Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #102 Why You Should Change Your Diet With The Seasons with Dallas Hartwig

Episode Date: March 18, 2020

Is it time we relearned to live in sync with the natural world? My guest this week asserts that, instead of sticking to the same habits and behaviours, year round, we should change with the seasons, as our ancestors did. Dallas Hartwig, co-author of The Whole-30 and nutritionist explains that how we eat, sleep, exercise and connect to the world in January should be different to how we do those things in July. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Intuitively, that sounds right. Yet how many of us consciously live by this, and allow ourselves to feel differently and act differently according to the season? In his new book, The Four Season Solution, Dallas theorises that our disconnection from our natural cycles is at the core of the modern-day stress epidemic and most chronic disease. We wake before dawn, stay up long after dusk, live with artificial lighting, heating and air con. We eat unseasonal food, flown across the globe, and use stimulants like sugar, caffeine and alcohol, which further disrupt our circadian rhythms. During our chat, Dallas shares some game-changing ideas that I think explain lots of the current debates in nutrition, fitness and wellness – especially when it comes to explaining why different diets work for different people, and at different times. This is an eye-opening conversation that will really make you re-assess your lifestyle – I hope you enjoy it! Show notes available at drchatterjee.com/102 Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee/ Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee/ Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The body is one beautiful, complex, interrelated system. And if we forget how all of the pieces fit together, we lose the ability to make the most well-informed choices. You know how you need to live because it's in you, that truth, that wisdom, that intuition is already in you. But you need to learn how to find it and learn how to trust it because we've taught ourselves that it's not valuable. We've taught ourselves or we have been taught in the context of ourselves that it's not valuable. We've taught ourselves, or we have been taught in the context of culture, that it's not real. It's not true. And I'm saying, actually, it's the most true thing around. Hi, my name is Rangan Chastji, GP, television presenter, and author of the best-selling books, The Stress Solution, and The Four-Pillar Plan. I believe that all of us have

the ability to feel better than we currently do, but getting healthy has become far too complicated. With this podcast, I aim to simplify it. I'm going to be having conversations with some of the most interesting and exciting people both within as well as outside the health space to hopefully inspire you as well as empower you with simple tips that you can put into practice immediately to transform the way that you feel. I believe that when we are healthier, we are happier because when we feel better, we live more. Hello and welcome back to episode 102 of my Feel Better Live More podcast. My name is Rangan Chatterjee and I am your host. Now I'm actually recording the intro to this podcast on Tuesday the 17th of March,

the day before this podcast actually comes out on Wednesday. Now clearly at the moment we are living in challenging times. Coronavirus has hit the world, people are scared, they're feeling anxious and are really quite worried about the future. Over the past few days I've been questioning whether to actually release this podcast conversation and actually whether it's appropriate at the moment to put out conversations like this but having heard from you on social media and having reflected on it myself I've decided as much as possible to keep to my Wednesday 1pm release schedule over the coming weeks and months to try and provide a sense of normality, but also to hopefully give you some

interesting conversations to ponder each week, especially if you're spending a lot of time at home, isolated and away from loved ones. I know that this is no substitute for things returning back to normal as soon as possible, but nonetheless, I hope these conversations provide a little bit of respite and escapism. I am trying my very best to put together some coronavirus-specific content on the podcast, so stay tuned over the next few days and hopefully I can release something very, very shortly. Now, today's conversation is all about seasons and what seasons mean when it comes to our health. It's actually a conversation I recorded with my really good mate, Dallas Hartwig, back in September last year when I was in LA. And I've been waiting to

release it this week to coincide with the release of Dallas's fabulous new book, The Four Seasons Solution. Dallas asserts that instead of sticking to the same habits and behaviours year round, we should change with the seasons, as our ancestors did. Dallas is the co-author of one of the most successful food books of the last decade, The Whole 30. He's also a nutritionist and explains that how we eat, sleep, exercise and connect to the world in January should be different to how we do those things in July. It makes sense, doesn't it? Intuitively, that sounds right. Yet how many of us consciously live by this and allow ourselves to feel differently and act differently according to the season?

In his new book, The Four Season Solution, Dallas theorizes that our disconnection from our natural cycles is at the core of the modern day stress epidemic and most chronic disease. We wait before dawn, we stay up long after dusk, live with artificial lighting, heating, and air con. We eat unseasonal food, we fly across the globe and use stimulants like sugar, caffeine and alcohol, which further disrupts our circadian rhythms. And during our chats, Dallas shares some game-changing ideas that I think explain lots of the current debates in nutrition, fitness and wellness, especially when it comes to exploring why different diets work for different people

and at different times. This is an eye-opening conversation that will really make you reassess your lifestyle. I hope you enjoy listening. Now, before we get started, as always, I do need to give a quick shout out to some of the sponsors of today's show who are essential for me to put out weekly episodes like this one. Vivo Barefoot are a minimalist footwear company and they continue to support my podcast. Now, if you are a long-term listener of this podcast, you will know that I'm a huge fan of Vivo Barefoot shoes and I've been wearing them for many years as have my entire family. They make super comfortable minimalist shoes that you can basically live your entire life in. So many of

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And I've been recommending them to many of my patients for years and have seen great benefits. They make shoes for all occasions, work, play, walking, going to the gym, and so much more. And they also make shoes for children as well as adults. For listeners of my show, they continue to offer a fantastic discount. If you go to vivobarefoot.com forward slash live more, they are giving 20% off as a one-time code for all of my podcast listeners in the UK, US and Australia. Importantly, they offer a 100-day trial for new customers. So if you're not happy, you can send them back for a full refund. You can get your 20% off code by going to vivobarefoot.com forward slash live more. Now, on to today's

conversation. Dallas, welcome to the Feel Better Live More podcast. Thank you for having me. Thank you for flying over from Salt Lake City just for the day. Appreciate that. I think the ulterior motive for most of us, for both of us, was that we get to catch up. Yeah, for sure. This is like an opportunity to see a friend who lives a lot farther away than a couple hour flight. Yeah, so I'm super grateful for you doing that. And I've got to say, I love the new book. Like I literally am mesmerized with it. I think from the minute you start reading it even the introduction has just got pearl after pearl after pearl in it and i think there is so much just from reading the introduction that there

is value for people well thank you i'll just say that simply thank you yeah i think one of the reasons i i think i resonate with it so much is you've taken a very holistic approach to health a very rounded approach but you've also come up with a lot of fresh ideas that i've not really heard before and i think i think are really game-changing ideas and i think they help to explain a lot of the a lot of the debates and fights that are going on out there regarding health and wellness i think you beautifully sort of showcase why many people may be right, but at different times.

Right. For different reasons. Yeah, for different reasons. So look, there's so much content in the book, it's kind of hard to know where to start. But I guess you are probably best known for the book that you co-wrote, The Whole 30. And I wonder if you could sort of contrast because many listeners of this podcast i'm assuming have tried the whole 30 right um so how does this fit in within the concepts of you having written the book the whole 30 right um i often discuss so i have a book that i also co-wrote

um before the whole 30 called It Starts With Food. That was my first book. And that sort of provided the rational framework for how I think about food. I describe this book, The Four Seasons Solution, as the conceptual prequel to It Starts With Food. So it's the biggest umbrella under which all of this other stuff nests. So the Whole30 is a sort of short-term program designed as a personal experiment and contained to the realm of food. This book is almost the kind of polar opposite of that, where it is highly personalized, highly conceptual, very broad, and takes the longest possible view over our entire lifetime and gives the reader tools to kind of think about living differently yeah there's

stuff to do right now and there's stuff to do next season and next year and next decade and all the way through so um the whole 30 and these are very complementary but on just really dramatically different timelines so people who are fans of the whole 13 have used that to you know understand themselves a little bit better understand how different food choices affect them and hopefully they've started to implement the learnings from that into wider components of their life this is a natural progression for them it totally is and you know this was the this idea of putting all these pieces together in a in a con sort of in a construct or a paradigm that kind

of makes sense and sort of a coherent system has been in the back of my head for a long long time and predates the whole 30 um but when i started working with consulting clients what i realized was that if i had to choose the most bang for the buck in implementing changes in a small corner of their life i would choose to start with food and hence the title of the first book and then the outgrowth there the the whole 30 program but ultimately um this is the opportunity for people to take the energy and enthusiasm and sort of self-efficacy that that often spontaneously gets generated by a short-term program with the whole 30 and to spin that into greater and greater momentum going forward because success breeds success.

I think the thesis you're putting out there is going to be very, very new for a lot of people. I think a lot of these concepts people will literally not have thought about. And I think the main theme that I feel is coming up for me that I want to start off talking to you about is this whole idea of, I guess, monotone in our lives. You know, the choices we make have to be the same on January the 1st as they do on August the 31st, whether it's the gym routine we do, whether it's our food choices. And you make a beautiful case of how we should be changing our habits and our behaviors through the seasons. How much has your childhood, do you think, you know, I guess, how much of that has sort of played into your thesis now as an adult? I mean, it's central. You know, I grew up in a very unconventional way early in my childhood,

which became more conventional, which then had to unlearn later in my adulthood. But when I was, before I was born and when I was born, my parents lived in a very small log cabin in rural Ontario, Canada, and we had no electricity and we had no running water. And the light we had was candles or oil lamps. Um, we had one like propane lantern, um, and that was our luxury, you know? Um, so we had a hundred acres, we had a very large garden. Uh, we cut wood, you know, firewood off the lands to heat the house, uh, you know, in the wintertime. But when you live like that, you can't help but be connected to the land, the earth, the seasons, the rhythms. And so my sleep cycle was very connected to to the land the earth the seasons the rhythms and so my sleep cycle was very connected to what's going on the seasons that varies dramatically time to time

so that's always been a you know always been a experience that was formative for me and then later in childhood and adolescence and you know college years i lived a fairly conventional life but always remembered in the back back of my brain that there was another way to do it. So as I started to kind of learn the science and physiology and all that kind of stuff, the research around health and living well, I started to unlearn some of the convention and I started to kind of peel back the layers that I'd put on by becoming normal and started to become fairly abnormal again. When is it a case like many of us we grow up a certain way and then we try and break free from that when we get a bit older into adolescence and teenage years

and in our 20s we're trying to break free from that but then you start as you get a bit older you see the wisdom in it you start circling back to where you came from yeah and i mean i can't i literally cannot imagine what that is like growing up with no running water i can tell you it's not on one hand it's beautiful and simple and elegant and connect on the other hand it's a lot of work and it's clunky and things are slow moving and part of the beauty is that everything is slow moving there There's a stillness in it because there has to be. It's not some sort of zen monk approach. It is, this is, we have to do things slowly because if we want to take a bath and the water's cold, we have to put water on the fire to warm the water up to pour into the bathtub so you don't freeze. You know what? I say, I don't know what that feels like and i should probably correct myself because you know it's great to see your face light up as

you talk about these things which is i think quite telling in itself right and that makes me light up because i now think about my summers where you know my parents are indian immigrants and from from india obviously And every other summer, we would all go to Calcutta and India for six weeks. And I was fascinated, like, in my dad's family house there, I remember we'd get down at the airport, we'd go to the house, and I was so excited because I got to have my bucket shower.

