Get all the bonuses from Dr. Anna: learntruehealth.com/ketogreen
Keto Macro Calculator + 1-day personalized meal plan:
https://dranna.grsm.io/KG16-KetoCalc-ashleyjames1757?utm_campaign=KGBookLaunch
Making Keto Work for Women Over 40 E-Book:
https://dranna.grsm.io/KG16-over40-ashleyjames1757?utm_campaign=KGBookLaunch
https://www.learntruehealth.com/keto-green-16
Highlights:
As an obstetrician and gynecologist trained with the best in the country, Dr. Anna Cabeca was baffled when she experienced premature menopause. That’s what led Dr. Anna to find the root cause and solutions for her premature menopause. Keto-Green 16 is not just any diet, it is also a health community that aims to boost oxytocin. Men too can do the Keto-Green 16 diet as the Keto-Green 16 book has a chapter on men’s health. Dr. Anna shares with us today the importance of testing urine pH and fasting. She also gives us some of the 16 foods from her book.
Intro:
Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of Learn True Health podcast. I’m very excited for you to learn from Dr. Anna Cabeca today. She is giving us amazing bonuses. She talks about it in the interview, and I want to make sure you have this link. Go to learntruehealth.com/ketogreen. That’s learntruehealth.com/ketogreen. Of course, that link is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast as well. Go to that link, and she gives you all kinds of awesome bonuses, digital downloads, really cool guides, recipes. Everything she talks about, she gives you all these great free bonuses she gives you, and then it also allows you to pre-order her book, which is launching right now.
I think her program is fantastic because she focuses on nutrifiying the body, alkalizing the body with mineral-rich antioxidant-rich foods. I absolutely love her way of measuring the body stress levels and measuring the body’s alkalinity levels to make sure that you are supporting your body in being out of a disease creating state, and in a healing and restorative state all while achieving healthy hormone levels, metabolism levels, and your weight loss goals as well. She really nails it. I think nutrition is key, using food as medicine is key, and she teaches you how to do that, but also how to measure your success along the way to make sure you’re on the right track, which is so great.
I know you’re going to love today’s interview. Please go to learntruehealth.com/ketogreen to get all the information, all the bonuses, and everything that she talks about in today’s interview. Share this with all of your female friends, although men will learn a thing or two from today’s interview. So men, stick around, but please, share this episode with all of your female friends. It’s never too early or too late to support your body’s ability to heal itself and create healthy hormone levels. Enjoy today’s interview.
[00:02:21] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 427. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have back on the show, Dr. Anna Cabeca. Dr. Anna was here on the show in episode 326, so it’s almost been 100 episodes since you were on the show, and so much has happened. Welcome back.
[00:02:52] Dr. Anna Cabeca: It’s so good to be back with you, Ashley. We’ve been big fans. I had told you my daughter, Amira, who we just brought back from the Netherlands where she was studying, turned me on to your podcast in the first place.
[00:03:05] Ashley James: It’s so cool. I love it. I love how this works. I love how podcasting works because it connects us in such a unique way and allows us to really be together as a community. Your message, you help women to balance their hormones, and this is such a relevant topic because so many women now in their 30s and 40s are going through premenopause. Back in the day, it used to be the 50s or 60s, and we’re just seeing this huge, huge spike in women really being out of balance with their hormones so much so that their body just says, “Alright, we’re depleted. I guess we’re just going to go into that next stage of our life.” Way sooner than it’s supposed to, and that affects our vitality, that affects our bone density, that affects our longevity, it affects the quality of our life on so many levels.
You help women to regain that balance and to regain their health in every system of their body. I’m such a fan of the work that you do because you are all about using food as medicine to balance the body. Today you’re coming back to share about your latest book. It’s been about a year since you’ve been on the show, and since then, you’ve written a new book. I’m so excited. Tell us about your new book that’s coming out.
[00:04:48] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Yeah. Thank you. My first book was The Hormone Fix, and it’s all about really working on our major hormones because it takes more than hormones to fix our hormones. I launched that out on February 26 and introduced it to your audience in that last podcast. Now, Keto-Green 16, which is my next book is releasing May 5th, and it really is like a kick-butt plan to get results very quickly in 16 days, and uplevel so that we really push our system to uplevel itself. So to become even more efficient, more energized, slimmed-down those stubborn pounds, and get out of a metabolic plateau or metabolic stall that we often hit when we have hormone imbalance issues.
[00:05:39] Ashley James: Take us back to after you launched, a year ago after you launched your book. I mean, that’s such a big feat to have launched a book, busy promoting it, and you’re also a busy doctor, and then turn around and write another book. Was there a specific aha moment when you said, “Okay, this is the next book I’m writing.” Did you have a, “Oh, this is exactly what I need to do now,” moment?
[00:06:05] Dr. Anna Cabeca: It evolved as I was in the process after I had written The Hormone Fix and was working with more clients online going through the programs. I wanted to take it to the next level. There is so much in The Hormone Fix beyond what we eat. There is how we manage cortisol, how we manage oxytocin hormone disruptors. For Keto-Green 16, I wanted to simplify it to say, “Okay, here’s the basics.” You don’t need necessarily all the reasons and science why I’m recommending this, although I’ve got some in there, of course, can’t help it. But here’s the plan that really works and we’re going to uplevel it, push it to a higher level that is doable, and quicker, and simpler.
I have beautiful recipes in The Hormone Fix, and lots of great information, and a great plan, but in Keto-Green 16, I trimmed it down to 16 key ingredients to make shopping easier, 16 key ingredient types. I pushed our fasting window. I was recommending 13 to 15, starting out 13 to 16, so I really push everyone to 16-hour intermittent fasting. Also, there are some other fun things around the number 16—16-minute exercise routine, 16 days. There is some good stuff here. I just wanted to simplify it, make it easier for people, but plus also bring the men into the picture. Make it so men can adapt it for them, and there’s a whole chapter on men’s health in their men’s health and men’s sexual health, and really get everyone doing it together.
My vision with Keto-Green 16, because the community is a big boost to oxytocin, a healthy community, the more we can be a healthy community, boost our oxytocin. My goal also with Keto-Green 16, you don’t have to do it alone. Do it with your work teams. Do it with your virtual communities now as we’re creating virtual communities. Do it as part of a corporate health program, 16 days. First 16 days of every month. I mean, let’s do this together. Let’s bring food in together. Let’s talk about this together.
[00:08:23] Ashley James: Very interesting that you did a whole chapter on men. Statistically, men don’t go to a doctor for regular check-ups as much as women do. That statistically, men wait until it’s really bad or their wives drag them in. Now, we do have male listeners, and they’re the proactive ones. They’re the black sheep. But statistically, the majority of men out there don’t really hone in on their health and practice preventive medicine.
You mentioned sexual health, and I think that ED, erectile dysfunction, is when men go, “Wait a sec, there’s something wrong.” Because erectile dysfunction can be caused by numerous things. It’s sort of like the canary in the coal mine, and it’s saying, “Hey, you might be headed for heart disease, diabetes. If you don’t handle it now, you’re going to be in a grave soon.” ED is something that shows that they have significant health issues that they might have been ignoring. When men can’t perform, that’s when they take action. So you have a chapter on how they can reverse ED and gain control of their health, is that correct?
[00:09:41] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Absolutely, absolutely. I’ve worked with men. I always tell the men that come to see me, the men that are listening in general that are proactive of their health, but I tell the men that come to see me, “You know, you really are a strong male when you come to see a gynecologist for answers.” It’s true because very often, I’m working with their wives or their significant other, and they’re like, “You know what, she’s doing great, and I’m falling behind.” or “I see what you’ve done for such and such and such and such, so I want help too.” Men who came into my practice on their own, and it is about that. It is about getting to the underlying, underlying reason why we’re having problems to begin with.
It’s not symptom treatment when you come to my medical office. It’s not symptom treatment. It’s getting to the underlying reason you’re having the symptoms and fixing that, and that’s what’s taken me on this journey, Ashley. I mean, this is really what’s taking me on this journey is that I kept looking for the underlying, underlying reason to what my problems were: my weight gain, my obesity, my depression, my trauma, my infertility, my premature menopause. I mean, just name it. I could probably keep going. I have a long list but I have none of that anymore. Yes, I am infertile because now at age 53, I am finally really menopausal and delivered my last baby at 41.
A lot shifted. A lot’s really shifted as we get to the underlying reason why we’re having these problems to begin with. For me, there was no good solution available. My doctor’s bag was empty. I had to create solutions that worked.
[00:11:20] Ashley James: We did go over your bio in the last interview, but for those who haven’t heard it, you were a doctor and you had health issues, and you were looking around going, “Wait a second. I wasn’t taught how to heal my body. What’s going on? Can you give us a little bit of an insight into the aha moments you had as you began to heal yourself using food, and that’s not something that is taught to doctors.
[00:11:52] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Right, yeah. It’s definitely food has been a part of it. Absolutely. I would say it’s not just about what we eat, and that’s why diets–93% of diets fail, right? Because it’s not just about what we eat, when we eat, where we eat, who we’re eating with, and what we eat ate. All of the things have to do with how we’re going to do, and so true. For me, I was 39 years old. I was running my medical practice, a medical spa. I was a National Health Service Corps scholar, and I practiced here in southeast Georgia—rural area—for payback in a community–a shrimping village–that I had.
As a result of trauma, really, I was plunged into early menopause, and I failed the highest doses of infertility treatments, the highest doses of recommended injectable. I pushed the limit. I trained at Emory University with the best reproductive endocrinologist in the country, in my opinion, and I had no ovarian response. I was 39 years old as an OBGYN, told I would never be able to have another baby again. We were devastated. Then to be diagnosed with early menopause.
I had severe depression. When I got out of bed in the morning, it hurt to put my feet on the floor. I ached. I can remember that. I just ached everywhere. My hair was falling out, just name it. I was basically given the option of antidepressants because of course, I was depressed. That was what was recommended. As well as I was offered egg donation as an option for my infertility. That wasn’t the answer that my husband and I wanted to go with at the time, and it really took me on a journey around the world.
I left my medical practice for a year, I took a sabbatical. An angel, I call her an angel. Dr. Deborah Shepherd came as an answer to a prayer and took over my medical practice for that year enabling me to do this. I had two daughters, one 6 and one 9 or 7 and 10. They’re just turning 7 and 10 at that time. We traveled around the world. I homeschooled them for a year.
[00:14:18] Ashley James: I love it.
[00:14:19] Dr. Anna Cabeca: That was entertaining. I am not the homeschool mom. Right now, kids are home, and I am glad Ava Marie. Homeschooling is not for me. But it took me on a journey around the world to discover all different types of medicine: traditional, Eastern, Western, I spoke with some of the best scientists in the world, and I met some of the most amazing indigenous healers, and none of it was planned. Anyway, none of it was my plan. I’ll say it was God’s plan, but as a result, I reversed my infertility, reversed my early menopause, became pregnant, and delivered a healthy baby girl at age 41. That was the beauty of it.
As a result of trauma, as a result of PTSD, the underlying consequences of PTSD, especially as we enter this perimenopausal stage, I call it a period of neuroendocrine vulnerability. I’ve really dug into this a lot since our last conversation and since writing The Hormone Fix. I’ve really dug into this neuroendocrine vulnerability because more is coming up about it now as we’re starting to image the female brain. There’s some great neuropsychiatrist and brain researchers looking at the female brain, really, for the first time in history, honestly, in the way that it’s needed to be done. We’re finding out some interesting things.
As a result of my PTSD and this trauma, a consequence to that was what I call in my book the cortisol-oxytocin disconnect. In other words, a hormonal disconnect, a burnout. You no longer feel love, you no longer feel connected, you feel isolated and dissociated. It doesn’t matter how many people around you love you. You don’t feel it. As a result, my relationship went through a divorce, and then he had a traumatic brain injury. So then, I was both a single mom and dad to my kids. Then at age 48, I went through the second period of early menopause with the brain fog and I had teenagers. One in elementary school, one in middle school, and one in high school. I had irritability, brain fog. I mean, some of that we can deal with, but the worst part was gaining weight.
I gained 20 pounds. My patients would say, “Without doing anything different?” And when they would tell me that, “I mean, really.” I’d be like, “Really. Really you’re not doing anything different.” Sure, you’re doing something different. No, but it happened to me. Really, I wasn’t doing anything different. I gained 20 pounds overnight, and it’s very fascinating how that happened. That’s what took me into my journey of discovering the keto alkaline, which I now called it my Keto-Green way. Getting my body into ketosis, but adding the alkalinizers on to increase hormone balance, and also using my urine pH as a measure of how well I’m doing because stress creates an acidic urine pH. Too much of an acidic or inflammatory diet creates an acidic urinary pH.
