The Dr. Hyman Show - Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

Lasting change begins with a shift in both mindset and behavior. Many people remain stuck in self-defeating patterns because of unconscious narratives, emotional triggers, and a disconnection from their body’s inner wisdom. Change isn’t just about willpower or information—it’s about learning to rewire the brain through small, intentional actions that generate powerful emotional feedback loops. Identity transformation happens not through repetition, but through experiences that create a sense of success. In a world flooded with conflicting advice and manipulative marketing, reclaiming agency requires tuning into your own signals, building self-trust, and recognizing that behavior change is a design challenge—not a character flaw. Empowerment comes from realizing that the ability to change is built into who we are as humans. In this episode, I speak with Tom Bilyeu, Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, and Dr. BJ Fogg about cracking the nut of behavior change. Tom Bilyeu is a filmmaker and serial entrepreneur best known as the co-founder of Quest Nutrition, a billion-dollar company built to combat metabolic disease through value-driven innovation. After nearly a decade of chasing financial success and feeling unfulfilled, he realized the importance of loving the struggle itself. This insight led him and his partners to shift focus from profit to purpose. Quest quickly became the second fastest-growing company in North America, according to Inc. Magazine. After achieving significant personal wealth, Tom turned to the other global crisis he saw—disempowering mindsets. To address this, he co-founded Impact Theory, a media studio with his wife, Lisa Bilyeu. Their mission is to scale mindset transformation by producing empowering content that shifts the cultural subconscious. Just as Disney built the most magical place on Earth, the Bilyeus aim to build the most empowering one. Dr. Rangan Chatterjee is regarded as one of the most influential doctors in the UK. A practicing GP for the last two decades, Dr. Chatterjee wants to inspire people to transform their health by making small, sustainable changes to their lifestyles. Host of the #1 Apple podcast, Feel Better, Live More, and presenter of BBC 1’s Doctor in the House, Dr. Chatterjee is the author of 5 Sunday Times bestselling books and his TED Talk, “How to Make Diseases Disappear,” has now been viewed over 4.8 million times. His newest book is Happy Mind, Happy Life: The New Science of Mental Well-Being. Dr. BJ Fogg is a behavior scientist, author, and founder of the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University, where he has researched human behavior since 1998. He developed the groundbreaking “Behavior Design” system, which explains how behavior works and how to design it effectively. Over the past decade, his lab has focused on practical applications—from helping people navigate coronavirus-related challenges to training climate change professionals in behavior change strategies. BJ is also the creator of the “Tiny Habits” method, a simple, science-backed approach to habit formation that has helped over 40,000 people make lasting life changes. His work empowers individuals and organizations to design behavior that benefits both people and the planet. He shares his insights in the New York Times best-selling book, Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything. This episode is brought to you by BIOptimizers. Head to bioptimizers.com/hyman and use code HYMAN10 to save 10%. Full-length episodes can be found here: Why Your Mindset Matters If You Want Health And WealthHow to Make Change That Lasts with Dr. Rangan ChatterjeeHow to Make Behavior Change Stick

Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman show. The thing I always lead with is humans are the ultimate adaptation machine. And if you focus on the amount that's malleable, the amount that you can change your life is so extraordinary. As a doctor, I've seen how chronic stress impacts nearly every system in the body, from sleep to mood, energy, and even inflammation. But what many people don't realize is that stress often depletes a critical mineral your body needs to feel calm and at ease and that is magnesium.

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and it comes with a full 365-day guarantee. Head to bioptimizers.com slash Hymen and use code HYMAN10 to save 10%. Now, before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone by my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real-time lab insights.

And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community, the Hymen Hive. And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website at drhymen.com. For my website store for a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products. Teaching people, how do you get people to shift their mindset? Because it's a hard thing, you know.

It is, I think the big thing is you have to get certain core beliefs. So there's one, one people come to me because they're in an emotional painful point. They know they can do more, be more, but they don't know how to get there. And oftentimes there's-

Can people stay stuck in this negative inner dialogue and loop of negative thinking and it's habitual and they're almost inside of it like a bubble. They can't see it's like a fish swimming in water, doesn't know it's in water Dude, do you know the talk that I got I'm blanking on his name. It's called. This is water by Something Wallace. Oh god, I'm gonna punch myself in the mouth Don't do that

I'm a doctor what I want to use my techniques David Foster Wallace, there we go that was really gonna bother me, he gave a speech called this is water and to your point about like the fish is the last one to realize that they're swimming around in water which is an amazing way to explain your mindset. So your mindset is the water, it is the thing in which you exist, it is the matrix and to finally get your head around the fact that you've constructed it, that it's a belief system. It's your identity. It's your values

It's the very reason that who you hang out with is good going to determine your health level I heard you give a stat of something like your if your friends are Obese then you're more likely to be obese and if your family is a hundred and seventy one percent more likely to overweight than if your Siblings overweight you're about forty percent more likely. That's so crazy, man. Yeah. Because our friends influence our behavior. Peer pressure works for good or bad. And I will hypothesize that the reason is our friends help establish our values and our belief system. And so I'm writing a book now,

which is like the tentative title. This will never be the real type. It's called build yourself. Like how do you construct a mindset that actually lets you go forward? So I'm a freak for looking at the human animal as a biological entity. And so understanding how thoughts wire your brain. Your brain has certain things that it's going to do like good luck ever not ever thinking. It's just one of the things your brain is heartwired genetically.

You're talking about thinkatating. Right, exactly. Like your brain is gonna cough up thoughts that just is its nature. Humans are an active species. Humans also balance out that active nature of wanting to explore and control their environment with a deep laziness designed to conserve calories.

So it's like you have this weird push-pull. So if you really accept that the human is this biological creature, that thoughts become literal physical wiring in your brain and that your brain wants to think the thoughts that are easiest, whatever you repeat then becomes the easiest. It goes into what's called the default network in the brain

and that's just where you always default. So you talk about these people being stuck in these loops they get stuck in these last You know we you talk about the default mode network Which is this part of the brain where the sort of the eagle lives and it's it's this sort of more rigid Sense of little self that separates you from the world and things like meditation Like you look at these monks have been meditating for 40,000 hours in a cave, these default mode networks are shut down and they just are connected in one with everything.

