on Instagram and all that sort of good stuff.
Dr Colin: So we're just starting to build out a website called stuffaboutfeet.com. So that's probably the best place to get me right now. You'll be able to see some of the books that are on there, other podcasts that I've done, you'll watch some videos, and then that's going to be built up just more and more and moreover the coming weeks and months.
And through that site, you'll be able to get to me whether it's a personal email or you want to get on the socials or what have you. And so I've been kind of locked away in both the research lab and the clinic office for too many years. And now we're going to get me a bit more online and doing a few more of these things.
Lisa: Yes, and you're so talented at this interviewing and stuff. So it's really easy to be able to share your knowledge and to get it out there. And then you can have much more of a massive impact worldwide rather than just locally, which is fantastic. You know that we can do that now with technology. So I love getting world-leading people on the show and sharing the amazing insights. And you definitely right up there, Colin. So thank you very, very much for sharing your insights today. So stuffaboutfeet.com, was that right? Was that correct? And that you've been listening to Colin Dombrowski.
Colin, any last words that you would like to share with people out there?
Dr Colin: You know, I really hope at the end of the day that you use your knowledge, the best to be able to get out there and do the things that you want to do. And don't put yourself in a box, really understand that you're capable of the things that you think that you are, it's just a matter of figuring out how to do them appropriately.
Lisa: Yes. And getting the right people with the right info.
Dr Colin: Yes.
Lisa: And we've just done that, haven't we? Brilliant. Thank you so much, Colin.
Dr Colin: Thank you.
That's it this week for Pushing The Limits. Be sure to rate, review and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.
The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.
Starting a business can be incredibly tricky. Statistics say about 80% or more of enterprises end up failing. If you’re a business owner or a founder, you know how there are so many factors to consider. Overcoming obstacles every step of the way is far from an easy feat. Moreover, starting a business requires a ton of research, but research alone won't guarantee success.
So what's the secret?
In this episode, Daryl Urbanski joins us to share the secret to building businesses and scaling them. You’ll learn about how his background taught him to be one of the leading business experts of this generation. He also discusses how to overcome obstacles and take your business to the next level.
If you want to learn how to be a successful entrepreneur, tune in to this episode!
For our epigenetics health program all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/.
You can also join their free live webinar on epigenetics.
Go to www.runninghotcoaching.com for our online run training coaching.
If you would like to work with me one to one on anything from your mindset, to head injuries, to biohacking your health, to optimal performance or executive coaching, please book a consultation here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/consultations.
My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within three years. Get your copy here: http://relentlessbook.lisatamati.com/
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‘Life is full of challenges and hurdles, and through overcoming those we develop our character’.
‘Pain often…makes you stronger and makes you more able to withstand—that’s what exercise is all about. You hurt yourself, you get stronger’.
‘It’s not just training, but it’s also how to recover and rest…Silence is part of music just as much as music is’.
‘Prevention is so much better than cure…the best solution is, don't let them do it to you in the first place. Know it, recognise the signs and protect yourself before it happens’.
‘It’s not even about being the best, the smartest, the brightest. It’s about making the least mistakes’.
‘You don’t know what you’re capable of until you do it’.
‘Evolution is about growth and challenge and overcoming obstacles’.
Daryl Urbanski, Founder, President of BestBusinessCoach.ca & Host of The Best Business Podcast is best known for his ability to create seven-figure, automated income streams from scratch. First as Senior Marketing Director for Praxis LLC, now Neurogym, he generated over USD 1.6 Million in under 6 months with a single marketing strategy. This became almost USD 7.5 Million in just under 3 years.
After repeating this success with multiple clients, he set on a mission to help create 200 NEW multi-millionaire business owners. How? They’ll do better when they know better.
Daryl has quickly climbed the entrepreneurial ladder, gaining respect from thousands of business owners worldwide. From author to speaker, marketer to coach, Daryl's multifaceted business approach sets him apart as one of the leading business experts of his generation.
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To pushing the limits,
Lisa
Welcome to Pushing The Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.
Lisa Tamati: You're listening to Pushing The Limits with your host, Lisa Tamati. Thank you once again for joining me. Today I have another exciting podcast with a man named Daryl Urbanski. Now, Daryl is a very well known business coach. So today, quite something different for you. This is all about what it takes to be an entrepreneur. Daryl is also a martial artist. So, he uses a lot of analogies from his sporting as we do in this podcast, from a sporting life and how that helps him in his career and also helping others build businesses. Now, he's helped over 1,000 businesses in his career in 50 different industries, and this guy knows how to grow and scale and overcome problems. So, he's a real expert in this area, and I really enjoyed our conversation.
Before we head over to Daryl in Vietnam, just wanted to remind you, if you're into finding out all about your genes, and what they have to say about you and how you can influence your genes to live your optimal lifestyle and be your best self, then make sure you check out what we do in our Epigenetics Program. So, this is all about understanding your genes and how they are expressing at the moment how the environment is influencing them, and then optimising everything, from your food to your exercise right through to your mindset, your social, your career, all aspects of life are covered in this really revolutionary programme.
Now, this programme is not something that we've put together; this has been put together by literally hundreds of scientists from 15 different science disciplines, all working together for over 20 years to bring this really next level cutting edge information about your genes and how you can find out how to optimise them. No longer do you need trial and error; you can work out what the best diet is, when the best time to eat is, exactly the right foods to eat right down to the level of, 'eat bok choy, don't eat spinach', that type of thing. And as—but it's so much more than just a food and exercise. It also looks at your health and anything that may be troubling you and future and how to deal with it. So, it's a really comprehensive programme, and I'd love you to check it out. You can visit us at lisatamati.com, hit the Work with Us button and you'll see our Epigenetics Program.
We've also got our online run coaching as normal, customised, personalised, run training system, where we make a plan specific to you and to your needs and your goals. And you get a session with me—a one on one session with me and a full video analysis of your running so that we can help you improve your style, your form, your efficiency, plus a full-on plan that includes all your strength training, your mobility workouts, and great community, of course. So make sure you check that out at runninghotcoaching.com.
And the last thing before we go over to the show, I have just started a new venture with Dr Elena Seranova, who is a molecular biologist from the UK, originally from Russia, and she is a expert in autophagy in stem cells, and she has made a supplement called NMN. Now, you may have heard of this nicotinamide mononucleotide. It's a big fancy word, I know. But you will be hearing more about this. It's been on the Joe Rogan show; it's been on Dr Rhonda Patrick show, some big names now talking all about this amazing longevity compound, anti-aging compound. Now, this is based on the work of Dr David Sinclair, who wrote the book, Lifespan: Why We Age and or How We Age and Why We Don't Need To. He is a Harvard Medical School researcher who has been studying longevity and anti-aging and is at the really the world's forefront of all the technologies to do with turning the clock back and who doesn't want to do that?
So I've teamed up with Dr Elena to import nicotinamide mononucleotide, our supplement from NMN bio into New Zealand and Australia. So if you are keen to get your hands on some because this was not available prior in New Zealand, I wanted a reputable company, a place that I could really know that the supplements that I'm getting is quality, that it's been lab-tested, that it was a scientist behind it, a lab behind it, and this is a real deal.
Now, I've been on this now for four months and so as my mom and my husband, and I've noticed massive changes in my life. Certainly, weight loss has been one of those things, that stubborn last couple of kilos that I've been fighting have gone without any muscle loss which has been really very interesting. It improves also cardiovascular health, your memory cognition, the speed of your thinking; all the things that start to decline as you age. And the reason this is happening is because we have declining levels of NAD, another big word, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. And this NMN is a precursor for NAD.
So, lots of big words, lots of science. f you want to find more about that, you can head over to lisatamati.com, under the Shop button, you will find out all about our anti-aging supplement NMN, and we're about to launch a new website which will be nmnbio.nz, but that's not quite up there yet, but it probably is by the time this podcast comes out. So, check that one out to nmnbio.nz, bio, just B-I-O. If you want to stop—well, not completely stop aging, but if you want to slow the clock down and get the best information that's out there then make sure you read Dr David Sinclair's book, Lifespan it's an absolute game-changer. You'll be absolutely amazed at some of the stuff that's happening and what they consider my mononucleotide can already do. So check that out. Okay, without further ado over to the show with Daryl Urbanski.
Lisa Tamati: Well, hi, everyone and welcome back to Pushing The Limits. Today I have the lovely Daryl Urbanski with me who is sitting in Danang in Vietnam. And Daryl, this is gonna be a little bit of a different episode because usually I've got some health science-y thing or some are elite athlete doing—well, not to say that Daryl was not an elite athlete because he is into martial arts. But Daryl’s specialty and what he's come to share with you guys today is, he is a business expert and a marketing expert, and also a mindset expert, I would like to say. So Daryl, welcome to the show. Fantastic to have you.
Daryl Urbanski: Yes, it's an honour and pleasure to be here. We've had some good conversations, like minds, two birds of a feather. Just an honour and a pleasure to be here.
Lisa: Yes. Thank you so much, Daryl, for coming on today. So, Daryl and I cross pass by his lovely lady who organises half my life as far as the business side of things goes. So it's been a fantastic liaison. And—but Daryl was actually here on his own accord. And he's—so Daryl, I want you to give us a bit of a brief background, where have you come from, how did you end up in Vietnam? And what do you do for a living?
Daryl: Right, so I'm Canadian. So I'm from Canada, travelled all over the world, and I don't know if it's too short. So that's where I come from, I ended up in Vietnam. That's a long story. So I guess I'm Canadian. I'm in Vietnam. I help businesses or websites get customers and keep them to make more money. And that's really kind of it in a nutshell. It's been a long journey.
When I was a kid I was an orphan and my adopted family, actually my step adopted dad's the one that really raised me and his brother, my uncle. We would visit him every time we went to Toronto, and he was a bit of an entrepreneur. He also did some property management in that and every time we went to visit I almost felt like he was kind of like the Godfather. What I meant was people were always coming by with like, a gift basket or to thank him for something. So the impression that was put in my mind was like to be an entrepreneur is to be of service to the community, and to get people's respect and adoration for the good that you're bringing. And that was really like—I know, there's all sorts of different like your salesmen, and everyone's got different images. But that was when I was a young kid, I was like, ‘Wow, I want to be valued by my community, too’. So that really laid an impression on me at a young age.
Again, I didn't have the lemonade stand, I didn't mow lawn, but I did shovel driveways. We have so much snow in Canada in the wintertime. We would shovel driveways for money. I did have a newspaper route. And just at a young age, I just kind of felt, maybe because I was an orphan, but I felt the need to be self-sufficient and self-directed. Yes...
Lisa: How to be your own ship, really.
Daryl: Yes, sort of. Yes, I just—I also had issues like I did air cadets when I was a kid. There's some other kids, they were using their authority outside of cadets to try to, like, lord over people and stuff. And right away, I kind of learned at a young age, you kind of have to be careful—you can manage up, let's just put it that way. It's not just managing down, but you can manage up, and you can choose who's above you too, it's a two-way street. So I really laid an impression on the young age. And then when I was 17, I added a co-op in university with the company called marketme.ca and they were just one of the early pioneers of online marketing. Got me into the whole business growth avenue and that...
Lisa: The rest is history. Yes, now that's fabulous. So you from like, in my young years, like I was an entrepreneur from the get-go. I never fit in in anybody's corporate square box. Tried—I tried, I failed. Did you have that feeling like you were just outside of like, you just wanted to be in charge? Because you've been in business, basically, since you were 17 years old. And you've learned a heck of a lot on this massive business journey that you've been on. And you've helped—I know that you've helped over 1,000 businesses in 50 plus industries. And you've really grown into this role of helping businesses scale up and grow and develop your own systems around this.
But did you have an idea when you were that 17-year old that this was where you were going, and this is the direction? Or has it sort of meandered throughout time?
Daryl: No, I was—because I think I had a lot of, they say, like everything, I'm not maybe everything that I am and not knowing my biological roots, and that as a kid left me really to kind of be given the path of self-discovery, you could say from a young age. A lot of confusion, maybe anger in my younger years as well. But what really made the difference, at least in the earliest days, was that when I was 17, I ended up at Canadian government programme called Katimavik, which means ‘meeting places’. Inuit, which a lot of people call them Eskimos. But now we say the people of the North, the natives of the North they’re Inuit, which means snow people. Eskimo means meat-eater or flesh-eater. So they don't like being called Eskimos, you call them Inuit, but Katimavik is an Inuit word, and it means ‘meeting place’. And it's a government programme that's been on and off over the last 40-50 years in Canada.
And really what the—when I did it with the terms of the programme where it's a social programme sponsored by the government, 17 to 21-year-old youth, and then what they do is they put a group of 10 kids together, and the group of 10 kids is supposed to represent Canada. So, what that means is that they grab some from the east coast, the west coast from up north they try to make it, so it's representative. Like we had half guys have girls. French, we have three French speakers, right? Then the English speakers. We had an Inuit guy Kenny, who when he came, he actually didn't even speak English. We always knew when the phone was for Kenny because we didn't—it all be like, '[mumbles] Kenny this is for you, I don't know what's happening, either it's a bad connection, or this is someone who talks in their language'.
And that programme, what we did—when I did it was we spent three months in British Columbia, three months in Alberta, and three months in Quebec and in every province, there was a house. In that house, there is a project manager, project leader...
Lisa: Wow.
Daryl: ...basically he was someone that would go to the house, and they were there, the whole duration of the programme. And this isn't a pitch for the programme, but I feel like it was—my life was really before and after.
Lisa: Wow.
Daryl: Because life skills I got from this...
Lisa: That's cool.
Daryl: ...so every place would have a project leader, and they would organise full-time work for all ten kids. And you were like a volunteer full-time worker, and in exchange, the government and I think this businesses may be paid a reduced hourly wage, I don't really know the details of it. But you worked for free, and in exchange, the government paid your grocery bills, they paid your rent and your travel expenses, and you got 20 bucks a week for like toothpaste and whatever else you wanted. And that was—it was a fantastic programme. I learned so much when I was in Alberta and British Columbia. I worked at a native band office, which is in Canada, we have a lot of native land, and that's land, like, we were the original immigrants. We took over the landmass, and then we gave the natives, ‘This is your land’, and so it's like a country within a country, and a band office is like their government office.
Lisa: Right.
Daryl: So, I actually worked at an Indian band office, Similkameen Valley band office and Iwe helped build sweat lodges. We did all sorts of stuff. I work there newsletter, helped communicate with the community. In Alberta, I was a seventh-grade teacher's assistant at a middle school, and a social worker assistant and I worked with a librarian as well. And then in Quebec, I was actually a mayor's assistant for three small town, 150 people. But you had a full-time job in each place, and then after work when you came home, the 10 of you were basically instantly signed up for any community events that were going on.
I remember in the small town of Karamea we built something like 20 out of the 25 of their Christmas floats for their Christmas parade. We did soup kitchens, music festivals, like, you name it, and there's just like, instantly—if there was something out of the community like the project leader would know about it and just drag us, and we just show up be like, 'Hey', and it was like ten pairs of hands. Like just we were coming just to make things happen.
So every three months, you had a full-time job, evenings and weekends, except for Sunday. You basically anything in the community, you were instantly signed up as a volunteer, and every two and for two weeks, every three month period, you would build it, you would stay with a local family for two weeks to like, see how they live. And that was really insightful because I didn't know any other family or how the family operated. But then I got to see inside the workings, like,
I remember this one family, I stayed with the three, the parents, the father was in finance, and he was always, like, his suit and his hair's so proper. He was very strict and very like this. And his kids on the other side, they had like mohawks, spike collars and black nails and eyes. And it was so funny because I felt like it was a yin yang. I felt like the kids were the exact opposite in the extreme of the parents, and just watching the dynamics of people. And also every week, a boy and a girl would stay home from their full-time jobs, and they would be the mum and dad in the house because we had a budget like for groceries and they would have to cook and clean. So that nine months experience when I was 17, I came out of that with more life experience than a lot of people and…
Lisa: What an incredible programme and how lucky...
Daryl: Yes.
Lisa: ...for you, like, because so many kids go off the rails, as they say at that point yet, and they get lost and to have the sort of a structure of development and experience must have been a real game-changer for you.
Daryl: Yeah, I mean, we moved around a bit when I was a kid, but we ended up settling in a city called Kingston, Ontario, which also happened to be the penitentiary capital of Canada. And so it was a unique community because you've got Queen's University, which is one of the top three universities of Canada. You've got the second-largest military base. It's almost one of the largest government employment cities. So you've got these high-income earners in the public sector, and then you've also got this great university. Some of the largest businesses out of Canada, actually, even in Kingston, like we've got one of the largest real estate investment trusts. There's a company that makes the shafts for all the pro golf clubs outside of Kingston. It's kind of weird, you got these unique massive spikes of success. But then because of the penitentiaries, a lot of families move to Kingston to be closer to the family. So then you have these areas where there's like when you get out of jail, you just settle in the town that you're in, and so it's weird, and I actually didn't think I was gonna see my 21st birthday.
Lisa: Wow.
Daryl: I was in high school, and I didn't—I had a friend that was found in a lake rolled in a carpet...
Lisa: Oh, gosh.
Daryl: ...and things like that. And I didn't think I was really gonna make it.
Lisa: So, really dangerous areas to be growing up as a youth.
Daryl: But then, I always say when you live in a city, you don't live in that city, you live in your bubble in that city. So my bubble was mixed. It was a mixed bag. I was in the middle—I grew up in a nice suburb, but through school and all that, I got involved with lots of different things. But in this group one day, they spoke at my high school, and they're talking about, 'Yo, we're getting to travel Canada for free'. Like, I was like, 'Hey, that sounds great. I need to get out of here. I don't see a future. I don't see a future', and I signed up and that was what I did. And then after that because of being involved and so I almost got kicked out.