So I'd go in and I'd literally put cold water in a bucket, have a little, a cup of some sort to put it in and pour it over my head. And it was a novelty for me. And I thought, this is awesome. And I used to see people, yeah, this is ridiculous because you would see people on the street who didn't have much, literally pumping water from wells. And actually when we went to visit one of my relatives, that's what they had in the garden so i've not thought about this stuff in years but i guess i had a a slight insight that's what we had we had a we had a pump on a on a um shallow hand dug well that was many decades old you know before my parents lived there um but yeah we had a we had a hand pump and it froze sometimes in the winter which made it really difficult because you had to figure out how to thaw it out like there was it was it was a complicated slow-moving way of living

but there's that's the blessing that's the that's the um the piece that gave me a place to go back to once i realized the way i was doing it wasn't working but i guess that really is in many ways, one of the essences of your book is this idea of slowness. And, you know, we're here in Santa Monica in California having this conversation, you know, people are, I guess it's California. So people are sort of still got that chilled vibe, but people are busy and running around and on their phones. And, you know, I guess when I'm here, I also move fast as I have been this week because I guess the environment often will determine our behavior. We sort of respond to it, right?

So do we in the 21st century, it's one of the fundamental problems for our wellbeing, for our happiness. It's one of the fundamental problems for us to live better. The fact that we don't know how to slow down for sure for sure and i think it's not so much a function of slowing down i think we often think about slowing down as okay i'm moving too fast i've got too much stuff going on i'm overscheduled i'm tired i'm overstimulated i need to just turn the switch off

and when i think about slowing down i don't think about turning the switch off. And when I think about slowing down, I don't think about turning the switch off in a binary way, like a light switch, right? We're not electrical in that sense. We're very cyclical and we're very subtle and we're very, there's lots of ebbs and flows. And I think the mistake that we've made is thinking about ourselves as binary, like machines, I think the mistake that we've made is thinking about ourselves as binary, like machines, like mechanical devices. And so the stillness and the slowness is really a function of letting the changes that would happen in our bodies over the course of, let's say, a year or even a 24-hour period. Those changes happen slowly, moment to moment to moment to moment, in a graduated fashion. So it feels slow if you appreciate the changes that are happening on a moment to moment basis or a day to day basis or a month to month basis.

So it's not a like, go, go, go crash, right? People will talk about, and this is me many years ago, up until recent years, actually, where I was kind of proud of this idea that I never had trouble sleeping and I could just go get into bed and go to sleep rapidly and easily and now i realize i'm just exhausted so there's a a function that's sort of a reframing of like well there's if all of the transitions between our activities are very abrupt then we're not so much slowing down as much as we're turning off and that's more of a survival strategy and more of an adaptation to chronic stress and all sorts of negative things than it is some sort of banner to be waved to say oh look i can go to sleep really good i must be super healthy um so i'm i'm thinking

about myself differently in that same way i often think that um one of the big problems that I see today, if I would argue, as I have done before, that probably one of the number one problems I see in society today is the fact that downtime has been eroded out of our lives. It's been slowly, bit by bit, taken away from us to the point now where we don't have to sit in stillness. We never have to internally reflect. We can numb ourselves with whatever we want, sugar, caffeine, phones, and primarily for sure. And I must read this quote that frankly is one of the best quotes I thought in the book. I think it really gets to the core of what you're trying to talk about here, which is in the absence of caffeine, sugar, alcohol, artificial lights,

and all the common stimulants we use to get through life, you might start to begin to notice a certain rhythmicity to your own energy levels. And I was on the plane over reading this. And I had to just pause and reflect on that. And I think something so deeply resonates with me about that quote. And I'd really love people to sit with that because it is, you know, we are using these stimulants all the time to hide, to numb things things to hide from these inner emotions and we all do this is not a criticism i have for sure and i continue i can write about that because i do it too yeah for sure and so i think that says it all i guess on that theme then um they often say that you write the book that you need to write for yourself. I hate that you exposed me, but you're absolutely correct.

I mean, that's, that's been my experience. Um, you know, and this is the book that I both am giving myself advice in and also the book that I wish I would have read 10 or 20 years ago, you know? Um, so it's, in some ways it's an amalgamation of my own accumulated experience and wisdom, much of which is accumulated through my own personal struggles and failings and trials and pain and some of which is a reminder of like oh these are the things i still need to work on and towards the tail end of the book i talk about that i'm like here are some of the things that i'm still myself personally grappling with that i don't have dialed in that i'm still working on um and you know areas of expertise that i don't have that i in that I'm still working on. Um, and you know, areas of expertise that I

don't have that I choose not to give advice on. Cause I'm like, I don't know what to do with this particular thing. Um, but yeah, I mean this, this was a, this was a book born of personal experience over my entire lifetime, over four decades. Um, and some of which were kind of spectacular crash and burn scenarios. And some of which were sort of this slow ache of not being on the right track um but all of it came out of kind of personal experience yeah i mean i've you know we we've got to become really good friends over the last few years which has been amazing and you know we don't get to see each other as much as we would like and i watch the things you post on instagram and I've seen over the last few years. And there's such a real depth there. There's a real, it's very clear that actually you're on

some journey and you're figuring stuff out and you're sharing some really wonderful insights as you figure that stuff out. And so I have been so excited about when that book comes out, what is going to be in it. So I'm delighted that you actually have put your thoughts together, at least where they currently sit today, because as we know, thoughts evolve, right? Well, right. It's where they currently sat when I wrote the book, which was a few months ahead of when this podcast will air. So like, it's always evolving. It's always changing. For sure. But let's go into that. So the four seasons solution okay so what is it about these different seasons and why does that matter when we're thinking about our

own behaviors well that's a big question um you know i think about the seasons and and the seasons are both literal seasons right in our you know our kind of force for annual seasons but they're also kind of archetypes they're also symbols of smaller and larger timelines. So I write about seasons and I use the labels of spring, summer, fall, and winter. But those are also sort of symbols of certain time periods. And in particular, time periods of our lives. And so really what I'm offering people is a way to think about the natural intuitions and yearnings and ebbs and flows that

are in us whether or not we feel them or are in us whether or not we acknowledge them and act on them they are there so this is kind of hearkening back to um our evolutionary history that we evolved in a very dynamic world in a world where, you know, the length of day changed incrementally over the course of a year, and it got longer, and it got shorter. And the temperatures changed, and our food availability changed, and the way we moved in response to our food availability, and the temperatures changed. And the way we slept changed in the way, you know, so all of these things were expanding and contracting over all of these timelines. And once we kind of got to the agricultural revolution and started to stabilize our food supply largely through agriculture, especially with grains, and then we started to stay in one place and we started the process of civilization and urbanization and things sort of started to get more concretized and less dynamic.

We started to lose and we started to dishonor those natural rhythms and that continued on through the industrial revolution where we basically mechanized things so we sort of outsourced a lot of our physical movement and so we this whole process and then going farther with the technological and digital revolutions we've progressively outsourced more and more of these things and fit them into neat and tidy boxes so they were good for efficiency or they were good for productivity um but they weren't good for our biology and that's the hypothesis embedded in this book is that um our departure from those natural rhythms is at the core of the chronic stress epidemic which as we know and you've written and spoken about extensively is at the core of virtually all chronic disease yeah i mean i really love this idea because fundamentally what you're talking

about is us getting more in tune with ourselves for sure and listening to our bodies and not necessarily listening to the endless overflow of information we're being fed but hold on a minute just take a step back and listen we like the listeners will intuitively know this as I do, your sleep pattern, your desire to get up at a certain time will be different in the summer than the winter. You know, if it's getting light at 5am, you naturally wake up, you actually want to get out of bed and go and embrace the day. In the depth of the British winter, or the Canadian or the Canadian winter where you grew up it's like you know the same time so your job let's say starts at the same time so you have to get up at the same time right it's very different and there's a different degree

of difficulty at a certain part of the year from another I think everyone recognizes that but we don't do anything with that information right and I guess in some ways it's hard to do something with that information for some people, because if your job is set up in such a way that actually I need to be at work at 8am. So therefore in the summer, that's no problem. But in the winter, now I'm sluggish and I'm consuming more caffeine and sugar to get me through the day because I'm not in tune with my rhythm, right? Yeah, I mean, I think the principle you're talking about here is mismatch, right? And, you know, anyone who has read any of my books or explored the sort of paleo or ancestral health concepts, which are deeply rooted in evolutionary biology, which are deeply rooted in evolutionary biology, the idea there is that our biological systems,

our genes, the creatures that we are, are deeply informed by our evolutionary past. And what we have is a mismatch between our very modern environment, which has only been around for a tiny fraction of human history, and the very ancient and elegant machines that we are. And so there's that, what we call an evolutionary mismatch. Well, there's also an environmental mismatch, right? And there's also sort of a contextual mismatch within different pieces. And so one of the things that I offer in the book is the opportunity to understand how some of those pieces could or should fit together, because we talk and there's all sorts of diet wars about what the right approach is on that. wars about what the right approach is on that. But we forget that the body is one piece, this one system. And so if we try to study in a very scientific and controlled way, we try to study nutrition, let's say, and to try to figure out what the optimal human diet is, we are

neglecting that there are all of these other factors that are going on for each of the individuals in each of those studies that we're not able to control for and there we're not taking into account and so i would hypothesize that a dietary study done in the depth of winter would have a different outcome in terms of metabolic adaptations to whatever the intervention would be from the dietary study done with the same group of people in exactly the same way in the heat of the summer because all of the circadian biology all of our light dark cycle all of our movement all of that interacts with our metabolism so to be able to say in a very reductionist way this is the perfect human diet and to ignore all of the rest of the context of our circadian rhythms of our movement patterns of our social interactions

is really to miss the mark and really to oversimplify and i'll credit michael pollan with the idea of you sort of nutritional reductionism or nutritionism but that's what we're doing with all of these other lifestyle pieces and so i'm seeking to reintegrate these pieces outside just of the isolated components yeah let's get's get into diet, because I think it is one part, one of many parts in the book, but I think it's a super interesting one. And I think because it has become so toxic and divisive out there, much like everything else in the world. In fact, diet is just a mere reflection of everything else that is going on, frankly. I think I really want to dive deep here because,

going on, frankly. I think I really want to dive deep here because, look, I think if I'm being completely honest, one of the reasons I like this book so much also is because it helps me further my understanding of various things I've been dancing around with in my head. I have had a particular viewpoint around foods, but then because I've seen tens of thousands of patients and I see what people tell me and i listen the reality is i have seen people do well on a variety of different diets that is the simple reality and you go on social media you think actually these people who are all fighting their case for let's say one particular way of uh eating you know i'm not gonna um i'm not gonna disregard their experience they have changed a diet and they are feeling that way.

