Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Eric Edmeades on How to Gain Control of Our Food Habits | EP 526

Episode Date: October 29, 2024

Join host John R. Miles in Episode 526 of the Passion Struck Podcast as he welcomes back Eric Edmeades for a transformative discussion on health, nutrition, and the concept of the "evolution gap." Discover how our rapid innovation outpaces biological evolution, leading to chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes. Eric shares insights from his groundbreaking book, explores the six hungers that drive our eating habits, and offers practical steps for aligning your lifestyle with your biological needs. Tune in to learn how to make lasting health changes and unlock the power of intentional living!Full show notes and resources: https://passionstruck.com/eric-edmeades-how-to-gain-control-of-food-habits/SponsorsBabbel: Unlock the power of learning a new language with Babbel's innovative system. Passion Struck listeners can get 60% off their subscription at Babbel.com/PASSION.Hims: Regrow your hair before it's too late! Start your free online visit today at Hims.com/PASSIONSTRUCK.Quince: Experience luxury for less with Quince's premium products at radically low prices. Enjoy free shipping and 365-day returns at Quince.com/PASSION.For more information about our sponsors and promo codes, visit: passionstruck.com/dealsIn this episode, you will learn:The post-diabetic concept: Eric Edmeades explains how type 2 diabetes can be reversible and the importance of dietary changes.Exploration of behavioral science: The episode delves into how daily habits and routines can support or sabotage health.The role of heredity in diabetes: Understanding how genetic predispositions can be managed through lifestyle choices.Practical steps for aligning lifestyle with biological needs: Tips on making incremental changes in diet and behavior for lasting health improvements.The significance of emotional and behavioral aspects of eating: Recognizing the six primary reasons why people eat, which include nutritional hunger, thirst, empty stomach hunger, low blood sugar hunger, variety, and emotional hunger.The impact of habits on eating behaviors: Understanding how emotional intensity and repetition influence the formation of eating habits.Connect with Eric Edmeades: https://ericedmeades.com/Order Passion StruckUnlock the principles that will transform your life! Order my book, Passion Struck: Twelve Powerful Principles to Unlock Your Purpose and Ignite Your Most Intentional Life. Recognized as a 2024 must-read by the Next Big Idea Club, this book has earned accolades such as the Business Minds Best Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Award, and the Non-Fiction Book Awards Gold Medal. Order your copy today and ignite your journey toward intentional living!Join the Passion Struck Community! Sign up for the Live Intentionally newsletter, where I share exclusive content, actionable advice, and insights to help you ignite your purpose and live your most intentional life. Get access to practical exercises, inspiring stories, and tools designed to help you grow.  Learn more and sign up here.Speaking Engagements & Workshops Are you looking to inspire your team, organization, or audience to take intentional action in their lives and careers? I’m available for keynote speaking, workshops, and leadership training on topics such as intentional living, resilience, leadership, and personal growth. Let’s work together to create transformational change. Learn more at johnrmiles.com/speaking.Episode Starter Packs With over 500 episodes, it can be overwhelming to know where to start. We’ve curated Episode Starter Packs based on key themes like leadership, mental health, and personal growth, making it easier for you to dive into the topics you care about. Check them out at passionstruck.com/starterpacks.Catch More Passion StruckMy solo episode on How Your Environment Influences Who You BecomeCan’t miss my episode with Kara Collier on How Real-Time Glucose Monitoring Systems Can Transform Your HealthWatch my episode with Eric Edmeades on the essential Keys to Postdiabetic TransformationDiscover my interview with Dr. Jud Brewer on How to Break Out of Your Food JailCatch my interview with Katy Milkman on Creating Lasting Behavior Change for GoodIf you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review! Even one sentence helps. Be sure to include your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can personally thank you!Show Less

Coming up next on Passion Struck. that opened the gap. And I would suggest to you that almost all the pain and suffering, emotional, physical, even social that we're suffering exists in that gap or is at least amplified by that gap. Welcome to Passion Struck. Hi, I'm your host, John R. Miles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become Passion Struck. Hey Passion Struck Tribe, welcome to episode 526 of the Passion Struck Podcast. Before we dive in

to today's transformative conversation, I want to start by saying a huge thank you to all of you who tune in week after week, eager to learn, grow and transform your lives. You're the heartbeat of this community and I am so grateful for your energy and commitment. If you're new here, welcome to the Passion Struck movement. We're thrilled to have you join us. I'd love to share some exciting news. I'm incredibly honored and deeply moved to announce that the Passion Struck podcast recently won the gold medal at the 2024 Davey Awards in the category

of social good. This recognition is particularly emotional because our winning episode honored the legacy of Emile Brunel, a visionary whose pioneering work in conflict resolution and empathy has left a profound mark on understanding human conflict. Emile's neuroscience-based approach to peace continues to inspire. It was a privilege to share his story. If you haven't had a chance, I highly recommend listening to this powerful message in episode 504. The Davy Award celebrates the Davids of creativity. Those who like the classic story of David and Goliath use big ideas and innovation to

make an outsized impact, regardless of resources. Winning this gold medal is not just an accolade, it's a testament to the impact we're making at PassionStruck and the power of stories that champion empathy and transformation. If you're looking to take these insights even further, I'd love for you to join our Live Intentionally newsletter. Each week I send out exclusive content, exercises, and tools designed to help you apply the lessons from our episodes directly to your life. Head over to passionstruck.com and take the next step towards intentional living. And for those of you thinking about sharing the show with your friends or families, which we absolutely love, we've made it super easy with our episode starter packs. With over 500 episodes, I know it can be hard to know where to dive in. So we've created playlists just for you. Whether you're passionate about behavioral science, mental health, leadership, astronauts,

military veterans, or hearing from powerhouse women, we've got a pack that's perfect for you. Check them out on Spotify or head to passionstruck.com slash starter packs. Last week we had some incredible episodes that you won't want to miss. I spoke with Dr. Zoe Chance about the art of influence and how we can use it to build healthier relationships, make impactful decisions, and live a more empowered life. Then I had a deeply insightful conversation with Dr. Susan Grah on spirituality, healing from grief, and understanding our connections beyond this life.

And in my solo episode, we explored the incredible story of Julia Butterfly Hill, who spent 738 days in a 1,000-year-old redwood tree to protect it. And in my solo episode, we explored the incredible story of Julia Butterfly Hill who spent 738 days in a 1,000 year old redwood tree to protect it. From her courageous act of civil disobedience we drew six powerful lessons on the impact of a single individual and the importance of standing up for what we believe in. Now if you've been following us for a while you'll remember that back in March we had Eric Edmonds on the show for a groundbreaking discussion about type 2 diabetes and his book, Post-Diabetic, co-authored with Dr. Ruben Ruiz.

We explored a revolutionary approach to reversing diabetes and explored how profit-driven narratives have shaped the medical understanding of this disease. In that episode, we promised to bring Eric back for a deeper dive, and today we're delivering on that promise. In this episode, Eric and I will Eric back for a deeper dive, and today we're delivering on that promise. In this episode, Eric and I will focus on the behavioral science behind lasting health change. We're going to explore how our daily habits and routines have the power to either support or sabotage our health.