Now, after the first two months, I was on my last warning, you get three warnings, and you get sent home. And every time you make them, you have to write a commitment to improve. And I was like, I just thought I think that project leader didn't like me, but I was like, on it by a hair. And it was so funny because I remember when I made the first three months, we moved to the second location, I was like, 'Wow even if I get kicked out now. Now I've learned everything that I could learn from this programme'. Three months, Alberta and I met all sorts of new people and new experiences. And I was like, 'Wow, I made it to six months. Now that I'm going to Quebec, now I've learned everything, I mean, so good'. And then the next three months, and then I finished it like, 'Wow, I made it to the end. Now I've learned...
Lisa: You're an expert.
Daryl: ...programme, right. But now here it is years and years later, and I met because they were like family, the other ten kids, right? And I still catch up with them every now and then, like I learned through, 'Why? You got a kid? You got three kids'?
Lisa: In other words, we all say we're no’s all the time. And then we're actually just at the beginning of our next journey. And it's all stepping stones to the next part of learning and stuff. But what a fantastic I wish we had a programme like that here because I mean, it must cost a lot to run and be really difficult to organise. But man, they could change lives, say for kids who are just lost and don't quite know what's the next step and how many of them are be.
Daryl: It's a fantastic programme. It's actually I don't think it's running in Canada anymore. Again, because of the cost that it gets government funding, it gets taken away. The Trudeau lineage is the one that started—they tend to be behind it. There was a big scandal in Canada 'we something charity' and it sounds like that they were going to give a billion dollars in one organisation that does something like that. But of course, it got into, like, where's money going and people arguing and is that a good use and I think nothing happened at it. But it's a shame because...
Lisa: It changes your life.
Daryl: Well, I think right now there's a ton of people, especially the younger kids who need a sense of responsibility. I think in some ways, I don't want to go on a big rant. But I think life is full of challenges and hurdles. And it's like, through overcoming those we develop our character. And some people, they just have such a cushy like...
Lisa: Yes.
Daryl: .Things have become so politically correct. We've softened all the hard edges. I remember seeing in Toronto, they replaced a bunch of the kids playgrounds, because kids were falling and getting hurt.
Lisa: Yes, yes.
Daryl: Like, yes, but that's, like, you climb a tree, you fall, like, you don't...
Lisa: There's no consequence to anything anymore. And there's no, like, yes.
Daryl: It's like participation awards versus achievement awards. Like, we really, in some ways, become a society of participation awards versus achievement awards. And that's...
Lisa: I totally get it. I totally agree. Because I mean, I'm showing my age, but I grew up in the early 70s and stuff, and it was a rough ride. I'm lucky to be alive.
Daryl: Not everyone. Not everyone made it in adulthood. Yes.
Lisa: And, but you know what, I wouldn't change that for the world because I don't want to be wrapped up in cotton wool and bounce around like a bunch of marshmallows for the want of a better expression. I want to be able to climb trees and cycle. I had to laugh yesterday. We live in a little village that, sort of, no police around here. And you've got all sorts in, and it's a lovely village, it's a sort of a beachy resort-y place. But you get the kids, they got no helmets on, and the other ones are on scooters, and there's three of them hanging off it and other people with their youths, and the kids are on the back, which is all illegal, right?
Daryl: Right.
Lisa: And I'm not saying it is good, but I do have to smile because it reminds me of my childhood because that's where...
Daryl: A little bit recklessness, a little bit of foolishness. We don't want it, but the world has real limits.
Lisa: Yes.
Daryl: And especially as a parent, like I have a daughter now and it's like, I call it careful neglect. I try to carefully neglect her in some ways to force her to develop and grow.
Lisa: Beautiful.
Daryl: It's like neglect under supervision, that's probably the best way to do it. Because if I always do it for her, and then I'm not there like they say kids who grew up with a single parent tend to be more independent than kids that have two parents, although kids with two parents tend to do better overall. I want a blend of that. The kids with single parents, they are more independent because that's expected of them. There's not all—you can't...
Lisa: backup.
Daryl: It's not all the swaddling.
Lisa: Yes, no, I totally agree. And like, not even just for kids, but like dealing with my mum with her disability, I had to—and people would criticise me heavily, but I used—I make her do the hard stuff. Like, if she's struggling to get out of a chair at night and she's tired I don't get up to help her and not because I'm an asshole but because I need her to learn which muscle it is to push and people would, like when we're out in public that'd be standing there watching me watch her struggling and I'd get abuse sometimes. Like, ‘why aren't you helping’?
Daryl: Yes, yes.
Lisa: That's all I'm doing. I have to do it all the time with her because I'm teaching her new difficult tasks all the time. I'm having to put her through some painful regimes and training. And because I've been an athlete all my life, I understand that pain often, when in training, in difficult training sessions and stuff make you stronger, and make you more able to withstand. I mean, that's what exercise is all about: you hurt yourself, you get stronger, you hurt yourself, you get stronger. And with mum's training, it's very often like that. So okay, she's not a kid, but it's the same principle. I have to let her go.
Or winching out when she got her driver's license, and I would let her drive my car and go around town. I mean, I'm still panicking half the time, a nice—and for the start, I would shadow her, like from behind. She didn't know that I was following her way right through the town where she went so that she had that backup. But she didn't know she had that backup.
Daryl: As I actually had been saying that to Kathy, but my daughter, I'm like, I won't stop her from falling, but I'll do my best to always catch her.
Lisa: Yes.
Daryl: I'm not gonna try to stop because sometimes you're like, 'Your daughter and you try to pad the room'. And I'm like, 'I gave her a pair of scissors'. This is when she was really young, gave her scissors, 'Don't, she'll cut herself', and I'm like, 'Yes, and it'll be a valuable lesson'. 'You're right'. And I'm right here, and it'll be a vet ship. She'll learn a valuable lesson; I don't know if she doesn't, I feel like that's partially where we have things like all these school shootings and that. These kids aren't growing up on farms. They've never been kicked by a horse or a goat, or they've never hit themselves in the foot with an axe. So they playing these video games of extreme violence and sexual violence in the movies and they feel these emotions, like really common as a teenager. They have access to such powerful tools.
I'm Canadian, but in the States, they sell guns at Walmart and so you've got a kid that's angry, he's got no real sense of the reality of the world around him in terms of like, what happens if you fall out of a tree and break your ankle, that's so distant because they grew up in a city and it's just, it's more just surviving and social dynamics versus a social and environmental dynamic.
Lisa: I totally agree.
Daryl: And I go to school, and they lash out with guns, I really feel that if those kids grew up with more hard labour in their lives, more physical—even if they just had more physical training conditioning. You play hockey, you get hit too hard, like something like that, it would have less school shootings because they still feel the same emotions, but one, they'd have different outlets, and they would also kind of respect it better. It's like my jujitsu. You mentioned I do jujitsu.
Lisa: Yes.
Daryl: I feel like it's very—when you guys are new, you get a lot of these strong guys, and they try to tough on everybody. And they just, it's useless. And they get beaten up by the more skilled ones. So then when they develop skill, they're kind of like a 'Hey, like, I know what it's like to be the one getting beaten up'.
Lisa: Yes. Which is the correct method.
Daryl: Like, the power, the skill is earned. So, you treat it with better respect.
Lisa: Humility is always a good thing. And I think learning.. I've taken up skimboarding with you, and I don't bounce very well at 52. But it's really important that I do something that I'm really useless at.and I'm having to learn a new skill. And I sometimes ski myself because if I don't get the stage, that's when you start losing those skills. And I don't want to lose any of my abilities, and I've still got good reactions and stuff like that, so I want to keep them. So I constantly want to push myself outside that boundary.
So let's dive in a little bit to your martial arts, and then we'll get onto your business side of things because what you've done the years is just incredible. What sort of lessons have you learned—I mean, that was one—but what sort of lessons have you learned from doing Jiu Jitsu in the discipline that's required for this very tough sport?
Daryl: Yes, that's great. So yes, I did jujitsu for about six, seven, maybe eight years. I haven't trained, probably in a couple years now. I've been doing more kind of CrossFit and my own physical training, but I think the lessons are through any—you learn about progression over time. You learn things like the fundamentals are fundamental. You kind of learn the basics, but then you get bored with those, and you want to learn the fancy, advanced stuff, but then it's hard to apply it and get it to work. And then through just time and observation and training with the greatest you understand it really is about the fundamentals. Virtue is doing the common uncommonly well.
The fundamentals that we learned are the stuff that's actually working against the highest level black belts. The basics that you learn, you see that happen at the highest level World Championships in the biggest competitions, and the really great to the ones that can do the basics and just walk through everyone with them. Like, 'How are they able to do that so well'? Everybody knows what's happening. Everyone knows what to expect, but they can't stop it from happening anyhow.
Another lesson was it's a game of inches in the beginning because jujitsu is kind of like a submission wrestling, submission grappling.It's not so much punch and kick.It's more about pull, roll, and just and using things like gravity. So there's things about drilling how practise makes perfect. You learned the rule, like 10,000 hours that it's if I've been training for 200 hours, and you've been training 10 hours, generally speaking, I have a major advantage. If I've been training 2000 hours, you've been training 100 hours, typically speaking, I'm gonna just mop the floor with you because I've—there's nuance detail and you can almost endlessly drill into the fundamentals.
And then there's just the progress. You've talked about learning new skills. Last year, I learned how to handstand walk. I can now handstand walk about 20 feet, I'm gonna be 38 in a couple of months.
Lisa: Wow, I can't do that.
Daryl: Yes.
Lisa: I'm jealous.
Daryl: It’s specifically for the skill development, for the neurological developments, to like to balance in a totally different way and physical development. So I mean, you just see you learn about people, you learn about how your emotions impact your decision making in certain respects. You learn about how it's not just training, but it's also how to recover and rest. And we talked about this I think before I interviewed you for my podcast, like, silence is part of music just as much as music is, the difference is it's intentional.
Lisa: Yes.
Daryl: Silences, intention. So it's about doing things with intent. Taking a concept like I want to learn and get good at this and breaking into pieces. And I was talking about this to my friend yesterday. Actually, I forget how it came up. But he's talking about something, and work, and the situation, and how to avoid, and I remember I was training and I was fortunate to do some training with Rickson Gracie in my early parts of my training career, legendary fighter guy.
And I remember I kept getting caught in these triangle chokes. Triangle choke is a type of choke. And I kept getting caught in these triangle chokes. I remember asking, like, 'How do I get out of it'? He says, 'Well, don't let them put you into it'. I'm like, 'Yes, I know. But I already got into it. Now what do I do'? he's like, 'Don't let them put you into it'. And I just wanted—I wanted the cure, and I was like, 'Yes, but I want it' and there are, there's some things you can do. But the real answer is...
Lisa: Prevention
Daryl: ...prevention is so much better than cure. Like, well it's good...
Lisa: Great principle.
Daryl: You're in it, like, you gotta panic, you got two or three options, you got to panic, you're gonna spend a lot of energy, you're gonna flail and struggle, it's gonna be close. We can talk about how to do it. But really, the best solution is, don't let them do it to you in the first place. Note and recognise the signs and protect yourself before it happens.
Lisa: That is a great law for the whole of the health paradigm that I live under.
Daryl: Yes. How do I deal with heart problems?
Lisa: Prevention, prevention.
Daryl: Prevention. Yes, exactly. And you know proactivity.
Lisa: Yes, occasionally,you will still get caught out and you will still and then you want to know those tricks. But in the first line, let's learn prevention and then we'll look at how do we get out of this mess?
Daryl: And another really—which kind of ties in and then we can if you want to move on, move on. But this one, I think is also really, really, really important. When I first learned martial arts, I always thought it was about doing things to other people, I'm going to do this too, or I'm going to use your leverage against you. I'm gonna do this to the world. What I've really realised is two things. One, it's not even necessarily about doing things. It's about two things it's about not doing things externally, it's about self-control. It's about boundaries.
So we just talked about 'Don't let him put you into it'. That means that I have to have boundaries around things. Will I let him grab me here? Well I’ll not allow that. Well, I let him grab me there. And I'll be like, 'Okay, whatever. And I'm going to try to do some'. So again, when people start and forgive me, I don't want to go on a huge long rant on this. But when you start, I'm going to do this to you, going to do that to you and I'm trying to do this...
Lisa: You got to be kidding.
Daryl: ...and so I don't even care what you're doing to me. When you get—later, it's like what do I accept? What are my boundaries?
Lisa: Wow.
Daryl: What situations do I let myself enter into? And that was—and then the other thing is that a lot of times it's not about what you do. It's not even about winning. It's about who makes the fewest mistakes.
Lisa: Wow.
Daryl: It's really—it's not even about being the best, the smartest, the brightest. It's about making the least mistakes.
Lisa: Wow...
Daryl: In this situation, how many doors do I open for my opponent?
Lisa: I totally...
Daryl: These things are great, right?
Lisa: Yes, yes, yes.
Daryl: There’s just me posing on the world and more about controlling myself.
Lisa: Yes.
Daryl: And am I allowing myself to be manipulated this way? Am I allowing myself to be grabbed here? Am I allowing his energy to mess with my mindset?
Lisa: Wow, that is gold.
Daryl: In a tournament, I've seen them lose the match before it even begins. Get you two guys step up, and the rest get in there, and they like their eyeballing on each other.
Lisa: Yes.
Daryl: You see one guy like and he's just kind of coward. Like he lost before we even get started. So...
Lisa: I haven’t seen that in ultramarathons are—another sporting analogy, but I've seen when people start bargaining with themselves and you do during an ultra. You start saying, 'Well, if I just get to there, I'll be happy with my results’. Or if you start to negotiate with yourself as how far you can get. And when I'm when I see people going, 'Well, I've at least done more than I've ever done before and therefore it's a success'. And when I start to hear talk like that, I know we're in the battle, like we are in the battle. And if they don't change the mindset, they're not going to because they're no longer in that, 'I'm gonna do this, come hell or high water there in the' Well, it's okay to fail and it is okay to fail. But in the battle, you don't want to be in that mindset. You want to be in that mindset, like, 'I'm going for this and I'm giving it everything I have.’
When you start to negotiate with yourself where ‘It would be okay if I got to that point, and therefore this is the longest I've ever run and therefore that's still a success'. When you start doing that type of bargaining with yourself, you're in deep shit basically because you've got to tune your psychology around too because otherwise, you're going to give yourself a way out.
I remember when I was running in the 220k race in the Himalayas that extreme altitude and I had a point where I just completely broke after going up the second path, and it was about—I'd been out there for 40 plus hours in a massive snowstorm. I had hypothermia. I had altitude sickness, asthma. I was just completely good enough reasons to be pulling out. And one of my guys came back to me, and I said, 'I think it's only two kilometres to the top of the mountain because you're calculating in your head'. And he came back and said, 'No, it's six kilometres to go'. And that just completely broke my mentality because six kilometres, I was going out 3k an hour, it was two hours of hell, and I couldn't, and it broke me. And I just fell into a heap and started bawling my eyes out, and everybody was giving me permission to give up. They were like, huddling around, 'You're amazing. We're so proud of you and you did everything you could', and then there was one guy. And he came over, and he shocked me, and he wasn't smiling, and he wasn't patting me on the back, and he was like, ‘Get the F up now’.
Daryl: You're so close.
Lisa: ‘You're so close, you're not failing, and I'm not letting you fail and get your ass up off the ground. And I'm going to stay here with you. And I'm going to walk you up top of that mountain’. And that was key because it got me over that psychological break—I broke, but he picked me up, and he got me back on my feet. And I followed his instructions. I just did what he told me to do, put one foot in front of the other, and he got me over that hump, literally. And it's this type of stuff that you learn through sports; it's just so valuable.
Daryl: It's just overcoming obstacles and just testing yourself. You don't know what you're capable of until you do it. You can spend all day reading a book about tennis, but until you're out there actually playing it. And there's learning you have to learn, you can learn through reading through lecture through conversation, personal experiences, and through other people's experiences and that's...
Lisa: That's what this is about.
Daryl: Yes, I mean Alan Watts has this great video called The Dream of Life. Imagine if every night you went to sleep, you could dream, however many years of life that you wished and because it's your dream, you can make them as wonderful as you want it. And so for the first—let's say you're dreaming 100 years of life every night. And maybe you do this for a couple of years, every night for a few years, you're dreaming 100 years of life. And all these lives that you're living, they're all the most filled with all the pleasures and all the wonderful things that you could possibly want. And what do you think would happen? And over time, you would kind of get bored, and you would want some risk and some adversity. And then eventually, you would want to be able to dream and go to sleep, and not know the outcome. ‘I want to go to sleep. I want to have this adventure, but I don't want to know the outcome’.
And that's kind of like that's almost like life. And if you could dream a lifetime every night in your—in a life of eighty years, you could possibly dream the life you're living right now. And that's the whole thing of evolution. Evolution is about growth and challenge and overcoming obstacles and...
Lisa: Yes, obstacles like phone calls coming in the middle of your podcast.
Daryl: But, we got—everyone’s with me.
Lisa: I think people listening to my podcasts are quite used to interruption. You just cannot stop the world from functioning half the time like somebody's phone is somewhere.
Daryl: Murphy's Law, you just gotta keep on recording. If you wait for perfection, it's never gonna happen.
Lisa: Exactly. You could panic now and start editing for Africa or another way, you could just get it out there and apologise for what happened, which we'll do. So, Daryl, I want to move now because I think there was absolutely brilliant and really insightful.
I want to move into the business side of things. And you've had a really successful business. You've taken lots of businesses to the million-dollar in a plus businesses from scratch, you've done that over and over again. You've helped people scale up and develop these systems and mine the data and work out all this complicated world of online, which is I'd struggle with daily so I want to know from you, how the heck do you do this? And what are some of your greatest secrets from building businesses over a long period of time now?
Daryl: That's a great question. There's a lot of different places to start; I think one of the hardest places and where I've had the most failure myself is getting something new going because well, one, it's just not my superpower. But if you've got someone that's got a proven concept, and that's really how in the beginning, I should look it up.