Okay, fine, I accept that. And someone else has done the complete polar opposite and is also feeling better. So which one is right? So which one is right? And there's got to be something more to it than is immediately apparent. So I'll ask you as a physician

and as a very well um read and and uh trained researcher um i'll ask you this have you seen people do well on uh lower carbohydrate or ketogenic dietary approaches yes i have have you seen people do well on a mediterranean type diet absolutely have you seen people do well on a paleo type diet yeah have you seen people do well on a mediterranean type diet absolutely have you seen people do well on a paleo type diet yeah have you seen people do well on a plant-based vegan or vegetarian diet absolutely well that seems to be impossible right because some of these things are almost diametrically opposed and yet it happens all the time and it happens in individuals when clinicians work with individuals and it happens in nutrition studies. Because all of these different approaches, all of these different styles, if you will,

and I'll kind of think about them almost as sort of archetypes or themes, they all work and they all provoke specific and often positive physiological adaptations to a different scenario to a different program so for most people in those studies whatever they were doing before is fairly different than what they were assigned to in the study or whatever the recommendation their physician gave them and they did after so there's a change there and the body's amazing at adaptation so there is an adaptation to that situation, which very often is positive. Now, it's not always the same physiological markers that are positive in these different studies, but there often are physiological markers that are improvements there in things like insulin

resistance. So my hypothesis then is not so much that we need to get more granular with the individual genetics and epigenetics and lab testing and specific individual context and perhaps we can zoom out and say well how in the world can all of these things all or mostly cause significant improvements in people's physiological markers and quality of life and in some cases longevity well there has to be something else going on there and what i started to kind of piece together and what started to notice was that the sort of the themes and the patterns hidden within these different dietary approaches started to look a lot like what seasonal variations would look like in diet, as in our ancient past, food availability would change dramatically at

different times of the year. So we would have to eat different things and we would have to have those physiological adaptations to different nutritional stimuli, to different challenges to us. And whether you're talking about the improvements in insulin sensitivity that accompany a carbohydrate-restricted diet or even a ketogenic diet, an extremely carbohydrate-restricted restricted diet or you're talking about the improvements in vascular health or antioxidant capacity that goes along with a diet that's really rich in a wide variety of nutrient-dense plants there's all of these different changes all these different things that happen so the hypothesis then is that uh the kind of the extremes of these dogmas, these dietary approaches, they're both correct for a while in different contexts.

Can I just say on that, that was the penny dropping moment for me when I read the book. and that i just thought i generally thought that is just sheer brilliance because you explained how at different times of the year we might thrive on a different diet like a vegan diet might work brilliantly for someone at one part of the year and a different part of the year actually they're better on a lower carbohydrate type diet you know i think there's such a deceptive simplicity i it's something i haven't really heard before right but it makes so much intuitive sense right it makes intuitive sense because it's truth not my truth but like your biology's truth it's in us i didn't invent this it's not an elegant brilliant thing that i invented i just observed what's been there all along. And the more we have sought to understand the body through science and gotten progressively more granular and more specific, we've also gotten more reductionist.

And the body is one beautiful, complex, interrelated system. And if we forget how all of the pieces fit together, we lose the ability to make the most well-informed choices. And this is not me saying, I know how you should live on any given day of a 365 day year. This is me saying, you know how you need to live because it's in you, that truth, that wisdom, that intuition is already in you, but you need to learn how to find it and learn how to trust it because we've taught ourselves that it's not valuable we've taught ourselves or we have been taught in the context of culture um that it's not real it's not true and i'm saying actually it's the most true thing around

we know what we need for our own bodies yet to sort of pick up on that phrase of yours i quoted caffeine sugar alcohol too much artificial light in the in the evenings which we're definitely going to come to when we have all these artificial stimuli in our lives is it possible for us to tune into what our bodies really want or is literally the first step to find a bit of quiet time, to find a bit of time to internally reflect and actually listen to your body? or in a bustling downtown of a very large city, how much, I mean, is that the place you go to meditate? Is that the place you go to find peace? Is that the place you go? No, if you think about what we've done for most of human history to find insight and wisdom is we have withdrawn from the madness. We have withdrawn from the urban environments and the fast-moving overstimulating environments to find quietude and stillness and peace and insight within ourselves and within kind of small kind of

intellectual or religious communities but you don't find that when you have a constant stream of stimulation coming in from the outside and so there is this challenge in this paradox where it's easy to get caught up in the rat race it's easy to get to it's easy to self-medicate with all the stimulation and i have absolutely done that myself for many many years partly because it's normal to i mean we are and as you know and as you've talked about before we're hardwired to respond to those stimulations so we have this challenge of you know the always-on world with all of its glitz and glam and the las vegas strip and you know all of this stuff all the time and our phones and at the supermarket and everywhere and it's extremely difficult to balance and mitigate some

of those natural drives and natural attractions to those things because they're there for a reason but now they are distorted and used against us in a commercial sense yeah um but yeah i mean i think you're absolutely right that there's no way to sense what is deeply hidden in us and i don't mean hidden in a you know it's not it's not something that we are supposed to kind of spend a lot of time seeking um but it's hidden in the sense that we are supposed to kind of spend a lot of time seeking but it's hidden in the sense that we are not used to listening to it because we have we're given all these prescriptions right the government tells us how we're supposed to eat we're how we're supposed to put our plate together and we teach children this in elementary school this is how you're supposed to eat instead of saying what which is what i do with my son who's's now six. I teach him, how does it feel? Do you want more

food? Are you already feeling satisfied? And to redirect him to notice what he's feeling in his own body, because the government doesn't know how much he should eat at any given meal. He knows. So, I'm really trying to kind of play up those pieces and food's kind of an easy one but um if we don't start that process with our children and validate their own experience by the time they're adults like you and i um they've largely lost touch with that and then we have to do the hard or perhaps even harder work of going back and finding that which was lost a long time ago you know that you know that point you just brought up is you know i really take my role as a father super seriously it's one of the most important roles in my life i'm always trying to model the right behavior but i guess i don't

really tune into that aspect with my kids right and i think certainly one of them i think probably does overeat and you overeat healthy food right okay so yeah you know i'm daddy feels happy because at least it's healthy but no actually a what does healthy mean anyway sure but also i can see a problem in this pattern if I don't start, or if as a family, we don't start doing something a bit differently. And I think your suggestion is brilliant. Start to ask them, yeah, you want more, but have you thought about how you feel? How do you feel when you have more?

And I think that is something, frankly, kids, we can benefit from. How much of overeating and and is emotional eating anyway i would argue a lot of it right so there's this combination this interface between the intrinsic stimulation right the sugar and salt and fat and the umami flavor like all of these and even texture things like crunchy things um those draw to us and so there is this sort of innate biological piece but there's a psychological and emotional component to it too and they interconnect right they're not one and the other separate things they're all interrelated so you could perhaps argue that emotional eating

is really a biological process or the other way around or both they're all yeah it's got me thinking it's got me thinking about my own behaviors and the way i parent and i think i'm gonna i'm gonna sit with that um well i i would i would go so far as to say that you know that you would probably benefit from the same simple experience of like what do i actually need what do i what do i want am i eating because there's food on my plate? Am I taking more because it's sweet and salty and the perfect mix of everything and I just like how it tastes? And really slowing down is the simplest way to do that. Not just to, you know, get better salivary secretion and just, you know, to chew more thoroughly so you digest food and extract more nutrition from it you can make all of those very kind of rational points but you can also then think about the actual experience of eating and the connection and one of the things that i've observed with my international travel and of course you see this all over europe is people in europe spend a great deal more time in communal eating than we do here in the states and by a large by a really stark change a really a really

sharp difference there and um i read an interesting research paper a while ago that talked about the trust that gets built between people eating the same food so if you go to a restaurant and you order fish and i order steak it's a different response in each of us in terms of the way we perceive each other than if we go to a restaurant and we both order steak or if you come to my house and we cook steak together so it's it's um it's such an influential experience to us as humans because eating is a bonding trust building connective experience and we've subtracted that out so it's not just tell yourself to chew your food to slow down it is put yourself in an environment design your environment such that your response to that particular behavior in this case eating is naturally more like your

biological or evolutionarily history such that you can just do what comes naturally and when you and i sit down it takes us three hours because we're talking so much so we don't have to think to slow down it just happens because of the context so so much about this book is also about changing the environment that you live in to set yourself up for success and that happens by assessing what's going on looking at what's working and not working and then making some incremental changes so let's say um you're listening to this podcast someone's listening and they're thinking okay i get that you know i accept the case you're putting forwards at the moment in my house i have a family i have kids um it's pretty chaotic

around mealtime. We're rushing around and then I'm sort of screaming at everyone to get to the table to eat. And, you know, I finally get everyone together, sort of in a rush because I'm sort of frazzled because I've got other things to do. Then we sit down, you know, we try and get it done sort of quickly

where someone's trying to get up and we're trying to say, hey, you've got to sit down. Someone's on their phone at the table um if that is someone's life and i know for a fact particularly having done doctor in the house for two seasons when i actually went into people's homes and saw how people are eating i know this is happening for sure all up and down this is reality for many people and none of us have been judgmental here neither you nor me and are criticizing that but what suggestions might you offer to a family

like that who are thinking okay cool how do i set my environment so that we can eat in a more mindful and communal way right i mean this is this is both a simple answer and a difficult answer. And the simple part of it is you incrementally make changes over long periods of time to move your family unit, to move your environment in the direction of a healthier, slower, more mindful, more present experience, more connective experience. You know, you mentioned, you know, someone's on their phone, which I'm guilty of a lot of the time. But those are, by definition, disconnective experiences. So the simple part of it is slowly make changes

in terms of involving your kids in cooking. It is making a rule that there's no electronic devices at the table it is um making prioritizing or or prioritizing um kind of cooking and eating together not just the eating together but the cooking together um because that's part of the process right and this is you know michael pollan wrote a beautiful book called cooked about that um because it is an underappreciated aspect so involving you know involving more family members in the the act of getting food from farmer's market or supermarket to home to stove to table and because it's starting to kind of put some of those pieces together and on one hand that might sound like oh that's actually taking more time and adding more work and more complexity but ultimately that then that experience can become a family bonding experience

and so instead of going to the arcade or going to the theater or going to somewhere else that would might be kind of a more typical family activity to do you can start to integrate across all of these different domains of living like a farmer's market trip at least with my son now who's six is so much fun yeah so then we can talk about you know where the food comes from we can meet the farmer who actually grew the food or or raised it and then you can start to connect the dots because so much of what we do is so disconnected and so fragmented they're really what i'm talking about is actually redesigning the whole system yeah and that's the simple part

the difficult part is the reality which is those changes happen slowly if i was to make a sweeping change to um the way the household runs like that there would be all sorts of uproar. So this is not the quick, hard, aggressive change. This is start to change the way you think about living well in the modern world and implement those changes over periods of time. Because the book takes the view not just of four seasons of one year and not just of four seasons of two or three consecutive years but those same four seasons which become patterns and symbols and archetypes year upon year literally for the rest of your life and you start to notice some of those same patterns so it is a an upward spiral where each cycle built on the last and it's not the done you fixed you know as you describe that i think

i think about my own family life and i think about how we do dinners and it's funny in the winters the dinners are completely different i don't necessarily mean what we're eating although i think having read your book i'm i'm sort of certainly convinced more and more that they should be different in terms of what we eat, but how we eat, it's very different. So we've got like a high kitchen bar sort of area in the kitchen, which is right next to the garden. So there's a lot of light in there. And where the dining table is, it's actually quite dark. So I sort of don't like spending much time there. So in the summer when it's light, we're often eating on these bar stools. But the reality is when we do that, you know, it's easy to get off. It's easy to sort of, I don't know, it doesn't feel as though we're quite confined in around together. And often we'll get up in the middle,

we'll sort of nip out to the garden. Look, we've always had a rule, no devices at the table. Okay, so that's not hard for us because that's always been the case. I recognize that some people even taking that step, especially if you have children. It'll be a riot. Yeah, there could be riots. And just an added point there is

if you want your kids to go off devices, look in the mirror first because typically they will just mimic our own behavior. That's probably my biggest learning as a parent. But in the winter, as soon as it gets darker, we go to the dining table able to just mimic our own behavior. That's probably my biggest learning as a parent. But in the winter, as soon as it gets darker, we go to the dining table and I take a real effort to put candles out. I love it. It's dark. So I embrace the darkness and put candles there. We set a table, we sit around so we're all connected with each other. And I think we just connect in a different way. How does it feel? What's the feeling there the feeling is because you've already honored that deep yearning to do it differently to have

