Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #257 Kara Collier -NutriSense

Starting point is 00:00:00 All right, y'all, we're back. We're back. We're back. And it's round two with Kara from NutriSense. We had her and Dan, one of the founders of NutriSense on kind of right around the early part of the pandemic. And they had a ton of useful tips and info on metabolic flexibility, the benefits of managing blood sugar, whether you're in a ketogenic diet, a carnivore diet or not. Obviously, blood sugar management is pretty well taken care of if you're on those diets. But for most of us, even if we've done those diets and we circle back to eating carbohydrates, we never really know what's going on inside. We never really know. We can go based on feel. And for those of us who are really connected and intuitive, we can say like, oh, I probably

Starting point is 00:00:42 overdid it there. Or maybe I had a little too many carbohydrates. And there's ways you can check on that without devices. But given the amount of stress and the amount of work and the amount of things we all juggle as householders in the current world that we live in, the current economic situation we're in, the current everything, it's really useful to have a piece of technology that can help us see inside the body. What exactly is happening right now? Is this going to cause inflammation? Is this going to cause, am I on the road to type 2 diabetes or type 3 diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, dementia? These are things we can see well ahead of time before disease manifests. And it comes from a

Starting point is 00:01:26 CGM, a continuous glucose monitor. So I wanted to get Kara back on. I've been telling people about this for years and she was fantastic. She is so good. She has such a wealth of knowledge. And yeah, I mean, I'm just blown away by everything I learned from her on this podcast and I'm only kicking myself for waiting, not getting her on earlier because it was like, damn, this is really incredibly useful for me and I know that it's going to be very useful for y'all as well. So make sure you share this far and wide, get it to as many people that are interested in this stuff as possible. It is an absolute game changer. There's very few pieces of tech that I stick with long-term that I really think can change people's lives. Talk about Oura rings and whoop watches and things like that in the past. And I think they

Starting point is 00:02:13 do a great job of helping one organize sleep, which is a foundational principle of living a better life. What this does is it allows us to peek into our food. Genetics only give you a part of the picture. And Kara is able to beautifully illustrate all of the reasons why we want to know this stuff. So share it, share it, leave us a five-star review. If you love it with one or two reasons the show has helped you out or changed you in life, changed your life, there we go.

Starting point is 00:02:39 Something about your life that's for the better, hopefully. And support our sponsors. Our sponsors make this show possible. And we timed it perfectly. NutriSense is sponsoring the podcast. They're going to give you $30 off any subscription to a CGM program. That's a continuous glucose monitor. In this podcast, you're going to hear all about it. But I'll just give you some brief bullet points here. The majority of chronic illnesses stem from an inability to manage your blood glucose levels. If you know how your body uniquely responds to different foods, sleep, stress, and exercise,

Starting point is 00:03:14 you can make changes to achieve your health goals from managing weight to optimizing longevity. We refer to our product as the NutriSense CGM program. The CGM provides real-time feedback from your body. Each individual person will know for their individual selves what is right and what is not right. Each CGM lasts 14 days. Each subscription plan includes one month of free support from a registered dietitian. This is super important. NutriSense dietitians will help you identify what you should be paying attention to to achieve your health goals.

Starting point is 00:03:44 They will hold your hand on the health journey. And if you're already knowledgeable in this space, they will be able to provide more advanced tips and recommendations. Our dieticians will help you make long-term sustainable changes. Putting on a CGM is painless. It looks like, oh no, it's going to hurt. It's not. It doesn't hurt at all. The CGM program also comes with an app which helps you track your data, understand your glucose trends, log meals, and see the macros breakdown and much more. The app will give you an overall score for each of the meals you eat based on your body's response. This is cool. You get to see it in real time. NutriSense also provides a private Facebook group for members where you can find support from other members and learn about their experience with the program. Go to NutriSense.io slash Kyle. That is N-U-T-R-I-S-E-N-S-E.io slash K-Y-L-E. And then

Starting point is 00:04:34 use code Kyle for $30 off any subscription to a CGM program. This is one of the biggest game changers in the game. Everyone that I have out for for full temple reset, where we do the five-day fasting mimicking diet together, Godsey gets them on the journaling practices and into depth psychology with dream analysis based on Jung's work. We do a lot. And I do a lot for the body. Hot tub, or not hot tub, sauna, an ice bath every single day. We're fasting all day.

Starting point is 00:05:02 We only have a small shake at night. All of these things matter because they can rapidly shift our metabolism and radically enable us to awaken the primal patterns in our body that are accustomed to going without food every now and then. We remember we didn't have refrigeration and shipping containers that long throughout human history. So our ancestors always went without. That was a part of it. It wasn't intermittent fasting. It was, I don't have breakfast and I need to find it. It wasn't the vision quest for four days, no food, no water.

Starting point is 00:05:33 It was, I need to track a bison for that long to find the herd so I can feed the tribe. That's how it worked for many, many millennia. And it's only in our modern, awesome life that we all live where we don't face that as an issue. One of the things that I bring up with Kara is like at 30 some years old, I had never missed a meal. At 30 some years old, I had never gone without carbohydrates at a meal, refined carbohydrates at that, right? So the idea that I could switch for fuel sources from carbohydrates to fat or from blood sugar into ketones, that was impossible, right? But we dive into all the health benefits on this show. You guys are going to love it.

Starting point is 00:06:09 You're going to for sure want one. So remember, NutriSense.io slash Kyle, and then code Kyle for $30 off any subscription at the end. And I want to hear about this. So please hit me up and my wife on at Living with the Kingsburys, DM us there, or hit me up on Zion and yeah, find ways to chat with me or through the fit for service app. Fit for service app is a great way to get ahold of me. And I can hear about y'all's health goals and health dreams becoming realized with NutriSense. This episode is also brought to you by paleovalley.com. These guys have some of the best healthiest snacks in the game that are whole food products. Their beef sticks are 100% grass-fed and grass-finished. Many

Starting point is 00:06:52 on the market claim grass-fed, but they're actually finished on grains. They use beef sourced from small domestic farms in the United States. They use real organic spices to flavor their beef sticks versus conventional spices sprayed with pesticides or natural flavors often made from GMO corn. They ferment their sticks, which creates a naturally occurring probiotic, which is great for gut health. Super important when you're eating dehydrated foods, beef jerky, beef sticks, dehydrated apricot, any of these things.

Starting point is 00:07:21 When you have the probiotic element that allows your body to more easily digest it. That means less gas, less GI issues, and it's super important. It means that it's going to taste good going down and it's going to feel good coming out. They taste amazing and they're a great protein-rich snack to grab on the go. I use these every single day I go through these. I try to keep my apocalypse pantry stacked with them, but I also eat them on the daily. 100% grass-fed beef equals higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids, fat-soluble vitamins and minerals, glutathione, which is the master antioxidant produced in the liver, CLA, conjugated lignolic acid, which is known from bodybuilders as the fat that actually burns fat, and bioavailable protein. They're also keto-friendly and a great protein-rich snack to grab on the go. These guys, from a brand standpoint, refuse to cut corners,

Starting point is 00:08:09 prioritize health over profit. They use conscientious processing and manufacturing, and they source only the highest quality ingredients available. I absolutely love them. They have some amazing organic whole food bars as well that have a bit more carbohydrates. But when I was grinding at the farm each day, my blood sugar was perfect. So I was slamming these bars along with the beef sticks to get the extra protein. And I just love that one-two punch. I felt amazing. I always had energy and I didn't need to take more than five minutes at lunch or breakfast to keep the ball going because I was well-nourished throughout the day. Check it all out, paleovalley.com. That's P-A-L-E-O-V-A-L-L-E-Y.com. And remember, discount code Kyle for 15% off. One of my favorite new sponsors is a company

Starting point is 00:08:54 called earthrunners.com. In congruence with ancestral wisdom, it's apparent that we need to incorporate more simple nature-based lifestyle practices and outsource less of our life to modern technology. An aspect of modern life that we don't often think about is how our shoes affect the ways in which we interact with the earth. Our ancestors were virtually always grounded. It's only since the advent of modern insulating souls that we have lost this connection to the earth. Our ancestors lived in constant connection with earth by going barefoot or wearing leather sold moccasins or sandals, which kept them grounded. Connecting your feet to the earth, a practice called earthing or grounding, allows the body to take in electrons, which helps to restore our natural electric state to enjoy the myriad of benefits felt while taking in the elements like our ancestors did. However, these days, we lack this healing earth connection by wearing shoes with rubber soles

Starting point is 00:09:46 that insulate us from the earth. Earthrunner sandals feature a copper earthing plug and conductive laces to keep you grounded to the earth 24-7. Earthrunners is an ancestral-inspired sandal company which has created minimalist earthing sandals to support a more barefoot experience, both physically and electrically.

