Good Life Project - JJ Virgin: Sugar, Addiction and the Good Life

Episode Date: November 13, 2014

Fueling your body for optimal health, performance and vitality is an important part of living a good life. Question is, how?I don’t know about you, but it’s more than a bit maddening trying to keep up with the latest nutrition advice.High-fat, low-fat, paleo, vegan, gluten-free, grass-fed donuts, who knows what’s next. Despite the onslaught, though, one ingredient seems to be emerging as a a potential nutritional black hole across nearly all the pundits, regardless of the approach. It's something that’s claimed to be more addictive than drugs, devastating to health and perfectly legal. In fact, according to today's guest, the average person eats about their body weight in this ingredient every year.So, who is that guest and what are we talking about?Leading voice in nutrition, wellness and weight loss, and bestselling author of The Virgin Diet and her newest book, The Sugar Impact Diet, JJ Virgin.That potential nutritional sinkhole she's talking about is a little thing called sugar, in all its forms, even the ones that don't sound like sugar. I thought I'd heard all the arguments, but JJ opened my eyes in a big way.You'll learn a ton from this conversation. But, as with all of our conversations here, this one's not entirely about sugar.You'll also learn about JJ's personal journey. In fact, the episode starts in a very different, very personal place. A hospital ICU, where two years ago, JJ's 16 year old son lay with doctors telling her to just "let him go." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So they did this study on rats and morphine and Oreos. And so what they did first was they gave the rats morphine, and they saw that lit up the pleasure center in the brain. And then they gave the rats the Oreos, and it lit up the same pleasure-reward center in the brain. And then they gave the rats a choice between the two. And the rats actually chose the Oreos over the morphine. They got more pleasure from the Oreos than the morphine,

and instantly they also cracked them open. So I don't know about you, but it's more than a bit maddening trying to keep up with the latest nutrition advice. High fat, low fat, paleo, vegan, gluten-free, grass-fed donuts, who really knows what's next? Despite the onslaught, though, one ingredient seems to be emerging as the closest thing to the nutrition devil pretty much as you can get. It's something that's claimed to be more addictive than crack, more devastating to your health, and perfectly legal. What am I talking about? Well, that's what you're about to find out in this week's episode. I'm Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series X is here.

It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. If you're looking for flexible workouts, Peloton's got you covered. Summer runs or playoff season meditations. Whatever your vibe, Peloton has thousands of classes built to push you. We know how life goes. New father, new routines, new locations. and meditations, whatever your vibe, Peloton has thousands of classes built to push you. We know how life goes. New father, new routines, new locations. What matters is that you have something there to adapt with you, whether you need a challenge or rest. And Peloton has everything you need, whenever you need it. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton.

Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot if we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. My guest today is leading voice in nutrition, wellness, and weight loss, and best-selling author of The Virgin Diet and her newest book, The Sugar Impact Diet, JJ Virgin. So what are we talking about?

A little thing called sugar in all its myriad forms. But the conversation starts in a very different place. In fact, in a hospitalized AU where JJ's 16-year-old son lay with doctors telling her to just let him go. Two years ago, he was the victim of a hit-and-run accident. He was left for dead in the street. He was 16 years old. And when we got to the first hospital he was airlifted to, they told me, you know, he's got 13 fractures, multiple brain bleeds, a torn aorta. We can't fix that torn aorta here because we'd have to use blood thinners. His brain would bleed out. You basically get to choose between his brain and his heart. And if we airlift him, he'll probably die

in the airlift. And even if he were to survive the airlift, he would probably die in the surgery. And even if he were to survive that, he's so brain damaged that you really just need to let him go. And I think any parent hearing that's like, wait a minute, you really just need to let him go. And I think any parent hearing that's like, wait a minute, you know, you've got to try, right? So they were basically telling you let him go. Oh, they were very adamant about it. In fact, we got the medical report back, and they were angry in the medical report. The parents, we told parents he would probably die on the airlift and keep, and I was like, but you told us he would die here in the next 24 hours, so I'd rather die trying, right? Wouldn't you?

But that whole situation, the four and a half months in the ICU, then the hospital, then the rehab after that, showed me that you have to live life prepared. Like, you have to be ready. You know, for so many of us, our health is the area that is holding us back. And it's silly little things that we're doing every day, habits, that are holding us back, holding us back because of energy, because of focus, because of weight. And you never know when a huge crisis like that's going to hit or a big opportunity or maybe just something small.

But I know that, like, with my son in the ICU and I was launching a book and I'm the sole financial support for my family. So it wasn't optional. Oh, I'll put this off. You know, besides publishers, you know, they were sorry for what was going on, but it's not like you can change your pub date. It was coming. But I had to show up there and I was there 12 hours a day with my laptop talking to my son and doing a book campaign and if I hadn't been super healthy I would not have been able to pull that one off yeah I think that's one of the big things is that we tend to uh turn back to the the practices that that allow us to maintain health and build health after some sort of major incident rather than you know just building it along the way.

And I've had so many conversations with this. I'm sure you have also. It's like what does it take to actually get somebody to adopt that lifestyle before you actually have this major traumatic event where it becomes so valuable having that lifestyle beforehand because it helps you through the event itself. Right. I mean, I just did a show with Mike Koenigs, who's a cancer survivor, and prior to having the stage 3 colorectal cancer that nearly took his life,

he would eat, you know, he's poor at diet. His wife was always, she said he was the difficult spouse with the diet, and now he follows an incredible low sugar impact diet. He's on this program. But, yeah, it shouldn't have to take that. It shouldn't have to take that. And more than that, when you look at it, just being able to kind of live full out each day,

have more energy, have more focus, not wake up in the morning and go in the closet and go, what the heck am I going to wear today? And trying on multiple things because you're like nothing quite fits and that horrible feeling of being bloated and that horrible reality of the evening when you promised yourself, you know, you promised yourself you weren't going to have the cookies or the ice cream or whatever, and you do it again and sabotage yourself.

So I think a lot of it, Jonathan, is just setting up your life for success and putting those habits into practice. And if you start to live like a healthy, fit, lean person, you will become one. And I've been really looking at this issue because what I discovered was I have a lot of male clients, and I've had the opportunity, you know, I've worked with, like now we've done over a million clients, but I've worked with personally over tens of thousands. And a lot of women, a lot of men, and they approach it very differently. And for the longest time, I thought,

oh, man, they've got it made. They've got better metabolism, more muscle mass. But actually, they've got a different approach. And I'll give you an example. Someone I'm working with right now, he goes, okay, I've got it. He put everything in place to support himself. He's got his wife on board. He's got his systems in place. He's got someone delivering his food. He just set it all up to create a no-fail environment. And you watch women, and women tend to be just the opposite. They put everybody else first. They're setting everything. They're not setting up, taking themselves, saying, what if I put myself first, created this environment of health for myself? Then it would trickle into my entire family, right? And I just made this situation so there's not ice cream in the freezer or cookies in the pantry.