And that becomes their default, right? They can slide so easily into that. And psychedelics do the same thing, right. And it's like, have you done psychedelics? I have. Oh, Mark Hyman, we've got to talk about that. So I am intrigued and completely chicken. I grew up in the 70s, you know. What can I say? about that. So I am, I am intrigued and completely chicken.

What can I say? I'm I'm really interested in psychedelics, really interested. I have micro dose psilocybin. Um, I didn't find it very interesting. So it felt like a low grade buzz, but without the fatigue. So if I were going to drink, it actually probably would be slightly more pleasurable Maybe to be to have that a micro dose of psilocybin Because there are no sort of After-effects that I find unpleasant, but I didn't find I was more creative. I certainly didn't find that I could focus

I found myself sort of drifting in and out of like attentive focus So I was like this isn, for the people who say that it really helps them be creative or more productive, not me, but I've never done like a full on. I don't think psychedelics are generally designed in full doses be a place for more creativity. It's more insight and connection and understanding, I think. Yeah, I haven't done that yet.

I'm keenly interested. The one that I would do literally this afternoon, insight and connection and understanding, I think. Yeah, I haven't done that yet. I'm keenly interested. The one that I would do literally this afternoon if I had access to it legally would be MDMA. To sit down with my wife and do MDMA together I think would really be extraordinary. Well, they're using it for post-traumatic stress and it's just people's hardwired patterns

that come from trauma and it's having extraordinary's hard-wired patterns that come from trauma and it's having extraordinary results. It's crazy how fast people talk about it, having that kind of impact. So this is one of those things that like, I can't come out and vouch for it because I haven't done it, but I will say that if I had some sort of trauma that I was trying to get over,

I would do that as a protocol very fast. I would fix my diet first, admittedly, to get my microbiome in line, to deal with depression, anxiety, whatever. Um, but if I had something that was intractable, whether PTSD, depression, anxiety, I would really give it a shot. The studies are just too crazy. It's pretty cool. So, so when you help people shift their mindset,

other than taking psychedelics, what do you, what do you do to help them transform their thinking and shift out of it? Because I just see people stuck in loops and they have a story that they tell and they have a narrative for their life and they live into that narrative in a way that often is dysfunctional and impedes their ability to be happy, to have happy relationships, to be successful in life. And for whatever reason, sort of was was also in that state when I was younger but I worked really hard to learn how my mind operated and and Changed the narrative to be one of I could do anything

Why not? So, you know here is the my deepest trauma in life is that you can't want it for people know so I was wired and I will say that this is we're not blank slates. So all of us have sort of Preset things that we're more into or whatever that we're a bigger responder to so just like some people respond to one food and some another Some respond to certain emotional states or ways of connecting with people. And for me, I love seeing other people win. And so like I pretended not to see Easter eggs in an Easter egg hunt because I knew my sister

was four years older than me. So I was like five or six and my sister was 10. And I knew it meant more to her to win than it did to me. So I would pretend not to see them so she could find them. Like that's my natural state. I've been like that since I was a little kid. And. Well explains why you're doing what you're doing right now.

Truly does and that's a huge driver for me and meeting people that I've impacted their life is always amazing. But my big trauma is that I can't want it for people. So people that I love can't make the change. And it's crazy because they've watched me. Like there are people who've watched me my whole life. They know how lazy I was.

They know that they didn't expect me to do anything. And yet seeing what I've been able to do and change in my mind, how much I've been able to learn, how I've been able to just take a new frame of reference which put me on a new path of behavior Which is actually how you get people to change right the things you do must be different so can you do the behaviors that then change your mind definitely it is it is a Loop that you can change either first. So

One I'll finish the loop on the fact that it is very difficult to get people to change, and then I'll tell you the people that do change what they all have in common. So the reason that it's hard to give people to change is if you don't want it, you're not gonna have the energy to see it through, and you can give people all the tools and tactics in the world.

If they don't want it, then they won't have the energy to make the changes. Okay so now set that aside. The thing that people have in common that all end up making the change, so first of all they want to make change, second of all they understand that at the end of the day the name of the game is to change your behaviors and whether they start with the mindset shift or they start with a behavior shift almost doesn't matter When you understand humans as a biological entity and you know that things like the following are true if you fake a smile Like they would have people they did a study

They had people put a pencil between their teeth and bite down on it so it sort of forced your face into a smile just like you're doing now and Then rate their levels of happiness. They rated them higher than when they had the make-up pencil just because it activated those muscles now I I have felt this very keenly so I will use like crest whitening strips on my teeth and so I keep my mouth closed which forces me into this sort of non smiling thing and I find myself while I'm whitening my teeth with this sense of like, just kind of mopey a bit.

And I'm like, whoa, this is so crazy. And so I wrote a letter to myself. So when my wife and I were first married, the first couple of years of our marriage, we would argue and like dumb stuff. And I just thought, we end up often losing like an entire Saturday to some stupid argument. And at the end of the argument, when my neurochemistry has changed and I'm no longer upset,

I think, wow, why did I waste all that time? Like, I know she loves me. This is really stupid. And so I wrote myself a letter and I said, hey, me, it's me. You know, you have no ulterior motives. And I gave it to my wife to read to me. I said, the next time I get annoyed about something and I'm not letting it go, read this to me. And did she do it? Yeah, she only had to do it once because it was so profound that I realized, whoa, you can shift your neurochemistry. And so what was the letter?

What did you say to me? So the reason that I addressed me is, when you're in an argument with somebody, a lot of times you think they're trying to calm you down because they have an ulterior motive, they don't wanna feel bad or whatever. When someone upsets you, unless you're unreasonable, they probably actually did something wrong.

They really did do something that hurt your feelings and you really do feel justified in being upset. I will assume you're not flying off the handle. I'll assume they really did misstep. And so they have misstepped and now you're annoyed about it and you think that them trying to talk you out of it is because they just don't want to feel badly. And so I was like, that never ends up feeling true. What's that?