We'll unpack important questions like to what extent does heredity play a role in diabetes, and how can those with the genetic predisposition take control? How does Eric's concept of the evolution gap explain the rise in modern chronic diseases? And most importantly, what practical steps can you take today to align your lifestyle more closely with your biological needs to create real, lasting change? Eric has spent years researching how small, incremental changes in diet and behavior can lead to life-altering health transformations. You'll learn how to start making those changes meal by meal and why they're the key

to improving your metabolic health and even reversing conditions like type 2 diabetes. Before we get started, I'd like to ask a small favor. If today's episode resonates with you, please take a moment to leave us a five-star rating and review. Your feedback helps us to continue to bring you these powerful conversations and grow our amazing community.

The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with someone you care about. All it takes is sharing it with one friend or family member. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and for trusting me to be your guide on this journey of growth and discovery. Now let's jump into this powerful conversation with Eric Edmeads. I am so honored to welcome Eric Edmonds back on Passion Struck. Welcome, Eric. It's so good to see you again. Hey, good to be back. Great to see you.

In our last conversation, which for the reference for listeners is episode 433, we discussed the essential keys to post-diabetic transformation, and you introduced a groundbreaking concept from your book, this idea of being post-diabetic transformation. And you introduced a groundbreaking concept from your book, this idea of being post-diabetic. Can you talk about the impact of the book since its release and what's changed from awareness about this post-diabetic concept? It's been an interesting process. We've had some really great victories. We've had some difficulties.

Without getting into specifics, I'll just say that some of the social media platforms that we normally run advertising and book campaigns are not as happy about the message that, uh, diabetes is reversible. And we've really run into quite a few roadblocks in that area, to be honest. That's been fascinating. But in terms of the impact, I've really been warmed by the stories that we've begun to collect both from, let's say people directly impacted by diabetes and the stories

they've shared with us about recovery and moving into that post diabetic world, but also the stories and commentary that we've had from the people that are indirectly impacted that would be particularly in this case, the medical workers. And it's really been interesting to have doctors come back and say, why don't they teach us this? And I'm so glad that I know this now, like it isn't while drugs can be helpful, while they can be supportive for certain symptoms and what have you, the fact is that you can, you know, that type two diabetes is largely

for the vast majority of people optional. And many of the people that we've interacted with since the book come out have really been shocked really to hear that message. And many others have said I felt so alone because I because they had that same opinion and that same knowledge and I suppose the book gave them some a sense of support a sense that there is a movement going on. Well I just want to ask a follow-on question to that because our mutual friend Dr. Mark Hyman

has been on this train for a long time as as has Dr. Gabriel Lyon and a few others, who are talking about the need that the curriculum in medical school needs to change to put more emphasis on diet. Are you seeing anything from your perspective that's actually happening? No. I mean, first of all, Mark's a great example of what we were talking about. The title of the book, Post-Diabetic, came about because we started referring to our reversed clients as post-diabetic. And in a conversation with Mark one day, I mentioned that to him and the look on his face

told me that we were onto something. And he asked me for clarity about what exactly I meant. And I explained the idea that you and I talked about last time that post-diabetic is a very useful reframing of the diagnosis because somebody who's pre-diabetic but trending in the other direction should probably be getting different medical advice and somebody who's fully in remission should be cognizant of the fact that they have a predisposition and so they remain in that post-diabetic stage and it was Mark's recognition of that logic that really inspired me to want to

get that book out. And that's why I was so very honored that he did the Ford for us. Now in terms of actual impact, I will say this as carefully as I can. Definitely have seen an impact at the street level. What I mean is that there are many doctors now that have really made a commitment towards supporting people in becoming post diabetic and not necessarily being reliant on a purely pharmaceutical solution to make that happen. And I've seen lots of that and that's, I think that's just going to continue to happen.

And it's really amazing. I will say with no out comment on any political leanings, one way or the other, uh, one of the things that I have admired about RFK's approach to this, to his PR campaign has been going straight at this health issue. Now, whatever anybody else believes about the politics, that should be a topic that everybody agrees on, and that we've got a problem in that area. And so I do see that there are changes that are happening that were part of that change and that we're stimulating

some of that change in our small way. I would say that on a larger level, it's going to take, it's a big ship, it's going to take a long time. I will say that there's a country that we've been working with and I won't name the country outright, but there's a country that we've been working with because a member of the government went through our program and got really excellent results and we engaged with the primary healthcare provider. We got quite deep into conversations about helping that country that has, and

it has a significant problem in this area. And then all of a sudden the talks just stopped. Not nothing fell apart. It was just like, oh, that's no longer a priority for us. And that is, it's difficult because if you imagine in many countries, the healthcare system frankly is funded by disease. So you have this weird chicken and egg problem that if you actually solve the disease, you're actually having a negative impact on revenue. And that's a problem. Another country, a prominent country, has taken a different approach. I've met with a number of government officials. We are now in direct conversations about integrating programs into their healthcare system in a trial basis. They're being very proactive about it. In the United States, we haven't gotten anywhere from a governmental level, but, but we

have certainly made inroads in the insurance area where insurance companies are beginning to see the long tail benefit of reversing the conditions so that the payouts are going to be reduced in the future. So we're seeing change. We're part of the change. We're stimulating it where we can. You would think the insurance companies would want and welcome the change because for them, it means less out of

pocket having to pay people to take the drugs and everything else when you could just focus. Really challenging and governments are always in a sense trying to protect the people. I would argue sometimes too much but that's a different political conversation. But I would say that let's imagine you have a country and the country has a healthcare challenge like most countries do and they have a lot of privatized insurance. Now what you want to do is make sure that the insurance companies are policed, that they're not price gouging, that they're not boosting their profitability in unethical ways. So you create legislation to protect them. And in a misguided way, what if you decide to create legislation that forces them to tie their profitability to their payouts? So in other words,

the only way for them to increase profitability ends up being to increase their payouts. So if you were to then come along and introduce a magic pill that just fixed diabetes overnight for everybody, their payouts would suddenly drop dramatically. And therefore, so would they have to govern their profitability down by reducing premiums and what have you. Now, this is a mechanism that the government did to try to protect the consumers. In other words, if payouts went down, premium should come down, fair principle, fair idea.

But when you tie it directly to profitability like that, now you have a company that says, well, actually, our profitability is expanded by having additional payouts. Now, I'm not saying there's any particular country anywhere in the world with a major health care problem that has a system like this in the legislation. But imagine if they did. It would be difficult. It would. But I think that's why initiatives like Sir Richard Branson's B-Team

initiative, I'm not sure if you're aware of it or not, where he's getting these CEOs to sign up to try to make the valuations of their companies based on something different than shareholder value and profits, et cetera. I mean, if you could make the payout and the valuation based on health outcomes and making them better for people, what a change that would be. I agree. I, I'm funny enough, I'll be with Richard in about four days and I was with him a couple of, I guess about three months ago. And we had a lot of talks about, because that was just before my book came out and before our book came out.