Starting point is 00:10:04 Earthrunners has taken the millennia-old footwear design known as the Horachi, which is a simple sole with a wrapping lace, one of the oldest designs in history, and upgraded it with Vibram soles and earthing technology to give you the most minimalist, natural, and grounded shoe experience you've ever had. Restore your natural connection with the earth via earthing to enjoy the myriad of benefits felt while taking in the elements, same as our ancestors used to live. Earthrunners, minimalist soul for healthy, full range of foot movement, which improves everything upstream. Earthrunners aspires to restore our relationship to nature and to discover our ancestral roots via minimalist earthing sandals. Rewild and reconnect with Earthrunners.

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Starting point is 00:11:03 I've been my own boss for some time. Um, in a sense, I also work for Aubrey Marcus in another sense and in a couple of different areas, but he's my brother. And thankfully he'd let me come into work barefoot when I was at on it, uh, get a few word looks from some of the other employees, but, but he was cool with it. And most of the other people became cool with it. And that was dope. The problem was I'd walk around outside in the heat and the Texas heat in the parking lot and I'm walking on asphalt and stuff like that. And my feet come black, they're black and charred. And I started getting cracks in it and athlete's foot.

Starting point is 00:11:34 And I was like, yeah, a little protection would be nice. You know, if I just had a little protection from the heat and from some of the griminess of the modern world, that would be good too. And so, you know, having these earth runners has been phenomenal because I wear them at Whole Foods. I wear them wherever I'm going. I even wear them on the farm. We've got a lot of mesquite and the vibram sole is strong enough to not be penetrated by these giant damn thorny bushes we have everywhere out of the farm. So earth runners, you have a fan for life in me and I've got my whole family wearing them now. We absolutely love them. Check it all out, earthrunners.com

Starting point is 00:12:06 and use code KKP at checkout for 10% off. Last but not least, we're brought to you by my homies at Organifi, organifi.com slash KKP. What is Organifi? Organifi is a line of organic superfood blends that offer plant-based nutrition with high quality ingredients

Starting point is 00:12:23 and less than three grams of sugar. We had co-founder Drew Canole on the podcast a while back, and he is long overdue for a return. So Drew, if you hear this one or if one of the employees, one of the awesome employees at Organifi that I've met in the past hears me spouting this off, listening to this, let's link up again. It's time. Their company is one of my favorites of all time.

Starting point is 00:12:48 I got into the juicing craze back in the day. Well, I got into both juicing crazes back in the day, but the organic green juice craze back in the day. And one thing that I found in looking at blood sugar was that to make juice taste healthily, you're going to have blood sugar skyrocket because you're taking the fiber out of it, right? And it's extremely inconvenient to juice everything. You're buying, you're chopping, you're shopping, you're mixing, and then you got to clean out this weird gizmo thing that if it spins too fast, it's going to ruin some of the enzymes and all the

Starting point is 00:13:17 other things. It ended up just being a hassle. And it was always, to make it flavorful, I could choke down celery and ginger, but to make it flavorful for the kids, that wasn't the best move. Now, insert Organifi. These guys come along, they create unique superfood blends that taste phenomenal. They actually satisfy a sweet tooth in a kid. And if it passes the taste test with my kids, it'll pass the taste test for you and for anybody else. And if it's going to pass your taste test, that means you can make it a consistent part of your arsenal. It's one of the most consistent tools that we use to round out a healthy,

Starting point is 00:13:53 well-balanced nutritional menu, including grass-fed, grass-finished regenerative beef, healthy organic starches, and of course, getting these unique, wonderful superfoods put into our bodies that just taste phenomenal. They have a wide variety of products. Now, if you go online, they've got the green, which is the all-time green juice. It's one of my favorite blends. I've talked before about mixing it with kratom

Starting point is 00:14:15 because kratom doesn't taste good and it's quite bitter. And that's still a thing. It is phenomenal for that, but it's phenomenal by itself. The red juice is awesome. It can increase energy. It also increases blood flow. So if you're heading to the bedroom, that is a great time to try it out. Pre-workout, pre-bed. Green juice, they just came out with a crisp apple, which tastes phenomenal.

Starting point is 00:14:36 It's like a green apple. It's amazing. They've got glow, which is incredibly good to help you utilize. So if you're doing bone broths and you're doing things where you're increasing collagen, Bulletproof Coffee, things like that, there are actually plants, superfood plants, that will help your body create and utilize more, take from that collagen and create more connective tissue, more hair, skin, and nails. It's going to help your body replenish and take that exactly where it needs to go so the collagen you're putting in is actually being activated and utilized properly. They have incredible protein for vegans. If you do not care to have the meat, then this is the spot for you. And then they've even got a brand new, you know, gold. Gold is my rest. Gold is the nighttime, the nightcap for me. I'll have a little gold with a full fat coconut

Starting point is 00:15:18 cream. I get it as fatty as I can handle it. And then I just slowly sip that guy down and it puts me into a restful space. The gold chocolate is a game changer. It's like hot cocoa with turmeric. And you might not think that sounds good, but trust me, when it's going down with some good healthy fats in it, it will change your life. It is one of the best ways to unwind after a stressful day. One of the best ways to drop back into parasympathetic, rest and digest. They're out, I'm chilling, I'm chilling, I'm good. Many, many, many great products here. Check it all out at Organifi.com slash KKP. That is Organifi.com slash KKP.

Starting point is 00:15:55 And remember, KKP at checkout for 20% off everything in the store. And without further ado, my girl Cara from NutriSense. Cara, welcome back to the show. Hey, Kyle. Nice to be here. Yeah, it's so good. It's nice too. I think we had, I'm not sure if we did video the first time, but it was kind of choppy

Starting point is 00:16:15 because you guys were in different places and it's awesome. We were just talking beforehand that you'd come out to Austin for a short while and then now you're out in Phoenix, which is my old neck of the woods. So it's pretty cool that you're bouncing around the old stomping grounds. Yeah, absolutely. I've been traveling around a lot and was in Austin for a while, went around all the mountain states, and then landed in Arizona, and I can't leave. So I fell in love with it. There is a draw to the desert for me that's unlike anything else. And when I'm there, it's like there's a, I don't know, maybe it's a past life and maybe it's just a past current life because I lived there for seven years.

Starting point is 00:16:53 But it's a really special place. And there's great people there, too. I have so many friends still from my time at ASU that people I still rarely get to see, but people I love. And yeah, Sedona is such a special place as well. There's an NAU where my wife went. Flagstaff is incredible. So it's nice that it's a big state, but you're also really close to everything being in Phoenix because you're just a couple hours south to Tucson and a couple hours north and you get all the Northern Arizona that's so beautiful as well. Yeah, absolutely. The thing I love about Arizona that nobody realizes, they're like, it's desert,

Starting point is 00:17:29 just hot desert, is you don't have to go very far in Arizona to see something completely different. Flagstaff, as you know, is green and cool. And then you have Sedona and you can go to San Diego, Mexico. It's all right there. It's awesome. Yeah, it's all a drive, you know, five-hour drive to LA. Not that I want to go to LA anytime soon, but yeah, San Diego is still cool. Yeah, there's lots of watering holes and the nature there is, it's gorgeous. I mean, some people are like, and I'm like, if you just spend time there, you know. It grows on you.