Using that to guide me and to develop this program to really fine-tune the dietary component plus the lifestyle component that improves our physiology. Doing that combination, getting into ketosis on a regular basis through intermittent fasting and low glycemic diet plus healthy fats, as well as, those alkaline components really make a difference. It’s been a fascinating journey, honestly. It really has been fascinating as kind of hacking the midlife physiology.
[00:18:17] Ashley James: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Especially like you said, this is really being studied for the first time. When we look at the history of medicine, women’s health and women’s brain health has not been explored, especially the way that they’re exploring it now. So this is very, very exciting. Urine pH test strips. There’s a brand I love. I can’t remember the name, but I’ll link it in the show notes. Do you sell them, or do you have a brand that you love? The ones that I get, you can use to test your saliva and your urine.
[00:18:54] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Okay. I’ve got one better for you because urine pH really makes a difference. I actually created urine pH test strips with ketone pads on them. They’re called the Keto-pH Test Strips. I’ll give you a link to those. We want to check the urine. Salivary is good and it’s interesting to check too. It will also relate to what you eat, but urine is kind of, “Okay, what’s the end product? At the end of this moment, what’s the result here?” You can fine-tune your day based on your urine pH. Say, for example, you check your urine pH in the morning. Now, I want that to be alkaline, but what’s very interesting, the more you push your body into ketosis after periods of fasting, for instance, you’re going to be acidic, so you really have to balance up the alkalinizers and the practices that increase the alkalinity.
I’ll share a story with you. Urine pH testing and urine testing for ketones, Let me tell you, urine is another vital sign. Urine pH testing is absolutely another vital sign. As we are exposed to a lot of stressful thoughts and situations right now, I think it’s more important than ever to be checking urine pH—more important than ever to be checking urine pH because that really helps us fine-tune what we’re doing and even our thoughts. I was just on a consult call with a client of mine. She lives up in Rhode Island, and she said over the last week, she was doing everything. She was really trying to get alkaline, and the news every night, and she was feeling stressed, and she goes, “Well then, we had a virtual Skype birthday party with my two-year-old grandbaby. With my next urination, I couldn’t wait to check, and lo and behold I was so alkaline. I was so alkaline.” She knows. Oxytocin shifts your pH, shifts your physiology.
We have focused so much on the wrong things. We focused just on the wrong things. We would ask, “Why would this healthy eater, this vegetarian, or this vegan, or this really healthy athlete, and very conscientious about nutrition, why would she get cancer? Why would she get inflammation? Why would she be struggling with this or autoimmune disease?” Really, it’s more than about what we eat. Figuring out what our physiology is, I love it. It’s like getting your Nancy Drew on and you’re just discovering. Okay. “Well, when I interact with so-and-so I’m acidic right away.” I mean I can tell you, I could have told you that, but having my urine pH prove it to me, that’s pretty fun.
[00:21:40] Ashley James: That is so funny. I was just watching a TV show where a police officer was wearing a Fitbit-like thing that monitored his stress levels. Every time a sergeant walked up to him it’d start beeping. It’s funny to think that we could measure our stress levels in such an easy way, such an easy way every time you urinate. I was going to ask when’s the best time you test, but through your story, you’re sharing you could test anytime throughout the day. Should we, as an experiment, test every time we pee, or only in the mornings, or what’s the best way to go about testing our pH to balance as good feedback?
[00:22:33] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Yeah, all throughout the day. It’s so fun to do, honestly. I know it sounds terrible, and most of my clients, when I run my programs, are like, “Oh, do I really have to?” I’m like, “Yes, yes. You have to, and I promise you, you will love doing it at the end.” This client, she’s been with me for three years, she’s like, “Oh my God. I couldn’t wait to test my urine pH.” I knew that. I felt so much better. That’s the beauty of it. With my urine pH test strip, there’s 100 in a container, there’s 50 in a separate foil so they stay fresh because humidity and light affects them. It’s inexpensive. It’s like $12 or $13 for 100 tests.
Check at least three to four times a day especially getting started. Your first pee in the morning, I’d love for everyone to wake up with a urine pH of seven. I would love that. That just makes me happy just thinking about everyone waking up with a urine pH of 7. An alkaline urine pH is more associated with healthier bones, decreased risk of inflammatory conditions like diabetes, metabolic syndrome, heart disease, and cancer. If we can monitor this, again, because it’s not just about what we eat, it’s how we manage stress. Also, Ashley, what’s really fascinating is I have a terrible dairy sensitivity. I discovered all this as I figured stuff out. Let me step back a second and tell you how I recognized that cortisol in my urine pH, I mean, I never learned that.
[00:23:59] Ashley James: In medical school, this is something they don’t teach?
[00:24:02] Dr. Anna Cabeca: No, I didn’t. No, I never learned that. We look at urine for ketones. There’s a pH pad on our urine test strips, like our 11-count urine test strips, but we’re looking at ketones. That’s on there too, but typically, we’re looking for white blood cells and nitrites for a urine infection or bilirubin in our urine. There are a few different things that we look at in our urine. It’s like, “Okay, well you’re not too far on this side and you’re not too far on this side. I guess it’s not a flag.”
When I started really recognizing that when I get into ketosis through my ketogenic diet, I was getting inflamed, and irritated, and kind of angry, and cranky. I called it going keto crazy. That’s where I recognized, “Okay, I’m just too acidic.” Check my urine pH. It was as acidic as the urine pH paper would read. That’s when I’m like, “Okay, add in the alkalinizers like kale, kale soup, collard, collard greens, chard, Swiss chard, and also beet greens, not the beets, but the beet greens.” I’ve got some great recipes in my books for those. Very alkalinizing and so mineral-rich, and I kept piling those into my diet until I would start to see some alkalinity, and as well adding apple cider vinegar, and increasing my Mighty Maca Plus, and incorporating some additional herbs and spices to help with alkalinity as well.
Then the mornings I walked on the beach, I was more likely to be alkaline all day. I started to test that, and certainly, the mornings I take my gratitude journaling, the mornings I walked on the beach, the more alkaline all day. The mornings I woke up late, and hurried, and rushed my kids off to the school bus, and ended up driving them to school because I missed the bus with them, certainly, much more acidic all day. That was a big aha moment for me. Even when I was thinking. “Oh my god. I have the stressful situation that I have to address at the office or in my personal life,” that created more acidic urine pH.
As I started discovering this in myself, and treating, and coaching other women to discover this for them also. Find out what makes them more alkaline, what makes them more acidic, and we just started doing this. I’ve been doing this for six years now. Food sensitivities, I can tell right away if I’ve been given something with dairy. I’m incredibly dairy sensitive, so for example, a pesto sauce has some parmesan in it, I will be acidic the next morning. That sensitive. It can help us figure out that food sensitivity too, the inflammation. At least that’s what I’ve been playing with that because I haven’t read that anywhere. It’s pretty interesting.
[00:26:55] Ashley James: Are there ever times when our urine should be acidic? Like, “Oh, that’s a good thing it’s acidic.” Because it means that it’s getting rid of something.
[00:27:07] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Definitely after our workouts. Lactic acid is secreted in our blood, certainly, and we’ll become more acidic. When we’re dehydrated we’re more acidic. Definitely, after an intensive workout, we’re more acidic and you’ll see that.
[00:27:21] Ashley James: Any other times other than that? That’s good to know about dehydration because I think that the majority of people walking around are dehydrated and they don’t know it. That’s good to know. If they can’t dial in their pH urine, maybe try increasing their water intake after a workout. Are there ever any other times in which we would expect or we would want to see a urine pH that is acidic?
[00:27:55] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Not that we’d want to see it acidic, not that I can think of.
[00:28:03] Ashley James: When we’re first entering ketosis, or when we’re fasting, or when we’re burning fat, all of that?
[00:28:12] Dr. Anna Cabeca: We don’t want to see it. We really want to see it more alkaline, but we will definitely. This is something my community has Q’d me in on. All of them was get alkaline first, then push into ketosis. Many women, once they’re in ketosis, have a really hard time regaining that alkalinity, but the combination is powerful. The combination is so powerful, so certainly, when we’re fasting, we’re going to be acidic. Don’t stress about it, but if you can hydrate more, add some minerals to your water, anything that we can do to nourish our bodies while we’re fasting, that’s awesome. I’ve also done some dry fast. Very acidic during those for sure.
[00:28:51] Ashley James: Can you explain the biochemistry of what it means to be alkaline or acidic in our pH? What is present to make it acidic, or what’s the body not doing well? Is it too much hydrogen? Not enough carbon? What’s going on that’s causing acidity?
[00:29:13] Dr. Anna Cabeca: This is very interesting. When I’m looking at urine pH, because we’re not talking about blood pH when we’re talking about acidity and alkalinity, at least I’m not. Sometimes you’ll hear the alkaline myth, “It doesn’t matter, your blood pH stays stable no matter what.” It does, for the most part, unless you’re really sick. If I had a client coming into my emergency room and they were really sick. I would put a needle in their radial artery, not the vein, the artery, and draw it on arterial blood gas. Now, we’re going to measure that pH, and that pH has to be so close to 7.4. It’s just slightly alkaline, and if it’s a little high, a little low, that person’s really sick.
Most commonly, they’re coming in acidotic. In that case, the first thing we do, we’ll give them IV bicarb. We’re going to give them something like baking soda, not IV, but we give them bicarbonate IV to alkalinize them. We’re going to get them an alkalinizer like baking soda is very alkaline. Half a teaspoon of baking soda in some water, drink that down, you’ll have some alkaline urine pH. There’s that shift on physiology, but our blood pH is going to stay really stable. How does it stay really stable? It robs Peter to pay Paul, so if we’re fasting, we’re going to get our minerals from our bone, from our muscle, from ourselves. We’re going to rob Peter to pay Paul essentially to keep that blood pH super stable.
Consider the urine like a thermometer is telling you, “A little bit cold, a little bit hot. Okay. You’re too cold. Let’s warm you up a little bit. Let’s get more alkaline.” When we’re looking at this across the kidneys, when we are stressed, cortisol increases hydrogen ion secretion across the renal tubules, so we see that as a more acidic urine pH—power of hydrogen. We’ll see that. We’ll see that. When we’re more inflamed, more malnourished, or eating very high sugar inflammatory foods, also when we have high glucose, we’re also going to push out cortisol, so we’ll see more of an acidic urine pH. It really has to do with the ions across the cell membranes. I mean, sodium, potassium, chloride, magnesium. I mean, we look at all the different minerals going across the cell membranes as well.
Looking at that from, again, the underlying, underlying reason why we’re not feeling good, we always go back to the cellular level. That’s how it guides us. The physiology guides us.
[00:32:12] Ashley James: Interesting what you said about baking soda. Is it because we’re deficient in something that baking soda provides? Like we’re having a deficiency in sodium? Does it mop up something? I mean, is this something we should all be supplementing with, or is it just a stopgap, and what we really need to do is eat greens because they’re so alkalizing?
[00:32:39] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Really, we should eat more greens because they’re alkalinizing and give us fiber, but bicarb for a short term anyway, what bicarb does it just helps with the alkalization. The abbreviation for bicarb is HCO3, not that that really matters, but it’s a byproduct of our metabolism. It’s more alkalinizing to our body. Not 100% sure how that works with sodium, and potassium, and chloride—the other electrolytes—but it does help with the pH balance. Our body will produce it naturally. The body will make bicarb as a byproduct or basically carbon dioxide. It’s essentially a form of CO2 gas. When we look at the cell exchange, the membrane exchange, you have sodium, potassium, chloride exchanging over the membrane. When we take sodium bicarb orally, we’re giving this alkalinizer, these highly-charged alkaline molecules, essentially, that quickly we’ll see that by-product in our urine.
[00:33:58] Ashley James: Did you have an aha moment around testing urine pH? How did you come across that piece of information? Because you must have started testing yourself first, right?
[00:34:12] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. So just in studying functional medicine from early 2000, one of the things that we’ve learned when we’re detoxing our bodies, eating more alkaline foods like our tenet is 80% alkaline, 20% acidic, really want to look and check your urine pH so that it’s alkaline. So there, it was all about food. That’s when I really had pushed that with my clients and my patients as part of our detox regimen in hormone balancing. But now, here I was, gaining that weight at age 48. What I used to do wasn’t working any longer. That’s when I went strictly ketogenic, but at that point, I had stopped testing myself because I’ve been pretty much on a healthy regimen for a while.
During that time, I was like, “I’m feeling crazy, keto crazy. Why is keto not feeling good like it does for my male counterparts?” That’s when I just said, “Okay, well let me just check my urine and see what’s going on.” I mean it makes sense that I’d be a little bit more acidic, but not as acidic as I was. The aha was that once I really pushed those alkalinizers on board, and I was alkaline and in ketosis, or how I had an alkaline urine pH and in ketosis at the same time, and I felt so much better. I had the clarity, I felt energized. I call it energized enlightenment. I felt peace. I told you I had three kids in three different schools, and yet, nothing in my external environment changed, but I felt peace. I was able to respond instead of react. I was at home in my body again, and the weight just came off.
