Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Our Top Takeaways From A Year Of Trying To Get Fit Sanely | Behind The Scenes with 10% Producer DJ Cashmere

Episode Date: June 7, 2024

How to pursue fitness without succumbing to the “subtle aggression of self-improvement.”The kickoff episode for the latest installment of an occasional series we do here on the show, called Get Fit Sanely (listen to past – and future – episodes here). In this candid conversation, managing producer DJ Cashmere talks with Dan about how they manage their mindsets on these issues, and how the interviews we’re doing on the subject have and have not impacted them. We’ll also preview the guests for this fresh round of Get Fit Sanely, where we cover longevity, Ozempic (and related weight loss drugs), the latest science on exercise, and the Buddhist case for laziness.The cost of getting lean infographic. Related Episodes:Get Fit Sanely PlaylistThe Science of Self-Compassion | Serena ChenThe Anti-Diet | Evelyn Tribole3 Buddhist Strategies for When the News is Overwhelming | Kaira Jewel LingoSign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/dj-cashmere-778See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, how we doing? Welcome to the show. One of my many obsessions, a theme we revisit very often on this show, is how to get fit sanely. How to sift through all the health information that is thrown at us on the regular without getting lost. Also, how to pursue things like healthy eating, exercise, sleep, etc. without succumbing to what has been called the subtle aggression of self-improvement.

I love that phrase. So today we are kicking off the latest installment of an occasional series we do here on the show called Appropriately Enough Get Fit Samely. Today I'm talking to the guy who dreamed this whole thing up, our managing producer, DJ Cashmere. We're gonna have a candid conversation about how the two of us manage our own mindsets on these issues and how the interviews we've been doing on this subject have and have not impacted us on this score. We're also going to preview some of the guests for this latest round of Get Fit Sanely where we're going to cover everything from longevity to Ozempic to the latest science

on exercise to motivation to the Buddhist case for laziness. DJ Cashmere, coming up. A new podcast network was launched recently by Chip and Joanna Gaines called Blind Nil Audio. And if you're a fan of Magnolia and the type of shows they create, you'll wanna have a listen to the network's first two shows, which include This Morning Walk with Alex L. and Libby Delaney, and 50 Fires, Money and Meaning with Carl

Richards. In the 50 Fires podcast, they know that talking about money is hard. We've attempted it many times on this show because it is such a sticky issue. All over the world, people are taught never to talk about money, politics, sex, or religion in polite company. In each episode of 50 Fires, the host and financial conversationalist Carl Richards will remove money from that list by having frank, funny, and often difficult conversations about money, the kind we're told not to have with guests from all walks of life. Tune into 50 Fires on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your pods.

Hello, I'm Emily. And I'm Anna, and we're the hosts of Terribly Famous, the show that takes you inside the lives of our biggest celebrities. And just a warning, our latest season will feature a lot of accents. Can I just check what accents, because? I can't tell this story without going all in.

Okay, I'm scared to ask, but can you give us a clue? Why I'm Ant? Oh, Ant, and or death? I'm afraid not and it's not Alan Shearer either. I am talking about a young woman plucked from obscurity who rose to become the nation's sweetheart. A woman who's had a lot of surnames? And has ditched them all to become just Cheryl.

Love it. Girls Aloud fans, strap in. We're gonna follow Cheryl from her Girl Band Glory Days, getting together with Ashley Cole, and the many scandals and humiliations that followed. Not to mention a near-death experience. Oh, she's been through a lot. And she has needed every ounce of her northern grit

to see her through. I promise you it's gonna be an emotional rollercoaster. Follow Terribly Famous wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and ad free on Wondery Plus on Apple podcasts or the Wondery app. I'm Mike Bubbins. I'm Ellis James. And I'm Steph Guerrero. And we're convinced that our podcast, The Socially Distanced Sports Bar, is going

to be your new favorite comedy podcast with just a little bit of sport thrown in. You don't have to love sport, like sport or even know anything about sport to listen. Because nobody has conversations which stay on topic and it's the same on our podcast. We might start off talking about ice hockey but end up discussing, I don't know, 1980s British sitcom Alo Alo instead. Imagine using the word nuance in your pitch for Alolo. He's not cheating on his wife, he's French. It's a different culture. If you like me and Mammoth, or you like Alice in Fantasy Football League,

then you'll love our podcast. Follow The Socially Distant Sports Bar wherever you get your podcasts. The Socially Distant Sports Bar, it's not about asymmetrical overlords. James, podcasting from his study. And you have to say that's magnificent. DJ Kashmir. Welcome back to the show. Thanks Dan.

I guess I probably shouldn't say welcome to the show when you run the show, but uh, uh, it still feels nice to be welcomed. Okay. All right. Well, you are welcome. I shouldn't say welcome to the show when you run the show, but... Uh... Uh... It still feels nice to be welcomed. Okay. All right. Well, you are welcome. So what is Get Fit Stainly? Why are we doing this series?