And so I'm very happy to go take him a copy now and continue the conversation. And I know that he was actually quite involved in a project in the BVI around dealing with diabetes in that area. And this conversation about that revaluation of the company, it's tough because of course, companies are valued by market forces. So how do you influence the market forces? Well, one of the ways you do that is by changing people's value systems. And so when you start seeing say ethical funds coming along, that is, in my opinion, part of exactly what Richard's aiming for there. If you and I preferentially go to our investment advisor and say, I want to be in a mutual fund, I want to be in an index fund or what have you, but the company has to maintain this score on the social good delivery campaign

that they do, then you are changing the company valuation based on that other version of profitability. I think that's a good move. Well, awesome. I hope he runs with it because he's got the power along with you to influence change. Now I want to get significantly more power, but I appreciate that. Here. You're also plugged in Tony Robbins and a whole bunch of other people can, can help get on the bandwagon here.

I'm largely on this bandwagon because of Tony Robbins and he has been a significant force. He was the first one that kind of got me questioning aspects of pharmaceuticals. And listen, I get they save our lives and the world is definitely in many ways better because of pharmaceutical companies. I also know that can be true at the same time that they could take advantage of things at times. And so he has really been a force for transformation in my own life. And I know in the lives of many other people that are out fighting this battle

as well. Yeah. Well, I'll just bring two things up for the listeners if they don't know it about Tony. One, he's been living with a brain mass for many years, which many people wanted him to operate. He decided he didn't want to do that because of the potential impacts it could have on his life and the way he wanted to lead it. So he made modifications to help him deal with that. And the other thing is, he is one of the best sources I've heard of using stem cells to correct injuries instead of going through surgical procedures. So those are two real huge value

points that the audience can check out if you want to. He's had a really interesting journey with that stuff. He grew 11 inches in a single year in high school because of that tumor, stimulating growth hormone and what have you. He makes a joke, of course, I wouldn't want to surgically remove it. I get like $200 worth of free HGH every week.

But I will say that, and when I first encountered him in my like late teens, early twenties, I remember him telling this story and it was very familiar to me and I've seen it a lot now, but he said he had spent a huge part of his life feeling really paranoid that some disease was just going to strike him down one day. And of course, with the media

being the way it is, we are constantly being told one in three people from cancer, 50%. If you get to 75, you're 50% chance of Alzheimer's. A pandemic is coming. Like it's no wonder that people are really afraid. But what he chose to do was a slightly different response. And it simulated a lot of my decision making. And that was to say, look, these things are out there. But first of all, a huge number of them are self-created. Now, I don't like the term lifestyle Z's. I think that is a term designed to shift the blame onto the consumer for unconscionable products and marketing programs and so on. But at the blame onto the consumer for unconscionable products

and marketing programs and so on. But at the end of the day, there's a degree of truth to it that a lot of those diseases are actually avoidable by lifestyle. And then the other issue is that what about the diseases that aren't necessarily affordable by lifestyle, say a pathogen or a virus? Well, as we saw during the pandemic,

your lifestyle had a huge impact on your outcome in that situation, your body's ability to protect itself. And so I was stimulated by his story of being terrified of all these diseases and realized, yeah, we should be terrified about them, but not cowering in the corner and living in a germ protective dome. It should be taking the best care of our bodies that we can so that we're in the best position to deal with those things if they approach. Well, I think that's a great lead in Eric to the rest of our discussion today.

And I want to take you back in time. There was a major pivot in your own health that happened in 1991, if I have the year correct that changed your life forever and gave you extraordinary amounts of energy. What was that pivot? Well, like most pivots, it started with rock bottom, right? extraordinary amounts of energy. What was that pivot? Well, like most pivots, it started with rock bottom, right? It started with being sick. And so at some point in my mid teens, I started developing horrible acne. I had debilitating allergies.

I couldn't breathe through my own sinus passages. I had throat infections so severe that my, if you looked into my throat, you would see these two golf ball size tonsils bleeding every day. I had digestive problems that made it very difficult for me to even think when the cramps hit in. And generally that was my life. And I, I don't know if I can explain this really well, but the bottom line is that children faced with chronic pain learn pain management techniques so that they don't, they just start to live with the pain. And that's basically what happened. I just basically, that was me. It was my life. I didn't assure my parents sent me off to doctors and specialists and recommended everything that they could to manage those symptoms, but nothing

helped. And in 1991, a buddy of mine convinced me for my business that I should go, as we talked about earlier, to a Tony Robbins seminar, a business communication seminar. And I went there thinking I was going to learn how to go, as we talked about earlier, to a Tony Robbins seminar, a business communication seminar. And I went there thinking I was going to learn how to make more money and learn how to communicate better with people. And of course I did learn those things. But what I really learned was on the final day, Tony started talking about food.

And I thought, why, why is the dude with the teeth talking about the food? We're not, that's not what we're here for. But he started saying some things that made some sense. And in the end, what happened for me was that I was so inspired by that little bonus content that I then started doing a bit of my own research and looking into this whole food thing. Of course, I was very lucky because I had a great grandfather that was a archaeologist, zoologist who discovered the oldest homo sapiens skull. So I had a little benefit of that science in my life. And I undertook a 30 day experiment inspired by Tony.

And it was, I'm going to cut out a few of these things. I'm going to add in a few of these things. And 30 days later, I was 35 pounds down. I was all of my symptoms were gone. I looked completely different and my quality of life was upgraded by far more than one order of magnitude. What an incredible story. And I also think a good part of your story that we should recap,

just in case the audience isn't aware of it, is you've spent significant time with Bushmen in East Africa. We discussed this on the last episode. But I think it's important for you to unpack that a little bit so you can tell the listeners, would it help you understand about how our ancestors lived in harmony with nature? It's a bit of a tough topic if we can't dive into it really properly and I'll tell you why, because the advent of the paleo movement and ancestral diets and that kind of stuff has stimulated a lot of conversation and then you've got these naysayers that immediately come and go well just because they live that way doesn't mean we should live that way.

They couldn't fly and now we can fly. And so they want to try and deframe that argument pretty heavily. One of the most common approaches to that is to question their lifespans. Well, their average lifespan wasn't very long, but of course, this is a very interesting trick of statistics because you see their average lifespan say might be 30 years old but they also have 80 percent infant mortality. So a very low level spreadsheet can show you that if you lose 80 percent of your children before the age of five to get to an average age of 30, the people who make it through the gauntlet of childhood are actually living quite a long time. And so I want to preface that the argument that we should be looking at our

ancestral history seems to be contentious. And what I want to suggest is that it's absolutely straightforward. And I'm going to put it this way. If you had an exotic pet, you just inherited this exotic pet and you didn't know how to take care of it. You have two choices. You can go and read all the articles at Harvard research or PubMed that were probably sponsored by pet food companies, or you could watch the nature channel or discovery or Nat Geo and watch a two-hour special on that animal and you will know

more about the care and maintenance and support of that animal from that two hours than any sponsored research paper was ever going to show you. And based on that logic, what I would suggest is that there are definitely clues about our evolved lifestyle and our evolved biology. There are definitely clues to that lie in archaeological history and to some degree in our modern-day contemporary hunter-gatherer people. And so what happened in my case was I used to run these leadership programs. I would take people up Kilimanjaro because I wanted them to have something real to wrestle with while they dealt with managing your emotions and leadership and so on.