[00:35:50] Ashley James: You knew you were on to something.
[00:35:56] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Yes, yes. I knew I was on to something. When I discovered that for myself, that’s when I brought in some of my most difficult patients/friends that were part of my medical practice and my community. I brought them in, I said, “Once a week for eight weeks this is what you’re going to do. Exactly what I’ve been doing. You’re going to get keto green. You’re going to follow this.” I wrote out a menu plan, I created a regimen, gave them a checklist—a to-do list, made them do questionnaires. I put all of that in my book, The Hormone Fix, and like, “You’re going to do this with me. You’re going to do bone broth in between for some evenings,” I made this whole regimen.
That’s basically my plan in The Hormone Fix. Every one of them felt better. Everyone who had been at a metabolic stall lost that stubborn weight and just, again, symptom scores dropped by—gosh, in that group—over 70% to 80% within a few weeks. That’s what’s really beautiful, and that’s what we see. What we’ve seen now with Keto-Green 16 in the 16-day intense plan that I’ve created, again, it’s work, it’s a discipline and a practice, but it definitely works. We’ve seen as much as a 90% decrease in symptom scores in 16 days. We’ve seen some really beautiful stuff.
[00:37:11] Ashley James: Have you published any of these, or are you planning on doing clinical studies, or getting it out there to the scientific community?
[00:37:22] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Yes, definitely. I’ve written about a couple of the studies in my book Keto-Green 16, and we will be publishing some of these clinical trials that we’ve been doing. So my Keto-Green 16, we have a pilot clinic near the University of Gainesville in Florida, Dr. Angeli Akey’s clinic. She’s been running group medical visits for the 16-day plan for my Keto-Green 16 plan. We were playing with it as I was making the menus and recipes. I couldn’t give the recipes from the book, of course, so I had approval from the publisher and had some Galley copies to use.
We finally have been able to do that, but even with the rough guidelines, we’ve had amazing success. With Keto-Green 16, another group is running through it right now. We’re gathering results, gathering research. We’ve seen an improvement in diastolic blood pressures, improvement in resting pulse rate, and again, up to 90% improvement in symptoms, and definitely an improvement in hemoglobin A1cs. We are going to publish this data when I have time. We’re getting, ideally, some interns or residents to eventually help me with the research.
[00:38:48] Ashley James: Cool. If there are any listeners out there that this is their specialty, then contact Dr. Anna. We got to get you some more interns, some more residents so we can get this out there.
[00:39:03] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Definitely. There are residents who have a requirement like we did at Emory to do research, so I welcome it. I definitely would like someone to write up this stuff.
[00:39:13] Ashley James: Very cool. So you picked number 16, why is that: 16 days, 16 food, 16-minute exercise? Is there any science behind it? What’s up with the number 16?
[00:39:33] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Definitely. And 16-hour intermittent fasting. The number 16, in general, is a good number. There are not many 16-day plans. I actually don’t know of any other 16-day plans out there, so that makes it new. A colleague of mine just said, “You know what, if you’re used to doing 10-day plans, you’re used to doing for two weeks or 21 days, having a different number really is like, ‘Okay, this is new. I can commit to this. This is something that’s different.’” I didn’t even realize that until recently, but the number 16 is about beginnings. About beginnings and completing/finishing. Also 16, sweet 16, it’s just a beautiful number. There has been research that showed within 16 days, we can really see some scientific results, some good scientific results. As well as 16-hour intermittent fasting. That’s part of the 16 plan, so 16-hour intermittent fasting. Ideally, between dinner, the night before, eaten by 6:00 PM or 7:00 PM and breaking fast 16-hours later with a Keto-Green meal, typically between 10:00 AM or 11:00 AM.
[00:40:39] Ashley James: That’s totally doable. That’s very easy. I’ve done the one meal a day intermittent fasting. I’ve done water-only fasting. I’ve done where you just have breakfast then you have dinner, playing around with it, but just basically having dinner that’s between 6:00 PM & 7:00 PM and then not eating until 10:00 PM or 11:00 PM. I think some people do that by accident, so that’s pretty easy. Should people not do something more intense? Is there a reason for that, or is this a minimum like 16-hour intermittent fasting minimum? But could people do 20-hour, 22-hour if they wanted to do one meal a day, or do you see evidence to suggest we shouldn’t do that?
[00:41:27] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Well, I think that in general, if you’re a type 1 diabetic on insulin or a type 2 diabetic that’s poorly controlled, you need to be under your doctor’s supervision to do this, and if you’re pregnant, or breastfeeding. Although, I definitely have taken care of many moms that inadvertently were hyperemesis that fasted for extended periods of time, so healthy, healthy babies. But we can’t recommend that, so I would say not without your doctor’s guidance. Each of us is different. So if you have issues, but the person is like, “Oh, I have to eat very often, very frequently because I get low blood sugar.” I address that in the book. We can definitely get you intermittent fasting. It’s about blood sugar stabilization.
Ashley, what’s really fascinating and fun is that as part of creating the recipes for Keto-Green 16, I discovered and started using over a year ago the FreeStyle Libre, which is a 14-day blood sugar monitor. It’s a sensor that goes in your arm. It’s technically only for diabetics, but any doctor can prescribe it for you. It goes in your arm. It just taps in. It’s just a filament that’s in there. There’s no needle in your arm or anything just in your triceps area. It stays in there for 14 days and reads your blood sugar—essentially interstitial sugar levels, glucose levels—around the clock. As I created the meals, as I worked with intermittent fasting, as I pushed the limits, created the combinations of food so that it doesn’t spike your blood sugar at all.
What that means, you’re not going to get a peak in blood sugar, and you’re not going to get that deep valley—that low blood sugar that’s causing the hypoglycemic reaction because the meals are really well-balanced. Then I teach those principles too like combine your healthy fat, good high-quality protein, and lots of greens, and low carbohydrate greens, so that you get good fiber in there, which also helps with blood sugar stability.
[00:43:36] Ashley James: I love it. I interviewed Dr. William Davis, the author of Wheat Belly. He’s a cardiologist that believes the key to healing the heart and preventing heart disease is balancing blood sugar. He said in our interview that 100% of the adult population should own a glucometer. It shouldn’t be an issue of whether you’re diabetic or not. We should all use a glucometer an hour or two after each meal to see, “Was that a good meal for me or not? Is my body responding well to that or not?” And to use it as a guide just like you’re talking about using pH as a guide, also using a glucometer as a guide.
You’re saying, we can wear one if we get our doctor to prescribe it, we can wear one for 14 days. That would be fantastic if we wrote everything down that we ate, did a food mood journal, write down our sleep, our stress, our water intake, and our food, and how we feel throughout the day emotionally and also physically. Then look at what the monitor says, and go. “Oh, those times I’m stressed. What’s my pH urine doing? What’s my blood glucose doing? Oh, those times I didn’t get enough sleep. Wow. That really affected my blood glucose. Oh, the times that I ate,” like you said, “the parmesan in the pasta. It’s amazing when I eat pasta without parmesan versus with parmesan how much does that make a difference.”
Just dialing it in and figuring out that our blood sugar can be affected by more than just eating a doughnut. It could be affected by stress, sleep, and food sensitivities. Also, some people can’t handle grains, some people can’t handle whole grains. Some people can’t handle legumes or beans, some people can. Some people do better on the green keto, and they’ll see that, they’ll see that in the numbers. That feedback that you get when you see, like you said, your urine pH go up, your urine pH go to a healthy alkaline level, and your blood sugar blood glucose go to a healthy level. That’s the feedback that allows us to say, “Hey, it is really working.”
I feel as though many women who’ve dieted many times have a distrust of their body, and it’s like the mindset. Even though, let’s say, they buy your book, which we can pre-order right now. Keto-Green 16, we can pre-order it. I know it’s going to be out on audible, I’m excited for that. You’re recording it, it’s going to be your voice, which is super exciting, just like your last book. But I feel like women and men who have been on many diets don’t trust their body especially if they’re in their 30s and 40s and they’re premenopausal, we feel like our bodies have betrayed us.
I’ve met a lot of people, I myself have been through this. The mindset, having to heal the mindset around my body, but the feeling that our body’s betraying us, or the little voice in the back of your head says, “You know, this works for other people but it’s not going to work for me.” We could be on the diet for a few days, let’s say the Keto-Green 16 diet. We could be on it for a few days, and that little voice is going, “It’s not going to work for me, it’s going to work for other people.” But then to get the external results of watching blood glucose normalize, of watching pH come into a healthy level. The little tests that we can do at home would help to affirm that we’re on the right path.
If they’re going in the wrong direction, then we can go, “Okay, there’s something here to uncover,” like you said, like Nancy Drew. There’s something here to uncover, and figure out, and decipher about my health, but it’s giving us extra feedback externally that will allow us to dial in our health. Are there any other tests at home that we could do to help us see that we’re on the right path? Maybe something we could journal or something we could see that goes, “Oh, yes. I know this is working for me. I know I’m gaining health because of these results.”
[00:48:13] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Yeah, absolutely. I definitely have loved wearing the 14-day monitor. Anyway, we can just check finger sticks of blood sugar too. That’s helpful as well. But it was really another interesting point, before we leave, the monitor. What I didn’t know was that when I did my boxing, my high-intensity boxing workouts, and they’re an hour and a half or so, that my blood sugar would go up to 150, it went 200, and that’s fasting because I’ll eat after my workouts. So that blew my mind. Because I check urine pH and ketones, I check with my Keto-pH urine test strips, I was like, “After this great workout, why am I not in ketosis? Certainly, I’m definitely acidic. Why am I not in ketosis after I’ve just worked out so hard? Surely I’m using fats at this point, right? Especially I was in ketosis before I went.”
That blew my mind to see, “Oh, yeah. That makes sense though because our muscles release glycogen so that we have glycogen for fuel and for energy during our workouts.” I thought that our body’s so brilliant, so that was beautiful to see and a surprise for me, but it absolutely makes sense. I wouldn’t have realized that unless I was wearing my 24-hour monitor. That was fun. Then, of course, urine pH and ketone testing because if we’re not testing we’re guessing, and that’s a really big thing too. Just things, observation like observing, doing your weight. As much as we don’t like to, I encourage people in the 16-day plan, do weights day because sometimes we eat a food sensitivity, and that’s going to make us heavier despite doing everything right, and we have to decipher that for ourselves.
[00:50:03] Ashley James: If you all of a sudden gained 5 pounds in 24 hours, that’s not fat, it’s inflammation and water. I use the scale every day because I’ve caught foods that all of a sudden I’m five pounds more or seven pounds more, I’m like “Well, that’s water.” Then I cut out that food, three days later it’s all gone. I know that I had to put that on the list of the foods that my body doesn’t tolerate. So it’s really interesting. We have to make sure that we’re emotionally—I don’t know. We don’t want to get triggered because I feel like some people, whatever the scale says, they’ll end up doing some self-harm like going off their diet completely, or bingeing, or anorexia—starving themselves, or depriving themselves.
We have to understand that the scale is feedback not for fat because women lose weight very slowly. A quarter-pound a week, half a pound a week, if you’re like really, really trying, that’s fat. If you start losing pounds, that’s water and inflammation. If you start gaining pounds very quickly, that’s likely water and inflammation. I mean, it could be other things like constipation, but we just need to understand that if it goes up really fast or down really fast, it’s probably either dehydration, or losing inflammation, or gaining inflammation. We have to check in with ourselves emotionally to make sure that we don’t take the numbers on the scale and then do self-harm as a result.
[00:51:56] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Right. The numbers on the scale should not determine our mood.
[00:51:59] Ashley James: Right, or our behavior. We should use it to correct behavior in a positive way, but not in a self-harm way.
[00:52:10] Dr. Anna Cabeca: I agree. It’s information-gathering. So, definitely, I have clients that are like, “Nope, I’ll never use the scale. I just feel how my clothes fit, how my rings fit,” and that’s perfect too. That’s absolutely perfect too. If you know the scale’s a trigger, don’t use it, but I want you to be observant. I want you to discover what works for you, and what doesn’t work for you. The same thing with how hydrated are you. When you use the bathroom, is your urine clear? That’s just a simple look. Look and see. When you’re having bowel movements, do they look like dark brown bananas? That’s a good thing. That’s what we want, okay. That’s good. Little self-assessments like that are really beneficial. And our energy level.
In my books, in The Hormone Fix, I have questionnaires for medical symptoms, toxicity questionnaire, hormone symptom questionnaire, and a checklist on a daily basis. I have clients start out with choosing and saying their cheer word—a word that makes them smile when they think about it and say it. That’s a cheer word. I have them do gratitude journal on this checklist, what are you grateful for? Write it down. Then check your pH, check your urine ketones. Have you done your alkalinizing drink? What movement have you had? Bowel movement and physical movement.