I haven't scheduled out my day so tight, so there is no time to fit in a quick 15-minute workout. Just those critical things that I watch a man, he just schedules it all. It's all just set up to structure. He's got a team on board to help him, right? So that you've got that support and accountability to make it easy for yourself. So do you find the same thing with, if you look at men and, is it different between moms who are full-time moms or women who are full-time moms versus women who work an outside job full-time? Have you noticed any sort of difference in that? No, because in reality, a mom who's a full-time mom is probably working more than the mom working. Yeah, no doubt.

As a working mom, I bow down to the full-time moms because I see what they're doing at school. You know, there seems to be a divide between the working moms and the stay-at-home moms, but I think they're all working moms. And so I just think that women, I'll give you an example. I had this one woman working mom, and she came to me because she'd had a huge health scare that made her scared straight. She almost died in the hospital. And she goes, I realized I really have to do this for my family. I'm the big financial support for my family is now what I think 40% of the women now are out earning the men and families. And it's not fun money anymore, like it used to be. And so she says, I really have to do this for my family. So we wrote out our whole program. And I'm all about simple shifts,

little little shifts that, you know, make big changes and just working that into your life. It shouldn't take more time. It shouldn't cost more money. In fact, most people save money. And I check in with her and I have people journal because if you look at people who are successful on a program versus not actually journaling is the number one determinant and then support and accountability are right behind it. I check in with her a month later, and she hadn't done anything. And I said, well, like, what have you been doing? Because this was this key, most important thing. She goes, well, I was working on, she gave me this list of the top ten things.

And what was so ridiculous about this top ten list was all the things on it were, you know, they were things to support her family, but one of them was getting life insurance in place. I go, so let me get this straight, right? I mean, you put getting life insurance in place in case you died above just getting your health in order so you don't. Is that right? Yeah, there's a really, there's a warped sense of priority. But like you said, I guess it is interesting that, because it wouldn't occur to me that a man would move into that sort of like same experience differently than a woman. So it's, but when you lay it out like that, then it's like, well, yeah, I can see that now.

We're just used to kind of putting ourselves last. We're the caretakers, right? You know, that's what we do. So we look at everything else. And I think in a way we almost feel guilty about it. So the mindset shift for women is we are the ultimate role model. We're the ultimate healthcare CEO for our family. And for our friends too, we become an inspiration for them and they're going to do what you do. You know, if you don't want your kids struggling with obesity, we now have 20% of the kids are now obese. The average child eats 32 teaspoons of sugar a day, which is just insane. No, we now have 20% of the kids are now obese. The average child eats 32

teaspoons of sugar a day, which is just insane, though we're eating less table sugar than ever. So it's not like they're sitting down, you know, pouring dominoes on their fruit. But you look at this and you go, all right, if you're the ultimate role model, it just starts with you. So if you're not going to do it for yourself, if you feel guilty taking the time, taste, but do it for your family and realize that they are watching you. You know, kids, they model everything, right? Yeah. It's not about what you say. Not remotely. It's entirely about what you do. I've had clients go, oh yeah, I smoke, but my kids aren't going to smoke. I go, really? Bet they will. I know. It was amazing. I was walking in the city, especially New York city tends to be fairly was amazing. I was walking in the city, especially New York City tends to be fairly enlightened.

And I was walking in the city the other day and I saw there's a guy, like a young dad pushing his kid in a stroller with a cigarette kind of dangling out of the hand that he was pushing the stroller on. And I'm like, okay, it's not my place to go up to him and say, do you realize- But don't you just want to run in there and grab that cigarette out of his mouth and stomp on it and slap him? I do. Because I'm like, it's not about what you're saying.

It's like your kid at some point is going to see that this is the acceptable way to behave, and it doesn't matter what you say beyond that. I mean, we're both parents, so you learn that really quickly. Your kids are going to hold you accountable really fast. I remember when I was a kid, there was a short window of time where my mom smoked. And she came home one day. She came upstairs, opened my sister's door, and my sister and me were in her room smoking. And this is when we were in our early teens, ridiculously young. We weren't inhaling. We were just sitting there

doing it because we want her to come in and see us. And then she's freaked out. She's like, you have to stop. And we're like, we'll stop when you stop. Ooh. I would never have had that insight as a young teen to do that. I'm pretty sure it was my sisters. I don't think I would have had that. But it's, it's all I think it's so true. And sometimes we realize this or like, say, okay, if not for me, then if I have people who are watching me to understand how do I behave in the world, then then at least maybe for them. Yes. And I think that's an important message for women to hear, is that the change starts with them, especially since we're the ones generally doing the grocery store runs, or at least

making sure what food's getting in the house, right? So take me even further back in time. You've been in the health, fitness, nutrition industry since mid-80s or earlier? I actually started when I was in high school. So I had the good fortune, I was born in San Francisco. I grew up in Berkeley. So the whole farm to table thing- Started there, basically. Yeah, Alice Waters, there it is. However, my mother is from the Midwest. So I was raised on Pop-Tarts. In fact, my nickname growing up was Poppy.

And that's how much it was. I literally had dessert for breakfast every day. Now, most people have dessert for breakfast every day because they're having a muffin, which is just a cupcake without frosting, but I literally did. And then at age 12, and all those Midwest things, like the casserole with the potato chips on top. And we had dessert every single night after dinner. At age 12, I was always very athletic. But at age 12, I discovered boys, and I had acne in this little Buddha belly. And I went, that's it. And I got very into health. But the challenge was, I remember it so well, I stopped eating the Pop-Tarts. I started having bran muffins. And I stopped eating the ice cream. I went, we had our first frozen yogurt store in Berkeley, Yogurt Park. And I stopped eating the candy bars.

And I went and got Tiger's Milk's bars. And I didn't do soda. I did tab. So I didn't, like, fix things. I fell into the trap a lot of people fall into. Right, you did what was the best available thing, like, at the time. But it's so funny because you look at it and you think you're doing so much better. But actually, you didn't shift at all.

But I was very athletic. I started teaching calisthenics, see how I'm dating myself, in high school. And then when I went off to college, I actually was catering in college. And I thought I was going to go to the culinary institute, but then I couldn't. They were not into healthy food. And that's what I was trying to switch to when I was teaching aerobics. So by the time I graduated from UCLA, I was a personal trainer. And then I went, I think I was in a doctoral level exercise phys program at SC and

I decided I really wanted to study nutrition. Because you kind of run out of, I mean, there's only so much exercise stuff you can study. It's just not that complicated, right? But nutrition certainly is and functional medicine certainly is and nutrition is complex i think one of the things that's so frustrating for so many people when you start to talk about nutrition is this is exactly what you were laying out you're like okay so when we were kids we're taught you know like bran muffins and this and that and that's the way to do it and then you know like 10 years ago we have a completely different message and now we see emerging maybe over the last four or five years or so, a radical shift where there are people like you and a lot of the functional med docs and stuff like that are kind of looking at all of the mainstream recommendations that are coming out of the ADA and the AMA and saying, no, that's what's killing us.