This started about a year and a half ago. I was just giving some thought to what are kind of the biggest levers for health and happiness. And a lot of them were things we were covering extensively on the show, our relationships with other people, our relationships to ourselves, some spiritual or contemplative practice, exposure to nature. One of the biggest levers, which is physical health and fitness,

I felt at the time was a little under covered in our repertoire And this was also something that was really resonant for me, and I'd had a really painful relationship with for a really long time. So out of a desire to serve the audience and also a selfish desire to heal some of my own stuff, I came to you and the rest of the team and said, hey, let's try covering this stuff more. Let's bring on more diverse voices and ask some tough questions and ask this guiding

question, which is how can we be healthy physically and how can our relationship to our health also be healthy, right? How can we take care of our bodies and have a healthy relationship to the process of taking care of our bodies? You know, it's one thing to try to eat well, it's one thing to try to exercise, it's another thing to do those things while not doing them from a place of self-loathing or a place of self-hatred or a place of deep rigidity. And so last summer we ran a half dozen episodes under this banner of Get Fit Sanely and we

ran folks from kind of across the spectrum. You know, we had one guest who works out, I think, 14 or 16 hours a week, and had a pretty regimented sense of what leads to physical longevity and health. And, you know, we also had a Dharma teacher who talked about healing her own relationship to her body and letting go of some of the intensive exercise

that she had built her life around for a long time. And we got this huge reception from the audience. People loved it, people hated it, people had all kinds of feelings about it, which we knew might happen, but it's usually a good sign actually to get a volume of feedback and a diversity of feedback like that.

So we ran a couple more episodes in January and now we're back and we're going to spend basically the rest of the month diving back into this territory and asking more questions. People who heard you last time you were on the show, which was a year ago, or the last time you were on the show to talk about this, which was a year ago, they may remember this, but just for context for anybody who doesn't remember or is new to this, you know, line of inquiry from us, you mentioned earlier that you've had a bit of a tortured relationship to fitness.

What do you mean by that? Fitness and health in general was always something that I cared a lot about and tried really hard at. And it was also always something that I constantly felt like I was failing at. I always wanted to be bigger and stronger than hard at. And it was also always something that I constantly felt like I was failing at. I always wanted to be bigger and stronger than I was. I always wanted to be eating healthier than I was. I always felt like I was behind on the latest research

about what all the best recommendations were. So I was both working really hard at it, and I had a whole story about how I was doing it wrong. And this, you know, had ripple effects, not just for me, but for the other people in my direct orbit. It led to a lot of disagreements with my wife in particular. And then, as I mentioned last time we talked about this, we had a kid.

And so all of a sudden, there's this child. Well, we have two now, but there are these kids who are watching me and how I engage with food, watching me and how I engage with exercise, watching me and how I engage with exercise and learning from me directly about how they should. And so I just felt like I've got to do better at this. I can't keep feeling like this is one of the most important parts of my life and I'm doing it wrong and I hate myself for it. It's just not a sustainable path forward.

And once, you know, once my oldest who's now four and a half, once she started having the ability to articulate any kind of preference whatsoever, which you know, may or may not include a preference to eat a certain thing or not eat a certain thing, I realized that I needed to get clear in my own mind about, yeah, how I wanted to be approaching food and movement and bodies for myself and for her and for her little brother who is now starting to articulate preferences as well quite adamantly. He's almost one and a half.

But yeah, it's been a long, long road. And I actually, I asked my wife about this last night because I knew you and I'd be having this conversation today. And I said, like, hey, you know, do you think I've changed at all since I started this process a year and a half ago? And her short answer was like, on food, a little, on exercise, a ton. And I was like, all right, I'll take that for the first year. Okay, that's, I'm glad we have her assessment.

What's your self-assessment? I think she's right. I'll start with exercise. My relationship with exercise looks completely different than it did when I started the reporting and research process for this a year and a half ago. It has a lot to do with the folks we've had on the show. I would say in at least three huge ways

my relationship to exercise has changed dramatically. The first is I just do a lot more exercise that I enjoy than I did a year and a half ago. A year and a half ago I was doing a ton of cardio or do some weight stuff occasionally and the only part of exercise that felt good was the having done it but the gearing myself up to do it didn't feel good, the doing it rarely felt felt good. And several of the guests nudged me in this direction, but I think Virginia Salsmith, who we had on the show in January,

was the one who articulated it the cleanest. And she just said, look, like for her, running was an activity that she began in a moment in her life where she was trying to control her body. And now that she's not trying to do that anymore, she needed to find different ways to move her body that weren't tied up in these psychic knots. And so for her, that means like gardening and going for walks and certain kinds of strength training. And this idea of trying to tack towards exercise that I actually enjoy was appealing and a little

bit daunting, but I've done it. We moved to Chicago last summer and we're not too far from Lake Michigan. I got myself a stand-up paddleboard and when it's warm enough, which it usually isn't, but when it is, I take it out on the lake and it's fantastic exercise and it's super calming. When it's not warm enough to do that. I joined an indoor climbing gym. And so I'm doing, you know, indoor rock climbing and bouldering a few times a week. And all of a sudden it's like, I'm trying to fit in my workouts because I want to go do them as opposed to, so that I can check a box and avoid feeling bad about not having done them.