And came down the mountain one day and my logistics partner said, hey, would you like to go and meet some Bushmen? Well, you have to understand, I've been fantasizing in my head about what life must have looked like in a hunter gatherer way, because my grandfather found the oldest homo sapiens skull in history at that time. And so I'd held a model, a cast of that skull in my hand at 12 years old. And I had daydreamed incessantly about what that life might've looked like. And all of a sudden somebody was inviting me to go and look to the closest representation of that life that exists on earth today. And I went 15 years ago. And I have

to tell you, it was mind blowing. It was absolutely transformational for me to see people living in an environment that was a direct match to their evolution of biology and most importantly to their evolved emotional responses or their evolved production of neurotransmitters. They were living exactly in the place where those things evolved. And they had a level of emotional harmony that I have not witnessed really anywhere else with any kind of consistency. And of course I could go on.

I mean, the nutritional ideas that we discovered there, the family dynamics, relationship dynamics, parenting dynamics, so much can be learned. And again, I am not romanticizing the life of the Hadzabe people or the Khoisan Bushmen or any of those people as a perfect representation of our history. But what I'm suggesting is that it really is

the closest representation of our history that we have on earth today, aside maybe from the archeological record. Well, Eric, one thing that your last episode did is it stirred a lot of questions about the ancestral diet from the audience. And they asked me to bring on other experts so that they could learn more. So since your episode I've had on Dr.

Michael Greger, Dr. Terry Walls, Cynthia Thurman, uh, Morley Robbins, Dr. Chris Kenobi, and just to name a few where for me, it's been enlightening because I read all their books, but I think we've brought a lot more to bear on experts who, like yourself, have been studying this and seeing how the positive implications can help everything from in Terry's case, reversing pretty much MS, or at least holding it stable and getting her out of a wheelchair to other things. I think there are bigger clues than we realize.

In fact, you and I were talking about on our last discussion, the post-diabetic book, this book here, which is not out, but The Evolution Gap, that's a galley copy. In fact, there is a pre-release version on Kindle that you can sneak over and get, but the book hasn't actually been officially released. But that book explores something that we call the evolution gap. And the evolution gap is a gap that I'm suggesting exists between our incessantly slow pace of biological evolution keep up with, and that opened the gap. And I would suggest to you that almost all the pain and suffering, emotional, physical, even social,

that we're suffering exists in that gap, or is at least amplified by that gap. And so studying our evolutionary biology and studying our ancestral history and studying contemporary hunter-gatherers and even studying chimpanzees and bonobos, all of those things can give us some fascinating insights into the human condition and help us discover solutions to many of the problems that we're

dealing with today. So I want to explore, I know you can't at this point talk too much about this book because it's not out yet, but I do want to talk about something that I've heard you discuss in the past. And that's something that you describe as the perfect human diet. And how do modern diets deviate from what our bodies are actually designed to consume if we were to have that perfect human diet? Okay.

I think we need to start with the word diet. And diet in every context in science, in nature, diet means way of life for that particular species. It's only us and our pets that can go on a diet, which is this newly adopted version of the word, which means something akin to a temporary alteration to my normal lifestyle in order to achieve a particular health goal on a particular day. When we talk about the idea of the perfect human diet, we go back to the same thing that

I mentioned earlier, and that is that if we want to learn about an exotic animal and we want to understand its diet, the best way to do that is to observe it in its natural environment when it's following its natural instincts. So then the question is, well, how do you veer from that? Well, a really good example would be elephants. In the 1800s, they were capturing elephants and taking them for zoos and circuses and all that kind of stuff.

And effective that was that those elephants, rather than living 70 years, like they would normally live in nature, were now living only seven, eight, nine, 10 years. And of course, an examination of that demonstrated the cause, what was going on. And that was that they'd been so shockingly removed from their natural environment that they were nutritionally under stress, they were mentally under stress, they weren't getting the movement that they needed in every way. They were not living according

to their design. And of course, that resulted in them dying 60 years earlier they really needed to do. Now that's a harsh change, right? It was like, you take an elephant from the wild and you put it in nature. Clearly there's no adaptation that's gonna help it with that. So then we look at our situation and it's not quite as harsh, although we have examples of that harshness

in our history. When Banting was traveling around Canada on behalf of the Hudson's Bay Company in the early days of Canada Banting was traveling around Canada on behalf of the Hudson's Bay Company in the early days of Canada, he was traveling around Northern Canada and investigating what was going on with the original Canadian people, the original settlers, the first, before Europeans arrived. And he, on the way, at the end of that tour, he was on a train and he was talking to a guy just casually about what he observed out there. And he said, what he observed is first of all, unfair transactions, buying huge tracts

of land when they didn't even understand the concept of land ownership for a bag of beads and flour. But he said, even more devastating than that is that they were not able to handle European foods they were being given. And it was causing widespread disease all over the place. And boy, did he get in trouble for saying this to this guy because it turned out the guy was a reporter. And so the guy reported his words and Banting was under an NDA from both the government and the Hudson's Bay Company.

So he wasn't allowed to say that stuff. And they asked him to apparently they asked him to issue a retraction and he says, look, I know I wasn't supposed to say it, but I'm not now gonna suggest that I was lying. It's another example of too harsh a change. But then let's talk about the gradual change, which is in some ways even more dangerous. And that is, imagine you and I are in the bush 50,000 years ago, actually probably 20,000 years ago,

and we return to one of our Koi camps, a place that we go to on a regular basis. And we suddenly notice, hold on a second now, wait a second, those bushes that we like the berries from, they're growing in camp now. How did they get here? How did that happen? Wait, isn't that where we usually sit on the rock and throw the seeds behind us and spit them out and what have you? You don't suppose, you don't suppose we did that. You don't suppose we did that. Is that did we do that? And all of a sudden agriculture is born. And the minute agriculture is born, there's a bunch of decisions to make. Shall we grow these yummy

sweet things, or these sour bitter things that we only ever eat because we're starving? Well, we're going to grow more of the sweet things. And then as we learn more about that, we learn that we can cross breed things and we can improve their sugar intake. And gradually, gradually we veer away from our diet. And I don't just mean food. I mean, how much we have to walk, the air that we're breathing,

the quality of the water that we're breathing, the amount of water, the timing of the food that we eat, both in terms of the daily timing, say in the concept of say, an intermittent fasting conversation, or the seasonal timing relative to metabolic reset. All of that stuff starts to get messed with, but

really slowly. 20, 30,000 years ago, 15,000 years ago, you start to see some dental caries and bone disease showing up in the fossil record that wasn't there before. Hmm, something's heading the wrong direction. And then that accelerates and accelerates. And we get to the point where at the start of the 1900s, cancer and heart disease and diabetes aren't in the top 10 killers of people in America. And by now, they basically occupy the top three positions or the top four positions.

