Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - What Actually Shapes Behavior? | Dr. Krista Scott-Dixon

Episode Date: August 19, 2020

This week’s conversation is with Dr. Krista Scott-Dixon, a former university professor and researcher who now focuses on helping people make meaningful change through the Precision Nutrition Coaching and coaching Certification programs.Krista was a previous guest on Finding Mastery (#192) and I enjoyed our conversation so much that I wanted to have her back for round 2.If you’re interested in learning more about Krista definitely check that first podcast out.This episode is focused on what actually shapes behavior – just because someone has the knowledge that something is bad for them doesn’t mean they’ll actually stop doing that… so why is that?I find this fascinating.And if you are interested in learning more about behavior change methodology definitely be sure to check out Precision Nutrition’s Level 1 certification program … you can find more on that at precisionnutrition.com/findingmastery._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Finding Mastery is brought to you by Remarkable. In a world that's full of distractions, focused thinking is becoming a rare skill and a massive competitive advantage. That's why I've been using the Remarkable Paper Pro, a digital notebook designed to help you think clearly and work deliberately. It's not another device filled with notifications or apps.

It's intentionally built for deep work. So there's no social media, no email, no noise. The writing experience, it feels just like pen on paper. I love it. And it has the intelligence of digital tools like converting your handwriting to text, organizing your notes, tagging files, and using productivity templates

to help you be more effective. It is sleek, minimal. It's incredibly lightweight. It feels really good. I take it with me anywhere from meetings to travel without missing a beat. What I love most is that it doesn't try to do everything. It just helps me do one very important thing really well,

stay present and engaged with my thinking and writing. If you wanna slow down, if you wanna work smarter, I highly encourage you to check them out. Visit remarkable.com to learn more and grab your paper pro today. I think we often have this idea that change comes from this one singular event, right? People talk about like, oh, I hit rock bottom. And then I knew I woke up the next day and I vowed I was never going to drink again or whatever or I had this epiphany this vision sure sometimes that happens but a lot of the time change comes from like the thousand paper cuts of life and there's one day when 1001 happens and you're like god damn it I am so done with this um but, or, or not just injury, but like little gestures.

We make micro gestures towards change that maybe operate even below the level of our conscious awareness. But over time, these micro gestures accumulate. So if you record each one of them, you could look back and reconstruct a narrative. All right, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm Michael Gervais. And by trade in training, I'm a sport and performance psychologist, as well as the co-founder of Compete to Create. And if you haven't picked up the Audible original that we just dropped, I want to encourage you to do that. And if you haven't picked up the Audible original that we just dropped, I want to encourage you to do that. And if you have, I want to say thank you. And you

can find the Audible original. It's only available at Audible at audible.com forward slash Compete to Create. Now, the whole idea behind these conversations is to learn from people who are on the path of mastery. We want to better understand what it is that they're searching for, not so that we understand them better so much, but so that we can better identify what we're searching for in life. And we want to dig to understand the psychological framework that they use, how they see themselves, how they make sense of the events around them. And we also want to understand the mental skills that they use to build and refine their craft.

Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. In any high-performing environment that I've been part of, from elite teams to executive boardrooms, one thing holds true. Meaningful relationships are at the center of sustained success. And building those relationships, it takes more than effort. It takes a real caring about your people. It takes the right tools, the right information at the right time. And that's where LinkedIn Sales Navigator can come in.

It's a tool designed specifically for thoughtful sales professionals, helping you find the right people that are ready to engage, track key account changes, and connect with key decision makers more effectively. It surfaces real-time signals, like when someone changes jobs or when an account becomes high priority, so that you can reach out at exactly the right moment with context and thoroughness that builds trust. It also helps tap into your own network more strategically, showing you who you already know that can help you open doors or make a warm introduction.

In other words, it's not about more outreach. It's about smarter, more human outreach. And that's something here at Finding Mastery that our team lives and breathes by. If you're ready to start building stronger relationships that actually convert, try LinkedIn Sales Navigator for free for 60 days at linkedin.com slash deal. That's linkedin.com slash deal for two full months for free. Terms and conditions apply. Finding Mastery is brought to you by David Protein. I'm pretty intentional about what I eat, and the majority of my nutrition comes from whole foods. And when I'm

traveling or in between meals, on a demanding day certainly, I need something quick that will support the way that I feel and think and perform. And that's why I've been leaning on David Protein bars. And so has the team here at Fondue Mastery. In fact, our GM, Stuart, he loves them so much. I just want to kind of quickly put him on the spot. Stuart, I know you're listening. I think you might be the reason that we're running out of these bars so quickly. They're incredible, Mike. I love them. One a day, one a day. What do you mean one a day? There's way more than that happening here. Don't tell.

Okay. All right. Look, they're incredibly simple. They're effective. 28 grams of protein, just 150 calories and zero grams of sugar. It's rare to find something that fits so conveniently into a performance-based lifestyle and actually tastes good. Dr. Peter Attia, someone who's been on the show, it's a great episode by the way, is also their chief science officer. So I know they've done their due diligence in that category. My favorite flavor right now is the chocolate chip cookie dough. And a few of our teammates here at Finding Mastery have been loving the fudge brownie and peanut butter. I know Stuart, you're still listening here. So getting enough protein matters.

And that can't be understated, not just for strength, but for energy and focus, recovery, for longevity. And I love that David is making that easier. So if you're trying to hit your daily protein goals with something seamless, I'd love for you to go check them out. Get a free variety pack, a $25 value and 10% off for life when you head to davidprotein.com slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. Now, this week's conversation is with Dr. Krista Scott Dixon. She's a former university professor and researcher who now is focusing on helping people make meaningful change through the precision nutrition coaching and coaching certification programs. So Krista was previously a guest on Finding Mastery number 192, and I enjoyed our conversation so much that I wanted to have her back on for round two.

If you're interested in learning more about Krista, definitely check out the first podcast. And in this episode, we focus on the deep structures of change, like what actually shapes behavior. Just because someone has knowledge about an ideal way of doing something, let's call it an upgraded or optimized way, that doesn't mean that they'll actually start doing the desired new behavior. So why is that? I find this fascinating that just because we know something, there's a space between that knowing and doing. And that essentially is what this podcast is about. My hope is that these conversations are not just clutter of great, insightful information, but actually it's information that you can do something with to upgrade, to change, to optimize the way that you think, the way that you behave. And if you're interested in learning more about these mechanics, the behavioral change methodology, definitely check out the Precision Nutrition Level 1 Certification Program. And you can find more of that at precisionnutrition.com forward slash finding mastery.

And with that, let's jump right into this week's conversation with Dr. Krista Scott-Dixon. Krista, how are you? I'm doing great. Thank you. I believe you. I believe every ounce of that, knowing who you are and how you work. And it's great to see you. Great to be connected to you. Yeah, likewise. All right, cool. So since we spoke last, you guys have been on just this radical clip of growing your

business, but sharing your insights. So can we start first by giving your take on Precision Nutrition and a bit of your mission and what you're doing with the company? Yeah, I think it's worthwhile to talk about the mission in context, because I think that will give people the sense of why we're at the place we are at now. And so back in the day of 10, 15 years ago, we kind of thought that our mission was to dispense information, dispense specifically sports nutrition information to people that were kind of already interested. They were already reading about changing their bodies. They were already working out. They were already fit and

they just wanted to get fitter or leaner or, you know, perform better. And so 15 years ago, we were just like, well, we're going to tell them what to do and they're going to do it. And we're going to come up with maybe good codified ways to do that, right? We'll put it into good formula for them or a nice handout or something like that. But that's really our job is to give that information. Now, over the years, we've really come to believe that our goal is helping people manifest, and I hate to use that word, but I can't think of a better one, but helping them manifest the kind of people that they want to be through that pathway of health and

fitness and performance and nutrition. And I think that's a whole different project, right? It's really supporting the change process for people in the ways that they want to change. So that requires understanding not only nutrition, obviously, and how things change over the years as we learn new stuff, but also human beings and psychology and change and the other layers of performance that they don't really tell you about. When you first get into something like bodybuilding or competition, we've really realized that there's this huge iceberg under the water of performance or body composition or health or whatever you are pursuing that is really rarely addressed. And so we've become really, I think, quite preoccupied with this idea of deep health, with human thriving and helping people achieve potential and defined in the ways that matter to them. And I think that's a crucial piece too, not just assuming, oh,