But I got my seven-step rollout system. It's like you always start with a market first. So that means you always have to start with a need and or want so because you can't—the idea of selling ice to Eskimos. It's not about doing mental gymnastics and pushing something on someone that they don't want. That might happen in the world. There might be people that invest a lot of time, energy and resources in that but I have no interest. It's really tough to be like I'm gonna generate this demand. It's not there. The demand already exists. People already want to feel beautiful, people already want to be entertained, people already want to travel and to explore the world. So these needs and wants and that already exists. The idea is that you want to stand in front of it. The demand and want is already there and it's constantly evolving. And every time someone a business comes out, and you create a new product or service to fix a problem there'll be a new problem.
Lisa: Yes.
Daryl: Because now, like before the internet, the issue was how are we going to have these conversations like we can? You’re New Zealand, I'm in Vietnam, how will we do this? Well, now Zoom is created. These companies created tool, and they created tool. And now here's Zoom, but then what's the next issue? And then what's the next problem? So problems are markets, not demographics.
Lisa: Oh, wow.
Daryl: Not demographics, the problem is a market. This is the problem that we solve for people. Once you've got that a lot of it—for me, it's like different ways that you can go, but the purpose of business is to locate a prospect, turn that prospect into a customer and then make a customer your friend.
Lisa: Yes.
Daryl: It's really a big part of it. It's tough to have a business survive. There are businesses that survive off one-time sales, but the vast majority of businesses need recurring business, recurring freight, ongoing relationships. And a lot of businesses aren't thinking about how to do that. And so, your business is a service to the world. And so the first thing you have to figure out on a small scale, ‘What problem do I solve’? And when you solve a problem, you kind of need to create, I call it a black box. This black box maybe is a mystery to the outside world; we can use a dentist's office people come in crying and in pain on one side, they go through the black box, which is a series of checklists, checklists for this, checklist for that, checklist for next thing, okay, check that we did this, this, this, this is this, boom, they leave smiling and happy on the other side. So that's the black box. That's the problem-solving box.
Lisa: Wow.
Daryl: The problem-solving box, all the company is one group of people solving a problem for another group of people via a product or service.
Lisa: Wow.
Daryl: Before that problem is, and you've got it, now you need to design it. Here's some people solve problems really well, but they don't do it in a way that's scalable. So the rule of 10,000. Now I know how to solve the problem. Now I know THE kind of the type of people having that problem. How do I solve 10,000 of these problems for people, think, if I had to bake a pie if I'm trying to bake one pie versus bake 10,000 pies...
Lisa: It's going to be more efficient.
Daryl: there's a different mindset that you got like, I need a bigger kitchen, I got to do that. You've got like planning in batches, and food storage, it changes the nature of things. And then you got to kind of go out and find those people and that's like a marketing function.
So there's—actually, I can share this. So last year, I actually spent like $40,000 hiring all these research teams to help get down to what are the critical success factors for small and medium-sized businesses?
Lisa: Wow.
Daryl: We came up with eight, there's actually nine, but the ninth one is government and economic factors. And it's not realistic that a person is going to influence.
Lisa: No.
Daryl: Not one person.
Lisa: Yes.
Daryl: No, it's not realistic. So the ones that we can influence is things like self-efficacy, which means your ability to be effective with your time, your energy, just yourself and through others. So it's like leadership is part of that, right? Your time management is part of that like mindset might be part of that. But self-efficacy, strategic planning, marketing strategy, market intelligence. So these are different market intelligence is understanding the needs, wants desires, problems of the people of the marketplace, and the competitors, the available options.
So it's market intelligence is like, what's going on out there? And then marketing strategy is how am I going to get my message across. Then you have sales skills and strategies, sales strategy. And then you have money management. You have business operating systems, which is—it could be technology, it could be simple checklists, it could be meeting rhythms, it could be a hiring process, that's the operating systems.
And then you've got business intelligence, and business intelligence is like the awareness of different things. So for example, like you are working with my partner, Kathy. She's helping you with your podcasts, you're getting greater awareness on how many downloads are we getting and how many people are sharing the downloads and how many people are listening and then coming my way—that's all business intelligence stuff.
Daryl: It's the idea of not just doing activities, but to actually measure… Right. But it needs to be aware. It’s like wearing a heart rate monitor, right? Like how's my—that's an intelligence system. How's my heart rate doing? How's my heart rate variability?
Lisa: Yes. I do all of that.
Daryl: What's my sleep pattern?
Lisa: Yes.
Daryl: Am I waking up twenty nights? That's like business intelligence. Those eight factors really are the critical make or break focus points for business.
Lisa: Wow.
Daryl: And anything that you would do for a business should back into one of those. So, team building activity. Well, that's kind of self-efficacy, maybe operating systems, it depends. You're going to do a podcast, well, that's a marketing strategy, right? And then the strategic planning is the plan strategically of how you're going to pull the strings together. And like, we know how you plan you develop, how you plan to meet people, is there a thought process and from all this stuff?
Lisa: And the hard thing is for the young entrepreneurial. I know we have a lot of people who, in business, starting businesses, or in developed businesses and wanting to scale further. You’re wearing so many hats at the beginning, like you're in charge of all of those departments if you like, and that is the very hard thing at the beginning. Once you get a team around you like we're at a stage now where we have small teams that are helping us with different aspects of what we do, and we're trying to outsource the stuff we're not good at. It's not our specialty, because we don't want to waste... But at the beginning, you have to do it all. And so you're just constantly wearing these multitasking hats and not being very efficient.
Daryl: Right.
Lisa: How do people get to that next rung on the ladder? And this is something that where we've been backwards and forwards going on for a long time. How do you get to the next stage? And how do you make an effective team? And how do you outsource certain things, but not the other things? And it's getting to that next level, isn't it?
Daryl: Yes.
Lisa: And at the beginning, you just forbought everything.
Daryl: If you've been doing a lot of activity, and you're not really sure what's working, a simple way to think about this is forget Uber and Grab and these other...
Lisa: Yes, this huge...
Daryl: Originally, if you were a cab driver, you would have a car, and your idea first figure out where are the people who need to be driven places and then pay money to do it. Maybe it's taking kids to school, maybe it's picking people up at the train station, or the bus station or the airport, maybe it's doctor's office appointments, right? Like every week for whatever.
But first, if you were the taxi driver, first, you'd have to figure out, how do I keep my schedule full every day? How do I keep myself busy every day? And so first, it's where are the customers? And where do they want to go? Right? Where are the customers and where they want to go? Can I take them there? You get paid in size over the relationship, and the problem you solve. What that means is if I want to get across town, but I have all day to do it, I can walk, right? But if I'm in a hurry, if my child is sick, and they're bleeding, and I got to get in the hospital in half the time, that's a bigger problem. I'll pay whatever, right? I can rent a car, I could bike, right? If I don't want to rent a car, I could pay more to have someone, you get what I'm saying?
Lisa: Yes.
Daryl: I could pay someone to drive me. So there's a scale of problems. So first, like, where are the customers? What do they need? Where do they want to go? And then how do you get yourself busy? Now that you're busy what's going to happen is now you have to do is you have to train someone and had it on quality control. How do I deliver this consistently? What is my doing? Because when you do something for someone, why—what's making people really happy? What's making them not happy? Right? How do I make sure I have a consistent good experience for people? Good.
Now, how do I help more people? And then if you're the cab driver, you might have to take a pay cut? Because at some point, you might have to bring someone in and have them drive the car for half the day.
Lisa: So you can focus on the business. Yes, yes.
Daryl: You can focus on getting another car and getting that. And so there's this weird period where it's like, 'Hey, I'm busy full time, but I can't be any busier'. So I can charge more money, or I'm going to hire someone, give them some of the work.
Lisa: Yes. Big portion of the money.
Daryl: Right. They're gonna take a pint of the money. And now I'm going to get the second part going. And that's actually how Kathy got started. So Kathy is working with you. And one of the beginning she had some clients online, and I was like, 'What do you like doing the most? What's the one thing that you think you can do a lot of? And she really enjoys the writing component', and so we got her really busy. And then she hired someone, and then right? And then she was busy, and they're busy, she hired another person. And she had another person on now she had like a team of six, she's got some, like 26 people now. But in the beginning, she had like four or five, six, 'Hey, now you need a manager'. 'Okay, well, now I need a manager', okay, and that's your manager for the team and the next problem and building that out. And that's a really natural way to grow.
And part of what helps you do that is documentation and training, an edge explained, demonstrate, guide, and power. First, explain how you do it. Let me demonstrate it for you. So you can see it done. And then let me guide you in doing it with you. And then I'm going to empower you to do it on your own, make some mistakes and learn from them, and just repeat that process.
Lisa: Wow.
Daryl: So it's an edge thing. And that's creating documentations and systems. But then you've got to actually keep—now you're getting into a different level. How do you communicate a vision? How do you keep a team productive? How do you monitor progress? How do you—because we're talking about self-efficacy, right? If you hire someone that could be brilliant, but if they don't get the work done, and now you're getting into people skills, and how do I communicate? And how do I help them tap into their own internal motivation? So they're not just showing up, clicking on the paycheck, and just clocking out, going home just on their phone all day. So these are different tiers of problems that people fall into. So I don't know if I read a whole of...
Lisa: No, these are perfect, Daryl, and it does highlights here. There's always the next level.
Daryl: Crazy amounts of entrepreneurship.
Lisa: No, but, like getting out of the startup gates is the hardest part and you dealing also with self-doubt and imposter syndrome often, and can I do this? And people telling you you can’t. Your family members or friends going, 'What the hell are you doing? And you've tucked in your regular job for this'? And you know, that 80% or more of businesses fail. I can't remember what the statistics were, but they're pretty horrific. And you're wearing all these hats. And what you then see is a lot of people starting to burn out. And that's really like part of what we do is all about managing stress and not burning out and how’s the basics of health because you need to do all that in order to be successful because there's no use having millions of dollars in the bank, but you are dead because that isn't going to help anybody.
Daryl: I've seen that. I've seen people sacrifice—I see people make money and keep their health at the same time. But I've also seen a lot of people sacrifice their health to make money and then end up spending all that money trying to get their health back.
Lisa: To get their health back. And I must admit like I've—not for the—just for the business but saying in rehabilitating mum cost me my health. I ended up nose diving because you're working 18 hour-days sometimes and you just go and helpful either trying to make the mortgage payments at the same time by the hyperbaric chambers, or the whatever she needs and trying to rehabilitate, and running all these juggling balls that we all have in various combinations. And you can't work yourself into the absolute—into the grave if you're not careful. And that's why health and resilience and stress reduction and stuff is what we do.
Daryl: Yes, it's always best to have people—one of the biggest—and I've done this before, I've done this a couple of times, unfortunately. Better to collect money first and then develop a product. What I mean is like in my hometown, they're opening up a gym, and they were building, they bought this building, they were kind of doing rentals on the inside, and they set up a trailer outside. And they were actively marketing and were signing up people for the gym that was not yet finished being built...
Lisa: Brilliant
Daryl: ...so they're not yet open. And what happened was at some point, they just closed down the whole operation and left. And what it was is they had a pre-launch goal for themselves. ‘We need to generate this many new members in order to breakeven, or we stop’. And that's a really good thing, and you don't, it's like if you just get pre-orders, Elon Musk did this with, I think, the model three. He made $100 million having people prepay $1,000 on a car. He hadn’t built the factory to make it.
Lisa: Wow. But then it’s Elon Musk.
Daryl: Well, no, but, yes, okay, but I mean...
Lisa: Reputation.
Daryl: In any way you shape or form it because he built a prototype so he had something he could show people, and they could see and they could—he could articulate what his vision was.
Lisa: Yes.
Daryl: And then he said, 'Hey, if you want to get one and be one of the first you have to make a non refundable $1,000 deposit' and he created $100 million, which is proof of concept.
Lisa: Wow.
Daryl: Use that $100 million to build a factory and then charge them the rest of the money for the car.
Lisa: Brilliant.
Daryl: And that is of demand. And this is where people go wrong. For example, I like baking pies, my hobby is baking pies. I like baking pies. People praise me all the time for my pies. Man, it would be so great if the whole city just praised me for being such a great pie maker. I'm going to build this business for me and how great my pies are. I'm going to plan this logo, and I'm going to plan the layout. I'm going to plan the menu, and all this stuff. And then I make all these pies. And then what I do is I tell all my friends about my pie shop, and they go, 'Wow, Daryl, your brand color is so nice, and wow what a nice logo and what a nice menu', my friends come in and make an obligatory purchase.
Lisa: Yes.
Daryl: Because they're my friend, but that doesn't last. And then I go through the seesaw where they buy the purchase. They make a purchase. So now I stopped telling people about my pie shop because I'm busy making the pies. But while I'm making the pies, there's no one getting people to come.
Lisa: Wow.
Daryl: I deliver those pies, but they're just my friends. They're buying out of social, like social contract, you're my friend, not because it's something they need. And this business is to fulfill my ego as a business owner, it's not to provide a service to the community.
Lisa: Wow.
Daryl: Because to provide a service to the community, I might like making pies, but I need to figure out who needs pies and I might find that there's some office buildings where these people are so busy, they don't have time to cook they're always on the go. And so I would make pies to go, and I would make a custom for their dietary nutrition perhaps. And now it's a symbiotic relationship. It's not a self-serving ego-driven business. It's fulfilling a need. That's something—that's why the market intelligence part is so big of those eight because it's how—you might not have everything else in line, but if you're trying to sell gourmet food to people as they leave in all you can eat buffet...
Lisa: And I've done this before I've made a course because I think it's what people want, and then worked out later on that, no, that's not quite what they wanted. They wanted something slightly different. So, we all always do now like questionnaires and polls, and ‘what is it that you need’? And how do you want this?
Daryl: It’s in the phase.
Lisa: Yes. And then start—yes because you can think you know what your customer wants and needs, but they will tell you better what they actually want and need. And so always listening to your customers and always seeing what direction are they going in and what do they need next is another good thing. So okay, I've done this part of the thing, but can you actually add on something else another service that will be a benefit to them, that you can provide to them, and create what you call the value ladder so that you have more things ready to go.
And all this is really, really complicated, but you've done this with lots and lots of people and lots of businesses and scaled them up. So, if anybody wants to like—coming to wrapping up the session now, Daryl, if somebody wanted to work with you as a business coach, where do they find you? And what sort of work do you do nowadays? What is your sort of core focus?
Daryl: Yes, good question. So, they go to bestbusinesscoach.ca, that'll redirect them to my main site, they can go check me out there. They can look up Daryl Urbanski on all the social media platforms.
Lisa: Yes, you’re pretty famous.
Daryl: Well, we're all famous now. We all have social platforms, so. But I am king in my own universe, that's true. I mean, that's it. And right now, really, what I'm focused on is group coaching. So when I had my martial arts school, I used to love being a part of an environment where people came to get better every day. No one goes to the gym, and they're like, ‘I want to break a leg today’, literally, ‘I want to get sick today’. They come and, ‘I want to get better, I want to fix this part of my jiu jitsu game’, or ‘I want to do squats because I want my butt to be’, whatever it is. But the idea of improving and improvement.
So I'm really focused on my group coaching mastermind, where I'm putting groups of people like that together. So it's a group coaching. And then for people that want more dedicated attention, I have a virtual VP of Marketing Service, where it's like, I can work with them or their team and be present in the meetings, it's a consultation, or I'm a consultant. I'm not necessarily executing or implementing.
So there's a good coaching programme, there's a virtual VP of Marketing. But then I also have a pay for performance model, which is with select people where it's a good fit, win-win-win. There might be an upfront payment just for some setup fees, $1,000, or two, or whatever, depending on the scope of the project. But really, they're only going to pay if they profit because I think that in the B2B space if you want to be a doctor and engineer and architect, you have to pass exams that demonstrate knowledge and capacity. But in the B2B space, anybody can say they're a life coach, anyone can say they're a business coach, anyone can say they're a marketing agency. There's no real way to separate them.
And you can get a certification. But there's not really any real scientific validation of these certification programmes. I just—these companies just create them, and you pay them a thousand bucks and go do a weekend boot camp. And now you're a business coach, and someone should bet their future, their life, their ability to pay medical bills and put their kids in school, on your weekend or dayment of so. I, like, I got away from providing marketing services and being paid a retainer. And I don't think there's anything wrong with people that do that if they provide... Well, I look for more for partnerships. I'm getting away from clients and more towards partnerships. We're like, ‘Man, I know some things. I've done some stuff, looking for people I can partner with, and it's a win-win’. And yes, so they just sort of…
Lisa: If I’m not successful, you're not successful.
Daryl: Right.
Lisa: So if you don't make it, you don't make it, that's the end of the partnership and move on to the next thing. Yes. And I think that's a great model. I think that well it works, it's really good.
Well, I think we've bloody covered a whole lot of areas there. Everywhere from use development through to martial arts through to Jiu-jitsu, and building businesses and overcoming obstacles. So it's been a real fascinating ride with you. I'm really stoked to meet you and Kathy. I think you're brilliant people. You're good people.
And I just want to give a plug to your podcast as well. Can you tell everyone where to find you? So you've mentioned your website, which we'll put it obviously in the show notes and stuff, but where can they find you on the podcast?
Daryl: Yes, just Google, The Best Business Podcast with Daryl Urbanski. It's not to be egocentric. It's just when I did the keyword research when I launched my podcasts, the most searched word term was best business podcast, so I was like that's gonna be my name.
Lisa: I didn’t do that, I wouldn have known to look for an SEO keyword search back in the day. I just went, 'Oh I'm all about pushing the limits, therefore I'm Pushing the Limits'.
Daryl: Keywords are fantastic, sorry to interrupt. Keywords are fantastic because in the privacy of my own home while I'm alone, I go into Google and I type in what are my actual thoughts. So keywords can actually be a sign of like mindshare. How many people are thinking this on what sort of ongoing basis. So if you check your keyword search volume, and not all businesses have to use keywords, but it's great from a research and market intelligence point.
I actually call the Google A to Z. A lot can be learned just going to Google and if you're a chiropractor, put in ‘chiropractor space A’ and look at what shows up. And then chiropractor space B, chiropractor space C, and just take note because these are suggested things is; Google's going, this is what people are looking for.
