The Liz Moody Podcast - The 12 Best Tips For Your Happiest, Healthiest 2026

Episode Date: December 17, 2025

Heading into the new year, I’m giving you the best-of-the-best tips and advice from experts and myself on the podcast in 2025 – from nutrition to happiness to making big life decisions to relationship advice and everything in between. The full episodes are linked below, so be sure to listen to any that you might’ve missed to get all the life-changing information. Check out the full length episodes featured today: Your Trickiest Healthy Eating Qs, Answered: Weight Loss, Protein, Gut Health, Longevity, And More with Dr. Tim Spector I’ve Tried Hundreds of Happiness Hacks —These 4 Actually Work with Liz Moody The Secret To Making Hard Decisions: Minimize Regret & KNOW You’re On The Right Path with Megan Hellerer EMFs, Microplastics, Red Light & More: The REAL Science Behind Today’s Biggest Wellness Topics with Dr. Vivian Chen Design Your Dream Life: Habits For Wealth, Work, & Relationships You Won't Hear Anywhere Else with Raffi Grinberg The Science Of Putting Together a Workout Routine To Hit YOUR Goals with Dr. Shannon Ritchey The 3 Simple Rules That Supercharged My Success with Liz Moody Why You Can’t Stop Sugar Cravings—And How to Fix It (Neuroscientist Explains) with Dr. Nicole Avena Simple Habits To Make Best Friends As An Adult When You Have No Time with Almost 30’s Lindsey & Krista Proven Habits To Build Resilience: How To Handle Anything The World Throws At You with Sahil Bloom How To Lose Weight In A Healthy Way with RD Nicki Parlitsis My Top Micro Habits: Proven Ways To Get Happier & Healthier In 5 Minutes Or Less with Liz Moody Check out our FREE “Your Best 2026” Workbook + Life Audit we made for our listeners at LizMoody.com/2026. Subscribe to Liz’s Substack to download a FREE Connection Conversation Card Game: https://lizmoody.substack.com/welcome Ready to transform every part of your life? Order Liz’s book 100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success now!  Connect with Liz on Instagram @lizmoody or online at www.lizmoody.com. Shop conversation cards, cute merch & more: https://shop.lizmoody.com/. Use vetted discount codes at https://www.lizmoody.com/codes. Join The Liz Moody Podcast Club: www.facebook.com/groups/thelizmoodypodcast. This episode is brought to you completely free thanks to our sponsors: AG1: visit DrinkAG1.com/LizMoody and get a FREE Canister, Scoop, Shaker, Flavor  Clearstem: visit Clearstem.com and enter code MOODYHH at checkout to get the Hydration Heroes Mini Kit free with a $75 purchase. The Liz Moody Podcast cover art by Zack. Music by Alex Ruimy. Formerly the Healthier Together Podcast. This podcast and website represent the opinions of Liz Moody and her guests. This content is for informational purposes only and is not medical, mental health, legal, or financial advice. Always consult a qualified professional for guidance tailored to your specific needs. The Liz Moody Podcast Episode 391 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You don't need a total life overhaul to feel better. You need a few small changes, the right small changes. And that is exactly what this episode is filled with. Welcome to the Liz Moody podcast where every week we share real science, real stories, and realistic tools that actually help you feel better in your body, your mind, your relationships, and your life. I'm your host, Liz Moody. I'm a longtime journalist.

I built this show because I was tired of wellness advice that sounds great in theory, but falls apart in real life. And I firmly believe that we all deserve to live lives that we love. Here we cut through the trends, the noise, the BS out there to give you science-back strategies that work even when you are busy or tired or overwhelmed. If that sounds good to you, make sure that you're following the podcast on Apple, on Spotify, or on YouTube because starting January 1st, we have content specifically designed to help you overcome your biggest hurdles and make 2026 your best year yet, including

an episode that will help you finally stick to working out consistently. And I say this as a person who did not work out consistently until like a year and a half ago. But this episode has such interesting science and it's so motivating. We also have a full health reset with the seven science-backed habits that truly matter and the three habits that surprisingly do not matter. And an episode with tiny habits for more money and more happiness. So make sure that you're following so those go right to your feed. Today's episode is a special one. I have pulled together some of the most essential insights that we learned in 2025 from health and habits to mindset to relationships to big life decisions from some of the best experts that we have had on this show. I do this podcast because I believe that every single one of us deserves access to information that makes life feel more abundant and more grounded and healthier and filled with amazing relationships and just all around.

more enjoyable. And while I could not include every single thing that we learned on the podcast this year because we learned a lot on the show, I have chosen the insights that made the biggest difference for me and the ones that I've heard from you guys helped the most in your lives. If you've been listening for a while, think of this as a reminder of tools that you might be ready to use. I'm a firm believer that if the information is there, we will access it. We'll be able to access it when we need it. And if you're new here, welcome. I am so glad that you're here and I hope that hearing this inspires you, motivates you, and helps you in some way. I will link every single full episode these clips come from in the show note.

So if something resonates, you can dive deeper. All right, let's get into some of the best lessons that we learned in 2025. First up, we're diving into one of my favorite conversations on food and long-term health with Dr. Tim Specter. He is one of the most-sided scientists in the entire world and he's spent decades studying what actually moves the needle online. longevity. In this clip, we get into how diet really impacts cancer risk, why your immune system matters more than you think, and the surprisingly early signs that you're eating in a way that's actually working. Why do you think that cancer rates are rising at the level that they are, especially in young people? I think the number one reason is probably poor diet. There's a real

link between poor diet, poor gut microbes, poor immune health, and then risk of cancers. So our immune systems are just not able to function as well as they should be optimally. They should be hunting out these cells when they start going rogue and killing them off very quickly. But they're too busy worrying about the inflammation in their bodies, about junk food and about not having enough fiber and thinking there's all kinds of other stuff going on in their bodies. So I think that's the number one. I think we are surrounded by an environment that's pretty unhealthy. So I'm not discounting things like pollution and plastics and, you know, the general toxins that we get in big cities and things like this that probably is also playing a role. But for me, diet is still

the number one reason that we're saying these changes in cancers that we didn't see before. I have a friend, and I feel like everybody has a story like this where they were unbelievably healthy. Like, they ate so, so well, and they still got cancer at a really young age. Is that just genetic, like bad luck of the draw? Cancer's a really young age often tend to be more heritable than those in older age. What about, like, 30s and 40s, which is where I feel like I'm seeing so, it feels so young to me, but I feel like I'm seeing so many more people get these diagnoses. So there'll be a mixture of genetic predisposition, plus something else that's happened, whether it's an infection, a change to their gut, something else that's on top of the gene that's made it happen.

So the gene was predisposing, but in the past wouldn't have come to anything because those cells would have been mopped up by the immune system and something is distracting the immune system. Perhaps it's related to the epidemic of food allergies that we're getting at the moment that didn't exist 50 years ago. You know, that our body's reacting to the wrong things. Again, suggests our immune systems are not as well trained as they were 50 years ago. You know, all this junk food coming into them, they don't know what's real and what isn't, and they don't know what to respond to, what's friend, what's foe. And so that's my view is that you've got this genetic predisposition in those people.

We're doing a big study between my group in London and a big group in the US to look at these early cancers of the colon. which have, you know, suddenly... Skyrocket. Skyrocket, exactly. So exactly, as you said, people aged in 20 and 40 getting all these things, which they never used to. And trying to work out how much of that is diet, how much that is pollution, how much it is, you know, driving cars, you know, whatever viruses, COVID, who knows what, you know, these things are. It's some other trigger that's come in.

And usually there's more than one cause. So, you know, you might have to have the right genes, wrong set of things. gut microbes plus something else happening to you, perhaps a bit of luck as well. To my mind, if we hadn't shifted our diet so dramatically in the last 50 years, we wouldn't be facing this. There could be a number of ways it happens. But I studied twins for 30 years, identical twins, and very often one would get one of these cancers and the other one wouldn't. And they lived their lives together. Which suggests that it's maybe not exclusively something in the environment, something that can't be differentiated between the two.

It might have been some infection that one of them had at some point and the other one didn't because they got the same genes. They lived for 18 years in the same house, but they have different friends. They might have got infections at different times. That might have affected their immune system. And we also know that their gut microbes, even in identical twins, are very different. That was one of the big sort of shocks for me when I was doing my research. And is that because of what they were eating or just they were born with different microbes?

Yeah, we're born with zero microbes, so we acquire them during life. And depending on whether who had a cold virus first or second, who got ill, who got given antibiotics first, even identical twins, things happen a bit randomly. Who got a gastro infection, who didn't, they will change the gut microbes. So they end up being really not much more similar to you and I, which is about the only thing in identical twins that, it's really different. Wow. So that made me think that the gut microbes are really the key to a lot of these problems. Okay, that's so interesting.

So basically, it's like if one twin is getting breast cancer and the other twin isn't getting breast cancer and genetically they're exactly the same. You're looking at all these other factors are exactly the same. And the only thing that's different is the gut microbiome that leads us to believe that the gut microbiome is very deeply involved in all of these cancers and things like that. Correct.

And that really was the aha moment for me. that made me shift from being a geneticist to being a scientist in gut health, saying this has got to be where the answers are. It's not just in the genetics. Do you feel like you've gotten some of those answers at this point, like concretely enough that you can say, eat this and this will reduce your risk of cancer?

I've got it broadly. Okay. Which is the 30 plants of that or anything more? Yeah. So we've got a lot of generic advice now that is getting clear that we know what a healthy gut looks like. We also have done some studies in cancer and showed that people with end-stage melanoma, skin cancer,

who are on these immunotherapy drugs which boost the immune system in order to fight the cancer for fantastic drugs. But whether they lived or died, the main difference between them was the state of their gut microbes when they started treatment. Wow.

Most oncologists don't discuss that with their patients. Wow. Is there like a crash course we can do? in rebuilding our gut microbiome. Like, if we wanted to do, like, one week where we're just trying to, like, go hard and be like, oh, I'm going to build up my gut microbiome for all these benefits.