everyone wants to do this. Everyone wants to bench press, whatever. Everyone wants to have abs, but kind of really facilitating that conversation around, you know, what kind of life do you want to live? And what kind of person do you want to be in the world? And what do you value? So it's just a completely radically different conversation than the one that we started out doing. Now, I mean, that sounds a little bit theoretical. What we actually do is curriculum, you know, teaching, education, coaching, that kind of stuff. So the delivery of it is often very practical. It's just the questions driving it are so much bigger, I think now. Yeah. I've watched you guys migrate in that space and your wealth of information across your team

is stunning. The depth of knowledge and the contextual information you have about nutrition, where I am constantly going, oh, look at what they did there, is your insights on behavioral change. And so I think you and I have talked about this. Like if you put out an apple and an apple pie, you say, which is healthy? Which is the healthier choice? 99.9% of people know, which is the healthier choice? And so it's not about knowledge. Some knowledge is good. We need some basic frameworks. But we know that asparagus is probably a pretty good choice for 95% of the population, whatever the numbers are. We have

some ideas about that. And so things that are in packages, maybe not so good, like, you know, candy, asparagus, whatever that thing is. So we have some basic knowledge about that stuff, but you guys are really good on, on the behavioral change stuff. And so can you, can you just put in a frame how you think about helping people go from knowing the information to making the choices. And that's a loaded, big question. I'm curious where you take it first. And then I want to go and kind of double click into deep health. And so if you can stay mechanical for just a moment, and then we'll get more into like, what is deep health for people? And nutrition is going to play a big part of it. So psychology. And that's why I love, you know, having conversations with you.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, one of the first steps really there is just education, which is kind of paradoxical, right? Giving people more knowledge, but the piece of knowledge that we give them is that information alone is not enough. Because I think that this is something that really puzzles people. Like, I know what to do. I really genuinely don't understand why I'm not doing it. And this paradox to me is occupying so much of my attention and so many of my resources that I can't think about doing things a different way

because I'm so stuck on this fact, this dissonance that I'm experiencing. And it's interesting. I don't know if this is a North American thing or what it is, but I find that people translate that puzzle then to some personal deficit in themselves. So what is wrong with me? I must be broken, stupid, lazy, whatever, self-sabotaging, which is a term I really don't like, because I can't do this. So rather than interrogating the conceptual model of how things are supposed to work, they locate some kind of deficit in themselves. And they're like, well,

I must suck. The reason this doesn't work is because I must suck. And so I think the first step is really educating people around that and saying, listen, you can know a ton of stuff and not be doing it. And it's funny because a lot of my clients personally are coaches and they come to me exactly because they feel like frauds and imposters. Like, oh my gosh, I am a nutrition coach. Why am I eating crap? Or why am I staying up too late? Or why am I skipping workouts or whatever it is they're doing? Right. So I think just that truth in of itself that knowing and doing are not related, I think that's a huge leap for a lot of people. And then we start to shift into saying, okay, what actually shapes behavior? Let's educate you around the actual determinants of behavior, where behavior comes from, and why you feel and act in apparently conflicting or dissonant ways.

I think that really helps people to understand that, oh, yeah, I can feel a lot of ways about something or I can do behaviors that seem to conflict. And that's just part of being human. Okay. So on the first note, the knowledge not translating to consistent behavior is that you hit on something really important. And for a long time, psychology has said, okay, let's have cognitive reframes. So when you say something critical, flip it. And you know what? It's weak. It's not wrong. It is not wrong, but it is not going to the core. And if somebody is going onto the pitch or they're going into, you know, on the field of play or they're going into the boardroom and they're like, oh, I don't know, I don't know.

Having awareness of that is really cool and really important. And then saying, wait, what's a more productive way of thinking? So it's a little bit of a practice that leads to some sort of physiological change and psychological impact as well. But it's so downstream. So if we're going to go upstream, at what intersection in our lives did we say we are not enough based on what we might not be able to do? So that's the key part that you're hitting on. And I think you and I have talked about like the difference between being and doing. And when you can decouple those and then integrate them it's really awesome but most of us go you know we we bite off this idea that we are what we do we are what we perform to be more precise

and if performance isn't up to standard then i'm not up to standard and eating is a performance in some respect in a weird way it's like a doing that is a reflection of self. So it's not just in the eating category. It's categorically something that I think we've swallowed as a pill, which is I am only what I do. And so you guys have a real deep understanding of the difference. If we double click now and say, because this is intellectual right now, right? What you and I are doing is like an intellectual exercise, which is good. How do you help people decouple the doing from the being and then get comfortable with themselves to say, okay, my actions are actually a reflection, but not a full reflection of who I am. How do you get

underneath there? Yeah. I mean, there's, there's lots of different pathways to that. And I think the answer is, is different for different kinds of clients, but I think that you've tapped into something really important there, which is the, the crucial fact of needing to go deeper, right? That this is not a cognitive reframe problem. Most of the time, This is a soul problem, right? And food and eating and health behaviors and fitness are just the dashboard indicator lights. They are not the metrics in and of themselves. They're not the goals in and of themselves even.

I mean, we eat well and move so that we can do other things. Now, we might enjoy the process of eating well. We might enjoy the movement that we do, but ultimately being fit or looking fit or whatever it is that people are seeking is a way to get somewhere else. So we are in the business of the human condition. I mean, we can't tell our clients that, right? We can't really sell it like that. But on some level, as a coach, you do have to get past that cognitive reframing piece. And I always think that like the cognitive pieces, that's what gets you to put on pants in the morning, right? And not like punch your boss gets you flossing your teeth, like it gets you doing some like surface level

behaviors that we need to function as humans in a civil society. But it usually does not get to the core of what we're grappling with. And, with. And what we're grappling with operates at different levels of scale. And so if we think about working backwards to the antecedents of behavior, sometimes- Oh, big, look at you using big words. Yeah, good. I have a PhD. The triggers before, yes, it's good. What we call the things before the things.

The things before the things, yeah. The triggers before the actions. What we call the things before the things. The things before the things. Yeah. The triggers before the actions. What was your PhD? And I know that you've got an advanced degree, but I was looking it up and was it in curriculum? No. No, no, no. I mean, I did a certificate in adult education, but it's funny because I've had this really weird, like rambling trajectory into this. So my undergraduate degree, my BA is actually in fine arts, visual arts and film.

I thought I wanted to be an artist. Oh, you still are. You're just now a scientist that's turned artist. You haven't moved that far away. I'm good enough to do really bad Photoshop and hand it over to our designer for curricular materials. But then I got into stuff like cultural theory and representation, and especially as they pertain to things like social inequality and marginalization. And so I was very interested in subjectivity and how we come to represent ourselves and how we have agency in the world. And so eventually I finished off with my PhD, it was actually in women's studies. Now it's funny because everyone, when I say that, is like, oh, that was a bird degree.

But I'm like, okay, let's look at what's happening right now, right? Me too. Issues of social inequality. It was funny. I even co-authored a book on ancillary workers in healthcare. So those underpaid, invisible workers in healthcare that are now the glue holding everything together because they're the ones that clean the hospitals. Now, when I did that book, whatever it was, 10 years ago, it was kind of, you know, 10 people read it kind of thing. But now all of a sudden people are like, oh, oh my God, hospital janitors, that seems important,

right? So it's so weird how all of the things that I have done at the time, people were like, oh, that's a ridiculous pointless degree. But I'm like, well, you know, women's studies, like two-thirds of personal training clients are women. Women are now 80% of the workforce, or sorry, a healthcare workforce. They're the primary household consumers. They go to the doctor way more. They do way more health behaviors. Like, so it's actually astoundingly relevant, the stuff that I have done. So yes, the PhD is in women's studies of all things. It's brought me here. I love it. And I remember it was a windy way to get to where you are, but it makes sense because really what you're doing is investigating your whole career, whether it's from the arts or women's

studies or cultural sciences and insights there is like, what is the human condition about? Yeah. So when you take this conversation, go, you know, the way you look and the way you kind of eat and the choices you make there, that's dashboard stuff. You know, your health indicators, that's still dashboard, but it's like underneath, it's like, who are you? What are you sorting out in the world? Where's, what's the why for the actions are you sorting out in the world where's what's the why for the actions that you're doing what's the purpose yeah and and how does change happen like one of the things i was very interested in so i actually there's a book out there um that i edited and like partly wrote um on the intersection now this was like unheard of at the time but uh when

not a lot of people had heard about issues with transgender people, you know, like, what are the, what are the conjunctions between feminist theory around gender and, you know, issues of gender that are emerging as put forth by queer and transgender scholars, right? And, you know, at the time that was like, what's that about? But I was very interested in people's processes of change. Like what made someone decide to transition? That was a really interesting question for me at the time. Like, cause I would meet people that had gone 30 years, 50 years, 70 years sometimes without transitioning. And then one day for whatever reason, they were like, today's the day. Today's the day I start my

process of coming to this identity that maybe I've always had. So I was just fascinated by like, why didn't, like, why was it today and not yesterday or six months from now or, or whatever. So I tried to talk to as many people as I could, who had undergone the process of gender transition in various ways and really be curious about like, what was that journey like for you? But what prompted it, especially later in life, the ones that transitioned later in life for me were just so intriguing. And what'd you come to find? You know, it's still intangible to me what makes people change, but it does seem to be, I think we often have this idea that change comes from this one singular event, right? People talk about like, oh, I hit

rock bottom. And then I knew I woke up the next day and I vowed I was never going to drink again or whatever. Or I had this epiphany, this vision. Sure. Sometimes that happens. But a lot of the time change comes from like the thousand paper cuts of life. And there's one day when 1001 happens and you're like, God damn it, I am so done with this. But, or not just injury, but like little gestures. We make micro gestures towards change that maybe operate even below the level of our conscious awareness. But over time, these micro gestures accumulate. So if you record each one of them, you could look back and reconstruct a narrative of them. You know, I had a friend who transitioned and kept a journal for like 10 years before he transitioned. And he said, looking back, I can see it. From male to female?