They don't want to feel guilty right it but that never ends up feeling true Once you've calmed down and you always then can have the compassion and see from their perspective So I thought let me just remove that because I know Two hours from now or whatever. I'm not gonna feel like it was a good use of time to be pissed. So hey me It's me You know, you don't have any ulterior motive other than you know that like there's energy behind Neurochemistry and once you get in a flow it gets hard to get out of that But there are physiological hooks into breaking that so right now no matter how you feel

I want you to laugh out loud I want you to laugh out loud until you feel better and you will find you know you've read the studies that if you do that, you won't be able to maintain the sense of frustration and I Did it I laughed out loud. I was so annoyed. She read it to me, which was courageous And I said to myself you told her to read you this letter So even though it's really annoying that she's reading this letter when you're annoyed Medicine do it. Yeah, and so I laughed out loud and I was like, oh my god

Literally in like seven seconds. It's absurd. How rapidly true when you when you change your physical State you change your mental state. So whether it's going for a run whether it's taking a steam or whether it's Jumping up and down or whether it's dancing whatever You can do to change your physical state. It'll change your mental state And I've learned how to do this because you know if I have a really tough day and no got stressed like I had a really Challenging, you know few situations at work recently and I you know, I it was really upsetting me So I just went to a hot yoga class and I came out Completely transformed and I didn't change my thinking I just went to a hot yoga class and I came out completely transformed and I

didn't change my thinking. I just changed my body, which then changed my thinking. Right? Like if people really hear what you just said, because then you know that it can go either way. So if you can't get yourself there with reason and logic, jump in an ice bath, laugh out loud, watch a comedy, go for a run, lift weights. Like there is this feedback loop that you get into with your thoughts and your body,

and your body and your thoughts. So the vagal nerve, of course you're gonna know this, but the vagal nerve is something like 80% telling, the body telling the brain what's going on versus the brain just instructing the body what to do. Like as a kid you think think oh the brain tells the body Breathe digest blah blah blah, but in reality It's like the brain is getting more input from the body and I am so grateful that there's this reciprocal feedback loop

So I know when I'm in a like a negative place that I all I need to do is Smile like literally I can even think smile without actually smiling and it makes me feel different It is so weird. Yeah, so that's super useful music can shift your state channeling aggression Which is something I do to like do hard things like there are all these feedback loops So I try to get people to understand that but the most important thing the thing I always lead with is Humans are the ultimate adaptation machine. So we are the ultimate apex predator for one simple reason. We adapt to change better than any other animal.

And I'll say that at a physiological level, like the ability to turn white adipose tissue into brown fat where it's more thermogenic. There was a woman who swam the Bering Strait. So think about that. The Bering Strait is the space between Russia and Alaska. That shit is cold, man. So the fact that somebody can swim that, it's bananas.

So she slept with the window open in Alaska for a year, which you can imagine how cold that would be. She took only cold showers. So basically all of her fat cells became more thermogenic and she could insulate herself. So we're adaptable on that level. She had a wet suit. Yeah. Um, she or sorry, the, so you have that level of that adaptation, which is like sort of purely biological, but then you also have the ability to learn. So there's a reason like a horse is

born, it's walking that day. it is not that way for humans. So the prefrontal cortex, which is like all your executive functions, doesn't finish developing until you're 25. Yeah, that's why they don't rent cars, the kids are under 25 years old. And it's not like it's more complicated biological material, it's the same, but it allows you to soak up your environment

and learn and figure out, okay, in this are the values the norms the beliefs the way that you act here because it could be different based on time based on circumstance whatever so humans are designed to be malleable now again we're not blank slates this is not like you can become anything you want like it is you have a certain amount that's hardwired and then you have a certain amount that's malleable and if you focus on the amount that's malleable. And if you focus on the amount that's malleable, the amount that you can change your life is so extraordinary.

So whether you can- What is an example? Like how would that play out? Well, the example of how it's played out in my own life is I don't have any entrepreneurial instincts whatsoever. So I am not a born entrepreneur. And the whole like, are entrepreneurs born or made as a debate is hysterical.

Well, you created a billion dollar company exactly So it's like I don't know what else has to be true in my life for people to realize I was so bad at Being an entrepreneur that so as a kid I had a newspaper route And I didn't collect half the money because I was too afraid to knock on people's doors So you get stories of people who like ripped the flowers out of somebody's front yard and sell them back, I was not that kid. And yet, I realized, oh, there are principles

of entrepreneurship, I can learn them, and a lot of this stuff is teachable. Look, maybe it was harder for me to learn than most people, maybe this is, some people really would have an easier time, I don't doubt that. And I'll say that verbal ability comes easier to me So every ounce of energy I put into getting better verbally has paid dividends

So yeah, the way I've always thought of it is I get let's say a 1.3 X return on my verbal and so For me, I've been practicing speech and debate and all of that since I was 12. So I am the result of not 10,000 hours, not even 20,000 hours at this point. It's gotta be 30, 40,000 hours. I used to stand in front of the mirror with a hairbrush. I wanted to be a standup comic. Like I've, I've put in the time and the energy I did speech and debate all through middle school and high school.

So it's like, what I want people to see in that is that you? Can put deliver practice into any area now if you can find areas where you get a disproportionate return amazing But if not, don't worry about it If it's something that your goals demand then you're gonna have to learn that thing So why do we all have this poverty mindset? Why why is it so well it really to me? I mean I the food I get, you know, because we're all obese and it's the food environment. But what about the mindset? How does that become such a poverty mindset for so many millions of people?

There, one, I think it is to keep you alive. The brain is going to make sure that you don't get yourself ostracized from the group. So you don't, the brain isn't designed to maximize your status in the group, it is designed to keep you alive. So doing things like pushing yourself, holding yourself to a high standard, taking risks, learning from the failures, for a long time that was a high risk endeavor because if you didn't understand how you fit into the group, you alienated

yourself, let's say you were on a ship and they're like, yeah forget this guy We're leaving him on this desert island It could quite literally mean death or if you were in the tribe and they kicked you out you were getting eaten by a line You're dead. So there's a reason our social beings. Yeah for sure There's a reason from an evolutionary standpoint to have that be high stakes But in a modern context, it's it becomes a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset. So Carol Dweck has a brilliant book on the subject called Mindset,

and she said with all the good intentions in the world, when you do something well, people are going to reinforce the behavior as if it were something based on an innate trait. So if you get good grades, your parents are like, you're so smart, look how clever you are. And the worst part is that feels amazing, but it builds in this fragility of what happens

when I encounter something that I don't understand. So then you try to hide from it, you try to always do things that are easier for you. So she said better to praise the process. So instead of saying, hey, you're so smart, you say, wow, you must have worked really hard to get grades this good. So it's a fundamental belief pattern around

whether you're born with intelligence and talents and they are fixed or whether, no no no, we all have some talent and intelligence but they're actually malleable and you can improve them all. The problem is most of the way we grow up we're getting the wrong messages from our teachers, from our parents, from our environment. Correct, and then your brain kicks in

and you've got what, you hear different numbers, but I don't think anybody thinks that there's less than a one in five ratio, so for every one negative thing I say to you, I'm gonna have to say five positive things to balance it out, I heard a study that said one in 17, so it's like, we all get it, like one painful you're not good enough comment is really hard to overcome

with a lot of you're good enough. So the mind goes to these survival mechanisms to keep you alive, which I'll say oftentimes means keeping you small. If you don't take it seriously, that people think that you're doing something wrong, and if you don't back off, there were times where that would have been deadly.