I'm going to replenish it, all these things. Like, is there something we could blast it with? Yeah, well, the thing we haven't mentioned, of course, as well as the 30 plants and eating the rainbow and this stuff is fermented foods. Hitting it hard with every fermented food you've got. And this is what I tell cancer patient, I'm not allowed to give specific advice,

but I say, listen, build up your gut microbes, however you can. You know, you've got a short time to do this. And many of these patients don't have time because they've got to go on therapy in a month's time, whatever. They're given no advice from the hospital because they're only worried about the drugs. Avoid antibiotics because that could be fatal for you.

If you mess up your gut microbes, they won't then respond to the drug. And, you know, improve your gut health as much as you can. They're all different because some of them don't have appetites. and it's hard, but I really push the diversity of plants, but fermented foods for me, are the secret weapon for many people. So whichever ones you like, you know, there are at least a dozen of them, pick the, you know, small amounts of them all, and get as many different of these probiotic microbes into your system, which we know helps the immune system. So they've

done studies on this now. It's proven. It's not just sort of folklore. And do those probiotics actually make it to the parts of your gut and to your intestinal track where they can populate and make a difference? There was an initial myth that they all got broken down in the stomach and none of them made it through, but there's no doubt now that you still get hundreds of millions or billions of them still getting through. And they do have an effect as they pass through. They don't necessarily stay there, but as they're passing through, they're having positive

effects on your body. Next, I wanted to share one of my favorite solo moments from this year. I have tried hundreds, truly hundreds of happiness hacks, and most of them, honestly, either didn't make a difference or didn't stick. In this clip, I'm breaking down the few that actually changed how I feel on a day-to-day basis. If you listen to the full episode, you can hear all of the happiness hacks that truly changed my life. Happiness hack number three is all about combating what's called the arrival fallacy. This is one of my personal top, top causes of unhappiness. It's that little voice in my head that's like, when you have the number one podcast, you will be

happier. When you have a beautiful home, you will be happier. When you have a group of friends like sex in the city, you will be happier. And the arrival fallacy shows that while that might be true, it is really only true for a brief period of time because human beings are annoyingly resilient. So basically, we adjust to whatever our circumstances are. This is great for when bad things happen because we deal with. with them much better than we typically think that we will. But it means that that voice that's telling

you, when I get this, when I do this, when this happens, I will be happy. It means that voice is lying. There's so, so much research on this. So I try to remind myself that even though I think that that thing will make me happy, my brain is just going to adjust. So it really likely will not. So that is step one, just reminding myself that. Step two and step three. are really fun little psychology tricks. The first is called mental subtraction and it's sneaky and it's a little grim, but God is it effective. Here's how you do it. Instead of imagining what your life will be like when you get the thing, imagine your life without something that you already have. Like, what if you had never met your best friend? What if you didn't have your job or your health or

your partner? What if you had never adopted your cat? Studies show that imagining the absence of positive things in your life actually increases happiness more than just feeling grateful for them. Because even when we try to feel grateful, we're still in that hedonic adaptation state, that state where we have adjusted to having all these wonderful things, that state where our resilient selves have made these things the norm. But forcing yourself to imagine life without them snaps your brain out of that state and into a state of true appreciation. Sometimes when Zach is on a plane or if he's out and he doesn't reply to my text for a while, my brain drifts to a worst case scenario because, well, just because my brain is super fun like that. And wow, let me tell you how much I care

about my podcast being number one if I picture Zach being gone from my life. It just makes me realize how many of the things that matter I already have, how wildly lucky I am. And it amps up my gratitude more than any gratitude practice that I have ever tried. So if you are feeling brave, try it. Take something that you have in your life and really picture subtracting it. Feel into that and tell me that that does not make you feel appreciative as all get out about the present. The other thing that I like to do to combat the when eyes is to follow the thread. This is based on the idea from behavioral psychology that action creates emotion, not the other way around.

So instead of waiting until you feel confident or successful or worthy to do the thing, you do the thing now and your brain catches up. The actual action step here is super simple. You ask yourself, if the thing that I'm waiting for already happened, what would I do today? So if, for example, you're thinking, when I lose weight, I will feel confident. What would confident you do? Maybe she wears the outfit in the back of her closet that she keeps saving for later. Maybe she signs up for a dance class. Maybe she lets someone take her photo instead of dodging the camera.

One of my when eyes is having my dream house. So the first question is when I have my dream house, I will what? I'll relax. I will feel cozy. What do I think dream house me or wealthy me would do today? Would she make a pot of tea and read by the window? Would she host a dinner party with fresh flowers on the table and a really abundant, beautiful, delicious cheese board.

The point isn't to fake it. It's to figure out what feeling you're chasing, whether that's peace or freedom or beauty or stability, and then find one small way to bring that feeling into your life today. Because we have access to a lot more of those feelings than we think. And actually, we should not be giving this future fantasy credit for things that we have the power to bring into our lives today. So that is hack three.

Combat the when eyes by using mental subtraction and by asking, what is the feeling that you're chasing and what is one small way that you can bring that feeling into your life today? Moving on to Hack 4. This one is super relevant to the world that we live in right now. It can feel like all of these terrible things are happening. We're being exposed to more of the horrors of the world than we ever have before in history. And it all feels like it is out of our control. There's research around how feeling like we don't have control over big things translates into us feeling like we have less control over little things.

Our brain essentially generalizes that idea that our actions do not really matter, which leads to increased stress, depression, and anxiety. I think a lot of us are feeling this right now with everything going on in our country and in the world at large. But there is this flip side that I love, which is that even tiny actions that give us a sense of control can interrupt that pattern. Even small boosts in perceived control has been shown in studies to significantly lower cortisol levels and improve mood, aka less stress and more happiness. This is why I'm always saying action is the antidote to anxiety. And these can be tiny

actions that are about the thing that is causing your unhappiness. Like you can ask yourself, what's a tiny action that I can take about climate change? Maybe like donating to a nonprofit or following a few substacks that keep you super informed about that issue. Or if you're unhappy about your job, you can say maybe what's one small way that I can have agency here? Maybe it's going for a walk on your lunch break or not answering emails after hours or asking for a raise. But this is where it gets really interesting. The research shows that you can even take small actions in different areas of your life and it'll increase your sense of general power and agency. And that will decrease your stress and increase your happiness. My rule is that I do one thing a day that makes

me feel in charge of my life that shows me my microagency. It does not have to be big. In fact, it should not be big. It can be reading a book during my lunch break. It can be planning a meal that I want to eat, even if Zach would choose something else completely. I love personally deciding when I check my email versus letting my email be essentially a to-do list that's dictated for me by other people. So I try to do one thing that reminds me of my control, of my agency, of my power every single day. And then I will also use this hack when it feels like my unhappiness is coming from things that feel scary and outside of my control. I'll ask myself, what is one thing that I can do that is in my control right now? Where does my agency lie? If I'm doom scrolling, if I'm just

feeling like the world is chaotic, the world is crazy, I ask myself, what is one thing that is in my control right now. Where is my agency? I know that it is somewhere, so I force myself to find it. And it always, always makes a huge difference. If you've ever felt paralyzed by a big life decision, like with your career or with a relationship or where to live, you are going to love this next clip. Megan Heller is a former Google executive turned life alignment coach, and she has one of the clearest frameworks that I have ever heard for navigating uncertainty. Let's go through some listener examples. Yeah.

Because I do think that's like very helpful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is my favorite part. I have a job that pays well, but it doesn't make me feel creatively fulfilled. Do I quit and try to find something more fulfilling or do I appreciate the paycheck, especially in this economy and stay even though it's eight hours of my day every single day? This is like the most classic example that people have. The first thing I would say is that it doesn't necessarily have to be either or, right?

So another, you know, sort of piece of pushback I get sometimes is like all this sort of self-help personal development stuff is really expensive. And like not everyone can just afford to quit their job. And my response to that is, yes, absolutely. I wish it was all more accessible and it doesn't have to be. So for this person, I would say, don't quit your job. Let go of that question and just start figuring out what makes you feel more creatively inspired. What is directionally right for you? And again, I know for me, this was one of the hardest things because when you're showing up at work all day and sort of masking in one way, when you get home, the last, it's very difficult to then like find your authentic, like true self-expressed self to figure this out.

But whatever you can do in this time period, you know, say for the next six months, I'm going to spend like every Saturday morning just exploring things that make me feel alive, make me feel aligned. that move me closer to what I want to be doing. And I would start figuring out what that looks like, right? Take some more concrete steps to that until you have, like, start to have a little bit better of a picture. I think one of the things with certainty and uncertainty is we think that we either have to stay in the job or quit the job, right? And in fact, I think just start focusing on like, what would feel more directionally, right? I would say look into things that have to do potentially with work, but it doesn't have to only be that. If you start feeling more aligned in your relationships, in your exercise, and your health habits, and where you live and all of these other things, that sort of rubs off on the other parts of your life because you start feeling more aligned generally. You're better able to detect the right opportunities for you.

I would also look within your job that you're in. Is there any way that I can make this more aligned for me? So is it what are the things that aren't aligned for me? I call these haywaltz. It's an acronym that stands for how are you walking around like that? And there anything in your life that's sort of like weighing you down? This came from a friend of mine who basically ignored a sinus infection that she had for months, just having headaches, not realizing what it was and eventually ended up having

to go to the ER after just like taking Advil for a while and forgetting about it. And the doctor said to her, how are you walking around like that? And I thought there are so many things like that that we just start tolerating because we think we can't change them. So figure out where are the Haywaltz in your life and in your work. Is it a certain client? Is it a certain type of work? Is it your boss?

Is it your team? If it's the whole industry, that's, you know, a different question. So I would get clear on, like, what is the scope of not liking? Is it just like this company I don't like? But I, you know, if I was at Google, for example, I don't like working at a big company anymore, but I want to stay in tech, right? That's a very different decision than like this whole thing is wrong and I'm making a big career swap. So I would do that too.

I would look at like, get a sense of the scope of that you're dealing. with where the haywolds try to eliminate those and create some more space for what is aligned for you and then start taking the smallest steps you can towards what does feel directionally right and aligned for you and doing it just because not with the expectation that it's going to lead to something in your career because we tend we tend to miss out in a lot of opportunities that way there's another scenario where you discover like this is a big scope like this has been you've been you and in my case, I was having anxiety attacks regularly. I was really depressed.