From female to male. Female to male. Yeah. He said, looking back, I can see it. But in the moment I couldn't. And so for me, the question is always like, how do we create, if we're in the business of change, how do we create micro moments for people that just nudge them towards change, which is sort of that idea of behavioral economics, right? Just nudging people into changes. So for me, that's always been just fascinating. Why today?

Why is today the day that you make that decision? Well, maybe today you didn't make the decision. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentous. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday, what you put in your body matters. And that's why I trust Momentus. From the moment I sat down with Jeff Byers, their co-founder and CEO, I could tell this was not your average supplement company. And I was immediately drawn to their mission, helping people achieve performance for life. And to do that, they developed what they call the Momentus standard. Every product is formulated with top experts, and every batch is third-party tested. NSF certified for sport or informed sport. So you know exactly what you're getting.

Personally, I'm anchored by what they call the Momentus 3. Protein, creatine, and omega-3. And together, these foundational nutrients support muscle recovery, brain function, and long-term energy. They're part of my daily routine. And if you're ready to fuel your brain and body with the best, Momentous has a great new offer just for our community right here. Use the code FINDINGMASTERY for 35% off your first subscription order at livemomentous.com. Again, that's L-I-V-E, momentous, M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S, livemomentous.com, and use the code FindingMastery for 35% off

your first subscription order. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Felix Gray. I spend a lot of time thinking about how we can create the conditions for high performance. How do we protect our ability to focus, to recover, to be present? And one of the biggest challenges we face today is our sheer amount of screen time. It messes with our sleep, our clarity, even our mood. And that's why I've been using Felix Grey glasses.

What I appreciate most about Felix Grey is that they're just not another wellness product. They're rooted in real science developed alongside leading researchers and ophthalmologists. They've demonstrated these types of glasses boost melatonin, help you fall asleep faster and hit deeper stages of rest. When I'm on the road and bouncing around between time zones, slipping on my Felix Gray's in the evening, it's a simple way to cue my body just to wind down. And when I'm locked into deep work, they also help me stay focused for longer without digital fatigue creeping in. Plus, they look great. Clean, clear, no funky color distortion. Just good design, great science. And if you're

ready to feel the difference for yourself, Felix Gray is offering all Finding Mastery listeners 20% off. Just head to FelixGray.com and use the code FINDINGMASTERY20 at checkout. Again, that's Felix Gray. You spell it F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y.com and use the code FINDINGMASTERY20 at FelixGray.com for 20% off. The way that I think about this, the shorthand is that pain is the reason we change. And it doesn't have to be rock bottom thing, but it's like I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired, wherever that is. And some people change, their threshold for pain is high and some is really low.

And low threshold for pain is problematic. You know, because your head is bouncing off the concrete and you're still not sure if there's an you know if you're kind of okay and then some people's threshold of pain like they just have the sock wrong on their foot and they're going to adjust it before they get the blister maybe and it's like that's not going to take us anywhere either so the the micro cuts the micro choices and cuts that lead to the idea that i've had enough. And I like that thought because change is pretty hard. It is difficult to change something you can't see because we can change behavior. Okay, most people would say that's challenging, but actually what we're changing is the thing, the antecedent before behavior, which is thoughts and the way that we're interpreting something

and the way that we're making choices. Knowledge is part of that, sure. You know, like not everyone knows. I've got a family member who eats, is concerned about weight, you know, in a healthy, pretty healthy way and eats peanut butter, jelly and English muffin with coffee every morning and says, that's not it. That's not the reason that, you know, like I'm struggling with weight. And I say, well, I'm not sure that's the highest choice, you know, but it's the thinking patterns and the interpretation and the meaning making part that is actually the part of the change we're making. And I can't imagine real change happening without a North Star. And why would

we shift our North Star if everything's working? Well, and I think what's missing in this conversation too, and I'm not saying anything like particularly innovative, I mean, people have remarked on this, but there are very powerful forces acting in favor of the status quo. Oh, even friends, even family will sometimes want you to act just as the way that you are. Yeah, absolutely. And I think we underestimate the degree to which we are relational and interactive beings, right? And again, maybe this is also a North American thing, but we tend to contain our narrative of ourselves within ourselves. So like, oh, I'm this kind of person, I act in this kind of way. And it's always a very decontextualized conversation,

rather than saying, oh, well, you know, when I interact with this environment, I get this result. When I interact with this person, I get this result, or it brings out this side of me or whatever. So, you know, I've come to really realize and respect the degree to which we are interconnected beings. And in a way, it's almost hard to say that we have a self that exists in isolation at all. I mean, you could, you know, you could argue it's sort of a debate that's interesting, ultimately not super helpful, but like, you know, change is also produced in context. And it's the contextual part that to me is in a way quite intriguing. And so what are the forces acting against change?

And sometimes they can be extremely strong and cause a person to not change even in the face of overwhelming pain, right? So the person I'm thinking of, this friend of mine that transitioned, he had overwhelming reasons to not transition. And so for him, those were strong enough for a very, very long time. They blocked him from transitioning. So I think people don't realize how strong the status quo can be sometimes. And also during periods of transition, like now in 2020, I think so much social stability has just been tossed out the window. A lot of people are changing in very unexpected ways because that block for them is now no longer there. I think that's just fascinating. That's really cool.

Okay, let's double click. What are some of the practices? Because we talked about some really cool insights. What are some of the practices that you found to be important to help people make change? So intellectually they say, I want to live the good life. And I'm not talking about, you know, podiums and money and fame. And I'm talking about like flourishing and fulfillment and high agency. And, you know, just this idea that you're making a difference in the world and the ways that you want to make a difference. And so people that want the good life and, but they're kind of grindy in a way where it's, um, it's not there for them. They're struggling and they're frustrated by the

struggle. Okay. And it'd be easy to say, Oh, I love the struggle. That's the actual main thing. Maybe, but like, how do you get people? Let's stay right down your lane on nutrition and, and the science there. But how do you help those folks? Because I think that's a lot of people. Yeah, absolutely. And I agree with you about the whole embrace the struggle. Sometimes you're just like, can we not with the struggle right now? Can we just step out of the process of growth? Because I think people don't fully grasp or they don't, somewhere in the instruction manual of life, they don't really tell you that growth really sucks and it hurts and it's painful and crummy. And anyway, so in terms of concrete practices, I'm a big fan of experiments and

experiences because, you know, unless you directly contact what it's like to do something, your adherence to that thing is going to be at best weak. I mean, there might be like some truths in life that someone hands down to you, like, you know, parental advice where you're like, gosh, that does sound good, right? And you internalize it and it's there with you. But in general, there's nothing that sticks as much as experiential hands-on learning and feeling something. So as much as possible, I try to design experiments and hypothesis testing, right? So like, oh, I believe this to be true.