Now you just get in these negative loops. You get in a negative loop, and people have taught you that, Hey, it's all, it's just what you're born with. And you get this like death spiral of, this is who I am and I'm never going to be any better. And so you don't have what I call the only belief that matters. The only belief that matters is that you can improve. That's it. So it's like, if somebody goes pretty simple, it is deadly simple. And it's why it's the only belief that matters because if you don't think you can improve

Why would you put in the effort to get better? Because if you believe that you will get nothing out of that there really is no point to putting in the time and the energy to Improve whereas if you believe whoa the time and energy that I put into getting better. I'll actually be rewarded with skills and the as a doctor you're gonna understand this immediately but this is one thing that I think people really struggle to understand they think that skills are about checking a box or pleasing your parents skills are about in the case of a doctor being able to save somebody's life going from C diff and thinking whoa I'm actually going to die from this to no no no I understand

this well enough I have a skill set that allows me to figure this out and now I can reverse all of that. So skills are insanely powerful, but people think about reading a book as being able to say, oh, I read the book. It's not about that. It's about being able to say I can now employ this skill in my life in a way that shapes the world around me. skill in my life in a way that shapes the world around me. If you're suffering from stress, poor sleep, low energy, these are all signs you might be low in magnesium. And not just one kind, your body needs seven different forms to truly feel calm and at ease. That's why I recommend magnesium breakthrough

from Bioptimizers, a complete formula with all seven types in one capsule. Head to bioptimizers.com slash Hymen and use code Hymen10 to save 10% and try it risk-free with their 365-day guarantee. Again, that's bioptimizers.com slash Hymen with code HYMAN10 at checkout. I believe that every single human being

can and wants to make change. And I have seen people in the darkest of places in my practice over the years make transformative change. So I want society to change and maybe it is starting to change. At the same time, I want to help the individuals be able to go, yeah, whilst I'm waiting these things I can do. And that's what Make Change at Last is about. It's about my 23 years of experience as a medical doctor,

having seen tens of thousands of patients. And one of the key things I wanted to crack Mark, which I don't feel we talk enough about in this health and wellness space in which we both operate. A lot of the advice is about what you need to be doing. And that of course is useful. Many people need to know what kind of, what should I be eating?

How much should I be moving? And you've written some wonderful books over the years, helping people with that. But I was thinking over the last couple of years, why is it, and I know the structural components to this, but I was thinking, why is it that despite all the increased knowledge, all the health that despite all the increased knowledge, all the health books, all the health podcasts, all the blogs online. Are we getting sicker and sicker?

Why are we getting sicker? I mean, there's more. We're getting sicker. There's more knowledge, but we're getting sicker. I'm like, what's the gap here? Now, yes, there's external issues like the structure of the food environment and the farming system.

I accept that. But it isn't just that for me. It's also because I feel, I mean, chapter one in this book is called, trust yourself. And I feel that we've outsourced our inner expertise to external experts. And I say that as a so-called expert myself. No, I would say the smartest doctor in the room

is your own body. Exactly. And so this book, I think is going to really empower people to know, look, I don't know if you get this or not, but I get this on my podcast. I've had it several times where one week I'll talk to a medical doctor with all the credentials. Maybe they went to Harvard Medical School and they'll let's say, come on and talk about a particular diet, let's say a ketogenic diet for specific mental health problems. And they will quote four or five research studies to support their perspective.

And will tell us about lots of patients that, you know, they've used that approach on and they've got better. And then you might get two months later, a different expert, a nutrition expert or a medical doctor, well credentialed, talking about the Mediterranean diet or a whole food plant based diet and quoting research to support their perspective and patients who improved when they followed their advice. And then I would often get people contacting me online saying, Hey, Dr. Chachchi, I'm a little bit confused.

Like that expert sounded great. They had research and patient studies, but this other expert also sounded great. And they're saying the opposite, and they have research and patient studies. I don't know which expert to trust. And Mark, I believe, I'm not saying, don't listen to experts.

I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is instead of asking which expert should I trust, I think the more useful question is, why do I no longer trust myself? So I say- And how do I listen to my body? Yeah.

How I listen to the signals it's saying and actually see what's working and what's not working. Some people say dairy is bad for you, but some people do fine on dairy. Other people say, you know, it's good for you and you know, it may not be good for you. We want the black or white. Is dairy good?

Is it bad? It's like, well, it depends for who and in what context. Is fasting good? Is it bad? Well, your body will tell you. It kind of depends. If, for example, you've got type 2 diabetes and you're carrying a lot of excess weight on your body,

fasting, if done in the right way, might be helpful for you. Right. Right. If on the other hand, you're an undernourished teenage girl with anorexia, it may not be, but we want to know is fasting good or bad? It depends. Right. And so with that example on my podcast that I shared, I would say, well, listen, if you resonate with both of those people's messages, why don't you do this for four weeks? Try this expert's diet and pay attention. Those are the two key words. Pay attention.

How do you feel? What's your energy like? Your vitality, your sleep, how much focus do you have? What is your gut like? You know, how are your bowels? Pay attention. And then for the next four weeks, try the other one and at the same time, pay attention. Now, I'm not saying that will work 100% of the time. Yes, we need advice from experts like yourself or me to help guide us.

