Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #7 Paleo Fitness and Natural Movement with Darryl Edwards

Episode Date: February 28, 2018

In this episode Dr Rangan Chatterjee speaks to Certified Personal Trainer, Nutritionist and international speaker - Darryl Edwards, on how he became a health and movement coach, why physical activity has become optional and his unique Primal Play™ approach to make exercise fun. Show notes available at drchatterjee.com/darryledwards Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee/ Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee/ Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, my name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, medical doctor, author of The Four Pillar Plan and BBC television presenter. 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. I've been really excited about the guest on my podcast today. It's somebody who I actually met a few years ago at a conference called Health Unplugged, a conference that he

had actually put on himself. And it's just amazing that we've become really close friends over the past few years. His name is Daryl Edwards. He's a natural lifestyle educator and creator of the Primal Play Methods. Daryl has developed the Primal Play Methodology to inspire others to make activity fun whilst getting healthier, fitter and stronger in the process. Daryl is the author of several award-winning books, including Paleo Fitness. Daryl, welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much, Rangan. It's a pleasure to be here.

So Daryl, since we met a few years ago, one of the things about you that has resonated with me the most is how you really seem to be able to help people make movement fun. I think that's something that's been really missing from our whole culture around movements. You know, it's about how many hours you need to be in the gym for, what you need to be doing. You need to be doing 40 minutes of this and 20 minutes of this. I've just found on a personal level that doesn't really resonate with me. It doesn't resonate with a lot of my patients. So your approach to making movement fun, you talk a lot about play, really resonates with me. Can you tell me how did you get into that? Yeah. So, I mean, you know my health background.

And part of that was my previous career working with an investment banking in technology and having an annual health check. And one year I was told I was suffering from chronic hypertension. I was pre-diabetic. I had elevated heart disease risk because I had a very poor lipid profile, cholesterol issues, triglyceride issues. And when I asked my doctor at the time what I could do to resolve those issues, they spoke about pharmaceuticals. So statins, beta blockers for my blood pressure, you know, supplementation because I was anemic, you know, so it's just a cocktail of meds.

And the one question I asked, because I was quite concerned about that cocktail was one, what about the side effects? And secondly, how long would I have to be on these meds for? And I was told pretty much the rest of your life. And there isn't much you can do about it, because it's your genetic, this is just how it is. It's based on your genes. So I was really concerned about the side effects, about the length of time that I'd have to be on these meds for. And I wanted there was another approach. And I was fortunate enough to encounter a book which spoke about going back to basics. So thinking about our ancestry, thinking about how we used to eat and move and live and how we could take some of that into the present day.

And I was fortunate within a few short months to basically improve my health markers. So I was no longer pre-diabetic, my chronic hypertension, my blood pressure was normalized, optimized, actually. I was no longer anemic. I was no longer suffering from some of the kind of musculoskeletal problems, low back pain, knee issues and the like. And I was convinced that if I continue on this path without any hiccups, it was something that I wanted to pursue for the long term. And that was over 15 years ago. And part of that transformation was improving my nutrition, was improving my attitude to physical activity. I was in a very sedentary job, 16, 18 hours a day, seven days a week, not moving.

So I started off thinking about physical activity pretty much as what I was doing in my day job. So I took a very competitive environment in the office, into the gym. And I thought about training like an athlete, ultra competitive. And I wanted to beat my peers within a gym environment, the sport of fitness. And I was very successful. The downsides were I got sick. I was getting colds every two or three months. I was getting injured on a regular basis. I started to hate the process. Even though the results were pretty good, I was getting fitter. I was getting stronger, but I wasn't enjoying the process. So I started to avoid gym time. You know, it's like, what else can I do to avoid the gym? You know, even though I know

it's important, you know, I'm not going to enjoy the pain and enduring that that sort of pain so the light bulb moment was thinking about what I enjoyed as a kid when it came to movement when it came to physical activity and that was play so I just remember you know long summers you know coming home after school getting my homework homework done, going outside and playing. And most of that time and most of the fond memories were around the enjoyment, the joy of movement. And of course, there may have been some competition. But the main premise of that was how can I and my friends just have a fantastic time? And it wasn't about exercise in quotation marks.

It wasn't about training. It was just having fun with movement. Yeah, it's absolutely incredible to hear that. You talk about you having pre-diabetes and, you know, you were faced with a couple of options, either take some medications that your doctor was asking you to take with potential side effects, or could you do something about it yourself? And you very quickly reversed your pre-diabetes, got rid of it, sorted out your blood pressure. But the interesting thing for me about that is how, as part of your mission to get more exercise, you know, you ended up in the gym. And although you were getting good results, it was very frustrating for you. And, you know, arguably you were overtraining. Yes, yes. I think many people listening were probably in a similar boat in the sense that,

you know, they have an idea around movement, which is in the modern world, if I want to stay fit, I need to go to a gym. But that's not your belief, is it? Yeah. So, I mean, going to the gym is one approach to increase the amount of kind of movement minutes in your day, in your week. But many of us join the gym with lots of enthusiasm, especially on January 1st, 2nd. And a few weeks later, you no longer go into the gym. You no longer have that enthusiasm. We're bombarded with messages about kind of fitness inspiration. You know, get a body such as this.