And if you just take an inventory of A to Z around your keyword and what you do, you can learn a lot about where people are, what they're looking for, the results that they want, you go to Google Trends, you put your keyword in there, you can see the trends over years of the search volume. And that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to relate to sales. But if there's 100,000 people that are interested in the topic, you might have greater success, instead if there's only a thousand. It just depends on your ability to reach and get a lot of…
Lisa: Google and all of that.
Daryl: Keywords are great. The internet is such a powerful tool. You can go on Amazon and look at other products and read the reviews. And you can go on Reddit, put your keyword in Reddit, you can see what people are saying in the forums, you can learn their language, their pain points, their wants and needs. There's a ton of—it's just the world's become so transparent, so well connected.
Lisa: I just learned half a dozen things that I didn't know, so…
Daryl: Yes. It's so great. It can just really make a difference, where are the customers? What do they want? What problem do I solve for them? And then how do you build a relationship? How do you get them to raise their hand? That's typically the first step.
Who here, who would beat you next? I call it the food court test. So, what I mean is a lot of companies—so think of a mall food court. Let's say I want to sell ice cream. So I could go into the food court, and I could get up on a table, and I could go, 'Baskin Robbins' and look around. A lot of people be like, 'What'? and the people who know me might come over and be like, 'Daryl, what are you doing on the table, man? How are you doing'? Like, 'What's going on? Come on down, how you doing? What's going on'? and be like, ‘Hey, what's going on? I got this nougat ice cream from Baskin', okay, whatever, right? That's one type of marketing. And that's about me, my company, my logo, Baskin Robbins. That doesn't mean anything to anybody. But if you instantly got on a table at a busy food court and I went free ice cream. Totally different things. People come to you, like, what free ice cream? ‘Yes, here we have eight flavours. You can get a free sample if you like. And then it's $3 for a tub of ice cream for $5 for two, which flavour would you like to try first’?
Lisa: Brilliant.
Daryl: Totally different analogy. Totally different situation. Totally different, right?
Lisa: Yep.
Daryl: And the flavours that I would make. I can make the flavours that I want. I could be like, 'Ooh, Cheez Whiz and pickles or a bubble—or like nuts and bubblegum' together at last, right? Like, but that's for me, and you can experiment with that. Or I could just go on to Google and go Ice cream, ice cream A, ice cream B, ice cream C, and be like, what are the top—go to Google Trends. What are the top ice cream flavours?
Lisa: Wow.
Daryl: Hey, these ice creams are the top. Now I'm delivering something the world wants and needs and is looking for.
Lisa: It was such a good analogy, Daryl. It's really good. I'm gonna go on to Google Trends and see. This just so—I think the hard thing for entrepreneurs is that there is so many things you need to be good at, that you don't even know where to start half the time. Is it product development is it...?
Daryl: It fails because people put their money down. And it looks—you can even go—look, you just be transparent. Look, I don't even have the product ready yet. This is what I'm thinking of doing. Would you be willing to put a percentage down to save your spot? Would you be willing to get a discounted deal if I give you...?
People like they say the two hardest things to get people to do with you is have sex and give you money. They require the highest level of faith and trust in a relationship. And we all know people who maybe it's not so hard. If I just walked into a stranger on the street and asked him for money, it's going to be they're going to react as if I asked them to just have sex with me like, 'Who are you? I don't know what? I'm just gonna give you my money'. It's gonna be the same sort of reaction. So you have to build that trust. And but you also need to say, 'Hey, if I'm going to build this amazing product. Are you in or not’? like what's going on?
And then after that, it's really those eight categories: self-efficacy, strategic planning, marketing strategy, market intelligence, sales strategy and skills, money management, operating systems of the business and then business intelligence. And again, you need all of them. You need all of them. Those are the eight areas, but the number one thing is, ‘what problem am I solving? And are people proving the demand is there with their wallets’?
Lisa: And it's not just my—what I want for my ego, but what is actually required out there in the world. And I think that's a really—even that answering that first question was a biggie. That pie analogy was a good one.
Hey, Daryl, look, I've taken up enough of your time today. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. I highly recommend everyone go and check out The Best Business Podcast and then hop over onto Best Business—what was it .ca?
Daryl: bestbusinesscoach.ca
Lisa: bestbusinesscoach.ca, go and see Daryl over there. Thanks very much, Daryl.
Daryl: Goodbye, everyone.
That's it this week for Pushing The Limits. Be sure to rate, review and share with your friends, and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.
Aging is a gradual process of cell deterioration, but while it is a natural process, there are ways to hack its biological mechanisms. Certain supplements paired with sirtuin enzymes can lead to better well-being and suppress the effects of aging.
In this episode, Dr Elena Seranova talks about the role of sirtuins in maintaining cell health. She also discusses how several supplements, including NMN and resveratrol, work to enhance the beneficial action of sirtuin.
Listen to this episode to learn how to promote longevity and overall health.
For our epigenetics health program all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/.
You can also join their free live webinar on epigenetics.
Go to www.runninghotcoaching.com for our online run training coaching.
If you would like to work with me one to one on anything from your mindset, to head injuries, to biohacking your health, to optimal performance or executive coaching, please book a consultation here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/consultations
My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within 3 years. Get your copy here: http://relentlessbook.lisatamati.com/
For my other two best-selling books Running Hot and Running to Extremes chronicling my ultrarunning adventures and expeditions all around the world, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books.
For my gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection ‘Fierce’, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection.
‘We'll be having different sets of genes being activated, and this will be in response to different external stimuli, environmental stimuli, amino acids, even availability of nutrients’.
‘What sirtuins do is they upregulate many physiological processes in order to deal with potential danger’.
‘[Sirtuins] do need a molecule called NAD, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, and without this molecule, they cannot perform its functions. And what's happening when we age is unfortunately we do have reduced levels of this molecule as we age’.
‘From anecdotal evidence from myself and people that I know that have supplemented themselves with both, everyone just pretty much mentioned to me that they do like NMN much more than NR and they can see the effect and this is the reason why I ended up supplementing with NMN myself’.
‘So within three, four days, I actually felt a different “different”. I felt different energy levels, I felt an increase in my energy levels and I felt an increase in my focus’.
‘Basically what activates the sirtuins is the resveratrol molecule, but in order for them to function properly, you do need the NMN because this is what they consume in order to function, and so this is why it's such a good synergy’.
‘Besides sirtuins, there are different other enzymes called NADases that also consume NAD and if they do that consistently there is not enough NAD for sirtuins to do their job’.
Dr Elena Seranova started her ventures into medicine through psychology. She established her private practice as a wellness centre, where she encountered neurofeedback therapy and decided to pursue neuroscience studies.
She took up her MSc in Translational Neuroscience at the University of Sheffield, followed by a PhD in Stem Cell Biology & Autophagy at the University of Birmingham. Her work focuses on the molecular pathways involved in autophagy.
Dr Elena is also a serial entrepreneur. Aside from her wellness centre, she also co-founded a biotech startup before her PhD studies. She is the founder of NMN Bio, a company focused on NMN and other anti-aging supplements.
To learn more about Dr Elena and her work, reach out through her website.
If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends!
Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can include more amino acids in protein in their diet.
Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts.
To pushing the limits,
Lisa
Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.
Lisa Tamati: Well, hello everyone and welcome back to Pushing the Limits. Super excited to have you again with me. Today I have Dr Elena Seranova, who is a molecular biologist to guest on the show. And really exciting. We’re going to be having Dr Elena on regularly to talk different aspects of longevity and anti-aging. And today we're talking about longevity. We're talking about sirtuin genes. You might be thinking, ‘What the hell are sirtuin genes’? but you're about to find out. And why it's important and what you can do to upregulate and support these genes, these anti-aging genes or longevity genes.
So before we get over to the show, just want to remind you. If you are wanting help with any sort of health journey that you're on, if you want some one on one coaching and please reach out to me at lisa@lisatamati.com. If you're looking for help with gene testing, epigenetics, anything of that nature as we've spoken about before on this podcast, you can also reach out to me there, or check out the programme via our website, at lisatamati.com. Everything in health now is about personalizing everything to your genetics. So that's the nutrition, your timings of the day when you eat when you exercise, what parts of your brain you use the most, what your dominant hormones, your personality traits, because of your genetics, all of these aspects are covered in our epigenetics programme. So I'd love you to go and get that.
And for all you runners out there, come and join us at Running Hot Coaching, that's our online run training system. We'd love to coach you. We have personalized customized training plans specifically made for you for your specific goal, along with side video analysis, and you also get a one on one session with me. So go and check that all out at runninghotcoaching.com. That's all for data today.
I am really stoked to have you back. I hope that 2021 is going well for you, that you've had a good break over the last few weeks. And if you're in the southern hemisphere, you're enjoying our beautiful summer. So without further ado, Dr Elena Seranova over in Dubai.
Well, hi everyone and welcome back to Pushing The Limits. I'm super excited. I'm jumping out of my skin. I have an amazing lady with me, Dr Elena Seranova. Hello Dr Elena, how are you doing?
Dr Elena Seranova: Hello, hello, it's really nice to be here today. Thank you for the invitation!
Lisa: It is super exciting. So Dr Elena is sitting in Dubai, and we're going to be having a really in depth conversation today. And it will get a little bit scientific but hang in there with us people because this is all about longevity and anti-aging and who isn't into that?
So Dr Elena is a molecular biologist. And she's going to be sharing today some really critical information about the sirtuin genes. you’d be going, ‘What the heck is a sirtuin genes and what do they do? And why do I need to know about them?’ But these are really important things.
But before we get into that, the nitty gritty of the science, Dr Elena, can you give us a little bit of background on you and where you've come from? And what you've done in a nutshell, so to speak?
Dr Elena: Absolutely, yes, so I'm actually an interdisciplinary scientist. So I started my studies in the field of psychology. And then I opened my private practice. So that was my first business that grew into a wellness centre and was in operation for five years. I had two branches. That was back in my home country in Greece.
And I ended up working with a neurofeedback device that was basically retraining the nervous system of different patients with psychological and neurological diseases. And this is how I got interested in neuroscience. And I started studying it myself. I took a couple of those online courses. And I realized that this is such an amazing field.
And in order to understand the symptoms that I see my patients, I actually need to understand the proper science behind it.
And when I started digging deeper, I realized that it's actually the genetic component that is the crucial part that produces all the symptoms. So then I found this amazing master's degree in neuroscience and genetics, and specifically in translational neuroscience in the UK. And back in the days, in 2015, the Greek crisis was bad. So I couldn't grow my business as much as I'd like.
So I decided to move to the UK to do this master's degree. And after this, I ended up, co-founded a biotech start-up that also had to do with the biochemical assays that were aimed at elucidating gene to gene regulatory networks.
And with that, I also realized that I'm even more fascinated by the science, and I really want to stay in biotech. And my co-founders were making fun of me because I was the only person in the office not having a PhD. Yes, that was a traumatic experience. And at the same time, they were surprised when I said that I'm leaving the start-up to do my PhD.
Lisa: They shouldn’t have said so.
Dr Elena: Yes, exactly. So yes, this is how I continued my studies. And my research was focused on the molecular pathway of autophagy. And I was using human physiological cellular platforms of neurodegeneration, utilizing human embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells to model neurodegeneration, which was very, very interesting.
And I actually have a review in the Journal of molecular biology that got out a few months ago, in April 2020, on the modelling of neurodegenerative diseases and studying autophagy in those models in human pluripotent stem cells. For anyone interested, you can go check it out. It has an open access.
Lisa: We’ll put the link in. Well done. Congratulations, that’s pretty amazing. And that brings me to a point I'll have to have a separate conversation with you about neurodegeneration and what we can do for the elderly. I've got a vested interest in that one. So we'll definitely put that on our calendar because Dr Elena is going to be coming on the show actually quite regularly in the next few months. So we're going to be doing a bit of a series because I think the information that Dr Elena has is just going to be crucial for you guys out there listening. So really, really excited.
But today's subject is all around sirtuin genes. Now these are—I'm going to try and explain it because I've been deep in this research too. So what tipped me down to this path and longevity and anti-aging, obviously, I've been in that space for a while. I listened to Dr David Sinclair on a podcast and subsequently read his book Lifespan, which I recommend everybody go out and buy. It's called Lifespan: How We Age—And Why We Don't Need To.
And Dr David Sinclair is a very, very prominent scientist at Harvard Medical School. And he has his own lab and he’s been studying anti-aging and longevity for decades now. And he was actually the one of the scientists who discovered resveratrol, which we're going to get into today and what resveratrol does, and it's very pertinent to the conversation. But it is also in this book, really giving me an eye opener into what's coming down the pipeline as far as longevity and being able to turn the clock, actually literally back to when you—so, our cells become young.
It sounds almost science fiction-y, some of the stuff that he's talking about that is just around the corner. It is like absolutely amazing stuff that we are going to be able to live longer, healthier lives. And for me, it is about health span, as well as like I obviously want to live long, but most importantly, I want to live healthy till the end. And I think that's probably the priority for everybody. Rather than having the typical degenerative, long, slow, drawn out process.
So anything that I can do to help my friends, my followers, my family live healthier lifespans, I'm into that research. So Doctor Sinclair is an expert on sirtuin genes, this is an area that he studied. And Dr Elena knows all about this. So Dr Elena, can you just tell us, for starters, where do we start on this big subject of longevity genes? And what they do in the body? That might be a good place to start.
Dr Elena: Yes, sure. So sirtuins are enzymes, basically. And it's a group of genes that is quite well conserved across multiple organisms, which means that they play a very important role in evolution and in our biology. And what they basically do is they control the epigenetic regulation in ourselves. And this means that when—in different tissues, there are different genes being activated at a different time. So we'll be having different sets of genes being activated, and this will be in response to different external stimuli, environmental stimuli, amino acids, even availability of nutrients, things like that. And what they really do is they control that all of the important regulatory pathways in the cell are functioning as needed, and they are quite responsive to external stimuli.
So for instance, you mentioned resveratrol, which is a molecule that is found in grapes and in other berries and different plant sources. So, resveratrol is actually found when the plants are stressed. So when there is some sort of either fungal infection in the plants, or there is no water and so on, resveratrol is the molecule that is being secreted. And what's happening is that sirtuins can sense this molecule, and as a result they do get upregulated.
And the reason for this — I guess this evolved from a revolutionary stand point of view is that, so you would have let's say, some small animals running around and consuming different plants, things like that. So the small animals cannot really distinguish consciously between danger, different dangers or lack of foods and things like that. So this process had to somehow be automated. So for this reason, again, resveratrol is like a signal that says to the little animal that there is some sort of danger in the environment. And then what's sirtuins do is they upregulate many physiological processes in order to deal with potential danger.
And there are different stimuli like that in our environment, and we can actually artificially activate sirtuins. So for example, with the use of sauna. We do have this heat shock response, where there is a stress signal from the environment, and then again sirtuins get activated because there is some sort of stressor coming into the body. Another one is exercise. So what happens? And actually not any kind of exercise. But let's say if you're just going for a walk for 20 minutes, you won’t get sirtuin activation. But if you're going for a run, and you start being out of breath, so that your body goes into slight hypoxia. And this is the signal that activates the sirtuin. So for all of the healthy living enthusiasts, don’t just go for a run. Absolutely.
Lisa: So just to recap on that, so this sirtuin genes which code for this enzyme. This enzyme is really important, and we'll get into a little bit more than nuts and bolts of this enzyme, but it does some very important activations on the genome, which is what we want.
Dr Elena: It basically regulates which genes will be switched on and which genes will be switched off. So it allows for a very tight control, for a very tight regulation of the functionality of different genes in the cell.
Lisa: Right. And then so sauna, which produces heat shock proteins, I've just bought a sauna recently for that reason. Yes, yes. Well, I heard about heat shock proteins, what sauna can do, how beneficial it is for so many things. I didn't make the connection to that and sirtuin genes. So that's really something I've learned today.
I did know about the exercise, and this is why like high intensity interval training, in moderation people — not like go and do this every day, please, but in moderation. It has a longevity benefit, has an improved actual VO2 max and endurance. And all of these great cardiovascular benefits is partly in relation to the sirtuin genes.
And just going back to the resveratrol, this is a xenohormesis, isn't it? So a stressor that the body goes, ‘Oh, where our environment—is there's something wrong in our environment. So we need to hunker down and get ready for battle’, rather than going forth and multiplying and everything's easy and happy.
So we want to push and pull in regards to all of these things like exercise, like sauna, like resveratrol, you want times of actually pushing things and in times of recovery, so it's not just going in one direction, is it? It is like balance.
Dr Elena: Definitely. Definitely. And then yes. And then another trigger for the sirtuins phase, caloric restriction. And this again comes from what we just described about the animal being hungry, potentially in the near future. So the sirtuins get activated. So it’s the same when you're on a calorie restriction and you're doing intermittent fasting, you will get this reaction again.
And this is tied up to autophagy as well, which has been activated. So you actually need to be fasted for several hours for autophagy to be activated. And research suggests it could be around 18 to 20 hours or more in humans. So I'm personally trying to do this on a daily basis. I'm having a very narrow window where I consume food probably three, four hours a day. I mean, it's not possible, always, especially when you're traveling around like I do at the moment. It might be challenging because I also want to eat high quality food. So I don’t want to be eating junk at the airport.
Lisa: Pretty hard, isn’t it?
Dr Elena: Yes. I mean, sometimes this actually pushes me to fasting even longer.
Lisa: Great discipline. I can't—I struggle to go over the 16 hour. And I think partly with autophagy—so autophagy, people, this is when the body basically, there is a pathway called mTOR, which we're going to probably do another episode on. And this is a growth regulation pathway where we are actually—if we are activating there's a lot of amino acids, a lot of proteins in the body and a lot of nutrients in the body sort of goes into growth mode. So like bodybuilders want this growth mode for example.