But ultimately, neither one of us know for sure which is the perfect diet for that individual. We can provide frameworks like you have your Pegan diet, right? So frameworks. Yeah, it's basically foundational principles, but it's highly flexible. Exactly. It's personalized. And I feel the problem, Mark,

when it comes to making change that lasts, is if you have outsourced your inner expertise to external experts, what ends up happening is that we start to feel like failures. Oh I followed that person's diet, it didn't work for me, it can't be the diet, it must be me, there's something wrong with me, like I'm a failure. And then guilt, shame, all these things start coming in which mean that actually we don't make any changes or we actually feel worse about ourselves than when we started before. So this book is really my attempt to go,

listen, I submit to you, Mark, and let's see what your perspective is on this. I imagine that people who follow you and people who listen to your podcasts each week, I reckon 95% of them already know that excess sugar is not helping them. 100%. They already know that. So if they've still got an issue with excess sugar, it's not more external knowledge they

need. It's like, oh, why is it despite the knowledge do I keep going to sugar? And so can I just share a really simple exercise that I've used for many years with patients? It sounds really simple, but it's very, very powerful. I call it the three Fs. The first F is feel, the second F is feed, and the third F is find. I'll go through it. I imagine that a lot of your listeners, Mark, are trying to reset their relationship with sugar, right? So what people often say is, Dr. Chastity, I was fine in the day,

but at 9 p.m., I was on the sofa, I was watching TV, and I really wanted ice cream. Okay, have you ever felt like that before, Mark? Me, never. Okay. What? Right, it's really common. Now, they wanna make changes,. They know my wife is terrible. By the way, she, she buys, she loves me and she thinks it's love. And she buys me my Achilles heel,

which is Sicilian Van Lewin's pistachio ice cream. Well, it sounds delicious. Amazing. Yeah. And I don't do it very often, but I know exactly that moment where like, yeah. And I'm not saying you should or shouldn't have it. It's up to you, right? But if you're trying to reduce your sugar intake, yet you still find yourself with half a tub of ice cream every evening, perhaps this exercise will help you. So I would say to my patients, okay, next time you're on the sofa, and you have a craving for the ice cream, take a pause, just for

a few seconds and ask yourself the first F feel, what am I feeling? Is it physical hunger or is it emotional hunger? Oh, because many people don't even know that they haven't taken a pause. They feel, oh, I need sugar. The ice cream's in my mouth, right? So it's just, just let's create a gap between stimulus and response just for a moment. Then you go, ah, well, maybe I'm a bit stressed. Oh, I've just had a row with my partner and this is just a way of making me feel better.

Okay, go ahead and have it. You're just now starting to build up that awareness. Next time it happens, do the first F and go to the second F, which is feed. Okay, next time it happens, you take a pause. What am I feeling? Oh, I'm feeling really stressed. You know, I've been on Zoom calls all day

and I didn't go out for a lunchtime walk. Okay, then the second F is feed. How does food feed that feeling? Oh, ice cream helps me feel less stressed. You're starting to build up this awareness, this inner self-awareness. Oh, that's why I'm going to the ice cream. And then the next time you go to the third F,

so now that you know the feeling, now that you know how food feeds the feeling, the third F is find. Can I find an alternative behavior to feed the feeling? So it could be I'm stressed. Instead of going to sugar, oh, I love yoga. Maybe I'll go on YouTube and do a 10 minute yoga sequence. Or if you feel lonely, because many people go to sugar, they feel lonely. How can you

nourish yourself in another way? Maybe you run yourself a bath for 15 minutes, or you phone one of your friends or your parents, right? So it's a simple exercise. So true. You can apply to anything alcohol, social media, online pornography, online shopping. It's very, very simple, but very, very powerful. I love it. And I've been doing this forever like you and came up with a very similar framework for my patients, which is one, it's not what you're eating,

it's what's eating you. Exactly. So you have to figure that out. And two, always ask yourself, what do I need? What am I feeling and what do I need? There you go. Am I hungry? Do I need food? Am I lonely? Do I need ice cream or drink to call a friend?

You know, am I tired? Do I need a nap or do I need sugar? I'm like and so there's a very simple set of non-judgmental questions You can ask about what am I actually feeling right now and what I need and we often don't stop to make that distinction That's what you're asking people to do is inviting them to go, gee, I had this earthy ice cream, well, what's really going on with me right now? Am I depressed? Am I sad?

Am I tired? I need energy. Have I been just eating too much carbs and I'm craving carbs? Like what's going on? And I think it's a very powerful tool to sort of create self-awareness around the choices you're making.

And then, yeah, then figure out what you really need in that moment and then go reach out for that. If it's calling a friend, if it's taking a nap, if it's whatever it is that's gonna sort of deal with what you need rather than the food which becomes our default. And we've created a culture with it, that's what happens when your kid shut up here,

eat this candy, if you're screaming, eat this ice cream here, have some treat as a way of kind of mollifying kids and it becomes this sense of our reliance on things that are really bad for us to make us feel better rather than understanding how to actually feel better. Yeah, this stuff is game changing for people because I imagine, Mark, that there's many people out there who know what they should be doing now for health, particularly people who listen to health shows like yours or mine, right?

These are people who are really interested. Yes, for sure the general public, we need to help keep help educating them on what are the healthy choices to make, but that external knowledge is not enough. I opened my new book with a very powerful story of a GP colleague of mine, a medical colleague, an expert in toxic diabetes. You know, she'd always send me the latest papers with her own informed commentary on them and emails. And then one day she actually sent me a text message saying, Hey, wrong. Are you around this weekend? I really need to chat. So I arranged to meet her. And what happened is that

she basically said that there was a patient that week in her clinic with a diagnosis of type two diabetes. And she was trying to educate the patient and said, listen, look, excess sugar, too many ultra processed foods. It's going to cause your body to be inflamed. It's going to affect your gut microbiome. And she was, you know was trying to educate this patient. And the patient just stopped her and said, why should I listen to you?

You're fatter than I am. That's what the diabetes doctor- Yeah, the patient said it to the doctor. That's crazy. Yeah, but what's really interesting, right, is because we can debate whether it was the right thing for that patient to say or not. But the point of me opening this new book with that story is to demonstrate a really important point. I met my friend for a coffee that weekend and she said, you know what, Rangan? The truth is the patient was right. The patient was absolutely right.

What the patient doesn't know is that in my drawer, I have big bags of Cadbury's giant buttons. Wow. Right, so the point is she had all the knowledge. Many of us have the knowledge. We have the external knowledge, but that's not inner awareness. That's not wisdom.