The full week, get your six-pack abs workout plan. And it can be quite intimidating, I find. And there's something about exercise, which I think we need to realize in the 21st century. Exercise is a modern, fairly recent and modern construct, which is a substitute for the lack of physical activity that we would be getting in our day-to-day lives. So millennia ago, we would have to work physically to obtain our food, to build shelter, to live within our communities. That's what we'd have to do day in, day out.

And post-industrial evolution, you know, we'd no longer have to do day in, day out. And post-industrial evolution, we'd no longer have to do this. And especially in the 21st century, we can work, we can earn money being sedentary. We can shop from our phones. We can get food for the first time. We can get food delivered. Yeah. It's incredible in terms of our evolution that we can actually do that. We can do that. Yeah. So movement has been engineered out of our environments pretty significantly. It's been replaced with convenience. So locomotion, which used to be mandatory, is now optional. Physical activity, which again used to be mandatory, is now optional. So exercise is one possible option. Being sedentary is another option. Being sedentary is another option. And based on our nature, based on our evolution, we were designed to conserve energy, to conserve, you know, the burning of calories. So it just makes sense to me that I will do anything in my being not to move. You know, it feels far better for me to be sitting on my couch, wishing was being fed grapes than me going spending an hour and a half in the gym. I mean, that's me.

And I think a lot of people feel that way. And it's not just about opinion. Look at the research. So there's interesting research about the number of adults and children undertaking physical activity on a regular basis. So we know what the recommendations are. So the baseline recommendations are 150 minutes a week of moderate intensity activity and a couple of days of resistance training a week for adults. Do you know how many people actually meet the guidelines? If you ask them the question, it's about 35% of adults who meet the guidelines. But if they're wearing an accelerometer, they're wearing a device that actually records

how much movement they're undertaking, it's only about 5% to 8% of adults who meet the requirement. And that's a baseline requirement of physical activity guidelines per week, which is shocking for one, but secondly, makes me realize that we just aren't aware of how little movement we're undertaking on a daily basis and that there is an aversion. We have an aversion to physical activity. We have an aversion to exercise. So in order to circumvent that, we need to put strategies in place, which will make movement more fun, make it more engaging and make it more attractive.

So I believe conventional fitness is missing out on a trick somewhat because most of the messages I see on social media are no pain, no gain. You know, my warm-up is your workout. It's all about punishing yourself for what you ate the day before, punishing yourself for the lack of physical activity that you may have undertaken for the previous period of time, rather than focusing on how good you're going to feel, how good it's going to make you feel, the health benefits bulb moment for me was recognizing movement as being medicine and finding the appropriate dose of that medicine and recognizing that you need a daily dose. And sometimes that dose will be more intense and more vigorous. And sometimes that's going to be more moderate.

And sometimes it's going to be very low intensity. And you need a wide array of kind of movement nutrients as such in order to get your well-balanced movement diet. I love that, Dara. It's such a great way of putting it across to people. And the thing that really resonates with me there is that, yes, you need a whole variety, but you also need to probably understand how to personalize it to yourself depending on the context that you find yourself in. So, you know, one thing you shared, some of your frustrations about the messaging on social media sometimes, which can be quite harmful to people actually,

and actually put them off doing any movements. One thing I've noticed also is this kind of, this push to do more intense physical activity at any cost. So you have people um even some healthcare professionals out there on on social media who are knackered they're exhausted they're working back to back yet they're still getting up at 6 a.m to get the workout in and you know i get the intention behind it it's hey this doesn't no matter what i'm still up there in the gym pushing it hard but you know what many people will be better off actually in that moment

probably just sleeping a bit longer and actually going for a walk at lunchtime to help restore their body or have a yoga, 20 minutes yoga on a YouTube thing, after work sort of thing, rather than intense exercise in that setting. Is that something you see a lot of? Yeah, I mean, I totally agree. I mean, if you're living,

I mean, most of us are living in a chron you're living, I mean, most of us are living in a chronically stressed environment. You know, most of us are chronically stressed. So if you then have sleep deprivation and you have very little me time, and then you're deciding to add another significant acute stressor, i.e. physical activity at the greatest intensity possible in a shorter space of time, and actually in a short space of time isn't good enough, so I need to do even more of that because obviously more is better, then obviously that's going to be detrimental to your health. And something about exercise, like any stressor, is it's about the appropriate dose. It's about the appropriate type of that dose of medicine.