more connection it feels cozy it feels i don't know you feel like a fuzzy feeling inside um we you know there's this yeah it's it's interesting we i think we're we talk more to each other we're not distracted by the things it almost the dark and then the candles on the table almost encloses us and kind of keeps us there so we often instead of finishing and then rushing off we're often sitting there for 10-15 minutes afterwards chatting which is just a wonderful connective experience and that's just one insight from my own life i can share to to demonstrate that these are natural things that when you tune in happen right i also feel what i did last winter

i was taking baths every night i mean this is not something i've typically done in my life but i would literally once the kids were in bed i would like i'm not a big tv person um you know certainly for the last five six years years, I barely watch anything. Once the kids are in bed, I literally run the bath, put a candle on, and I sit there and I feel as though, whereas in the summer, I might go for a walk. I want to get outside. I want to go in the garden and mess around, right? But this is the beauty of your book. I think you've articulated what many of us actually ordinarily do but we don't apply it but you don't but i'm i'm like dying to say a bunch of stuff right now it's fascinating because what you just described was the way i would recommend people make shifts in their everyday

life in the wintertime because what you're describing is naturally, spontaneously, intuitively making changes in a way that is very contractive. The world gets smaller, literally, like even when the light is dimmer, you can't see as far, like your experience gets smaller. So the winter experience is of contraction. The world gets smaller physically, it gets smaller socially because you pull the most important people to you closer and you connect more meaningfully sitting across the table or whatever the experience is. Which is contrasted with the summer which is looking out and looking at stimulation and having neighborhood parties and going on road trips and seeing old friends and family, and doing all this stuff out there. But really, that winter experience is of coming home and settling, and having the world comfortably and restoratively shrink back down to a very small size. And you've already done that just

because it's in you. You've already started to honor some of those things that are in you. And I think it's a beautiful thing. And that's a great natural example of some of the patterns that are in us that we've largely trained out, but that I'm arguing should be re-implemented. And the thing that you already said is that it feels good. It's warm, fuzzy. It's not, I'm forcing myself to do this thing because someone told me it was good for me. myself to do this thing because someone told me it was good for me. You did it intuitively, spontaneously, and it feels good in a really deep way. And so the way I write about the experience of fall going into the winter, because that's sort of the directional change, right? So spring and summer as patterns are expansive. They are dopamine driven, adrenaline driven, and stimulation,

and novelty, and stress, and risk, and stimulation and novelty and stress and risk and reward and success and all of this stuff and there's a pivot that has to take place there at the end of summer where you make the shift into slowing down coming home resting more reconnecting reassessing distilling down the ideas and people and resources that you've gathered out there in the world. And this is true on a daily basis, right? You think about the pattern of your day. You start with a very small world, you know, your bedroom. You wake up, you turn the lights on, things get bigger and bigger. You go out, you do the thing. So, you're sort of spring of anticipation and then your stress of summer, the midday thing,

you go to work, you go to school, and then you come home and then your stress of summer the midday thing you go to work you go to school and then you come home and then there's that change of coming home and slowing down that's the fall kind of experience and that then goes that continues to contract and settle and become more reconnected as you go into the winter or the darkness and sorry the patterns are same yeah same across all these different timelines it's almost a fractal pattern of like a day and a year and a lifetime because the same pattern is true you know you and i are about the same age and we are approaching the fall of our lives and so we have that same directional change and reassessment and thinking about and i know this i know you

personally will have to know that we are thinking about we are looking back on our previous decades and said what have we done kind of thing in a lot of cases in both good and bad ways um but the experience of saying okay i don't want to expand forever in the terms in terms of work and success and recognition and just plain like beating yourself to death it is what matters who matters what do i want to leave behind and so some of these thoughts of like legacy and roots and where am i from and who am i you made an allusion to that earlier um i'm looking forward to that conversation with you um over dinner but those are the things that change and so long-winded way of saying what you already have started to do in the winter time is the perfect natural thing to do in terms of and it's a great example of what you can do as a

family your earlier question was how do people make changes in like the crazy you know the crazy lives and you've got a busy schedule you've got a busy family and you have found a way to change the way the dynamics of your family structure work to prioritize those connective experiences in particular in the winter time so i'm not arguing that you should do that year round i'm arguing that's the thing you should do episodically that's the thing you should do during the winter doesn't feel right in the summer it doesn't feel right in the summer. It doesn't feel right in the summer. It would feel really strange to pull the blinds and light candles when it's still light outside

and eat dinner in this really contained space. I think the kids love the candles as well. And, you know, that may sound quite trivial and throwaway, but it absolutely engages them in the process. For sure. You know, my son now lights the candles. And I know someone will post that, you know, your eight-year-old son or your nine-year-old son shouldn't be lighting candles.

My six-year-old son lights the candles. Great. I'm delighted to hear that because, you know, with these rules we come up with, this health and safety, which has value. I am saying that, right? Disclosure. You're a doctor. You have to say that. I am not recommending people go and do this, but we have been teaching him and we've been supervising him. And now I feel, yeah, he's okay. I will watch him while he does it. But what you been teaching him and we've been supervising him and now i feel yeah he's okay i will watch him while he does it but it's um but what you're teaching him this is kind of maybe getting off topic but what you're teaching him is how the world works and what the consequences are and my six-year-old son has a small not too sharp pocket knife that he uses carefully for very specific tasks highly supervised um because we have also you know this is kind of more of a

parenting conversation i guess but we've taught kids um that the world is a very very scary place and they're not allowed to use any of the dangerous things until they're much older and whether it is the way that we behave with knives or fire or our own bodies we learn or we we are not taught how to use them responsibly and how to maneuver through the adult world and so we get to the adult world and all hell breaks loose i mean you say we're going off topic i think we're bang on topic you effectively we're effectively teaching them how the world works right what your book is doing and what your philosophy is doing is teaching us what we've always known that there are seasons right this is how the world works there are

seasons let's stop trying to live the same life we do in summer as we do in winter right and the one because that is not how the world works exactly so it is bang on topic because we're talking about connection we're talking about being in tune with ourselves. I'm thinking about Christmas. In many ways, like the holiday season, as you guys call it over here, is almost in the wrong season, right? Well, yes and no. Okay. Let me take a crack at that. Well, yes and no.

Okay. Let me take a crack at that. I think what you're saying, I think what you're getting at is the madness of holiday parties and buying gifts and rushing around and the stress of having to spend money that you might not really have to buy gifts that people might not really appreciate out of obligation because that's what everyone's doing is way off track. Is that what you're getting at? Yeah, exactly what I'm getting at. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, the holiday season, um, which could also be interpreted as recognizing what's important to us, recognizing the gifts that we have, being grateful for the gifts that we have. I mean, here in North America, we have Thanksgiving. So we have this experience of coming together with the people we care about the most to at least conceptually express gratitude, thanks for what we have. And it's a harvest celebration, right? Now it's

become something totally different, especially with here in the states with black friday the biggest shopping day of the year the day after so it's become very bastardized and distorted but the underlying principles of recognizing who is most important in your life and and drawing them close into a very intimate space usually your home to share the same food with them and have that connective trust building experience could not more be bang on with a winter kind of experience or an end of fall kind of experience we've just turned it into something totally different in the modern world so in the same way as we have distorted the sugar cravings that would be totally biologically normal in the late summer

when we are tired and underslept because we've had many consecutive long days and short nights and we've been stressed from all of that movement and sleep restriction during the summertime, it would be normal to have sugar cravings that would match the availability of seasonal fruit in the late summer and early fall. That's a biologic and normal thing, but we've bent that. And with that same chronic sleep restriction, we then create a situation and then we supply processed sugar everywhere all the time. And it's no wonder that people have difficulty managing their sugar cravings in that context. So ultimately, I would argue that the holiday season is spot on if we remember what it's about and we don't accept the modern, civilized, commercialized version of that. Because I think that sitting down with the people that matter to you most and sharing food and expressing gratitude and connecting is one of the most beautiful and meaningful experiences we could ever have as humans.

So what could be better to do then? It's about, I guess, it's keeping the winter elements off it and taking away the summer elements out of it. Yeah. So I think, to contrast that, something like New Year's resolutions, which is to abruptly put something into action, does not belong on January 1st. The concept of starting a new program, of doing something new, it's an exercise program, it's a diet, it's some commitment to yourself, has no conceptual connection to the first day of the calendar year. What it has connection to is the energetic and hormonal and physiological underpinnings the motivational pieces that would tend to go along with the neurotransmitter dopamine of motivation and anticipation and energy and it would dopamine draws us towards things well that's

a spring experience yeah man it just so new year's resolution should happen in the spring and it's the perfect time um it's the time when we go and we do spring cleaning in the garage and we start a garden and all that but we should bump that january 1st and we should think about things in the deep winter and enact them early in the spring it makes so much sense i didn't make this up this is the way it's always been you know that's the beautiful thing about this you've got i get a little excited about this. Well, good, because you should be, because it's great. And you've articulated something that is so...

It's like anything, once you know it, you can't unknow it, right? And that's, I think, there'll be penny dropping moments all throughout this book when people read it, because it just makes intuitive sense. And I've really not thought about that January resolution. It's very arbitrary. Concept. But I tell you what I have thought about before,

this is in my early days as a GP. A lot of patients were coming in, they were on antidepressants. And the pros and cons of antidepressants is a completely separate conversation. This is not the point in me bringing this up. The point in me bringing this up is, I would be helping various patients with things in their lifestyle to help improve their moods and, you know, whether it's their relationships,

their diets, their movement patterns, their sleep hygiene, all the kind of things that we both know play a huge role in our mental health. And I can remember some cases where, huge role in our mental health. And I can remember some cases where, and again, I didn't know any of this stuff back then, but I always try to follow my intuition with patients as much as I could. And I remember some patients who like in January or the end of January, they'd be saying, hey, I felt good for a few weeks now. I want to start tapering off and coming down. And I always used to be a bit resistant. Now, of course, I would never tell someone not to do that if they felt ready. But I said, hey, look, you know what? You've been up and down with this for a few years now. In six weeks or in just under two months,

it's going to be spring. In my view, I think it might be better for you just to just stay where you are at the moment keep figuring out the lifestyle changes keep just taking your time on that why don't you come back and see me in the middle of march and we'll talk about how we can taper down going into spring and i've not thought about this in years but i used to do that because it felt wrong like if i'm getting cold walking in i've got my raincoat on i just felt do you really want to start taking on this challenge now right like do you don't want to do it when the day is getting a bit brighter so i guess that is tapping in exactly to what you're talking about well and there's also the component

too and and you know um seasonal affective disorder is a real thing and also i will argue there is a natural seasonal downturn in the energy happiness sort of thing and i will argue that that's biologically normal it is a really mild version of sickness behavior right when we have uh you know some sort of major illness infection systemic inflammation or make a major injury um the natural response is to conserve energy, to kind of hole up physically and socially, to kind of not expose yourself to such risky, deep, potentially dangerous situations, to rest and heal. And heal not just in a structural injury or inflammatory injury sense, but to heal from the sort of assault of being out there all the time that's what we do every night when we come home and sleep and i'll argue that there is a