No. Right, and I think this is the missing piece. For those disconnected from themselves. We're disconnected from ourselves. You know, you've talked about how we're disconnected from our food environment and we are, but we're also disconnected from ourselves. And again, in that chapter called, trust yourself,

I write, I really enjoyed reading this account of this American scientist who went to see this Aboriginal tribe and was explaining to this tribe how Americans think with their heads and the tribe were really confused. I said oh yeah yeah oh we think with our guts. And again it's not feeling any it was even the word the word for mind in Chinese is heart exactly. It's your heart mind. So it's really it's interesting how languages. So it's really, it's interesting how language is. Exactly, but it's not about who's right or wrong.

We need all of these things in balance. You want the head, but you also want the heart. You want your gut feeling. And I feel that society has changed a little bit too much where we're being bombarded with more and more information, which is good up to a point, but we need to become our own experts. And that's really why I'm so proud of this book. I think it's gonna be incredibly helpful for people because I think it's gonna give them a self-awareness

that they may not already have. That's all right. I mean, I think you and I are on the same track. People need to be empowered in knowledge and the tools to both know what to do, know how to do it, and with the information that allows them to be informed about their own biology. And I think most of medicine has been paternalistic

and patronizing and has created a firewall between you and your own biology, and the doctor and the insurance companies and the healthcare system are standing on that firewall. And your work is breaking that down. And I co-founded a company called Function Health that empowers people to get their own lab data and learn about their own health in a deep way

that they never were able to before without having to go through the system then be empowered with that knowledge and say, you know, I'm not crazy. You know, like, you know, I have these things going on. My doctor didn't check for my vitamin D level. I didn't check for my iron level. They didn't check for my inflammation levels.

They didn't check my metabolic health. They didn't check my insulin. And these are what's making me feel bad and they're not things that are abnormal in normal tests. So we had this moment where we're shifting sort of agency back to individuals and realizing that 80% of health does not happen in the doctor's office.

I can't cure diabetes in my office, right? It's cured in the kitchen, it's cured on the farm, all the way from the field before, not in the clinic. And so this moment where we actually can Once they recognize that we live in a structural system that promotes disease But two we have agency and now can use tools and products and books things like yours make change that lasts It's just fabulous book. Everybody definitely got to get it. It's out nine simple ways to break free from habits and hold you back. I mean You know, I think I think there's so much pain that people suffer and shame and we have such a culture of blame.

And I think that's something I'd like you to dig in and address because right now what's happening is as the threat to the food industry is coming from the current American administration, they're freaking out and they're coming out with their talking points and they're very clear. This is discriminatory to tell people not to eat ultra processed food. It prevents them from getting access to affordable food that's safe, the shelf stable that they can prepare easily. It's convenient that it's really about taking away It's really about taking away people's choice to not give them that. It's all about personal agency and it's a bunch of propaganda to justify them continuing with what they're doing without actually the public actually having the ability to understand that they're being manipulated by these messages.

The truth is when you do the things that you've read about in your book, I wanna go through more of them, you start to have the agency and the sense that you can be the CEO of your health and that you have to really listen to your inner signals to guide you and not be kind of manipulated by the propaganda out there,

both from the food industry and the medical system. And the way to not get manipulated by it on an individual level is to learn to trust yourself. Because if it's always about what are you hearing outside this external noise, you're going to get confused. You're going to get confused by maybe what the food industry is saying. You're going to get confused by experts who have different opinions. So if you, for example, for 10 days, just eat whole foods, right? Let's say you're struggling with it and you know this full well, Mark,

and you've written books on this. If for 10 days you cut out all those ultra processed foods and you just eat whole foods in whichever form you want to that, you know, minimally processed, pretty close to how they're found in their natural form, you are going to feel like a different person. It is still one of the most impactful things that I could do with a patient is just for two weeks. You find it hard. Okay, let's find the right two weeks or 10 days. Let's clear out the cupboards. Let's make sure you've got a plan. You don't have many social engagements,

whatever it is, do it for two weeks and then come back and tell me how you feel. If you, as most people do, feel more energy, more vitality, you're sleeping better, your skin is better, your relationships are often better. This is what people don't realize. It's not just about their weight. It's the whole being.

When you're healthy and yes. Luminous and light and free and happy. Yeah, you're less reactive. All these things are different. Then you're better equipped to go into the world and you can hear what your friends have to say or the media have to say, but you have this inner knowing that, yeah, I know what.

Because the truth is some of us, some of the people listening now will go, look, I can't really influence the government. Right? Now you may argue that you can through your choices, right? Through where you spend your dollars. Where you're with your voice, call your congressman, call your senators. You care about these issues.

You don't want to be poisoned anymore. But, but I would also argue Mark that we're better able to change the world when we are able to look after ourselves. Do you focus on new habits that you want. There's a way to design them into your life. And that's what tiny habits is all about. That's what the book's all about. And so it's doing two things at once. Number one, it's presenting an absolutely new way of thinking about how they gave you the words, a new model and a

new set of models, and which I think is really groundbreaking. I think that's, the major model is the ababio. And then it's also telling people how to apply this in a really easy way in their everyday life. So in writing the book, I'm trying to do both at once, then, okay, I hope. You did. It's very good.

But you know you talk about what's different about it and other behavior change models have been studied and it's one of the veins of existence. If you go to your doctor and he gives you a prescription there's only a 50% chance that you'll fill it and if you fill it there's probably a 50% chance that you'll take it and so doctors do all these great things unless you're a surgeon you have the patient lying unconscious on the table you can do whatever you want to them you know to get patients to do what you think is right for their health or what you think will help them whether it's take a pill. I mean, taking a pill is pretty easy, right? Forget eating better, exercising, meditating,

getting you to sleep, building your social network, relationships, all those things are so challenging. And it is why we're seeing this incredible global epidemic of chronic illness. Yeah, well, right now there are two medical doctors who are part of my boot camp this month. And one of them is from Ireland and he, after

class three, I think, or after class two, he emailed me said, BJ, I now see for the last 20 years, I've been doing this exactly wrong. And I felt kind of bad. But also he is training a behavior change program for his patients and other physicians. So now he can do it right. One of the systematic problems is focusing people or yourself on something abstract, like, oh, I got to exercise. That's an abstract thing.