It was I could not function. If you're at that extent of things or if you discover that, like, truly this whole thing is wrong for you, you can still take that small steps approach. Or, and again, depending on your circumstances, you can take an approach, which is like, I need to leave this job and I need to give myself the space to figure out what this next step is, and I have the means to do that. So I would never suggest doing this if you're going to feel anxious the whole time. If you can create however much time you can create with psychological safety, meaning, and I did this, I quit my job with no plan, not a risk taker, and I knew that I would

just take the next job that was offered to me because I would be so scared about not having income. And I also knew that I had to figure out another way to do this. And so when I left, I committed, I looked at my savings. I sold some Google stock and I was like, okay, I have six months to live on like the bare minimum and figure this out. And I am not going to worry about money in that interim. At the end of the six months, if I still don't know what I want to do and I still haven't figured this out, I can always go back to some tech job or whatever it is. I would never suggest doing this if you're going to feel stressed all the time because we do not make good decisions when we're in our stressed fear of mind. So you have to be able to create a space where you can feel psychologically

safe. So if that's moving home, whatever, savings account, all those things, if you can create that space for yourself where you can go all in on like what is aligned for me, I'm just figuring this out. I would love that for everyone if we could do that. But obviously that doesn't. That's not in the cards for everyone. I do think something we're sort of, we've been talking around the whole episode is developing a tolerance for uncertainty. How can we begin to do that? Like, how can we practice becoming more tolerant of uncertainty in our lives? There are a few things. The first is if you really get into the mindset of my job is only to figure out the next directionally right step. My job is not to know the destination. My job is only to figure out the next directionally right step. And you focus on the next directionally right tolerable step. So you're not doing something that again creates this gigantic cloud of uncertainty. Just the next one that feels like, okay, I could do this because you can always backtrack, right? If it's a small step. So starting by only making decisions that are tolerable for you, that are a tolerable

amount of uncertainty or unknown, but still are moving you in a direction that feels warmer than where you are. And again, notice that it's warmer and colder. The other thing I would do is to set yourself up as an experiment, to commit to trying a mindset shift from this Destinational thinking, which is about making decisions based uncertainty. You're maximizing for certainty in destinational thinking. That's the whole thing. Making this mindset from destinational thinking to directional thinking. Directional thinking is where we are allowing for some sense of uncertainty because we understand that that is where all of the good stuff in life is. And we can get into more of what that is. But when you start to make this shift,

It's hard to do in the beginning because it's sort of like when you first learn to drive where you get in the car and you're like, I don't know if I know how to do this. But you learn, right? So I'm going to decide to tolerate uncertainty more or learn how to do that. And give it a time-bound experiment. So I'm going to do this for six months. And there's an expression in like 12-step groups. We can always refund your misery, which is like you can always go back to your old way of doing things, right?

Most people who are coming to me or having this conversation reading my book listening to this podcast probably aren't doing it because their life is so perfect that they cannot imagine changing anything to make it better. And that's the big thing is certainty means sameness. Certainty means no change. Uncertainty needs a rebrand, right? Uncertainty means possibility, potential, opportunity. It means something different than what you're doing now. So I think understanding what the potential is, but making this commitment to, I'm going to experiment for six months with switching this mindset and to focusing on the next directionally right action. And if at the end of six months, you're like, that didn't work, cool. Go back to your old way of doing things and maybe, you know, see how that goes. I have never had someone do this and not feel, not feel better, first of all, so much less anxiety than trying to pretend we live in a world that can be certain. And when you limit, like, it's so liberating to be like, I only only.

need to make this one next decision of where the headlights are shining in front of me, that my only job is this little part here, what I can know today, that's my only job. I don't need to know where I'm going. And so there's so much less anxiety involved. And so I would put it in a time-bound way. And the other thing is that when you start to see it working, when you see your life getting better, when you see yourself getting less anxious, when you see decisions coming more easily and more naturally, when you know where you want to live, when you start to see what you want to do for your life's work, you don't usually want to turn back. So it really is just getting over that hurdle of being willing to give it a try to make a concerted effort to switch this mindset.

And it really is just deciding, pausing when you're making a decision and saying, am I forecasting into the future? Or am I just trying to make the single next right decision in front of me? Dr. Vivian Chen is an MD and researcher who came on the podcast to get to the bottom of wellness trends like EMFs and red light therapy and more. Basically, if you've heard it on the internet, we had Dr. Chen on to talk about the actual science behind it. In this clip, she shares one of her favorite tools for longevity and also for eliminating microplastics from our bodies. What do you think that the wellness world is paying too much attention to and what do you think they're not paying enough attention to? Oh, I love this. I think we're paying too much attention to

protein and not enough attention to fiber. Protein is definitely important. We need to be getting enough of it, especially as we get older. And it definitely does make us more satiated. So protein is important. But what I see is people are kind of sacrificing the amount of the plate that's given too much to protein and not enough to fiber. And fiber, I would say, is just as important for satiety and also for longevity, for

I've got health for so many different things. The protein conversation is interesting because I feel like it's almost the modern iteration of the weight loss conversation. I think a lot of people feel like they're upping their protein and they think it's for an amorphous health reason, but really it's because they think that's going to help them lose weight. Exactly. So do you think that high amounts of protein, if your only goal were weight loss, do you think high amounts of protein is the best way to get there?

I think it could work for sure because you, you, you know, you. you get fuller and you stay fuller for longer. And so naturally you end up eating less and you snack less. But is that good for long-term health? I think that's a different conversation, right? Because both of us know that the number of the scale does not equate to health. So if that's your only goal, sure. But I think for both of us, the goal is to thrive and to feel great and not just the number on the scale. Do you have concerns that protein unto its is causing harm or is it just about the space that it takes up that could be other stuff? I think there's two things. One is that it's taking up the space for fiber, right? Because

if you're just cramming lots and lots of, let's say, animal protein onto the plate, naturally the space for fiber goes down. And if you're full from just eating that protein first, you're not going to eat as much fiber. So that's number one. And number two, for certain populations, I do think that there is such thing as too much. much protein because it's not something we can store in our bodies, right? So when you get too much, now your body has to excrete it. How does it excrete? It's through the kidneys. So if your kidney function is compromised, you may have issues. It's just an extra strain on the kidneys to excrete that amount of protein that you're not using. Talk to us about the benefits of fiber. This is really

quite shocking, but just an additional 10 grams of fiber in your diet. can reduce your risk of dying by 11%. That statistic is mind-blowing to me. And I feel like more people should know this. And if they knew this, they would be adding a lot more plants to their plates. Can you peg 10 grams for me? Is that like five carrots? That's like probably one avocado.

Okay. It's not hard, right? Maybe half a cup of beans. Oh, okay. You'll get that in your morning oatmeal. At every meal, I actually aim to try and get at least 10 grams of fiber. So people want to get that 30 grams of protein. I would challenge everybody to also think about 10 grams of fiber into that ball as well. And what are, so we have that it's going to reduce all cause mortality. Is that correct? Yeah. So risk of dying from anything. Risk of dying from anything. And then you've talked about some really interesting benefits that I've heard from fiber. Like it can actually help our body get rid of microplastics. Yeah. So fiber, think of.

it as a binder as well. So in our gut, it actually can bind onto contaminants. We don't want to absorb. So, you know, now we're overwhelmed, right, from studies showing there's heavy metals in our seafood, there's microplastic in all kinds of foods, there's PFAS everywhere. Well, one of the ways that we can kind of prevent absorption from that is through ingestion of more fiber because yes, we may be eating these contaminants, but if we don't absorb them, then they don't impact us as much. There was this really interesting study on 700 healthy adults, and they show that the more plants in the diet, the lower their overall body burden of toxins. So we're talking about things like heavy metals, cadmium. It's a really interesting study

because they looked at plants, not just fiber, and of course fiber does come with plants, but plants also come with binders like phytates, which people like to call antinutrients. But they are anti-nutrients in that they bind onto things like iron and minerals, but they also bind onto things we don't want to absorb like heavy metals. So interesting. So when the carnivore community is like you should avoid beans because of the phytates, the lectins, all those types of things, those qualities actually have a beneficial component. Yes, absolutely. And their study showing that phytates can have anti-cancer effects in small

amounts. So there's nuance here, right? We don't want to eat, get too much of these antinutrients because then, let's say you already have a compromised gut and you're kind of bordering iron deficiency. Now, if you introduce a lot of phytase into your diet, then that could prevent the absorption of iron and make that deficiency worse. But for most people with healthy gut, not iron deficient, a little bit of phytate and anti-nutrients, I'm putting that in air quotes, can actually be good for us. I love this. This is what I love so much about podcasting is because I feel like most of these things have nuance. Most things in life have nuance and social media by default because you have to get somebody's attention in like five seconds. It has this flattening effect. And so, and you also need to get people

riled up. And so of course, people were like, this is ruining your gut health. And it's like, well, actually, it has benefits. But if you have too much, it also is negative. And there's, there's a middle ground. 100%. Yeah. And I feel like we're doing people a deserve us if we're not painting that nuance for them. Because everybody deserve to know the full picture. And they can decide for themselves what to eat. I also love this because I was talking to my girlfriend the other day. And it just, microplastics keep coming up over and over. Microplastics. on the podcast. And she was like, look, I know they're bad for me. There's a number of doctors who are like, this is one of the reasons young people are getting cancer at such a higher rate.

She's like, I know they're bad for me, but like, how am I supposed to avoid them? They're quite literally everywhere. And so I like the idea, and we'll talk about maybe strategies to avoid them, but I like the idea that you can also support your body getting rid of them. That feels really empowering to me. Right. It almost feels protective in a way, right? Yes, I know I'm being exposed, but let me eat more plants to reduce that absorption. And talking about cancer, well, 10 grams of fiber has been shown to reduce your risk of colorectal cancer by 10%. Which is one of the types that's going up in young people.