And right now we're in a position where it feels like you're still the maverick. The functional med docs, even the leading names are still the mavericks. You know, it's still you're bucking against a really big system. Well, it's the money. Yeah. It would be the money issue. I mean, here's the issue. And this really happened a couple decades ago.

There were two men. You know, it was the big thing of what's causing heart disease, because it's the number one killer of women. And it calls about, I think, 35% of men. So what was causing heart disease? Two guys, Ansel Keys, John Yudkin. John Yudkin said it was the sugar. Brilliant guy, pure white and deadly. I mean, amazing book. So ahead of his time. He kind of got the mechanisms, but didn't have the studies to back it up yet, right? And I always think if you have the chemistry, biochemistry, do you really need the study? Because you can make a study prove anything, which is what John Yudkin did. He took the study that was the Seven Sisters Cholesterol Study and made it, like if you really read the study, you realize he interpreted it

wrong. However, he came out with, it's the fat. And I remember about 20, 25 years ago when all of a sudden fat became the devil and all the fat, we went fat-free. Susan Powder was Stop the Insanity, and we started pulling the fat out of it. It was everything. Right? Everything was fat. I went down at the time. I was personal training out at the Pritikin Center,

and so I was a vegetarian trying to eat as low as 10 grams of fat a day, which if you're a vegetarian eating 10 grams of fat or less a day, you are eating all carbs. You can imagine how well that worked for me. That was really a tough time. Very crabby too. But during that time, we pulled the fat out and you have to put something in. And at the same time, the Japanese figured out how to do high fructose corn syrup

and stabilize the price of sugar. So it's like the perfect storm when you look at it. And the food manufacturers discovered that when you put sugar in foods, people buy more of them because now they're hungrier. We know that fructose, the only way you can metabolize fructose that goes straight to the liver where it's metabolized mainly is fat because there's not much storage space for glycogen there. And fructose bypasses satiety signals. So if you're eating a food with high fructose corn syrup, fructose and glucose, you're going to both raise blood sugar and become insulin resistant, but you'll also get hungrier.

So all of a sudden people are getting addicted. Sugar's a drug, eight times more addictive than cocaine. They're hungrier. They're buying more. I mean, from a food manufacturer standpoint, that's nirvana. You've got 80% of the processed foods now have added sugars before we even look at natural sugars in the food, which are the same to your body, or carbohydrates, which, if they don't have fiber, are turning into sugar too. And I think the big challenge out there in this whole sugar debate is people are talking about added sugars, but white flour is still going to turn into sugar, and corn is turning into sugar.

And so you can't just look at added sugars. You have to look at the natural sugars in the food and the carbohydrates turning into sugar, and then understand that it's not really like you can't eat any sugar. It's really understanding which sugars to choose and which to lose based on the impact on your body. So here's a question. I want to go deeper into this because I know you have a lot more to say, and I'm curious. I have questions about it. But for anybody who's listening to this, there are going to be people who are sitting there saying, 10 years ago, I was told the exact opposite from the smartest people in the world, or the people I thought were the smartest people in the world, every magazine out there, every news show, all the spokespeople. Now you're telling me this. Why would I believe that this is the truth rather than this is the new new that's going to be disproven 10 years from now? So in the 1900s, the average person was eating five pounds of sugar a year

and our obesity rate was 0.75%, 0.75%, three-fourths of a percent, point, right? Then 20 years ago, the average person was eating 26 pounds of sugar a year and the obesity rate nationwide was 10%. Now, 20 years later, the obesity rate, well, the average sugar intake is 152 pounds per person a year, basically a person's weight of sugar, and the obesity rate is 34.9%, so 35%. If you look at every major disease, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, prediabetes, osteoarthritis, dementia. If you look at all of these things, sugar doesn't just play a role.

It plays a major role in their study after study after study. If you look at what's really shifted over the last couple decades, I mean, you know, some of these toxins, yes, but the biggest shift really has been an increase in sugar intake. I mean, it's a straight, like you can look at the linear increase in that and obesity, and then you know what obesity does with all the disease rates. And so that's why we need to pay attention, is we've basically done a chemistry experiment over the last 20 or 30 years with artificial sweeteners and dropping fat that didn't work.

So should we be insane and continue to do more of what's not working? If you're looking for flexible workouts, Peloton's got you covered. Summer runs or playoff season meditations, whatever your vibe, Peloton has thousands of classes built to push you. We know how life goes. New father, new routines, new locations. What matters is that you have something there to adapt with you, whether you need a challenge or rest.

And Peloton has everything you need, whenever you need it. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required,

charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. So then why so much resistance from the arbiters of what's going to save your life? I mean, is it what you just laid out before in terms of is this a money thing? Well, I'm going to sound so cynical.

I know. Oh, my gosh. But I think it's a conversation that it's going to be in people's heads. So it's like we have to address it or else it's just kind of lingering out there. But I think also people really don't want to believe that it's a money thing. Is it a power thing? Is it a prestige thing? Is it just that people are so locked into this is the way that we've built our professions and told people that we're kind of incapable, like we don't want to backpedal if this is the new reality?

I think in the medical field, generally the rule of thumb is it takes like 20 years for something to get into practice because you've got to have it taught in the medical schools and then put into practice, and there always has to be a study on it, right? So you can't just look at something and go, okay, now we know that fructose creates problems and the glycemic index doesn't really make sense because it disregards fructose because it doesn't raise blood sugar. So we better shift that. It'll now take them studying, looking at bringing fructose and they'll have to study insulin

resistance and it'll take 20 years and they'll have to teach it in the medical school. So there's that lag time of the medical profession. There's also in the medical profession is a very unique profession in that, like John Yudkin's a great example. If you come out with a new idea there, in the business and marketing world, you come out with a new idea, you're Richard Branson and people are like, yay, he's so cool. You do that in the medical field and you are totally criticized, put down, you're a quack. I mean, there's quack watch, right? Like, it's crazy.