albeit mild effect in the winter where we have this culture of being obsessed with being happy and energetic and outgoing and motivated all the time and i don't think that's actually normal across the entire year i think that is something that we should feel a ton of in the spring and summer and a little bit less of in the fall and somewhat more or somewhat less of in the winter. So not to dismiss seasonal affective disorder and depression, but I think that sort of from a conceptual commentary, it's okay to not be really energetic and really motivated to go out and kind of tear things apart in the dead of winter, because that's the time that we should be sleeping a ton and resting and restoring and reconnecting with ourselves, with our partners, with our family, with our closest, most kind of our anchor connections. I write about the book, write in the book about anchors. And I think anchors are one of the ways that we remind ourselves where we belong and kind of what some of these key behaviors are, because we can get spun out with wild oscillations and, you know,

experimenting with all sorts of different things. But that experience of settling and being home and deeply nourishing and restoring ourselves physically, nutritionally, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, all of these things have an up and down cycle as well. And I think that we sometimes mistake a lack of motivation, a lack of energy in the wintertime for something pathological when really it's just a natural ebb and flow of our own cycle yeah absolutely i want to go back i just want to make sure that i'm not people don't feel like i'm dismissing their their depression yeah and absolutely i think you made that super clear and i think just having that awareness i think

of that being a possibility i think it's super helpful for people and might help someone listening to this they might realize that yeah it is worse in the winter actually and or someone who doesn't have a diagnosis may be like hey maybe this is how i'm meant to feel at this time of year well we have we have a mismatch right so um you know there's mismatches all over the place and the more you see these different layers and these different time frames contrasted with the way we're expected to live in the modern world, the more problems we identify. So, in the kind of natural world, it wouldn't actually be a problem to have a natural downturn in mood, to sleep more, to just not be super motivated to do stuff. It would be a restorative time that over the course of

weeks and months through the winter would leave you coming into the spring feeling a ton better, feeling restored. Almost like the same as the equivalent of a good night's sleep when you feel really good and you wake up spontaneously early in the morning, it's that same feeling. And the problem is that we yearn for that deep winter restoration. But because of work schedules and artificial light and financial stress and all these other things, all these other external modern factors, we don't allow ourselves to have that experience. So then we don't emerge into the spring feeling good. We emerge into the spring still feeling mildly depressed and that continues year round instead of it being a more of a cyclical and natural pattern yeah for sure i guess i guess my i guess my argument embedded in there is that some of those things do naturally resolve if we do these seasonally appropriate behaviors

that we don't currently allow ourselves to do and And I guess I would think, trying to expand this out in my head, do athletes, do some athletes naturally get this? Like, I guess they've got competing seasons. They've got some, you know, these guys- And off-seasons. And off-season, right? So it's built into the way they eat, the way they train. They'll do different kinds of activities in the winter to prepare themselves

for summer competing season, you know, where they can push harder, let's say. And it's all there, it's all out there in front of us if we could just hear it, we can hear, you know, pay attention to those signals. Just taking a quick break in today's conversation to give a shout out to the sponsors of today's show. Athletic Greens continue their support of my podcast. To be really clear, I absolutely prefer that people get all of their nutrition from foods, but for some of us, this is not always possible. Athletic Greens is one of the most nutrient-dense whole food supplements that I've come across and contains vitamins, minerals, prebiotics and digestive enzymes. So if you are looking to take something each morning as an insurance policy to make sure

that you are meeting your nutritional needs, I can highly recommend it. For listeners of this podcast, if you go to athleticgreens.com forward slash live more, you will be able to access a special offer where you get a free travel pack box containing 20 servings of Athletic Greens, which is worth around £70 with your first order. You can check it out at athleticgreens.com forward slash live more. I want to go back to what you said about nutrition studies i think you know i've had sachin panda on the on the podcast before and his his work is superb at talking about you know how when we eat might be you know as important certainly significantly important i think maybe as important as what we eat um i think there's a very good case now that

i've spoken about on this podcast before about how we eat might be as important as what we eat you know you talk about the french paradox for example and you know i i absolutely the way i view life now and the way i view stress i think having a two-hour lunch break where you sit down and chill out and close off i think that allows you probably to eat more in inverted commas unhealthy foods you know and i agree with you we have got so reductionist about health it is untrue nutrition is the prime example of that right how we fight viciously whether it's fat or carbs and i'm bored of the argument frankly and i don't engage in it because i think they're missing a big picture so you made the case that um a nutrition study done in the winter might have not might will probably have a different outcome and impact than a nutrition

study done in the summer that is brand new information for many many people okay and many many researchers i would imagine well basically i'm basically pointing out a confounding factor that is almost never controlled exactly that's exactly there are many confounding factors out there that that people recognize and say this is the limitation of the study this is the limitation of this study but we never hear the limitation being this was done in the winter right and i think just to get really specific you make the case i think um and i read the book on a on a plane half the book on a plane so i don't want to misquote you but that we're living in like an endless summer yeah and our dietary choices are not really in tune well we're also, we're basically eating as if it's summer 12 months a year and how different diets might do better at different parts of the year. So

we sort of outlined the overall philosophy. I wonder if we could dive right in and say, well, look, so to be quite specific, then what does a summer diet or what might a summer diet look like for someone as opposed to a winter diet? Right. Well, let me zoom out and then I'll zoom back in. Sure. Because not only are we eating like it's what I call chronic summer, you know, summer on and on. And the choice of chronic there is to highlight the link between chronic summer behavior and chronic disease, that i think is is a really underappreciated linkage um but chronic summer would entail a lifestyle that is uh long days so light exposure for many hours a day with a relatively short amount of darkness which

is what we get in the summertime um it would entail a lot of movement um that's either kind of you know general movement or an excessive focus on what we call cardiovascular exercise um whether it's running or cycling or triathlons or whatever um with a relative lack of higher intensity and strength-based training um so if you look at sort of and this is this is a a generalization for sure um and chronic summer would also entail um a lot of very stimulating and very fractured fragmented distracting social connections so social media would be a great example of a summer type social connection where it is relatively superficial relatively filtered and controlled but we can have it with dozens or hundreds or thousands of people that's very much a that's sort of the digitized version of going on a road trip and meeting a ton of people

but only few of which would ever become long-term serious close friends but then the summer dietary piece of it it tends to be so the relationship between food choice and season becomes really important because in for virtually all of our evolutionary history, different foods were available at different times of year. And so we developed parallel patterns of changing circadian rhythms at certain times of year with different food availability. changing circadian rhythms at certain times of the year with different food availability. And we obviously know that in the spring and summer and fall, we have a lot more plant matter,

a lot more fruits and vegetables available. And that, of course, progresses throughout that time. And in the winter, there's a lot less of that available fresh. Now, in the globalized world, that's changed radically. But for virtually all of our evolutionary history, the summer was a time for lots of carbohydrate-rich fruits and vegetables. And so, it tends to be heavier on the carbohydrate, but to your earlier point, not carbohydrate as a problematic macronutrient, carbohydrate as a natural constituent of highly nutritious whole foods. So then, just as a product of sort of displacement, there's also a little bit less fat in the summer type diet. So this is the last several decades

of low-fat recommendations, where we skewed ourselves into a summer kind of paradigm of low-fat foods, lots of carbohydrate, and then we do that year round for decades. And it's no wonder then that when we corral ourselves into not just one seasonal kind of eating, but also when we progressively industrialize and refine that and we take the nutrients out of that by making it progressively more processed food, it's no wonder then the chronic diseases skyrocket over the last few decades. And that's clearly not the only factor, but it is a major factor.

So these diets might work at a particular part of the year. So that recommendation- They do work at a particular time of the year. They should, because they always have, but not forever. Yeah. So hence the plant-based vegan type diet, you know, by and large may work beautifully well for many of us in the summer, but not so well in the winter. Absolutely. And if you look at the commonality, and this is kind of my, you know, kind of decade plus of observing nutrition studies and kind of looking in a more cursory way at the anthropological evidence, what we see is that a wide range of societies in many different parts of the world

have commonalities. You alluded to the fact that they eat basically unprocessed foods in all sorts of different shapes and kinds. So the anchor behavior within the food then is a consistent source of complete dietary protein typically from meat or seafood or poultry or eggs that then there is a natural oscillation between the fat and carbohydrate the other the non-protein calories but not because we're monitoring macronutrients just because we're eating the food that's available in our region in our locale so it happens very naturally and this is what allows us in different parts of the world to do this local seasonal eating. And very naturally, that will sync up

our physiology, the more we honor our local circadian rhythms as well, right? So for example, and I addressed this briefly in the book, There's a lot of research around intermittent fasting and compressed feeding windows and shortened feeding windows or time-restricted feeding. And like many of these other strategies, there's really good research that in the short term, these provoke really interesting and often beneficial physiological adaptations that are good for people. This is good research. This is good for people. I will argue that that's not a biologically normal thing to do year round for decades on end for years on end it is however a normal thing to change so the the time restricted feeding is effectively a winter kind of eating because um what happens when you don't have electricity um is you do most of your eating during the daylight hours because you can right so for all of human history we ate mostly during daylight hours well in the winter time that means there's a lot fewer hours spent eating and a lot more time spent effectively fasting so the intermittent fasting is another example of a program that is completely effective and completely

appropriate at a certain time of year but is but if we extrapolate that out and we say i was good for in this three-month study we should do it year-round we should just keep doing it forever um i'll argue with that as a as a i don't see the solid rationale there just because it works in the short term does not actually mean it works in the long term i see this with um vegan and vegetarian proponents a lot as well. What we see are often people who are quite unhealthy making dedicated changes to their health and improving their health through the addition of a lot more whole plant foods in their diet. Things get better.

That's a real thing. I'm not negating that. That's a real thing. What I often see is that when that same dietary approach, which is more of a summer type approach, often see is that when that same dietary approach which is more of a summer type approach gets stretched out for a year two years three years four years is that health status starts to decline and one of the most common reasons for stopping being a vegan is a decline in health status well i'll argue because you're off track because you're behaving like it's summer way beyond the summer yeah it is it's a paradigm shifting viewpoint and but there's something about it that that i think is bang on

um not something about it but i think you are absolutely spot on and it helps tie together a lot of different pieces that i think have been floating out there for a little while. And it helps to explain why different things work for different people. At different times. At different times. And fundamentally, we are opportunistic omnivores whose diet has always been dictated by geography, climate, and I guess I would add now season, right? That has always been the case. Yeah. There is something about humanity. I think there is something about the way we live these days that we think we have mastered the natural world and we can override the natural world.

Dominion over the earth. Yeah. And I think nature, Mother Nature somewhere is laughing her head off thinking, you guys know nothing, right? You think you can do it better. You think you can do it better. You know, you go to someone like Dubai, for example, I think they now seed rain clouds to provide rain. Yeah. I think we think we can control nature.

And I think there's a consequence. And it's, you know, for me, for me that was like, I think about this study, a good friend of mine, Mike Ash, sent me a couple of years ago that showed our microbiome. So for new listeners to the podcast, you know, these trillions of bugs that live and reside inside us that showed our microbiome. So for new listeners to the podcast,

you know, these trillions of bugs that live and reside inside us and their genetic material. And we know that the health of these bugs and the relationship they have with each other is important for many different aspects of our health. That's super simplistic. I think accurate, but super simplistic.