Exactly. It's one of the types that's extremely alarming because the rate has doubled in young people. And now I think 20% of colorectal cancer is diagnosed in those under the age of 55. 20%. Yeah, that's not ideal. What are your favorite forms of fiber? I love raspberries because it has both soluble and insoluble. I mean, most plants do, but the soluble ones, they have the more kind of heart-healthy cholesterol lowering benefit, whereas the insoluble that's, you know, think of it as bulking, helping you go to bathroom. By the way, talking about excreting microplastic, one of the main ways we get rid of microplastic is through our poop. Pooping is really important if you want to

lower your overall toxic load. Look, I'm never going to make everything that I wear organic, but your sheets, your pillows, your comforter are literally touching your skin for eight hours every single night. That is a third of your life right there with one simple swap. And if your betting is worn out, it's trapping heat or it's made with questionable materials, your sleep is going to suffer. And so will everything that depends on it? You want a bed, you deserve a bed that you are excited to get into every single night so that you can get the sleep that you need to feel your best. That's why I love Bowlin Branch so much.

Their signature organic cotton sheets are incredibly soft. You notice that the first night, and they are so breathable, which is a godsend if you sleep hot like I do. But what massively impresses me is that in an era where everyone is greenwashing everything, bowl and branch takes the safety and the quality of their products so seriously. They're got certified, meaning the organic integrity is verified at every single step of production, not just the raw material. They're Okotech certified, which I always look for. It means that everything has been tested and cleared for harmful substances from the yarn all the way to the finished

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This advice has not applied to everyone, but I loved it. He said, your spouse is definitely going to annoy you for your entire life. They're always going to do things that annoy you. It's not possible to find someone who doesn't annoy you. So the key is to have a high tolerance for being annoyed. And I think the insight there is actually a lot of it is about you, not the other person. It's about adjusting your own mindset, your own expectations to accommodate the other person.

There's only so much you can change the other person and a lot of it has to be about changing yourself. Oh, that's so interesting. So instead of like, why can't you stop chewing so loudly, it's like, how can I change my tolerance for loud chewing? Exactly. I have chosen someone who is perfect for me in every way except that she chews very loudly. And rather than being annoyed by that every single time perseverating on it, why is that the case? Why God couldn't you even give me someone who doesn't chew loudly?

Like, well, it was, first of all, worth the trade-off and now how can I learn to live with it? Something that a lot of people struggle with is how much work they should be putting into relationships. Like, how do you know something I hear often in early, relationships especially is like it shouldn't be this much work this early on like the work should come later. How do we know if the amount of work means this is not the right relationship for us versus the amount of work means that's what a relationship is? The question to ask yourself is, do I need this person to change in order to love them or do I want them to change because I love them? The former, right, in order for me to love this person they need to change, I think you're

placing all your bets on, you know, like whatever is number three on the roulette table. It's like it's like a very risky bet. It's very unlikely the person will change in exactly the way you want them to. And so for that being a precondition to love, often is a good sign that the relationship may not be worth investing in because it may not work out. But if you say, I really love this person and because I love them, I can see the better person they're capable of being. And therefore, I want them to, you know, improve in some way. To me, that's a sign of love. Oh, I love that. Are there any little, like, tactics or habits that you and your wife do to keep your relationship strong? We have a bunch of them. I can tell you my most recent, fine. Yeah, tell us. We're coming up with these all the time. But I recently read this book called

The End of the Affair by Graham Green. Have you read this book? I would not recommend it. It wasn't a particularly good book. There's one thing that made me think, though. He's in a sort of self-destructive relationship where he keeps sabotaging it because of his own insecurity. And he has this realization, you realize that there's like a little demon sitting on his shoulder. And the demon is basically telling him to like start all these fights and arguments that he knows are going to end badly. And that's the self-sabotage thing. And he frames it in this perspective where he's like, well, if what God values most is love, then what the devil values most is the destruction of love. And so this demon on my shoulder, it's not just my insecurity, it's actually the embodiment of like anti-love.

And it's actually an outside force that wants to destroy my relationship. And I think that's actually an amazing conception because it externalizes it, right? It says, it's not just about me and my own bad tendencies. Everyone has their insecurities. Everyone has their tendencies towards self-sabotage. But you say it's this other force that's coming in to destroy our relationship. It puts you and your partner on the same team. And so I love this idea we call it the love demon, that we're on the same team against the love demon, the anti-love demon. And so let's say we're in an argument. And in the moment, I feel like so self-righteous, like I'm right, I have to win this argument. By winning the argument, I'm actually losing, because it's eroding our love. And actually

the thing to do in the argument is to give in compromise whatever is necessary to preserve the love, and by virtue of that, we're actually defeating the love demon. So it's kind of hacking this personality trait that myself and I think a lot of other type A people have, which is we want to win, and saying the way to win is not what you think it is. It's not to win against your spouse. It's to be on the same team as your spouse and defeat the anti-love demon. Oh, I love that. Okay. You said you have a million. Let's do one more. So we have another one, which we actually turned into a sign that we have in our bathroom to remind us. It says, more imp, less hobgoblin. So do you know the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote?

It's something like foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. Have you heard this? No. Okay. It's a famous quote, but actually it's what precedes the quote that gives it. context. He's basically saying how most people behave very consistently because they don't want to upend someone else's expectations of how you act. And it's this weird innate thing that most humans have, myself included, where it's like I expect, I think someone else expects me to act a certain way. And so I act that way around them. Even subconsciously. Even subconsciously. But it's like my mom sees me a certain way whenever I'm around my mom. I kind of default to that like

dynamic. And it's not intentional, but just kind of how most people are. And so Emerson, who was brilliant, like, pointed that out. Okay, so what do you do with that? I think that that's, that's, what we call it the hop goblin. The imp is the opposite. Impish is like acting unexpectedly. And to me, this is one of the main insights from Esther Perel's book, Mating in Captivity, is basically how in order for love, romantic love, erotic love, to continue to exist between two people who have been married for a long time, you need to have that level of difference. You don't want to converge into being the same person. She takes a stance of being like anti-intimacy, which I think is really interesting. And so I think there's definitely a place for that kind of intimacy

and a place where it's destructive in the ways that she says. And so one of our takeaways for that book was like, let's surprise each other more often. And it's not necessarily surprising each other for the sake of being provocative or whatever. It's just like, there are certain things about me that you've never seen, even though we've been together for 15 years in the case of my wife and I, there's certain things that like of just opinions I've never shared or ways I've acted that you've never seen. And so just because you've never seen them doesn't mean I shouldn't do them. In fact, it means I should do them because that's how love can thrive. So we say more imp, less hop goblin. So is that something to be self-aware of? Are you consciously trying to surprise your wife?

Or how does that look in practice? I think it's being aware of the times that the imp wants to break free and my innate impulse, and I think most people's innate impulse is to shut it down, to be the hobgoblin, right? And shut down and be like, oh, it'd be weird if I do this thing like the other person just can't even fathom me doing. And then I realize, like, oh, it wouldn't be weird. It not only would not be a good thing if I do that. Do you think it's good to consciously have that conversation with your partner? Because I can imagine a lot of people listening and they're like, God, I wish my partner would surprise me in some way. Like, I feel like I know them inside and out, but maybe they wouldn't have that inclination. Yeah, I think the conversation

is probably good starting point. This is a different type of relationship. But this is one of my favorite tips in the book, which was you think we should have a define the relationship conversation with our parents. Tell me about that. The dynamic between you and your parents changes a lot when you reach the level of independence. When it goes from your parents are your caretaker, sort of responsible for you financially and every other way, to you're now on your own. It's a totally different relationship when you think about it. And suddenly it goes from your parents know what's best for you to maybe they don't know what's best for you all the time. The example I gave is like, when you're a little kid, your parents tell you to eat your vegetables

because they know that it's going to make you healthy even if in the moment you don't want to. And they're correct about that. This vendeagram of what they think is best for you and what's actually best for you overlaps. But as you get older and older and as you become more and more independent, that venn diagram separates more. What they think is best for you is not necessarily what's best for you. And there are a few reasons for that. One of them is you're independent. You're making your own choices.

They don't have to see the consequences of those choices up front and close as they would if you were living together. And also, you've just had more time to grow into yourself. and you're now a different person than you were when you're little, and your parents actually don't know you as well as you now know yourself. And so I think it's safe to say when you're three years old, your parents know you better than you know yourself. When you're 23 years old, it's starting to be no longer the case. And I think that merits the define the relationship talk

so you can acknowledge that up front, ask the series of questions that I out in the books. I give a whole framework of how to have this conversation in a way that's productive and not awkward or off-putting. But that's the first step in it. Can you share a few of those questions or how we can approach that conversation? I think it's always good to start with a positive.

And so you can just ask, what is the thing you value most about our relationship? And now I want to share a thing I value most about our relationship. Let's start with that before we get into the criticisms. And then how would you go about the criticisms? Again, I have the whole sort of framework. And so I don't want to do it injustice by, like, miss speaking. And I'd recommend that anyone was interested, definitely look it up. But to paraphrase it, basically to talk about what are your hopes and goals for the relationship and say, okay, I'm acknowledging the dynamic has changed.

now the dynamic has changed, what would be my ideal version of this relationship that we have? And you can paint the ideal scenario in a lot of dimensions. So it's kind of like how close are we? How often do we talk? How do we deal with things like money? Living situation is a good idea or bad idea for me to move back in and talk about your hopes and dreams along each of those dimensions and also theirs. Dr. Shannon Ritchie is a physical therapist who specializes in sustainable strength training,

especially for busy, stressed out humans living in the real world. She came on the podcast for an entire episode about putting together a workout routine to hit your unique goals. If somebody suspects that their cortisol is high because we live in like a high stress world or they've been tested and found out that their cortisol levels are high and they really want to avoid spiking their cortisol with workouts, what would you have them do and what would you have them avoid? Great question. Again, dosage is everything here. So if you are doing 45 minute hour long workouts, hard boot camp workouts where you're sweating, you're exhausted, you're sore, those type of workouts on top of a stressful life with maybe you're not sleeping well, maybe you're super busy, mentally stressed, whatever it is, are probably not going to pair well. You're probably not going to see the results that you're looking for because, again,

your body just can't keep up and recover. And we see the results from recovery. So I like to think about, again, making strength training the cornerstone. And you don't have to do a lot. You really don't. I mean, four hard sets per week at a minimum, the workouts don't need to be super long. And then from there, zone two cardio, which is not very stressful on your body, is where I would focus. Again, you don't have to be afraid of cortisol spiking with something like a hit routine because studies show that it returns to baseline after you're done.