And that doesn't mean I don't still do some running and some weight stuff, but the balance has changed and the percentage of exercise that I'm enjoying has changed drastically. The second one is from Peter Atiyah, which is he has this idea of four, one, four, one. So basically it's like, take as much time in the week as you have to exercise, which for me,

it's often only like three or four hours that I can carve out. And he says divide that up into 10ths, spend four 10ths on low intensity cardio, one 10th on high intensity cardio, four 10ths on strength and one 10th on mobility. And I'm not hyper rigid about that, but it has drastically altered the balance of what I'm doing each week. And I try to tack in that direction generally. And that's also made a huge change,

and I can just, I can feel it in my body. I'm stronger than I used to be, and I feel like I'm more on track for aging as healthily as possible, at least to the degree that that's in my control than I was before I made that adjustment. And then the last one is, and this is what my wife was pointing to last night,

I just hold all of it way more lightly than I used to. So I have goals and I'm serious about them and I'm committed to them. And in any given week, if things got crazy or I was sick or the kids were sick or whatever, and I don't hit the goals, the level of stress and negative self-talk that come up is just a tiny fraction of what it used to be.

So I'm enjoying it more, I'm more clear on what I'm trying to do, and I'm also, there's something about that clarity that's actually helped me take the whole thing less seriously. Getting back to the Star Rats who you referenced, and by the way, we'll put links to all these episodes in the show notes so people want to go back and listen to them, they can. The Star Wretz, we talked to them a lot about mobility in the last, or the first installment of the GFS series, and they were talking about counting your steps, and instead of 10,000 steps a day, they said 8,000 steps a day.

That was something that really stuck in my head. Did it stick for you, and do you actually try to do it? It did stick in my head, and I do try to do it. Although one of the guests listeners will hear from, I think the week after next has some other thoughts about steps. So we can continue going round and round on the step count thing. But yeah, what they said did really strike me. They talked about the origin of the 10,000 number and how it has its origins in being a marketing ploy

for a pedometer, not necessarily in research, but that there is a lot of research to suggest that walking and getting in a decent amount of steps each day has a huge impact. The thing they said that stuck with me most was they talked about how in the US military, when troops are suffering from insomnia, the first level of intervention is more walking.

That's like the first thing that's prescribed, more walking to help with sleep. And that, yeah, I heard that once and it's never left my mind. So I do try to get in 8,000 steps and this is often distinct from my exercise time, right? So if I'm climbing for an hour, if I'm on the paddleboard or something,

or even if I'm doing the exercise bike or some weights, I'm often not getting a lot of steps doing that. And so what I try to do in the afternoons when I can is take one of my work calls outside on a walk and try to get my steps that way. So you and I, for example, have a weekly call and I don't know when the last time either of us Was sedentary during that yeah, we both are we're a thousand miles away from each other, but we both tend to take that call on a walk

This is another thing that I also Again try to hold really lightly so if I Think of it early enough in the day and I can find a good time to get outside and get some steps in That also doubles as a great time to get a little bit of exposure to nature, a little bit of sunlight, huge benefits to doing that. I'm happier. And it occasionally doesn't happen and my step count is occasionally much lower than

that and I stress about that less than I used to also. It's the same experience for me. I mean, I hearing them talk about the 8000 steps, I both hold it lightly, because science is always changing and is often contradictory. So I don't think of it as you know, etched in stone, but it's an interesting number. And there's a pedometer on my Apple watch. And so I do try to, you know, use that as some sort of North Star. And that that means not freaking out about it, but doing some of my meetings as walks or just taking a walk, all of which is a value add for my life.

So it's not this insane obsessive tracking mode that I used to be in years ago, where I would count my calories and count my meditation minutes. And all, you know And I was just like quantified up the wazoo in a ways that were really unhelpful. And so the 8,000 step thing, I do hold it lightly, but I do hold it. I found it to be helpful as a North star that we may or may not believe in too rigidly. And that kind of gets me back to this whole idea of holding it

lightly, which is given that the science is changing all the time and given that we don't want to develop what's called orthorexia, which is an unhealthy obsession with getting healthy. This seems like the key move or at least one of the key moves in all of this. It seems like a bottom line learning for both of us as we continue to do this work. Yeah, my ability to hold this stuff lightly is the single biggest change, I think, even bigger than the finding kinds of exercise that I enjoy, which is also a big change. At the end of the day, I don't know that I'm hitting a significantly higher or lower percentage of whatever goals I've set in a given week than I was two years ago or four years ago or six years ago. But I am being a lot nicer to myself about it and it feels a lot more sustainable and the level of consistency with which I've been able to hold onto

this latest round of goals and this latest round of understanding is so much higher. I am fully aware that there are still a lot of blind spots in my understanding of this and part of holding it lightly for me personally is being okay with that too. Because I just used to get so, every time I would see a blind spot, I would get so worked up about it. And you know, there's really, on some level, like looking back on it now, it's like there was no point in trying so hard, while it was also making me miserable. There was no net positive to be gained, no matter how much I worked out in

a given week when I was clinging so tightly. The upshot for me through all of this has been less clinging, which is suspiciously resonant with a lot of the other things we talk about on the show. So a bottom line learning is, for both of us is, you know, we keep using this phrase, hold it lightly, you can say, like, don't get too obsessive, be another way to say it. Another bottom line

learning for me, and this is something that a theme that just keeps emerging on the show is thinking about not trying to wrench your body into a specific shape, which may or may not have any relationship to underlying health, because often our quote, unquote beauty standards for men and for women and for everybody in between are arbitrary and based in lots of, you know, fucked up historical stuff, you know, tied up in all sorts of biases, et cetera, et cetera. I think for me, that has been hugely liberating. And I believe, can't remember who it was in the last, in the first go around, it was Kelly Sturred or Peter Atiyah.