So it's not a profession where people are celebrated by looking at new ideas. And so you really have to be a renegade to do it. I think one of the benefits for me, I remember I was debating, I went to UCLA on a theater scholarship, but I fell in love with the whole nutrition and exercise fizz. And I thought when I graduated, I went to graduate school for exercise science, but I thought about going to medical school. And my medical friends were like, the system's going down, don't do it. But I think because I'm not an MD, I've had 40 graduate and doctoral courses and go to

all the functional medicine conferences, but because I'm not an MD, I can get away with stuff and kind of pave the way for them and take the hits. That if they were to say this stuff, they're really going to get, I mean, we've got to like celebrate our friend, Dr. Mark Hyman, because he really is out there on the front line saying this stuff and getting attacked, you know, and it's, it's really shouldn't be that way. So there's that side of it, a profession that really doesn't like to change, doesn't change on a dime. And then there's the money side of it. And, you know, hey, big pharma, diabetes drugs, cancer drugs are big, big business. And it may be that it's a money thing, but it may be that they're just trying to solve problems. They're not going underneath and going, why is this problem happening? What's going on? They're just going,

here's the immediate problem. Here's the hole in the, you know, hole in the hose. What do we need to do to cover it? Instead of going, why don't we look at why this is happening in the first place? And then of course the food manufacturers. So it's, I think it's kind of a perfect storm and I don't want to start this whole conspiracy theory, but you know, I think sometimes you just get into the middle of it and all of a sudden you're just trying to fix, fix the problem instead of looking like where is this coming from? And that's probably where we're most trapped. Yeah. And what's interesting is I've had conversations with a number of physicians who would actually really love to practice differently, but they feel like they're tied to the professional guidelines that are issued by sort of like governing bodies.

I know. They're trapped. And if they don't follow those, even though they, right, exactly. And they're terrified of that to the extent where some are actually leaving the profession. Almost all my friends are doctors. And as you know, if you have a patient with high cholesterol and you don't prescribe a statin and he has a heart attack, you are going down. And so they learn all this stuff,

and then it's like, now what do you do? Because you still have the standard of care that you're supposed to prescribe certain medications, even though you've now learned the challenges with those medications, right? You know, with the lifestyle stuff. So, yeah, that's a rough place that they're in. Yeah, but it does seem like there is a light in the tunnel. I mean, guys like Mark Hyman,

and I guess now he's working with the Cleveland Institute, and just the whole functional medicine world seems to be becoming more of a movement. It seems to be picking up steam, and I guess it's also fueled by people like you, fueled by the ancestral health movement, which is picking up steam. So it almost seems like from a groundswell standpoint,

it's like it's starting to reverse its way up the chain. Well, and the internet's the great equalizer because you can get so much information out. 20 years ago, I was teaching doctors how to put nutrition in their practice. And a patient could come in back then and say, well, what about supplements? The doctor goes, ah, you don't need them. Now the patient can go online, get all of this research and go, okay, so the doctor can't claim ignorance on this anymore. So that helps too. And also you've got a situation with doctors where they need to look outside their practice because we aren't going to have doctors anymore with what's going on with the healthcare system. I mean, who would spend all that time and money in medical school to come out

to have the kind of overhead they have where they'd be better off being a barista at Starbucks, right? They can't practice the way they're supposed to practice. They've got crazy overhead, and it's just a rotten system. Well, before we veer too far off on changing the entire medical system thing, come back to you and your story and also the work that you've been working on really most recently. So you got to a point where you're deep into the health and fitness and nutrition world, and you're helping people a lot on an individual level. But then at some point, you're like, this needs to be bigger than what I can do one-on-one. So what's going on?

Yes, that got very frustrating fast. And I started as a personal trainer, and then I realized that I was getting asked all these nutrition questions, and they assumed because I was doing all this fitness stuff in graduate school that I knew something about nutrition. I knew what I was reading in the magazines, which was not, you know, I'm so sorry to all those clients who I put on these very low-fat vegetarian diets. Now, if you're going to be a vegan or a vegetarian, you know you don't go low-fat. You've got to get the healthy fats in, and everybody does.

So what was the question? I was asking how you kind of went from one-on-one work and really working privately, just saying I need to reach a bigger audience. Yeah, it was very frustrating because I'd love to see what happened with one person. I'd work with one person in the family. Ultimately, the whole family came on board. And then someone asked me to speak at a conference. They said, okay, so we want you to speak at this conference.

They offered me a lot of money to do it. And I'm like, they said, do you speak? Of course I speak. Classic entrepreneur answer. Of course I speak. Classic entrepreneur answer. Of course I do. I stood up at this conference, and what turned me on so much was I went, wow, instead of reaching one person in this hour, I just hit 500 people. I need to do this more. And I also realized that I was repeating things.

And this was right along at the time we didn't have all the internet ability. So I started recording my stuff and writing it down. And so at least I could give people recordings. So I actually had an audio tape duper. I remember that. Audio tape dupers. And I had everything written. So at least I could leverage my time that way. And then I realized I could put people on the phone together. It was when we first started having that easy conference call access and boy, I could put people on the phone. And then I realized I could have all that recorded. And then I realized they actually didn't need me at all. You know, just, I kept looking at what could I do to reach more people, more people, more people and really change the world. And part of that is realizing when you work one-on-one with people,

you want it to all be perfect and to do every single thing. I thought, you know, really, if you went more macro and said, what would happen if we just got people to sleep eight to nine hours a night? What would happen if we just had people drink more water? You know, those little shifts, eat more vegetables, actually have breakfast, and that wasn't dessert. And that's what I focused on is some simple switches that could make big shifts fast because what the studies show is that you have to see it. We're so fast now that if we don't see results quickly, we're out. And so what I've really focused on doing is taking complicated things, making them very simple to follow with quick

results so people get in the game. Because once you talked about it early on, you said, gosh, it takes a big life challenge to get you in the game. But a lot of that's because people can't see themselves there. So when you have a program that gives you a fast shift and you then can start to feel yourself there, then you get involved. So that's what I focus on is what stuff can make you realize, wow, this is how I could really feel. Because I think most people have no idea what it feels like to feel good. I think that also they don't believe that it's possible. So to me, that short window is like there's this tiny little piece of evidence for them

that says, oh, wait. A glimmer of hope. Right. This might actually be possible because I can see it. I can feel it. I can taste it. Well, when you look at it, and it's funny with every book that I write, they always want to call them a diet because diet books suck.

Right, yeah. But those diet books really would have created the problem because if you look at a lot of these diet books out there, you are set up to fail from the start with them. How so? A lot of them still are really limiting your portions. Or there's one popular one that limits your portions and has you eat every two to three hours these high-carb snacks, which basically is going to make you insulin-resistant to sugar burner and fail. And these things where you really either focus on cutting calories or cutting fat or eating, the traditional dietary recommendations are still low fat, higher carbohydrate, and eating every two to three hours.

And that will make you old, fat, and tired over time, if not pretty quickly. And you still have, I think, the American Diabetic Association, even though the studies are showing differently, that artificial sweeteners are acceptable. So as long as you brought it up, it's an interesting topic, right? Because it is counterintuitive to a lot of people who've made the switch to artificial sweeteners. Well, okay, so now that should be the answer, right? I'm not having sugar. Right. It's all about the calories. See, if we stop looking at calories, and yes, calories do count, but it's really about where they come from. And you really have to think of food as information and even foods with no calories, even chemicals with no calories.