Those factors that help guide us through making sure I’m doing the best I can do for me during a day, and I know when I get away from doing that. I’ve created this checklist years ago now, but when I get away from doing it on a regular basis, like now with kind of all this stuff over the last couple weeks, it does make a difference. I’m like, “Yeah, I got to go back to doing my checklist.” How many hours am I sleeping at night? How much water am I drinking? Movement every day and just checking in with myself in this way. That’s helpful. That’s been really helpful for me for sure.
[00:54:16] Ashley James: What’s the relationship between insulin, and cortisol, and our other hormones that we need to be aware of? Many people say, “Well, I’m not diabetic,” but insulin, even if we’re not diabetic, or pre-diabetic, or have metabolic syndrome, insulin still is a hormone that we want to keep in balance. Could you explain cortisol? For those who don’t know what cortisol is, could you just explain insulin and cortisol, and the relationship between those two, and how they affect the rest of our hormones?
[00:57:46] Ashley James: You’re not lying. This is exactly what happens. I can’t tell you how many people, and I’ve been doing health coaching for several years, and how many clients have told me that their numbers continue to get worse year after year, and their MD said, “Come back next year, you’ll be diabetic then, and then we’ll get you on XYZ drug. But you’re borderline right now.” None of them were given guidance besides, “Well, maybe see a dietitian,” and the dietitian told them like what they can and can’t eat at McDonald’s. I mean, it was just ridiculous the ignorance, and it’s focused on the system.
The system is focused on wait to get sick and then get on a drug. If your blood numbers, if your lab results are moving in the wrong direction but you aren’t sick enough to get on a drug, they have nothing for you. They have no resources for you because they’re not trained in medical school how to correct the body. These diseases are caused by our diet. Why are doctors not trained in this? It drives me up the wall. The majority of deaths and diseases in the United States are caused by diet. Why are we waiting to get sick, and then throwing drugs at the problem when the problem is the diet.
So I love that you’re teaching us how to correct the problem with a healing diet and then how to monitor our own health. Of course, see a doctor, see a great physician, see a functional medicine practitioner, or Naturopaths. You see a doctor that actually has dedicated their life to studying how food affects the body. We should all have a doctor like that and use food to heal the body and use the pH test strips and the glucometers so that we can dial in our health.
I love that when we’re in our 50s, be like you. Your body thinks you’re 30. You’ve got wonderful A1c hemoglobin levels. Now, does this way of eating, this very cleansing way of eating, does it also increase insulin sensitivity? See this is the question, I’ve heard from some experts that if you eat a diet with oils and high fat that you don’t increase insulin sensitivity. I’d love for your input. Have you seen that people on your protocol get insulin sensitivity? You can see it in labs, and then if they were to go back to eating, I’m not saying eating the standard American diet, but if they were to go back to eating let’s say potatoes, or brown rice, or they incorporate some more carbohydrates, does their blood sugar spike up again, or do you see that they have achieved insulin sensitivity and so they’re more balanced?
So our body is designed for that, and the more insulin resistant we are, the more hot flashes we have, the more problems we have with diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease. The more likely we have inflammation, aches and pains, and lower quality of life. That’s the more insulin resistant. Hot flash is a big, big issue in these clients. What we’ll see very quickly as we shift to be more insulin sensitive through intermittent fasting and no more snacking, there’s none of these three meals, three snacks. That is just not a care. Eight-hour feeding windows, or even four-hour feeding windows. I’m like, “No, no. We don’t do that.”
We break fast and then we don’t eat again until our next meal, and no snacking. We hydrate in between because if we’re drinking all our fluids we’re supposed to be with our meals, we’re diluting our digestive enzyme that’s meant to break down the food. I mean, that’s just pure chemistry. We’re also flushing through partially digested food is one of the reasons why probably many people have [sebum 01:02:50]. So free refills with your meals, that’s destructive. I absolutely see an improvement in insulin sensitivity with my Keto-Green plan 100%, and even with myself because I have been traveling.
Came back from Portland the other day, I was wearing my monitor still as I’m playing with some feasting recipes. I wanted some dark chocolate, didn’t have any, but I had some dates in the house. I had five or six dates, which typically, three is my limit because that’s like my full carb count on three dates, but I had six dates. My blood sugar went up to 200, no lie, but it was only up there like for not even a few minutes. My interstitial glucose went up to around 180 or 200. I was shocked. I was like that was just six dates, but it was right back down again. I mean, insulin did the job it needed to do. I was pretty [inaudible 01:03:46] to see that. I was like, “Darn, darn.”
[01:03:49] Ashley James: No, that’s good. That’s actually great. That’s what your body’s supposed to do.
[01:03:55] Dr. Anna Cabeca: That information it’s exactly what it supposed to do, yes. No low either. It didn’t go way low to get that hypoglycemic as if I’d had simple carbs.
[01:04:04] Ashley James: Yeah. You ate five or five or six dates. They’re very, very high in sugar, but the sugar’s natural. It’s a fruit. It’s very concentrated. It’s like a superfood, but you don’t want to do it too excess. Every time I see dates in the store I’m like, “If I buy them we’re probably going to binge them.” They’re so good.
[01:04:26] Dr. Anna Cabeca: So bad. [Inaudible]… in baking.
[01:04:29] Ashley James: What I think I’m going to do the next time I buy dates is I’ll prepackage them in little reusable Ziploc bags. I’ll go, “Okay, here’s three at a time,” or something. Because you grab a bag of dates and then all of a sudden you realize you ate 10. They’re very sweet. With dates though it caused your blood sugar to go up, and then you saw it immediately go back down, and that means you have insulin sensitivity. Because insulin resistance means it stays high for a really long period of time, and that’s what causes the damage. This is my understanding, and please feel free to add more information.
That the longer we have high sugar, as the sugars high, so you’re sure was high for a very short period of time, and then it got back. It got into the cell because the insulin brought it into the cells. It left the bloodstream, and then your cells were able to turn it to energy, and that’s exactly what they’re supposed to do, but if the insulin receptors are not working correctly with insulin, then the blood sugar stays outside of the cell. So the cells are starving and we are having high blood sugar for a longer period of time in the blood on the outside, and that causes inflammation and damage to the cardiovascular system and to our brain, which is what Dr. Ayman is seeing.
That high blood sugar is causing dementia and causing basically holes in the brain, in the cardiovascular system of the brain. The culprit is the insulin resistance, and of course, the bad diet, which causes it. But you’re seeing that your Keto-Green way is balancing insulin sensitivity, bringing back insulin sensitivity, and balancing blood sugar, and it’s also affecting the cortisol and the oxytocin. I’d love to hear more about what you’re seeing in these hormones as they’re balancing.
[01:06:35] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Yeah, well I agree with you 100%. A big part on blood sugar in the brain, which is so eye-opening to me, is that gluconeogenesis and the brain, ability for the brain to use glucose for fuel, is an estrogen-dependent phenomenon. So as our hormones start to decline, especially progesterone—when progesterone starts to decline and now in this time of stress high cortisol, I mean progesterone is needed to make cortisol. It’s also higher up on the food chain, so to speak than estrogen and testosterone. So as our body is pushing to make our stress hormones, we’re also depleting our reproductive hormones even more.
In the case of estrogen needed to be on board for gluconeogenesis in the brain, the brain fog, the dementia, the memory loss, the some timers—my patients would sometimes call it some timers. “I have some timers, Dr. Anna. What should I do?” I had experienced that, but ketones are not estrogen-dependent, so that is why getting Keto-Green is really mandatory for really every woman over 40, and periodically. We bump into ketosis and then we have a couple of feast days and we bump out. We want that metabolic flexibility, that’s just part of life and living. That’s okay, but we need to use ketones for fueling the brain to eliminate that starvation mode despite having an abundance of glucose, which is they are causing damage and oxidation.
[01:08:08] Ashley James: Now, could we get the same results if we ate, let’s say, a whole food plant-based diet where we were eating 9-12 cups of a variety of vegetables a day, and then doing intermittent fasting or water only fasting three days a week or something where our body’s going into ketosis because we’re not eating for three days, or eating very, very little like drinking broth or something. Our body goes into ketosis naturally because we’re fasting, and then we come out of it, and we eat lots and lots of vegetables. Instead of eating high fat, could we get the same results by eating plants, and then fasting, and going back and forth between the two, or is there something magic in eating high fat as well?
[01:09:03] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Really, we need the flexibility, Ashley. In my program, I encourage extended fasting as well. I’m absolutely encouraging it because we want our body to make its ketones, not just from the fat we’re eating. We want to encourage that, and there’s a place for fasting. Before I make a major decision, I fast for three days. I make sure I’m Keto-Green for sure, but I’ll certainly do an extended fasting, and that makes a difference in our lives. It really does, especially the older we get. We get that clarity, we really get that alertness, and really, if we’re doing it right, we are even more energized. I have in Keto-Green 16 because I have a lot of clients, for personal reasons, they’re vegans or vegetarians. I don’t judge.
I created a plan to help them get Keto-Green and be a vegetarian or vegan. I want them to have enough protein, enough healthy fats, and to incorporate principles so that they can experience the same benefits. Because of this whole inflammatory factor, many of my vegetarian clients breathing way too many carbohydrates, and their hemoglobin A1cs were unacceptable. In this way, through lifestyle, through intermittent fasting, through low carbohydrate protein sources, increasing healthy fats, and spacing the meals, that helps them improve insulin sensitivity. Certainly, with my plant-based eaters, extended fasting is very doable and desirable as well. For me too, at least once a month, I’m doing three days of fasting.
[01:10:54] Ashley James: I love it. I think I shared this in our last interview, but for those that didn’t hear it, I had a very interesting experience with the ketogenic diet. I feel like I eating way healthier than the dirty keto, but I wasn’t eating as clean as the Keto-Green. We were eating vegetables like kale, but I feel like we were eating more meat. It felt almost close to an Atkins diet, which I think a lot of people accidentally do. When they’re trying to achieve Keto, they end up going Atkins. It’s not about the 24-ounce steak on your plate with some butter. That’s not ketogenic. It was doctor-led.
We, my husband and I, did it for three months. Weekly meeting with a Naturopath, testing our blood ketones and testing everything and our blood sugar. Every week we’d adjust the diet based on what our results were, and she also would hook us up to this machine that would test to make sure that we’re not losing muscle mass. Then we had our labs done. My husband had kidney damage so bad he had to be put on two medications. My liver became so inflamed that I went for an ultrasound, and they said my liver was very inflamed. All my liver enzymes were through the roof. My doctor said that if it didn’t start to go down she wanted me to get a liver biopsy. It was really scary to see that a diet, which was doctor-led, could cause so much damage.
It took us over a year to get my husband healthy enough, to heal his kidneys so that he could get off of those two medications. I did a lot of work to heal my liver. It took me a while. It made me shy of the ketogenic diet. Looking at it, I see, “Okay, yeah. You know what, it was probably more meat and definitely not enough vegetables.” I feel like you’re diet, Keto-Green, there should be a different name for it. We could disassociate your diet from the Atkins, keto dirty diet that a lot of people out there are doing.
Now, my husband and I were not doing cheese because both of us are dairy sensitive. But we were doing a lot of bacon, a lot of ghee. We were doing a lot of nuts, and a lot of coconut oil, and a little bit of kale, and a lot of bulletproof coffee—a ton of bulletproof coffee. Very acidic foods besides the kale, very acidic. I’m sure if we had tested our pH, which man that was missing. Because if we had tested our pH, we would have seen early on, “Hey, something is unhealthy here.” We might have been able to course-correct and not do that damage.
I want to share my experience to help the listeners know that just any keto diet is not okay. That there’s a significant risk if you do the dirty keto or Atkins. Have you seen this in your clinic? Have you seen people have really unhealthy results from a keto diet that isn’t your version, which is incredibly alkalizing?
[01:14:48] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Yeah, absolutely. I hear from clients all the time that, “I tried keto before, and I hit a wall. I tried keto before, I didn’t feel good.” I mean that’s what it was for me, I didn’t feel good. The inflammatory markers can definitely increase in keto. There is a right way and a wrong way to do it, and that’s how it is. Especially men have 10 times as much testosterone as women. That’s very protective. We are more fragile when it comes to this, so we have that alkaline piece. I can’t emphasize it enough. Plus the choice of foods, the menus, the recipes. In Keto-Green 16, 16 key ingredient types for hormone balancing, for good protein sources, for digestion, and just name it.