But how our microbiome shifts throughout the seasons if i'm gonna you may have read the paper whilst researching uh the book but i'm gonna dig it out to not send it to you so i think it's super super fascinating how you know even this shifts so when we talk about good gut health habits maybe there's good gut health habits in the winter versus the summer there there is i will i will unequivocally say there is because and one of the things is that we know very clearly that the microbiome follows the dietary choices yeah right so we should i think it's a here's the here's the rational progression which is um your food should change seasonally because the food availability changes seasonally. Therefore, your microbiome will just follow the food and so it should change seasonally as well.

Yet another confounding factor in the study of the microbiome. If we compare a diet in the winter and a diet in the summer that on a calorie for calorie and macronutrient for macronutrient basis looks identical, on a calorie for calorie and macronutrient for macronutrient basis looks identical but if the food choices are different or even if the food choices are the same but the circadian rhythm is different the context is completely different and therefore if you are living near the equator where you have less of a seasonal variation then potentially you're eating a different diet or the optimal diet for you is different from someone living in the northern hemisphere it's less oscillatory there's there's a smaller amplitude of oscillation right because really what's what's important here is that the degree

of oscillation in the length of day dictates thermal flux when the temperature is outside it dictates how significantly the food availability changes season to season. So to your point, if you're living in the equator, there are fruits that fruit at different times of the year, but often there's high carbohydrate, high sugar fruit available nearly year round. And what we see there is that some of these uh south pacific islands that have either lots of fruit or um lots of starchy root vegetables like sweet potatoes they are pretty well adapted to a relatively high carbohydrate diet because they have a more moderate space and so they don't have the extremes of very long days and very short days and things are much colder and um but the concept there is

that there's less oscillation but they are honoring their local context and they are still honoring the rhythms that do exist to add in another confounding factor because the more you dive into this rabbit hole it can start to get confusing potentially we we will sort of spin out again and give some practical takeaways to people but if i think about myself and my ancestors who for many generations as far as i know we're in india so i often wonder about well if you know should i be eating more like my ancestors and the foods that they ate and therefore presumably their microbiome and then the microbiome i've inherited is more um adapted to eating but then you start to chuck in seasons

and i think well hold on a minute i'm living in an environment uh which is completely different from the environment in which my ancestors evolved so obviously with plane travel now we can supersede uh and all this sort of mass emigration we can supersede all these you know natural processes where we probably didn't go that far and we certainly probably didn't you know travel you know move like across continents right in the same way that we can do now and then you're just thinking, well, do I eat like my ancestors did, or do I start eating like someone who lives in the North of England should live? And then when I get, so I always want to simplify. So for me, I'm thinking when things get too complicated, I start to think you've missed something here. So now I'm thinking, well, the solution there is listen is listen to your body absolutely so i have a conceptual answer to your question as well

so the the the broad piece of it is our ancestors are yours and my ancestors even though for we're from different parts of the world in the fairly recent past we don't have to go very far back into human history and we have the same ancestors so in terms of using evolutionary biology to inform what our food choices should be they're actually more the same than they are different and then they get a little bit diverse as humanity has spread around the world and different environments and different latitudes but they're still more the same than different with the commonality of you know opportunistic omnivory and we eat what's available in our local environment so then the other piece of it is one of the most power and i keep harping on this but one of the most powerful drivers of the way our physiology including our metabolism and digestion and

processing of food is our circadian rhythm and that's dictated by our local environment and our local environment includes the artificial light that we expose ourselves to all the time so it's not just what goes on outside because that's all fine and good um but we've really disrupted and overridden that not just on the um adding light to our days um you know particularly after sunset when normally light would be you know be getting quite dim and actually getting completely dark we have many hours of light artificial light into those evenings the other side of that is we have dramatically darkened our days by being inside so um and i discuss this extensively in the book yeah this is one of my favorite bits actually

cool so but but i talk about you, the way that we have inverted that situation. And so not only are we exposing ourselves to the harmful effects of light at night, whether it is falling asleep with the television on, or it is being on our phones right before we go to sleep and having the melatonin blocking effects of that exposure to blue light, which is effectively telling our brains we should be alert because it's blue sky, it's bright and it's blue sky, so we should be alert and active. So there is this mismatch there as well. But then during the day, what feels like a bright supermarket or department store or office by light standards when you measure the

lux the actual measurements of brightness is very very dark it's equivalent more to like dusk or twilight and so what we do if we have added light where it shouldn't be and we've taken away light where it should be and so we have this real inversion and flattening there so in much the same way we've done with everything else we've taken what should be very dark to very bright and back down to very dark and we've made it not so dark to not so bright to not so dark and we have this really flattening of that that oscillatory pattern to our own detriment yeah i mean in the book you mentioned linda geddes and her book and she was actually at my house a couple of weeks ago nice we went super deep on you know the book and her own experiments and was actually at my house a couple of weeks ago and we went super deep on

you know the book and her own experiments and by the time this conversation comes up that will have aired um you know i think about do you follow the work of dr jack cruz i do yeah i find i find jack's work super super interesting i don't claim to be an expert in that area. I don't claim to understand every aspect of it, but I do think there is something about light that again, is a confounding factor in all these studies, something we have seriously not taken into account. You know, we have studies showing that actually you mentioned daytime eating and nighttime eating. And I think I did quote this study in my first but i can't remember it now at the top of my head i think 30 of us have a genetic variant where in the presence of melatonin we don't release insulin the same way right right so what does that mean when it is dark

and we have melatonin levels you know colloquially the darkness hormone up we're not going to process food in the same way like so there's a lot of and that's relevant not just for for nighttime eating it's relevant for daytime eating because when we don't expose ourselves to enough bright light in the morning and during the day which we definitely don't do we don't have as much full suppression of melatonin even during the day. So we're affecting metabolism inappropriately in an imbalanced way, almost at all times of day. Yeah, we flatten everything, haven't we? We flatten the seasons, we flatten the light, so we're not getting enough light in the day and we're getting too, we're not getting enough in the day and we're getting too much at night. So everything's

become flat. I guess, you know, we talk about seasons and rhythms and I'm not proclaiming either one of us are experts in this area, but I guess women, women have natural, I'm not going to say seasonal changes, they have hormonal changes. They've got this cycle, the menstrual cycle, right? So it's fascinating that women are required to work in the same way for the entire month and again i'm super conscious we are two men talking about women's issues right okay we're talking about human issues it's not a human issue it's just saying look is it right that we expect everything to work the same way something i've been chatting to my wife about recently is like baby have you thought about the fact that because she started working out with a personal trainer when doing strength training. And I was saying, look, you know, I think is your PT aware

that actually at different parts in a female's menstrual cycle, there will be a different requirement in terms of what you do. answer is no because no one knows that yeah but it's quite obvious right on one level on one level but so is everything i've said here yeah for sure once you know we've forgotten everything we've forgotten the basics and so i don't know there are people out there talking about this and i'd love to get some of them on the podcast at some point around the topic of female health because i think it's super interesting not that males don't also have rhythms and cycles, but I guess in terms of this fundamental core idea

that you have that there are natural oscillations. Yeah, you've done it around the seasons, but it's everywhere you look. For sure. And that's the beautiful thing about it. It's everywhere, but we've numbed these seasons. And I guess what you're also putting out there, Dallas, is you're really talking about, on a very deep level, fundamental societal change. Maybe work time should be different in the summer and the winter.

If there's any bosses out there, any employers who are listening to this and you have flexibility with your staff, maybe start thinking about this and thinking, if you want to get the most out of your staff and have a happy, productive workforce, maybe I would say read Dallas's book and start to actually think about,

can you change the sort of the rhythm of your work to better suit human biology? Hospitals, like the more you think about this- It's everywhere. It's everywhere, right? What we expect of ourselves, even the expectation we put on ourselves, let's be kinder to ourselves and recognize, hey, you know what? It is winter. It is dark.

Yeah, you don't have energy to go and work out. Fine. Fine. Absolutely. You know- Totally fine. it is winter it is dark yeah you don't have energy to go and work out fine fine absolutely you know totally fine and all the subjects are working out i know you have sort of touched on that but if we just dive in in in terms of movements and you know i love this i've got so many of your quotes written down and genuinely you have such a gorgeous writing style that is such a joy to read. You say we exercise in highly contrived ways. What do you mean by that? Well, you know, this is where we'll compare and contrast the word movement and exercise, right? Because exercise we typically think of as very deliberate, an attempt to move our bodies in a specific way for a specific outcome right it's a

it's a it's by definition a contrived experience movement is just living movement is being human in the world that's three-dimensional that requires us to move to get food and move to interact with other people and to explore our world and to get resources and to just be a human is a moving experience. So the exercise piece really is an attempt to kind of differentiate everyday all the time movement, just moving through the world from the movement that we do for a specific physiological adaptation or for weight loss or for muscle building or whatever. And that's not to say

those things are not valuable because they are. I think the concern that I have is that we miss out on the fact that exercise, or actually I'll say it this way, I think we make the mistake that exercise is all that matters. And so when we exercise, we do it either in um you know using a lot of machines with a fixed plane of movement or we do highly repetitious movement or we do a very prescribed type of movement for a certain time at a certain heart rate for a certain duration and often we do that multiple days a week sometimes for months or years on end with a lot of routine. And movement, the healthiest kind of movement is three-dimensional and unpredictable because that's how the world works. So I would like to encourage people to introduce more general movement into their lives.

And it can be small things like walking to the supermarket to get groceries if you live two kilometers away and putting food in bags or in a backpack and carrying it home, which is not something people would typically choose to do because it sounds like more work, right? And so much of our modern civilized world, especially during the time of the transition of the industrial revolution was removing physical movement, removing actual work done, right? Calories expended in work. So I would like to encourage people to start doing more movement of all kinds,

which in the reverse, this is comparing because that'll feel like contrived, right? If I tell people to carry their groceries home from the supermarket, that in and of itself will feel contrived because the other context the norm is drive there park your car walk in the norm the norm is becoming pick up your phone go on the shopping app right whilst watching tv and you you literally you know we talk about us being hunter gatherers. You don't have to do anything.

You just have to answer the door to get your food now. That's the new norm. Did you see the animated film WALL-E? No. I think it's a Pixar film. It's from probably a decade or more ago. But it's a vision of the future. And one little part of it is that humans basically become these sedentary useless

blobs that have to be transported around because they don't even have the muscular structure to move themselves and i'm like man that's kind of where we're headed um where everything the effort has been removed from everything to the extent that we have to convince ourselves to expend effort in the form of exercise instead of keeping things the way they've always been, which is doing movement, which partially reduces or eliminates the need for structured exercise. You think about the way the world used to be where we would climb things, pull things, carry things. We would drag stuff. We would maybe wage war every now and then but we would have these very kind of physically demanding tasks we would certainly cover long long distances on foot either foraging

or migrating or hunting particularly in the summer absolutely absolutely and we would do a lot less of that so then the the movement we would do in the winter to piggyback on that would be much shorter much more intense and smaller in total volume so you start to see a natural expansion contract contraction cycle in our movement across the course of a season as well yeah so so to make it super clear for people i guess to take the extremes of the hearts of summer and the and the depths of winter just to really try and make the points, are you saying that basically during the wintertime when it's darker, which is being shorter types of movement, more in, let's say, potentially more intense kinds of movements, like, for example,

HIITs training, high intensity interval training, lifting things potentially in very, very short bursts, whereas in the summer to contrast from that and i get these are two extremes there's a lot of variation in between and we've got to figure it out for ourselves but in the summer we can do more of the kind of longer aerobic sort of less intense but maybe longer duration activities a hundred percent and this is this is what's already built into athletic periodization because they found that it actually makes better athletes over time. Season over season over season, we have periods that are hypertrophy. They're building, right?