Starting point is 00:18:07 If you like really appreciate it and look at it at first, you're like, it's brown, but then you realize there's so many different flowers and trees and flora and it's beautiful. The desert's beautiful. Yeah. It's incredible. And the skies, the sunsets and the storms, those are my favorite storms. You get the big monsoon season, the lightning, everything is just like, man, you really feel, I think Rogan talked about, I don't want to spend the whole podcast talking weather here, but I remember Rogan saying that when you're in California for so long, you pretty much

Starting point is 00:18:32 have like this, it's always perfect, you know? So it's like you, without being able to see the stars at night and because the light pollution and without much fluctuation and weather, you really disconnect from the natural cycles and seasons of the earth. And when you get out to a place like Arizona, you're like, there's something that draws you in and the, you know, monsoon season, something like that, where you're like, oh yeah, this, this, I'm a speck on the ball. And this thing is way bigger than I am. And it's, it's almost like getting swallowed up by a wave where you just along for the ride and you know, like that, that, that, uh, nature is this grand operating system that's still going, even if I'm not paying attention to it.

Starting point is 00:19:14 Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's something about being in that constantly perfect temperature too, that you just, you become way too comfortable. There's something about where a cold season or a really hot season, if we're talking Arizona or Austin that pushes you to get used to like that being outside of a comfortable zone constantly. Uh, so I think there's something to it, but yeah. Yeah. It's funny. All, all of the, um, all the research on heat shock proteins and cold shock proteins and sauna and ice bath and Wim Hof and that stuff. And it's like, yeah, if you live in a place like that and you fucking lean into the summer and go outside and play still and don't avoid it, you know, in your air conditioned box, um, there's, that's, there's a lot of health

Starting point is 00:19:53 benefits there. There's a lot of benefit for sure. Yeah, absolutely. I play beach volleyball and I continue to play throughout the summers here. And there's a lot of people that do, and it's tough, but it pushes you, you come out way stronger at the end of it. So yeah. Hell yeah. And then I'm sure when you're not playing beach volleyball, you're like, yeah, it's summer. Big deal. Yeah. You're like, it's chill. It's good. Yeah. We've got a couple of days coming up in the one at 104, 105 and a little bit more humid here than it is there, but the 104, 105 definitely feels like it's in the low 110s, but it's a, the one Oh four, one Oh five definitely feels like it's in the, in the low one tens, but, um,

Starting point is 00:20:26 we're outside every day regardless. And we're doing a lot on the farm. So it, it can, it keeps us connected and it's kind of like, cool. Today's a hot day. Bring extra water.

Starting point is 00:20:34 No big deal. Yeah. Cool. Well, we've got, you guys came on at some point early on in 2020. Um, not long after shit hit the fan. And you had some really cool data

Starting point is 00:20:47 points around mortality and metabolic flexibility and how long it would potentially take somebody to become metabolically flexible or at least more healthy in that regard. And I'd love to reiterate that for people because as Paul Selig states, if it's capital T true, it's always true. So it doesn't matter if we're talking about COVID or potentially the next viral wave that comes through, whether that's monkeypox or something else. themselves and know that the decisions they make do have a dramatic impact upon how their body receives and responds to something that's in the air or something getting passed around. And, you know, if COVID kicked our ass when it happened, I mean, late December 2020 or December of 2019, rather, I was laid out for eight days and then it passed. We didn't need medication.

Starting point is 00:21:44 We didn't need anything else as before people knew about ivermectin, hydroxychloroqu days and then it passed. We didn't need medication. We didn't need anything else as before people knew about ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and things like that. But we rode through it. My son rode through it. We changed the sheets each night because we were sweating a lot. And I think we're better off for having had it. What are some of the ways, some of the data points that you guys have gleaned because you work with so many people from general population to elite level athletes where you've seen, you know, kind of how long it takes to get metabolic flexibility and also what that actually means for somebody from a health standpoint and an immune standpoint. Yeah, absolutely. And just to, I guess,

Starting point is 00:22:19 first reiterate the point that this is not specific to the most recent virus or most recent pandemic. We've known this connection between metabolic health and glucose control and immunity for a long time. It's not new news, even though it wasn't hot news ever, and hopefully it will become. But even prior to working at NutriSense, I worked in the hospital systems. And when somebody has a high A1C, so they have uncontrolled glucose values, we can't operate on those people. They might need a necessary surgery. And unless it's life or death for that surgery, if their glucose is too high, surgeons will not operate because they are too high of a risk for infection.

Starting point is 00:23:01 Their immune system is so suppressed from those high glucose levels and poor metabolic health that it's just too high of a risk for infection. Their immune system is so suppressed from those high glucose levels and poor metabolic health that it's just too high of a risk. So we've known this for a long time that high glucose levels innately alter our immune system. It is actually affecting the way our body is able to protect ourselves. So one of the most powerful tools we have is to lower our glucose values and have good metabolic health because that is in our control, as you mentioned. And there's a spectrum of metabolic health. A lot of people are like, you're either non-diabetic or you're diabetic. You go to the doctor, you get an A1C test, and they're either going to say you're good or you're not good. But it's totally a spectrum. And our goal as a company, our mission is to catch people

Starting point is 00:23:46 as early as possible and shift them on that spectrum towards optimal metabolic health. And so really what's happening at the very end is type 2 diabetes, that spectrum. And we can still make a lot of changes there. At that point, your body has broken its metabolic system, so to speak, to the extent that you're now in the classic medical systems diagnosis. But that doesn't mean there's nothing that we can do at that stage. For that person, within a few weeks, we can at least see their meal glucose responses improve. So that's the powerful thing about a CGM.

Starting point is 00:24:22 So just to recap for those who might not know what the CGM is, that's a continuous glucose monitor. And that's the data we're using at NutriSense in combination with our app, where you can track your meals, your activities, and talk with a dietician about your data. When you're logging those meals and you see, let's say, a really big spike to cereal for breakfast, because that might be what you were taught was healthy. You can swap

Starting point is 00:24:46 that right away for eggs and vegetables and some protein and see an improved glucose response, even if you've had diabetes for 20 years. So we can see those postprandial, postprandial just meaning after meal improvements within days. You just got to swap some of those ingredients and be a little strategic about what you're eating and what you're doing. So those things we can see right away, and that's already going to bring your average glucose levels significantly down. So let's say before you were having a glucose spike three times a day to meals up to like 200. That means your average glucose was probably pretty high. And if we can get those post-meal spikes down to 150 just by tweaking what you're eating, then all of a sudden your average glucose is going to drop within a week or two. And that's already putting you in a more protective state.

Starting point is 00:25:35 So those are simple things that we can do is tracking and improving those meal responses. Then when it comes to if you have that metabolically broken system and you really want to get back to optimal metabolic health, that might take a few months of consistent effort. Probably if you're overweight, you need to lose some weight. If you don't have a lot of muscle mass, you need to put on some muscle mass. But these are all things that are completely within your control

Starting point is 00:25:59 that can be changed. And then within a couple months, we can see significant improvements. And then a lot of common people, like let's say your everyday person who has no chronic conditions, but they've never tracked their glucose, they might have less than optimal responses. But again, with the data coming at you in relatively quick real time, you can make those iterations pretty quickly. And within one to three months, significantly improve all of your glucose metrics. So the healthier you are on the metabolic spectrum, the less time it's going to take.

