The School of Greatness - 765 Making Healthy Simple with Yuri Elkaim

Episode Date: March 1, 2019

THINK ABOUT YOUR LONG TERM HEALTH. We all want great health. But whose advice are we taking? Often, we jump on the latest diet craze without figuring out if it’s the best thing for us. Your body works differently than anyone else’s. And these fad diets can have serious long term effects on your metabolism. For this Five Minute Friday, I revisited a conversation I had with Yuri Elkaim where he shared how to find the optimum diet for you. Yuri is a New York Times bestselling nutrition author, keynote speaker, trusted health and fitness expert, and leading business coach for other health and fitness professionals committed to growing their business and creating more impact in the world. Yuri simplifies the complex world of health and reduces your confusion with clear, actionable, and science-backed advice that cuts through the nonsense. Yuri suggests finding people who are in your shoes to model your diet after. See what works for people in your same phase of life. Learn how to reach maximum health in Episode 765. In this episode you will learn: Why it’s important to find a workout and diet works best for you (2:00) Why a low-carb diet can hurt your thyroid (3:00) The steps to find the perfect diet for your body type (4:30) How your gender affects your diet (5:00) Plus much more...

This is 5-Minute Friday! Welcome everyone back to the podcast. I'm very excited about our guest today. He's been on before and he's coming back again. Now, Yuri is a New York Times bestselling author and renowned fitness and nutrition expert who's helped more than 500,000 people. That's right, a half a million people to great health and fitness.

At 17, he developed an autoimmune condition called alopecia, which attacked all of his hair on his body. He played professional soccer. He was a head strength and conditioning coach for men's soccer at the University of Toronto. He's also a father of three boys, and his new book is out called The All Day Fat-Burning Diet. The same approach we want to have to health and diets and exercises, find that path that's going to work best for you. I'm not a fan of CrossFit, but that's just for me. Other people, they're like gung-ho into it and that works for them.

Awesome. So you need to find what's going to work best for you and your lifestyle. So how do we know how to find that? I think you really just have to try things. So for instance, if you've tried one approach, a dietary approach that has worked really well for you and assuming that it has health benefits. For instance, let me give you an example. So a lot of people have done Atkins. Actually, this is crazy. In the 1990s, we had this huge surge, this huge surge in the low-carb craze. And at one point, it was said that in that decade,

at any given point, 18% of Americans were on a low-carb diet. That's including the population of kids and teenagers who, for the most part, don't diet. So that percentage is usually probably a bit higher considering it's mostly for adults. So a low-carb diet will help you lose weight, but it has serious long-term ramifications on your metabolism. For instance, it's going to suppress your thyroid function. And our thyroid is our master metabolism gland. So if that goes down over time, maybe it doesn't hit you right away. But in a couple of months, a couple of years, you just start slowing down. Your body

has a tough time losing weight. And you're thinking like, what did I do? What's going on here? And that could be part of the problem. The other thing with low carb diets is that, yes, you'll lose weight, but it's mostly water weight because for every gram of carbohydrates, your body's going to hold on to four grams of water. So as soon as you lose the bread and the pasta and so forth, you're going to lose a lot of that water. So you have to be able to distinguish between, okay, this result is what I want, but is it giving me – is it hurting my health in the process? it giving me, is it hurting my health in the process? So I think there's a little bit of sophistication that has to come into that as well in terms of whether it's, you know, checkups with your naturopathic doctor or just kind of looking at if you're a little more knowledgeable about your body, symptomatically looking at like, are things working? Do I feel good? And maybe doing,

you know, occasional blood tests just to make sure that everything's okay. You know, if you wanted to really get kind of granular. Gotcha. And if people don't have the, you know, occasional blood tests just to make sure that everything's okay. You know, if you wanted to really get it kind of granular. Gotcha. And if people don't have the, you know, they're not wanting to do a blood test, but they want to try something else, or they want to see what works and what feels right for them, what are some of those steps? It's tough. I mean, you want to model people that emulate you, right? So, for instance, if you know other menopausal women who've done well on this specific diet,

then maybe that's something you want to consider if you're a menopausal woman. For instance, a lot of the paleo research, not that there's really been a lot of research, but the research scientifically on paleo has mostly been done on men. And what we found, and this has been confirmed with a lot of naturopathic doctors that I've worked with, is that what they've seen in their practice is a lot of women who go paleo end up having a very tough time and do a lot of damage to their hormone and to their hormonal makeup because for them, they need, in some cases, higher levels of carbohydrates. For instance, women are a little bit more susceptible to thyroid issues. So if we cut out carbohydrates or keep them at a very low level,

then that might work for some men, but for women, maybe not the best idea. So you want to do a little bit of research in terms of what has worked for other people, for instance, in my shoes, and is this validated by science or is this just another gimmick that's just put up on the bookshelf