I believe that I couldn't possibly or I must always blah, blah, blah. Okay, cool. That is a testable hypothesis. Let's go and try something. Super concrete example. A lot of people will say, oh, I have a carb addiction. I can't stop eating carbohydrates. Okay. That's a testable hypothesis. I would like you to go and make an entire day's menu out of boiled potatoes. No flavorings, no seasonings, no butter, no sour cream, just boiled potatoes, just straight up carbohydrates. Cause like let's, let's constrain the variables, right? Either that or sugar packets, right? But some like incredibly uninteresting, pure carbohydrate food. And I would like you to

eat nothing but boiled potatoes for a day or two. And let's see if by the end of day two, you know, you feel like you have a carb addiction. It's funny. So you're sitting right on the, it was a controversial behavioral change mechanism for smoking. I think it came out of smoking cessation. And the idea is I can't quit smoking. Okay. What have you tried? A, B, and C remedies, this, that, and the other, which is all reduction based. And so the science here was, okay, how many, this is, it's dangerous because smoking is an unhealthy behavior, but how many packs a day are you smoking? One. All right. I want you to smoke three. Yeah. Jack it up. What? You want me to do what? Yeah. Let's see if you can actually

make change, right? Like we're in the business of change. So sometimes let's, let's step on the gas rather than kind of pull off the gas. And it And ethically, it's a little challenging because it's so unhealthy, you know, smoking. There's like a skull and crossbones on the package. But the idea, like go deeper into the behavior that you're already exhibiting that you want to change is counterintuitive. But there's some research behind it. Yeah, absolutely. Or even test the hypothesis that the problem is what you think it is, right? Which is, you know, when people say, for example,

I have a carb addiction, actually you don't. You have issues with food reward. You're highly attuned to food reward, which is all the other nifty, amazing stuff that goes along with many carbohydrates. Okay, interesting. It is the bells and whistles. Okay. So you're saying it's more of like the dopamine serotonin flush that you're getting from eating the starchy, carby food, as opposed to something else. Yeah. And starchy, carby food with bells and whistles, right? Crunchy, creamy, like David Kessler's book, End of Overeating, I think is a really great example of that, where it's like- Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah.

So you get that explosion in your mouth of the mixture of things, which is way more interesting and fascinating than the actual carbohydrate post-chemical experience that you get. That's right. Nobody eats just plain carbohydrates. Like no one sits down to like a big bowl of brown rice and is like, yeah, this is amazing. Right. But if you put, if you put like rice and sushi format and put some pickled ginger on it, like now you have a party. Right. So it's like, how many elements can you stack on it of stimulation to make the food into a party? I mean, even plain sugar packets or glucose, right. I mean, no one sits down and chugs a mug of glucose because it's disgusting.

So, yeah. Hey, I should have, I think I, maybe I did. I can't remember, but I blew it on the ultra like from a, from a nutrition standpoint, I was all, you know, starched up and I had this plan based on my mentors that were telling me about how to do nutrition for this ultra I was doing. I completely bonked at I think I was doing, I completely bonked at, I think it was hour, it was like hour seven, six, maybe it was six out of eight and a half. And I had zero, I had nothing left, zero. And I think what happened was I used, and you'll be smarter at this than I am, but I didn't use the

right systems early on. And I just was chasing after carbs and I was using starch, but I, I didn't use the right systems early on. And, um, I just was chasing after carbs and I was using starch, you know, like one of those starch drinks and, oh God, what a mistake. I mean, it was, it was talking about like self promoting suffering. That's all this. It was an exercise of meet your maker, you know, meet your true self because you have zero left as a resource. And what are you going to do with this next paddle? It was a standup paddle thing. But so I say that because starches, I don't even want to think about them right now. I know there's a purpose to it, but you know. So we've trained you out of your carb addiction. Yeah, we changed that. The crunchy rice stuff like that, that's a little different, but

okay. I like the insight. All right, now let's double click under that. So if you're saying, okay, let's actually take a, where were you taking us? You're saying there's actually a thing that you think that you want to change, but you've got a block. You says, yeah, I want to change. I want to have a good life, but I got this block. Like I really like carbs a lot. And then where are you taking us?

Well, so one of them is experiential and experimental learning. And the goal of that is to try, you know, new tasks, new actions, new coping strategies. So like, that's one of the objectives. And another objective is to challenge beliefs that you've had, like, oh, I couldn't possibly do X, Y, and Z, or I must always do X, Y, and Z. Okay, cool. Let's go try that. I mean, you know, a parallel to that in psychology is exposure therapy for social anxiety, right? Oh, I can't possibly talk to people on the street. They'll think I'm crazy. Okay, go and talk to, I don't know, 10 people on the street and then ask, did you think I was crazy? And of course, most people will say, no, you seem perfectly fine. So, you know, part of it is about helping people test beliefs and assumptions and establish ways of doing things.

And then a third objective for me is helping people feel in their bodies in very real and concrete ways when I do something different. And, you know, when I sleep eight hours a night, my gosh, I feel different. I don't need someone to tell me that sleeping is good, right? So as much as possible, helping clients learn cause and effect. And I feel like a lot of our job in a way is helping clients grow up developmentally in terms of particular views on the world. And so one of them is linking cause and effect. When I do this, I get that. And to really amplify that, you amplify the effects.

So you can direct their attention like, okay, do this. And you're looking for this kind of feedback. So I want you to attend to these results that you're getting and report back. And when they can really, really connect it, you don't have to tell them stuff. You don't have to give them prescriptions because now there's like a deeper felt sense guiding them that goes well beyond the thinky brain cognitive stuff. Okay. So setting up frameworks, it's a little bit of permission.

What's the experiment? What's the experience? And so you're setting up some permissions and then you're saying, Hey, get some really good feedback loops. Yeah. And those feedback loops can be, um, kind of external prompts, like from a trusted source saying, Hey, what was that like? You know, cause and effect, or how about it? What if you became a radical feedback, um feedback tuning fork for yourself? That'd be nice too. Oh wait, but you can't be drunk and you can't be so fatigued that you can barely get out of bed. And like, so there's some deep health stuff, right. To take a look at, to be a really great tuning fork. And then there's a community relational piece to have external feedback loops, right? To help kind of, okay, nicely done. How do you think about deep health? And you've got six pillars, relational, existential, mental, physical, emotional,

and environmental. And so how do you want to talk about this model? Yeah, I was, I was, I'm impressed that you remember all six elements. And sometimes I worry that when I'm talking about them, I'm going to you remember all six elements. And sometimes I worry that when I'm talking about them, I'm going to forget some crucial. I mean, like, what's the one? And really, like, these are just kind of arbitrary categories, right? Because the fundamental concept is like, that health is a multifactorial, multidimensional construct. So there's various domains of it that are all intersecting, but ultimately it's about this holistic experience of thriving. And they are interconnected in the sense that it's very rare to have one of them completely out of order and the other one's

doing great, right? Like if, let's, for example, your mental health is just horrible, there's a really good chance that other domains of deep health will be affected as well and maybe contributing to it, right? Like maybe your mental health is horrible because your relational health is horrible. Maybe you're feeling alienated and isolated and alone and cut off from people. So those two things start to become connected. And then maybe the mental health affects physical health, you get depressed, you don't feel like going out anymore, and you don't exercise and, you know, whatever. So I think the goal is to, first of all, present health as a very holistic kind of experience. And I want to be clear about this, not to create any kind of new ideal that someone has to live up to, right? Like, I don't want anyone listening going, oh God, you know, now I just thought I had to have abs and now I have to like excel in six domains.

Like, my God, thanks for giving me that completely unattainable standard. It's really more about showing that there is this kind of holistic intersectional, you know, set of components, but also to demonstrate that they are very interactive and to kind of push ourselves as coaches to kind of produce clients or help, you know, facilitate clients filling out these domains. And so the example that I think about a lot is in fitness, we have done a terrible job as an industry, creating people that are deeply healthy, because we, you know, the pinnacle of physical fitness is often someone who's deeply unhealthy in all of these other domains. And I think that especially if you're someone who's very focused

on physique, or even top performance, you'll probably agree that the moment when you were your most photo ready, if we can call it that, or putting in your gold medal performance was the moment that you were sacrificing other domains of deep health. Now, to be clear, these are trade-offs that we can choose to make. Like there's no right way to do this, but we were producing people for lack of a better way to say it that looked amazing, but felt like crap. And to me, I was just like, I don't want to make this. I don't want to make these people. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't

just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day. And Cozy Earth has become a new part of that. Their bedding, it's incredibly soft, like next level soft. And what surprised me the most is how much it actually helps regulate temperature. I tend to run warm at night and these sheets have helped me sleep cooler and more consistently, which has made a meaningful difference in how I show up the next day for myself, my family, and our team here at Finding Mastery. It's become part of my nightly routine. Throw on their lounge pants or pajamas, crawl into bed under their sheets, and my nervous system starts to settle. They also offer a 100-night sleep trial and a 10-year warranty on all of their bedding, which tells me, tells you, that they

believe in the long-term value of what they're creating. If you're ready to upgrade your rest and turn your bed into a better recovery zone, use the code FINDINGMASTERY for 40% off at CozyEarth.com. That's a great discount for our community. Again, the code is FINDINGMASTERY for 40% off at CozyEarth.com. FINDINGMASTERY is brought to you by Caldera Lab. I believe that the way we do small things in life is how we do all things.