Somebody was talking about some resource that's out there that I never went and actually looked at, but it was called, I think, the cost of being lean. Yes, yes. Did you look at it? I did, it was nuts. It was basically just this breakdown, we can find it and put a link in the show notes,

but it was this sort of infographic breakdown of, if you want a body that looks like this, here's what you have to do. If you want a body that looks like this, here's what you have to do. And it just made it so crystal clear that the sort of highest level standard that a lot of us are walking around with in our heads is a full-time job. Yeah. Right. I mean, there's a reason that when actors get cast in Marvel movies, it takes them months and very expensive personal trainers and intensive workout regimens and intensive diets and it's their full-time job to look like that for the one movie, right?

And so in that same vein, you also asked Peter Atiyah point blank, you were like, if I never get my abs back, does that actually mean anything objectively about my health? And he was like, no. So it's like, so where is it coming from then, right? And I think, again, I could point to the Virginia Soul Smith episode that was really clarifying for me to think about how I've been taught by the culture, to think about bodies, about my own bodies, about fatness, about thinness,

and how much judgment, fear, criticism I'm directing inwards and outwards. And the temperature on that is slowly going down too. I've got a little exercise is like, just be mindful as you move through the world, what kind of judgments come up when you see people with different kinds of bodies. You can apply this by the way to skin pigmentation

and as Joseph Goldstein likes to say, self-knowledge is always bad news. And I suspect that as you run this experiment, you'll be receiving a lot of bad news about your conditioning, but it's interesting. And you can, I think over time, start to call bullshit on these assumptions that you're reaching, which not only are not fair to other people, but they're not fair to

you. Like you're writing people off. You know, this is less important when it comes to strangers and more important when it comes to like your colleagues or members of your family, you're writing people off in your mind, in ways that are, you know, we're, you know, reducing the amount you can get out of those relationships. And so that I find that to be both humiliating and rewarding as an exercise. Yeah.

And it's also, you know, it's inevitably directly correlated to the level of judgment you're carrying around about yourself, right? This is something that you've talked about quite a lot, but they're just, and this is something Thich Nhat Hanh talks about, like it's a truism, but you can't love other people if you can't love yourself. You can't stop judging other people if you can't stop judging yourself. If you can't calm the inner weather in your own mind,

you're not gonna be able to calm it externally. And so for me, just the way that I'm wired, the way that I'm conditioned, you know, producing these episodes, having these conversations, doing this research and reporting, I find it helpful because it's direct factual information that can help counter program against some of the non-factual but very loud and very deeply rooted voices that are swimming around and for too long had been swimming around kind of uncontested in my mind.

Yes, well said. One last thing to say here is that I don't think we're gonna cover this particular data point in the series, but it's worth saying, and it has been covered in other episodes, including the episode we did with Dr. Serena Chen about the science of self-compassion,

which is that self-compassion, even though it might seem gooey or self-indulgent, and as an interesting digression, Dr. Chen, that was now one of the leading researchers in the field of self-compassion, initially thought it was ridiculous and that it was gonna be self-indulgent, but she did a bunch of work and saw that that's not true.

In fact, one of her principal findings is that people with self-compassion, either taught or innate have more desire for self-improvement. So DJ and I, having done some of this work, some of this deprogramming are more likely to engage in exercise, even though that may sound counterintuitive because we're, you know, not obsessing about it as much, but that actually is a cleaner burning fuel over time, like having a reasonably warm relationship to yourself as opposed to the self hatred or the subtle aggression, as is often called the subtle aggression of self improvement that, youment that leads to burnout.

Yeah. I'm seeing this play out for me when I go to the climbing gym in particular. One of the reasons I like it is because there's a social element to it. There's always other people around. Another thing I like is that it's pressing all the buttons, the strength, the mobility, the cardio. There's a lot of stretching and balance and holding yourself up and your heart rate goes up. So it's just a very well rounded form of exercise. But another thing

that's fun about it is there's different levels, like there's a level zero climb, there's a level one climb, a level two, a level three, a level four, level five, et cetera. And when I first started a few months ago, I could like barely do the level ones. And I was super gentle with myself about that. Cause I realized that I had just started and I'm like seeing progress. Like I did my first level four the other day and it felt really good. And like, I haven't done a level four since then. And it might be, it might be another few months before I manage another one. But it's like one of the first times in my life that I've seen

active physical progress sustained over multiple months that I'm both excited about and not stressing out about. And when I got from like a level two to level three, and then I got again, just the one time, but when I got a level four, it was a direct signal that I was stronger and more mobile than I had been three months ago when I was physically incapable of doing that. And yet there was no part of me that was like, you know, angry that I couldn't do the four

beforehand or that has since been angry that I'm not up to the five yet. And I think it just all comes back to this idea of finding the thing you enjoy, having some balance injected into it, holding all of it lightly. But yeah, a huge benefit that I didn't really highlight at the top of this, but that is true is that like, I actually really am stronger on top of all of the rest, but that almost feels like a bonus,

like both the point and sort of beside the point. Is it helpful or hurtful for me to point out that if you don't get to five, I'm gonna judge you very harshly? If you can do a five and I can't, you can judge me. I don't appreciate that response. I'm a lot older than you. All right, let's talk about what's coming.