Starting point is 00:26:35 But even with that being said, that diabetic or kind of more metabolically broken system, we can see significant improvements within weeks. And then we can see significant reversal of some of those classic diagnoses within six to nine months with consistent effort, improvement, habit changes. So there is a lot of power in your habits. The things that you're doing day in and day out can completely change your life. It's going to not only improve your metabolic health, but then that is going to improve the way that you interact with your environment as we're talking about. Who knows what's going to be thrown at us? Who knows what's going to change?

Starting point is 00:27:17 The only thing that is certain is uncertainty as everybody probably is aware. And so preparing the one vessel you have, the one body you have as much as you can to be a good defense mechanism for whatever craziness is going to happen is something that's completely in our control. And then tools like this just help you do it faster and more appropriately. Without data, you can do a lot of healthy habits and probably still make dramatic improvements, but the data helps you to drive those changes faster. Cause instead of being like, uh, is this meal better or this one, should I eat at this time or that time? You just get the answer right away. And then now you're motivated to stick to that. Cause you have the real data

Starting point is 00:28:01 from your body that is showing you that actually works. I'm going to keep doing that every day. And it's just accelerating that behavior change cycle. We know that it's hard to make behavior change. So the faster we can accelerate that and really enhance that kind of intrinsic motivation, the desire to stick with something, it's a win-win for everybody. So there's a lot to that. But in a nutshell, we have a lot of control over our health and there's so many tools available. We just have to be able to do it and have that motivation and care. But people should know that there's 100% ability to protect yourself and enhance your innate defense mechanisms as much as possible.

Starting point is 00:28:48 Yeah, there's so much to chew on there. But one of the things that there's a number of things that are coming up for me right now, one, hemoglobin A1C, of course, was like the gold standard for many years. And for a while there, Dexcoms, which were the original CGM, required a prescription. They were only available to diabetics and they were about $1,000 a piece. So we've seen technology improve and change, which grants more people access, people who, like me, just want to optimize, who are not diabetic, and the general populace. Before getting to that point, they can now access this. And back in the day, if you're looking at hemoglobin A1C as the gold standard, which is taking a month-by-month snapshot of maybe the

Starting point is 00:29:30 past three or four months of your overall glucose levels, to get a bad score there and then say, okay, I want to change this, pretty much be left up to what someone else says is healthy food for you to see how that makes an improvement next quarter when you go to get your blood work done. If you're one of the few people that gets quarterly blood work, you know, I don't know many people that do that either, right? Unless you're Ben Greenfield or myself or people working with, you know, different optimization coaches, you're not necessarily going to do that every quarter.

Starting point is 00:30:00 And that in and of itself is not enough, right? Because then you're still trying to figure out based on what somebody else told you, is it working or not? And one of my favorite quotes from the keto game was, if is literally like a, it's a pain in the finger. And that only gave you what it was two hours after the meal. If you were diligent and took it exactly two hours after your meal, it didn't tell you where the spikes were at the one hour mark in between the one and the two hour mark. And then of course, after the two hour mark. And I remember some of my first data points coming in, and what's great about your guys' company is that you guys, you're on it. You have an RD that's going to connect to you through the app that will tell you like, hey, you had a triple spike from that meal, right? So like what that means is your blood sugar spiked,

Starting point is 00:30:57 your pancreas dumped insulin, and it shot back down, and that still wasn't enough. Your blood sugar spiked again, and it did that three times. So that's actually something that can lead to more health issues than say one clean spike that gets swept away relatively easily from the insulin response. And there's an educational piece that's tied wrapped right in. And that level of information and care is just something that previously wasn't available to us. And I think that can be the difference maker because I did my genetic report before, and I'm sure I talked about this in our first podcast a few years back, but the genetic

Starting point is 00:31:32 report for me, my wife, and even my brother, Aubrey Marcus, all showed we had the predisposition for type 2 diabetes. All of us have a predisposition for obesity. And I laughed at that because I'm like, I will never express those genetic determiners, right? Like the epigenetic on-off switches are not going to allow that. I won't allow that. But what it didn't say is what's going to cause that? Which foods in and of themselves do I have a problem with? Because my wife and I are not the same in which carbohydrates we tolerate and which we don't. Same thing with Aubrey. We're just different genetic backgrounds. And the thing that blows me away is if you were like a kid and you had five siblings,

Starting point is 00:32:10 same parents, each of you would have a different response to different foods. Even though you all may express similar genetic traits on something like a 23andMe or outsourcing the raw data to Rhonda Patrick and diving a little deeper. It may all look the same, but how that actually functions in real life changes dramatically. And without checking that and knowing the full story of it, meaning a continuous glucose monitor, which will actually show you minute by minute, everything that's happening, and then having a professional to interject and say like, hey, look, you either got to not eat sweet potatoes or you got to scale down and have one sweet potato instead of three sweet potatoes with a gallon of honey on top.

Starting point is 00:32:52 Right. So like I find that information completely. It's some of the most important data I've ever looked at. You know, when I think of things like an aura ring, a whoop watch, like, sure, that tells me how I'm sleeping relatively accurately and a number of other things, how hard was my workout, stuff like that. But when it comes to the big picture health, even before I got into ketosis, I was reading books like Grain Brain by Dr. David Perlmutter, who was big on A1C and lowering that number and understanding how elevated blood sugar and advanced glycation

Starting point is 00:33:25 end products are leading to systemic inflammation. They're leading to dis-ease in the body, which could even be type 3 diabetes, right? All your neurodegenerative diseases, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, dementia, if left unchecked for too long. And unfortunately, that runs in my family as well. My great-uncle and my great my great grandmother both died of Alzheimer's. And so really seeing how that impacts the body on a personal level then becomes like the golden key because we have access to that information.

Starting point is 00:33:54 We have access to it immediately. And then it's as simple as, okay, I either need to reduce the amount that I just had of carbohydrates or I need to change the carbohydrate and see, can I eat till I'm full with berries? Can I eat till I'm full with different foods? And what does that look like? And I think those are really the keys to the castle because you have this information in real time. You have an expert level person guiding you through it. And then you have the sovereignty and the awareness of which decisions do I make about my food that are personal for me. Yeah, absolutely.

Starting point is 00:34:32 And the thing that I think is so powerful about the data and the system is that empowerment aspect where a lot of people expect when they're paired with a dietitian or when they're getting this data, they're like, I'm going to have to cut out all the foods I love. And then they usually walk away with the opposite reaction where it's, I'm not having to cut things out or never eat something again. It's that now I have a level of awareness that is so much deeper that I can be much more mindful about my decisions. So maybe it is that I love this food and it doesn't, I don't respond to that well to it, but if I cut the portion size in half and I do it after my workout, it's perfectly fine. Or, you know, I thought this food was healthier for me, but I actually, you know, the glucose response is not that great. I can

Starting point is 00:35:10 actually stick with this other thing I like more. An example for me that always surprises people and myself was I tried like every fruit out there and I used to specifically eat, you know, like strawberries for breakfast, berries only, which I do have a good glucose response to, but I avoided certain more higher glycemic fruits like bananas. But I actually, my lowest glucose response out of all fruits that I've ever tried are bananas, which is just one weird personalized glucose response that I have, but I avoided them because I threw they were more starchy, but they're a great smoothie addition. They work really well in a lot of different dishes. And so I don't have to avoid this thing because as a population level, it's higher

Starting point is 00:35:56 glycemic index, but as an individual, as a unique person, I respond well to it. So just like you're saying with, you could have five siblings who all come from the same parents and maybe they're all the same weight or fitness level, but they're going to have completely different glucose responses than each other. And that's a combination of all types of factors we probably have yet to identify, but certainly environment, epigenetics, your microbiome, all these other aspects that are going to create a unique response for you. And that's where that information, what you don't know, you don't know. And even as a dietician who was diving deep in the space of metabolic health,

Starting point is 00:36:35 when I first started wearing the sensors and seeing some of my own data, you learn information that is just mind-blowing and life-changing because you wouldn't know it otherwise. And as you were mentioning as well, putting that on gives you that empowerment to make strategic decisions. So maybe there's also things I did know were important. So it's like walking after meals or being active throughout the day, but you get lazy or you get in a routine or a rut where you're not doing all the right things, having that data to reinforce the good habits too that you want to do makes it so much easier to stick to them. And that's really what is important if we're wanting to drive behavior change consistently. Part of the reason that I got so frustrated in the traditional healthcare system

Starting point is 00:37:22 that I was working in prior, one of the 500 reasons, but is that behavior change is so difficult to motivate in other people and any tools we have that drive that are so important. The other thing I wanted to mention related to the A1C story is my mother actually a year ago had a pre-diabetic range A1C and her response from her doctor was, you know, just kind of watch what you're eating and we'll check it again in a year. That's the traditional advice. It's not really advice at all. And it's not taken seriously. That moment of being on the bubble is this beautiful window of opportunity to make significant change and redirect which direction you're moving on that spectrum of metabolic health.