And when you go hypocaloric for a while and you restrict the calorie intake, then the body goes into a state of autophagy, which is where it's basically eating and recycling it's old cells that actually need to be gotten rid of. And these cells are called senescent cells. So these cells are alive, and they're putting out inflammatory chemicals or cytokines, and then not actually replicating, and that causes problems in the body. And as we get older, we eat more senescent cells.
So you don't want to be in a state of starving all the time. That's not what we're saying here. This is why it's intermittent fasting. And you don't have to do this every day, people. I know, I don't. I'm not as disciplined as Elena. But doing this on, I think something like five days may be normal and a couple of days, where it's sort of a longer fasting period. And just giving your body that change. If you go hypocaloric for weeks on end, you're going to down regulate your metabolism. So that's not where we want to go. And then you're going to have nutrient deficiencies and so on from that point of view. What we're trying to get is this seesaw, the body seems to—like in all of the studies that I've done, it seems to like the seesaw, like cycling. It likes going up and down, up and down. And that actually helps it keep its ideal balance, putting it very bluntly and simply.
So autophagy is something that we want. So fasting, mimicking sauna, exercise, all of these things are going to upregulate the sirtuin genes and these sirtuin genes. Now can you tell us—there are seven sirtuin genes in the human genome, can you just go briefly over what one up to seven does?
Dr Elena: Yes, I mean, there are quite a few functions that those genes have. So I don't think we'll have time to go through all of them. The important ones for our subject today for sports and longevity, and so on, is sirtuin 1 for sure, which is a very important protein that can be found both in the nucleus and the cytoplasm. And actually, its expression is different in different kinds of tissues and it also depends on its necessity and its function. And it's actually what we’ve seen is that sirtuin 1 is one of the first genes that would go onto the side of a double stranded DNA break to recover it. So it is heavily involved with DNA repair, very important gene.
And then sirtuin 3 would be the other very important for longevity, which has to do with mitochondrial health and mitochondrial function. So those two, they both are enzymes that in order to function, they do need a molecule called NAD, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. And without this molecule, they cannot perform its functions. And what's happening, when we age is unfortunately we do have a reduced levels of this molecule as we age, of NAD. And it just keeps on decreasing and decreasing, basically leading into death but a literal death spiral, where you don't have this beneficial effect of the sirtuin genes repairing your genome, repairing your DNA. And the epigenetic regulation becomes basically loose. So this is what is directing the loss of cellular identity as well. So this is one of the hallmarks of aging, where the cells are losing their identity. And then everything that is happening in the cell, all of the functions, they’re being so tightly regulated. So this is what's happening there.
And then NAD, it's worth mentioning that it exists in two forms and both forms are important. So NAD+, which is the oxidized form and NADH, which is the reduced form. So the reduced form, it's actually something that not many people talk about in the aging space and the supplement space, so they barely know NADH and NAD+. And NADH is actually important for the maintenance of mitochondrial membrane potential. So if you don't have enough NADH, your mitochondrial membrane potential will not be preserved as needed. And this would also lead to decreased mitochondrial function. And decreased mitochondrial function means that you will have a less ATP production and less energy as a result.
And the reason why this is so important for neurodegeneration, as you mentioned previously, because actually, the central nervous system is perhaps the first one that is being affected as we age. So it's very important. And the reason for this is that the postmitotic neurons that we have in the brain, they are heavily relying on massive ATP production in order to function.
Lisa: So let's stop there, Elena because your brain is so big. We might have lost a few people on the way there, we might have to backtrack a little bit. So NAD, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide plus or NADH. So is this a little bit like oxidized, like vitamin C oxidizes and then reduces, oxidizes and reduces. And electrons can be donated backwards and forwards. Is that the same thing, sort of pathways?
Dr Elena: Yes, yes. Yes. That’s right. So NADH gains two electrons.
Lisa: And that is recycled through?
Dr Elena: Yes, this is happening through electron transport chain in the mitochondria. And we need both of those molecules in order to maintain proper cellular function. And so this would bring us to our next subject, which is what we can do in order to fix this decline of NAD.
Lisa: Before we go there, let’s just hang on a tiny bit on this NAD, because — so NAD, I know Dr David Sinclair said, arguably the most important molecule. So people, note this name, NAD, NAD+, or NADH. This is the most important molecule in our body next to ATP, and ATP is our energy production. So without energy we’re dead in 30 seconds, and without NAD, we're dead in 30 seconds as well. So either or we're both pretty much up the creek if we don't have either.
As we age, the NAD levels go down. And one of the things that regulates the NAD, or needs NAD sorry, is the sirtuin genes to do their job of DNA repair, is one of their jobs. There are many jobs that it does. And if the NAD is being used by the sirtuin genes to repair DNA, then it's not doing its other jobs. And as we get older, like we have something like 2 trillion DNA breaks, it can be wrong, per minute or something ridiculous. Dr Sinclair said, every minute in our body — so, these enzymes are running around trillions of times in our body doing the DNA repair. And also we need to replicate ourselves and do all of this sort of work.
So if the sirtuin enzymes are busy doing one thing, they're not doing another thing. So we want to have more of these enzymes available for all of these jobs. And especially as we get older, and we need more support. So that's just a bit of how that sort of explained what the NAD is.
Now, we should go on to the next part of the equation. So like there was an NAD salvage pathway, the body needs grams of it every day and we don't necessarily just get it by our food. But there is NAD boosters. What can we do to increase our NAD levels in the body?
Dr Elena: Yes, so yes, this is exactly where energy booster supplements come in. And there are various supplements out there. and recent evidence points towards two particular molecules that are being researched. One is an NR, nicotinamide riboside and then the second one is NMN, which is nicotinamide mononucleotide.
So now the NR molecule, in order to boost the NAD levels it needs to be converted into NMN first. And for this reason, scientists are focusing predominantly on NM. And I would say now there is increased interest in the NMN molecule at the moment because it looks like it has increased bioavailability, is being absorbed better. And in tests in mice, it does have a better effect on NR in terms of boosting NAD, but also in terms of the—in terms of improving the phenotype of aging mice with different studies that we've seen that have come out in the past couple of years, from gene expression to energy metabolism, lipid metabolism, insulin sensitivity. A bunch of other markers being improved in my supplemented with NMN. And I have to be honest with you I haven't looked in depth into the research for NR, however the evidence from NMN studies so far is quite overwhelming for me.
Lisa: Exactly, wonderful with all the research, too.
Dr Elena: Yes. I mean we would need to have more comparisons but from anecdotal evidence from myself and people that I know that have supplemented themselves with both, everyone just pretty much mentions to me that they do like NMN much more than NR, and they can see the effect. And this is the reason why I ended up supplementing with NMN myself.
So basically, I started studying NAD biology in block during my PhD. And unfortunately, my research paper is not published yet, so I won't be able to share that out. Perhaps next year hopefully I'll be able to share my data with you.
There is a paper from our collaborators lab though that is on bio archive already. And it's from Viktor Korolchuk in Newcastle. And they showed there how basically functional autophagy can maintain NADH pools, which is quite an interesting paper. And it does intertwine a bit with my work. But unfortunately, I can't share right now.
Lisa: Yes, you have to keep zip right now until it's published. So we can link to the bio archive, the one you mentioned there, at least, do some research and also I’ll also link to Dr David Sinclair's work, in his book, obviously. Because it does put it in in a way that people can understand, which is really, really important.
Okay, so NMN, nicotinamide mononucleotide is one of the in NAD boosters, and we need the in NAD to...
Dr Elena: Yes. And it's the only direct precursor of NAD. So this is the beauty of it. So from NMN, it converts straight away to NAD. So this is why it has such an enhanced bioavailability. This is why it has those effects because NAD is quite a large molecule by itself. So it's actually hard to—if you supplement orally with NAD. The absorption of the—it will not be high, because of how big the molecule is. So this is why it's called dinucleotide because it has two nucleotides that would need to penetrate the cell. But NMN is a mono nucleotide. And this is why it absorbs better
Lisa: It's actually made there—it's put together in the cell. So the nicotinamide mononucleotide enters through the membrane into the cell, from what I'm understanding, and then it becomes a dinucleotide. So it's a phosphorus molecule, I think or something that's added to the NMN. And then it's an NAD.
Dr Elena: So yes, so basically it's NMN is a phosphorylated NR molecule basically.
Lisa: Okay, phosphorylated NR molecule, okay, and then when it goes to NAD...
Dr Elena: And that’s the reason why NMN is actually a bit more expensive than other supplements. Because in comparison to other supplements that are just, let's say, plant extracts or something like this, there is quite a lot of biology implicated in the production of NMN. So there are several steps it would need to go through. And it's quite complex and laborious to produce. And this is why it's a bit higher in terms of price.
But from my personal experience again, so I started supplementing with NMN over a year ago, while I was still doing my PhD. And at that point—when I found NMN, I already had a burnout. So, which is something that a lot of PhD students experience and my project was quite, quite challenging. And human embryonic stem cells require quite a lot of cell culture in order to just survive, let alone to expand them and do experiments on them.
So yes, at some point during my PhD, I literally was doing 18 hours, from 6am till midnight. With eight or ten hours of cell culture during that day, let alone the experiments I had to do. So yes, quite challenging. However, it was a priceless experience. I learned a lot. And I think that it was definitely worth it.
So yes, back in the day, so while I was experiencing this burnout, I found out about NMN. And I thought to give it a go. And it was basically amazing the fact because I've been supplementing with different supplements for the past 15 years or so. And I'm a biohacker myself.
Lisa: Yes, yes. Like me.
Dr Elena: I transfer with different supplements and stuff. And this was the supplement that I felt the effect of within a few days of taking it and I've never experienced that before with any other supplements. So within three, four days, I actually felt different. I felt the different energy levels. I felt an increase in my energy levels and I felt an increase in my focus. And I remember my partner calling me at some point in the evening at 8 or 9pm, something like that. And we were talking on the phone and he just said ‘Oh, so you're not tired yet’. And I’m like, ‘No, I'm not tired. I actually feel great’.
Lisa: ‘This stuff's working’.
Dr Elena: Absolutely. Yes. And this is how my current business was born. And this is how NMN Bio was born. And I was so excited to actually have a product in the market that is pure, potent and I know that it is what it is. And because I have been struggling to find a good supplier of NMN for quite some time.
Lisa: Tell me about it.
Dr Elena: Yes, because of its price, I think that there are quite a lot of opportunistic companies out there that just white label the NMN powder, and they don't even have a certificate of analysis and you don't even know what's in there and things like that. And they just totally diluted with niacin or something else.
Lisa: Exactly. Yes, this is a danger and this is why having a significant analysis and having it scientifically backed in every batch tested and stuff is really important. I've been on—prior to meeting Dr Elena—I've been on in NMN for maybe five, six months now. And I've had my mom and my brother on it and my husband on it. But I had to go through, jump through all of these loops to get it out of America. Get it sent to someone there. Get it shipped over here and it's not been available down the scene of the world. And finding a reputable source is absolutely key with this molecule.
I remember David Sinclair saying, when you do get your NMN do keep it in a cool, dry place. So don't stick it in a hot place under the sun somewhere. Ideally, probably in the fridge if you can, to give it an extended shelf life and for it to do its job properly.
So you've founded a company NMN Bio, at the UK, and I'm really excited to be working with Dr Elena and I'm going to be importing it down to Australasia.
Dr Elena: I'm super excited about this too.
Lisa: Yes, me too. Like it's just super exciting for me. Because I'm spending a fortune a month, giving this to my family anyway. And I could never test what I was doing. And now I have a place where I can trust that it's coming from a good source.
So nicotinamide mononucleotide is the one aspect but that's not the end of it all. Is it though? That's not—so resveratrol we mentioned before. This work in combination—and on that point, it should be trans-resveratrol that you take, if you're taking resveratrol with it.
Dr Elena: Yes, absolutely.
Lisa: And we don't have this yet in the cater of products. But this is in the pipeline, isn't it, Dr Elena?
Dr Elena: Absolutely. Yes, this is coming in 2021. Super excited about it. Hopefully we'll have it on the market in the next few months.
Lisa: In the next months.
And but resveratrol, trans-resveratrol you want to be taking that in combination with nicotinamide mononucleotide. So an analogy that Dr Sinclair said was resveratrol is like the accelerator pedal and nicotinamide is the fuel. I think that’s the way around.
Dr Elena: Yes, absolutely. That's correct, because basically what activates the sirtuin is the resveratrol molecule. But in order for them to function properly, you do need the NMN because this is what they consume in order to function. And so this is why it's such a good synergy. And as you said, trans-resveratrol is absorbed much more. And also in order to increase the bioavailability of resveratrol, it's good to take it with some sort of full fat dairy. So for instance, a yogurt. David Sinclair says that he does take it in the morning with a full fat yogurt.
Lisa: With some fat, yes..
Dr Elena: In fats, or you could you could do some cheese, probably. I do yogurt as well.
Lisa: Does it have to be dairy? I've been taking it with oil, is that okay?
Dr Elena: Yes, this could work as well. So yes, absolutely. There are a few people doing olive oil for this type.
Lisa: So it just needs a fat in order for it to be bioavailable, because it’s a dry powder. And so the oil in the fat helps. Because it's a very insoluble molecule.
Dr Elena: And then what I do for my personal anti-aging cocktail...
Lisa: Which is obviously working, because Dr Elena is actually 110 years old.
Dr Elena: No, just 32.
Lisa: She’s just 32 but looks like—honestly, I thought, seriously 32? I would have thought you were 22. So something's working. The good diet. It can't be that overworked because you've been definitely overworking for the past few years. And this is obviously helping.
And I'm 52. So I'm old enough to be your mom. And I'm definitely super excited about anything that's coming down the pathway that's going to slow down the degeneration. Because over the years, and after smashing the crap out of my body, I've definitely got some repair work to do. And my mom is 79 years old, she's in the corner over there, taking her NMN as we speak, and her resveratrol, along with their hemp seed oil and all the other supplements and a big green smoothie of broccoli juice. So she's like going, ‘ugh’, it'd be quite funny for you to see her face right now.
Dr Elena: You should also add apigenin to her cocktails. So, this is another molecule which is very interesting. And perhaps in a later podcast, we can also talk about a couple of different things that have to do with raising your NAD levels in different ways. So, basically, what happens, besides sirtuins, there are different other enzymes called NADases that also consume NAD. And if they do that, consistently, there is not enough NAD for sirtuins to do their job.
So such enzymes are called parks, which are activated when there are some stress signals in the body. So, for instance, one such signals when let's say your mitochondria are going bad and there is some sort of stress related to mitochondrial function, you will get a secretion of cytochrome c from mitochondria. And then as a result, you will get some sort of activation of the park enzymes and they also consume NAD.
Another NADase is CD38. So, this is an enzyme that is activated when there is increased inflammation in the body. So, as we age, CD38 levels increase. And what has been demonstrated very beautifully in a recent study in mice was that CD38 actually controls the functions of sirtuin 3 in an NAD dependent manner. Because they did quite an elegant experiment, where they did have CD38 knockout mice, and the wild type mice or regular mice. And in the CD38 knockout mice the levels of sirtuin are two and a half times higher. And then when they put a saturating amount of NAD in the wild type mice, what happened is basically the function of sirtuin is also increased. And it was similar with the function of surgeries in CD38 knockout mice. So this means that if CD38 is absent, then sirtuin3 in this instance is upregulated and is working much more. But when CD38 is present, it consumes all of NAD and then there is not enough NAD for sirtuins.
Lisa: And this is so this is why we need a bigger pool of NAD, basically for all of these problems as we age.
Dr Elena: So this is one point and then the second point I was going to do there is that apigenin, so the supplement that I mentioned to you, which is actually present in parsley and predominantly in dried parsley. So you can actually get it for cheap.
Lisa: Yes.
Dr Elena: Have a teaspoon of dried parsley every day. So apigenin is a molecule that actually blocks CD38. So this means that it can also increase the levels of your NAD and make it available for your sirtuins.
Lisa: Wow. I'm off to get some parsley. I just ripped my parsley plants out of the garden. Bugger. I will get seeds, so I'll have to plant some more. And you do need to dry it in order for it to intensify.
Dr Elena: If you dry it, it will have even apigenin. So, the bioavailability increases somehow, I'm not entirely sure of the mechanism. But yes, dried parsley.
Lisa: Yes. Sorry. There's a noise in the background with my mum washing out a broccoli.
Dr Elena: No worries.
Lisa: Yes, yes, yes, this is my podcast life. Real.
So activated immune cells. So like I've had an infection for the last couple of weeks. So I've been under a hell of a lot of stress in the last year, like really—losing my father and so on, a hell of a lot of stress. And the day before Christmas, I stopped working and I started to relax and my immune system then went, ‘Okay, cortisol levels are now going down. We're going to make you sick. We’re going to do some repair work’.
Dr Elena: That’s how it’s usually done.
Lisa: Yes, yes. That's what happens when you relax. So my whole Christmas period was spent with a head cold and a chest cold. Now, when my immune system is activated like that, I'm going to need a lot more NAD because of this in NADases. You call them, NADases? And the CD38 would have been one of those things that was probably more active when I was sick. Would that be right? Okay, so we need to increase that in order to help our immune system.
So does this—random thought—does this help with other autoimmune diseases as well? Like, does it help deep down regulate some of the inflammatory pathways?
Dr Elena: I don't know, this is not my area of expertise. Wouldn’t be able to comment on top of my head on this.
Lisa: Yes, just me connecting the dots going—that would make sense but okay. So all right, so we've covered quite a lot of ground today. And I think we'll probably wrap it up there, Dr Elena. And we'll go on to mTOR and autophagy and other things in subsequent podcasts, and so on.
So we're going to put all the links. If you guys want to get some NMN, and in a few months, we will have resveratrol as well. I'm going to put the links in the show notes to the new website. And we're going to be importing it down to here to New Zealand and Australasia. And I'm really excited about that. Because there is one other company that has it here and it's not got any certificate of analysis, there's no sort of thing. So you want to make sure that you know where you're getting this information from all your supplements from, and you want to know who's behind it.