Like it's everything has changed. And so the answer about the perfect human diet is to recognize that every species on earth has an evolved diet. And what that means is evolved nutritional dependencies and evolved capacity for extraction. And the more you veer away from that, the more likely you are to suffer with disease and consequence, and the closer you adhere to that evolved diet, the more likely it is that you are that you remain healthy and heal and recover when you're not. I think that is the perfect lead-in to where I wanted to go next, which is the emotional behavioral aspects of why we eat. And I've heard you talk before about that there are six primary reasons why people eat and understanding these reasons gives you greater

control of your eating habits. Can you walk us through some of these reasons and explain why recognizing them could help listeners make more conscious intentional choices about their food choices? It's a tough topic to do quickly. It's a masterclass by itself and it's a huge understanding of food psychology. And if people can grasp these things, they help a great deal. We call them the six hungers. And the general idea is that there are six primary hungers that drive all of your eating decisions. And it's not typical that any one of them motivates a particular eating decision heavily on its own, but collectively, they gang up on you. And out of

the six hungers, only one of them actually relates to nutrition. And we would call that nutritional hunger. And nutritional hunger is a very important thing to understand because first of all, how does it happen? Well, it happens when you're malnourished and the vast majority of people in the developed world today are overeating stimulants and garbage and sugar and what have you overeating calories, and then under eating nutrients. So they're literally overeating and starting to death at the same time, which means that their nutritional hunger is almost always activated. They're almost always nutritionally hungry. In fact, they often only stop eating because their

stomach is so full that they're hurting, right? They want to keep eating. So their nutritional hunger is a very important piece. And of course, the best way to neutralize nutritional hunger is to eat really well, to focus on getting the good stuff in, and then you neutralize that hunger. The other trouble with nutritional hunger is that it's nonspecific. It's not like it says, oh, go get this because you need that. It basically says, eat what's available around you, because we didn't have choice before. Mother nature controlled the availability of food. So you couldn't, if you were, for

example, not in fruit season, there was no point in having a craving for food. It just wasn't there. So instead your body goes hungry, go eat something. Maybe it might direct you in the direction of a macro, like fat, salt, sweet, and what have you. But generally speaking, nutritional hunger is this general desire for food and the only genuine hunger. The other five are really fascinating. Thirst. Now people often, what do you mean thirst is a hunger? Well, I mean, I guess you could say thirst is a hunger for water, but that's not what I mean. What I mean is that for the vast majority of history, humans didn't have water bottles. We didn't have running water. Like the water that we got was largely delivered to us from the food that we ate. The fruits, the vegetables, the root vegetables,

and even the meat that we ate was so fresh that it was heavy in water content. So we ate a lot of our water. Sure, we drank it when we could, but we didn't have the mechanism for carrying it around. So we got a lot of our, in fact, as an example of this, there's an antelope, at least one that I know of, in Africa that never drinks. It doesn't go near the water. That's a great evolved response. You know why? Because there's freaking crocodiles in the water

and the lions like to hunt there. So they evolve the ability to avoid going to the water. Where do they get their water from? They get their water from plants they eat. So we also have a capacity to do that. The challenge today creates this problem. A lot of the food that we eat today is not water rich. So when you eat it, not only does it not replenish your hydration, but it actually utilizes some of the water you already had in you. So now somebody's dehydrated a little bit, they send up a craving,

and that is go eat something. We need water. Then they go eat a bag of hostess potato chips, which has arguably a negative quantity of water in it because it uses water out of your body. You eat that and then you want more. Why do you want more? Because you need water. So you eat more. Now you want more. Why do you want that? Because you need, and the cycle is repeated. So that's a very powerful hunger. It drives a huge amount of our eating decisions. And one of the best ways to neutralize that is to pre-hydrate. If you are drinking to address your thirst, it's too late. I'll be more brief with the next four because frankly, I could get very carried away. But the next one is, let's say, empty stomach hunger.

The idea that your stomach being empty has anything to do with you being hungry. It doesn't. Your stomach being empty is actually a very important thing to do from time to let it repair to let it cleanse to let it flush out and to generally have more energy for healing and what have you. So that's why you see this big trend around intermittent fasting and fasting because it actually is important to have empty stomach time. Most people have a Pavlovian link up between nutritional hunger and their stomach being empty. And they're like, oh, my stomach's empty. My stomach is growling.

Yeah, it's cleansing. Leave it alone. So getting used to the feeling of an empty stomach is one of the biggest life upgrades that people can get. And that can be done with various forms of fasting. Low blood sugar hunger. It's not a form of hunger, but it feels like one. I, for the first time recently wore

a constant glucose monitor. And I found that to be a fascinating exercise. I even experiment a little outside of my normal regime so I could see what the impact that was. And I'll tell you, it's not the spike that you're trying to avoid. It's the crash after the spike. And most people are living with sugar spikes

and crashes on a regular basis. And then they experience these low blood sugar moments. And during those low blood sugar moments, there are problems, emotional problems. That's when you snap at people. That's when you're angry. That's when you're grumpy. That's when you're fungry.

But the other problem is that it causes cravings. It causes you to have emergency cravings. And that's a problem. Because if you suddenly feel this emergency feeling, you're pretty much willing to eat anything. And next thing you're scarfing down a chocolate bar in the car on the way to pick up the kids, not ideal. And then the next one is variety.

And the thing with variety is that we crave variety. And largely, I think this was a protection against eating any one thing for too long, because plants in particular have defense mechanisms that are bad for us. So eating kale, I mean, if you talk to Dave Asprey, kale is killing the planet. What I would argue is that while the current form of kale may well be doing that, that every plant is trying to defend itself. And our ancestors never were really hurt too much by those defenses because they evolved

responses to them, except that they ate the plant seasonally. So they would eat the plant for as long as they could to get the benefit from it, but not longer so as that the toxins or anti nutrients or anti digestion mechanisms were impacted. So they had also a craving for variety. We've been eating this plant for a long time. Don't you think we should try to find something else? Only today, we want variety on a daily. No, we don't want variety on a daily basis. We want variety on our plate. I don't, like you can have your friends going,

oh, should we get sushi? Oh, I had sushi on Tuesday. I don't think I could do it again. I mean, our need for variety has driven insanity when there was a reason for it, but of course it's mal-deployed. And then lastly, and I told you this would take a minute, the sixth hunger in this case would be emotion, emotional hunger. And this is where people have been conditioned a variety of different ways. Some were unconscious

parenting mistakes, others were deeply manipulative advertising campaigns by unscrupulous food companies, but we have been sold the idea that this food can solve this emotional problem. And that is incredibly dangerous to us. Now the real challenge is that, as I said, not any one of these hungers is a problem unto itself, but it's when they get combined. So you imagine somebody who's nutritionally hungry, which is most people in America or Europe for that matter, they're nutritionally hungry. And then let's say they have a blood sugar crash

and at the same point in time, they have a negative emotional response to what's going on in their life at that point. Those three hungers are gonna end up with a bowl of ice cream, a bar of chocolate or a glass of wine or a pizza or whatever it is. And so neutralizing those hungers is one of the most

valuable things you can do in facilitating long-term dietary change for people. I'm glad you ended on emotional eating because following our conversation, I also had Dr. Judd Brewer, who you probably know on the show, and we explored his book, The Hunger Habit. And when I think about these six different reasons that you give for why we eat, all of them in some way or another tie into our behaviors, the habits that we become accustomed to. Can you explore that a little bit more of what our habits have to do with why we eat and how we go about eating? Sure, John, this is a little playful, but I basically wanna suggest to you that all humans have this little app that it's running.

We run apps, we run different apps, and we've got this one app, and the app basically says, if I am alive today, then whatever I did yesterday was good. Because for the majority of human history, survival was not a given. I mean, it was hard out there. I mean, it was hard out there. I mean, it was hard 200 years ago, nevermind 20,000 years ago.