If you can do a three and's talk about what's coming. If you can do a three and I can't do a three. Let's change the subject. Coming up, DJ and I will talk about DJ's latest perspective on food and diet and how he's integrating that into his own life. The joys and struggles and some of the techniques of intuitive eating and what's coming up in this latest installment of Get Fit Sanely,

the series that kicks off officially on Monday. Hello, I'm Matt Ford. And I'm Alice Levine and we're the hosts of Wondry's podcast British Scandal. In our latest series, Michelle Mone, we tell the story of a woman from Glasgow who left school at 15 and devised an idea. A next level bra that remoulds the cleavage. An uplifting story which gives you a real boost. I hate myself. She moved from business to politics and when Covid hit says she knows a great company to supply PPE. And the company PPE Medpro made

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the promo code COHO75. That's code K-O-H-O-75. Before we get back to the show, just a reminder about the Healthy Habits course over on the 10% Happier app taught by Kelly McGonigal and Alexis Santos. To access it, just download the 10% Happier app wherever you get your apps. You mentioned before that your wife told you there wasn't much change for you on the food front. So what's going on or not going on there? So last time you and I talked about this, you dragged a reluctant admission from me that I had more or less been convinced by this idea of intuitive

eating through the course of reporting on the series, right? So we have done multiple episodes on intuitive eating. We included one in the last round of Get Fit Sanely. We also had a bunch of other folks talking about diet and nutrition. And I was surprised, which I admitted to again, reluctantly to find that this idea of, you know, diets don't work, diet culture is not super healthy, better just to listen to your body, to listen to your body's own intuition, to eat what you want to eat, to stop eating when you're full, to let go of these ideas that certain foods are sinful, to hold a gentle concept of just basic nutritional facts in the back of your mind, but to hold it lightly. That that's actually a pretty solid path forward. I would say in the years since then, I still

basically at a baseline believe that that's true. And I am a little more chill around like desserts. I'm a little more chill about encouraging my daughter to make balanced choices with what she's eating, but pushing a little less explicitly around like around you have to have this many bites of this vegetable or you have to finish this part of your plate before you can have more of this other thing. I'm moving in that direction slowly. That stuff is really deep in there. And yeah, I don't know what it is exactly.

The one thing that has changed really positively for just me personally, is that I'm no longer chasing the right way of eating the way that I used to, and I'm no longer getting hooked by these click-baity headlines around, oh, new research says don't do this thing that you've been doing or whatever. I have a much better ability than I did a year and a half ago to tune out whatever the latest noise or food trend is. And I'm putting less pressure on myself to get the eating exactly right. At the end of the day, I'm incredibly lucky to be well-resourced enough

to have access to pretty healthy food. I buy mostly pretty healthy food. And so when I go to the kitchen, I can only eat mostly pretty healthy food. I buy mostly pretty healthy food. And so when I go to the kitchen, I can only eat mostly pretty healthy food. And when I just really need a few handfuls of popcorn, I just have a few handfuls of popcorn. And then I just move on with my day. But popcorn isn't even that bad for you. I know, man. But this, I told you, it's like, it's levels with me. It's true that popcorn isn't that bad for you

and relative to where I was a couple of years ago, being okay with having a few handfuls of popcorn is like a step in the right direction for me. And occasionally I'll even have a brownie or a cupcake and be okay with it. But I'm still not in the promised land. L'Essay Les Bon Temps Brûlés, I mean, that's amazing. Yeah, I have a dessert every day. Sounds yummy.

It's great. The only thing I think about it is Evelyn Tribbley, who's one of the progenitors of intuitive eating, the woman who really got me interested in this and with whom I still chat once a month. She often says, like, how do you want to feel? And so I'm aware that certain foods, including dessert, might interrupt my sleep or make me feel logy or whatever.

And so I use that as more of a regulator than I do. You know, some bronze age, wrathful sky God who's going to, you know, frown upon me for eating X or Y sinful foods. Where I struggle with intuitive eating still is having the patience to actually do it. I don't really obsess much about what I'm eating. Although I had a bit of an interesting challenge. I had slightly elevated cholesterol and my doctor wanted to put me on statins for that and that had never happened before and so I said give me a month and I cut back on a few foods and added started adding a few

other different types of food and it fixed it but so that was interesting and like managing that as part of this but I don't really struggle around anymore I don't really and I used to struggle mightily with this around like you know obsessing about what I'm eating at any given time. The part that I do struggle with is eating slowly and mindfully enough so that I'm aware of my satiety cues and not overeating. That I that I blow it on a lot. self-retreat last week. I just was at an Airbnb near our home and just did a few days of quiet meditation. And I did all my meals in silence, was doing eating meditation. It was great.