And for me, that includes how I take care of my body. I've been using Caldera Lab for years now. And what keeps me coming back, it's really simple. Their products are simple and they reflect the kind of intentional living that I want to build into every part of my day. And they make my morning routine really easy. They've got some great new products I think you'll be interested in. A shampoo, conditioner, and a hair serum.

With Caldera Lab, it's not about adding more. It's about choosing better. And when your day demands clarity and energy and presence, the way you prepare for it matters. If you're looking for high quality personal care products that elevate your routine without complicating it, I'd love for you to check them out. Head to calderalab.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's Caldera Lab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash FindingMastery. There's that insight that true high performance begins where health ends. And that was something that I'm still seeing. And it's a bit of a dilemma. It doesn't mean it has to be that way, but it is a much harder

approach to say, I'm going to look for some sort of integrative health framework and then layer on top of it extraordinary, dedicated, relentless, nauseatingly focused, disciplined approach to one of the factors, which is the skill piece. To explore your own potential does require a tripling down in technical skill, right? There is some sort of technical skill required, whether it's your technical skill of decoding science of nutrition into behavioral change and frameworks of change. It doesn't come like to repeat it over and over again at the level that you've done requires some discernment and discipline. So when you think about high performance ends or high performance begins where health ends, you're saying, let's do better. And so what are the steps that you are hoping people can take in that aim? Well, I mean, that's one pathway,

right? Like the win, if we can call it that, is thriving in all domains. Like high fives to you, hashtag winning, good for you, life success, right? That is not the only path. And I think it's important to, you know, if you coach athletes in high performance, you know, that pushing the limits is part of part of what makes them thrive in a way they wouldn't be themselves without it. So their mental health actually depends on doing crazy stuff. Like there was something that you got out of being stranded in the water with a paddle that you weren't going to get any other way. And I'm not judging you for that. Yeah. Let's be clear. It's funny. My, my mentor says to me, he says, um, I called him afterwards and, uh, and he's known me since I was, he's mentored me since I was like

16. And he goes, you know, Mike, what does this say about you that you had to reach absolute kind of, I was hallucinating in the water, like hallucinogen or hallucinating experiences to get to the truth. You know, like it's a, it's a bit of a scary thing. How guarded humans do, right. A lot of there's a, there's a, you know, I don't know. I, I, any percentages that I put on this would just be completely made up. But I would say there's probably like 10% of humans who need to spin those dials, who need to check those boxes, who need to go to the edges. I mean, the whole podcast is about finding mastery, right? And it's not about the average person is not going to find mastery, because they're not clawing down the walls to get to it. So, you know, high performance in a lot of ways does require being a little bit insane or a lot insane. And, you know, peak experiences often come where we're like that fine, fine little thready edge between, you know, living and something terrible happening to us, right? So anyway, so that's sort of one pathway for deep

health is really acknowledging that, but also understanding that for top performers, deep health may look different. So for example, you know, perhaps deep health, for some people, is an incredibly powerful encounter with the self that can only occur during some kind of strenuous physical event. Or maybe someone is willing to push themselves to the limits physically, but they do it with teammates. So their social health is really fulfilled or their existential health is really fulfilled. There's a deeper why, there's some kind of purpose that drives them. It's like those people that are like, you know, goddamn it, I'm going to swim across the Pacific to raise money for cancer.

Like their existential health is off the charts because they're driven by this intense purpose. So I think the idea of the deep health model is really not to create some kind of problem of mediocrity. We're all just trying to juggle the plates and be as healthy as possible in very vague ways. It's the fingerprint of the deep health is going to look different for different people. And by the way, the domain that we didn't, we argued about this a little bit,

we didn't include was sexual health, but we were like, oh, it kind of cuts across all the things. So we, but we went back and forth on like, is that a relevant domain? And I think that also, you know, recent over the last few years, recent calls for social justice have illustrated that there's this kind of piece around health that is all about like how you are in the broader world and how the broader world sees you and how you're embedded health in a broader and deeper and more intricate way, understanding that it's going to look you with nutrition choices and behaviors of, you know, moving to the desired goal that you have, which is call it a superficial goal of looking a certain way or moving dynamically a certain way. And do you start first with saying, let's take a look at this model and where would be the place to start? And the reason I'm asking is because that's actually how I work with athletes, is that I'll present athletes or artists or entrepreneurs. I'll start with a large model. And we'll just say, OK, where are we?

Let's get a snapshot. And then, you know, kind of shoring up some of the places that are struggling and figure out if we want to triple down on some of the things that are low-lying opportunities. So that's how I work. One of the ways I should say that I work. So do you do that or is it something else? So you're starting with this model, the deep health model? Yeah, we absolutely can. We've actually got a deep health assessment tool that people can use. And it's like, it gives you a score in different

domains. And so you can look at it and there's different ways you can use it too. Like you can look at it and say, this might be a way that we can track progress, right? Like here, you gave yourself a five out of 10 in this domain. Do you want to boost that to a six or a seven or whatever? Another way is just to kind of have a conversation to introduce people to these concepts. So there's lots of different things you can do, but yeah, we do have a nutrition, a deep health assessment tool that we've developed to start that conversation. Yeah. Okay. So I'm just thinking about frameworks, how you're working and some models and frameworks, I love them.

I really do. I used to have a problem when I was young in the field that, this research laboratory, blah, blah, blah. It's frustrating because it's not how it is in the real world. There's just different nuances. The research lab is such a vacuum. Then a brilliant scientist said to me, and he just grabbed my shoulders from an attentional standpoint, and he looked me in the eyes and he said, the best application is built on tested research. I was like, oh, God, I just got changed. Like, it changed me right there. And I was like, I'm kind of wondering how you guys are working from. And that being said, I noticed that you don't have nutritional health as part of your model. And so it's just an interesting choice that you made there. And so do you put that under physical health? Or where would you put nutritional health? And maybe there's no such thing. Well, knowing what you know about how we approach things, food, eating, dietary patterns,

eating in context, where do you think, where would you put nutrition in a deep health framework? If you noodled on it a little bit? Yeah, I think it's, it's more of one of the choices that you're making, you know, like you don't have under physical, you're not saying essence, strength and conditioning or mobility or whatever. It's like those are choices and tactics. And it seems like nutrition is a choice. But I'm kind of just taking a quick run at it. Yeah, and that's cool.

And I'm just curious. I mean, for me, the answer is that nutrition is everything. And if we... I did not go there. Well, you're getting at the challenge that a lot of people have with thinking about nutrition, which is that we now think about it as like chemical compounds in our foods that do things. Like it's a very limited understanding of nutrition, but if we think about it in a much broader way, so there's... And at different levels of scale, right? So there's the molecules that make up those compounds, protein, carbohydrate, whatever, right? There's foods, there's meals, there's dietary patterns, there's food eaten in context. Now you have the whole deep health

framework, right? So let's just kind of go. So physical, there's molecules that do things in my body. They have a certain function physiologically, you know, mentally, emotionally, there's choices that I'm making around food. There's emotional experiences that I'm having around food. There's relational experiences that I'm having. You know, if I share a meal with someone or I feel connected to someone through food, there's existential stuff like my deeper, why am I making this choice? Oh, I'm making this recipe because it connects me to my heritage and my family's from here. And I feel like by making this recipe, I'm carrying on their legacy. That's a deep philosophical why, right? And then there's environmental stuff. What about the environment or my community or the world that we live in right now is changing my eating habits.

So nutrition actually lives in all of these things at different levels of scale. If we conceptualize nutrition as much more broad. Yeah, I can see that the way that we consume and the choices we make around nutrition affect all of them. Yeah, so I definitely get that. That's really cool. And then, you know, the thought about nutrition for folks, I really appreciate that you guys are, it's almost like zigging when the industry is zagging and people are saying, you know, hey, this is about eat a vegetable or a protein before you eat a starch or not a starch, but yeah, like a starch. And that's going to turn on, gosh, what mechanism does that? It turns off one of the mechanisms for fat storage. I'm blanking on the name of it on the Krebs cycle. And so that's a cool little thought. And like, I have

fun with that. But you know what? It doesn't matter if I'm not getting the basic big rocks in the container, getting the right high quality proteins in relationship to fats and carbs. So can we just take a minute and kind of like level set on the macros for a minute? And then I'd love for fun, I'd love a few clever ways to think about eating well that will help with, you know, overall health. But can we start with some macros? Do you mind doing that for a minute? Yeah, sure. Let's go. Let's go with macros. Yeah. It sounds boring, right? Well, you know, we wrote, we wrote a whole definitive guide, specialized course on macros.