However, if you're worried about it, then just wait. Just wait until you feel better and just focus on strength training, zone two cardio, and then add in hit once you're feeling a little bit better. You're probably going to be feeling better pretty quickly. Those are the things I would recommend if you feel like you're just a ball of stress and you just kind of need something to see results, but not make your stress worse. Does time of day matter at all for cortisol or for anything else when it comes to working out? This is interesting. So cortisol is highest in the morning and falls throughout the day. Does it matter as far as your overall cortisol regulation when you work out?

I don't think so. Just for overall results, number one, just work out whenever you can. Like that's truly going to be the best routine. A lot of times I'll work out at night. It's not my best workout because I'm tired from the day. But if you can, work out when you're the freshest. because, again, I talked about this in regard to perimenopause, but this applies to anybody. We want to limit fatigue before your strength workouts.

The fresher you are, the more likely you are to recruit a higher percentage of your muscle and therefore stimulate the most of the muscle and see the best results. If you think about it this way, would you rather lift like a heavy piece of furniture after you've ran five miles and you're super fatigued or when you're super fresh? You probably want to lift that table or super heavy piece of furniture when you're more fresh. So the same thing applies to your workouts. We see fatigue as a good thing, but we actually want to feel as fresh as possible going into each set so that we can recruit the highest percentage of motor units in each exercise. Which makes it more effective. Which makes it more effective.

Makes us reach our goals more. What if we're not just thinking about having the best workout, but having the workout have the best effect on the rest of our day? If workouts make us really tired, so would that help with sleep or would that deplete our energy for the day? Like if we're trying to fit a workout in in the way that we're reaping the benefits of the work. to have the best day possible. Is there a best time of days? Well, I love to think about exercises rejuvenating you, not exhausting you. Let's say you're doing a strength workout. If you feel exhausted after that strength workout, this sounds counterintuitive, but try to lift a bit heavier for fewer reps. It's overall less fatiguing on your central nervous system than higher rep training. Studies show, again, you can lift between six and 30 reps. Anywhere in that rep scheme will

drive muscle growth. However, if you're lifting closer to the 30 reps, you might accumulate more central nervous system fatigue than if you were lifting closer to that like six to 10 reps. So if you want to save your energy for the day, but you want to see results, you could lift a bit heavier for a bit fewer reps. And then you won't feel as fatigued, but you will have stimulated muscle just as well as if you lifted for more reps. Oh, interesting. Do you have any advice for jumping in to working out when you've been not doing it for a while? I think ease in. Like really give yourself a structure. So again, really thinking about, okay, I'm going to spread my muscle work throughout the week. I'm not going to do really

long workouts. If you're not working out and you're like, I'm going to work out for an hour, six days a week, you're going to fall off. Your body is going to be exhausted. You're going to be tired. It's going to be too much too soon. So really think about maybe four strength training sessions throughout the week and keep them short, keep them 35 minutes. And that can be a really, really effective routine, whether you're a beginner or not. So think about adding things slowly. And I, again, we always say gentle consistency. So that means even if you don't want to show up, show up for the workout and do one hard set and skip to the cool down, make the workout even shorter. But continuing to show up consistently so that you can continue to see the benefits because people think it's all or nothing.

That's kind of why I don't love these like 80-day challenges where they're, you know, 75 hard. 75 hard where there's a timeline. It does work for some people to sustain a habit. But for a lot of people, they get to the finish line and they're like, oh my gosh, finally I can like stop having to work out twice a day. And like then they just fall off completely. So to me, I think if you are doing nothing, start with short workouts and set a real, really realistic schedule for yourself. Do you have any other advice for motivating ourselves to work out or to making it more fun and less boring and awful? Yes. I think that music is big.

So finding a playlist or whatever that you love. And then two, not doing the same workout every single week, I think is really important. It is important to do a lot of the same exercises each week because progressive overload involves you doing the same movements and slowly adding more reps or more weight as you go on. But in Evalo, just for example, again, there's lots of programs, but you don't ever have to do the same workout. So we do a lot of the same exercises, but there are different orders or there's different drop sets or there's different warmups and cool downs. So every workout feels fresh.

And I think that's, we've heard from our members, that's really helps them stay consistent, knowing that, oh, God, I did this workout last week. I have to do this again. Like, I'm so bored of this. You know, it's kind of like, ooh, what's today? And kind of keeps you guessing, which I think really helps with consistency. This next section comes from one of my most personal solo episodes where I share the three rules that I credit for the success that I've achieved in my life today.

The last habit, the last shift that I want to talk about is curating community. And no, I am not just going to talk about the Harvard study of adult development, which showed that the single biggest predictor of long-term health and happiness was the strength and quality of our relationships. We love that study on the Liz Moody podcast. No, I'm going to talk about two other things. And the first is social contagion. This is basically the idea that we are far, far more likely to do the things that people around us are doing. A Brown University study found that having a friend who gets divorced increases our likelihood of getting divorced.

by 75%. A Stanford study found that people who worked towards fitness goals in community exercised 78% more than people who win at it alone. Our behaviors, both positive and negative, are heavily influenced by the people around us, whether we realize it or not. I think a lot of us think about the positive impact of a community. Like, wouldn't it be great to have someone to work out with or to have friends driven to do big things in their career? But the negative impacts of community are so much more insidious. If you're struggling with keeping up with healthy habits or hitting your career goals or with negative self-talk or with your relationships, first, of course, I want you to take accountability for your own actions and your behavior. I am not

suggesting, I want to be so clear on this, I am not suggesting that we just blame everything on other people. But then, after you do that, I want you to look at the people you're surrounding yourself with, and I want you to ask yourself, how might the people that I am surrounding myself with be contributing to or taking away from my goals for health, happiness, and success in life? I was hanging out with a friend of mine recently. She is an entrepreneur. She's built a multi-million dollar business from the ground up. And more importantly, this is a business that just creates hugely positive change in the world. And this was not a business meeting. It was just like a casual hangout, but I left so amped up about ideas for my business just by being around a person

like that. And I realized how much that had been missing in my life. I hadn't been spending time with people who were dreaming big dreams and making those dreams come to life. And that had started to rub off on me. My dreams had gotten smaller. My goals had gotten smaller. And here's the scariest part.

I hadn't even noticed. When I hang out with my healthiest friends, I leave inspired to eat more veggies to move my body more. When I hang out with my most positive, uplifting friends, I am kinder to myself and to other people. I see the world through rosier tinted glasses. And by the way, this includes your partner. Choosing your partner has the single biggest impact on our daily habits, yet the vast majority of us don't even consider if that's an alignment when we're starting to date. There is so much research that supports this. If one partner starts exercising regularly, the other partner is much more likely to

start exercising too. If one partner gains or loses weight, the other partner is significantly more likely to follow suit. If one partner has poor sleep habits, the other is more likely to develop insomnia or disrupted sleep patterns. If one partner quits drinking, the other partner is far more likely to quit as well. And if both partners decide to cut back on drinking together, they are significantly more likely to succeed. Our partners influence our happiness, our health, our stress levels,

our performance at work, our longevity, our earning power. And yet movies have convinced us that we should pick them based on the amount of butterflies that we get. Chemistry is important. It's huge. But we also need to be saying to ourselves, this person is going to be the most influential factor in the life that I create. Do I like the influence that they're going to have. And just before you freak out, it is never too late. If you have a willing partner, if you have a partner who is excited about the future that you can create together, you can use this research to your advantage and you can take on health habits together. That accountability is going to make you so much more likely to stick to your new habits. And as you start to

find success, you'll rub off on each other. And that will just keep going and going and going. But the most successful people that I know are being very, very intentional about who they surround themselves with. When I started to get intentional about my relationships, instead of just accepting relationships of convenience, that supercharged my success in all arenas of my life. Dr. Nicole Avina is a Princeton neuroscientist who specializes in food, cravings, and brain chemistry. In this clip, she explains the one thing that you can do in the morning to, to support your brain, stabilize your cravings, and set yourself up for better energy all day long. There are so many different healthy things that people are told they should be doing every single

morning. It feels like a lot. It feels really overwhelming. As a neuroscientist, if somebody wanted to pick one thing they could do in the morning to optimize their brain health to make them feel really good all day long, what's the one thing you would pick? So the number one thing I would say would be, and I'm a bit biased because I'm a neuroscientist, but I focus on nutrition, is to have a healthy breakfast. And I know there's a lot of controversy around, you know, when breakfast should be, right, the breaking of the fast. And so when people who are doing intermittent fasting, wait until like noon to have something to eat, it's great. I'm just concerned that when people do that, it does have a lot of physical benefits, right? And it can help

if you have a sort of a limited eating window. But in terms of, of kind of setting yourself up for how you're going to interact with these other stressors throughout the day, your brain doesn't have any fuel. So you're going off of whatever you had, you know, last time you ate the night before. I would say start off with a breakfast that has healthy fats, that has fiber in it. The fiber is critical because that's what's going to make you feel fuller and feel like you actually have something of substance. And also, a lot of times people don't really talk about this, but you have to like it. You know, you can't force yourself to eat something for breakfast just because it's healthy. You have to, you know, figure out something

that's enjoyable and eat something that you actually like because otherwise you're just setting yourself up to feel deprived. How soon within waking up do you recommend eating? I am a big advocate for eating when you're hungry. The majority of people who are not hungry until later in the day, it's because they're suppressing their appetite with caffeine or other things. right? So I don't know anyone who is able to kind of wake up and just consume absolutely nothing and then make it until, you know, noon and then say, okay, now I'm hungry. So I think that people are artificially making themselves not hungry by consuming these appetite suppressing things, energy drinks or coffee or whatever it might be. And so I would say, ideally it would be within like one to two hours of

waking up would be having something to eat. And it doesn't have to be a full-blown, you know, like diner meal, right? It can be something small, even if it's a hard-boiled egg. Something, though, to get you going, get your body fueled. You have this primitive brain when it comes to food. And so if you don't have anything to eat, at some point, your brain is going to go into this sort of like survival mode of, okay, well, haven't had anything to eat in a really long time. So, you know, the other systems are going to start to be affected by that. What other systems? the immune system. If you think about it, we were hunters and gatherers. If you had gone, you know, a while without eating, you're going to want to conserve your body's resources.