I took the right amount of food at every meal. I finished my plate at every meal and I came home. And it's just amazing how hard it is to translate that I finished my plate at every meal and I came home. It's just amazing how hard it is to translate that over and still say no to the screen and still say no to the late night snack that you're not actually hungry for. There's something about having some amount of built up mindfulness or being in some kind of container and touching into what it feels like to really do that that's really powerful. I've not fully ported that over to the day to day. Vis-a-vis the late night snack. Where I went with that in my head was I'm often alone at night

because Bianca and Alexandra go to bed earlier than I do. And so because I'm bored or lonely, I might want a snack, even though I'm not hungry. But even if I am hungry, frankly, if I eat at like nine or 10, it's going to screw up my sleep. And there was a really helpful technique that I heard about from Joseph Goldstein, the meditation teacher. I just finished a 10 day retreat with Joseph. We will be several weeks old, that information by the time this posts. But as we're recording, I just finished it. And he talked about this,

this is straight out of the Buddhist scriptures, although it's a bit of a summary on his part, but the idea of gratification, danger, and escape. That gratification of eating something delicious or checking Instagram or anything pleasurable can be pleasurable at a certain point though becomes a little dangerous because you overindulge. And so this three step exercise starts with the fact that gratification exists and we have to have a healthy relationship to it. If we don't, there

is a danger so that I might, for example, at nine o'clock at night for no good reason decide to have a bag of pretzels or whatever, not that there's anything wrong with pretzels, but it's that it will make me feel like shit the next day. And then the escape is just cutting the craving with some rational reflection about, oh, am I willing to pay the price for 15 minutes of dopamine now with a pretty shitty day all day tomorrow? And now this does not always work, but it's an interesting exercise to run. And by the way, sometimes you might decide, yeah, actually, I'm out with friends. It's late at night. I know that if I, you know, have this next drink or eat this dessert at dinner that I won't feel great tomorrow. But you know what, I'm willing to pay the cost. I sometimes think of that as like a social hangover. I don't drink, but I might stay out later than I normally would or eat a bunch of stuff just because it's part of like conviviality.

What I like about Buddhism is it's, there's not a lot of finger wagging. So it's like figuring it out for yourself and play with it. So I just put this out there as a thing people could play with on their own. Hmm, hmm, yeah, I like that. One of my hacks for that last part, that escape part

is that one of the last things we do before we go to bed is we prep the kids' food for the next day. And inevitably, if I'm the one doing that, I will eat while I do it. And if Christine does it, I won't. Because I'm just literally like touching the food and holding the food and slicing the food

and putting it in a little lunchbox. And I just, I have no ability when I'm that tired to recognize that I'm not actually hungry. So I've just asked like, please Christine, can you just be the person who does that task every night? And then I just don't eat. And again, it's not like, it's not like it's bad to eat and it's not like it's bad to eat then, but I just know that I do sleep better when I wind down earlier, and then I'm not actually hungry at that time. If I am actually hungry at that time,

it's a different thing. It means I didn't eat enough during the day, but that's rare. And so, yeah, one of my little behavior modifications is just trying not to put myself in the position where I know I'm not gonna be able to listen to my body, even if I want to. In fact, one of our guests in this installment of Get Fit Samely actually says something similar.

I'm talking about Dan Buettner, who's our first guest, which kind of does lead me to, let's give everybody a preview of what's coming up the next couple of weeks. You want to run it down? Yeah. So we've got six episodes coming starting next week, and Dan Buettner is indeed the first guest up. So some listeners might know his work from his books or his Netflix series. Dan Buettner is the guy behind the Blue Zones. The Blue Zones are these areas in the world which he,

meaning Dan Buettner, has gone to and researched and identified as places that have historically had longer lived populations than your average place. So there's one of these places in Greece, one of these places in Italy, one of these places in Japan and so on. Places where there's been an unusual amount of centenarians and he and his team have gone, talked to the residents,

done a bunch of research and come back with recommendations around how folks in these various, quote unquote, blue zones around the world are living longer. What I like about him and his work is that he has a holistic approach. So he has thoughts about diet and exercise, but he also has thoughts about community and spirituality and how we structure our lives and our days. So let's just tee up a short clip from Dan Buettner. You know, in blue zones, nobody exercises. There's no CrossFit. There's no yoga class, no Pilates class. Nobody's running them. There's no Blue Zone marathon. But they live in communities where every time they go to work, a friend's house, or out to eat, it occasions a walk.