And so we benefit from a hormetic response, which is if you take part in exercise, there's a biological response that comes from that because it's a physical stressor. And so there are benefits based on that stressor, based on overcoming that physical activity, based on your body adapting to that physical activity. But if you just continue to do that

and you don't have proper rest and recovery, then it becomes harmful. If you do too much of that thing which is beautiful and has great impact in the short term, it becomes detrimental. Going back to the original point, it's finding the appropriate timing of that physical activity or that exercise, making sure you enjoy it, I think is extremely

important. And also making sure there's the appropriate dose of that physical activity. And I was overtraining. I can recognize I was overtra training and under resting and I didn't have the appropriate recovery. And I was adding that to being sleep deprived and believing that, oh, I can out exercise my lack of sleep. I mean, you can't. Part of you sleeping is to repair and rebuild the body based on that physical activity. So if you're not having adequate sleep, you're undoing some of the good work that comes through physical activity. Yeah, and it's interesting to me that a lot of what you're posting about at the moment that I see is about movements,

but you absolutely recognise the importance of a rounded 360-degree approach to health. So it's a food and sleep and stress, you know, movement's just one component, isn't it? Yes, for sure. I mean, I do believe movement gets a bad press. I was going to come to that actually. Yeah. I think it's a really important point because recently, particularly in the, you know, the social media sort of health world where people are trying to, you know, help empower people. Yeah. It's amazing how over the last, I don't know, maybe three or four years, there's been very much a, you know, it's about your diet more than it is about your physical activity. People are talking a lot about weight.

And, you know, there have been some papers out there, you know, with sort of quite catchy headlines. And I've noticed that you try and actually provide the balance to that. So perhaps you could share that right now. Yeah. So I do think movement has had a bit of bad press. And the classic quote is, you can't outrun a bad diet. And of course, if you have a balanced approach to health, you recognize that you need all of those multi-factors, multi-factorial approach to improving your health and well-being. So you do need to focus on good nutrition and good food. You do need to focus on mitigating chronic stress. You do need to focus on sleep quality and sleep hygiene, your relationships, avoiding pollution and your approach to physical activity and the like.

And when you start picking out one of those as being the only thing that's important, the only way you can reach health nirvana, that's when I believe it's dangerous. Because for some people, they will latch onto that message and that narrative and only focus on one of those. And it could even be exercise. Somebody could decide, you know what, I don't need to worry about anything else. I'll just exercise. That may lead to orthorexia. That may lead to somebody believing that they can have a poor diet and it doesn't really matter as long as you exercise. Of course, there's no way I would advocate that. But pushing one of those factors as being the only way to improve your health is detrimental.

Because I, for one, didn't recognize that movement or physical activity could be therapeutic. I believed it was just about burning calories. It was just about improving body composition. Because I was veering much more towards this message of food being medicine. And so, you know, what you eat is not just fuel, but also medicine is also therapeutic. It's, you know, feeds a gut microbiome. You know, that's what's important. It reduces inflammation. That's what's important. And when I started looking at the research and recognizing, oh my goodness, exercise can be anti-inflammatory. Exercise can

improve the gut microbiome. Absolutely. Exercise can improve, you know, reduce blood pressure and can improve your mood hormones, you know, your serotonin, dopamine. And, you know, once you recognize there's this whole body of research around exercise being medicine, then you realize just how powerful and potent it is. And when you look at the evidence being that most of us are physically inactive, even if we're not aware of that, most of us who are having a day job where we believe, if I just get out of the office at 30 minutes and hit the gym, don't realize that that may not undo your sedentary time during that day. You know, many of us just aren't aware yeah of this

you know yeah yeah you're right there's there's some very good studies in the last few years i i put a few of them in the foreplay the plan about how we we possibly can't outdo the effects of sitting all day just by going to the gym for an hour in the evening you know breaking sitting with standing yes it is very important and i think there was one study that i've seen recently where uh we have patients with type 2 diabetes and they were either put into a structured gym program or they just move more in the day yes and the people who move more in the day would just like to movement and didn't do the structured gym program their blood sugar control was better yes and i think that is remarkable.

And I think one of the reasons I've always liked you and what you stand for is it always seems very pragmatic to me, very balanced, very unextreme. And I think I've always resonated with you on that, I think. I've always known on some sort of deeper level, actually, I really like what Darrell is is promoting what he's standing for here when you say if we over prioritize one area of health over others we can have problems potentially and really that is that's the approach that i lay out on my book daryl it's it's kind of like it's not about the perfect diet or the perfect gym

routine it's about you know for many, if your diet is good enough, actually you might be better off going to sleep an hour earlier each night rather than trying to get a 10% improvement in your diet on an already very good diet. Yes, for sure. When you look at the Blue Zones, for example, I mean, arguably, their lives aren't perfect. Even though they live long and healthy lives,

and that's evidenced based on those populations around the world where that exists, their lives aren't perfect. They don't have the best nutrition optimally every single day of the week. They don't always have the best approach to physical activity. It's about what foods are available to them, which are local, healthy, unprocessed. It's about the fact that they have to move in order to live because it's part and parcel of their day. They tend to sleep based on what nature dictates. They tend to have really good, healthy relationships and family structures that give them a sense of purpose and the like. We need to simplify a lot of these messages

as health practitioners, as lifestyle coaches, as health coaches, rather than overcomplicating things. Because as you say, people are looking for that, just that extra edge, that extra additional 10% that can come, you know, by me optimizing this particular phytonutrient. Oh, that's the key. That's a secret. If I just add that supplement to my diet, everything will be perfect. It's the whole point with the whole looking for the perfect diet. The reality is I was very lucky. I was in Guernsey in June, and one of the guys who coined the term Blue Zones is Michel Poulin. He's a Belgian researcher.