Starting point is 00:38:11 That is like the most opportune moment. And we as a traditional healthcare system, don't do that. You know, we say like, oh, you're fine. I have other patients that are much worse. Like you're good. And we don't do anything with it. And so of course we worked on a lot of changes and then she went to get her labs a year later, not quarterly, unfortunately, because they wouldn't do that for her. But, and she asked for the A1C and he's like, oh, I don't think you need it.

Starting point is 00:38:37 It was, you know, on the bubble last year. Wouldn't even retest it. So she had to ask for it and like kind of beg a little bit. And so this is an example that we hear all the time from our members. They're had to ask for it and like kind of beg a little bit. And so this is an example that we hear all the time from our members. They're coming to us because they're like, you know, I have PCOS and I think my glucose is probably high, but my doctor won't help me with it. Or, you know, I'm reading a lot of blog information online. It's confusing and I'm not really sure what I should

Starting point is 00:39:00 be doing, but I want to take control of my health. And there aren't a lot of tools, unfortunately, that empower people in that way to actually take control once they're motivated, they're excited, they want to get going. And to me, that is just super unfortunate. And I think that's what a lot of us are trying to change in this industry, in this space is helping people actually take control of their health, kind of flipping the way that we've looked at it traditionally in our sick care system, so to speak. Yeah, it's that empowerment piece because nobody's going to,

Starting point is 00:39:38 I mean, Tim Kennedy just tweeted something along the lines like nobody's coming to save you. Nobody's here to help you. No one's going to feed you. No one's going to fix you. No one's going to make it all better and make it all right. You're the only one that can do that. And that applies on every level of life. And I think there's a part of that too. I mean, from a psychological piece in an initiation standpoint, which is something I talk quite a bit of on this podcast, without rites of passage, without true initiations and practices that bring us up from

Starting point is 00:40:13 the graduation piece from adolescence into adulthood, we have a lot of adults that are little kids walking around in adult meat suits. And what does that actually mean? Well, what that means is they're still looking for daddy in the sky or daddy in government to solve all the issues. And it could be daddy in a lab coat that they think is going to make them better with X, Y, and Z pill that can do the thing for them. And again, I've talked about this as well. I've had a right labrum tear from an injury and fighting, and my shoulder would slide out of the socket every time I threw a punch. Surgery was the best thing for that.

Starting point is 00:40:51 It took me a year and a half to recover. It was no walk in the park. And I really appreciate that. But from a preventative standpoint, there was nothing in Western medicine to prevent the shoulder tear. And from a health standpoint, there's even less in Western medicine to make us healthy. There's no healthy pill. There's no healthy this or that.

Starting point is 00:41:13 It's literally on us to sort that. And unfortunately, that requires us digging deeper into ourselves to really get a grasp on what that means for us as individuals. Yeah, absolutely. No one is going to do it for you. There's certainly supporting tools out there. And again, that's the role of like, if you're willing to put in the work, if you're motivated and excited,

Starting point is 00:41:36 like here are tools that are going to help you accelerate that, or here is support or knowledge to help you accelerate that journey, but nobody is going to do it for you. And I think that's a lot, a common misconception that I saw in the hospitals as well, as people just assume that anything their doctor tells them is, you know, absolute gospel, take it and go do it. And they're humans too, and they're not perfect.

Starting point is 00:42:03 And sometimes you need to be able to be your own best advocate in order to have the best outcomes and best success. You 100% need to be your own best advocate. And a lot of people aren't doing that, unfortunately. But I think more and more people are. I'm very optimistic that we're moving towards that direction of more people kind of taking control of their own health, taking control of their own decisions. So I'm optimistic. Yeah, same.

Starting point is 00:42:30 Well, I mean, if it hasn't worked and it's not working, it's only a matter of time before it doesn't work and death is the final curtain or it doesn't work and you switch on and say, let me look somewhere else to actually understand what health means to me and what are the best moves for me to make to actually approach that methodically, scientifically, and get the data points necessary for me to understand that for me. I want to dive into some of the data points that I've gotten from my last couple of runs with the CGM because they've come at important times with things that I hadn't necessarily done before. And I think they're ultimately really valuable information. And at the same time, as we've talked about before the podcast,

Starting point is 00:43:13 it's not one size fits all. And I don't expect that somebody can mirror what I did on one level and then have the same results just because of the fact that I've been a professional athlete my whole life. I eat all organic food and I still, um, take care of myself on, on every level. I sleep great. I'm in bed on time every, every night, you know, with exception to maybe four or five times a year, you know, and this is coming from a guy who stayed up till

Starting point is 00:43:40 the sunrise many times at ASU on many illegal substances. But I had had two five-day water fasts back in the day. And then I had done a fasting mimicking diet that was modified from Dr. Walter Longo's Prolon therapy, which I believe is like 500 calories of inorganic food for five days where you get like watered down. I don't mean to shit on it. I love this guy's science, but 500 calories of watered down tomato soup with saltine crackers ain't going to cut it for me. So we stick to like a thousand calorie shake, 1,000 to 1,200 calories of organic coconut cream.

Starting point is 00:44:19 It's a ketogenic shake. And then for women, we put them on a little bit more carbohydrates because we don't want them to lose their monthly cycle. We don't want to take one step back to take two steps forward. And we've had incredible results from that, just from the blood work that I've seen, even myself. So it had been 2018 was the last time I had done a fasting mimicking diet. And then January of this year, I did one.

Starting point is 00:44:41 And we had a lot of the data points that I got from you guys with the CGM showed pre-diabetic levels if I was eating the amount of shit carbs that I wanted. Meaning, if I went to a Thai restaurant, I'd have an order of Pad Thai and I would get some curry with a plate of white rice. That's how much Thai food I want to eat. That's how many carbohydrates I want to eat when I'm there. So I'd eat to the level that I wanted to eat to feel full and satisfied. And I'd be between 160 and 180, you know, postprandial. It was not a good look. And I was like, damn, I started to feel my age. I just turned 40 this year. And then with the fasting mimicking diet, I think having that same meal, I was like a 138, which still isn't perfect, but it's

Starting point is 00:45:25 significantly better. It's astronomically better. And one of the scores that I loved, and again, it's not apples to apples. Don't try this or try it and just see what it does. But three months after the fast, I was getting a lot of data. And I remember having three almond butter and jelly sandwiches and I coated the jam on sourdough. I put a bacon cheeseburger wedged in between one of the sandwiches because I had had a burger like that at Slater's 50-50 in San Diego. Highly recommend that place. Get the PB&J