I mean, obviously they can exert powerful effects. They're called drugs, right? And if you start to look at sugar as a drug and artificial sweeteners as a drug, and artificial sweeteners are really an experiment that hasn't worked for us. There just was a recent study that showed that in seven days, they took people who'd never had artificial sweeteners, and I'm looking at this study, I'm going, this is not okay to do to people. I mean, someone volunteered for this. So you had the IRB say okay to this. Yeah, I was like, oh my gosh.

So for seven days, these people had artificial sweeteners. In seven days, they transformed their gut microbiome. I'll explain that in a minute. So they became glucose intolerant. They didn't handle sugar well, which then means they're going to have issues with insulin, which basically can set them up for diabetes and weight gain. And that's what we see with artificial sweeteners. Number one, they cause weight gain.

Number two, they increase your risk of diabetes. Number three, they actually make you crave more sweet because when you eat sweet, what do you want? So it's just more the sensation actually triggers it then? Well, it's both the sensation, but also if you're transforming your gut microbiome. So we are more bacteria than cells. A hundred trillion bacteria in our body body, 100 times the DNA of our cells, totally changed by diet. And if you have too much of those bad guys, which the artificial sweeteners feed, you actually extract more calories from the food you eat and store it as fat. So yes, you've got your taste buds wanting more sweet, but you actually have your body now more glucose intolerant and insulin

resistant, which means when you eat sugar, when you eat another food, you shoot your blood sugar up more than you should. You shoot your insulin up more than you should, which then tells your body to store fat, not burn it, and makes your blood sugar then drop low so you need to eat something again. So there's a whole – it's not a simple thing. asked to do a TV show where they wanted me to go on and talk about how to work off, you know, oh, I just ate cake. I just had pizza. And how much do I have to do to work it off? I go, our body doesn't operate like that. It's not, you can't just eat a piece of cake and go run for two hours because the cake has done all sorts of things to your body. It's fed the bad bacteria in your gut. It's increased your insulin levels and your leptin levels. It's made your cell receptors slightly more, and your blood more sticky. So you can't look at a food and go,

oh, okay, I'll just eat this crappy thing and burn it off. No, it's because it's in there as information going, all right, now we're going to make you inflamed and we're going to go to your brain and we're a drug and we're going to make you want more. And we're, you know, all this bad stuff. Yeah. So it's a cascade. It's not just the calories of whatever it is. Yes, it creates this inflammatory cascade of doom. Talk to me more about inflammation because this is also, I mean, we talked about artificial sweeteners. You brought up this whole thing of the microbiome or the gut biome,

which is becoming a really hot topic too. It's so exciting, yes. So actually, can we go a little bit deeper into that? And then I want to talk about it. Yes. I love it. Gut bacteria to me is one of the most exciting things on the planet. It seems like there's a lot of research that's really focusing on that. I think this is going to be one. I think the two hottest topics coming out are going to be the gut microbiome and sugar. And they're totally woven together because one of the big ways you can change your gut microbiome is by sugar. Sugar will feed the bad bacteria in your gut. So you've got this

bacteria in your gut. You've got more bacteria than cells in your body, and that bacteria can dictate your immune system. But just for a weight loss perspective, because for me, everything's about weight loss is really my area of specialization. Too much bad bacteria. And I actually saw this firsthand before I'd seen any of the studies. I had a client, it was Suzanne Summer's stepdaughter. Leslie came to me and a doctor sent her to me and said, she just needs some motivation. I'm like, okay, all right. She did not need motivation. She was so frustrated. She was actually not even eating enough. She was exercising. She was doing everything she thought right, but she had an overgrowth of bad bacteria in her gut.

And the way we knew that, it's called small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, SIBO, if someone wants to Google it. The way we knew that is she got more bloated as the day went on, whether she ate or not. Very classic. Happens due to stress. Happens due to artificial sweeteners. Too much sugar, just like a yeast overgrowth can. Birth control pills, antibiotics are a huge one because they're going to kill off everything and then the bad bacteria can come in there and proliferate. And poor diet. Fiber is really important for feeding the good bacteria in the gut. Pre and probiotic foods, cultured foods, fermented foods that we don't have in our

culture at all. I mean, they're just not a part of it. And I've been eating more of those, but, you know, because I wasn't raised on them, I think they're really icky and disgusting. I'm like doing the same thing. I'm trying to eat like kimchi and this and that. And I'm like, it's an acquired taste. It's such an acquired. I actually, Donna Gates, who wrote the Body Ecology Diet, we did a little cooking, a creation, a culturing show together. And then she had me eat them. I'm thinking, this is going to be like Tom Hanks and

Big, because I'm scared of it. I'm scared of these things because they're disgusting. But I actually found a cultured coconut drink, Kavita, that I love. And so I drink two of that. That's how I do it. Try that. I drink two of those a day and I can handle it. So, while we're on that, what do you think of kombucha? Kombucha is not, and I wish I could remember this because Donna, I had a whole thing from Donna about it that why kombucha is not good, that you don't want to do it. Of course, I can't remember why it was,

but she's like, don't do the kombucha, but do some of these fermented coconut water drinks. And you can do your own and you can ferment coconut milk or coconut water. Okay, so here's another thing don't most fermentation processes also use some form of sugar as like the feeder for fermentation right and does that end up staying in it or is that no it goes away you know so i mean that takes you over to alcohol to wine wine generally the fermentation process unless they're cheating is eating up all the sugar.

Now, it's still your body tends to metabolize it like sugar, but you're eating up the sugar as you go. Of course, some of the winemakers are adding, sneaking in some sugars, which is not okay. And there's some residual sugars depending on how they do it. But in all of these types of things, the fermentation process uses sugar to ferment. Got it. So zooming back, this is all in relation to developing the right bacteria in the gut and microbiome so that you process. Right. It changes everything. So if you have too much bad bacteria, you extract more calories from the food you eat, you store as fat, it can make you glucose intolerant, which means when you're eating carbohydrates, your blood

sugar is now dysregulated. So it'll raise more than it should, which then is going to trigger insulin. So we eat food. Blood sugar should come up. Insulin should come up to bring blood sugar back to normal because you don't want elevated blood sugar. And if you're eating every two to three hours, which is what we've been taught to do because of the pulling the fat out and eating more sugar. You're hungry every two to three hours. But if you're eating every two to three hours, every time you eat, you raise blood sugar and insulin never has a chance to come back down to fasting levels. Insulin is inflammatory, but also if insulin's high, you can't use stored fat for fuel. So you basically turn yourself into

someone who's required, has to eat sugar all day long. And if you're eating a piece of bread, you're eating sugar. In fact, whole wheat bread raises your blood sugar more than table sugar does. That's surprising. But essentially, I mean, just I know from my own experience that if I start my day with something doughy, even if it's like, you know, gluten free, and maybe we'll talk about this too, like a gluten-free alternative bread or something like that. Anything that's sort of carbohydrate-driven or if there's any level of sugar or something in it, the entire rest of my day, I'm madly craving something sweet.