And he was sharing with me the diets on the Blue Zones. He goes, they're all quite different, actually. Some of them eat quite a lot of meat, actually. And one of the problems we have when we try and look for that perfect blue zone diet is that frankly it doesn't exist you've just echoed what it is it's minimally processed it's local it's in season is what they do and they've got different amounts of fat and carbs depending on which blue zone you're talking about exactly so it clearly is more than fat v carbs is the problem yeah yeah but then we can't take the diet in isolation because these cultures are generally well slept.

They're generally physically active. They are low levels of stress. They've got a strong sense of community. That's why it's very hard to take out one component. The other thing I find interesting about the Blue Zones and other healthy populations around the world, and this is one of the reasons I think we're struggling so much in the West at the moment to help our populations be healthier, is that their way of living means that being healthy is just the default option.

Whereas here we're having this interview in London, being out in London, the default option for many people is to be unhealthy. If you take all the transport everywhere, if you get locked into this stress culture, go, go, go, you get back from work late and you're stuck on your computer very late with work emails, you get up early for the commute back to work and you're stuck at your desk all day, the default option there is poor health. And I think this really goes on to what i love about your movement approach as you well know i'm a huge fan of your various movement strategies if

i talk about you in my book daryl you know i mentioned thank you very much one of the favorite things i do with my son is primal play tag an exercise that you taught me i don't can't remember when it was but you i thought this is incredible. What an incredibly fun, engaging way of playing with my son, having fun with him, yet within a minute, we're both breathless and knackered. And I think play and making movement fun is something that we've not done enough of in society. Yeah, for sure.

And we can see that kids, there's less playtime now for kids at school. We're less likely as parents to let them go out and play as would have been the case when I was a youngster. My parents are like, get outside and entertain yourselves. Come back when dinner's ready. That doesn't happen nowadays. So our kids are spending more and more time on that doesn't happen nowadays. So our kids are spending more and more time on devices rather than playing and engaging in active play. Adults for sure are becoming far more sedentary. So we do need a solution to this. And the solution isn't just telling people you need to move more. And unfortunately, there are far too many health professionals now saying, actually, you don't need to move that much. You know, you can condense what you need to do in just a couple of minutes.

Oh, yeah, if you do this really ultra high intensity protocol for a couple of minutes a day, you're kind of sorted. You'll get all these health benefits and that's all that matters. Well, actually, there's far more to movement than what you can do in a couple of minutes. And so, as you say, that integration, integrating movement throughout your day-to-day lives, you say, that integration, integrating movement throughout your day-to-day lives, if you're sitting, spend a bit more time standing, a standing desk, for

example, or make sure every phone call you take, you stand rather than sitting. Take the stairs more often than taking an elevator or the lift. So there are practical approaches to increasing the amount of non-sedentary time throughout your day. And that's definitely my approach. It's very difficult for me to set up an hour, 45 minutes during my day to say, right, that's going to be my workout time today. I'm going to pop it in my diary. I'm going to get it done because life gets in the way. Absolutely.

So it's better for me to actually get up in the morning, get a few minutes done, think about opportunities throughout my day. I will do things like I want to get the remote control. I'll bear crawl across my living room floor to pick up the remote control. I'll squat during commercial breaks. So by the end of the day, I've actually got far more than my minimum requirements for movement but i i have no idea where that time came from it's like oh i think you know that's such a key message to people and that's again the approach i take in my own life which is

particularly these days i struggle to find that 45 minute one hour period where i can go to the gym let's say and have a have a workout. I remember even as a kid, as a teenager, I used to watch Neighbours, the Australian soap, whilst eating my dinner with my brother so we could multitask and eat and watch our soap at the same time so we had more time to do homework afterwards. And I delve in my book as to some of the negatives of having done that. But I remember I'd go in to put the food plate into the microwave to heat up and even as a kid even as a teenager in those two minutes I would be knocking out some press-ups or some lunges I would always look for opportunities in the day to get a bit of movement

in and interestingly enough one thing I did try for the first time in my life about two years ago is I tried a personal trainer for a couple of months. I never had it before. I never thought I needed one. I thought, you know what, I kind of know what I need to be doing. But I got a really good recommendation of someone in Manchester. And I thought, I'm going to give it a try. And I've got to be honest, he's fantastic.