So I'm really, really excited about working with your Dr Elena. I think this is brilliant. I know we've got a whole lot of products that are in the pipeline that are going to be coming down in the next year or so. Other things—so we will be covering those in future episodes. Things like, I don't know epistane...
Dr Elena: We should definitely talk about senescent cells and what we can do in order to combat them. And then of course, the subject of my PhD, which was around autophagy. So, this is definitely a very nice subject for discussion, because as you mentioned, mTOR is not something that you want to mess with on a regular basis. And actually, the good news are that there is the mTOR- dependent activation of autophagy and mTOR independent activation of autophagy. So my PhD supervisor was the one that discovered during his PhD probably 20 years ago, 15 years ago, the mTOR- independent regulation of autophagy and different molecules that value also can work and activate autophagy in an mTOR-independent manner. So one such molecule is already on the market as a natural sweetener. It's called trehalose.
Lisa: Trehalose.
Dr Elena: If you want to supplement your...
Lisa: How do you spell that?
Dr Elena: Trehalose. T-R-E-H-A-L-O-S-E. This is what I use for my coffee.
Lisa: Oh, trehalose. So that will help you increase your autophagy?
Dr Elena: Trehalose has been shown to activate autophagy in an mTOR-independent manner. Yes.
Lisa: Wow. So I don't need to starve myself in order to activate...
Dr Elena: I mean, there is not that much data in humans yet on this particular molecule, to be honest. I actually don't know what is the dose that you would need to have this effect, but I still prefer it over sugar.
Lisa: Yes, absolutely. And anything that supports that pathway anyway and getting rid of these senescent cells. So senescent cells just for those wondering what the hell we're talking about. Senescent cells are basically cells that are still alive, but they're no longer replicating. They're not doing the job properly. And they're sending out inflammatory signals into the body. So they attract cytokines that cause inflammatory responses.
And so what we want to do is we want to knock these cells off them to have their autophagy, meaning their cell death. And when we recycle the parts of the cells for the new job, and that's what we want to happen. As we get older, we get more and more senescent cells and there's actually literally ways our body down and stops and increases inflammation and causes a lot of the effects of aging, if you like. So that's definitely a subject for next time.
But Dr Elena, you've been fabulous today. Thank you so much for the work you do, for the patient you bring to the project. I'm super excited about our collaboration and helping lots of people stay younger for longer. I think that will be.
Dr Elena: Absolutely, that’s the goal.
Lisa: Yes, absolutely. Have a wonderful evening because it’s around midnight in Dubai. So thank you very much for staying up late for me over in Dubai. It's probably too much.
Dr Elena: My pleasure.
Lisa: And we'll see you again soon. Thanks Dr Elena.
Dr Elena: Okay, thank you. Bye bye.
That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate, review, and share with your friends. And head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.
The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.
Every day, we spend an average of 20,000 breaths with 11,000 litres of air, primarily made with subconscious effort. If you want better health, changing your breathing technique probably isn’t the first option that comes to mind. We don’t even think about it; we don’t pay attention to how we do it. But it turns out that how you breathe has far-reaching effects on many aspects of human health. Discovering what it means to breathe correctly is crucial for greater wellness.
In this episode, author and journalist, James Nestor, joins us in seeking to unlock a person’s full breathing potential. He discusses the myriad of health benefits controlled respiration can provide. You’ll also learn how industrialisation made it harder to breathe correctly and how various exercises can improve your respiration.
Listen to this episode to discover simple methods to maximise the benefits of each breath you take.
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‘By mastering this sort of breathing, we can not only dive deep, but we can heat ourselves up, heal ourselves, and do so many other things’.
‘Scientific papers were published about this 115 years ago, showing very clearly that you need a balance of carbon dioxide and oxygen to operate effectively and efficiently. When we breathe too much, we can offload too much CO2, which actually makes it harder for us to bring oxygen throughout the body’.
‘That slower breath with that pressure allows us to gain 20% more oxygen breathing through our nose than equivalent breaths through our mouth.”
‘I think our bodies are the most powerful pharmacists on the planet and that’s been shown, so why not try to focus on your body and health a little bit’?
‘By having a smaller mouth, you have less room to breathe. And this is one of the main reasons so many of us struggle to breathe’.
‘Start slow, start low. See what your body can naturally do. If after six months, you’re like, ‘I’m still not, this isn’t working’, go see someone and take it from there’.
‘I talked to dozens and dozens of people who have fundamentally transformed themselves through nothing more than breathing. I want to mention it again. I’m not promising this is going to work for everyone, for everything, but it needs to be considered as a foundation to health’.
James Nestor is a journalist and bestselling author. He has contributed to many newspapers and publications such as The New York Times and Scientific American.
His first book, DEEP: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us about Ourselves, took inspiration from his journalistic coverage of a world freediving championship.
James also authored Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art where he combines thousand-year histories with modern research to shed light on proper breathing. His investigations have revolutionised the conventional understanding of breathing and have helped many people live healthier lives.
His other projects include speaking engagements for institutions, radio and television shows, and collaborations for scientific research and communication.
Learn more about James Nestor and his work on diving and breathing by visiting his website.
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To pushing the limits,
Lisa
Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host, Lisa Tamati. Brought to you by lisatamati.com.
Lisa Tamati: Well, hi, everyone. Welcome back to Pushing the Limits in this new year. I hope you're enjoying yourself. You've had a good break over the holidays, and I have a fantastic guest today. Wow, this guy is insane. So his name is James Nestor, and he is an author, New York Times best selling author, Wall Street Journal best selling author, London Times New York Times bestselling author of a book called Breathe. So it's all about breathing. You might think, how the hell do you write a book on breathing. But I tell you, this is going to be a really exciting interview, and you're going to learn so much that you wish you'd been taught years ago.
He's also the author of Deep, another best selling book that he did on freediving. And he's a filmmaker and science writer for many of the science magazines. Now in this book Breathe. He explores the million year long history of how the human species has lost the ability to breathe properly. And why we're suffering from a laundry list of maladies from snoring to sleep apnea to asthma to autoimmune diseases and allergies. And in this, on this journey in this book, which was absolutely fascinating. He travels the world and spends a decade in the attempt to figure out what went wrong and how do—we fix it.
And, you know, the links that the sky week two—for his research has just absolutely next level. I really enjoyed doing this interview with James. He's an incredible person. And just so very, very interesting. So I hope you enjoy the show. Before we head over to speak with James in San Francisco, just like to remind you to do a rating and review if you came for the show. This is a labour of love. And it really really helps the show get out there if you can give us a rating and review, either on iTunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast. Or if you can't work it out, just send me an email with it. And we'll gladly receive those as well.
And if you want to reach out to me if you've got any ideas for podcasts, or people that you would like to see on here, or if you have a question, health question, if you want help with health journey, health optimisation, epigenetics, run coaching, that's our day job. That's what we do for a living. And that's what we are passionate about. And that's what we love. So if you're having trouble with a tricky health issue, if you wanting high-performance, if you're wanting to do that next ultramarathon or first run your first five-kilometer race, whatever the case may be, please reach out to us, lisa@lisatamati.com. And you can find all our programs also on that website, as well as this podcast and lots of other goodies. So I hope you enjoy this interview with James Nestor. Over to the show now and thanks for listening.
Lisa: Well, hi everyone and welcome back to Pushing the Limits. It's fantastic to have you with me and I am jumping out of my skin for excitement today because I have someone that I've been just so looking forward to interviewing. An amazing author, James Nestor, who is going to be sharing his research and his book, which is really a game-changer. Breathe is the name of the book. And James is coming to us all the way from San Francisco today. So welcome to the show, James. Fabulous to have you.
James Nestor: Thank you for having me.
Lisa: So James, can you just give us a bit of a background into your—who you are in your background? And how the heck did you end up writing a book about breathing? And why do we need to know about it?
James: So I'm a journalist, and I write for science magazines and outdoor magazines. I've been doing that for years and years and years. And I think the real jumping off point for me was when I was sent out to go to Greece to write about the world freediving championship. And even though I've spent my life near the ocean, I'm a surfer. I'm a swimmer and body surfer, all that, I had never really spent too much time under the ocean. And I had never seen anyone freedive before because the water is very cloudy here on the West Coast. There's not a lot of places to do this. So I remember going out in this boat, it was the first day of the competition and just watching these people take a single breath and go down 300, 400 feet on a single dive there. And come back four minutes later and—just it was like they we're answering emails just like.
Okay, next up, back for lunch. It was what the hell is going on here? I had understood that this was absolutely impossible. And yet here these people vary sizes, various forms - big, tall, large, small, all that - that had mastered this thing. And I got to be friends with a few of them who took me into this other side of freediving outside of the competitive freediving, which I just thought was pretty insane. And they allowed me to understand free diving as this meditation. And of course, breathing is at the core of this meditation. And by mastering the sort of breathing we can not only dive deep, but we can heat ourselves up, heal ourselves and do so many other things.
Lisa: Wow, so that was the jumping off point in, for those interested. Yeah, I've taken an interest in freediving too. And my gosh, what they do is pretty next level, insane. I don't think I'm crazy enough to really have a go at it. To be fair, but absolute admiration for what they do and how they do it, in—the everything that they have to overcome. But okay, so if we just jump in now, the into—how does we know? What can we learn from these free divers and other traditional breathing techniques? And why is it important for the everyday person to be understanding how the breath works in the physiology, which we'll get into which I found absolutely mind blowing and thought, why is nobody told me this? And why did—why does, why should someone listening to this actually be interested?
James: So the free divers told me that the only way to hold your breath is to master this art of breathing. And it was also something interesting to see all of these different people. And they all had these enormous chest, they had expanded their lung capacity. Some people double the average adult lung capacity by forcing. Well, they were not born this way. So it made me think about how malleable the body is depending on what inputs we give to it. And so I got back to San Francisco, and I wrote another book that featured freedivers. But in the back of my mind, that book was called Deep. And it looks at the human connection from the very surface to the very bottom of the deepest sea, magnetoreception echolocation all that.
But as I was researching that book, and writing, I just kept finding more and more information about breathing, about how so many of us in the West, including in the medical world view breathing as just this binary thing. As long as we were breathing, we're healthy, and we're alive. When you're not breathing, that's bad, your dad or you have a serious problem. But that is such the wrong way of looking at this. It's like saying, as long as you are eating, you're getting food, you're getting nutrients. But it's what you eat. That's so important. And it's how you breathe. That's so important.
So I was lucky enough to then meet a bunch of leading experts in this field who have been studying this stuff for decades, even publishing in these weird scientific journals. No one's been reading their stuff. I thought, why the hell hasn't anyone told me this? Like, I'm middle aged, I've been mouth breathing, through most of my life. I've been whenever I was working out or surfing, I'm just thinking I'm getting more oxygen in. And this is so damaging to the body, and no one was talking about it.
So this book took me so long, because I couldn't understand why some researchers on one side were saying how you breathe has no effect on your asthma, has no effect on your body, on your brain. And this other side was saying they're 100% wrong. Here's all the data. So it was going through all that and weeding through all that that took me a while. But I think at the end, I finally found the truth behind all of this.
Lisa: He certainly did. And the book is such a deep deep dive like you know, and I've been talking to some friends about you know, reading this book and, and everything. How can you have a whole book on breathing? And I'm like, you have no idea. You could probably write 10 books on breathing and it's so powerful. And as an athlete I've, you know, I was just saying to you prior to the recording, I've spent my entire life as an asthmatic since I was two years old. I have a very small lung capacity. I have a low VO2 max, despite that I decided to become an endurance athlete. Go figure that one out, got some mental issues, obviously.
But I'd spent my entire athletic career breathing in my mouth in places like Death Valley, in the Sahara, in the Himalayas, and altitude, and you know, freezing cold temperatures. And all of the problems that that brought and so this book has been a life-changing thing for me personally. Unfortunately, I'm no longer a competitive athlete bagger. You know, like I didn't get the memo back then. But now training hundreds of athletes. Wow, I can start to influence them and change them and are already started to adopt some of the information into the programs that we're using. So super powerful information, and in really important. So, okay, now let's go into a little bit—the physiology of breath because we sort of think if I take deep breaths, and breathe often in faster, if I'm running, then I'm going along. I'm getting as much oxygen as my body can get. Why is that completely upside down?
James: That is upside down. And it's so counterintuitive. It took me months to get my head around this, even though we've known these scientific papers were published on this 115 years ago, showing very clearly that you need a balance of carbon dioxide and oxygen to operate effectively and efficiently. And when we breathe too much, we can offload too much CO2, which actually makes it harder for us to bring oxygen throughout the body.
If you don't believe me right now, you can breathe 20 or 30, heavy breaths. You might feel some tingling in your fingers or some lightness in your head. This is not from an increase of oxygen to these areas, but a decrease of circulation.
Lisa: Wow.
James: Because you need a balance of CO2, for circulation, for vasodilation. This is—it is integral to providing blood and nutrients to our body. And for some reason, as Westerners we just think more is better, more is always more. That is not the way of the proper way of thinking about this when you talk about breathing, you want to breathe as closely in line with your metabolic needs as possible. Why would you?
It's like being in a car. Why would you be revving the motor? Everywhere you're going, I had a stop sign just revving the motor. When you were over breathing. That's exactly what you're doing. You're causing a bunch of wear and tear on your heart on your vascular system. And you're sending stress in those—to your mind. People like you are very strong willed and we'll fight through it right you'll just keep going you're in pain, I don't care. I'm gonna finish this race. I'm gonna make it happen. Compensation is different than health. Oh, and and so this is why so many professional athletes, they'll be really good for a few years. The minute they stopped, diabetes, chronic health problems. Our body..
Lisa: Thyroid, diabetes, metabolic problems. Yeah, like no hell, you've spent your life being a disciplined athlete. I'm struggling with hypothyroid, for example, and high blood sugars. And I'm lean and I'm, you know, it's like what the heck. Like, wow. And I hope through the breathing in some of the other stuff that I'm doing that I can remove some of the damage because you're because it is so counterintuitive. So that carbon dioxide there was a real mind bender for me, because I've always understood carbon dioxide as a negative thing. You know, we want to breathe it out. We want to get it out of the system. That's the end result of you know, what do you call it the electron chain in the ATP production, and we're producing this carbon dioxide, we're gonna give it out.
And that's not the case, isn't it? It's a controller of the acidity in the blood is something that we want to train, our chemoreceptors need to be trained in order to be able to tolerate more carbon dioxide. So this just dive into the winds a little bit on the actual physiology that I've just touched on the air so that we can actually get to the bottom of this carbon dioxide, your mind bender, really.
James: So when we take breath in, it enters into our lungs and the bronchioles, to these little air sacs, the alveoli, and from there it goes through various layers and enters into red blood cells. The vast majority of oxygen enters into red blood. So there's some free floating but not much. So in those red blood cells or something like 270 million hemoglobin, and so then it enters into this hemoglobin. And it's, you know, it's funny, why would when we're working out, why would we get more oxygen in one area than another? So CO2 is the signaling molecule. So where oxygen is going to detach is an areas where there is CO2, and oxygen isn't going to attach otherwise. So you need this healthy balance of CO2, we have 100 times more CO2 in our bodies than we do oxygen.
Lisa: Wow.
James: Okay, so this is this very carefully controlled system that needs to be in balance, and our bodies are so wonderful at keeping us alive. So when we become imbalanced, all these other things happen. If we become too acidic, we'll learn to breathe more, right? We’ll trigger that if we become too alkaline, our kidneys will release bicarbonate. So all of this is incredible and so important.
Compensation, different than health. We can compensate for a very long time. Imagine you can live maybe 40 years eating garbage crap food eating Fritos. That doesn't mean you're healthy. No offense to Fritos. Delicious, absolutely delicious. But, you know, it doesn't mean you're healthy. So…
Lisa: Yeah.
James: ...the reason why you have to understand this balance of CO2 and oxygen is because you can't just understand CO2 as a waste product. It's still considered this a medical school. Yeah, you don't need it. But people who study this know that is—it's absolutely essential to have that balance, you don't want too much. But you don't want too little. You want your body to be able to operate at peak efficiency without having to go through all those compensations, right? To keep you there.
Lisa: Exactly. So when we breathe in, we.. When I say, we don't hold our breath, and I'm holding my breath for a long time, as long as I can. And then that's horrible urgency that comes up and you start to—your diaphragm starts to make that sort of hiccup thing. And this is actually the chemoreceptors in the brain, which is the area that is what I understand, correct me if I'm wrong, that is measuring the CO2 levels more than anything in the blood, not the oxygen levels. And it's so, the CO2 going up, and then the body's going “Oop, time to breathe,” and it makes you do that, you know, hiccup thing in order to make you breathe. And when I'm doing my breathing exercises that I've learned from you, I let that reflex go for a while while I'm training my body and to be able to accept more carbon dioxide. And that will help me be a better athlete with a bit of a EO2 mix hopefully, and make me faster and so on. But it's the CO2, that's actually pushing the oxygen into the cells as well, isn't it? And that was another, a mind bender as well.
James: It's an exchange. So you can think about those red blood cells as this cruise ship, right? So and they're full of oxygen. And they cruise to areas where there are other passengers that want to get on this is CO2, and they exchange. The CO2 hops on as oxygen hops off. And this is just how it works. So that need to breathe, you're 100% right. A lot of people think, gonna exhale, hold my breath. “Oh, I don't have enough oxygen, I need to breathe.” No, that is dictated by rising carbon dioxide levels. And so many of us are so sensitised to CO2, that we can't hold our breath more than 10 seconds without going.
But they've done a study with athletes. And they found that to very comfortably hold your breath, over 25 seconds, 89% of those athletes will not have any breathing dysfunction. So this is a great practice to do. And this is why this is used in so many different breathing techniques for so long. The ancient Chinese were doing breath holds. Pranayama ancient Hindus were doing breath holds for thousands of years—is to exhale softly. And to hold your breath calmly. You don't want to be struggling and feeling your diaphragm moving. Just calmly, when you feel a little teaspoon of discomfort. You breathe and you calculate how long that is.