It's not a behavior. Well, often called those things, but they're abstraction. And then the next thing that goes wrong is people are saying, I just need to motivate myself. That combination of trying to motivate yourself towards something abstract is not working very well at all. So they think they're on behavior of somebody else. In fact, with,

which is kind of an oversimplification in my work in tiny habits, rather than motivating the fraction, make something very specific, really easy. And so that might do three jumping jacks, right? Yep, they make it really easy to do. And so you're not worried about motivation. And you know exactly what the behavior is. One of the differences between I think this doctor, this would be one of the issues, an expert when you say, you know, eat more leafy grains, an expert in his or her mind knows what that means. But an amateur might go, I don't know what that means. Grass, the grass. So experts that are prescribing like, hey, you need to change your diet, E-Bardeletic grains.

They're not understanding that perhaps their patients are like totally confused. So instead they need to be very, very specific. Here's what I want you to do. Now eat bok choy, and now eat broccoli and have 17 leaves of kale Yes every evening and steam it or sauteed it and put it this way, right? So really it's what is exactly the meat of your and here's how to do it And that is a much more successful approach than she is

Well, no wonder no wonder we have such a problem because all doctors say is eat less and exercise more and lose weight. Good luck with that. You know, I don't work as I want. I don't know if you want to go that, I'm going to go here and you can change it if you want, but just everyday people don't even have the right guidance.

I mean, for most people, if I were to walk out on the street and say, oh, how do you lose weight? Just everyday people don't even have the right guidance. I mean, for most people, if I were to walk out on the street and say, oh, how do you lose weight? I would wager 90% plus would say, oh, I just have to exercise more. And that's the, you know, that's what people- Which was actually a false idea. Right, right. And so people, so they're like, oh, if I only could

give myself to exercise more, I could lose weight. Well, they're headed in the wrong direction. They haven't been given the right behavior, which is mostly nutrition behaviors, as you know, and the right way to make those into habits. And why that idea that exercise is a key to weight loss? Why that keeps living on and on? I have no idea.

Well, I'll tell you why. Sorry, why is Why is that? Why does that so persist at? Well, because the mantra of the government and the food industry is calories in, calories out, is the secret to weight loss. And it has nothing to do with nutritional quality. And so it doesn't matter whether you have a soda or broccoli, as long as you're the same calories, it's the same amount of energy. And if you can exert more exercise to expend that energy, as long as

you're in calorie balance, you'll stay the same weight. If you're exercising more than the calories you're taking in, you lose weight. But scientifically, that's just not true because all calories are not the same. And some calories like sugar and starch actually cause you to spike insulin, which makes you store fat. So I've written about 16 books on this. But it's it's really extraordinary. And one of the things I read in your book, I really liked it, I use all the time, which is, you know, people internalize this message of it's, it's your fault. It's your fault. You don't exercise. It's your fault that you're overweight. Shame on you, but you said I'm here to say

it isn't your fault and changing your behavior isn't as hard as you think. I think that's really an essential message because people are stuck in this idea of self-loathing, self-hate, and discouragement because they're not having the willpower, the motivation, and they beat themselves up about it. How do you address that with people? You know, I didn't understand that's where everyday people are until about coaching was probably two or 3,000 people. This would be 2011.

So you're a slow learner. Ha ha ha ha ha. Well, I was in my little bubble of Stanford and high achievers and cross-head type people, right? So I'm in this very selected Selective kind of world and I'm coaching, you know 300 people a week about in tiny habits through email, but there's email exchanges and About two three thousand people and somebody wrote me and she said oh my gosh BJ. Thanks to you I now see that I've endured a lifetime of self trash talk.

And Tiny Habits, what we do is we teach people to say good for me and feel successful and raise it. And so she wrote to thank me, she says, this, this, boom, has changed my life. And I paused, this was a huge moment for me, Mark. It's like, that is where people are really at. And then I started reading all the emails and my interactions with them are different. And I was like, people have so many ways to say,

I did a bad job, I'm insufficient, I lack willpower, which is, and that's why in the book, when I say that, that was in some ways a little bit risky because it's just inviting a lot of criticism, but it's true. And it's accurate. And so to say, look, if you haven't changed, it's not your fault. You just didn't have the right way to do it yet. That's right. Now you welcome to tiny habits. Now you do, now you can do it. And it's not about willpower or discipline. It's about design. You design new habits into your life. You don't force them or you don't use

discipline, motivation or willpower. It's a design challenge, not a test of somebody's character. I think that's so important to say that because I see this all the time as a doctor. People beat themselves up, they trash talk, they get self-loathing, they get discouraged. I just love this part of your book, 100 Ways to Celebrate and Feel Shine. You have like 100 ways to celebrate yourself and to celebrate the little successes and the tiny habits and builds and builds on a positive feedback loop

And I think that's a really key part of behavior changes these positive feedback Look, so it's like oh, but how I could do ten push-ups and I wasn't in pain for a week in my chest muscles I was like, oh, this is fun You know, I want to do more and it's like and you just I felt good and I want to do more So I think there's these little tiny strategy you have throughout the book that really help people to break free from some of these really discouraging

and debilitating beliefs about themselves that limit themselves in their lives, that limit themselves from actually doing the things they want wanna do. And it's so important, you talked about this idea of behavior design. So it's not just random, you're actually thinking about this sort of,

you know, if you want to do certain things, like if you wanna, I don't know, build a house, you have to put the foundation in, you have to put the framing in, you have to put the, like there's a design feature of how to get things to work. And we've been going about it all wrong when it comes to behavior change which is why we're not changing our behaviors at a scale

that we need to because many of the problems we're facing in our society are behavior change problems and you're pointing this out so well so so one of the other strategies that aren't working that people do that they work yeah because because because I think it's helpful if you understand, you've talked about this model, it seems pretty obvious. You have a motivation to do something, you have the ability to do it, and you have a trigger or a prompt. And that seems like a very simple model,

and it is, it works, I've used it. But on the other hand, what is pushing against people that it's limiting them? Well, first, we talked about the idea of people even focusing on the wrong thing. Like if your aspiration is weight loss and you think it's about walking on the treadmill at the gym, focused on the wrong behavior. So that's one of the systematic problems. Another one of the problems is the idea that you set this really lofty goal and then you

just have to keep yourself motivated this really lofty goal, and then you just have to keep yourself motivated toward that lofty goal. Now in my work, I don't use the word goal. In fact, in the book, I talk about why I think it's a bad idea to use that word. But if- But you're gonna put a whole bunch of goal setting people out of business.