And I learned a lot. But I had a few sessions left that I didn't use up. And I hadn't been for about six months. And about two months ago, I was in Manchester and I text him and say, hey, you don't have a spare session in about half an hour. You guys actually have just had a cancellation. So I went in and I had like a 40-minute workout with him, which is a lot of fun. And he said to me, Rangan, you are one of the rare clients who I've got

who cannot see me for six months yet still be at the same level as you were six months ago. And on a personal level, that was really nice and really inspiring to hear. But the reason I think that is, is because I, whether I get to a gym or not, and these days it's not, I'm always doing little workouts, two minutes here, two minutes there. As you say, it's a remote control. I squat every day with the kids, body weight squats while we're waiting for dinner. It's like two minutes of squats. When I do it and we have fun, we play your game, your Primal Play tag game, playing that most days at home.

I've got a five-minute kitchen workout that you can knock out some press-ups and some lunges and get an olive oil bottle and twist it to the side. All kinds of fun, inventive ways to keep being active. I think the big problem is that we have outsourced our idea of movement to the gym. So if we can't get to the gym, we think we can't do it. And even if we do get to the gym, we don't think we're done. Oh, I've been to the gym. I've got my movement in. I don't need to worry now until my next workout. I can go back to being sedentary. And this is very, very common. So my goal and your goal is to try and,

from what I understand of what you do, Daryl, is to try and simplify things for people and try and inspire them to say, you can do this. It isn't as hard as you think it is. And one thing I've noticed you talking about recently is your animal moves challenge. Can you tell me what is the animal moves challenge?

Yeah, so I mean, people started to ask me what I was doing on a daily basis. And, you know, they'd read my book, but still wanted more kind of guidance. So I started to create some online programs, including the Animal Move Challenge. And the whole concept behind that is that as humans, our movement potential is one of a generalist. So if we compare ourselves to the rest of the animal kingdom, we don't really hold our own at all. So we can't run anywhere near as fast as a cheetah.

Actually, we can't even run anywhere near as fast as a goat or a camel. They can out-sprint us. We can't lift as heavy as an elephant. We're not very strong. We can't jump very far and can perhaps even say a kangaroo. But where we are incredible is our ability to do all of those movement patterns just above average. So we can crawl, we can climb, we can jump, we can run, we can sprint, we can walk great distances. We have so much movement capability. And yet whenever we engage in physical activity,

we tend to focus on probably one or two movement patterns. So, oh, I like running, I'm just going to run, maybe swim every now and again, maybe get on a bike. But all the other repertoire of moving patterns we don't engage in. So by training like an animal, it forces us almost, coerces us to engage in all those moving patterns that we need to engage in to be healthy. So that program includes crawling. It includes jumping. It includes balance exercises. It includes varied intensity. It includes strength and resistance. It includes mindful movement.

So this kind of well-balanced diet of movement that I spoke about earlier is all part and parcel of this program. But that's a result of them having fun whilst they're doing it. Yes, for sure. So part of, I mean, just imagine when you were a kid, I mean, most kids, I'm sure,

pretending to be an animal of some kind, you know, whether it was a panther or, you know, piggybacking somebody on your back and pretending to be a horse, whatever it was, whatever you can remember as a kid, pretending to be an animal, it's recapturing that as an adult

and just engaging and visualizing what it was like to be a child again, not to be childish, but to be childlike in our approach to movement means there's instant gratification when it comes to movement. So when I engage in those movements, I'm actively enjoying my environment, being mindful, I'm changing the kind of various levels of interaction with my environment. And that in itself means you're so engaged in what you're doing, it doesn't feel like punishment and pain. It doesn't probably feel like exercise.

It doesn't feel like exercise. It just feels like movement. Yeah, absolutely. And so all those kind of aches and pains that you that you get as you oh i'm getting older oh i feel a little bit stiff in the morning they all just they all just come out of it you said like i don't need to stretch in order to obtain natural flexibility mobility i can just move in a way that's therapeutic and corrective and regenerative so again it's part of my journey has been appreciating that movement can be an antidote

to some of the issues around chronic lifestyle disease. And once you recognize that, then it's very easy to start thinking about interesting and creative ways of ensuring that's done. So I wanted to create a program basically that was one not only meeting the minimum guidelines of health recommendations for movement but also ensuring that you're undertaking such a wide repertoire of movement that you wouldn't be overtraining that you would be getting stronger and fitter and faster more powerful and more flexible more mobile and increase your endurance and agility and coordination all these components of fitness that we, again, tend to forget

that we need to be engaging in. So all of those are part and parcel of this program. Yeah. And most importantly, it's designed as a community-based program. So there are videos, there's a community where people are encouraging each other, people are actually inspiring each other to move. And it's designed for people who are couch potato former couch potatoes to weekend warriors to those who believe play is going to be ineffective so what what age groups have you got people signing up to this is it who is it applicable for i mean it

tends to be people who can afford to use a credit or debit card okay it's an online program it's an online it's an online program but i've've got basically people in their latter late teens. And the oldest member of that community is about 75 years old. Wow. Incredible. So with no history, they weren't a former athlete. They were just somebody who wanted to have more fun with movement. Oh, wow.