So 150 pages of you thinking about macros. And I've, I've loved it. You know, really, it's, it's really good. No, seriously, it's really good. And, but when you think about macros, like the relationship between myself and protein and the activities that I'm doing, proteins, carbs, and fats, to the activities that I'm doing, and my metabolic rate, give some guiding thoughts to me and to folks about like how to do well with the macros. Yeah. And I like to start from first principles and thinking about terminology.

So when we're talking about macros, we're talking about macronutrients, right? Groups of nutrients that are clustered into big groups. And I think that the word macros for a lot of people is a very meaningless, empty term. Because if people are like, oh, I'm into macros, I'm like, what does that actually mean, right? I think a lot of people don't even completely know. And what is the foundational assumption that is driving macros? And people can't see this, but I'm putting it in finger quotes, right? I think if you drill down, most people are not entirely sure what macros means or what it's supposed to do. So the fundamental belief about macros based stuff is kind of twofold. One of

them is not sort of made explicit, but one of them is that there's a belief that there's an optimal amount of protein, carbohydrate, and fat. And by the way, alcohol is technically a macronutrient. Make of that what you will. The forgotten food group. So, you know, there's a belief that if you get the optimal combination of these three macronutrients in a diet, that something awesome is going to happen to your body, or it's going to fulfill some kind of goal that you have. The other piece of it, which people don't talk about as much, but which is a crucial piece is that energy intake is typically a factor in macronutrient based diets. Now, energy intake is just calories in and calories out. I like to call it energy to kind of divorce it from that very laden term of calories, but we do measure it in calories. So I'm not going to be like totally pedantic about it, but I do like energy intake and energy balance just as a little bit more

neutral terms. So typically on macronutrient based plans, people are given some kind of quantity or percentage of protein, fat, and carbs, along with a prescribed energy intake. So typically what happens is because people are meeting their physiological requirements for these nutrients, plus controlling their energy balance, generally they feel like, hey, this is working out pretty well for me. And, you know, they often kind of see some kind of advancement towards their goals. So that's the basic landscape of a macronutrient concept. Now, one of the things that macronutrient stuff does is they, because they sort, there's only three categories, everything goes in that bucket, right? So we don't talk about necessarily the quality of the macronutrients or the fact that macronutrients are a huge family of molecules with significantly different effects in the human body. And one

of the most mind-blowing things I learned about many years ago, if you're into chemistry, this is going to seem really dumb and obvious, but it dawned on me years ago that molecules have a three-dimensional shape. So if you blew them up really big, they would be like an object, like a particular shaped object. Now the shape of that object changes how things interact with the three-dimensional shapes that are the other parts of your body, there are huge differences in the shapes of fat molecules that fundamentally affect how they behave in your body. So one of the challenges of the macronutrient approach is that they take a whole lot of stuff and put them in three very simplified buckets. So I'll stop there for reactions and clarifying questions. Yeah, cool. And when you're talking about shapes, I'm thinking about like how big magnesium is relative to some other.

Like it's a really big, that's why you've got to take like to get some, if you take magnesium supplements, it feels like a handful of pills where vitamin D, you know, is really tiny, you know? And so, you know, that's interesting. And then so let's do this um is organic overrated you know i like to challenge terms overrated for what for health probably the way it is publicized now and understood yes because if i can buy organic candy that label of organic is meaningless yeah yeah okay um i like to i like to shop at places that i know like i can make choices

sustainably grown you know um small farms i like to shop at places where i know that they're making some conscious choices and when when those people say organic, I believe it. But when fill-in-the-blank mass market whatever says organic, I don't know what to think. Like I have no idea what to think. And I still find myself trying to choose organic because I don't want these extra whatever compounds on top of it. But okay, if you could design like a really great meal,

can you talk me through what that would be? Super practical. And I'll tell you mine if you want. And define great, because we're going to need to know what great means. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, thank you. That's really cool. So for me, it's something that I've got a, I'd say better than average expenditure from a physical standpoint on a regular basis, but not like it was when I was 22, right? So some sort of high intensity movement on a regular basis and some sort of whatever. And I want to have mobility and high quality muscle tissue and fiber. So for me, it's like layered underneath of that is full health, like heart health, liver

health, all that good stuff. And so for me, when I think of a good... It's like, I think a salmon fits in there pretty well. That's high quality salmon that's probably grilled with not a lot of junk in there. And then some sort of colorful vegetables on a plate, maybe sauteed. And then, you know, some sort of maybe rice or grain. I don't know. So that and then need a healthy fat like an avocado. But I can't eat that every day.

You know, like I'll just be sick of it but i'd love for you just to kind of shape how you think about a healthy meal for the average athletically minded non-elite athlete but just the athletically minded folk yeah i i think about a lot of variables to be really honest so when you ask me what a great meal is my my mind is like which meal do you, well, or questions like, do you derive, do you want to derive enjoyment from your food? Does a great meal mean that you really love it? Is it, is it great because it's absolutely suited to your schedule? Like maybe you're a busy run around kind of person and it's convenient, right? Is that how you define great? Is it great because it connects you to something, to your heritage or to your community or your family or something like that?

And if I'm a mechanic, I like all those. I move around a lot, so it needs to be kind of low threshold, high quality, low threshold to barrier or to entry high quality. And I love the heritage piece to it. And sometimes I'm a bit of a mechanic, like, no, no, I want, I just want to feed myself really well. Cause I value health, you know? Um, so, and I should say not this, I value deep health, but I'm talking about like physical health in this standpoint. So yeah. So I just looking for a couple of examples.

Yeah. I mean, and I, and so like what we're narrowing, like what we're circling around is, you know, your criteria for a great meal, which I think is super important to get, to get clear on. Right. And, and so like, I would be like, you know, what trade-offs would you be willing to make? Would you be willing to eat something that's quote unquote healthy, even if it doesn't taste that great. Right. Like we'd want to know what trade-offs. That's, I love how you're doing this.. Like I'm reminded that you really do come from a multidimensional, multifaceted, individual preference, customized approach to change. Like I'm reminded of that right now.

So yes, if we're just talking for me as an example, for many people, it's like, no, no, no, more mechanical in that respect. Okay. Okay, cool. And what can you afford? Like what's your food budget? Do you have any limitations on budget? Probably not A5 Kobe beef with like whatever butter.

I'm not making that choice every night. Nothing we have to fly in. Yeah, we're not flying food in. And do you have access to foods? Like, I mean, do you have a car? Can you get to it? Right. So that's something I'm asking. I mean, I'm curious about too. Like, what is your, do you live in a food desert? Right. What's your income level? What's your, so like what cuisines are you open to? What kind of tastes and flavor profiles do you like? That's

something I'd want to ask about too. But so if you're just asking like, what are some really good, awesome, high quality foods I can eat? Yeah. I mean, that salmon, avocado, I think that avocados truly are one of nature's most perfect foods. As are eggs. I think that eggs are just wonderful. You're not afraid of the cholesterol bit with the yolks or is that old science? That's old science. Yeah. I mean, our bodies regulate cholesterol fairly tightly within their own internal feedback mechanisms. It's actually remarkable to me how much, how much we can not game the system. Like one of the things I used to love about nutrition was that we, I used to think that we can game the system. And I do

believe that we can, it's just that we can't often do it to the degree that we think we can. And so, you know, regulating body pH is another example of that where people are like, yeah, no, it's not a thing. Wait, hold on. So acidic foods and alkaline foods is a little bit of a futile battle? Yeah, not a thing. Wait a minute. If I'm going to eat a bunch of big bag of chips versus some asparagus, you're saying that, no, that's not really interfacing on the alkaline system.

Okay, so there are things that I call, um, right for the wrong reasons. Um, and so like, yeah, I get that. I get that argument. Yeah. So it's like why people think something works, like it may work or not. It's just the explanation for it is not always like correct. So it's like, you know, acupuncture probably doesn't work based on like chi, but like, there's probably something, there's like some neurotransmitter mechanism that we can look at to understand why it works. So I mean, yeah, so the body pH thing, not a thing because the body regulates pH very, very tightly with its own internal feedback mechanisms. And one of the biggest regulators is actually respiration,

which I think is kind of interesting. So. I did not know that. So are you taking us back to deep breathing is actually going to be a really important practice? You know, I wish that were true. Again, I wish that we could game the system so much more than we can. But it's, you know, yeah, this is funny because as soon as you mentioned mentioned how the body works, people are like, okay, so could I do it this way? If respiration is a fundamental cellular process, what if I breathe really hard? It's like, doesn't work like that. But I like that your mind went there.