I know, well- Make their lives out of helping people set goals. Not totally as opposed to the goal thing, but it's not a winning strategy. The fact that I've even written down a goal and I'm like, now I'm gonna just keep myself motivated toward this goal. Like it's hard to do.

You're not facing the reality that your motivation is gonna shift over time. The idea, and we can come back to that if you want. And so the goal setting people don't get super upset with me. I break it into aspirations and outcomes. So there's a type of goal that's an aspiration. There's technical outcome. So rather than using an ambiguous word,

because I'm really big on precision, let's use when it's an aspiration like earlier, Mark, you said you wanted to get stronger. That's an aspiration. And then you find behaviors, specific behaviors that will take you there. An outcome might be, somebody might say, wow, I want to lose 20 pounds.

That's an outcome. Then you find specific behaviors that will take you there. So in either case, you start with what you want to achieve. This is part of the system in the book. And then you figure out what behaviors are the right ones for you to take you there. So you don't guess at the behavior. So there's a way to figure out one of the best behaviors for you. You get there to that aspiration or the outcome. And you I'll go to a slightly different spot. Another one of the misleading ideas is that

repetition creates the habit. So you can just keep yourself doing the behavior, it'll become a habit. And that's not true at all when you look at what the research, so the people that are advocating this, and they're very popular books, and there's a lot of the culture that saying repetition creates habits. That's not true. You're being misled by those books. And that thing. When you look at the research that most people cite, it shows that repetition correlates the strength of habit. It gives no evidence whatsoever. Repetition causes the habit to form. So the correction in my book, what I try to make very clear is it's emotions that create the habits. So that's one of the myth busters in the book.

Other things include like you have to set a goal. Why doesn't repetition cause habit change? Well, I have quite a long, so I'm training the tiny habits coaches we go through this thoroughly. And the reason, I mean, the question really is why do people think it creates habit change? Right? That's really the question.

Why do people think that? Well, because they've been told that for years. So when you look at the research, it does not say that. So I'll give you an example. For me, just to be a little devil's advocate, I had back surgery recently and I really, you know, don't like swimming long distances, I never really done it.

I love swimming, but I just like go out for a little bit. But I had to like, you know, swim for half an hour. And you know, at first it was like, oh, and oh, it's so far and I have to swim back because I swim in the lake and it's like, it was, I was resistant to it, but I knew I had to do it because I couldn't do anything else but but over time the more I did it now I look forward to it and now I can do it and I don't have that mental resistance that I

have yeah and the way to think about that it wasn't a function of repetition it was a function of your feeling successful. You're seeing progress Right. Okay. So notice it resulted like if you Had to do the swimming and you never felt successful You would not eventually once you veiled you would not created the habit out of that. Okay. All right so so people are First they're misleading you in these books and blogs But when people think that repetition is the key to creating habits They think oh, I've got a and one of the memes is that 66 days not true, but that's what's out there

So they think okay in order to create an exercise habit. I have to repeat it 66 days Oh, I don't have time for that. I'm gonna wait for my time They look at behavior changes something to dread something to endure something that might be painful and none of it is helpful Instead you can change your behavior by feeling like happy and choice now when you look at what has worked Like your example is a great one mark when it has workable will always be true That there was an emotional component work will always be true that there was an emotional component really felt more successful or it relieved some negative emotion yeah or pain or right now but that's what it is and so in tiny habits we don't leave that to chance I mean I

have a chapter that's like emotions great great habits. And then we give in the book specific techniques and the coaches, the coach, people in tiny habits help you to find exactly what techniques do you use so you can feel that emotion at exactly the right times, you can wire in habits really, really quickly. And the better you are at feeling that emotion, that positive emotion on demand, the better you will be at wiring and habits. So that's an interesting piece. So it's the B, which is behavior equals motivation, ability and prompt, but there's also the emotion in there.

Yeah, yeah, no, well, let me sketch it out. So when I say behavior, I mean all types of behavior. Habit is a subset. So within, like if I were drawing a diagram within the big circle that is behavior, motivation ability prompt applies to all behavior types, applies to habits, it applies to stopping behaviors, it applies to one time behaviors, it applies to temporary behaviors like, like taking an antibiotic. Then when you get down to the subset of habits, those are behaviors you do quite automatically.

Those are different than the other types of behaviors. What creates the automaticity in the emotion, so the positive feedback, the emotion, I have people focus on the emotion of success, the feeling of success. That's what makes that behavior automatic and posted in the category of what we call habit. Powerful. And you talk about how this starts to change people's identity, their way they think about themselves and see themselves. Tell us how that happens.

I can't say this is the magic, because I'm a scientist, but this is awesome. What happens, and we see this in our data week after week, is when people do something small and feel successful about it, like they're flossing one tooth or doing two push ups or steaming broccoli for dinner. That feeling of success change also changes how they think about themselves. Oh, I'm the kind of person who can take care of my teeth. I'm the kind of person

that eats steamed vegetables. So when they don't change their identity by like going and listen to motivational talk, at least in tiny habits, they change because they see evidence that they are changing, and they're seeing the effects of that. And that identity shift can happen really quickly. We see a lot of evidence in five days, and it seems to be a function of people seeing evidence and feeling successful in their quest to change. And it doesn't have to be like running a marathon. So it's like a feedback loop. It's a positive feedback.

Yeah. And when people acknowledge that and see that and part of the program and part of the book is like, Hey, look, recognize you are succeeding. I might be tiny, but you're still changing. That then shifts people away from self-trash talk, the thinking that they don't have enough willpower to seeing themselves in a whole new light. And the phrase that come back to us is like, now say I'm the kind of person you've contained, I can follow through, I can achieve whatever goal I have

and it goes on and on. So it's a positive feedback loop. Yeah, yeah, and I don't talk about it exactly in those words as positive feedback, but that's exactly what it is. I mean, we talk about it in the motions. And it's positive feedback that affirms you're succeeding. exactly what it is. I mean, we talk about it in the motions and positive feedback that affirms you're succeeding. So it's the feeling of success that

wires in the habit and also motivates you to continue. So it has those two functions. Have you ever wished there was a trusted space where you could get real support on your health journey, where your questions get answered and you don't feel like you're doing it all alone. That's exactly what's happening inside my brand new membership community, the Hymen Hive, and I couldn't be more excited about it.

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