So, yeah. So I've got people from all over the world. Where can people find this program? If you go to primalplay.com, you can find out a little bit more about what Primal Play is, but also have access to these programs. Fantastic. Hey, Daryl, you know, when you talk with such passion

about the various movement types that are incorporated within your program, and a thought came to me, which is that, you know, mindful movement and actually, you know, trying to mimic various animal moves, I actually think will relieve stress. So I talk about four pillars of health, but by doing this kind of movement,

you're probably also de-stressing yourself and switching off because it's all connected, right? That's why it's very hard to talk about an individual component. I'm finding it harder and harder now to talk about just one component of health because for the people who do talk about food being everything and the most important thing, well, you know what? I used to think that, and that was a personal bias because when I changed my diet, felt so much better but I've

recognized that with some patients I've got I've got patients with mental health issues some of them even though I can explain to them how food impacts their mood some of them are not ready to change their diets but when they get more physically active right and that's where I put my time and energy that has helped them sleep better and that has helped them then make better food choices. So I see these various components of health as all intertwined and you change one thing, you change everything. Yes, that's a great point. And for me, food was definitely the gateway to improve my health and well-being for sure. But thank goodness movement was right behind it.

It was like I recognised within a few days, I was like, you know what? Even if I'm eating a perfect diet, in quotation marks, I can't be healthy if I'm sedentary. I mean, it just can't be possible. How would we have obtained this ideal food in our ancestral past without movement? How would we obtain this food? We had to move. So movement has always been a priority for us as humans. And now it's less and less so because of our environment.

So you're right. I am passionate about movement. I do believe it's a key part of improving our health and longevity. The evidence supports that. My own personal experience supports that. The challenge is now where we do have this environment which encourages us to be sedentary. You know, I can roll out of bed.

Maybe I've got stairs. I can walk down the stairs. I can get to my car 10 meters away. I can sit in my car for my commute to work. I can get into the office, spend most of my time sitting at the desk, maybe have a sandwich at the desk and then repeat on the way home. And as soon as I get home, I'm fatigued. I want to sit down and relax, hear the microwave ping to have my ready meal,

then get to bed, probably making sure I'm browsing some health tips online before I do so. Impact on my sleep and then repeat. So that for many of us is our environment and it's so difficult to reverse engineer some of those issues. And it're right but the flip side is what you said right at the start which is certain aspects of modern technology such as activity trackers we can many of us can use that modern tech now to help us you know reverse that process which is a

certain beautiful irony there yes for sure i mean i don't want to i i'm very happy living in 21st century london i don't want to go backwards to a time where I didn't have access to these devices or even being on a podcast, for example. It's a fantastic opportunity to share this information. But sometimes we do have an over-reliance and use these devices as a crutch. And that crutch could be, oh, I can avoid social interaction because I can just socialize on social media. I don't need to be physically active because I can watch somebody else doing so. I can watch the Olympics. I can watch the Premier League on a Saturday.

And I'm engaging in movement even though I'm being very sedentary. So there can be an over-reliance on technology, which means that we do less, which means we make poorer health choices. And so, again, a strategy has to be, how can we use these devices as enablers? So if I do have a, you know, so for example, one strategy I use is every hour I will set, I have an alarm on my watch and it will just ping to say, you need to move. So whatever I'm doing, whatever i'm doing at a time if i'm sedentary i'll just do 60 seconds of of something and even though i do engage in movement throughout my day

it's just another prompt so i'm like yeah you know what i can use these devices to make sure that i'm i'm doing even more i can have this kind of like little nudge every now and again to say hey dale you know what move a little bit more yeah that's great that's a great tip actually yeah you know for those of you listening who are not familiar with daryl's work i would highly encourage you check out his social media feeds where you share some just incredibly inspiring workouts that the sort of thing that people wouldn't consider to be a workout and i love them so just give people give me ideas give me ideas and what I can do with my kids can you just share with us and where they can find you actually Daryl yeah so the best place is my blog which is primalplay.com my social media

handle is at fitness explorer so twitter instagram and the like you can search me on google Daryl Edwards D-A-R-R-Y-. And yeah, there's lots of interesting ideas of how you can disrupt, you know, your sedentary lifestyle with more movement, with more enjoyable movement, because that is the key. That's the only solution in my opinion, to ensure that you can have a long-term movement practice is to find something which is fun and engaging and something that you actually receive the benefits immediately not at the end you know like you have an endorphin rush after 60 minute run i can't you know 60 minutes is a long time if you're not enjoying what you're doing do you know yeah and it will lead to failure ultimately that your week on week day on that

you'll be like i'm not gonna do it yeah i'm not gonna do it anymore i haven't got enough songs on my playlist anymore you know i you know you do an animal move and you're having fun straight away and you're feeling it yeah yeah you're saying primal play tag with your kids yeah no there's laughter and and yeah you're jovial within a few seconds it's like instant gratification there's instant immersion in that activity my little my little girls got involved as well so now it's a two-on- me at the moment. That's currently what's going on at home, which is just incredible. Which is nice. Because my daughter

who's younger, she watches me and my son play. So she wants to get involved now. She doesn't want daddy just playing with her big brother. So now it's two against one, which is a bit more challenging. Well, that's fantastic. And it's the sort of memories they'll never forget. The times that I remember playing with my parents and my uncles,