They're muscle building. They are resistance training. So we're putting on muscle mass. We're getting stronger. We're making ourselves more powerful. In the course of skeletal loading, we're increasing our bone density and bone strength. So it's a hypertrophic phase. We have phases that are more on the metabolic conditioning piece and these get chunked out across the course of an athletic season or an athletic gear because it works so we've already figured this out over many eons of humans doing competitive sport

periodizing those things right we're talking about periodization right um so the same thing is true for general health yeah we should be periodizing it's such a it's you know i don't said this but it's such a fundamentally simple complex at its simple concept right at its core isn't it it it's just the way things are yeah i guess what is not what is against your philosophy what is against the practical application for lots of people is the way society is set up when this expectation that everything runs the same right year in year out. And I love this conversation around athletes because we can always learn so much from the top 1% because they're always pushing the envelope.

They're always trying to figure stuff out, see what works. If you're in a top athletic team, this is worth a lot of money potentially. So you've got to figure this stuff out. What are these marginal gains you can make over your competitor? But it's that the take-home can be can literally be applicable to all of us you know it's a bit cliche but we are all athletes in our own life fundamentally we want to be able to perform we want to be able to do the things

efficiently that we want to that that bring us joy that we need to do for our families i know plenty of personal trainers listen to this podcast and i'm hoping that they're going to take from this hey that is a super fascinating concept. Let me dive in deep. Let me understand it and then think about, oh, maybe that's why some of my clients really respond well to this in summer, but not so well in winter. And then I think there's going to be a lot of penny dropping moments for people in a lot of different disciplines. I guess continuing, I've got so many wild thoughts going on in my head, Dallas. So this is why I've gone to long form conversations. It's hard to cram them into half an hour. But I guess the Whole30 program, you can then make the case, may have a different impact,

may tell people, may give people different results and different learnings when applied in august versus when applied in january because one of the key ideas is that through the elimination and systematic reintroduction of certain foods you can learn to intuit what works well for you which is going to vary time of year and year upon year. So in the same way that we know, and I'll stretch it out to the lifetime timeline, you know from both being a physician and from being a parent that healthy children tolerate carbohydrate very well. Yeah.

Well, that's because they're in the spring of their life where a lot of carbohydrate from whole foods is perfectly metabolically appropriate. But what we notice towards the other end, we notice people who are older, who have perhaps some insulin resistance, who perhaps have less muscle mass, who perhaps have a more sedentary lifestyle, people in the sort of fall going into winter of their lives often respond really,

really well to carbohydrate restricted diets to improve that insulin sensitivity. And so what we're seeing here is effectively comparing a spring diet to a fall diet. So I'll argue that if people did whole 30s over decades they would continue to find different intuitions within themselves over very long periods of time perhaps trending towards more of a fall and winter type diet as they age so this is the longest timeline this is the whole lifetime arc and what i love about that is that it makes this new book entirely consistent with your previous two books. Yeah. They nest in, they're just different timelines.

Exactly. And they do different things to different people at different times. And I guess on that, what would you say is the commonest misconception about the Whole30? Because I think there's a lot out there. There are a lot out there. I think the commonest misconception, well, there's a couple different ones. I'll give you a couple. One is that it's sort of representative of an extremely restrictive and perhaps dysfunctional or what we call orthorexic way of eating. And, you know, I think I often hear that because the recommendations for the 30-day program are starkly different than conventional governmental dietary recommendations.

My kind of reply to that is that what we're really doing is we're encouraging people to learn about their own bodies through whole unprocessed nutrient-dense food and i struggle to see dysfunction in a short-term keyword short-term experiment um where people eat nothing but nutrient-dense unprocessed food i don't i don't see a problem there the problem and this is something that's just maybe the kind of second misconception is that this should become a lifestyle. Forever. Forever, right? I've seen hashtags on social media, you know, whole 365, or I've done my ninth whole 30.

And that hurts my heart because what that shows me is that people are relying on a restrictive program that was designed to be restrictive just to provide parameters for this experiment. But they're relying on that restrictive program as a safe haven because they have not yet learned how to self-regulate. And they have not actually internalized that intuition so that they can't, they're trusting an external source. Some parameters in a book somewhere that somebody wrote instead of internalizing that leadership and that intuition into themselves and really honoring that so the concern and the heartbreak for me is that um people overuse that time after time after time either for extremely long periods of time or or you know many many times over and over and if i see people who see someone who's done 12 whole 30s i know they've

missed the key idea and it's not morally wrong to do but it demonstrates that the key principle of learning about your body and then continuing to pay attention to your body outside of the Whole30 program to continue to learn that that piece got missed. Hey, I've seen incredible results from patients who have used the Whole30 and other, you know, these kind of eliminations type diets. I think it's super helpful for some people to do that, eliminate, and then it's that key, it's that reintroduction and that learning piece that comes with that that tuning into oh i didn't know i could feel this way okay what foods now make me fatigued and make me feel bad and and i actually i have a lot of sympathy for people who are doing

multiple ones because i i guess sorry i just want to jump in and clarify i don't mean multiples like two is a problem um but it's and each person is going to have to evaluate for themselves whether they are really understanding their bodies better through this or whether they are relying on an external authority and i don't know that i've seen that in the clients that i've worked with directly um but um viewers here will have to figure that out for themselves if that applies to them. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, you always look at these people

and anyone you're dealing with with the utmost compassion. I was, I guess, simply trying to say that I think, and I see this pattern in other things and other behaviors with my patients, is that when people are repeatedly doing something a certain way and you know if it makes them feel good I get it like they're like nothing else is working right this makes me feel good I don't care what anybody says right I feel good when I do this logic and and knowledge is going to do nothing at that point because people want to

feel good right so they're searching for something i think what some people um i think what many people miss um and i think you've i think i think you've been ahead of your time really because even your first book it starts with food beautifully written it's not all about food it starts with food now i don't think it always starts with food beautifully written it's not all about food it starts with food now i don't think it always starts with food i think you know we can maybe this is well this is the kind of tongue-in-cheek um title of the chapter about circadian rhythms is the book is a reference to that um which is it starts with food maybe yeah and but then that echoes my own journey so it's an it's a constant evolution of learning for all of us,

for professionals in healthcare like we are, but also for the public and for people who are trying to learn about their bodies. Ellis, there's so much more we could talk about. I think if people have had their appetite whetted enough, I seriously would recommend people check out this book. I really think it is a help but like no other that I've read. If we go back to that phrase that I quoted at the start of yours about this idea that, you know, in the absence of things like alcohol, caffeine, sugar, excessive artificial light, we can start to tune into ourselves. What do you think you're using in your life currently that is keeping you away from tuning in with your natural rhythms that's a great question i love the painfully

personal questions um uh caffeine for sure it's interesting actually um i just said to my partner last week um and i'm a real coffee aficionado. I know. As you know. You and I share that. I will say shared and I will expand on that in a minute. Oh, good. All right, good. So we are unknowingly on similar tracks. I said to my partner last week, I'm going to take some time away from coffee. And that came out of just sort of an intuition that as much as I

love the, you know, energizing dopamine response to caffeine, it's not something that's deeply nourishing for me. And does it make me feel really good? Yes. Does it also artificially drive me to move fast in the world at a rate that is not sustainable for me? Also, yes. So that's part of it. I've spent the last couple years pretty aggressively addressing my self-medication with social media. self-medication with social media. Because for those of us who are kind of influencers and who have online presences, it's easy to justify needing to be connected and responsive on our social media accounts often. But for me, and I know for a lot of colleagues I've had this conversation with, that tends to be a self-justification for the perpetual self-stimulation and the ego stroking of having people say you're doing amazing work in the world. And just the raw neurochemical stimulation of things lighting up and colors and notifications and things coming to you.

So even on the most kind of rudimentary biochemical level, there is stimulation there. And so I'm working my way out of that to kind of deconstruct that um and honestly this is the kind of this is getting perhaps even more personal but i have over the past couple years really recognized the way that i have mismatched my own very deep um intuitions to be relatively introverted, which I say to people and, you know, friends have known me for a long time. They go, you're a what? But I've basically, I've self-medicated with moving fast in the world and travel and keeping myself busy at conferences and doing podcast interviews and writing books and all kinds of stuff, but I've moved fast as

a way to self-stimulate. And it's all very admirable and professional and success-oriented and defensible, but it's not deeply nourishing for me. So at the soul level, I'm recalibrating a lot of things in my life and doing a lot of that slowing down that directional shift that i actually i write about in the book the um the recalibration that i think a lot of us feel the need for but don't know don't quite know how to do because we look around and everyone else is doing it the same way and so the sensation there is for for me for a lot of my adult life is that same sensation of the like end of summer i'm so tired i can't wait for the day for the days to start getting shorter again and so that kind of endless chronic summer feeling of exhaustion over stimulation or something that

i've carried for a long time and the recalibration and the sort of directional change into more of a slowing down smaller quieter more autumn way of living feels really deeply good for me yeah i appreciate sharing that um it is it is amazing how parallels our journeys are on different sides of the atlantic um you know and on one level it kind of me feel, makes me feel good that there is some intuition in there where, you know, there was no reason for us to be drawn towards each other and develop such a deep friendship from just hanging out at a couple of conferences. But there was always something more, I think. And I think I've seen that with other friends, like I spoke this morning with Drew on my podcast. And again, Drew is also someone who I've always felt very very connected to and it's funny how as we get

older and our the journeys are not necessarily the same but there's a similar pattern um and which is really nice to know and actually helps helps you trust your own intuition and go actually yeah although I was using and still do a lot of behaviors to numb things, actually, there is something there that actually is drawn to this strong human connection. You mentioned social media there. And I think if all of us are brutally honest with ourselves,

hey, I'm sure this doesn't apply to everyone, but I think most people use social media at times as a distraction. And if we think we don't, I would say many of us are kidding ourselves. For sure. I think that- And I say that with compassion, for sure.

I mean, I say that doing that myself. For sure, exactly. And I still have your more social, less media sticker right there on my laptop. Every day I open it, I see it. And it's a it's a lovely reminder but but in terms of caffeine um what's interesting for me is i i am surprised i'm pleasantly surprised that you are going down this route because much of our time together has been

hunting out the most artisan uh coffee shop near where we are missing turning up for various lectures while we make sure we have our you know our perfectly um poured and brewed coffee the reason i say was is because i have i have I should say methodically, with varying degrees of success, have gone down this path over the last few years. I have, at times of high stress, I have gone back to coffee. I've gone back to caffeine. Like this summer, so August 2019,

when I was hoping to take a lot of it off and relax with my family, I did manage to do a lot of that. But my third book really overran into the summer. And I would justify to myself, to help get you through this, to complete it, you can go back to coffee. And I know I'm kidding myself, really, because... Well, you used the word justify.