We are seeing some interesting research on breathing and thresholds for, let's call it choking, but it's really like dying. So long exhales and carbon dioxide exchange can trigger and trip over some tripwires for the brain that, oh my God, we're going to die. And by playing in that almost dying brain wire, you know, tripwire stuff, you actually, we think we can shift the mechanism of anxiety a bit too, which is really interesting. Right. And, but it's not that far of a stretch that if you play in the difficult space, you're going to get good, better at the difficult things. And so carbon dioxide, that sensation where you want to breathe in, but you don't, that thing is what we're talking about. It's scary. You know, everyone's got a tripwire.

Everyone's got a place. It's so true. And it's kind of just make a, you know, just a completely tangential point, which is that, you know, it used to be that training in a mask was a thing, right? People believe that it would somehow increase their oxygen capacity or whatever they believed about it. So they were like doing hardcore CrossFit stuff in masks, you know, to kind of limit their breathing capacity. And now I find it kind of sad and hilarious at the same time that the anti-mask argument, which is incorrect, is that it increases your carbon dioxide, right? And you're suffocating yourself. But I'm like, but wait, like, weren't these some of the same people that like two years ago were training hardcore, you know, in masks? So anyway, it's just sort of context is everything, I guess, is the point of that story. But who knows? There was NFL athletes on our team that would come out and practice before or before a game

with a mask on. Yeah. And the science nerds, you know, were like, what are you doing? What are you doing? You know, maybe do it on a Wednesday. I don't know. You know, so, okay, good. So I'm not clear on what a good meal is, but I'm more clear on the right questions to ask. Like, okay, that's really good. It's actually, they're super helpful. Well, I mean, and I think the discussion that we kind of wandered into is it demonstrates the value of understanding mechanisms and first principles and why things work or don't, right? And so kind of the questions that you have around what makes a great meal or, you know, what makes wearing a mask useful or whether something regulates body pH, to answer a lot

of those questions, we need to understand the fundamental processes by which things work. And so that's something I always insist on in our curriculum is like, we have to explain how and why things work. And, you know, rather than just telling people that I like to do it through stories. And so, you know, were this curriculum, I would explain the concept of a great meal through the story of Michael trying to figure out what a great meal is. And so like the kinds of questions that he grappled with and, and the kinds of topics that we went over. But, but yeah, so did we do, I mean, I gave you a few foods that I liked. How about chin check this? Okay. For me, like four out of the seven days a week, I've got, I wish I could tell you that I've got this flamboyant range of foods that I eat. But the truth is, I'm not very good at, you know, preparing food. So I'm better off when I have a meal service program that's delivering food to the house. But so eggs,

avo toast. So I'll get Ezekiel bread. I throw some, sometimes a little bit of a grass fed butter on there and then a healthy amount of avocado, throw some, an egg on top with some chia seed. How about that? A little spicy pepper. And then, you know, and so that's kind of like a go-to and I'll have a couple of those or some sort of oatmeal with some, you won't like this probably, but I'll mix in some protein powder, some, throw some nuts in there and a little bit of fruit. But so how about, how about that as a choice? What do you think? I think that's, I think you make a very interesting assumption about what I would like or not like, first of all. Yeah, that's good. Fair. Thank you for that. You know what I've got in the back of my head that you'll appreciate is I was sharing that with somebody recently about the oatmeal.

They're like, ah, I wouldn't do an oatmeal. I'm like, really? They're like, yeah. And so it's part of the reason i'm asking you yeah i mean i i want to step back from this conversation and and note that we live in such a bizarre time in human history in a way when when these are the kinds of conversations that we can be having and and the fundamental model that governs a lot of like this is a bad food this is a good food is in a way based on a kind of implicit model of human fragility like if you eat oatmeal, oh my God, there's something terrible that's going to happen to you. When in reality, I mean, humans rose to being the dominant species on the planet because we were scavengers and omnivores and could eat anything, anywhere, anytime, maybe not anything,

but it is because of our resilience and our ability to really adapt to a whole variety of niche diets. And if you look at the incredible variety of dietary patterns around the world, there's huge diversity in the macronutrient makeup, the choice of foods that people eat, you know, even the meal timing patterns, there really is no standard way for humans to eat. And so the only way we can truly determine whether something is working or not is look at the lab of Michael in a way, right? Are you performing in the way you, do you feel good? Do you mentally and emotionally feel good when you eat? Is it meeting your ethical standards? Is it, is it tasty in the way that you like? And so like, once we kind of achieve, this is why I love speaking with you. Yeah. I'm going, damn it.

You're right again. You know, and, and, and this is actually how I work with athletes on the, you know, the psychological side. And, and you're so right. Like context is so important about all of this. And I will tell you, uh, cause I do measure some, my HRV that, um, uh, restricted feeding like a, like a 10 hour window, um, or like an eight hour window, somewhere in there, my HRV thanks me for it. Cool. Now, you know, yeah. And that's, that's, that's, you are, you are your N equals one, right? You are your own scientist. Yeah. It's awesome. But I need some feedback loops, you know, like trusted experts like you that give me nothing but better questions. Well, I mean, like if we were working together, what we would do is some kind of iterative process, right? Where I'd be like,

okay, listen, I'm going to, I'm going to start with the wide part of the funnel and ballpark some stuff based on your initial criteria that I think would probably be good options for you. You sound like someone who's content to be an omnivore. You know, your food budget is pretty good. You seem to like some balance of variety and stability. Like I could come up with a roster of things that I think would work for you. You don't like fruits and vegetables. Like, okay, cool.

And then over time, we would look at your indicators and the criteria that we determined were important and drill down into, okay, here for you is probably a pretty solid roster of go-to meals that you like, that you prefer, that you know how to prepare, that are in your comfort zone, but sometimes novel enough to give you a little bit of entertainment, right? So there really is no... and you know, I mean, human beings also vary quite substantially in their ability to tolerate things, right? And we all know that friend, that's like a goat, right? They can just eat anything, like they can eat the extra spicy burrito, like that they get from a street vendor in Indonesia, like there's just no problem, right? Whereas it's like the person you were saying who can,

you know, they put on their sock and there's like the sock is on wrong. It's that person that's like a little purebred dog and they can only eat like three things or whatever. So, I mean, there's huge individual variety and intolerance to it. And we don't know that with you until we get into it. I love it. And, you know, some of the things that I'd like to just get your general take on glucose monitors, what you think about that. And then also, let's call it, I'm blanking on the technical term right now, but gut biome assessments, you know, and those are complicated and not fun to get. We can laugh about that together. And then the other is, is like DNA stuff. Right? So

I'm interested in all three as feedback loops. Can you just give me a top line on let's start with glucose monitors? Yeah, okay. So I mean, my, my, I have kind of different ways to think about this. So one of them is, number one, science is cool. And being a scientist of yourself is awesome. And when you do things that teach you about the science of yourself, that's terrific. So if doing a DNA test, you know, inspires you to learn about, you know, how that works, that is amazing. And being curious about yourself and who you are, like, it's really just another form of self-investigation and self-knowledge to me. I think that's awesome that we know of that have been, you know, shown in large populations. Like how do we know whether a genetic variant affects something or doesn't?

Well, we have to do a lot of work to figure that out. Right. And then we have to do it, you know, reliably in a particular population. And then that's only one population. Now we have, you know, hundreds of genetically distinct populations in the world. We have to make sure that this is relevant in all of the populations. So it's a massive amount of work to determine whether even one genetic variant makes a difference and to what degree, like maybe this is a 1%, like a, you know, a negligible difference. Maybe it's a 50% difference. We don't know. So there's a massive amount of work that has to go into just one variant and we could potentially

have millions, billions, right? So, so unfortunately at this point, the utility of these things for diagnostics and in terms of like, what do I do next is really low. Then you have the other kind of to circle back around to what we talked about in the beginning, the behavioral components. So let's say that I could give you the most amazingly customized diet. But what if you don't want to do that diet? Right? Like, what if I say, you know what, I'm sorry, genetic testing has revealed that you have to give up avocado and eggs and a zeekiel toast and salmon. You're like, well, but I like that. Krista, come on. But you know, to your point earlier, there's a healthy population of people probably just like me that said, no problem. I just want to know. Yeah, good. I just want to know. So I did, speaking of testing, I did a nutritional blood analysis at one point. And I recommend them because I got some really good information back about the choices I was making that was helpful and stuff that I was just kind of blowing it on. You know, like deeper stuff.

And one of the things that came back on one of the food sensitivities was sesame seed and mustard seed. And it was like severe. And I've taken these tests like three or four times over the course of, let's call it six years. And they keep coming back severe. So guess what? I'm done with them. And when I know I eat them, I'm like, okay, maybe I got to suffer some inflammation.