Starting point is 00:46:00 burger there. It'll change your life. I mean, I remember going in there and talking to the bartender. I was like, this burger has to suck. And he was like, bro, it will change your life. And I had it and I was like, now I have to eat hamburgers like this. That's how good it is. But I had that meal and I was a 123. That was the peak glucose after that. And I was like, all this from one fasting mimicking diet. And this is four months after the fact. And I think one of the cool things that Walter Longo's science is showing is that it's going to be about 70% to 80% as effective as a water fast. Of course, the four days only water studies done at Stanford was the holy grail of fasting, shortest window, most maximized benefit. And that would last for six to 12 months, those benefits. So if you can do something like that twice a year,

Starting point is 00:46:51 and the fasting mimicking I like because it's really low-hanging fruit for a lot of people who if you've never done a water fast or a dry fast, at least you get some calories each night, and at least you can still sleep moderately well. Every time I've done a water fast after night two, I'm not sleeping. My body's like, hey, wake up, go forage, you're starving, it's time to eat. And being able to still not lose sleep and kind of have my cake and eat it too, in a sense, has felt really good. And it had benefits like that to where I was like, wow, I actually have the ability to eat like an asshole. I could eat like I did in college and still have good glucose levels. Now I gained fat from that. It's not like I was getting leaner or the aesthetics piece wasn't there, but I was so

Starting point is 00:47:38 pleasantly surprised to see that just one of those could create rapidly a lot more metabolic flexibility and carb tolerance. And I think of these things that I've done a ketogenic diet for two years. I've done right when I finished fighting, I think it helped heal my brain in many ways from the amount of trauma that I had from fighting and football. But that was a lot of work and it took being very strict for a very long time. And then I see some of the new stuff from Mark Sisson around the keto reset diet, which is typically done for three weeks quarterly at most. And I think of those as like little touch points you could do around equinox or the solstices or, Hey, it's January. Let's all drop in and do this together as something

Starting point is 00:48:20 that can be a really important reset for us. because up until the first time I fasted, I had never missed a meal. And at no meal had I ever, you know, there's no meal that I ever had that didn't have carbohydrates in it for 30 some years, right? So if I think about things like that, that's not an anomaly. There are so many people who have never missed a meal. There are so many people who have had carbohydrate, likely processed carbohydrates missed a meal. There are so many people who have had carbohydrate, likely processed carbohydrates with every meal. And I think giving ourselves a break can have a profound impact. And it certainly was for me and the people that we've brought through in Fit for Service with that. What data points have you seen? Because one of the cool things

Starting point is 00:48:59 about your app is people can run their own little experiments, you know? And so I'm sure that ranges from building muscle to increasing carb tolerance and metabolic flexibility or weight loss. What are some of the self-experiments that you've seen that have had really good success in what you guys are doing? Yeah, absolutely. And just to touch on kind of your data was incredible as we talked about it. It was very impressive, quite likely, you know, in the very 1% there, but it does go to show you how powerful something like the fasting mimicking diet can be. And I love that you modified it with whole foods again, not to knock on the company that might provide some of the food substance for the fasting mimicking diet

Starting point is 00:49:46 but we have seen that that doesn't work as well from just a glucose response as when people kind of modify it with their own foods that are a little bit more whole foods organic maybe a little bit lower sugar lower starch um and that has worked really really well for people and i also think that there's an amazing psychological benefit to occasionally fasting or occasionally doing the keto diet in the way that you said of we get so comfortable, similar to living in San Diego, getting used to that same temperature all the time. I'm used to my three meals a day. I'm used to my carbs with every meal and I'm used to being super comfortable. And there's something to be said about pushing

Starting point is 00:50:25 yourself out of that comfort zone. And this is one strategy to do it that also has health benefits. So I think it's really great from a psychological perspective to also occasionally do something that is really pushing yourself out of your normal eating or fasting routine. And with the fasting, it's one of the most powerful tools that we see, especially for anybody showing signs of insulin resistance. So maybe you're not traditionally diabetic, but when you wear a CGM and you eat a meal, maybe traditionally you were checking with those glucometer finger pricks, as we mentioned, and you were checking at two hours and it looked good, but you're wearing the CGM and it's spiking to 200. This is something we see all the time where your A1C is normal, your fasting glucose is normal, your random glucometer checkpoints have

Starting point is 00:51:13 been normal, and then you put on the CGM and it's jumping 100 points at every meal. This is quite common. One of the most powerful tools that we see for these individuals that are kind of in that middle spectrum of metabolic dysfunction is those occasional fasts. And it can be the fasting mimicking. It can be a 24-hour fast once a week. It could be a five-day fast once a quarter. I think different things work well for different people. For some people with the fasting mimicking, if they start to eat any food, they're like, oh, now I've binged and I can't stop at a thousand calories or whatever it is. I limited myself. So it's also a know yourself type of moment, what's going to work best for you. But that can make a really dramatic improvements in a quick amount of time. Like you're saying,

Starting point is 00:51:59 I've seen your experience, maybe not to the degree of the amount of food you can still eat and have those responses, but the degree of improvement in that period of time from fasting. It's incredible. The other really big one is engaging in strength training. So a lot of people who have very low muscle mass or the only exercise they've ever done is running, ellipticals, the HIIT class, Zumba. If we start to do any sort of strength training, adding muscle mass, that can make really dramatic, quick improvements in their glucose values. And that's probably a huge reason too, why you have such great glucose responses, even when you go all out with your, you know, triple stack cheeseburgers is you also have a lot of muscle

Starting point is 00:52:45 mass. It's a powerful, powerful tool to improve insulin sensitivity and have somewhere for that glucose to go. Our skeletal muscles, so our muscle on our body is our largest sink for glucose. So when we eat food and it has a lot of glucose in it, it has to go somewhere. And the more muscle mass we have and the more we're using and moving that muscle mass, the easier and quicker it's going to clear from our system. So that's a super powerful tool is engaging in strength training. And that's the differentiator we see when women are going through menopause. Menopause is a key moment where a lot of women lose a lot of the insulin sensitivity that they

Starting point is 00:53:25 previously had. Maybe before they were like, I always ate this. It was fine. And now I'm going through menopause and I gained 20 pounds eating the same thing, doing the same activities. The big difference we see in women who maintain good glucose control through menopause are those who have a lot of muscle mass already or who are engaging in strength training. So it's a super powerful tool when you're also navigating hormonal changes. But the other thing I wanted to mention was kind of what you're talking about with metabolic flexibility and doing these more cyclical keto approaches or kind of seasonal keto approaches. This is something that we really recommend if you kind of want to

Starting point is 00:54:06 level up to the next level of glucose control and metabolic flexibility. A lot of people, I think, go in extremes where they might have found keto and found it helpful. And so they do it strict for like five years in a row. And now we haven't trained the system to use carbs or glucose very well. So it can be two extremes. 99% of the population is stuck on the other extreme where they eat carbs at every meal and they don't really know how to use fat as a fuel. But we often see the health conscious folks who have gone keto so far and so extremely that they've lost that metabolic flexibility.

Starting point is 00:54:44 So I kind of describe it like a hybrid car. The goal is to be able to switch our fuel system to the environment, the ability to adapt quickly and easily. If gasoline is our glucose fuel, that is helpful if we're doing something intense, if we need to speed up really quickly. But fat or ketones is more of our electric in the hybrid example. And that can help when we're cruising or when we're just doing steady state. So being able to tap into both of those systems easily and quickly is the idea of metabolic flexibility. And that is where we're really finding great glucose control, great metabolic health,

Starting point is 00:55:25 and setting yourself up for success. And there's many ways to do this. The two levers that are probably most important to pull if you want to achieve that quick and easy flexibility is fasting and exercise. And then also we can throw in the manipulation of macronutrients. So the three things that we've talked about, sometimes you could do all three or you could lie really heavily on one. Maybe you want to do a week of keto every month or a month of keto every quarter, and that's going to help flex that metabolic flexibility. You could also achieve that with the fasting because that's putting your body in a ketogenic state also, which is why I really recommend if you're doing the fasting mimicking diet is to kind of keep it a little bit lower carbs so that you are maintaining ketosis because you're helping achieve that metabolic flexibility

Starting point is 00:56:17 in that way. But this is something that we're finding to be really helpful for people and setting people up to have a good metabolic system that lasts and kind of has those prolonged dramatic improvements is being able to flex both of those energy systems. And again, exercise, playing with macronutrients, mixing it up, and then the occasional fasting. And this could be in many shapes and forms in the way of fasting and kind of whatever suits you best. The one you're going to stick to and actually be successful in is the one that I would recommend because it definitely varies. I think it's highly tied to your personality type of which fasting works. Yeah, absolutely.