I remember that to this day, how much fun we had. You know, parents sometimes miss out on that experience with their kids. You know, play has become, you know, we outsource it. So you mentioned outsourcing earlier. So we outsource play to other individuals. Like, oh, we'll send you to football practice on a Saturday morning so you'll have your two hours

of running around in the park with a ball and I don't have to worry about it. Whereas actually they crave that interaction with you as parents and having fun. And once parents realize, actually I can have fun too. I don't have to sit on the bench watching my kids play in the park.

I can actually get involved. So don't have to sit on the bench watching my kids play in the park. I can actually get involved. So I'm getting a bit of a workout or a play out as I prefer to use that term. I can get a bit of a play out with my kids. And we're all having fun. I mean, we're all getting taking part in physical activity. I mean, for me, that's a win-win right there. Yeah, absolutely, Daryl. Look, I could probably talk to you for the next three or four hours about this stuff, as no doubt we often do when we're not recording a podcast, because

yeah, I love it. And it really is, I don't think people realise how simple and how easy it can be if you start shifting your mindset on what movement is and what movement looks like. But one thing I try and do at the end of each podcast is to share with the listener four simple actionable tips that they can put into practice in their own life immediately to help improve the way that they feel. And I wonder, maybe around movements if you want, are there four tips that you would share with the listeners? Yes, so the first tip is to focus on fun. is to focus on fun. So as I mentioned earlier, fitness, in order for it to be a long-term practice, a long-term journey, and something that becomes self-motivating, there has to be self-intrinsic value. So if you're engaging in something that you enjoy immediately, if it's something that you find engaging, if it's something where you notice time just compresses so it's like oh my goodness you

know half an hour has gone by but it's only it feels like five minutes if you can if you can capture that experience with movement then you're on to a winner yeah so that could be dancing it could be playing a game that you played as a kid where you throw the rules out of the window. It's like, let's just have some fun. It's almost like if you play tennis, for example, just having a rally. Forget scoring points. Let's just see how long we can get this ball back and forth over the net for as long as we can. Doing funny trick shots, just being crazy with the ball. That's what you want to feel when you're engaging in this playful approach to movement. So first, fun has to be a priority, whether it's primal play, whether it's playing a childhood game, whether it's dancing, whatever that is for you, that's what you should

be engaging in. Secondly, it's how do you convert bad habits into good habits? So, you know, a bad habit comes about through, you know, greasing the groove over years, decades, generations of a certain practice. So for me, I get out of bed in the morning. The last thing I want to do is movement. I'm like, I just probably want to make a cup of coffee, don't drink coffee, but I'm like, I want to do something that's going to pep me up and make me feel good in the morning. So one strategy for me was to place my training gear and my training outfit right at the side of the bed. And I made a decision that every time I saw my training gear, that I put it on and I would engage in some form of movement for whatever period of time, even if it was a minute or two. And I found that every day I would commit to that. I'd put my training gear on. I'd do something for whatever period of time. That one or two minutes may become

10 or 15. And then I'd have a great kickstart to the day and I wouldn't need my morning coffee. So, you know, thinking about strategies where you can replace some of those poorer lifestyle habits into better ones, which will become part of your DNA. So we've all heard the 21 days to affect a habit. And the research actually says it can be anywhere between 18 and 250 plus days to forge a habit. So I find I need longer periods of time to encourage me to make better decisions. So that's one strategy of converting poor habits to better habits.

The third is integration of more movement minutes within your day. So for me, it's very difficult to set out an hour a day for exercise, but I can just get more movement minutes done, find opportunities for movement. So that can be, for me, I rolled out of bed this morning, for example. I rolled out of bed. I started doing some crawling. I started jumping around. Fortunately, no one was there to watch me, but I went to the kitchen. I had breakfast.

Whilst my food was being prepared, I played some music, I started to dance. Again, no one was watching. And so I had 15, 20 minutes of movement, again, without realizing it, without taking up any more time out of my day. So find any opportunity you can to get more movement in. Do some exercises whilst you're watching TV during a commercial break. Engage some of your family members so it feels more like you're in this together rather than you being the odd one out.