Like, I mean, until I close my eyes at night, I can't get enough of it. If I start my day without that, then I'm pretty much good. And if I start my day with a fair amount, a fair amount of like a high dose of like a good healthy fat, I'm completely sated very often for, you know, like a long window of time. And that's, that's the trick. You should be able to go four to six hours before you need to eat again. And if you have to eat every two to three hours, you have to look back and go, did I get enough clean lean protein? Did I get enough healthy fats? Did I get carbohydrates that are slow and low impact, loads of fiber to temper the sugar effect? Because it's not about not eating sugars. It's about knowing which to choose.

But fat is the one that we're still phobic about. And it's one of the greatest ways to reduce inflammation is eat the right fats. Yeah. I remember even when Atkins came around, you know, and everyone's, all these people are jumping on the Atkins bandwagon. Still most people, what they were really doing was... Pork rinds and tab. Right, exactly. It was all like, it was like a ton of protein. Yeah. You know, like almost no carbs.

But still like most people were still so phobic about fat that they really didn't, they kept that kind of low at the same time and wondered why there was a lot of rebound after. Yeah. Well, and also when you look at these almost no-carb diets, they do create a rebound effect, especially for anyone under any amount of stress, and I'm still trying to find the person who's not under stress. If you have good slow, low carbs, it gives you a nice steady supply of energy to the brain,

and then you've got your protein, because protein and fiber together keep you satiated longer because they slow down stomach emptying. And then you add in some fat, which actually triggers the release of some different chemicals to the brain to tell you you're full. It also helps with mood and also triggers reward center in your brain. I think a lot of the times we're craving sugar because we didn't eat enough fat and we didn't get the protein in to build our serotonin and dopamine. So when you really eat correctly, you stop the sugar cravings. But you're right. When you start the day with a high sugar impact food, it sets the metabolic tone for the day. You're done. So they did this study on rats and morphine and Oreos. And so what

they did first was they gave the rats morphine, and they saw that lit up the pleasure center in the brain. And then they gave the rats the Oreos, and it lit up the same pleasure reward center in the brain. And then they gave the rats a choice between the two. And the rats actually chose the Oreos over the morphine. They got more pleasure from the Oreos than the morphine. And instantly more pleasure from the Oreos than the morphine. And instantly they also cracked them open and like went to the center, just like, you know, kids do. So you look at it and you go, sugar, if we just called sugar what it was, a drug, would we be really having these birthday parties with juice? And it's crazy. I mean, we are creating a total drug addict. Children are drug addicts.

They're given juice and cookies as their little snacks. It's just rotten. If you really accepted sugar as a drug, you would start to treat it so differently. And whenever I say that, people are like, oh, but I think we have to take it on like that. It's a drug, it's a poison, it's a toxin, it's taking us down. It is the number one threat to our health worldwide. And it's not just our health. If you look at the medical costs all associated with the sugar that we're eating, I mean, you could fix everything if you just lowered sugar impact.

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Right. You kind of, like, treat it like you're withdrawing, like a progressive withdrawal from an addiction. When I decided to really dive into the subject, which I did because in the Virgin Diet, the number one question I got asked was about sugar. And there were two camps. There was either they just could not get off it. They were controlled by it. They were consumed with their cravings. Or they were confused. They were like, well, wait a minute.

It's all natural, right? And so all of a sudden they were having too much fruit. Fruit is not free food. Or just it was slipping into places they'd never expect. Their balsamic vinegar, their marinara sauces. So I decided to take it on and I literally bought every single book on sugar over the last couple decades and the programs on it too. And I'm looking at this, I'm thinking this is so clearly a drug. Now, if someone's a drug addict, you wouldn't say, hey, no, you've been using morphine. We're just going to take it away. Just hang out. In fact, we'll just put it around everywhere, but you're going to be fine. Just stop. That would be

ridiculous. And you look at a lot of the different drugs and they've got something else they put in its place to help you get off of it. And they have a very controlled environment. I said, all right, well, we're not going to be able to put people into like the Betty Ford Center here. So what can we do to create, set up a situation where they cannot fail? A total success thing. You've got to taper because again, if you've created a sugar burner body where you have to eat every two to three hours and you're used to relying on sugar and just pull that all out, you think it's going to work? No. In one or two days, they're going to be running for sugar. There's no possible way that's set up to succeed. So that's why I have people identify where it's sneaking in and then taper from high sugar impact foods to medium sugar impact foods.

Yeah. Which makes so much sense to me, but you don't, because normally we're just like, we're in or we're out. I know. And it's funny because I thought, the toughest part of this program for people is they're going to want to dive right in. Right, exactly. It's like, nah, I don't have to do the taper. Let me just cut it. To the transition thing. And I'm like, do not, do not. Just go through. Because the first part of the program is to really learn how to eat correctly, to learn how to eat by that plate that I talked about, because you'll be able to, it's just like you said, if you just start breakfast with that gluten-free muffin, which is so high sugar impact. This idea of some of these gluten-free foods,

you know what's a gluten-free food? An avocado is a gluten-free food, right? Chia seeds are a gluten-free food. So it shouldn't have to have a label that says gluten-free. If it has a label that says gluten-free and it's a cookie, you weren't eating cookies before, do not start eating cookies now. There's not some big halo around that cookie that makes it like, you know. Yeah.

Well, I mean, that was like all like the fat-free products also. Oh, yeah. Oh, believe me. I was a snack world girl. Right. Exactly. I was a snack world myself. And you didn't have one.

You had the box. Right. Exactly. Because they didn't make you full. They made you hungry. Yeah. And they tasted so good. You just wanted more, more, more, more, more because that's sugar.

Yeah, absolutely. Two other things that you brought up that I want to go into. You've used the phrase sugar burner a number of times and just a second ago in the context of transitioning more slowly. So take me deeper into that because I know we can use different food substrates as fuel. So tell me what you mean by sugar burner and how do we move away from that? Yes, because ultimately our body is set to survive our stupidity, right? So no matter what we do, we try to live on chemicals or go totally fat-free or whatever, our body is going to go, okay, I'm going to do this.

And I can tell you that because I was on that TV show Freaky Eaters. I was a co-host on that. And we had people on there that only eat French fries or only had soda. I mean, just crazy stuff. And I've done that for decades. I was like, how are you surviving on French fries? So basically, you know, you're a sugar burner if, I always feel like Jeff Foxworthy here. You know, you're a redneck if, you know, you're a sugar burner if you need to eat every two to three hours. It's really that your blood sugar is crashing, you're getting headaches, you can't focus well, you carry your weight around your waist. That is really a sign of someone who has to, who's a sugar burner.