I mean, I have done embedded stays with the Hizabe people and I can tell you at the end of a week, I am like, I cannot imagine living a year like this. It's a very hard lifestyle and you're facing survival issues on a regular basis. So if you woke up one day, then the app goes, wow, we made it. Yes. Whatever we did yesterday is a good thing.

And that app is the app that stimulates the creation of habits. So I think maybe you've probably seen the atomic habits, great book, fascinating. And you have a lot of people talking about habits and there's this big debate. Does it take seven days or 21 days or 65 days to create a habit and all this kind of stuff, right? I would say to you that the premise of the question is flawed in the first place. It is not about the number of days.

Yes, it looks like it is and everybody believes that it is but I would put to you that it's a combination of emotional intensity and repetition. So if you have 65 days of doing something, but you have no emotional response to it, sorry, it's not going to become a habit. I just don't think so. But if you do something one time with enough emotional intensity, it will become a habit.

A good example is rookie sports guy playing, playing in the world series, baseball bases are loaded. they're two runs down. It's the bottom of the ninth. Everything's all positioned. And the kid slams a grand slam, wins the game. The crowd goes wild. The people are celebrating. Everything's amazing.

He's producing incredible celebratory chemicals in his body. Everything's amazing. And his body activates the app. Holy shit, this day was amazing. Not only did I survive, but look at all this attention. It's amazing and his body activates the app. Holy shit, this day was amazing. Not only did I survive, but look at all this attention. It's amazing. What did I do for the last 24 hours to create this magic? And so whatever he ate that day

is gonna become his game day food. And when he suddenly realizes that when he was tying his shoes, he banged his head on the locker. It hurt, he didn't get any blood, but it hurt. Guarantee you that kid's banging his head on the locker before It hurt. He didn't get any blood, but it hurt. I guarantee you that kid's banging his head on the locker before every game for the rest of his life. It's not about the number of days for repetition. It's about the level of emotional intensity. And so when you understand that about habit creation, now we take a look at a kid who just slipped and fell down.

Now, John, I know you've seen it. Kid falls down, looks up. No parent looking. Kid gets up and keeps playing. If it wasn't too bad, right? But if the dad's looking, the kid's got one response. If mom was looking, the kid's got another response, right? Like it's a moment, right? And what's going to happen in that moment? There's pain, I fell, there's surprise, and I suddenly see the most nurturing person around and I start to cry. And that person wants to end my pain and they come along and give me a cookie. And in that moment, just like the kid with the baseball game, I have learned that

cookie is a combination, an unbelievable combination. It is a combination of anesthetic and a communication of love. And so that's why at 45 years old, I'm scarfing down a cookie when I feel bad. Well, I love that explanation. And it leads me into so many people realize that health is important. And I love something that Rory Vaden has told me for those who know Rory is that people don't pay for knowledge. They pay for the application of knowledge. And there's so much knowledge out there about you need to improve your health.

Yet I find that it's so difficult for people to translate what they know and what they hear into lasting behavior change. Yeah. For someone who's listening today, what's the first step that you recommend that they can take to truly get their body and mind back on track? It's a tough question because it has a lot to do

with their starting point and how much pain they're in and what their primary motivations are and so on. But I'll start with this. The diet, the fad diet industry, the weight loss industry, the biohack industry, the longevity sciences industry, this whole influencer field that we're in at the moment, unfortunately is influenced by algorithm. And so what that means is that we know that controversy and that kind of stuff feeds the algorithm. And so therefore we have to do stuff like that.

And so one of the things that we see a lot is fear-based campaigning, avoid these seven dangerous foods. Like I could do a series of videos that would, first of all, frighten people about eating meat. Then I could do another video that would frighten people about not eating meat. And then I could do a video that would frighten people about not eating meat. Then I could do a video that would frighten people

about eating kale. And then I could do a video that would frighten people about drinking too much water. And then I could do a video about frightening people about the sun, as if that's not already been done to them. I could frighten you about just about everything. And then you're like, what's left? What the hell do I do?

But the challenge is that because we are very easily motivated by fear, it's a great way to get people's attention. And so most diets and life hack programs of some kind are predicated upon making you feel fearful and telling you to give up stuff. And often they're telling you to give up stuff that's deep in your heart and you have a deep connection with. And they're trying to do that at the same time while you're probably somewhat malnourished if you're an average person living in the developed world. So this is one of the many reasons that diets simply fail. And I will be really clear about when I say that diets do fail.

People don't fail. Diets fail people. The diets are badly constructed psychologically and mostly nutritionally and they fail people constantly. And it's awful because it's the industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. And the reason that it's a multi-billion dollar energy is because it doesn't work. If it worked, you wouldn't need billions and billions of books about it. So I want to suggest that we break with some of those trends.

And if it has to be down to one thing to focus on, this would be the one thing to focus on, don't focus on removing everything you love, focus on eating the stuff that your body needs. Start there. You want to eat ice cream, do that, but eat the good stuff first. You want to have a chocolate bar, go for it. I mean, I would say choose better quality chocolate if you can. That's okay with you. But first of all, make sure you're getting your core needs met. We know categorically, without debate, without cognitive dissonance, without any question that humans have spent the last 300,000 years as sapiens and arguably another five or six million years

as pre-sapiens, we know that our diet is largely comprised and really made up of seasonally available meats, fish, poultry, eggs, seasonally available fruits, vegetables, and root vegetables, and seasonally available fruits, vegetables, and root vegetables, and seasonally available nuts and seeds. So I would suggest that if you were to build your focus on getting enough of those natural things in, that would be the best starting place. I think that's great advice. And I think everything that you do with your WildFit program, and maybe you can introduce that for the listeners so they know what it is.

Behavioral change is at the core of the success. And what I find is most of these diets rely on willpower and fail long term. How have you been able to integrate behavioral psychology to ensure that people make lasting changes? I would say there's a few different points to touch on there. First of all, let's talk a little bit about willpower. behavioral psychology to ensure that people make lasting changes? I would say there's a few different points to touch on there. First of all, let's talk a little bit about willpower. Willpower is a largely misunderstood thing. It's a bit like a muscle and what happens is that it's a muscle that's

designed for short-term tension. So you and I, for example, could go to the Maldives and go free diving. And in order to go free diving, we would need to use willpower to hold our breath. We would use will to not breathe while we're under the water. But if you were underwater and you got stuck under there, then eventually your willpower would give out

and you would try to breathe, even though you were underwater, right? So willpower is this short-term thing that can only hold on for so long, even when it should keep holding on, it won't. And I would suggest is exactly what most people experience on a willpower-based diet. They hold their breath, they stick with it

as long as they can, and then any number of things interrupt them and get in their way. In fact, I read about a big study wherein it said, adults go on an average of two diets a year through their lifetime and stick to each one for only seven days. There's your willpower window for food for most people. Some are better, some are worse, but there's the average. So that's the first thing to look at.

The second thing to look at is to look at the structure of the programs they're on. And generally speaking, if I were a teenage alien from another planet here to evaluate the diet industry, I would have to deduce. I mean, looking at the output, I would have to deduce that the entire diet industry positions itself about helping people lose weight and meanwhile seems to be constructed with the specific intent of damaging people's self-esteem and destroying their relationship with their body.