Don't look at this as a competition. I know that there's a lot of people out here. No, you can compete later. So what you want to do is to get your CO2 tolerance higher, because by having a higher amount of CO2, which is really a normal amount of CO2, your body can operate better. You will have more circulation. Oxygen will detach more easily. And when you're doing endurance sports, this is what you want. You don't want to use energy for things you don't have to use energy for. You want to be burning clean and tight. And that's what this allows you to do.
Lisa: This is about efficiency isn't and maybe you're saying that the average person is breathing 12 to 18 times a minute, on average. And ideally, we should be around the five and a half or six times a minute would be ideal. “So breathe light to breathe right” was one of the catchphrases that stuck in my head. And that's my trigger for all over breathing again. And so it's actually slowing down our breathing rate and not increasing the volume so much as diaphragmatic breathing. So using the deep, lower lobes of our lungs to actually get the breath end and doing it a lot slower. And why are we all you know, doing it 12 to 18 times a minute and overbreathing? Which is yeah. It is...
James: Sometimes a lot more than that. I mean, I've talked to clinicians who see people breathing 25, 30 times a minute just and they've been doing this for decades, and their bodies are just destroyed.
So it's, these things become a habit after a while and our body gets used to that cycle of compensation. And we start acknowledging this is normal. We started thinking having migraines is normal, having cold toes and cold fingers all the time is normal, being exhausted all the time is normal. None of this is normal. And especially if you look at modern populations of what's considered normal now, I mean, what 15% of Americans have diabetes, 25% have sleep apnea, 10% have autoimmune like, what is going on here? And that this is just accepted that, “Oh, just you know, I've my diabetes...”
Lisa: Aging.
James: ...my drugs. So anyway, I'm getting off track here. You when this becomes a habit, again, compensation different than health. And a wonderful practice to try is to breathe in at a rate of about five to six seconds, and breathe out at around that same rate. I put in the book 5.5 yet, but then people have been writing me, saying, 'I'm a half a second off'. Oh, my God. So now I'm saying anything in that range. And if that's too difficult for you, slow it down, go three seconds in three seconds out. It's perfect.
This is not a competition. This is about acclimating your body. So we can't breed this way all the time, that's going to be impossible. But whenever you become aware of your breath, that you're breathing too much, you can bring your breath back by breathing this way and recondition it. And the point of all these exercises is not to think about them. You want to do them often enough, that you're always breathing through your notes that you're always breathing lightly and slowly.
And that range of diaphragmatic movement, especially for athletes, I cannot tell you how essential this is, when you're breathing too much. Okay, here's what's happening, you're breathing up into your chest, which is extremely inefficient. There's more blood further down in your lungs, so can participate much more, much better in gas exchange. But you're also doing something else. You're taking air into your mouth, your throat, your bronchi, bronchioles, none of which participate in gas exchange yet do you bring it in? You go? I'm using maybe 50% of that breath.
If you slow down with the same volume, six laters a minute, to about six or seven breaths, right? Per minute, your efficiency goes up 35%. 35%. And if you're not gonna make a difference, you're running for five hour days. You're crazy. If you look at Kipchoge, check out how he's breathing, you know, an hour and a half, extremely light. He's completely in control, you can hardly see his chest. And he is in the zone.
Sanya Richards-Ross was the top female sprinter in the world for 10 years, check out how she's breathing through the nose in control, destroying everyone else and all of our competitors. So it takes us a while, which is why people don't, you're going to see a decrease in performance when you switch. Okay, guaranteed that it's gonna to go down. If you stick with it, it's gonna go up. I don't want to say that it's true for everyone. But I would say 95% and the breathing experts, the elite trainers I've worked with have told me 100% of the people they've converted, their performance goes up and the recovery is cut by half.
Lisa: Wow. And then I mean, who the hell doesn't want that as an athlete, you're fighting for 1%. So when we're talking, no such mess of possible changes that don't rely on your genetics and don't rely on you know, things that you can't control anyway. And like, for me, transitioning has been hard. I'll be honest, because I was completely congested all the time. And that's why I'd heard that nasal breathing because that’s the next thing we'll discuss that nasal breathing was very, very important for a number of reasons. I didn't really understand why. But I was like, well, I can't breathe through my nose is just blocked the whole time. And I don't have a show on hell of doing that. So well.
Well, I'll carry on doing my breathing. And then when I learn how to decongest my nose and sometimes it will take me two or three breaths. And the first time the first couple of weeks when I was doing it, my nose was running and I wasn't getting anywhere and I'm like, this is not working. But I pushed through that phase. And now I can run for like a team case at a fairly good pace, completely nasal breathing, if I do the warm up phase properly, if I go out the door and just try and do it straight out, the gate won't work, I need to do the walking, holding my breath, and get that cleared first, and then I can get into my training. And then I can hold it in the first 10 minutes, I'm still finding it a little bit like I want to breathe with my mouth, but that instinct is there. But I'm slowly training myself into that system.
And saying, I can actually, you know, I can actually run for a good hour just through my nose without any problems. And I've also not done the high-intensity. So I backed off the super high-intensity, because I know I'm automatically going to open my mouth when it gets to that. So while I'm in this transition phase, I'm not doing anything beyond that sort of aerobic capacity level. And I think I need this just to adapt. So these are huge types of people listening out there, if you are congested, and you think, well, this is all well and good guys, but there's no way in hell that I'm going to be able to breathe through my nose. Think again, there is, it's just a matter of being taught how to do it. And that's a pretty simple couple of exercises that were, you know, that's in the book. It can really, really help us if you persevere through it.
And then I expect to see improvements and my VO2 max and all the rest of it. Now, let's talk a little bit about the reason why it has to be nasal breathing. And so it's not just about breathing slowly. We've talked about breathing slowly, we've talked about diaphragmatic breathing. We've talked about CO2 and the role that we don't want our CO2 levels too low in the body. Let's talk now about the whole. Where was I going James? Help me out. I've just hit a..
James: You wanted to talk about breathing, you want to talk about fitness, you want to talk about nasal breathing.
Lisa: I hit a moment. So nasal. So we want to understand the physiology of the nose and why the nose is what we want to be breathing with rather than our mouth.
James: So I want to mention a few things. A few more things about running. This may seem overkill, but just a couple of points. So what I've heard from various instructors, Patrick McKeown is a world renowned breathing therapist, top got Brian Mackenzie the same thing. Never work out harder than you can breathe correctly. So if you're entering the zone, your mouth is open, slow it down and build your base and work up from there. Sometimes it took Dr John Douillard took him six months to fully acclimate. But once you get there, you are going to find a power in yourself that you did not know existed.
And this has been proven time and time again. When Carl Style was working with the Yale running team and the US Olympic running team. He said that these people suffered way more sicknesses, respiratory problems, asthma, COPD than anyone else. And he said, “They push through it because they're competitors. They're gonna push through it.” A complete mess. So there has to be a slight shift and thinking of like, you have to accept your performance is going to go down for a little bit.
Right now's a good time to do that. We're still in a pandemic. So you know, once things open up, you'll be kicking everyone's ass. And that's not a bad thing. But just know that this is a wave. This is a process. So the reason why you want to be doing this, we'll get to nasal breathing now is I will bring on my guest. He's been waiting over here patiently. Steve, for the people who aren't watching this, I'm holding up a cross section of a human skull. You can see the nose right here. When you breathe through the nose, you're forcing air through this labyrinth.
It's so similar to a seashell. It's called the nasal concha. So seashells have their shells this way to keep invaders out to keep pathogens out. Right? Our noses serve the exact same function. This is our first line of defence. So when we breathe through our nose, we're heating air which is important in cold climates where humidifying it, which is very important in dry climates. We're pressurizing it, we're conditioning it, we're removing particulate which is important, if you live in a city or basically anywhere else now. We're helping to fight more viruses. So there will be a smaller viral load breathing through the nose. And we condition this air so by the time it enters our lungs, it is properly conditioned to be more easily absorbed. When you're breathing through your mouth. You can consider the lungs as an external organ. Yeah, because they're just exposed to everything in your environment. So not only that, not only is this the most effective filter we have is it forces us to breathe more slowly. This is a self-regulating device. Yeah. How long did it take me to take that breath took a while? How long does this take? Yeah, nothing. So that's slower breath with that pressure allows us to gain 20% more oxygen breathing through our nose than equivalent breaths through our mouth. Again, if you think this is gonna make no difference to, you you're absolutely crazy. And this is simple science. You know, this isn't controversial stuff.
Lisa: No, this is simple science, but not well, knowing until your book came out and became a worldwide best selling book. Thank goodness because this stuff needs to be out there. And I'm called silly because I'm deep in the waves and in researching all the time. And by hacking and the latest longevity, and the goodness knows what I'm just always into the latest and greatest. And I'm constantly surprised at how you know that some fantastic information never sees the light of day, because of the systems that are in place, or traditions and laws and stuff. And it's like, wow, we have to get this information out there.
And this is one of those times when I'm thinking thank goodness, someone has put this into a book that's readable for people to understand the science without having to do such a deep dive themselves. And I think that that's really important. And that nasal, you know, nasal breathing. Also, it does another thing that I found really, really interesting was all about the nitric oxide. Can you explain what nitric oxide is and what it does in the body and why the nose is so important in that regard?
James: Nitric oxide is this amazing molecule that our bodies produce that plays a central role in vasodilation. Having more nitric oxide will decrease your chances of having a stroke, will decrease your chances of having a heart attack. It will increase circulation to your brain. I mean, I can go on and on here. It's no coincidence that the drugs Sildenafil also known as viagra, guess what it does, it releases nitric oxide in your body. That's how it cleans. Yeah, we get six times.
One study showed that we get six times more nitric oxide breathing through our nose than we do through our mouth. And if we hum we get 15 times more nitric oxide. So this has an incredible effect on the body and especially now there are 11 clinical trials right now where they're giving patients with COVID. Guess what? Nitric oxide. And apparently, according to Nobel Laureate, Louis Ignarro, oh, it's working wonderfully well in these. Studies are going to be out soon. I heard something. My brother in law's an ER doctor, my father in law's a pulmonologist. So we talk all about this stuff. And the vast majority of the people suffering the worst symptoms of COVID are people with chronic inflammation.
And as an opposite, very observational study. There are also mouth breathers. Yeah. And this was known 100 years ago, they were saying 75 to 80% of the people with tuberculosis are mouth breathers, chronic mouth breather. So there's been no official study on this just this is just observational stuff. Don't go write me about this, that your nasal breathing got COVID. It can happen.
Lisa: Can happen still, we're not saying that.
James: It's to me, but we know that can happen. But we also know something else. That breathing through the nose will help you defend your bodies so much more effectively, against viruses. And this is what Louis Ignarro again, he won a Nobel Prize. So listen to that guy, if you're not gonna listen...
Lisa: Yes and I've actually I've heard Dr Ignarro speak a number of times, and I'm hoping I can get him on my podcast to actually just to talk a whole session on nitric oxide and what he discovered, because he he won a prize for discovering this, this gas if you like in the body, because nobody really understood what it was or how it operated.
And it is being used for Viagra. And the reason it works for that is that it expands and dilates the blood vessels, but that's what's actually doing it and all parts of our body. And therefore when we're doing this nasal breathing, and we're getting more of that nitric oxide and I mean, a lot of the athletic supplements that you can get now in your corner supplement store are about, you know, drinking beetroot juice or whatever increases your nitric oxide. So this is another way to get at an info for you athletes out there. You want better performance, you know, a lot of my athletes are on beetroot juice and things like that. Just nasal breathing is another way of doing that. You know, so that's a really big piece of the puzzle, I think.
James: And those don't work. They certainly work but the key was so much of this just like with a key with oxygen. You don't like, go and get a bunch of oxygen for five minutes, then walk away so I'll fix them. You want to constantly be producing this stuff. So beet juice, you know what we'll work for a short amount of time. But to me, it seems like a much better idea to use something that we're naturally gifted with to use our nose. And to constantly be having a body that can constantly produce a healthy healthy level of nitric oxide. I drink beet juice.
I'm a big fan of that, the nitrates and other vegetables can help release more nitric oxide. Great stuff, right? But nasal how often can you be drinking beet juice, you don't want to be drinking that 10 times sugar in it.
Lisa: No. There's a lot of sugar in it.
James: There’s a lot of sugar in it and you know, occasionally is great, but there's other ways of doing this. And you know, I think our bodies are the most powerful pharmacists on the planet and that's been shown so why not try to focus on your body and health a little bit? Well last thing I want to mention that I just find, is so frustrating here in the US is all this talk of COVID all this talk of you know wear a mask, which I'm a believer in that stay at home. I'm a believer in that. Zero talk about not eating four double cheeseburgers a day.
Lisa: Hey, mean.
James: Ola, like getting your health and breathing through your nose. like where's that conversation? Getting vitamin D, getting vitamin C. And so anyway, we've seen what the government's you guys have a much more progressive government, let me tell you, we're so jealous of it. But now we have the whole...
Lisa: We’ll be a medical society, though there's nothing. It's not that late. But yeah, and I've had a number of episodes, I've just done a five part series on vitamin C, and intravenous vitamin C, and cancer, and sepsis. And, you know, the whole gamut in the problems there. In this, every single doctor has said to me too, when it comes to COVID, why aren't we building up our immune system so that we don't get people in our ICU on ventilators? You know, so that we don't get to that point, or we have less people and, you know, that just seems like a no brainer to me, but we're still promoting eating crap and drinking crap. And, you know, and not taking into account. It's, yes, I mean, the vaccines and all that, but how about we just take a little bit of self-responsibility we might not have as bad if we do get it.
You know, like I've got a mum. I've just written a book called Relentless that my listeners know about and it was about rehabilitating my mum back from an aneurysm four and a half years ago, where she hit massive aneurysm. Hardly any higher function, I was told, like, should never do anything. Again, I spent four and a half years rehabilitating her and she's completely normal. Again, she's driving the car, she's walking, jogging, everything's fine. And this is why I've ended up doing what I do, because I'm very passionate, because none. And I mean, none of this was offered in the standard medical system that we were in. They were great at the surgeries, they were great in the crisis.
But when it came to rehabilitation, there was just nothing there, and so I discovered all of these things. And one of the passions I have is just staying one step ahead of here and giving her the next thing now she's 79 years old, I want to keep her healthy. So when COVID threatened us, you know, I've, you know, got over there in the corner, my hyperbaric oxygen chamber, my ozone over the air, and, you know, you name it. I've got it so that if it does come, we prepared as prepared as we can be. And that is a good approach, I think prevention, rather than waiting for the disaster, and then trying to pick up the pieces at the end of the day. You know?
James: Yeah, and I just want to be clear, and I know that you're saying the same thing here. There's, doctors in my family that practice Western medicine who've helped people, when I get a car accident, last thing I want is acupuncture. I want to go to the ER and have somebody say, “Sir, I break a bone. I'm not doing pranayama breath work, I'm going to go and get a cast.” But about rehabilitation. This is 100% true, because it costs a lot of money.
There's no way a system can support full rehabilitation. And one thing that I've heard from almost every expert in the field, whether it's a professor at a university, or an MD, or a nutritionist, or whatever is they believe, this isn't my view. This is their view. I want to be objective here but they believe that there's a reason people aren't talking about breathing again. It's, there's no money in it. There's a money. Oh, why the US government isn't saying “Don't go to McDonald's today.” That's going to shut the economy down. So the good news about this is people who are interested want to take control of their health. There are now other means of getting information from people who have studied this stuff, people who are into scientific references, who are looking at science in a real objective way.
And so I view this thing, hopefully, this is going to be a lesson we can all learn then that we can acknowledge how incredible the human body is, how we become susceptible to illness, and how to better defend ourselves in the future.
Lisa: I'm just so on board with all of that. And I think it's our right and this is a problem we do. You know, we love Western medicine, they do some brilliant things. I love naturopathic medicine, I love alternative, complementary, whatever you integrate, or whatever you want to call it.
We've all got deficits, and we've all got blind spots, and every single piece of this. And it's about bringing the whole lot together, and not letting money rule the world. I think is, if we can ever get to that point, that would be fantastic because it is at the moment. And there's a lot of things that are being hindered, like things, simple things like breath work, like stress reduction, like intravenous vitamin C's, like things that don't, nobody can make money at, or hyperbaric oxygen is not going to make millions for anybody. So it's not getting out there, that information is not getting out there. And it needs to be out there.
We got I reckon we could talk for days, the job's because we were obviously on the same track. But I wanted to touch on a couple of areas. One was the whole skeletal muscle record of our ancestors and our facial, you know, our whole facial development and why that's part of the problem and the food problem, the mushy food that we eat today. And then remind me to talk briefly about the immune system and all this inveigled the vagus nerve and stuff. So let's start with though, with the skeletal record, and the difference between our ancestors and how we are today.
James: So early on in my research, I started hearing these stories about how humans used to have perfectly straight teeth and I don't know if you're like me. I had extractions, braces, headgear, you name it, every single person I knew had the same thing. It was never if it was just went this is what how it was done. At wisdom teeth removed. If you think about how weird that is, you're like, why are we removing teeth? From our mouths? Why are teeth so crooked? Where if you look at any other animal in the wild, they all have perfectly straight teeth. And what I learned was that all of our ancestors, before industrialisation, before farming, any hunter-gatherer all had perfectly straight teeth. So I went to a museum and looked at hundreds of skulls, and they all stared back at me, these perfectly straight teeth. Completely freaked me out.
They had these very broad jaws, wide nasal apertures forward, growing powerful faces. So if you have a face that grows this way, and you have a mouth that's wide enough for your teeth, you have a wider airway. Having a smaller mouth, you have less room to breathe. And this is one of the main reasons so many of us struggle to breathe, we have upper airway resistance syndrome, sleep apnea, snoring, and so many other respiratory issues is because there's less room in there. And what happened is this came on, in a blink of an eye with industrialised food in a single generation.