And you know. I mean, you know if you're like, I can't go from breakfast to lunch, I'll get angry. And by sugar burner, you mean like the body is preferentially using sugar as its primary source of fuel. Yeah. And so you want your body actually to make sugar from the food you're eating. You don't want to just mainline it. But ideally, you want your body to be able to use stored fat for fuel. And the way you do that is you have to keep insulin low. If you're eating sugar or high sugar impact foods like that gluten-free cupcake,

every couple hours blood sugar is going up and insulin stays high and you will not be able to use stored fat for fuel. So if you can't go four to six hours without eating again, you've turned yourself into a sugar burner. The cool thing is you can turn that around fairly quickly. So how quickly? So in a matter of four to seven days. It is pretty darn quick.

It really depends on how insulin resistant you are. I've got some people who are really either diabetic, pre-diabetic. That might take a week or two. So the taper phase of the program set out to be a week, but I have people take the sugar impact quiz. I go, if you have to spend another week there, just hang out. This is not a race. This is a transformation here.

So then you go into a transition phase. I think the biggest unique thing I do, and as I was looking at the biochemistry of all this, and I never could understand, we have this glycemic index. It makes no sense. It is why we are having the problems we're having because you'll look at this and you go, oh, glycemic index, agave is good for you. Honey is okay. Because the glycemic index takes a 50 gram dose of something and looks at your blood sugar response. It takes a food in isolation,

like a potato or a carrot and looks at your blood sugar response. And by the way, it makes a potato look like a carrot because you're taking a 50 gram dose, which is silly. You wouldn't eat 50 grams of carrot unless you were doing the juice. So you have to take the amount into account, which is what glycemic load does. But the challenge is fructose doesn't raise blood sugar. So we've been following this glycemic index as our model for gauging sugar for years, and it makes agave look like it's healthy for you. It makes juices and milk look like they're healthy for you. And that's what I set out. I went, okay, we've got to fix this because this is what's creating the problem.

And fructose, it turns out that the more fructose you have, the better you get at transporting it to your liver. And when it gets to your liver, it tells your body to make fat and get inflamed. I don't want to be good at that, like at all, right? But it turns out that this is something you can shift in days, like three to four days. So if you're eating more fructose, you get better at it. And if you're eating less fructose, you get worse at it.

So what I did was pull fructose totally out of the diet. No fruit for two weeks. And it's funny because I say that and people freak out. Right, because it's like, well, isn't that the one remaining healthy sugar? I mean, if there's some form that is. It's two weeks. It's two weeks. And we can do anything for two weeks. And what I set out to prove, Jonathan, is I know there's various reasons we have sweet tooths. I think a lot of it's learned. Exposure equals preference. Just like I was raised on Pop-Tarts and then

I switched over to bran muffins and frozen yogurt, I didn't change my sweets. I just changed where they came from, right? They just had the halo effect of being healthier, but they weren't. But there's also genetics, clearly. That was part of what I did on Freaky Eaters was genetic testing on people to see if they had a sweet tooth or sweet taste. But the more sweet you eat, the more you want. And fructose is super sweet. That's why we like it so much. And so I thought, you know, if you can pull this out, if you can teach people to go for sour, which takes your sweet tooth away, or savory, some of these different tastes, over two weeks, I believe you can get rid of that. And that was my goal to prove. And I put 700 people through this. And at

the end of two weeks, these were sugar addicts. These were not the easy people. These were people who'd either been on the virgin diet and could not get over the sugar part, or people who came to me and they're like, I'm a sugar addict. I'm like, great, come on in. Sweet food tasted too sweet, it tasted gross. That's what I set out to prove, and it can happen. And I know people listening are like, you know, going, oh, yeah, right. I say, just give it two weeks to do and see.

And at that point, you test back and go, all right, let's see where fruit falls in here. And I find that, you know, yeah, you can put some berries in. You can have like some pink grapefruit. But juice, apple juice has more fructose than a Coke. It is one of the most harmful things we can do. And if you look at so many of the foods out there that say no sugar added, they've actually got apple juice concentrate in there that they're using to sweeten. But they can legally say no sugar added because it's fruit juice concentrate. Criminal. Ketogenic diets. So the other thing that you shared was that when you go on the ultra low carbohydrate diet, which is becoming really popular too, and a lot of people

who are adopting like the ancestral health or the paleorate diet, which is becoming really popular, too. And a lot of people who are adopting the ancestral health or the paleo-based diet, which are both exploding, I don't want to call them diets, it's an approach to eating, are essentially pulling almost all. And it's becoming a very popular recommendation in that world to essentially go ketogenic. And then you have doctors like Terry Walls and stuff who are trying to really aggressively treat some sort of condition, medical condition by doing that. Your thoughts on that?

I think there's absolute applications for them. Number one, seizures. Ketogenic diet can totally take a seizure away. Seizures. That's hard to say. So in someone with seizure disorder, absolutely. Ketogenic diet should just be what they follow, how they live. Someone with cancer, sugar feeds cancer.

So there's an application there. I love paleo nutrition. That was one of the first things I started studying. I had the good fortune of being one of five people in the room with Lauren Cardain. Mark Sisson is a good friend of mine. I mean, I love the whole paleo stuff, but we don't live in paleo times. So I think that there's lessons there. And I kind of would say I do a plant-based paleo plus in that I think we need to eat a lot, as many vegetables as we possibly can. I do think that legumes and quinoa have some merit. You just need to soak them.

And we have to be very careful about the animal protein sources that we have because we've really managed to trash those. I have found that women who follow a strict paleo or very low-carb diet tend to do worse and gain weight. And I think that's because paleo times were very different. We didn't have lights. We didn't have iPhones. We didn't have all of these chemicals. And so all of a sudden now we have a lot of toxicity. We have a high toxic burden. We

have a lot of stress and our bodies are different and especially our endocrine system and cortisol and insulin. So I think there's lessons we can learn there. But if we were going to adapt a really true paleo diet, we need to live in a paleo lifestyle, which means we need to sleep less in the summer and eat more fruit. And by the way, if you think about this, so paleolithically, we would have slept more in the winter and access more stored body fat because when you're sleeping more, you're more insulin sensitive. You can use more fat for fuel. You would have slept more in the winter and accessed more stored body fat because when you're sleeping more, you're more insulin sensitive. You can use more fat for fuel. You would have slept less in the summer because the days were longer. And that's when we had all the fruit. You would have gorged on fruit. You would have gained a lot of weight so that you could get through the winter when you