They're, oh, you should restrict all your favorite foods immediately. You should go on deep calorie restriction to lose weight. You should exercise your ass off even though you're overweight and you're going to damage your knees doing so. I mean, it's lie after myth after lie after myth. And so that's the first, that's the next step is to really evaluate those things and part with them, let them go, let go of the diet mentality. And then we get into the things that we do with our clients and we really do a deep dive into their food psychology, understanding how they created their beliefs about food, their habits about food and so on.

And I could do again, we could do a whole master class on that discussion, but I'll give you one really tangible example. If you eat something very calorie rich, your body will reward you for that. It'll taste good, it'll feel good, you'll produce feel good neurotransmitters, like it'll reward you for that. And that reward is designed to act as an indexing feature. Memories are created by emotional response. So that emotional response is like an indexing feature of,

oh, this was a good decision I made. Well done. And what led up to this decision? Let's repeat that behavior. And that's a deep human mechanism. Now take somebody who's had, say, a crappy day at work, and then they get in the car and they have some road rage, and then suddenly they feel inspired to stop off

at Krispy Kreme, Dunkin Donuts, Tim Horton's or any number of other diabetes peddling organizations and they get there and they're suddenly eating a donut to help them feel better. They eat the donut, they get the coffee, the caffeine and the sugar and all the stimulant and their body goes oh well done because the body doesn't know about bad stuff. It doesn't understand that's brand new to humans. The body goes, well done. And then it says, whatever did we do to leave to this magic reward? Oh, road rage, that's what we did. And so pretty soon your body begins to learn

that if it wants those big payoff, cheap garbage calories, all it has to do is trigger you to have a road rage incident or to have a bad day at work. So when you use food as an aesthetic for say a negative emotional state, what you're doing is teaching your body that the path to that food is through that emotional state. So the body goes, well, I'm feeling like an ice cream. I know how to do that. Bring on depression. And the next thing you know, you're having an ice cream. On the other hand, if you refuse to do that and you only reward success,

you only reward your best possible days, you only reward the completion of big projects, you only reward you showing up in the best possible way. That's the day that you have the ice cream. I would argue against ice cream as a regular food anyway, but if you're gonna have it as a reward mechanism and then your body goes, wow, the path to ice cream is by finishing the book I've been writing or completing that big project or work or wow, my kids pushed my buttons today and I rocked

it. I didn't raise my voice. I was loving, I was compassionate. I understood that I'm the parent in a situation. Now I can have ice cream. And so you get to employ a really powerful principle in the WildFit community in that, or geez, I think it's just basically a human principle, but that is any behavior that you reward is very likely to be repeated. So do you wanna reward your road rage? Do you wanna reward your sadness and depression?

Do you wanna reward those feelings of loneliness? I don't think so. Well, I love how you just explored behavioral triggers and really what you were just saying is that those triggers around food are tied to social situations, stress, our environment, things that are going on. And we keep tending to reward ourselves oftentimes for things that we're not holding ourselves accountable for.

Yeah. Which leads me to how much does accountability play in creating the lasting change that we want? Well, proper accountability plays every role. It's unbelievably important, but the wrong kind of accountability is a problem. And let me explain what I mean. The diet industry has been just destroying people's psychology and self-esteem for many decades at this point. And the idea there is that, oh, you gave in. Oh, you slipped up. Oh, you cheated. Right? If you look at that whole diet mentality thing, then the idea is to trigger a sense of shame in people. Now I want to be really clear. I think shame is one of the best emotions ever because it's a huge behavior modifier. It can work really well, but it only works really well when you handle it really well and when somebody else didn't give it to you.

What I mean is that your own internal shame has the ability to really help you improve and become a better human being. But when a company is making you feel shameful about failing at their product, that's something else. That's something else that's going on. So when we talk about accountability, if the accountability is functional, that is to say, I'm taking responsibility, then that's going on. So when we talk about accountability, if the accountability is functional, that is to say, I'm taking responsibility, then that is going to be a big component of the transformation. But if the accountability is, I feel shameful, which is another form of accountability, then shame, unfortunately, is a negative emotion that also acts as a food trigger and a self-esteem destruction. So the next thing you know, that form of accountability can be a problem. And I would say

that a lot of the eating disorders that we see are an over-application of accountability. When you see somebody walking into a toilet, sticking their fingers down their throat and vomiting up their meal, that's accountability, but not the right kind. And one more question about your program. WildFit boasts 80 to 90% success rates, which is unheard of in the diet industry or in the health industry as a whole. Why do you think your approach is so different and has such higher levels of sustained behavioral

change in your participants? I would say there's a few components. The first one is consumption of the program. That's a very important thing. If you buy a diet book or a diet program or a health program and you don't read it or you don't watch it or you don't consume it, it's probably not going to work. We could start there. When I first decided to do this, I was approached by many people that were saying, hey, you

should do a book about this. I was like, I don't know. I don't think a book is the right venue. I want to use multimedia. I want to be able to convey more emotion and I want to do it digitally. And so I created it as a digital program. But before I did that, I did a bunch of research into digital education programs. And what I found out was shocking.

And that is that the average industry completion rate of digital programs is something like six or 70%, which is really shocking since most of these programs are like five or six modules long and you can watch them in a day. It's like, why are people not completing them? In fact, one story that just broke my heart, but really opened my eyes was that there were these internet marketers talking about this 10 DVD back in the days of DVDs, but 10 DVD, how to make a million dollars or whatever it was program they had. And after years of selling it and making millions of dollars selling it, they got a note at the help desk and it was like, oh, my 10th DVD was blank. And they're like, oh, no problem.

We'll just send you another one. So they grabbed a 10th DVD, stuck it in the player to make sure it was good, just because you want to check. And it was blank. And that's weird. What a coincidence. Well, further investigation led them to find out that they had never printed the 10th DVD. And that made them laugh their asses off because it meant for years and years people have been buying this program and never getting to the 10th DVD. And that made them laugh their asses off because it meant for years and years, people have been buying this program

and never getting to the 10th DVD. That would not make me laugh. That would make me feel like an object failure. If I created a program and you don't watch the 10th DVD, I have let you down. And so I constructed a mechanism of developing transformative education programs called behavioral change dynamics. And there's a number of developing transformative education programs called behavioral change

dynamics. And there's a number of principles and filters and mechanisms for how you deliver content to people so that it's sticky. So I can tell you, like the first metric in helping people transform is getting them to actually engage. So the first metric we were really working on, we achieved an 85 to 90% completion rate for people who started the program to completing it. And that wasn't measured by us, that was measured by our publisher. That was told to us as an external number. That was pretty cool. So then the next part of it is the transformative technique or the transformative structure of the program. And the program is an incredible balance of really

solid nutritional principles informed by evolutionary biology and really powerful step by step incremental psychological shifts that people make so that they won't have to rely on willpower or that they will learn how to use willpower in very short bursts to achieve what they want over the long term because they've changed their identity. And that's really the big deal is that people come out of the end of it and they're like, I am a different person. And I'll put it in one simple term. If you want to eat ice cream, you're going to eat it.