It’s really designed to be very balanced, healthy, and get results at the same time. Absolutely. There are women who all have had so many significant problems. In fact, I just had this testimonial that came in today, let me see if I can find it real quick, that was from one of my clients in my Magic Menopause program. I have a 10-day Breeze Through Menopause program. She said, “I’ve been having hot flashes for three years. My OB-GYN put me on a medication normally used to treat depression but was also known to help hot flashes. The medication helped ease the intensity but not get rid of them. I decided to try the Breeze Through Menopause program. On my fourth day, I noticed I didn’t have any hot flashes. I was so excited but thought it was a fluke. I completed the program one month ago, and I followed The Hormone Fix. I have not had a hot flash since. Doing regular keto made me feel terrible, but your way just made the difference,” Donna.
[01:16:43] Ashley James: I just wish there was a different name. We need to erase dirty keto from our mind and Atkins, just erase it.
[01:16:58] Dr. Anna Cabeca: When we’re talking about ketogenic it’s the creation of ketones, but when we think of a ketogenic diet—high-fat, bacon, and butter—we think about that keto dirty diet. But getting our body into ketosis gives us so many benefits, it really does. A high energy source. We’ll have to come up with another name. For now, it’s Keto-Green, Keto-Green 16.
[01:17:25] Ashley James: I love it. I love it. Can you tell us some of the 16 foods that are in the Keto-Green 16 book?
[01:17:32] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Yes. Certainly healthy meats like grass-fed beef and bison, wild-caught fish like salmon or a white fish. Those are great choices. Avocado gets its own category. I just think it’s so great.
[01:17:46] Ashley James: I have an avocado every day. It’s so great.
[01:17:50] Dr. Anna Cabeca: So good, so good. My heart hurts for people with avocado sensitivities. They’re so good. Also, that’s very rare, but every once in a while, I come across someone.
[01:18:00] Ashley James: My son is allergic to avocado. If he avocado just touches his food he gets asthma. He has a severe allergy. There was a California roll or something and I took the avocado out but there is trace amounts, and he immediately got asthma. He’s so allergic to avocado, which is really sad. It’s so sad because he used to love it. He just developed the allergy, just boom, all of a sudden. I eat an avocado every day. I just love it. I can feel for the people who have avocado sensitivities. I definitely want to finish your list, but just tell us, why is avocado such a superfood?
[01:18:40] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Healthy fats, minerals, nutrients. It’s just one of that. I don’t know. It’s really this protective fruit, really. Just from the fatty nature that it has and it’s rich in phytonutrients. I don’t know. It’s just one of those delicious superfoods.
[01:19:05] Ashley James: It has fiber. It’s also the satiety factor. I can have an avocado and that’s it. I’ll eat up avocado maybe with some greens or some sauerkraut because I’m really busy. I’ll just throw it on some greens like a salad, and boom, four, five, six hours later I’m good. I don’t have to eat. It’s really wonderful for that satiety.
[01:19:35] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Because it has that healthy fat in there too, and that it’s creamy. When you’re eating it, it’s creamy and delicious typically. That’s a nice sensation when we’re eating it too. Putting a little bit of avocado into your smoothies makes them so creamy, and making some great desserts like key lime pie with avocado. I’ve come up with some great recipes.
[01:19:59] Ashley James: Are you kidding me? Is that is one of your recipes?
[01:20:02] Dr. Anna Cabeca: So good. Yes, that is one of my recipes. That’s one of my favorite recipes. It’s either in The Hormone Fix or Keto-Green 16. It’s probably in The Hormone Fix. If not, it’s one of my bonus recipes. Key Lime Avocado Pie, let me tell you. We found some really great ways to use avocado. Then you mentioned sauerkraut. Fermented vegetables such as sauerkraut, kimchi, that’s one of the sixteen. Some of them are categories. Cruciferous vegetables because we need that for healthy hormone metabolism, and lots of good fiber so cabbage, broccoli. You can mix and match. You can substitute any cruciferous vegetable for the other, but they’re all so good for us and for hormone balancing. Those are some of them.
Added in a couple of fruits for digestive enzymes to use as part of our evening meal, but if it keeps us from getting into ketosis, I recommend that we eliminate it. Papaya, mango, and pineapple. Again, just the not overly ripe, just ripe, just right so that it’s not too much sugar. A little bit goes a long way, and it really does help at the end of a meal, adding a little bit of digestive support, plus it’s a fresh fruit for dessert. We get a little bit of that in there in the plan, but yet if it’s too much to keep us out of ketosis, we just eliminate it temporarily. Those are some, and then of course, onions.
The concept between the greens and the different ingredients, we want things that are going to support our detoxification in our metabolism that have methylators, sulfurators. Rich ingredients to help with, again, hormone balance and decrease inflammation in our system also help with elimination. Many people on a ketogenic diet have a lot of trouble with constipation. Everyone really needs to have a bowel movement a day. That’s part of it too, part of a plan.
[01:22:14] Ashley James: How many grams of fiber are on your program would you say per day?
[01:22:20] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Well, in carbs in general, I didn’t separate fiber grams but about 40 grams of carbs.
[01:22:27] Ashley James: On your program, people have at least one bowel movement a day?
[01:22:35] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Mm-hmm.
[01:22:37] Ashley James: That’s much different from the dirty keto, which is very constipating.
[01:22:43] Dr. Anna Cabeca: It’s the other things like the instructions to drink in between your meals, not with your meals. To really chew your food until it dissolves in your mouth versus swallowing half-eaten bites of food, which I know I’ve done. Also, intermittent fasting can really help. Plus, if we need to, probiotics, magnesium, vitamin C because I instruct, if you’re getting constipated, you have to do these things. Increase your oil, adding extra olive oil can be beneficial to help with that too or omega-3 supplementing. But we have to have bowel movements every day. That’s definitely one of the objectives.
[01:23:23] Ashley James: How do you handle the keto flu? In the first three, four days of doing the ketogenic diet, people feel flu-like symptoms. They feel pretty crappy because their body’s been depending on glucose. It’s run out of all the glucose in the muscles and in the liver, and now it’s just starting to turn over into making ketones for fuel. But somewhere around there, as we’re being deplete in glucose, we haven’t quite yet got the ketones up. We’re feeling pretty crappy. How is it that your program lessens that?
[01:24:02] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Because of the alkalinity factor. I really push towards getting alkaline first. Getting alkaline first, hydrating really well, and then we don’t get keto flu or keto crazy as a result of it. Nope, not at all. I have worked with clients. They’re like, “Oh, I just went right into ketosis.” I’m like, “Well, you didn’t follow instructions. Let’s do this. Stop what you’re doing and let’s backtrack.” It does, it makes a difference. We don’t want anything that’s going to create more free radicals or inflammation. Granted, keto flu, it will eventually come to an end at some point or another, but that’s not what this is about. It’s not. I want healthy from step one. I want to feel good from step two. I mean, I want to feel good right away. Why would I do it? Why would I do it again, and again, and again? That’s my… [inaudible 01:25:02].
[01:25:03] Ashley James: Yeah, absolutely. You don’t want to feel sick while you’re eating to get healthy. What the heck? If you’re feeling sick, there’s something wrong. That’s your body saying there’s something wrong. So you’re saying that when people get the keto flu it’s because they’re acidic and they’re dehydrated.
[01:25:20] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Right, right.
[01:25:22] Ashley James: Very interesting. Would that be the same? Would you say that people should get alkaline and hydrated before they start a three-day water fast? That would be the same concept that we should go into it.
[01:25:34] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Absolutely.
[01:25:35] Ashley James: My friend, who eats a whole food plant-based diet, we both do, she eats probably 12 cups of green vegetables a day, at least, or drinks them. She makes a smoothie that’s kind of insane. She fills the Vitamix with all kinds of wonderful greens. It’s great. She pushes her Vitamix to the limit. She recently went on a five-day fast, water-only fast. I did a fast recently too. We were both expecting to feel some weakness. Imagine yourself, because every time we fast is usually when we’re sick in bed like, I’m too sick to eat, right? Most people don’t go, “I’m just not going to eat for a few days and see what happens.”
What we noticed is that we had more energy, not less. That we didn’t get shaky, we didn’t get weak. We actually were more motivated. She said, “I can’t believe it. I am doing things around the house.” She listed off everything. It was 11:00 in the morning. She listed up 20 things. She goes, “It’s not even noon yet. I did more in a half a day than I normally do in an entire week.” She just noticed that emotionally, her motivation went through the roof. That’s really, really exciting that this idea of getting the body alkaline, and then getting into a ketogenic state, whether we’re fasting or eating the Keto-Green diet, would improve our mood, improve our mental clarity, but also improve our motivation, and our drive to do things in life. Have you seen that as well in your clinic?
[01:27:25] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Absolutely, absolutely. In my own life, are you kidding me? It’s like oh my gosh. I’m looking at my room right now. I’m like, yeah, I need about a three-day fast. That’s why I fast before I do any major decision to really gain that clarity. I always joke, and I’ve said this on stage. At that point I was 48, I had brain fog, mental fatigue, I was making some really bad decisions. I was making some really bad decisions. I mean, I was even engaged to the wrong person, let me tell you. I made some bad decisions, and that’s brain fog. We can’t have that. There’s just so, so many references to fasting, biblically certainly, and in so many religions around the world.
I really believe the reason is that higher spiritual connection, that clarity that removes all the clutter, takes off the ceiling, takes off the roof so to speak, and really have that higher level of connection. That’s why it’s this energized enlightenment that we experience with the Keto-Green plan. Getting alkaline and in ketosis at the same time, it changes our electromagnetic energy, changes our physiology. It raises our vibration without a doubt, and that’s where we want to be. If we’re going to do it, it takes a little bit more tweaking to get Keto-Green, but it raises our vibration. It feels so much better.
The same with fasting. Again, as you discovered, actually, once you get through day two, because our ghrelin hormone is so high on day two, it gets easier. It just gets easier.
[01:29:02] Ashley James: I love it. Oh yeah, the ghrelin hormone. Aren’t there three hormones that affect hunger?
[01:29:13] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Yes. There’s leptin which is that we’re satiated, and there’s ghrelin, which is like the gremlin, the hunger hormone, and that makes us feel hungry. There are a few others, but adiponectin is another one that affects our appetite and also our metabolism. As we get older, that one goes down as well. I really believe that’s tied to a different biologic clock than our reproductive clock hence that 5, 10, 20-pound weight gain without doing anything different. It has a lot to do with the adiponectin hormone. Those are the three major ones that I deal with in really working through this program. There are actually 13 hormones that I talked about in Keto-Green 16 just for awareness that it’s complex, and the plan I created addresses every one of them.
[01:30:09] Ashley James: Have you ever tested those three hormones that affect hunger and satiety in patients before and after doing your program?
[01:30:19] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Only adiponectin so far, not really leptin and ghrelin. I think that is really pulsatile so I think it’s hard to test, and not so sure on the results with adiponectin. In the couple clients, testing myself and testing a couple of their colleagues, we see a little bit of an improvement, but not much. We didn’t really see moving the needle significantly with that, but we definitely have seen the scale move in our hemoglobin A1c improve.
[01:30:50] Ashley James: I had my levels tested a few years ago. My entire adult life I’ve been dieting. I’ve been dieting for health, I’ve been dieting for weight loss, and I’ve been working on healing my body my entire adult life. In my 20s I was incredibly sick. It was in my late 20s that I started to turn my life around. I was able to heal type 2 diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue, chronic infections for which I needed monthly antibiotics for, polycystic ovarian syndrome, and infertility. I was very sick, so using food and supplements to fill in the gaps, I navigated. I had to go, “Okay, this works, this doesn’t work.” I had to keep shifting my diet and finding. I’d go three steps up, one step back, and I just keep going.
My whole 30s has been about healing my body. I have to look at it from every angle because health isn’t just physical, it’s emotional, and spiritual as well, and mental. I had to look at, well, what’s going on emotionally and mentally that am I overeating? Why don’t I feel full at times? Why is my plate bigger than other people’s plates? Is it that my metabolism is different, are my hormones different? What’s going on? Is that emotionally I’m doing something? I found that no matter what, I just never felt full. I never felt satiated. Even if I ate a full meal, I always felt there was something missing.
So I did emotional work, I did mental work. I’m very happy for the personal growth. I put years into growing as a person. Then I came across these hormones about satiety and hunger. I had to also work on my relationship with hunger. When I start to feel hungry what emotions come up for me? There’s this fear response. What’s going on there? Is this part of our ancient neurology to be afraid of starvation, or is this something that I have for my childhood? I did a lot of personal work, but I also went and got these hormones tested, and sure enough, they were so out of whack.
They were so out of whack my doctor, she’s a Naturopath, and she goes, “No wonder. No wonder you feel the way you feel.” She explained it. “Your brain thinks you’re a 90-pound starving person. Your brain is getting the wrong signals from your body. Your brain is saying, “Quick, we need more nutrients. We’re starving, we’re starving, we’re starving.” I’ve been fighting, I was fighting against these hormones because everything was out of balance. Everything interplays with each other, and you’ve described this, but this whole endocrine system is not compartmentalized. They’re all affecting the cortisol, and oxytocin, and the insulin, and all of our sex hormones. They all play off of each other and affect each other. Of course, everything I was eating was affecting them, and here I was fighting with food to figure out, what’s going on? Why am I always hungry? Why am I never satiated?