Starting point is 00:56:57 Yeah. And some are easier than others. You know, it's to do a water fast now for me, even though I've made it through two of them fairly easily, it feels damn near impossible because if I'm at home, unless I can go on vacation and not eat, which I don't want to do on vacation, cooking for my family, having to taste food, is it too hot for my little daughter? All of those things become a factor and the irritability, you know, I think I'm a good dad, but while I'm fasted, I'm not a good dad. So being around, you know, being around the kids and having your normal roles and responsibility, probably not the best time to do it. There's a

Starting point is 00:57:36 few books I want to recommend to people that really helped me on this path. One is the complete guide to fasting by Dr. Jason Fung and Jimmy Moore. They pretty much cover the gauntlet of all forms of fasting from 16-8 intermittent, 12-12. Where do women hit the wall as opposed to men? Because there are differences there. And then the water fast, the mimicking diet, all the things in between that. And they really dive into the benefits of each. And one of the cool things, one of the cool takeaways from reading a book like that is all of these work to some degree, right? They all work to some degree and the benefits go far beyond metabolic flexibility or weight loss, which might be like the two main things, right? Like you're going to have

Starting point is 00:58:20 cognitive improvement, stretch mark improvement, things like that. I remember they talked about the longest fast ever was medically supervised. The guy did 368 days and he was over 400 pounds. He finished at 185 pounds. And instead of like biggest loser where people rapidly lose weight and they need a tummy tuck after, the body intelligently ate itself and recycled itself, and he had no loose hanging skin. His skin actually sucked back into his body. And of course, medically supervised, he did over a year. Some days he had broth, some days he had electrolytes and things like that.

Starting point is 00:58:56 But it really shows the benefits of what that could be for longer term and a deeper health issue. And then, of course, on the smaller end of that spectrum, what are some of the easier things that people can do on occasion? One of the important things you brought up is like, if you're doing 16-8 for the next five years, that's not intermittent anymore. Like there's no change up pitch happening that forces your body to respond to variability. And then your body will learn how

Starting point is 00:59:25 to store in the eight-hour window that you eat. If you're in a ketogenic diet for long enough, I've had my sister, lots of people that I know hit the wall after a certain period of time. And they're just like, I don't get it. I don't know what's going on. And when I tell them eat carbohydrates, they're like, I could watch their head explode. It's like, that is the thing you've been missing. So running that back actually will help. You touched on weight training, which is such an important piece. It's a strange one for people to get because cardio has really been force-fed as the means for the tight waist or I get in shape via running marathons and things like that. And while I'm a

Starting point is 01:00:04 fan of distance running, I've ran an ultra back in the day. I've done a handful of half marathons. I like it because I enjoy it, not because I think it's going to give me the body that I want. Two books that really stuck out to me, I forget the author, it was a neurosurgeon who wrote a book called Get Serious. And he talks quite a bit about the benefits of strength training, especially for women in prevention of osteoporosis and as well as metabolic flexibility and fat loss.

Starting point is 01:00:29 And then my brother, Sal DiStefano from Mind Pump, he wrote a book called The Resistance Training Revolution, The No Cardio Way to Burn Fat. And what else here? Well, he's got more of the tagline there, but again, it's the same approach. Can I lift weights solely for fat loss, metabolic flexibility, and really attaining all of my aesthetic goals? And the answer unequivocally is yes. So I'll link to those books in the show notes. And then finally, I'll link to what Eric Godsey and I came up with because we've run a couple of these. We call them full temple reset, where we do this modified approach with an organic shake that's very low in

Starting point is 01:01:09 carbohydrates for men and moderately low for women. And we've had fantastic results. And I want to make that available to people. That'll be in the fitforservice.com link slash FTR at the bottom in the show notes. But that's all available for people online. If you can't make it to one of the events, you can at least scope out and see what does the shake look like? So I can do this from home and hopefully, hopefully what, what doesn't, it won't happen to you the same way it happened to me, but I came home on day three of this last one, a couple of weeks ago. And right when, you know, when you fast, you can smell like people can't smell anymore through garbage and through cologne and all that.

Starting point is 01:01:45 Right when I opened the door of the truck in my parking lot, I could smell best Yukon gold potatoes I'd ever smelled through the fucking walls. And I walked in and I was like, dear God, I hope they finished eating. And this is just the remaining smell of the house. And my wife had cut, hand cut Yukon gold potatoes, rolled them in warmed duck fat, sea salted them and herb them. And those were still in the oven. What had just recently been pulled was a five pound roast of filet mignon. I was like, no. So that was quite torturous. And thankfully, I've been able to eat that meal since my fast. But I mean, three days in, that's not the experience you want. You don't want to come home to that.

Starting point is 01:02:30 A true test of the willpower. That really was. That was the ultimate test. It was like, oh, you're going to do this? And it's funny because a lot of the people we were coaching, they're like, I can't believe you didn't eat it. And I was like, had I eaten that, I wouldn't be here right now. I would have just, the level of hypocrisy for me to go through that with you guys and teach you

Starting point is 01:02:50 about it, to eat that meal mid-fast and try to act like nothing, I wouldn't be able to live with myself. But yeah, there's best practices in there on how you could curate your own experience for that on a very cheap level. And then how often, how regular does that look? What are some of the tests that I want to get to actually see that it's working? And no greater test than working with you guys, than being able to see it in real time. What does it look like before? And what did the same meals that caused issues, what does that look like after? And how many months does that last after, right? So those are critical things because the benefits are six to 12 months. Well, at what point does it start not benefiting me anymore?

Starting point is 01:03:30 That's probably a good time to run back a fast and reset my metabolism. Yeah. And it's also important to note that just because you had enhanced glucose flexibility, metabolic system after the fast, and you were able to eat things like the burgers and the PB&J stack doesn't mean that if you ate that then every day that it would still last six months. There's going to be that accumulative effect too of just because you have these benefits doesn't mean now we can change all of the good habits you had before, which I know you're not going to do, but also want to emphasize that. It's like, yes, you have really improved insulin sensitivity,

Starting point is 01:04:09 but to maintain that, you also have to maintain the good habits that got you there in the first place. So it allows you the flexibility to occasionally have meals that you enjoy. And that's where the more metabolically flexible you get, the more insulin sensitive you get, the less you have to micromanage what you're eating. You can have something like that and enjoy it and not feel guilty about it because you know you've set your body up for success. But if you're not doing the things right, those moments become a little bit more difficult to manage.