could access stored fat and use that. So you would have all these natural cycles. And then, of course, you'd have to starve for a couple of days, you know, periodically. But we're just not set up for that now. And, you know, back then you were either under stress and you died or not. So chronic stress was not non-existent. Yeah. And you also, you weren't sitting all day. You had a really powerful mechanism to burn through the stress. You would either do heavy stuff or you would just walk. You never did endurance training. You would never go jog. So when you think about it,

you were either migrating or you were doing really heavy stuff like running after an animal or running away from an animal, hopefully, or climbing a tree or whatever. So it was either bursts of activity or long, slow distance. So I think there's a lot of lessons there,

but then we need to look at where we are now and what those shifts have done to our biochemistry, our endocrine system, and what that makes us need now. make sense. It's too much, especially for women. And then really hitting the, just thinking, take all the carbs out. And actually Dr. Terry Walls was, you know, all of us are in the same group together was saying that, you know, she sees women that go to strictly paleo have weight issues too, because it really is hard on their adrenals. So I think we kind of have to take that, take those lessons, like intermittent fasting for women, they become infertile. And think about the, of course they would, right? Which again is very popular now in the sort of paleo ancestral. But if you look at it like your body, our bodies are meant to survive.

So if we're not getting the food we need, our body is like, oh, do not make babies right now. So you got to look at it and go, well, some of the paleo times things, our body had to endure these things doesn't mean that they were good for us. You know, it doesn't mean we have to go get bitten by an animal. And I think the big lesson for me there also is that, you know, if like those were times where we had moments of intense stress and then we would move and be able to dissipate all of like both the circumstance that called, you know, we remove ourselves from the stressor, but we also diminish the chemicals that are released in our body during that time.

Whereas now most people, like we're not away from the stressor where it's around us 24 seven and the chemicals are there 24 seven. So then when you put the additional stress of an extremely low-carb diet, and the thought is, well, it is stress, but it's good stress. Well, maybe if you have no other stress. Study Hans Selye. It's all the same. It's just like you can say this is a good sugar, bad sugar, but it's the same.

In stress, it's the same thing. If you look at the general adaptation syndrome, the whole thing that Hans Selye put out, it's like good stress or bad stress. It's the same once it goes into your body. So the stress of getting married, moving into a new house, the stress of a divorce, they all actually, your body reads it the same. So you're going to have the same issues with cortisol and adrenaline. And then what happens with insulin because of that and sex hormones. So it's, even though it's good or it doesn't matter, doesn't matter. So, you know, you look at it and go, I think that with any of this stuff, there's amazing information, but we have to look at what's our life like now. And then how do we

use what we now have? Like the same with medicine. We've got incredible advances in medicine. I have a son alive today because of what's happened with medicine. They saved a kid who was in a puddle on a street with 13 fractures, couldn't breathe, multiple brain bleeds, in a coma, torn aorta. You know, they saved him. Had I gone, oh, I think I'll just go all natural. No, he would have been gone in 24 hours.

So it was the combination of great nutrition and great medical care that did that. It's like, let's take what history has shown us in all these different cultures. There's amazing stuff in Chinese medicine. There's amazing stuff in all these different cultures. Let's take all that and take what we've got now and then put together the perfect hybrid. We're kind of coming full circle here. And you brought it back to your son, which kind of takes us full circle to a certain extent. You mentioned that it was modern medicine that was able to take him and keep him alive. But you also mentioned that it was nutrition.

We haven't talked about that. I went on both the doctors and Sanjay Gupta did a story on Grant on CNN because as soon as possible, I started doing progesterone therapy on him and I started high dose fish oil on him. He actually spit his own feeding tube out. I brought in, I had shakes going, probiotics. I did everything for him in the hospital. He never ate hospital food. Whole Foods was delivering. In fact, one of the first things, words he said was disgusting when they tried to give He never ate hospital food. Whole Foods was delivering. In fact, one of the first things, words he said was disgusting when they tried to give him a plate

of food. I had a big sign up because they wanted to give him Crystal Light, artificial sweeteners for brain injury and Ensure. I'm like, I had no hospital food. I had everything stashed there. I brought it in every single day and then we had blenders and all sorts of powders and stuff. But literally they saved his life and then we brought him back and all sorts of powders and stuff but literally they saved his life and then we brought him back and we brought him back with high dose fish oil and progesterone and then you know amino acid therapy and probiotics all sorts of stuff so you know you're in a hospital for a while they're the biggest thing that takes you down is uh the bacterial overgrowth the infections so so he was in for four months four four and a half months? Four and a half months. Yeah. Yeah. And then in and out of the ICU twice. So, I mean, you know. And how's he doing

now? Amazing. He's so great. He just was on one of my live casts. He's sweeter than ever. And he actually was not a sweet kid prior to this. He's now a sweet kid and very artistic. I think, you know, life, we made a decision standing there the first day in the ICU, that this was going to be the best thing that ever happened to all of us. We're never better than when we're challenged. You know, we don't get better when things are perfect. We're all better for it, a little recovery from PTSD, but he's definitely better for it. And he's made a major impact out there in the world, which is just starting because I think people used to think that when you had a brain injury, there was nothing you could do.

That was what I was told in the hospital. I knew better. But they said, there's nothing we can do. Now we wait. I go, we wait? There's nothing we can do? Clarified. Nope, not a thing.

And I'm like, all right. That's what I did pretty much behind their back. But we're getting that message out there big too because I think that we have to be proactive with our health. We have to be proactive with our health before anything happens so that you live your life full out. You know, why, why sacrifice even 10%? And especially when it can be as simple as just shifting, say from, you know, that muffin you had in the morning to a shake, shifting the type of salad dressing you put on your salad, shifting

from the marinara sauce that's got as much sugar as Oreos to maybe some sliced tomatoes and basil. Simple shifts can change everything and give you your life back. So you can just really go out there and do what you're set out to do. Yeah. Love it. So the name of this is Good Life Project. So if I offer that term out to you, to live a good life, what does it mean to you? I think it really, you know, at my age of 50 plus, it really starts to come to what are you leaving the planet with? You know, how are you leaving it better than you found it? And obviously, first, that comes through your kids and, you know, them finding that purpose and that bliss. But, you know, my biggest goal is to help as many people now as possible realize how

easy it is to take control of their health so they can go out and do what they're supposed to do too. And I think that's living a good life is really living a life of impact on purpose. Love it. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks so much for listening to Good Life Project. If you enjoyed this episode, I'd be so grateful if you'd share a quick review over on iTunes.

It helps us get the word out to more people and make a bigger difference in the world. And hey, while you're there, please be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you'd love to know more about how we can help you live your best life, check out our upcoming events and courses at goodlifeproject.com. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off with gratitude. Thank you. you you you you you you you We'll be you next time. new routines, new locations. What matters is that you have something there to adapt with you, whether you need a challenge or rest. And Peloton has everything you need, whenever you need it. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca.

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