They're taking about 8,000 steps a day without even thinking about it. Last thing to say there is that the Blue Zones have become pretty famous and popular, and so inevitably they've generated some blowback. And so, Dan, you intentionally asked some tough questions, which were really interesting to listen to. Part of the idea behind Get Fit, Saneley,

is to bring on folks with really diverse, varying viewpoints, ask all of them difficult questions, and then let the listeners choose what to pick up and what to leave behind. And so, my favorite part of that interview actually is when you sort of grill him towards the end, and it was just interesting to see how he responded. It's also interesting, my whole training was 30 years

of being a journalist where I was, you know, asking people impolite questions. And sometimes they were walking out of it using things like that. And in this podcast, that's generally not been the vibe. And so getting myself back into that mode has been actually trickier than I thought it would be. Because, you know, you can do a very friendly interview for 45 minutes and

then at the end you're like yeah yeah but there are all these people who say you're an asshole so that's that's not that people say that about Dan that is that is a right that is a challenge in this series for me and I'd be interested in some feedback from listeners about whether they think I slash we are walking the line appropriately anyway so what's the next episode after that one? Yeah, so the next episode is with two guests, T Morgan Dixon and Gary Bennett. So T Morgan Dixon is the co-founder and CEO of this cool organization called Girl Trek. And Gary Bennett is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke. And the two of them basically are coming on the show

to talk about behavior change around exercise and how it's linked to community, how it's linked to culture, how it's linked to history, how it's linked to our relationships. And so I'm excited for folks to hear their episode because this is a way to think about behavior change that isn't about the latest trend or the latest app, but is about connecting to where you're from

and who's around you and yeah, just a totally different way in. So here's a little bit of that episode. If you have a friend now and you may be that friend who is just struggling with all this whole conversation, they're like, look, I just went through a divorce. I'm like not feeling well. I had this diagnosis or like my kids are just acting just bizarre. Whatever it is that you're going through in your life, you may not be able to source the motivation. But I guarantee someone around

you is in a place where they can make forward momentum. And my charge is to the friend around you to come back and get your friend, because we all need help at some point. After that episode comes Shannon Paulus. Shannon is an editor at Slate and she spent all of last year, 2023, editing and occasionally writing for a series of what she herself conceived called Good Fit. And Good Fit was this exercise column at Slate. It ran for a year. It had a lot of overlap with how we've been thinking about diet

and exercise and fitness in our Get Fit Sanely series. And so we wanted to have her on to find out what she learned from covering this stuff for a year, why she chose to sunset the column on her own, even though it was really popular. And so that's a really great conversation. And here's just a little bit of Shannon. There's a lot of different ways to get the recommended amount of exercise. You don't have to do one set of exercises or another. If you decide you're not going to hit 10,000 steps a day or 8,000 steps a day, it's really not going to make or break you. if you decide you're not gonna hit 10,000 steps a day or 8,000 steps a day,

it's really not gonna make or break you. If you decide you don't like doing HIIT workouts, if you never want to run a half marathon, we think of all of these really specific things as being healthy, but in reality, you can get the health benefits from exercise and you can get the health benefits from exercise and you can get the mood benefits from exercise from doing a lot of different stuff. And you don't have as much control over your health as you think you do. So doing what is going to enhance your life on a day-to-day basis is as good a way to figure out what exercise you should be doing versus really trying to lock in on like the optimal spread of stuff.

After Shannon, we've got a fan favorite, Johan Hari, who's been on the show a couple times and is a really engaging and dynamic journalist. And he has this whole new book out about Ozempic and the new class of weight loss drugs. I was personally a little nervous about doing this episode because this is tricky territory. And I think he wound up being a really great guest for this topic because he has personal experience

struggling with his own weight. He's actually taken these drugs himself. He's got very complicated thoughts and opinions about them. He said something early on in the interview about how he started the process of working on this book, feeling really conflicted about Ozempic and the similar drugs, and he ended it feeling just as conflicted. This is not someone who's going to come in and sell us on these drugs, and it's not someone who's going to come in and tell us they're the end of the world.

He's just going to come in and have a really nuanced conversation. Here's a little bit of that. You may think you're a bystander, but Barclays Bank commissioned a very sober-minded analyst called Emily Field to investigate these drugs, looking at it for, you know, what will, to guide their investment decisions. And she came back and said, you want a comparison for the creation of these drugs?

It's the invention of the smartphone, right? You're not a candidate for taking these drugs, but this is going to transform the society around you in all sorts of complicated ways. If we'd been having a conversation in 2007, the day Steve Jobs unveils the iPhone, we would not have been able to game out TikTok and Uber Eats and everything else. This is gonna affect your life,

whether you use these drugs or not, because it's gonna profoundly transform the society around you. I found that interview to be really interesting. And I just echo what you said that he's really conflicted and that is what makes it interesting because I was nervous about this too. We, there was, we maybe had more conversation

about whether to have Johan on than we've had about almost any guest. And we love Johan, he's been on two other times. It was just, is this subject too hot? And it's super hot to the subject and tricky. And we may get some blowback for this, but you know, the, what did people used to say on Twitter, RTs are not endorsements. Like we're not trying to say that everything he's saying is right, but he

is a person who's very thoughtful, very smart, has done a ton of research and isn't coming down on any side in particular. So I'm sort of excited for and slightly bracing for the response to that one. Yes, yes. And it's worth just underlining again that this is a difference between Get Fit Sanely and most of what we do on the show, right? So generally when we put a series together, do on the show, right? So generally when we put a series together, we bring on experts who are moving to one degree or another in lockstep towards some pedagogical aim, whether it's self-compassion or how to handle anxiety or what have you. And our goal here, you know, in this episode that you and I are recording in this moment and in this series that folks

are about to hear is not to give explicit advice to any individual person. I'm certainly not an expert and nothing that I've said about my own journey through this should be taken as direct advice for any other person. But instead to just wrestle really honestly with how tricky these things are and bring on smart people and just let folks take what's useful again and just leave the rest behind.