You know, like if I do want to eat them, but I'm just kind of done with them. And are those symptoms that you notice perceptible? Like if you eat sesame seed, do you notice the symptoms? I didn't know. But when I stopped eating sunflower and mustard seeds, that I had less kind of congestion in my nose. So I notice that now because I haven't eaten them for probably, let's say eight months,

that I probably would recognize a little bit of congestion. So I think so. Like not congestion in my chest, but like nasal type of stuff. Yeah, something changed when I stopped taking them. And listen, I also have that kind of curious science mind like, okay, where's the placebo effect? And is it really enough inflammation to make a difference? But there was a bunch of other things that I was moderate and light on that I didn't change. And so contextually. Yeah. Well, I mean, as a

psychologist, you know about validity, right? And one of the questions about any of these tests is, is the test measuring what it says it's measuring, right? Is this actually telling me about the thing that I want to know about? And I think, I mean, different tests do that to different degrees, right? So, I mean, a glucose monitor, well, that's probably going to give me a pretty clear picture of what my blood glucose is doing. That one, I think we can high five and say, yeah, you know what? That's cool. Certain kinds of food sensitivities tests, like immunoglobulin G tests, they're not really regarded as valid because they don't necessarily show what they say they show. They show something else. They might show some kind of clinical indicator, but they don't necessarily show the thing that they say that they do. So I think that's one of the challenges of interpreting a lot of these tests. So yeah, you're not bullish there.

Because is that more on the lab side? The inconsistencies on lab? Because we ran some tests just to see and set two samples of the same person to the same lab and different results came back. And we're like, damn, that's a bummer. I mean, that is part of it, right? We did the same thing for our genetic testing book that we wrote. And we sent the same samples of the same person to different labs, I think. And those actually had a pretty close concordance. I think those were fairly similar. But yeah, I mean, that's another piece of it, right? And I wasn't even actually thinking about the quality of the lab test itself. It was more like.

You're talking about the actual measurement, the validity. Is it measuring what they say they're measuring? That's exactly. Yeah. So you're talking about reliability, but it's the same kind of question. And then, okay, maybe it gives me a personalized set of recommendations, but can I use them? Can I apply them? And, you know And one of the big challenges too is that a lot of these measures that we talk about in nutrition, if I improve certain things, I can probably make an unhealthy person healthy, but I won't necessarily make a healthy person healthier. So that's a crucial distinction for me, right? And when you work in the domain of top performance, you know this too.

It's like, I can take you defining. I'm really, I'm really glad you asked that question. Sorry. I've got this idea of deep health. Stay with me. No, I and so like, for me, like, these are fundamentally different kinds of people right and and you know in your work with athletes you know you can probably take anyone off the street and make them into like an average like you can teach them the skills to be an average amateur who isn't terrible but can you take a regular person and turn them into like a top 1% elite? No. Like those top 1% elites are that way anyway. So I think a lot of folks who are affluent and really interested in their health are thinking that if I just do more of the things that make people healthy,

that I will be healthier, but it doesn't work that way. Past a certain threshold, you're not ever going to arrive at a place we would call healthier or ideal or optimal. It just doesn't work that way. So I mean, intermittent fasting is a great example. It's like, if you're unhealthy, there's a really good chance it'll improve metabolic indicators. But if you're already healthy, it's not going to make you awesome. In fact, it might make you not awesome. That's the downside. Right. Yeah. And what I've come to learn from some research is that there's a different sense In fact, it might make you not 99.9% the sameness about that idea, is that women is somewhere around the 10 to 12-hour mark.

And then men have a little bit higher threshold with just like a 14-hour window. Yeah, I mean, rather than putting in terms of numbers, what I would say is that on average, women of reproductive age, their bodies defend energy balance much more aggressively. So women's bodies on average of reproductive age are much more sensitive to disruptions in energy balance or nutrient scarcity. So their bodies will raise the alarm at a lower threshold of threat. So that can be all kinds of things. It can be nutritional threat, like, you know, not having enough carbohydrate. It could be energy. It can be a bunch of stuff. And also, I mean, what we're

really talking about is, you know, the full load of stress, right? Oh my gosh, I'm looking for the word, not homeostasis, the hormesis effect, the hormesis effect. So, you know, it's what I call it, a little dab will do you, right? Or one tequila is fun, 15 tequilas, not so much. So the problem with a lot of intermittent fasting is people are doing it in a context of other life stressors, especially people that are interested in performance. They're already training hard. They're already driven. They're already type A. They're already like, you know, piling stress on stress on stress on stress. You add intermittent fasting and it's just like crunch. The camel with the load of straw on his back just collapses. So context is huge in determining whether something will work for you or not.

It's one of the reasons, unless you have somebody like you or one of your team members helping guide and ask the questions like, how is this working? How is that? Oh, well, we want one too many. Okay, let's pull back. You know, don't worry about the mustard seeds. They're fine because you've thrown yourself into a whole different world. So, you know, I think that all of it, what you're saying is really important to have skilled people around or technologies that are reliable and you can trust. So the HRV for me is like, oh, well, this is actually working from an HRV standpoint. And that's a, I need all the help I can get on HRV, you know, from the kind of fast paced nature of my life. So, so listen, I want to say again, thank you for the time. I love the conversations we're in. My hope from this conversation is that, well, I will say what not my hope is what I've always experienced with you is an appreciation for the multidimensional way of thinking about individuals bespoke changes for better, you know, however

we're going to describe better. And so I just want to say thank you again for sharing your time, for your wisdom, your insight. And my hope is that folks that are part of this conversation in an odd way removed from some technology, but we're right there with you, is that they go, I want someone like Krista in my corner. And so how can they get that? You know, Precision Nutrition is an epic resource. And so where can we find you and your peers? Yeah, I mean, precisionnutrition.com is the place to be, right? And there's so much, I mean, so much of our thinking, we just put out into the world, right? So you can go and there's so much free material. And every time we're working through like a concept,

we put it out there and see what people think. And we just put out this one that's making a lot of waves, especially in 2020, but it's about trauma and the relationship between trauma and eating behaviors. And it's something we've been sitting on actually for many years. I wrote the original many years ago and we just kind of sat on it because we thought it was too much, right? But now it seems like super relevant. So I mean, it's a place where people can go and see our thinking as it unfolds, like almost in

real time. So that's where I would definitely suggest starting just to get the headspace of how we do things. Yeah, there's so much free stuff. Yeah. And if you want to get better at coaching clients, if you've got clients on nutrition, flat out the resource to get to sign up, get, get, get all that rolling. And if you just want to make changes for yourself, you know, I've been on your program for, I don't know, Tim sends me an email every day from, you know, I'm lucky to be part of it and it's good. It's just good. And so just a lot of good. So I just want to say, Krista, thank you for, um, time and talent and sharing both and, uh, appreciate you guys. Oh, my pleasure. Yeah. Cool. Okay. And on social,

where do we find you on social? Um, I'm at, at stumptuous.uous. I think that our PN on Instagram is at InsidePN. I mean, just do a search for Precision Nutrition, you'll find us. I think we couldn't get Precision Nutrition for some reason, but if you just do a search on Precision Nutrition, you'll find us, you know, Facebook. We're on the Grams. We have actually a pretty lively Instagram profile. I think they do some good work there so yeah okay fun and then how about your writing any books any of that kind of stuff of note um nothing from me i mean you can find my book on amazon if you search my name actually you can find even my old academic works on amazon so if you're if you're interested in

reading about auxiliary workers i'm sorry ancillary workers in healthcare, you could find that. Or stuff on trans and feminist issues, you can find that too. But in terms of what I'm writing now, it's really just a lot of this new curriculum that we're building. So yeah. Awesome.

Appreciate you. Thank you, Krista. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're

listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more insights, we have a newsletter we send out every Wednesday. Punch over to findingmastery.com slash newsletter to sign up. The show wouldn't be possible without our sponsors and we take our recommendations seriously.

And the team is very thoughtful about making sure we love and endorse every product you hear on the show. If you want to check out any of our sponsor offers you heard about in this episode, you can find those deals at findingmastery.com slash sponsors. And remember, no one does it alone. The door here at Finding Mastery is always open to those looking to explore the edges and the reaches of their potential so that they can help others do the same. So join our community, share your favorite episode with a friend, and let us know how we can continue to show up for you. Lastly, as a quick reminder, information in this podcast and from any material on the Finding Mastery website and social channels is for information purposes only. If you're looking for meaningful support,

which we all need, one of the best things you can do is to talk to a licensed professional. So seek assistance from your healthcare providers. Again, a sincere thank you for listening. Until next episode, be well, think well, keep exploring.