And so in order to do that, we have to, you know, make sure that all of the access we have to, you know, energy in our body is being directed to making sure that we survive, right, and keeping us alive, maybe trying to suppress the hunger if it's, you know, something where we don't know when we're going to get our next meal. And so in order for that to happen, You know, something has to give, and it's often the immune system. We hear a lot about people who are doing yo-yo dieting or, like, you know, just not eating a healthy diet. You put yourself a risk for getting sick, and it's really because you're compromising your immune system. As a neuroscientist, what is your go-to breakfast?

Well, I love eggs. I'm a big egg person. We eat so many eggs in my house that we actually had to get chickens. So we have chickens in our yard. But, yeah, I love eggs because they're a good thing. source of protein, I think that they're very, very satisfying in terms of making you feel full. And they're this kind of sustained satiety. Same with my kids.

Like, I'll throw two hard-boiled eggs in my daughter's lunchbox, and that's what she has for snack, when she gets to school. And it really helps for her to focus. I usually try to have some sort of green, so a little bit of salad, if we have like leftover salad or some sort of vegetables, even if it's just, you know, something small. I don't really do many toasts and bagels and things like that. We kind of got away from buying commercial bread just because it's just got so many additives in it. And it just became a thing in our family where we don't need it.

And so like I'll bake bread and we'll eat that. So maybe I'll have a little bit of bread that like I made that has literally like four ingredients in it. But that's usually it. I'm not a big, to be honest, a big sweets person. And that includes fruit. I just don't feel like I need to have that sweet taste all the time. I think it's probably because of the work I do. I've kind of trained myself away from it.

But, you know, depending if it's in season, like I love strawberry once in a while or blueberries. So, you know, I'll throw those into the mix too. I think this is a big, it's not quite a hack, but it's something that people don't talk about that much, which is a breakfast salad. You're like, oh, I have some greens on my plate. I think we think of like salads or like some roasted broccoli or like any type of greens is a later in the day thing. I will often have, if I'm having eggs, I'll have like a little salad on the side where I put a little olive oil. I put a little sea salt, something like that, a little lemon zest. I love it.

And I think it's a really wonderful way to start the day. And like to go back to your earlier point, fiber is so, so important. And so many of us are missing that in general. But I would say especially at breakfast. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. If you think about, you know, the kind of American definition of breakfast, it's usually a lot of stuff that has a ton of added sugar, like cereals and things like that. And not a lot of fiber.

pretty much everyone now is not getting enough fiber in their diet. It's becoming a huge problem. We're starting to understand a lot more about these like gastrointestinal issues that people are having. We're not getting enough fiber. The data are like alarming when we take a look at that in terms of, you know, especially among children. So yeah, I love the breakfast salad story because that is definitely what I'm doing. I think having greens or even just like if I'm cooking the egg, if I'm maybe if I decide to like make an egg in a frying pan, like I'll just take some spinach and kind of just take some spinach and kind of just throw it in there and like saute it up and like just do it all in one pan. Throw some veggies, throw some salad into your breakfast mix.

That's just like a really easy, simple life hack. The number one rule of habits is to make the things that you want easier and the things that you don't want harder. Yet so many of us want to eat healthier, but so few of us actually take the steps to make eating healthier easier. That's where Marley Spoon comes in. What I love about this company and what's different than all of the other companies out there that are doing like stuff in the same arena is that you can customize your choices based on

the effort that you want to put in. So if you want them to send you ingredients, so you can make your own 20 minute meal and like get into your chef energy, they'll send it to you to all be in perfect portions so you eliminate waste. Great. That's sorted. But they also have meals that you can just heat up. They have ready made breakfast, which is always such a tough time of day to get a healthy meal in. They have grab and go snacks. Everything is made from farm fresh produce, with high-quality proteins and you can select by dietary preferences, including Mediterranean diet, which is the top diet that doctors on this podcast recommend. Also things like gluten-free, dairy-free, low-sodium, anything that you need. The food is so good and it's so gourmet-fe feeling

like you feel like you're at a nice restaurant. We're talking like chicken Milanese with a crunchy cucumber arugula salad or everything bagel salmon with truffle chive potatoes. My favorite recent meal was the creamy lemon chicken tray bake. I had one of those moments where I looked at my plate and I was like, wait, I made this. And so quickly, like so easily, it's just so little effort for so much reward. Marley Spoon just makes eating well feel easy instead of stressful. And honestly, that is everything. This new year, fast track your way to eating well with Marley Spoon. Head to Marley Spoon.com slash offer slash Liz Moody for up to 25 free meals. That is right, up to 25 free meals with Marley Spoon. That is Marley Spoon.com slash offer slash Liz Moody.

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When you think about strength and resilience, like your ability to feel energized, to recover well, to stay strong as you get older, what do you think that actually comes from? Most people say working out or good nutrition, and yes, of course that matters. But there is a biological foundation underneath all of that that most people are completely overlooking. I have been diving deep into this lately with the team at timeline and what I've learned has genuinely shifted how I think about my own health. Every single movement that

your body makes, every step, every workout, every muscle contraction depends on energy produced at the cellular level. And at the center of that is your mitochondria. Here is the thing that nobody tells you, certainly nobody told me, starting around age 30, our mitochondria naturally become less efficient. More get damaged, more become sluggish, and over time that impacts your energy, your strength, your recovery, and your resilience. Most of us respond by pushing more. We're like noticing these things and we're adding in more protein. We're trying to fix it with more supplements. We're trying to do harder workouts. And those things do help. But timelines research suggests that we also need to be supporting the cellular machinery underneath, and that is exactly

what their supplement, Mitopure does. It contains Erolithin A, which helps your body clear out damage mitochondria and support healthier ones so that your cells can produce energy more efficiently. Because this is happening to your cells, it's going to impact your entire body, your immune system, your muscles. One study found that taking Mitopure increased muscle strength by 12% in four months with no change in exercise routine, it's going to impact your energy, your sleep, your skin, your cell health impacts all of this, and urolithine A keeps your cells healthy. Timeline has done over 15 years of research and testing on this one product, urolithin A, which, by the way, most of us lack the gut bacteria to synthesize naturally.

That's why many of us need to supplement it to get the benefits. This has become a staple supplement for me. It is my top way to support how I want to look and feel as I age. support yourselves and how you age with mitopure gummies from Timeline. Visit Timeline.com slash Liz and save up to 39% on your mitopear gummies. That is timeline.com slash Liz. This next clip is from one of your favorite episodes of the year about how to make best friends as an adult. Lindsay and Krista from the Almost 30 podcast open up about navigating friendship through motherhood, divorce, and totally different life phases.

So like Lindsay, you had a baby and Krista, you guys stayed friends. through that. That's a huge, huge change that a lot of friendships are lost over. Do you guys have any practical tips you would share for either people listening where they had a kid or their friend had a kid and they're having a hard time navigating that moment in their friendship? What I do practically, because, you know, I can't lie that whenever my friends, because I'm single, I just got divorced, it's like are having kids. There is, the highest self version of me is so fucking excited. I can't wait to have another baby in my life and like spend time with them. it's some of the best favorite relationships are the mothers and my friends but there is always a tiny

part that's like oh I'm going to lose them so what I do is just take time to just like release the relationship and release it in the context of where it is and allow it to come back in the context that it's going to be in for the remainder of our relationship because you're not going to have the same relationship and you have to really just accept that it's like I want people to allow me to grow and evolve so I want to allow my friends to grow and evolve so in my mind I've psychically kind of just take in a second in meditation and just let go of the person and the relationship, just come back home to myself and know that I'm okay no matter what. And then I can re-meet that person with a sense of peace and really a sense of, you know, love for them and the path that they're on because we all

deserve to be truly supported by our friends. And I think oftentimes women are in codependent relationships. I was in so many codependent friendships where it was like if we weren't talking all the time, if we weren't always relating on the same thing, if we weren't talking all day. and just kind of like in this dynamic that was a little immature, then we weren't going to survive. And now being in a relationship that's more mature and that can survive change and transition and sovereignty. It's like that's the only thing I'm available for. What about in a practical sense? Like do you ever get resentful that you need to align your schedule more to somebody whose schedule is revolving around a child, you know, very rightfully revolving around this whole new human in the world?

or there's like little moments that come up day to day. No, I don't. And I don't want to sound like pretentious at all, but I don't. Because I just know that they're going to get me when I have that. And I just, it's just the way it is. I have more time. I have more energy. I have more spaciousness.

They don't. So it's a part of me that shows up in my friendship in that way because that's just the truth. So I could look at the story. You know, the story would be, oh, they think they're better than me because they have a baby and that I don't have as much time. and that, you know, my time's not valuable, sure. Or I could be like, you know, the truth is actually I'm single and I have more time

and they don't and I love them and I am going to go see them because this is true now. And maybe in five years when I'm doing whatever, I'm going to cash in on that truth and be like, I actually don't have as much time so I need you to show up for me. So in relationships, it shouldn't always be that tick for tact. Like, you know, they gave me two hours. I give them two hours. Like, that's not how relationships work. And the more flexible you can be, the more you can allow people to just be who they are.

I think the better your relationships are. Because I don't want to feel like I have to show up 100% or over give, but the resentment makes sense. I think it's just understanding what is beneath that, like what kind of is there? Because that type of resentment will erode a relationship. And I think for me as like the mom, and I know other moms that feel this way, there is anxiety about, oh my gosh, I don't have as much time for my friends who I was spending a lot of time with or we would catch up on a regular basis and now that's kind of fallen through the crack.

And so there's definitely an anxiety there and a desire to balance it all. And to Krista's point, it's just a season where there's not much balance, you know, at least in the way that I'm approaching motherhood and maybe people have figured it out to balance it a little bit more. But I also think it's really important that the, you know, if we're talking moms and people who don't have kids yet, it's like, can you all? also invite the other person in to express how they're experiencing this because they might feel like they don't have the space to talk because their life, quote, hasn't changed. But it has.

It has for them in the sense in how they relate to you, how much time they're getting from you, et cetera. And so if you can just have, I mean, Krista and I talk about this, having a clearing conversation where, you know, there might be just some funkiness in your friendship field, you know, and you just want to call it out in a really loving, honest, compassionate way. And hearing from your friend, like, I know it's been a huge change, like, in some ways since I've had a baby. And, like, I just wanted to hear from you, like, how you've been feeling, like, what do you feel like is working and what's not? Or, you know, is there a way that I can show up to this that would just, yeah, make you feel more loved or seen or, like, you know, how are you doing?