Starting point is 01:04:41 So it's kind of this, you can have your cake and eat it too, but within reason. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And a common question I get is like, how often, you know, when is your cheat day? Yeah. I don't have a cheat day. That shit's been long gone. There is no cheat day. You know, like there's just, there is no cheat day. I probably eat pizza, which I still love just the same, maybe three or four days a year. You know, my son, my son, he's never been to Chicago, but I've been a few times. We've got family up there and I'll order Lou Malnati's deep dish and the taste of Chicago ships in on dry ice. And so his last two birthdays, we've had Lou

Starting point is 01:05:16 Malnati's deep dish and it's awesome. I didn't have bad scores with that after the fast either. But should I eat Lou Malnati's once a week? That's going to change those gains really quickly. And then when I go to have something like Thai food, which is, you know, Thai fresh is in downtown Austin. It's organic food. It's really high-end meat. I want to be able to eat that more regularly, right? And I don't want to have the really, you know, the pre-diabetic blood glucose response from that. And I'll certainly pick a day where I'm going to crush myself under the squat bar and then I'll have Thai fresh because that does make a big difference for me. And even if my blood glucose levels don't look great, I know the insulin response and building muscle is going to be there. And I'm going to be driving

Starting point is 01:05:59 protein back into the muscle as well as carbohydrates to restore glycogen. So I can finagle that from an overall fitness standpoint, and it actually works out quite well. What I would hate to do is eat like shit and then lose my ability to eat something that's still organic and relatively healthy, but see the numbers that I had when we first started working together prior to the fast. Yeah, absolutely. People always ask me, you know, they're like, you probably never eat anything fun. It's like healthy food isn't fun. Also, it can be really extremely enjoyable, but people always assume that I never eat burgers or fries. And my answer is always that I eat really well so that I have the freedom to choose to eat those things when I want to,

Starting point is 01:06:44 to mindfully choose them. And again, it has to be the right moment. If somebody has like leftover pizza that's sitting out and it's not that good, it's like Domino's. It's not going to be the moment that I crush 10 slices of pizza, but there is out. Yeah, it's out because it's just not worth it. So you have to make these mindful trade-offs. Um, and I think that's what a lot of people don't do. And that's actually a benefit as well of the longer fast as we're talking about. It's not just weight loss. It's not just improved insulin sensitivity. You mentioned a lot of things with brain health, the BDNF, inflammation. But another thing is that it can help. I think it can help build more awareness to our eating behaviors, enhance mindful eating. It also can help reset

Starting point is 01:07:25 some of those hunger and fullness cues. They start to become routine. If I eat every day at 8 a.m. and then noon and then 6 p.m., my body is going to start to feel hungry at that time, whether I'm actually needing food or not. We have these kind of set hunger cues based off of our routine. And when, again, you mix up your routine, you alter things, you shake it up, you can reset some of those as well and get closer in tune to your actual state of hunger or satiety. And I think that that's a really huge benefit as well. Yeah. And you can look at this through Eastern mysticism, the aesthetics, or asceticism rather, renunciation. So why would you choose to be celibate? I don't know. But if you elected a period of time where

Starting point is 01:08:14 you were like, hey, I can't have sex with my wife because we're going to do ayahuasca in a month, and you take those four weeks off, the appreciation that happens after that, like the first meal, the first lovemaking, the first, anytime there's been space and a break, the tendency to take it for granted is gone. Like you have, again, the full appreciation. If you're me, you're probably like a 16 year old where you're like, slow down, slow down, slow down. But the point is like that in all aspects of life, when we have space and a break from the thing

Starting point is 01:08:46 that we're just so accustomed to, and it's always a joy to eat, it's always a joy to make love. But with a little bit of space, the fuller appreciation can be there. And I think that's what they were pointing to with renunciation of spicy food or any of these things. That's not something that I feel is necessary for the rest of my life, but it is certainly something that can be a huge benefit when done periodically for a period of time. Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. It's about mixing it up. And we are,

Starting point is 01:09:16 as a society, people who don't tend to do that very often, but it's extremely powerful. And any, not just in nutrition, as you're mentioning. And it's kind of the same concept of distance makes the heart grow fonder or whatever it is, a little bit of space. And you do appreciate those things that sometimes you get a little numb to if you're seeing it every day or you're doing every day. So I think there's really dramatic impact of mixing it up and being able to really appreciate and be fully present when you are doing something. And that's the other thing that we see often is that people will have higher glucose responses if they are not being mindful during meals. If they're like rushing and stressed, we see a lot of people who will have the same lunch at their desk at work while they're replying to emails and

Starting point is 01:10:04 they have a big glucose spike. And then they eat that same meal desk at work while they're replying to emails and they have a big glucose spike. And then they eat that same meal on the weekends when they're chilling with their family. And it's very mellow. And the only difference is the setting of which they're eating. So getting yourself in that parasympathetic state before a meal, relaxing and actually being present with your food and taking that moment to eat and appreciate it also can go a long way. And a lot of people don't do that. We're often watching TV or on our phone or scrolling Instagram or trying to work multitasking, but meals should be a moment where we're really present with our food. And I think that that is something that people don't expect to see reflected in their

Starting point is 01:10:43 glucose values, or they think maybe it doesn't actually matter. But that's, again, when you have the objective data, it helps to make these things more important. Same with like stress or things that are harder to quantify in a tangible way. When you see it in the data, it's like, oh, this is important. When I'm super stressed at night, my glucose spikes, even though I didn't eat anything, like this is actually important. I need to take this seriously. So it can really help to make that more objective for people. Yeah, that's awesome. I'm happy you brought that up. It's like the French paradox. How can they eat croissants and smoke cigarettes and eat chocolate

Starting point is 01:11:20 and have all the things that would normally cause heart disease, cancer, you name it over here, how can they get away with that and still not manifest those diseases? Perhaps they're walking more. Perhaps they have better community. Perhaps they have lower stress levels or a deeper sense of belonging to their tribe. All of those things, right? Those are the intangibles that we're not figuring out or don't quite have a real grasp on at this point. I think health and wellness professionals like Paul Cech, who's been a mentor of mine for years, has been alluding to this conversation. But one of the beautiful things about NutriSense is you'll know, does this have an impact on me? And to your point, you haven't eaten, but you wake up in the middle of the night

Starting point is 01:12:01 stressed out, what happens? You can actually see that spike where you're like, holy shit, I was in bed. I hadn't eaten in hours and my blood sugar went through the roof when I woke up. Yeah, this thing that I've kind of been sweeping under the rug is, and it is really eating at me. I actually need to spend some time sifting through that to become okay with it and come to terms with whatever any of these possibilities are going to lead to. Can I alchemize that and trust that it's going to be okay? And then I see that mirrored in how I sleep. And I see that mirrored in my blood sugar response at night. Yeah, absolutely.

Starting point is 01:12:32 Sometimes people who eat very well and are very health conscious with their diet and their exercise, their highest glucose responses ever that they're ever seeing are from something like stress or poor sleep. And we see a lot of people who they're having an argument with someone or they're stuck in traffic or something happened that's acutely stressful. And that glucose spike is like you just drank a soda or had a hamburger. And it's very real. And people are always like, what is that? And I'm like, that was a stressful moment. And it's hard to comprehend that it can be having such a physiological effect. And that's where if comprehend that it can be having such a physiological effect. And that's where, you know, if we really want to take control of health, we can't just look

Starting point is 01:13:10 at the macros or, you know, the calories or simplify it to these couple few factors. We have to also think about the mental health and our stress state because it's so, so impactful. You know, we talk about there's four core pillars of making sure you have good glucose control and it's nutrition, exercise, stress, and sleep. And they're equally important. They're kind of the legs of the chair of which take one away and it's going to topple over. And all four are equally important if you want to really get that good foundational health. Hell yeah. Well, this has been absolutely awesome having you back on. I was like, I don't know why we waited so long, but I do know why we waited so long. I had to try these

Starting point is 01:13:54 fasting implements out again and actually get some data points and see the dramatic shifts that could take place. I love what you guys are doing. We'll link to NutriSense.io in the show notes. KKP will get you guys a fat discount at checkout. We'll have all that written in there. Where can people find you if they want to reach out to you online and learn more from you directly? Yeah, you can follow me. Kara Collier1 is my handle, or I'm also putting out a lot of content directly through the

Starting point is 01:14:22 NutriSense social media as well. So NutriSense.io there. You'll probably see my face quite often on that one too. So either of those and yeah, always happy to connect with people. Phenomenal. All right. Well, you got a couple more follows from me right here. Thank you so much. Yeah. Have a good one. Thanks for watching! you

Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #257 Kara Collier -NutriSense

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