People went from having perfectly straight teeth, wider nasal apertures, to having crooked teeth and smaller mouths and a different facial profile. And this has been documented time and time again. Yet I had learned in school, which for me, it was zillion years ago that this was evolution-meant progress we're getting we're always getting younger, you're getting taller, we're getting better, look around the day and ask yourself if that's true, it's complete garbage. And then I went back and looked at the real definition of what evolution means. All it means is change and you can change for the better, or for the worse. And humans, as far as our breathing concern is concerned, are changing very much for the worse.
Lisa: Wow. And so we're, I mean, I'm saying I grew up have had so many extractions and teeth completely crooked and a tiny little mouth and all of those sort of problems that you're describing. So what was it that their ancestors did differently? So it was just the food being not we not chewing as much was that basically? Yes, like that's that was a real chain game changer for us when the industrialisation happened and we got mushy food.
James: There were many inputs, chewing is the main one. So when you live in an extremely polluted environment, sometimes your nose can get plugged, right? You start breathing through your mouth, that can create respiratory problems, but if you breathe through your mouth long enough, your face grows that way actually changes the skeletal picture of your face. So that's another input improper oral posture is what that is called, but it's for when you're younger chewing is so essential and it starts with breastfeeding.
There were no Gerbers food. I don't know if you have that out there, but there were no, like, soft foods. Just a few 100 years ago. So if you think about it, so now we're eating the soft processed foods right out of the gates. We're going, we're being fed on a bottle, soft processes. All of our mouths are too small and too crooked. So this chewing stress starts at birth. They've done various studies looking at kids who were bottle fed versus those who are breastfed.
When you're breastfed, your face pulls out your mouth, gets wider because it takes a lot of stress to do. Two hours a day, like every day, every two hours, you're doing it. And literally, and I've talked to parents who had twins, I just talked to a lady yesterday who bottle fed one did love not want to be breast fed breast fed the other. They look totally different. One has crooked teeth, one has autoimmune problems. One has swollen tonsils, the other doesn’t. So that is anecdotal.
But there's been studies in the 1930s they did tons of studies into this. So I'm a dude, I'm not going to sit here and tell everyone they breastfed people for that is not my point yet. But some people just can't. But I think it's important to acknowledge that the physics of how this works. And after that, if you have bottle fed a kid that's fine. But they need to start eating hard foods baby led weaning, this is what needs to happen to develop that proper jaw to develop that proper airway.
And even if you don't do that, if you then go to soft foods, and your kid is two to three years old, and it's snoring or sleep apnea, which is so common now it's so tragic, because that leads to neurological disorders, ADHD, again. This isn't crazy New Agey. This was at Stanford, there's 50 years of research on this from the top institution here. So there are direct links between those things, but luckily we have technologies now that can help restore to the mouth to the way it was supposed to have been before industrialisation. They actually widened the mouth of these small little kids, and open their airways, and it drastically improves their health.
Lisa: Today so it's palatal expanders that you you tried out and actually isn't even as an adult was you developed I remember it was at eight coins worth of new bone in your in your face and in a year or something crazy so we can still so if you've missed about if you've not received your kids or your you didn't get that yourself or whatever, it's not all over there is things that you can start doing even starting just to chew now like that to eat some carrots and whatever you know, whatever hard foods you can find to actually use those that powerful joy in order to make it stronger.
It's just like every other muscle in the body isn't it? And when we're mouth breathing to our remember you saying or the muscles here get lax and flattered and just like any other muscle that we're not training, if we're if we're going to mouth open all night and we're you know, then we're causing those muscles to be lax and over time that that leads into sleep apnea and things as well can do. So yeah, so this is something that we can practically get a hold on now even if it's a bit late for you and I think.
James: Yeah, I talked to my mum I was bottle fed after like six months my mum was like six months is a long time when I was growing up bottle fed soft foods industrialized crap my off intel I was you know 25 and it discovered these things called vegetables. But you know, so so this isn't pointing the finger at anyone we were sold this story by our governments that said you shouldn't eat mostly refined grains, eat your Cheerios, eat your bread, or crema wheat eat your oatmeal like that this is eat your sugar, that's good. Eat your chocolate milk, you know, so we have knowledge now we know the folly of our ways.
But the one thing that was inspiring to me this is easier to do, when you've got a developing kid quickly growing it, you can set the foundation and their face will grow around like their faces grow different. It's just, it's beautiful to see how the body forms to its inputs. So I, you know, youth was several decades ago for me, for far too long. I was a child of the 70s and 80s. Right? Yeah, we thought I thought once you're in middle age, you're completely screwed. What can you do, but that is just a convenient excuse for people to say, “Oh, it's genetics. Oh, I inherited this.”
Like genes turn on but they can also be turned off and so I wanted to see what how I could improve my airway health in a year and so I took a CAT scan, and I did proper oral posture, you're 100% right when, when you're just eating soft, mushy food in your mouth is open. All of those tissues can grow really flabby just like anywhere else on your body. But if you exercise them if you exercise the jaw, the strongest muscle in the body, you know, for its size, the tongue, extremely powerful muscle, you exercise these things, they get tone like anything else. And this can help open your airways. So this is just an anecdote, this was my experience, it'll probably be different for other people. But I did a number of these things.
And a year later to the week, I took another CAT scan, and the results were analysed by the Mayo Clinic, which is one of the top hospitals here. And they found that I increased my airway size about 15 to 20%. In some areas, and I can't tell you just as a personal story, it has absolutely transformed my life because I can breathe so much more easily through my nose. At night. I am silent. I didn't snore before but I was knowing that my wife would always tell me, totally silent now. And of course I am because I have a larger airway, things are more toned air can enter more easily.
Lisa: Is it easy to find palace expanders are these like any a couple of dentists in the world doing this sort of stuff?
James: Not everyone needs palatal expansion. I've gotten so many hundreds of emails of people, you know how we are, it's like, what's the latest thing, oh, there's a new pill, there's a new device. Oh, I get it, that's gonna solve all my problems. So they can really help people who need it just like surgical interventions. For people who have severe problems in their nose are a huge help. They're transformative. What I found is a lot of people don't need that. And what I firmly believe is start slow, start low, see what your body can naturally do. If after six months, you're like, ‘I'm still not this isn't working,’ go see someone you know, and take it from there.
But palatal expansion absolutely works for people who really need it, but you would be amazed by just doing something called oral-pharyngeal exercises. There was a study out in chest, which is one of the top medical journals, you know, they found this significantly cut down on snoring, not lightly, significantly. And all it is, is exercising the tongue, roof of the mouth, proper oral posture, just working out this area. Toning it, of course, that's gonna help you if this is flabby and hasn't been to..
Lisa: The gym for your mouth.
James: That's what it is. And I view that world, there's a whole separate school called myofunctional therapy that is helping people do this, which is so beneficial. They focus mostly on kids, but they also work with adults. And this is what they do. They are the instructors, the gym instructors, for your mouth and for your airwaves. And I strongly recommend people looking that up, there's a bunch of instructionals for free on YouTube, you can go that route as well.
Lisa: Oh, brilliant, we'll link to some of those on your website. And, you know, I get people those resources. It's just, it's just amazing and fascinating stuff. And who would have thought this conversation would go so deep and wide, I wanted to just finish up then with talking about the immune system and stress reduction and vagus nerves and all of us area too, because, you know, me included in this and most people are dealing with, you know, massive levels of stress, and breathing can I've, since I've read your book, and I was really, you know, quite aware of how to bring my stress levels down and movements and the importance of you know, yoga and all those sorts of things.
I've had that piece of the puzzle sort of dialed in, if you like, but the breathing exercises and actually calming the nervous system down within minutes. Now I can fall asleep in seconds. And you know, what seconds is a bit exaggerated but minutes, and I can I can take myself from being in this emotionally, my god and i tend to be like that because I'm like, you know, busy, busy, busy. And then go, “Hey, I'm spinning out of control. I've lost control of my breath. And I hear myself and I pick myself up on it now.”
And I go and do two minutes of breathing exercises. That's you know if that's all I can afford to do, and I can switch into parasympathetic now, that's been gold. Can you just explain why the heck does doing this slow light breathing diaphragmatically stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system and the vagus nerve from what's actually going on there?
James: Sure. So what people can do now is take a hand and you can place it on your heart. And you can breathe into rate of about three seconds and try to breathe out to about six to eight seconds, just whatever's comfortable. Now, breathe in again. 123 and exhale. And as you're exhaling out very softly, you're going to feel your heart rate, get lower and lower. And lower. So when you are exhaling, you're stimulating that parasympathetic side of your nervous system, our breath can actually hack our nervous system function.
And by exhaling more, and taking these long and fluid breaths, you can trigger all of those wonderful things that happen when you're parasympathetic. You reduce inflammation very quickly. You send signals to your brain to calm down. You actually change how your brain is operating the connectivity before the between the prefrontal cortex and the emotional centers of the brain changes when you slow your breathing.
So throughout the day, if you want to remain balanced, you take those soft and easy light, low breaths, to account of whatever's comfortable, three, four, even up to six, and six out. But if at some times you feel “My stress levels are starting to increase. I'm feeling my mind slip. I'm making rash decisions.” Start extending the exhale. An exercise I like to do is inhale to about four, exhale to six, you don't have to do it that long. Inhale, two, three, exhale to five, whatever's comfortable, as long as that exhale is longer, you're gonna feel your body slowing down.
And if you don't believe me, all you need to do is get your heart rate variability, monitor your pulse oximeter and take a look at what happens after 30 seconds of slow, focused breathing. And you will see this transformation occur in your body, if that can happen in a couple minutes, what's going to happen to you after a couple of hours of taking control of your breathing, or a couple of days, or a couple of months.
I'll tell you what's going to happen. I talked to dozens and dozens of people who have fundamentally transformed themselves through nothing more than breathing. I want to mention again, I'm not promising this is going to work for everyone for everything. But it needs to be considered as a foundation to health.
Lisa: And you need to stick at it for a little bit. And you know, I do my HIV monitoring every morning before I get out of bed and do my breath holding exercises and look at my boat score from Patrick McKeown. And you know, all that sort of stuff. Before I even put my feet on the floor, and I yeah, I can control my heart rate to a degree just through my birth weight. So I know this works. And I know that when I do a longer exhale from that, and compared to the inhale, immediately, I just feel a bit more calmer, and a bit more in control.
And it's reminding myself and this is the trick because we, when we're in the middle of work, and we've got meetings and phones are going and emails are coming at us, and it's like the “Lions are chasing me.” And it's been trying to remember to breathe in. Bring yourself down and calm yourself down. And just take that couple of minutes many times a day, you know, depending on how stressful Your life is. And in doing that on a regular basis, over time will have massive implications. Because we're talking here, your digestion. You digest food better if you're in a parasympathetic state versus a sympathetic, your immune system.
Again, coming back to COVID in that conversation, you're going to be improved, you know, your hormone balance. Yeah, just to fix everything, the way your, the brain waves, all of these things are going to be affected by your stress levels. And what is the easiest quickest way to reduce your stress? You breathe. So I think you know, that's a that's a really, really top tip. This just before we wind up and I've taken enough of your time, James but I you did in the, towards the end of the book, you went into some extreme super breathing practices, which because I was like, wow, okay, because I you know, read all about Wim Hof and looked at his breathing techniques.
And I was like, wow, how how does that work, then? Because I'm over breathing when I'm doing that. How does that work? What is there a specific time when that type of breathing or the extreme breathing one pops just one of them? But you know, is there a reason to be doing that type of extreme breathing stuff? Or can it help? Or is it just for crazy like good, crazy, but crazy.
James: Seems so counterintuitive, after learning about all these benefits of breathing less and breathing lightly, to then practice something where you're breathing like this. Yeah, and I was like, What is going on here? These are two completely opposite things. But think about those breathing practices like going to the gym. You're not going to go to the gym for 24 hours a day you're going to destroy your body, but going to the gym for half an hour and working out going to the gym for an hour and working out says huge benefits to so these breathing practices are all about working out the body and working out the respiratory system and working out your stress.
Okay? So they purposely stress you out. A lot of people think “I don't want to stress that, why do I want to do something that stresses you out?” The point is, they teach you to control your stress, you consciously bring stress on, and then you consciously turn it off. And this hormetic stress, these short bursts of stress are so beneficial to our bodies, because we are not meant to be sitting on soft sofas and soft beds, eating soft foods, watching soft TV programming all day, we're meant to work out sometimes. And that's what these are so effective for doing. Some people find them jarring if they haven't done any breath work.
So I suggest people start with that foundation of nasal breathing, breathing, awareness, breathing slowly and all that. But for some people for whom nothing else's work, no other drug has worked. I'm talking about people with autoimmune diseases, rheumatoid arthritis, even amass of psoriasis. I mean, the list goes on and on. I've seen this time and time again. And the science is very clear that this hormetic stress, doing this in a controlled way, allows you to decrease inflammation for the other 23 and a half hours of the day, which is exactly what the parasympathetic state does.
So I love what you call Wim Hof Method, he's the first person to say I talked to Wim semi often I love what he's doing. He's such a cheerleader, he changed people's lives. Love the guy. He knows this isn't his method. This is 1000 year old stuff, you can call it Sudarshan Kriya, you can call it pranayama. Whatever all these methods are so similar, because they do the same thing. They have you breathe very intensely. And then they have you hold your breath or not breathe at all. And then they have to breathe very intensely.
So this is the interval training, you see what's going on here. So this is HIT training for the respiratory system. I'm a huge fan of it. I use it as much as I can. I've seen big benefits to it. And it so happens to be right down the stream from me at University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Alyssa Apple, who is the expert in telomeres, had a famous book out a couple years ago. She's now studying this stuff, breathing and arthritis. And her study is coming out next month. I'm talking to her next, next week. So this stuff in, in my view, especially with athletes, the people getting the calls now are people that are focusing on breathing Brian Mackenzie elite in stride, length is Brian. He's doing this is all he's doing now.
Lisa: Yeah, these guys are just on the next level. And when I first read the book, and I you know, read Patrick's too. And I was like, hang on, I don't get this because I was into the Wim Hof stuff. And I was like, yeah, I'm doing that sort of stuff. And but, you've just really clarified that for me, actually put that into sort of mistake, that part of it. That it is, like the intense interval training. So you don't want to be doing this 24 seven, you know, you want to do this with a specific purpose for a specific short period of time to create a stress just like you do when you go in train your backside off, and then you come back and you recover from that and it just that push and pull.
And on you're so right, like, we and this is an issue in our, in our world now we are so comfortable. We are so warm all the time and cozy, you know, in our clothes, clothes and their cozy houses and our cozy cars and now we never get outside and we need as human beings to be pushed and pulled and out in up and down and have challenge, you know, challenge both mentally and physically. I think to keep ourselves strong and we don't, that's when we you know, fade away and have problems and get sick and all those sorts of things. So I'm a big, you know, mean, pushing the limits is the name of my podcast for crying out loud. You know.
James: I actually talked to Patrick quite often, we correspond all the time. He and Anders Olsson told me at the beginning they're like, Oh, this heavy braid. This is bad. This is bad. Yeah, Patrick's come around now. Worst wins book. He's like, Wow, this is great stuff. So he's starting to incorporate this stuff. Because again, it's Westerners, it's we always think, it's needs to be one or the other. You're the slow breather, you're the fast breather, your paleo or your vegan, your kid. These things all have benefits to me. They're more tools in the toolbox to use at different times. And we're showing this these short periods of intense breathing can really be this pressure release valve for stress.
And I'd be surprised if someone does the Wim Hof Method or Tummo. I'd be surprised if anyone is feeling more stressed after that. I mean to me, I find this is a very powerful tool. I use it before sleep sometimes, man the second my head hits the pillow. I'm gone in about eight hours. And that's what you want. That's brilliant. And it's good to Yeah, that Patrick's saying that, that Toby and Patrick's coming on the show in a few weeks time, so I'll ask him about it. Because I, you know, like I've been fooled do I, you know, because I've been doing the Wim Hof stuff previously, and now I've like, all backed off of it.
But now I might have another crack at it again, and go a little bit deeper and just see if I can, you know, get to the next level. Because I mean, there's slow breathing for most of the time and certainly controlled in the in the training, and then there in the running and so on, is what you want to be doing most of the time, but we want these little stressors, these are medic stressors in order to improve and…
James: Guess how one breathes the rest of the time. He rolls through his nose. Yeah, really slowly. And he hums a lot. Increase nitric oxide. So this is everyone sees him as the maniac screaming at you to breathe, and they don't see him the other 23 and a half hours a day where he's very chill, you know? So this is again, it's not one or the other. It's able to look at the benefits of all these things, just like the benefits of all these different foods that pick out the ones that work for you and to use them.
Lisa: Excellent. I think that's a beautiful place to wrap it up. James, thank you so much for writing this incredible book, and for sharing your knowledge and spending so many years because I know this was a lot of years of research that went into this. Please everybody go out there and buy this book. Get the word out there, share it with your friends and family the links will be in the show notes. But James, where can people find you and in your book and where they best to get it?
James: My website is a good place to start. I've listed all of the scientific references because I know this stuff sounds completely wacko. You can see videos, you can see expert Q and A's with a Harvard professors. There's exercises from Johns Hopkins. All of this is free. And it's at mrjamesnestor.com. There's links to the book too, because the how of breathing is the easy part. It's to me I found the more interesting story was the, what does it do? Where does this come from? You know? In what ways can it help benefit us and that's what I focused on. I'm also on Instagram trying to get better at this social media crap. And I'm posting things related to only breathing there.
Lisa: Yeah, Instagram, you probably need to do a bit of Wim Hof before you jump on it because all the social media has drives me nuts too. But we have to do it. We live in this world. We do James, thank you so much. It's been an absolute honour to meet you. And I'm really, really grateful to you.
James: You have to promise in six months after continuing to nasal breathe and work out. I want to hear a full report on where your endurance levels are and your performance levels.
Lisa: You got it, maybe I'll be competing again with Lenovo. That's great. Thanks a lot for having me.
That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate, review, and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.
The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.