And I think that alone does wonders because so many people, most people, just want to be seen and heard, you know? And when there's a child in the equation, it's hard to like really give a lot of attention to anything else. Our brains completely change. So it's literally neurologically hard. But I think those conversations just kind of bring you back to the just love that's in the relationship. And you know, the common goal of like, no, I want to make this work. Like I love you. And even if it looks different in this season, how do we do our best right now? Yeah. I had a friend even yesterday who just had a baby. I'm a godmother to a baby. And she messaged me. She's like, do you think I've changed?

I just want to let you know that I haven't changed. Like it was just like, so she's like, because we've kind of been missing each other. And it was just so sweet that she was like, hey, just so you know I haven't changed. Like I'm still your friend. It doesn't have to be crazy. She's like, I'm still here.

I'm still your friend. And I think as mom, there is that insecurity that you're going to kind of lose people. And I think just the last thing to say, like, it's allowed me, this spaciousness in our relationship of you having your baby has allowed me to deepen with other women. Like now because Lindsay meets me in so many ways,

but I'm not going to be texting Lindsay at 9 p.m. like, so he sent me, he hearted what I said. What do you think about that? Like, you know, I have other single friends now that I'm deeper with. And so allowing that space of how this relationship changed has allowed me to deepen with women that are sort of at the phase that I'm at. So I can kind of be in it with them on that and then be with her on this. I love so much of what you said, but I really love the idea of like maybe you can't give a ton of time right now, but what can you give? And you're like, you can give hearing something. You can give showing up, like you can give trying to understand and making them feel seen in their perspective.

That doesn't take a lot of time. So I think asking yourself, maybe I can't give everything I want to give right now, but what can I give at this moment is really, really powerful. It's really about the quality. You know, when we do see each other, we're really like in, you know, like, I'm not like calling my son every five seconds. And it takes practice because I know this is not easy. You know, it's a nervous system practice.

it's, you know, quieting the chatter in the mind. But I just feel my best when I'm able to be present and like really be with you, you know? Yeah. And, you know, Lindsay's like logged hours, you know, like through my divorce, like Lindsay was there for me for years, just like in the trenches in that whole process. So it's like I could give her the grace that she gave me by processing and being with me for something for years, you know? So friendship always has its balances, we have seasons, you know, of things.

It makes me think of the Michelle Obama quote where she's like, our relationship isn't 50-50, it's 80-20 or at 70-30 or at 60-40. Not that you should be keeping score, but it has to balance out in some way over time. It's not going to be 50-50 in the moment, but it should inch towards that over the long run, I think. And I think if it's not, that's when you start to feel resentful. You feel like I am always showing up for this person and they are not showing up for me consistently over the years in the same way. I think it's so important in friendships and relationships, and I love what you said, just speaking to that, to understand how you like to be taken care of. For me, I don't need all day.

I don't need constant. But when we're in, I want to be in. So for me, I love trips with my friends. Like a few of my friends, I'll see twice, three times a year. I'll see them for three days on a trip. And it's just deep and intimate. We're not on our phones. We're together.

And that fills me up for the whole year. Or like when I'm with Lindsay, like, she's fully logged in to us and to our relationship. Like I don't need to talk to her the weeks in between. Like I don't need little text, memes I love. You know, I have some friends that are just like meme friends. But I think if you know how you like to be cared for and attuned to. So for me, that's presence. It doesn't need to be a lot. But when we're in, we're in, that's helpful. Maybe someone else loves a call every morning on the way to work. Maybe someone else loves a date night on Fridays or they like cards. It's like finding a love language for your relationship so that you know what it really feels like for you to be in a relationship that feels like it has reciprocity. And asking your friends even. I love that as a question for your friends. How do you like to be taken care of? I think that's a beautiful question to ask. How would you say you? I like feeling thought of when somebody is not with me. So I love like, I'm at the grocery store and I saw your favorite snack and I thought of you. I listened to this podcast and it made me think of you. I love that. And then I also love really intentional quality time. I could do without like dinners and like I don't need a lot of time,

but I want it to be very concentrated and I want to make new memories together in that time. time. Sawhill Bloom is a best-selling author who came on the podcast to share proven habits to build resilience. Here, he talks about incredibly practical tools for finding value-aligned people and actually turning everyday conversations into real connections. If we look around our world and we want those people who are going to push us, who are going to help us live our best life, but we don't see them around us, what can we do? The most tactical thing, I would say, is, Find value-aligned rooms. What I mean by that is you have a core set of values, interests, energy creators in your life,

things that you feel really strongly about the world or about how to live well. There are people out there that share those values. You need to find your way into the rooms where you are likely to meet those people. That is very tactically something that you can do and exercise around on a piece of paper. Write down on one side of the paper, those values, interests, those things that you really care about. Maybe it's you really care about health and you're really interested in new health technologies, you're interested in foods, you're interested in all of the latest things that are happening. Write those things down.

Then think about Zoom out and brainstorm. Where are places that other people like me would be spending time? Well, gyms tend to be a good one. Farmers markets, health food stores, outdoor parks, hikes. Those are places where you were going to find or be highly likely to find. other people that share that common value with you, which are going to be people that are aligned with you on this core thing that you really care about.

Those are going to be more likely the people that are going to lift you up in these different ways in your life. And so it's an example of just thinking a little bit differently, thinking almost strategically about how to position yourself to catch the right waves in life, to be prepared for those great waves of these people that you might be able to meet and engage with. So let's say we're at the gym, we're at the health food store, we're at the park. how do we spark up a conversation with these people? How do we turn them into these relationships that are going to change our lives?

Create doorknobs, not stop signs. Door knobs in a conversation are things that invite the other person to tell us story. Stop signs are just a question that invites an answer. So most of us have a tendency in a conversation to ask a question. So I might be talking to you for the first time and I say, where did you get married? That invites an answer, a simple answer. say the place versus the doorknob version of that, which would be, how did you choose where you were going to get married? Now, you might light up. There's usually a funny story about how you

chose. Maybe it's a family reason. Maybe there's something going on. Suddenly, you're getting the other person a little bit more excited. They're telling a story that creates conversational momentum with someone. So the reason I say that's so important is because I am sort of naturally more introverted and a little bit more socially anxious by nature. And for me, having these kind of set of like doorknob questions that I can go to and just pull out of a toolkit, if you will, when I get into a new conversation with someone is really nice because it's an easy way to create conversational momentum and actually build relationships more effectively if you aren't a natural extrovert that just feels kind of easy for you to do. So how do we know if something's a

doorknob question, is it just something that wouldn't invite a one-word answer or their words we're looking for, like how or why? It would be anything that would invite a story as a response. So you think, what is something that you're really excited about right now? That could be anything, but it gets someone talking about something that they're excited and passionate about, so you know they're going to light up in the conversation. How did your parents choose your name? Simple things like that, they get the other person talking out of the normal line of questioning that they're used to. The most standard thing people go ask the first time they meet someone is like, what do you do? What do you do? Yeah.

And usually people are either uncomfortable answering it or it invites the like one-liner cookie cutter response. And both of those are bad outcomes. So get people out of that norm. Ask some of these like more interesting questions. You know, what was your hometown like? How did you choose where to go to school? Ask about key decision points in someone's life. Ask about what they're excited about.

Ask what they've learned recently that they found interesting. getting out of the norms in these conversations breaks the patterns, and it makes the other person remember you more, actually, as well. So just as a follow-up thing, it's a stickier conversation. Even if you want just the slightest variance on what do you do, how did you get into your job? It's like just the teeny-tiniest-tweak, and it invites so many more interesting questions. That's true. And that's a great example of a key point, which is the most basic questions you ask, you could write those down. Think about in normal conversations. What are the questions you typically ask? and then think if there's a tiny tweak you could make to those questions to make them more interesting.

I love that you say that because you noted that you tend to be more socially anxious. You tend to be an introvert. I do as well. And people are always like, yeah, but you're such a good conversationalist. You host a podcast. And I'm like, yes, because I think about these things. I analyze them because they made me nervous. So like your suggestion of like, you can make a list.

I'm like, that's something that I would do. And people would perceive on the other end that I'm a good conversationalist, but it came out of being anxious about it and wanting to do well. which is a really important point as a macro point on all of these areas of your life, which is you can work at these things. They are skills, they are muscles. People tend to think that you are either an extroverted, incredible conversationalist, very confident, or you're introverted, you're not great at conversation, and you're never going to be able to build tons of relationships or build these deep connections. And it couldn't be further from the truth. You can

just work on these things. The same way, I'm a nervous public speaker. Full disclosure, super nervous public speaker. I used to like be stuttering when I would get out in front of people. I'd get really like sweaty, hot, really nervous. Now if you see me give a talk or even if we're having a conversation, you would not believe that that was the case. But that's just because I've worked at it. And you can all do that, but you have to be willing to invest in those things in the same way that you invest in any financial investment. It's just making investments in your social wealth, like in this other area of your life that is going to compound probably just as effectively, if not better than any financial investment that you make.

Nikki Perlitzis is actually my personal RD, whom I started working with after a series of tests found that my weight was putting my health at risk. I had her on the podcast to discuss how to lose weight in a fully health-aligned way with no shame, no starvation, just something that was truly supportive. This is a very nuanced conversation, and I'm incredibly proud of this episode. Just for context for everybody listening, I've been working with you for months on my own journey, which has been really incredible and something that I've had to grapple a lot with the meaning of and if it's okay to feel the way that I feel and if it's okay to want these things and how it fits into my perception of what healthy is, which you've experienced in our sessions. And I think people will experience through the conversation today.

Oh, yeah. And I have experienced that myself as well, which is why I do what I do and why I do it, how I do it, because there is a lot of back and forth, especially in the world that we live in now and all of these movements that have come up. I really just want people to kind of be okay with what their goals are and find their path to feeling the best that they possibly can. Can you talk us through kind of the ideal plate framework? Because this was also really helpful for me when I was like, I don't want my calorie count. And like when I'm traveling, what am I doing, blah, and you were like, okay, just picture your plate. And here's what you want for protein. Here's what you want for carbs. And remember, these things are carbs.