You're going to, maybe not a lot, maybe a lot. You can use willpower from time to time, but you're going to, if you want it, you're going to eat it. What if we could get you to not want it or we could reduce your wants sufficiently that it really truly was an annual event rather than a weekly one? Well, I think that's a great way to think about the whole thing. And personally, I've had my challenges with wanting to eat ice cream because it's probably my favorite dessert. But you're right. When you get in that mindset that you don't crave it, you don't need it. And it becomes something that you put to the side.

You'd consume a lot less of it for sure. John, at the risk of coaching without permission, well, let me put it in a, I can offer you that. Yeah, absolutely. Here's my little prescription for you. Continue to eat ice cream, but do what I said earlier. From now on, for say three months, only eat ice cream on exceptionally amazing days.

Only eat ice cream when you have shown up in business, the way you want as a father, the way you want, when your emotions are tuned in, it's those days where you go, wow, I was amazing today. Only eat ice cream on those days and never eat ice cream on a bad day, on a day that didn't go well. So you start there. And then what I think you'll find is that on some of those truly amazing days, you won't even want it. And that's interesting in and of itself. So that's step one. And then step two would be, you know what, don't even worry about step two. One day I'll get you,

you come in and do the whole outfit program. I'll take you through steps three and 93, but start with that step one. I'll bet you, you change your whole relationship with ice cream just by making that one change. I think that's a great to leave behind for anyone who's here is it's got to start with that first step and then go from there before you're going to be able to perfect any of the other ones. I was going to ask you one final question, Eric. You've spoken on stages around the world, and you've influenced countless people with your work. You've transformed so many people's lives. What is it that's a challenge that still persists, that's keeping you up at night and making

you to have so much passion with the work that you continue to do? Motivation, or the thing that gives me the biggest emotional feedback professionally is when I Facilitate a breakthrough moment or I facilitate long-term transformation for somebody. I really I appreciate that literally not a day goes by I can not a day goes by that somebody doesn't write to me and And tell me about the incredible transfer transformation. They've been through I was gonna try and find you one here

Just came in this morning. Like every day somebody sends me before-after pictures of their life. They tell me about the incredible transfer transformation they've been through. I was going to try and find you one here just came in this morning. Like every day somebody sends me before after pictures of their life. They tell me about the babies they were told they would never have and now they've had them their diabetes is reverse. Like I really enjoy doing that. And the reason is that I was in so much pain and I know about the quality of life upgrade I experienced. And so I have a let's call it an overactive empathetic response when I see people suffering in similar ways to what I was suffering. So yes, I've been very privileged to share my message with millions of people around the world, and I'm very privileged to get these messages from people and so on. But when you ask the question of what is still out there,

that drives me. I mean, the fact is that solving this problem for one person just highlights there's another 10 that have the problem. Most people have some kind of low grade eating disorder of some kind. And we're dealing with the fact that the majority of people in America have metabolic health problems and that the healthcare system is groaning under the weight of it. One third of people gonna go to heart disease,

one third of people going to cancer, diabetes coming up the scale super quickly and diabetes is gonna cost, this is crazy, diabetes is going to cost the American economy $400 billion this year. That's half the defense budget. It's insane. And so for me, I am just driven by that. I'm driven by the fact that as long as humans are suffering and in pain, we are not going to have the energy or resources to turn our attention on some of the big issues that we really need to talk about. Hey, look, I think we can all agree, there are some environmental concerns that we have right now. We can get into the climate debate

over there, but why even do that? Let's talk about the mass rate of extinctions, the Armageddon of insects, the air pollution. I mean, these are all tangible things. We know that they're happening. But for the average person's health is in such disarray that they don't even care about those other things. Or if they care, they don't have the mental energy to approach them. So it strikes me that to facilitate the transformation, let's say socially, psychologically, psychologically in the, in the

population around the world that we need to have, we need people to be in the best possible condition they can be in. And so solving this health problem for them is to me, the only way we even solve the problems in the environment. Thank you for sharing that. And you're absolutely right about that. And there are so many people that need to be helped. So I'm glad that you're so passionate about that. And there are so many people that need to be helped.

So I'm glad that you're so passionate about this and want to change so many people's lives. Eric, if people wanted to understand more about you, where's the best place for them to go to learn about your programs, your writing and the work that you're doing? Sure. For WildFit, go to getwildfit.com. In fact, I think we have a two-week trial there where people can go and do that super easily. Low touch just gives them a sample of what's going on. And I think that they'll find that pretty mind blowing. And generally you can

find me at eric.ee, www.eric.ee. And I'm active on Instagram. I manage my own Instagram account and I very often reply to people directly when they've got questions and stuff like that and I'm happy to support people. My main areas to that where I really love supporting people is in helping them find their passion from an entrepreneurial perspective, helping them become really effective at communicating and first of all and of highest priority is helping them really come to grips with mastering their own health and quality of life and expanding their health span and if I can help people I will. Well Eric thank you so much for coming back on the program it's them really come to grips with mastering their own health and quality of life and expanding their health span. And if I can help people, I will. Well, Eric, thank you so much for coming back on the program.

It's always such an incredible honor to have you on Passion Struck. Thank you again. Thanks for having me. Good to see you. Wow. What a transformative conversation with Eric Edmeads. His insights into aligning our habits with our biology and understanding the true impact of our daily choices offer a practical framework for creating lasting health change.

One of the biggest takeaways from today's episode is that true health transformation begins with small intentional actions. Whether you're setting healthier routines, rethinking your diet, or building a better mindset, Eric's approach reminds us that each of us has the power to steer our lives towards a healthier, more intentional future. As you reflect on this episode, consider one specific change that you can make today, something that aligns with the healthier, more vibrant life you envision. Remember, those small, consistent actions can lead to incredible transformations over

time. If today's episode resonated with you, please take a moment to leave a five-star rating and review. It helps us bring you these impactful conversations every week, and if you know someone who could benefit from Eric's message, share this episode with them. Together, we can inspire change and growth. For those interested in bringing these ideas to a broader audience, I'm also available for speaking engagements, helping organizations and teams drive intentional change and growth.

Visit JohnRMiles.com slash speaking to learn more about how we can work together. to YouTube channels, John R. Miles and PassionStruck clips. And don't forget to check out our sponsors and deals at passionstruck.com slash deals to support those who support the show. Be sure to follow me on social media for more insights, behind the scenes content and updates. Just search for John R. Miles on your favorite platforms. Next up on PassionStruck, I'll be joined by Jason Silver, a multi-time founder, startup advisor and the author of Your Grass is Greener. Use what you have, get are the decisions that I make. And if I'm clear with my intention, I might not get the outcome that I want, but I'm going to be trying to accomplish it in a way that I'm proud of. And I think the

challenge happens when, hey, it's five years later and I look back and I say, oh, I have nothing that I wanted. It's terrible when you look back and say, geez, I didn't do the things I wanted to do, and now I'm in a position where I don't have the things that I want. That's different than looking back and saying, you know what, I'm proud of the way I tried to accomplish these things, and it didn't work out in exactly the way that I wanted it to. Let's figure out how to do whatever it is we're going to do with the situation that we're in right now.

Thank you, as always, for your time and attention. Remember, the fee for the show is simple. If you found value in today's episode, share it with someone who could benefit. And as always, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. Until next time, live life passion struck.