Switching to eating a whole food plant-based diet, for me, it’s like it turned something on in my brain. Maybe it was all the fiber, maybe it was the alkalizing, maybe it was all the vegetables, maybe it was cutting out processed food, maybe it was all of them. But I feel satiated. It’s past 1:00 PM here. I haven’t had breakfast. I haven’t had lunch. I feel fine. I feel great. If I feel hungry, it comes and goes really fast, and the panic in my body doesn’t happen. I’d love to go back and get my three hormones tested again just to show, but I could feel it in my body. I’ve shifted something big, and I’ve been doing this eating more alkaline for the last two years now, and I just really feel that eating the way you described where you’re eating getting healthy fats like avocados. If you eat meat that you make sure it’s the cleanest meat possible. If you fish, you’re getting the wild-caught. You’re eating really clean, no processed foods, and you’re getting tons of vegetables, and you’re focusing on alkalizing your body.
I felt so desperate for so many years, and I felt I was suffering for so many years. Then just the light bulb went on when I switched into eating this way. It’s just so healing. It’s so healing. My body’s now coming back into balance. I’d love to see more research done on those three hormones, but I can tell you that I feel it. You must see it with your clients because you said, they’re getting tremendous results with balancing their weight and balancing their hormones. I’d love to hear about the feedback of how their relationship with food changed emotionally.
[01:36:20] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Oh my gosh. That’s such a big topic. I feel like I wrote this book for women like you, for women like me, for those of us that have been a slave to our physiology, that’s been screwed up because we were just doing the wrong stuff. We thought we were doing right, but we’re doing the wrong stuff. There’s that physiologic imprinting, so to speak, the habits that are formed. Like I said, I used to go to bed thinking about food and wake up thinking about food. I was a slave to hunger. My mom was a baker growing up. I could drink syrup, basically. I had such a sweet tooth. I love it, I love it.
That hormone ghrelin, that’s a really big one. That hunger hormone is a really big one for women and men to override, but it is possible. That’s where the healthy fats are so necessary, and that’s where blood sugar stabilization is so necessary, that’s where the combination of foods, and ingredients, and when and how we’re eating is so important to master because physiologically, it honors our physiology, and we’re in control, and no longer feel like we’re in a battle with willpower. Because willpower is not an issue anymore, it’s just like okay. We’re not a slave to a habit, or physiology, or the ghrelin hormone, or the hunger hormones, or becoming leptin resistant. We never feel satisfied. Oh my gosh. Did you ever see the Hamilton musical, Ashley?
[01:37:47] Ashley James: I haven’t. I haven’t. It’s not here in Seattle.
[01:37:50] Dr. Anna Cabeca: So good, so good, but there’s a song in there, I will never be satisfied. You just got to listen to the soundtrack. It’s a great song. I mean, that should be my theme song, seriously.
[01:37:59] Ashley James: Okay, I’ll check it out.
[01:38:02] Dr. Anna Cabeca: You’ll have to listen to it. It’s great. It really is very interesting how our hormones can drive us versus us drive our hormones. I lecture on hormones all over the world, you know that. I lecture on testosterone and estrogen, and one of my big peeves with some of these testosterone clinics is that look, testosterone can increase your novelty-seeking behavior. Can create divorces, can create affairs because you’re upleveling the testosterone into super physiologic zones, and that affects mental reasoning, without a doubt. Behavior affects physiology, and physiology is affected by behavior.
In the plans, and I laid it out in The Hormone Fix in really good detail. I just kind of blended it in Keto-Green 16 by creating a lifestyle, creating patterns, creating behaviors that empower our physiology like intermittent fasting, like no more snacking, like feeling satisfied enough out of a meal with the combination of foods that we’ve eaten to not have that hunger in between meals. A little bit of hunger is okay. We recognize that. A little bit, right? A reasonable amount. It’s okay to say, okay I’m not overstuffed at a meal, not to be completely full or overstuffed at a meal either. To start to dial those things in. That’s okay too. It’s listening to our body and empowering our physiology.
I was totally a slave to my physiology with willpower, and hunger, and binge eating, and struggling for decades of my life. It was only over the last decade and a little bit that I’ve been liberated from that.
[01:39:47] Ashley James: I love it. We can use food as medicine to heal our body. I’ve interviewed four or five cardiologists now. All of them use slightly different diets, and they all get great results at healing the heart, but the one that has the hands-down best results with healing heart disease, and reversing—even four blockages in the heart—reversing heart disease, and angina, and high blood pressure, is Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn. His diet is very low fat, although, he says you can have a handful of nuts and seeds a day. There are zero oil and zero animals or animal products in his diet. It’s tons of vegetables, and I mean tons of vegetables, whole grains, and potatoes, but mostly vegetables.
He sees very rapidly clogs in the heart clear up. He’s got people, basically, off of death’s door. That’s a very specific diet. That diet would not be optimal for healing hormones. You’ve talked about hormones need fat, but if someone has heart disease and they’re on death’s door, go do that diet because he’s published studies and shown that that diet is incredibly healing for the heart. If we’ve got hormone imbalance and we don’t have heart disease, then this diet is shown to be healing. There’s no one diet that fixes everyone. That would be ludicrous to think that we could put everyone in one diet and be perfect because everyone’s got different health problems. We have to triage.
[01:41:38] Dr. Anna Cabeca: On that note too, men and women are different, right? Men have 10 times as much testosterone as women. They have bigger muscle mass than we do, bigger bone mass than we do. There are differences between men and women. The menopausal women need something different for sure, not just for hormone imbalance, but for cardiovascular protection. We need healthy hormone levels, healthy estrogen, healthy progesterone, healthy DHEA. We need as much testosterone as we can get circulating for healthy bones. This is really important. We know statin medications lower cholesterol, lower our testosterone levels.
We look at this, but it’s not just what we eat. This is where it’s not just about the diet, it’s not just about what we eat. The when, the with who, the other aspects of what we’re eating and what we eat ate become really critically important. Timing of meals, intermittent fasting, no more snacking. These principles give us more flexibility too in what we’re eating so we can fine-tune it for us. But ultimately, we have to test not guess. In the case of the cardiologist, monitoring the patient so we’re seeing improvement. We have to do as much of that as we can. We have to self-monitor as much as possible. How am I feeling? How does this resonate with me? What results am I getting? How’s my urine pH test? Everyone’s going to go get some urine pH and ketone test strips right now.
[01:43:08] Ashley James: You’re going to give us the link. We’ll put it in the show notes.
[01:43:13] Dr. Anna Cabeca: It’s so important. By figuring that out, discovering what works for us and what doesn’t work for us I think that’s critical. It’s not just about following a diet plan, it’s a lifestyle. It’s a lifestyle within what we know works for us. Within our fasting regimen, I’ll say, 80% Keto-Green regimen and then another 10% feasting regimen so that we’re having, we’re experiencing life, we’re laughing, we’re playing, we’re doing more of the things that really are as if not more important than what we’re eating. I love that there are different things, different ways for people to explore and play, and ultimately, to see and decide what works best for them.
It can be different over time. What I did in my 30s and early 40s, I mean, it stopped working when I hit 48. Despite not doing anything different, the scale moved. The brain fog, came on, and all that stuff. The timing too and maybe different stress levels in our life too. We have to do different things as well. That’s important to realize.
[01:44:28] Ashley James: Your message is really relevant now because the whole world is stressed out. In the next year, we’re going to see women’s health decline across the board because stress affects hormones, and hormone imbalance affects women’s entire life. It affects our brain, our ability to function, it’s very significant. Your message is very relevant right now and for the coming year. Stress is always going to be there, we’ve got to do things to mitigate stress. But using the pH test strips for example and going, “Oh wow. Okay. I’ve got to do something to balance my stress because I was watching the news yesterday, and my pH has gone down, that my acidity has gone up.” For those people that don’t know, like you said, 7 is good pH in the AM, but some of us don’t remember it from high school science. Can you talk about the pH scale, and what’s good, and what’s not good?
[01:45:42] Dr. Anna Cabeca: In general, our pH scale is 0 to 14, so the lower the number the more acidic we are. When we think of acidity, I always like to think of acidity like New York City—industrial, a lot of concrete, kind of inflammatory. Alkalinity, all the way at the other end of the scale, from 7 to 14 that’s on the alkaline side. Think of the Amazon jungle. Think lush, greenery, think of being outside, enjoying yourself, a waterfall in the background. I mean, it just sounds lovely. So that’s more alkalinity. Again, our blood pH stays around 7.4. Different parts of our body have different pHs. Our stomach is very, very acidic, and the vaginal pH is acidic to kill off sperm and bacteria. It’s naturally acidic. It gets more alkaline as we get older. The skin has a lower acid pH, and again, it’s part of our defense mechanism.
Then different areas are more alkaline, which is so fascinating to me how the body is so interconnected, and yet there are organelles running at different pHs. Pretty cool. How it can shift based on what we’re experiencing, but urinary-wise, again, emphasizing we want to see that urine pH at 7.4-7.5 above that in general, but most people when they start checking, they’re at a urine pH of 5 or 6. A lot of shifting has to be done. Now, I forgot your question.
[01:47:29] Ashley James: You answered most of it. It was, explain the pH scale for those who don’t know it. You did beautifully and brought in the analogy of New York City versus the Amazon jungle, 1 to 7 being acidic or New York City, 7 to 14 being alkaline. A 7 is sort of the middle, right? But neutral.
[01:47:51] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Neutral. Seven is neutral.
[01:47:53] Ashley James: Then upwards towards 14 is the Amazon jungle. That we don’t want to alkalize our stomach acid, for example. Don’t take a bunch of baking soda right before a meal. We don’t want to alkalize our stomach acid. We actually want to support the acidity of our stomach acid to help us have healthy digestion, and that’s a whole other topic because most heartburn is caused by too little stomach acid not too much. I’ve had several guests talk about that on the show, pH in different parts of the body, very interesting, but the pH that we can learn from is our urine.
What numbers are really good to see throughout the day? You said if we had a 7 in the morning, our first-morning pee, if it’s a 7 that’s great, but throughout the day, it would be different, right? What are good parameters to see throughout the day?
[01:48:51] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Definitely depending on your activity level. To really maintain it, 7, 7.5, or 7 to 8 throughout the day, at least above 6.5. Now granted though, after a workout, after a hard run, anything like that, after a stressful situation, you’re going to be more acidic. After a good workout, you’re going to rehydrate, have a good Keto-Green shake, something like that. So you want to really work to optimize so that you run a urine pH 7 to higher. Now, if you’re going to bed acidic and waking up acidic, you’re probably not sleeping well. Your body’s probably not repairing itself well while you’re sleeping. So if we can shift to get alkaline before we get to sleep, and then ideally wake up alkaline.
Now it can take a lot of time for some people, especially if you have high blood sugar or other chronic inflammatory conditions, but don’t give up, be persistent, continue to see what works for you and what doesn’t. We can supplement with additional minerals like magnesium at bedtime and even hormones, certainly, like progesterone. During this time of stress, adding progesterone, if we’re over 40, at bedtime on a cyclical basis can be very beneficial for us too, because again, stress will produce cortisol, which we rob progesterone to make so to speak.
There may be some additional hormones that we can use or adrenal adaptogens like my Mighty Maca Plus. One of the reasons I created it with the combination of ingredients was to add those alkalinizers, so think chlorella, spirulina, and maca is an adaptogenic alkaline root. There’s turmeric in there so we can make a turmeric tonic, a turmeric tea. We can add some green tea during the day. That’s also an alkaline tea. Adding some of those, that’s like 30 superfoods in my Maca Plus, Ashley. It’s a good combination.
[01:50:52] Ashley James: I love it. I love your Mighty Maca Plus.
[01:50:55] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Thank you.
[01:50:56] Ashley James: I’m sorry. I totally interrupted you because I’m so excited. It tastes so good, and my body buzzes in a good way. If you eat a really great kale salad your body’s just buzzing. It’s like, woo, your body’s so excited. My body gets so excited when I drink your Mighty Maca Plus. It’s refreshing, it tastes delicious, and I don’t drink coffee anymore, but it would be a great replacement for coffee. It feels so good. Actually, I ran out, and I’m like, “Oh man. I could totally go for some right now,” because it is so delicious.
[01:51:31] Dr. Anna Cabeca: I’m going to send you some.