And then here's what you want for veggies. So I like to look at meal templates. This is so helpful, by the way, for people who are like, I don't want to track. Like, I'm not downloading my fitness pal on my phone. I did that when I was 16, and I'm not doing it again. So we will start with something like a meal template. So I do want to say this is very individualized. If you do like a generic template and you're hungry, eat more.

Like this is not a max. But we want to have your plate. We want to have protein, fat, carbs, and fiber, which can be your carb. We want to look at how much are we actually having. There's two ways to do this. We can look at your standard, like mediums, sized dinner plate and we just want like a quarter of it as protein, a quarter of it as our fiber or a carb, maybe a half of it as our veggies as well, and then a little bit like a tablespoon

of fats. Or we can do it in terms of hand sizes. This is my favorite for like if you're going out or something. So about a fist size is like a cup of something. So for your carbs, we would say, okay, one serving of carbs is like a half a fist. By the away, way smaller than most people realize. About a half a cup of your carbs would be a half of a fist size. And then your protein would be about like the size of your palm and the thickness of that little pad like by your thumb. And so that's going to be somewhere between like three ounces of protein, maybe four. Four usually goes up to like the first knuckle. So we want to have enough protein, enough carbs. We do want to make sure our carbs have fiber in them. So something like potato

would have more fiber than like a white rice. And then we want to have one to two fifth sizes of veggies, especially if you're on a fat loss journey. That's going to really provide more satiety. And then your fats, oils, butter, are going to be like a thumb size, basically. So like a tablespoon. Avocado's a little different.

It's like a third of an avocado depending on the size. So we're using kind of like our hands to assess what are my portions. It's a general estimate. It's a gauge. but we're not bodybuilders preparing for like a competition. Like we don't need to be weighing our food and super specific about it. We can use these portions to generalize and look at how much am I actually taking in and am I getting enough at each of my meals. Okay.

So let's say I'm out at a restaurant and I want to order the pasta. How would that fit into this? This is where I will bring up the idea of looking at the calories of something to a client, if I feel that we can have that conversation in a way that doesn't trigger any fears or history. This is how I think about it in practice, because we just talked about the meal template, right? But the way that you're living your life, are you going to go out and have every single meal of every single day that fits this exact template? No, my meals don't look like that. I don't have every meal like that. So we're going to have moments where we deviate from our

general structure or a general plan. That's okay. So if you're going to be a goal to, out to eat, there's two ways we can do this. So if you're someone who can look at the calories and you're like, yeah, I just want more information. Because again, calories are science. The way we feel about them is a story. So we have to separate the story from the science. Now, I can observe and say this bowl of pasta, I looked it up. I usually use like a, you know, like a chain. If you go to any local mom and pop shop and you get a bowl of pasta, just look it up an olive garden or something and see generally speaking what is their serving of pasta in terms of calories. We're looking at that calorie number and we're saying, okay, so if I generally want

X amount for the day, I want X amount per my meal, divide it out, all right, maybe I have half of this bowl of pasta or maybe I have a quarter of it, whatever, you know, I think I can do to fit into my general structure. We can also look at it in the sense of like, okay, you know what? I know that about a fist size of it would be my carb. And so that's going to be what I'm aiming for. And then I'll kind of build out the rest of the meal. Now, one thing I also like to bring in, I don't like to talk about going out to eat without

mentioning this, is what is your intention behind going out to eat? So what is the intention behind the meal? We have convenience. So maybe the kids came home and you are like, I'm too tired to make dinner. Let's just go out to eat. It's convenient. In that situation, we're not getting the best thing on the planet. We're just there for convenience.

So in that situation, why don't we put together a meal template, something that's as close to what we would have at home as possible? But then we have moments where we go out to eat for the food. Like, you mentioned pasta. I live in New York City. There's so many great pasta places. So if I'm going out to eat at an Italian restaurant that has the best pasta in the city, I'm not thinking about my meal template. I'm just not.

So in that situation, I need to make sure that I am satisfied with this meal, psychologically and physically. So the whole point of me going out is to enjoy the experience. So my only rule is I have to enjoy it. Now, one thing to keep in mind is research also shows that hedonic pleasure or, you know, the enjoyment of eating exponentially decreases after the first three to five bites of a food. So we should make those three to five bites the best experience we can possibly have because that's the whole point. That's why we're there. But if I'm still hungry after that, all right, maybe I get a side of veggies, maybe I add some protein to it. Maybe I had a snack like an hour or two before dinner to make sure I wasn't starving going into dinner.

But I still got to have the pasta. Now, I don't need a whole bowl of pasta to get that satisfying experience and enjoyment. I really just need the first three to five bites and maybe I'll have a little bit more than that. But I want to make sure that that's giving me the mental satisfaction. And then I have the physical satiety coming from either a snack before dinner or pairing it with some veggies on the side. What's a good example of a snack before dinner? I like to bring in fiber here or protein, depending on what's available to you or what your preferences are. But I really like something that is high fiber, something even like carrot sticks or some like cucumbers, bell peppers, any type of veggie as well, especially if you're not going to get.

veggies at dinner as well. We're just kind of like supplementing a little bit. We can bring in something that's higher protein. Now, if you have leftover chicken from dinner the night before, that could be your snack. We tend to overcomplicate things. Like in our country, we have breakfast foods and we have snack foods. Food is just food. Like a snack can be a mini meal. So we can literally pull leftovers and have a little bit of chicken and some leftover broccoli. And that's going to be my snack two hours before I go out to dinner. It's what's available to if you're out. I like to even just have like stuff in your bag as a go bag. This clip is from an episode where I share my personal top micro habits. These are tiny science-backed practices. Some take less than 30 seconds that have had

an outsized impact on my happiness, my relationships, my overall well-being and life. Next, microhabit is micro-connections. Microconnections are these little moments of connection and two others that are a secret to happiness that nobody talks about. Chatting with the person behind the counter at the grocery store, smiling and making eye contact with people in the street. This morning, Zach and I met a new neighbor on our circwalk. And we talked for 20 minutes about Buddhism and kittens and nomad life. And it drastically improved my mood for the rest of the day.

I first learned about microconnections when I had Dr. Sue Varma on the podcast. She's a psychiatrist who specializes in the science of optimism. So we were talking about all of the ways that we can train our brains to become more optimistic. And one of the ways that she shared was to take advantage of microconnections, which are these little moments that we connect with people in our lives, whether they're the people that are close to us or strangers. And there is a ton of research to back this up. Making eye contact releases oxytocin.

So you get a rush of good feelings when you look someone, in the eye and have a real conversation. Oxytosin helps reduce stress. It can increase pain tolerance. It can even support our immune systems. It also increases your sense of feeling socially connected, which is hugely important. A very famous study found that lack of social connection was a greater risk to our overall health than obesity, smoking, and high blood pressure.

In fact, it increases our odds of death by 50%. And here's the interesting thing. You don't necessarily need a whole group of amazing friends to get the benefits of social connections, although of course that's awesome and we all want that too. But for these benefits, you need to feel connected to others. And having these micro moments within your community is a really powerful way to build that feeling of connection. But it's so important to note that that feeling of connection, it's not only going to improve your mood, your psychology, but your physical health. health, your lifespan on this very real tangible level. I aim for at least one of these a day, if not more, but the ideal dose is dependent on you. So play around with it and see what makes you feel socially connected. And yes, sending a text or having a phone call is better than nothing, but this is one where you really want to do it in person if possible because you want those eye contact benefits, you want those local benefits of feeling part of your community. If nothing else, I use the research around micro connections to remind me to keep my phone in my pocket when I'm in line at the grocery store or on my cirquarks to look up, to look around, to smile at people.

It's made my days and my entire life really feel so much brighter. The next one is one of my absolute favorites. I learned this trick from Dr. Rick Hansen, the famous happiness psychologist when I had him on the podcast. And it goes back to what we were talking about earlier with rewiring our neural pathways and the neurons that fire together wiring together. Rick shared a trick to hardwire the brain to feel more happiness, essentially to wire the happiness, the savory neurons together so that in the future your brain is more likely to fire those neurons making you feel happier. I love this trick because it is so specific. I love, love, love, an action step that brings legitimate science to life in a way that's easy to apply on a daily basis. And this is exactly that.

So what you're going to do, you're going to notice something good. It can be anything. It can be a great conversation. It can be flowers that smell really amazing. And it can be the taste of a really delicious piece of chocolate, the feeling of the sun on your skin. That's one of my favorite feelings in the entire world. It can be how good it feels to laugh at a TV show. really try to tune into the good feelings and then even turn up the dial on how good they feel if you can.

Just really savor it and sit in that savoring for 10 to 20 seconds. And that action, that's going to help these positive emotion-based neurons wire together, which is going to help your brain overcome its negativity bias and help you feel more positive feelings in the future. The more you do it, the more positive wiring will happen. And let me tell you, Rick is like a poster child for this practice. He has the gentlest, loveliest, happiest energy of any person that I have ever met. It is the micro-wist of micro-habits. We are talking literally less than 30 seconds. And it has these huge results in terms of our happiness. And that's it for 2025. I hope that I helped you in some way this year, whether it was to

provide motivation or share a tip that helped you with some facet of your life or just be a friendly voice to hang out with in your car or on your walks or in your house. It has truly been the honor and the absolute joy of my year and honestly my life to get to spend this time with you. This is the best community in the world and I don't take that lightly and I am just so grateful every single day for you guys. Just take one quick second to follow the podcast on Apple Spotify or on YouTube. You can watch full video episodes on Spotify and YouTube. So if you're watching, hello, hi. We have a really killer January lineup specifically designed to help you achieve whatever goals you have for 2026. And on Monday, we posted the six questions asked today to make

2026 your best year yet. So if you haven't listened to that or downloaded the free life audit and workbook, scroll back in your feed because it is so helpful. Also, I would love to hear from you. your favorite episode of 2025. Tell me in the comments because I am so curious. As always, you can find all of the discount codes that you heard in this episode, as well as codes for mattresses and skincare and workout routines and supplements and so much more at Liz Moody.com slash codes. Using our codes keeps the podcast completely free for you and allows you to save money on products that I have vetted and believe in. All right. I love you guys. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I will see you in 2026. Oh, just one more thing. It's the legal language.

This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, a psychotherapist, or any other qualified professional.