And to that end, in our final week, we take a sharp left turn and we have two Dharma episodes in this territory, which, yeah, for anybody who felt like the Ozempic episode was a little bit much, this next episode will be a bomb, I believe. So the next guest is Brother Phaphu and he is a monk in Plum Village in France. He was a personal attendant to Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh for many years and he's now the abbot of Plum Village. And I wanted to have him on the show because this is a little bit counterintuitive, but just stick with me for a second. When you go on retreat in Plum Village, let's say you go for a one-week retreat one day out of your week

There will be no schedule at all and it'll be called lazy day and if you're there for two weeks, you'll have two of these the first Monday and the second Monday and Ticknock Han and his fellow monastics developed this practice of lazy day as its own distinct practice alongside and next to walking meditation, sitting meditation, eating meditation, chanting, singing, many other things that they teach. And I had the chance to go to Plum Village a number of years ago. I was really struck by lazy day.

And when I was thinking about this series and thinking about how much bandwidth we've given to how to move and how to exercise and how to stay mobile, it felt like kind of a fun and counterintuitive idea to also talk about laziness and to talk about rest. And Brother Fahpoo is actually a self-identified gym rat who loves exercise and is pretty obsessive about exercise. I believe he actually tore his ACL within the last year and has been rehabbing it. So he's not coming at laziness from a place of laziness,

but he does have a lot to say about what the Buddha said about rest and what Thich Nhat Hanh says about laziness and how we might be able to fit that onto our tool belt along with some of the things we've learned from the other guests. So here's a little bit of that conversation. You know, I look at animals, like when animals get hurt, instead of finding things to do, they have the art of doing nothing. They know how to rest. And a part of our ancestors, our lineage of humanity,

we've also had that wisdom of knowing how to rest, to heal. But we've also forgotten this. So the lazy day is also an antidote where, why don't you not try to run after healing, but why don't you just be to heal? And then last but not least, we are gonna re-air one of our favorite episodes from the series that we've done over the last year

with the Dharma teacher, Kara Lai. And she, in this interview, first of all, it's just a great conversation. It's funny and it's deep and it's light. And there's just a lot to love about the vibes of the conversation. But she also has a lot of pretty profound things to say about how she's healed her own relationship to her body,

her body image, her relationship to exercise, how we can do the same. I remember this conversation landing quite resonantly with you, Dan, when you first had it. And so when we were thinking about the best way to wrap things up this June, we thought it would make a lot of sense to bring her back because you can never have too much Cara in the podcast feed. Here's just a little bit of Cara. I am a huge proponent of trying the things that you're not supposed to do until you really find out why you're not supposed to do them. And you also

find out why you wanted to do them so bad. Go eat that whole bag of potato chips, but just really be present for it and see what it is that you like about it and what you don't like about it. Or like make yourself go for that run. Make yourself run as much as you want to make yourself run and see what it is that feels good about that and see what it is that you hate about it. But just be really honest with yourself about all those things. We learn through experience. I mentioned earlier that I just did 10 days at the Insight Meditation Society with Joseph Goldstein and I was in a little cabin and the cabins there, they're not quite duplexes in that they're one level, but they're kind of split down the middle.

So there's one apartment on one side and one on the other, and the person in the next apartment over was Karoli. Awesome. I didn't know you guys were going to see each other. I didn't know we were seeing each other either. Yeah, I just, yeah, it was, oh Oh, really? She was on her own little retreat. Oh, oh, that's awesome. Well, DJ, you've done a great job with this,

this interview and this series. I thought the, in particular, the Brother Fob, who booking was particularly inspired, so thank you. Thank you, and let me just, last thing I wanna make sure not to forget to say is that this time around in particular with these episodes, it was a genuine team effort. So every single producer who works on the team that this time around in particular with these episodes, it was a genuine team effort. So

every single producer who works on the team has helped make this latest round of episodes. And so shout out to everyone who works on the show because this was by no means a solo effort. And yeah, if you're mad, be mad at me. But if you enjoyed it, share the gratitude with the whole team. Thank you again. Thanks, Dan. share the gratitude with the prior episodes. And don't forget to watch this space for the upcoming episodes we're doing in this latest round of Get Fit, Sainly where, as mentioned, we'll be covering everything from motivation to exercise to longevity to the Buddhist case for laziness. And don't forget to sign up for my new newsletter where I will list out for me the biggest takeaway

from each of the episodes of the week. Before I go, I want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. With additional pre-production support from Wanbo Wu. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our managing producer, and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. Play us out,

Nick. If you like 10% happier, and I hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondry.com slash survey. Hey y'all, it's your girl Kiki Palmer,

your favorite quadruple threat, actor, singer, dancer, and my new role, podcaster. My podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer, is blowing up, y'all, cuz every episode I bring on an icon. Like when John Stamos and I talked about internet trolls hating on Disney adults, or when Jordan Peele explained why we love scary movies, even though the world is already creepy as fuck. Tune in to learn a little and laugh a lot, because your girl keeps it real. Listen

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