[01:51:33] Ashley James: I love some. I totally recommend listeners buy and try it. It’s delicious. Try replacing your coffee or your tea with it because the maca has natural caffeine, but it wasn’t overstimulating. I could totally fall asleep at night, and I’m very sensitive to caffeine. If I were to have chocolate, like a little bit of dark chocolate at 4:00 PM, I can’t sleep. That’s how sensitive I am to caffeine. Your drink, I could drink it during the morning. I even had some in the afternoon, and I totally was able to get into sleep, so I found it to be very gentle, but my body buzzed. I love it. It’s so delicious.
You talked all about your journey, and how you discovered the ingredients, and formulated it in episode 326, so listeners can go back and check that out. That is awesome.
[01:52:30] Dr. Anna Cabeca: That’s awesome. We’ll give your audience a free trial too. We have now four single pack, so a four-day trial of it. Just give it a try, taste it, because the biggest fear factor with greens is the taste, right?
[01:52:44] Ashley James: It tastes amazing.
[01:52:45] Dr. Anna Cabeca: It looks like fear factor, but it does taste.
[01:52:48] Ashley James: No, it has almost a little bit of a mint flavor to it. At least that’s what I perceive, but I thought it was delicious. It was very refreshing. It tastes very refreshing. I enjoy it tremendously. That’s fantastic. So we’ll get the link to that and put it in the show notes, so listeners can check out your four-day trial as well. That’s wonderful. Before we wrap up, I wanted to cover this last topic. You talk about cortisol, oxytocin, and how you can get to the point. So for those who don’t know what these two hormones are, cortisol—the stress hormone, oxytocin is the feel-good love hormone. If you hug someone for 30 seconds you get a boost of oxytocin.
I had a friend that would count as we hugged because she’s like, “We got to get the oxytocin. Let’s count to 30 together and hug each other,” so it always stuck in my mind. Cuddling your animal, your dog, or cat, or your children, or your husband, or wife, or whatever. You got to cuddle for more than a five-second hug. It’s got to be a long hug and then you get this oxytocin, but you were talking about how we can get disconnected. Women live in the state of cortisol to the point of burnout, but we can get disconnected where we don’t feel oxytocin, where we’re not feeling the joy in life, we’re not feeling the satisfaction. Even to the point where we’re not just feeling the love for our family or for ourselves.
Suicide is on the rise. It is very scary especially in the generation, I believe, ages 10 to 24 it went up over 50% in the last few years. It’s the number two cause of death in that generational cohort. So suicide is on the rise. I imagine if someone has a cortisol-oxytocin disconnect, especially for veterans who come back from the war. They have a tremendous amount of cortisol, and you’re talking about this disconnect. Can you explain how that works in the body that we have a disconnect, or where we can’t feel our oxytocin, and how can we correct it?
[01:55:05] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Yes, absolutely. Because I’ve lived it, and I am definitely worried about our society too with the social isolation add that into the hormonal, physiologic disconnect that we’ll be experiencing if we don’t take these practices to heart. That’s why I’m so passionate about getting this message out, Ashley. This cortisol-oxytocin disconnect is when cortisol goes high, oxytocin goes low. There’s that, okay, if cortisol is high and I’m fighting an enemy, you don’t need to love your enemy. Okay, God, I know what you said. Love your enemy. There’s a reason for that practice, right? There’s some philosophy behind that statement because I mean, hate it affects our liver, it affects our detoxification organ. I mean, it really does. Cortisol goes up, oxytocin goes down, and then when cortisol is up for a long enough period of time, it’s like frying out our nervous system.
So the constant hits of oxytocin, the news in the morning, and the afternoon at night, or daily, and just fear. Fearful thoughts, real or perceived fear, is going to affect our cortisol levels. So when cortisol is up for a long enough period of time, it’s basically frying our nervous system, but our brain is smart enough not to let that happen. So a command center in the brain called the paraventricular nucleus turns and shuts down that cortisol, so it’s like putting the brakes on cortisol. So all of a sudden, now cortisol is low and oxytocin is low at the same time. So you feel disconnected like, “I know I love my husband, I don’t feel love for him. I know I love my work, I don’t feel love for work. I know I love to paint, I just don’t ever pick up the paintbrush anymore.” Whatever it is. The activities I love to do I’ve stopped doing. Also, you stop going out, stop taking social engagements, stop interacting, more and more isolated, and that’s a physiologic disconnect.
Now what’s really interesting is there was a recent article published at the end of 2019 that looked at soybean oil because soybean oil has been used in so many food manufacturing businesses, and frying, and this [that 01:57:16] and the other. Well apparently, soybean oil can affect our oxytocin receptor site too. That’s pretty crazy, right? That’s just really crazy. So kind of getting a generation hit from both ways between we’re in a war against a virus right now and how we eat. By getting Keto-Green, getting the ketosis part creates insulin sensitivity. The green part manages cortisol and empowers oxytocin. That getting alkaline part is learning not just about how we need to nourish our body but the activities and lifestyles that temper cortisol and increase oxytocin. That’s where we really honor and empower our physiology. We have the mental clarity, the joy, and the passion to do it.
[01:58:08] Ashley James: I love it. We all could use less cortisol and more oxytocin.
[01:58:15] Dr. Anna Cabeca: More oxytocin, yes, yes, yes. Laughter increases oxytocin.
[01:58:21] Ashley James: Now, I’ve heard that during fasting we have a spike in cortisol. Have you seen this?
[01:58:27] Dr. Anna Cabeca: I haven’t measured it, but yes, I’ve heard that.
[01:58:31] Ashley James: We get all these great health benefits from fasting, and so the increase in cortisol is, I guess, part of that. It doesn’t create negative outcomes.
[01:58:47] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Not for short duration. I don’t believe so, no. I’m not 100% sure why physiologically we do have a spike of cortisol, unless that’s to get glucose like a spike in glucose as well. So increased cortisol, increase glucose to just squeeze any of that out through fasting, that kind of life-saving mechanism. But I agree, I don’t think it’s detrimental in the short term. It’s when it’s on persistently, that’s the issue.
[01:59:21] Ashley James: Right. We want cortisol to be there. If all of a sudden a boulder’s in our way when we’re driving or something, we have to react quickly. If we have to react quickly, we want the stress hormone to help us stay alive, and then we want it to turn off, and turn the feel-good oxytocin back on. Fasting, although has been around forever, it was taboo for so long in the United States. I feel just since 2012 we’re just starting to study it. All the studies are coming out. It’s starting to become more acceptable to study. It’s becoming more acceptable for doctors to prescribe it. The next 10 years is going to be very interesting to see all the results that come out from intermittent fasting, and from water-only fasting, and from one meal a day, all these different things. Of course, there have been studies here and there, but really, just in the last 10 years, we’re starting to see a spike in acceptability within the medical field. So it’s very exciting.
We’ll see more information come to light about cortisol’s role and how fasting affects the different hormones. Because we have to get over this idea, and I think we’ve just been marketed too that we need to eat three meals a day. It was really good marketing for the food industry to make lots of money. Look at what our ancestors did. Our ancestors went long periods of time without food, and our grandparents would eat breakfast, and then work in the fields, and not eat lunch, and come home, and then eat dinner, and that was normal. So it’s normal for us to not snack like you said. No snacking between meals.
[02:01:15] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Right. Absolutely. No snacking between meals. Even for religions, over the centuries, fasting is part of it. We’re in the spirit of Lent right now. So there’s extended fasting, and the Orthodox Church, they fast over 200 days a year, the Christian Orthodox Church and Greek Orthodox. I mean, there’s so many different fasting like on Sunday, you don’t eat until after Communion. Little things like that have been built into cultures, and it just amazes me because I’m like, “Ah, they must have had a good reason for that.” I always think of this season of Lent. This is usually when harvest is low anyway and people are already seasonal affective disorder. So fasting is really powerful to clear up the mind, to elevate the spirit, to have that higher time of connection.
It’s interesting how things have adapted to these principles and put them in place in many different ways, in many different societies. I love it. I just want science to look at women and men differently. So we study and we publish women and men differently, and that’s the biggest thing that was part of my journey, part of understanding how some things can work in men but not women. Certainly, for men doing my plan, they get amazing results.
I had this one guy, we call him Big Bill. He met up with me in Gainesville when I was down leading, just kicking off this next group of clients, 30 people going through the group medical visit for Keto-Green 16. He said, “I’ve been struggling with this, that, and the other thing, but I’m all-in to do this. Anything I need to know because I’m 250-pound male versus many of the women that are in the group. I said, “Yeah, you got to figure out what works for you and what doesn’t work for you. You’re going to measure. I don’t want you to feel like you’re starving. I want you to eat.” And laid it out for him.
I just heard back from him yesterday. He’s like, “I have already lost seven pounds, and I’m just feeling so great.” I’m like, “Yeah, that sucks,” because men get better results quicker. It’s just not fair. They have more testosterone. That’s part of it. They’re also black and white. “Okay, she told me to do this. I’m doing it.” There’s no gray. I even have the grey zone. I’m like, “Oh well, we’re going to have that glass of wine tonight,” or whatever the reason is to have a glass of wine. I can probably find a lot of them. We’ll find the grey zones, and men are black and white. I think for this, this is where the self-discovery part for women comes in, then you really know, you know. “Okay, this is what this is doing for me, or this is what I have to do in order to feel this way and to get this result.” That helps us as women do what we need to do. At least for me anyway.
[02:04:16] Ashley James: I love it, I love it. Let us know about all the ways we can work with you. You mentioned that you have some online classes, and people can work with you online. Just walk us through all the different ways we can learn from you.
[02:04:30] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Definitely join me at my website at drannacabeca.com. I’ve got tons of research there, but I have my online communities. I have a group called Magic Menopause, and I have my Keto-Green Community, a private community group on Facebook. I’m always showing up in Instagram, but really, it’s in my online groups, and through connecting with my office, and joining in one of my programs is probably the best way to work with me.
[02:04:58] Ashley James: Brilliant. It’s been such a pleasure having you on the show. Man, we could talk for hours and hours. This is wonderful. Definitely, I recommend listeners check out your book. All the links to everything that Dr. Anna Cabeca does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. Keto-Green 16, get the book on pre-order now. The link will be in the show notes. The audible, I’m so excited, is going to be by Dr. Anna Cabeca, so you’ll hear her wonderful voice instead of a voice actor, I love it. I love it when doctors do that.
Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interviews? Is there anything you want to make sure that the listener is left with? Maybe some homework or something about mindset. I just want to make sure that we wrap this up in a pretty bow for the listener so they understand they can heal their body with food.
[02:05:52] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Oh, yes. Go back to that time where here I was, a board-certified gynecologist and obstetrician, trained at one of the best institutions in our country, and my doctor’s bag was empty. It was a pretty hopeless bleak situation, especially when you’re working with some of the best in the field. Honestly, it’s great if you’ve worked with the best of the best, but listen to your body, and don’t give up hope. You know you can be better tomorrow than you are today, I guarantee it. Finding the wisdom that’s inherent to our body, removing the clutter, it makes a difference. I will tell you, I stand behind it. Get Keto-Green and just feel the difference.
[02:06:34] Ashley James: Wonderful. Get alkaline, try some fasting, get Keto-Green. I like that you said remove the clutter because that’s exactly what I felt like when I started doing fasting. It really removed the clutter inside so that I could move the clutter outside. That’s exactly how I felt. That’s really cool. Awesome. It’s been such a pleasure having you on the show. Of course, you’re welcome back every time you come up with a book. Your track record is once a year, so let’s see how many books you can get out every year. You’re welcome back every year.
[02:07:07] Dr. Anna Cabeca: Thank you. Thank you, thank you. I look forward to talking with you again, Ashley. Thanks so much.
[02:07:14] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s episode with Dr. Anna Cabeca. Please, go to learntruehealth.com/ketogreen. That’s learntruehealth.com/ketogreen to get all of the awesome bonuses, and downloads, and free recipes, and ebooks, and everything that Dr. Anna talked about today. Go to that link.
In the show notes of today’s podcast, there’ll be other links that you can go to. Dr. Anna has her Mighty Maca. She’s got a sample pack that you can get, and also you could put in your information and it will spit out your exact macros and a meal planner for you that’s personalized to your lifestyle. So check out those links as well in the show notes of today’s podcast, but for sure right now, go to learntruehealth.com/ketogreen to access all the bonuses before they go away because I know it’s a limited time. I know that they’re only going to be up for a while while she’s launching her new book.
Awesome. I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, and thank you so much for being an amazing listener of Learn True Health podcast.
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Highlights:
The lifestyle choices we make and the food we eat have a big impact on our overall health. In this episode, Dr. David Perlmutter, author of best-selling book Grain Brain, joins us on the show. He talks about the difference between decision-making based on the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, and how our decisions relate to our health. He shares with us lifestyle changes we can do, the importance of sleep, the foods we need to eat, and the foods we need to avoid to improve our immune system.