Yeah, but I recognise now. I have the awareness now to recognize what i'm doing and i have used it as a crutch i have substituted in coffee for other things that i used to use right nothing wrong with that it served a purpose but now i feel i've got to that point where hey i think i'm okay without using it nice and i've gone through like in the last 12 months i've probably seven to nine months of that i was off coffee completely i felt like a million dollars i slept better i was making more calm and more rational decisions i have flipped back recently i've come off it again

we're in california so i've two times this week i've used a bit i feel like a confessional i have used a bit to uh help me with my jet lag so i i look i actually don't mind that because what i'm doing is using it as the drug for which it is a drug right so this week to help me just uh try and reset my circadian rhythm a bit i'm using it now and again in very small doses as a drug. Okay, maybe there's nothing wrong with that. It's a tool. It's a tool. And I recognize that, but it's not the same thing. I need my coffee fix before I can function,

which was me for many, many years. And we can justify that it's, hey, you know, we buy nice coffee and we brew it in a really nice way. And, you know, I get a single origin one. Again, I am not having a go at people who do that. I genuinely not. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it, but I'll tell you what I've recognized for me and literally coming full circle to the start of this, when you're talking about intuition, that actually we know what the right thing is to do. If we allow

ourselves to feel it, I fundamentally know for me, by and large large if i'm in my home environment where life is busy coffee keeps me in my head and makes me less grounded and i've realized such beautiful language it's it's taken me a while to be able to articulate that but it i don't make brilliant decisions yet it gives me the artificial energy I want to make one observation about the pattern that both you and I are kind of you know over the last couple years kind of making some of these shifts independent of each other um because I think it's interesting you know um our entire civilization is built around um perpetual expansion dopamine adrenaline excitement novelty risk reward success accumulation of resources um but sort of so much of the motivational underpinning there is dopamine

and of course um dopamine is uh something that is linked right in with caffeine and so we get this sort of motivation and excitement and pleasure response to it and it's one of the reasons why we get addicted to it what i find interesting is that dopamine is sort of as a as a theme is a very kind of spring and summer kind of experience and you and i are starting to lean towards the autumn of our lives and intuitively noticing that the chemical that induces the thematic neurotransmitter of the spring no longer feels most deeply connective and most right for us and we just decided to lean away from that um maybe that's total coincidence but i have other friends who are doing the same thing not because they read my book and thought about it, but because they're starting to assess what feels deeply good for them, kind of capital G good.

And the things that they did in their youth no longer feel good. But therein lies another mismatch between what society expects us to do, which is push harder, get the promotion, make more money, buy another house or boat or car or whatever. And so there is a divergence here and an opportunity for, I don't know, it's, I think it's an opportunity for refining ourselves and to use your word, to ground ourselves in a place that feels much more deeply satisfying and connective and collaborative in the way that we behave because that's the fall type experience that most of us stuck in the chronic summer need and deeply yearn for yeah yeah i mean so much to reflect on there um dallas look how i like to end a lot of these conversations is with this whole idea of feel better, live more.

The reason the podcast is called Feel Better, Live More is because when we feel better in ourselves, we can get more out of our lives. I think the philosophy you're proposing, the framework you're proposing to help people understand their lives and start to personalize their lives in a way that feels good to them is going to be super, super helpful for hundreds of

thousands of people around the world. I really do think that's true. I literally, I'm sure of it because it is one of the most paradigm shifting help books I've ever read. I do believe that. I think the concepts have been missing. They really help tie things together. So what I'd love to do if you're open to this is right at the end of this podcast, I love to leave listeners with some actionable tips, things that they can think about applying into their own life immediately to start improving the way that they feel. And I appreciate you don't not any warning on this, but I wonder if, you know, what's coming to mind.

It could be things that you've already discussed, things that you haven't, but are there some simple actual things that people can think about doing in their own lives? Certainly. I'm going to pull from the chapter in the book about anchors, because anchors are effectively those most basic, most consistent behaviors across all seasons and

all years. So then the anchor behavior around food would be include complete dietary protein at each meal. It's simple. It's simple. My son often asks, you know, whether this food is healthy or not healthy or whether he can have this or kind of how we were starting to do more cooking. He's really enjoying that. And starting to kind of think about how to put meals together. I'm like, it's meat and vegetables. I'm like, it's simple, you know? And so the simpler we can make things. So in the food realm, you know, include complete dietary protein at each meal. And I think the other kind of part of that there is eat during the daytime, eat during when it's light, and really try to curtail the eating during darkness.

And that's just a simple heuristic. It's not a hard and fast rule. It's not something that people need to adhere to with tight parameters. But it's a simple concept, much like choosing foods that are available locally and regionally. The more you do that, the more you shop at your local market or farmer's market and choose foods that are available locally, the healthier you're going to be, hands down. So don't buy blueberries in winter that have been imported from Kenya. Right. And actually, I wrote briefly about this in the book.

One of my earlier experiences intuitively around food was the recognition that it felt really strange and not quite right to eat grapes imported from Chile in January in New England. I was like, nope, this doesn't feel right. And that was over a decade ago. The other piece, the other kind of really actionable piece that I would encourage people to do, and we didn't talk about a great deal here,

but I write extensively about connection in the book. And connection interpersonally, but connection intrapersonally, connection to and within yourself, connection to the place. And that is not only the place where you live, but the place where you're from. So it's a sense of roots, of home, of where you're from, and then connection to a sense of purpose. And you mentioned and made a beautiful point about stillness and about slowing down and about listening to yourself. And the other pragmatic recommendation I would make there is if you don't already have a practice of stillness, institute one. such as a three or five minute meditation it can be reading poetry it can be going for a walk without a podcast or music or something on um but of stillness and stillness doesn't have to be stationary stillness is a feeling it's an attitude it's a way of approaching the way of moving

through the world so your stillness could be a walking meditation um but that will open the door then to more self-awareness and more honor and acknowledging and valuing yourself which then allows you to bring your best self forward into the world for family and colleagues and patients and everybody yeah i mean really really great tips a lot of food for thought for people the one that's kind of i i like all you know i like all of them the one that i really sort of think people will be able to super grab hold of is this whole idea of eat when it's light yeah and i want to say it's such a such it's so simple right but it's something that we can all try and apply and think that's quite a nice thing to to try our best to live life by um dallas i know

you spend a lot of time off social media but you are present there nonetheless um if people want to follow you and uh keep up to date with your musings and your ideas and philosophy uh where is the best place that they can connect with you? I'm most active on Instagram. My Instagram is at Dallas Hardwick. That's D-A-L-L-A-S-H-A-R-T-W-I-G. I do a lot less on Facebook and Twitter, but Instagram is kind of my place. I also am kind of an amateur photographer. So I kind of like to kind of use that there

as a way to kind of foist my stuff upon people who are interested. You're underplaying your photography skills there. Some of the beautiful faces on my grid are ones actually that dallas has taken when i've been out on holiday with you we've had some good times we have had some good times dallas look super appreciate you flying in to see me today um primarily so we can catch up but also i guess the podcast is catching up right we are going to go out for dinner tonight i'm looking forward to catching up more but thank you for coming i go out for dinner tonight. I'm looking forward to catching up more.

But thank you for coming. I very much, from the bottom of my heart, appreciate you making the effort to come here. Thanks for sharing your wisdom with my listeners. And I'm sure we will continue this conversation at some point in the future. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.

That concludes today's episode of the Feel Better Live More podcast. What did you think? I'm a huge fan of Dallas's ideas and would highly recommend that you pick up a copy of his new book, The Four Seasons Solution. He really does shine a light on an area of health that very few people are talking about. And his writing style and the way he communicates his ideas is simply sublime. So on the back of that conversation,

what changes do you think that you might want to implement into your own life? At the time that this podcast is being released, it is March in the UK. So spring is just around the corner. Do you feel as if you're ready to awaken from the dark winter months? Are you keen to get more active? Get out more. Walk more. Get out in nature. Whatever your thoughts are. Please do let Dallas and I know what you thought of our conversation today.

On social media. Dallas is most active on Instagram. At Dallas Hartwig. And I of course am on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. If you go to the show notes section on my website for this conversation, it is drchatterjee.com forward slash 102. On that page, we will link to Dallas's website, his social media handles, as well as links to the two studies mentioned and some articles on the subject of seasonal eating and the gut microbiome. So if you want to continue your learning now that the

podcast is over, please do head over to drchastity.com forward slash 102. Now as mentioned in the introduction to this podcast, we are living in incredibly challenging times. If you are self-isolating, one thing I would say that it is super important to look after your own well-being at the moment as much as you can. And my top tip would be to use in your own life the framework that I outlined in my last book, Feel Better in 5. I think it works great for individuals as well as for families. So the framework is as follows. Basically, I want you to do something each day that's going to help your mental health, physical health, and emotional health. And the way that breaks down is I want you to do something each day that's going to help your mental health, physical health and emotional health. And the way that breaks down is I want you to do five minutes on your mind each day, five minutes on your body and five minutes on your heart. So mind is anything to do with

your mental health. So that could be five minutes of journaling, breathing, five minutes of nature. It could even be doing something creative, what I call flow state. You could do some painting, drawing, something basically to get you out of your head and get you lost in the flow state. So think about what can you do either by yourself or with your family or your partner or your friends to help your mental health. So I hope those give you some ideas. Now, as well as for your mind, I also want you to think about doing something for at least five minutes a day for your body. That means get your body moving. That could be five minutes of skipping, five minutes of dancing. It could be a five-minute high-intensity interval workout, a five-minute bodyweight workout, but something, and this has really got to be a daily habit because the next few weeks, the coming months could be long. We could be isolated for long periods. So having

that daily routine, I think is going to be really, really important. Now, as well as mind and body, there's a third component that I want you guys to think about doing each day. And I think this is the most important component, particularly in the current times in which we're living. And that's about what I call your heart health, which is about human connection. Many of us are going to feel scared. We're going to feel isolated and connecting with other people is going to be really, really important. So you could, for five minutes a day, you could phone a friend each day. That is something I actually did this morning. I phoned one of my best mates from uni. He's a spinal surgeon in the South coast of England. And we just had a five minute chat

on the phone. And you know what? I felt a lot better about everything after having a bit of a, you know, fun chat with him, how things are going on in his hospital comparing that to my work so I would encourage you five minutes of let's say phoning a friend it could be facetiming or skyping an elderly relative you can't get over to see at the moment it could be five minutes of writing things that you're grateful for in your life a gratitude game there are just so many different things that you can do, but I really hope you find that framework useful, mind, body, and heart. I really think it's going to be really, really useful over the coming weeks and months. It's something I am applying in my own life. It's

something my family are as well, and it is really, really helping. Guys, if you know someone who you feel would benefit from the information in this podcast, but they don't listen to audio podcasts, you may well know now that I'm putting all of them out on YouTube. The best way to find my channel is to go to drchastity.com forward slash YouTube. And I really want to try and grow that channel because I really think people are looking for this content. They're looking for it in video form. And if you guys could do me a favor and get onto that channel, press subscribe and like a few of the videos. It really helps with the algorithm.

It really helps get the channel out there so that more people can benefit from listening to these conversations. If you do enjoy these weekly shows, please do consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or whichever platform you listen to podcasts on. But you can also help me spread the word by telling your friends and family about the show.

I'm really hoping that over the coming weeks, many people who are spending time at home may find this conversation and my previous 101 conversations useful as a way of spending time thinking about things in a different way and also working out how best to look after their own health. and also working at how best to look after their own health. A huge thank you to Vedanta Chastity for producing this week's podcast and to Richard Hughes for audio engineering. That is it for today. I hope you have a fabulous week. Make sure you hit press subscribe and I'll be back in one week's time

with my latest conversation. Remember, you are the architects of your own health. Making lifestyle changes always worth it because when you feel better you live more i'll see you next time Thank you.