So yes, integration throughout the day is much easier for most people to get into as a movement practice. And the final tip is avoiding convenience. So avoiding convenience means you see a set of stairs, you see a lift, take the stairs. Your shop is five minutes away. You decide not to take the car. You decide to walk. You decide

not to get your groceries delivered. You decide to take those shopping bags back home. Instead of taking your local bus stop, you decide to walk one or two bus stops. So again, that way you're getting more movement minutes, you're finding more opportunities for movement, and you'll find the more that you start avoiding convenience, that transfers and translates to other areas of your life. So it doesn't just become about movement. It's the same, similar for food. It's like, I'm not going to take the easy way out. I'm not going to get that takeaway because actually I'd rather walk to the shop, get some food, bring it back and spend time preparing this because I know that's going to be a healthful, more healthful option. So avoiding convenience would be my final tip.

Darrell, absolutely fantastic tips. And I'm just so on board with each and every single one of them. You mentioned coffee and, know you know your new new habits and i've had a love-hate relationship with coffee myself and i'm reducing my intake bit by bit at the moment but what i do every morning when i'm at home is i weigh out my coffee and for the four minutes that it's brewing for i have a a step in the kitchen so it's right there and i do you know three or four minutes of these little exercises that help me wake up my glutes that i have a lot of fun doing i would be waiting for that coffee

to brew anyway so in that sort of dead time as it were instead of scrolling social media i'm there on the step doing some exercises and you feel better straight away you your mood lifts it just puts you in a different frame of mind yes for sure it's incredible as you say it's we we are primed for movement first thing in the morning you know our our cortisol is naturally elevated first thing in the morning we should be the most alert i mean that's what people again don't realize when you wake up you should feel as if you can take on the world exactly and if you don't feel that way you you know, you've got an issue. Again, it's an issue. So for me, you know, coffee is not the solution for me. I agree. For me, it's like if I can just do some form of vigorous activity. And again, here's something else to think about. You watch a very young child, you know, probably two or three or four years old, what they do when they're waking up out of a deep sleep. old what they do when they're waking up out of a deep sleep and they'll have that kind of like extended stretch and sometimes they'll shake their bodies and then they're awake they're alert they're

like okay now i want now i want to play now i actually want to do something and lots of animals partake in this kind of pandiculation and i use that strategy to kind of invigorate myself in the morning i'm like i want to feel as if I can take the world on today. And so movement is, again, a catalyst and a springboard for that. Yeah. The other thing that I really loved that was about avoiding convenience. And, you know, we're sitting here in the basement of the Penguin building. And I gave my publisher, which is Penguin, who are on the eighth floor here, I gave them a well-being talk before the summer last year. And at the eighth floor here, I gave them a wellbeing talk before the summer last year.

And at the end of it, I left them with a challenge. I said, guys, you guys are, well, you're on the eighth floor of a building. How many of you take the lift? How many of you take the stairs? And, you know, the majority of people were taking the lift. So I set them a challenge, said, how about tomorrow morning, you know, not next week or next month or, you know, after the summer holidays, how about tomorrow morning, each and every single one of you that is able to consider taking the stairs and do it with somebody else. And remarkably, you know, I think the next day,

it was something like 90, 95% the next morning were taking the stairs. But interestingly enough, four months on, it was over 80% of them were still taking the stairs four to six times a week. I found that remarkable. So you've got that option there. You've got the lift or you've got stairs, but then you do it at work and your colleagues are also doing it. So you engage that community.

So one day you don't feel like it, but Linda down the hall is getting the stairs. You're more likely to take it. So I find that amazing how quickly these things can change. Yes. I set them one challenge. Four months on, they're still doing it. Do you know what I mean?

Which is fantastic. It's incredible. It's simple. It's something that, as you say, if you're able to do so, then do it. And that's the point because there's a time, there may be a time in life where you may not be able to, I may not be able to climb the stairs in 20, 30 years. And I may not be able to do so only because I haven't done in the past. I mean, that's the point. So whilst I can, I want to maintain my function for as long as possible.

Yeah. Well, Daryl, I love it. Love it. And really, you know, I'm so inspired by this conversation. I'm just going to say something I rarely say, but for those of you listening, you know, just think about something that you have heard just now, either from myself or from Daryl, and think, you know, even if you just take one thing that you can change immediately in your life, you will feel the benefits very soon. And it absolutely is worth it. So, Daryl, really appreciate your time today. I think we definitely need a part two of this at some point.

But I've just got to say, look, good luck with everything. I'm going to myself check out this Animal Moves Challenge. And I hope I get the chance to get you back on the podcast soon. Thanks, Daryl. That's fantastic. Thanks so much for your time, Rangan. It's been a pleasure. That's the end of this week's Feel Better Live More podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And I really hope you found the conversation useful, but also enjoyable. If you're not already,

I'd highly recommend that you subscribe to this podcast so that you can be notified when the latest episode of my podcast comes out. I'd also be incredibly grateful if you consider going onto iTunes and giving this a five-star rating so that I can get this information out and reach more people. It really does make a difference. And if you have any suggestions for people you'd like to see me have conversations with on this podcast, I'd encourage you to get in touch with me on social media using the hashtag feelbetterlivemore. You can find me on Facebook and Instagram using the handle at DrChatterjee and on Twitter using the handle at DrChatterjeeUK.