Intro:
Hello, true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. You’re going to love at today’s interview with Dr. Perlmutter. He’s giving away a copy of his latest book, and you can win a copy of his latest book by going to the Learn True Health Facebook group. There’ll be a post in the top, a pin to the top for the next few weeks. If you’re listening to this and it is April or May of 2020, jump in the Learn True Health Facebook group and win that book. If it’s past 2020, if its past April or May of 2020, no worries, still come join the Learn True Health Facebook group because we do great giveaways there all the time. Our guests love to give away their books and other goodies, so come join the Learn True Health Facebook group. We’d love to see you there. It’s a wonderful supportive holistic community.
Now is the perfect time to implement what you’re going to learn today from Dr. Perlmutter. He is going to teach you how to avoid disease, how to even support your body in the face of the coronavirus, and how to support yourself in living an even longer healthier life, so fantastic interview. I’m really excited to share it with you. One thing I will say, since we have extra time on our hands, and we all are at home, and a lot of us are doing home cooking, now is the perfect time to join the Learn True Health Home Kitchen. I teach you how to use food as medicine, to make delicious food for yourself and your family that is also incredibly nutritious and healing for the body.
We have recipes that kids love, we have recipes that husbands love, we have recipes that the in-laws love, we have recipes that the whole family loves. Come join the Learn True Health Home Kitchen. Go to learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. That’s learntruehealth.com/homekitchen, use coupon code LTH for the list of discount. I made it affordable for everyone, and when you join, you’re also supporting the Learn True Health podcast. We regularly upload videos to the membership. There are well over seven hours of content, of videos, of recipes in the membership right now. Great videos teaching you all kinds of wonderful recipes, and tips, and tricks in the kitchen to use using your kitchen as your pharmacy to heal your body and to also stay healthy.
Come join Learn True Health Home Kitchen. That is learntruehealth.com/homekitchen. I look forward to seeing you there. Awesome. Enjoy today’s interview. Please share it with as many people as possible so we can help our friends and family to learn true health.
[00:02:53] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 426. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have one of my heroes in the holistic health space, Dr. David Perlmutter, who wrote the book Grain Brain and also wrote his latest book Brain Wash. I am very, very excited. This is absolutely revolutionary—the information that you’re bringing. I love that you bring in so much science to back up everything that you’re showing. Today, you’re going to show us how to gain health on a whole new level using food as medicine. Welcome to the show.
[00:03:41] Dr. David Perlmutter: I am totally excited to be with you today, Ashley.
[00:03:46] Ashley James: Absolutely. A few years ago, maybe about three years ago, I heard a lecture you gave on a summit. For the life of me, I can’t remember which summit it was because I listened to so many of them. Your talk was the best talk in the entire summit, and there were some pretty awesome people there. It totally blew my mind, and I’ve been wanting to get you on the show ever since because of how much I learned from you. I’m very excited to have you here today.
Before we dive into talking about your latest book and what we can learn from you, can you tell us a bit about your background? Because you’re an MD. Most MDs don’t get into nutrition and healing the body with food, and I’d love to hear your story. What happened in your life that led you to helping people heal their body with food?
[00:04:36] Dr. David Perlmutter: Well, Ashley, don’t let me disappoint you but there was no epiphany. There was no moment of transition. I’ve been, obviously, asked that question many times, “What was it that turned you in favor of looking at the world through those eyes?” I can’t say there was a moment. I will say that I’ve always been a bit of a disrupter. Even as a kid, I was never satisfied with the status quo of explanations for anything. Obviously, that wasn’t necessarily a good way of behaving in high school, but as years went by, I became a neurologist, and entered a very mainstream neurology practice, and practiced according to the book for 10 years.
I became really very dissatisfied with what I was doing with my life. I was treating symptoms, I wasn’t treating disease. I was treating the smoke and ignoring the fire. Around that time, 10 years in, I began looking at was there any evidence that lifestyle choices had any role to play in the development of these challenging neurological problems that I was dealing with on a daily basis? Whether it was brain degenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, or seizures, or headaches, or any of the common things that we as neurologists would see.
In fact, even back then, the literature was quite robust in terms of making, at least, the correlations between various modifiable lifestyle factors and risk for developing these situations. I felt that offered me a lot more tools for my toolbox, whereas it wasn’t necessarily going to focus on letting people get better right now, which is something I’d probably already mastered because it was in the book how to do it, but rather how to keep these things from happening in the first place—what an idea.
I began pursuing that and began realizing that there were a lot of people out there in the world who are like-minded. I began attending integrative conferences and functional medicine conferences and realize that there were a lot of people out there who recognize that we don’t need to be practicing reflexive medicine, but rather pre-emptive medicine. That we could really create lifestyle plans to keep people healthy. What a notion. Especially in our time right now. The notion of healthcare, which is something, with all due respect, not being practiced in America.
We talk about our healthcare system, but truly, much as my neurology practice was so very long ago in the early 1990s, we aren’t practicing healthcare, we are practicing response to diseases. We are responding to patients who develop a list of criteria that allows them to get a named disease, and then we respond to manage their symptoms. So very little going on in our so-called health care system that has anything to do with health, that has anything to do with care—in the most important sense of that word. I found that this is where I wanted to be and that I could be much more effective as a doctor—meaning a teacher—if I could focus on ways of keeping people healthy.
[00:08:20] Ashley James: I love that you identify as a teacher. The root of the word doctor is doceri, which means teacher. We should look to our doctor to teach us because we can’t take our doctor home with us. Our doctor isn’t going to cook for us, and tell us when we should go to bed, and tell us how much water we should drink, and follow us around. We have to go to our doctor, a doctor is going to teach us, then we have to take that—what we learn from them—and we have to apply it to our daily life.
[00:08:47] Dr. David Perlmutter: That is fundamental because we just realized, in writing Brain Wash, that that moment that you just described, for those of us who practice integrated functional type medicine, that’s where the system breaks down—three steps. First step, we as the healthcare provider do everything we possibly can to stay up to date, to learn the best information we possibly can. Step two, we impart that information, we act as the teacher, we give that information to our patients, and we depend on step three, that they then implement that they utilize the information that we’ve given them to change their lives for the better. What we’ve learned is that it’s step three—the utilization of the information—where the system breaks down the most. That between 50% and 80% of the information that we give to patients—that we impart—is not acted upon.
For many years, until quite recently, I like many, would accuse the patient who comes back week after week, continues to gain weight, continues to have blood sugar climbing, or whatever the metric is that we are following knowing full well that they are not engaging what we’ve recommended. They haven’t adopted the diet, they decided not to meet with the dietitian, they’re not exercising, you name it, and there was really a sense that we would blame them for that. What we’ve identified now is that the actual decision-making part of the brain has been hacked by our modern world.
It’s unfair for us to point fingers at patients as it’s unfair for them to point fingers at themselves, “Why can’t I do these things? I know it’s important that I do these things. I’ve went to the doctor. I got this information. I bought all these wonderful books. I attended these online symposia. I know what to do, but why in the heck can’t I do it?” The reason is that, again, our decision-making apparatus is under siege by so many aspects of our modern world. Therefore, it’s not necessarily appropriate anymore to blame patients for not following through, or for people to blame themselves for not being able to act on good information because they don’t have the brain connections anymore to make that happen.
That should certainly be one of the areas that you and I focus on moving forward with our time together today. What is it that has so hacked our decision-making ability, and perhaps most importantly then once we understand that, what can we do to regain connection to the better decision-making part of the brain—the prefrontal cortex—so that we can act in a way, make choices that think about the future, that take into consideration how my decision today will impact me moving forward, but also impact my neighbor, my community, the planet upon, which I live moving forward. That is, bringing back our connection to this area of the brain called the prefrontal cortex.
[00:12:20] Ashley James: Can you give us some examples of how our decision-making has been hijacked?
[00:12:26] Dr. David Perlmutter: Certainly. The decision-making parts of the brain are many, but for purposes of our discussion today, I’m going to simplify between two areas. One, as I mentioned earlier, the prefrontal cortex. That is an area of the brain that allows us to bring to bear on our decisions—on our choices—a lot of information from our past experiences, our understanding of the decision that we have to make especially as it relates to the future outcome. What will be the long-term consequences—good or bad—of whatever I decide to do right now? That’s the prefrontal cortex.
In contrast to making more impulsive decisions—choices—that come from the area of the brain called the amygdala—the impulsive amygdala I like to say. That is an area of the brain to which we are getting more and more attached by multiple mechanisms these days in our modern world. We know, for example, that even one night of not having enough restorative sleep tends to significantly lock us into making decisions that are short-term, that are impulsive, that are based upon narcissism, and us-versus-them mentality coming from the amygdala. Even one night of not enough restorative sleep is associated with as much as a 60% increased activity of the amygdala.
We depend upon a vital connection between the adult in the room—the prefrontal cortex—and the more childlike behavior that stems from the amygdala. The connection allows the adult in the room—the prefrontal cortex—to supervise, to make recommendations, to influence and exert control over more impulsive behavior as would otherwise have been brought about if the amygdala were in charge. So many factors in our day-to-day lives tend to sever that connection between the prefrontal cortex exerting its top-down control over the more impulsive decision-maker—the amygdala.
I’d like your listeners to be thinking about this model in the context of what we talked about earlier and that is that critical point whereby we give our patients great information and they don’t act upon it. They don’t make good decisions, they make decisions based upon impulsivity as opposed to thinking about the long-term consequences of an apple versus a jelly-filled doughnut.
I want the jelly-filled donut now I’m going to eat it, or in the long run, if I cut back on refined carbs and sugar my health will be better, my immune system will be more balanced, my inflammation markers will be reduced, my likelihood of having a sudden explosion of inflammation should I contract COVID-19 virus, for example, might be dampened. It’s interesting to think about our decision-making as it might pave the way for diseases like diabetes, obesity, coronary heart disease, and even how our long-term decision-making affects our immune responses, and how that might be certainly germane vis-a-vis at COVID-19 discussion.
Again, it’s all about, do we tap into our more adult part of the brain—the prefrontal cortex—and let that exercise top-down control, or do we simply lock into the amygdala and live our lives without thinking about future consequences? Now, one of the most powerful influences on whether we’re going to lock into the amygdala and exclude the adult in the room is, as I just mentioned, the quality and quantity of our sleep. Who knew? Not some exotic expensive nutritional supplement, but simply getting a good night’s sleep.
Now, what can we add to that? We can add exercise, eating a diet that’s lower in likelihood to cause inflammation, exposure to nature, keeping a gratitude journal. All of these things are really very important ways that we can re-establish a connection to the prefrontal cortex. Perhaps one of the most important daily activities is a daily meditation. The research showing how powerfully meditation practice amplifies the activity of the prefrontal cortex goes back at least 15 years and is really quite profound because you’re able to demonstrate by functional types of brain imaging studies virtual lighting up of the prefrontal cortex—that really good decision maker by simply engaging in meditation.
[00:18:01] Ashley James: When they’ve hooked people up, their brains up to scans, and they have them meditate, and they see then even after meditation—if someone were to meditate every day, how long after meditation do they see the amplified usage of the prefrontal cortex over the amygdala?
[00:18:20] Dr. David Perlmutter: It’s an excellent question, and the answer is for people who are regular meditators that these pathways become more permanent. The more we amplify our connection to the prefrontal cortex through a process of neural plasticity, the more we strengthen that connection then between the prefrontal cortex and its ability to top-down, regulate, or calm down the amygdala activity moving forward. This is, as you well mentioned, this is a benefit that we get even while we’re not meditating. The more we do it, the more indelible, the more strengthening we observe of those pathways that connect the prefrontal cortex to the amygdala.
[00:19:12] Ashley James: One thing I learned about stress is that when we’re in the sympathetic nervous system response, the body shunts resources away from the prefrontal cortex so that we don’t overanalyze things—at least this is how it was explained to me. That we become more reactionary in the moment, like if our house was on fire, we’re in the second floor, we need to just react—jump out the window. If we weren’t in that state of fight-or-flight, we might start overanalyzing something. Is this true that when we’re in a state of stress—and we might not feel cause stress isn’t an emotion—if we’re in a state of stress, and we’re in the sympathetic nervous system response a fight-or-flight, do we really lose or dampen our prefrontal cortex—the adult in the room—that kind of decision-making, and have more of an amygdala response to our decision-making?
[00:20:08] Dr. David Perlmutter: In a word, yes, and there is a very powerful upside to being reactive versus being reflective. There are times when we want to react, we want to react very quickly. As an example, you’re in your car in your driveway, and you’re backing up, and suddenly a child on a tricycle appears in your backup camera. Your foot goes on the brake, and you stop, and a child’s life is spared. Now, that is not the time when you want to engage the prefrontal cortex, think about, “Well, if I step on the brake now, then I’ll slow my car down, and come to a stop, and then likely I won’t hit this kid, and that’s probably a good thing.” If you’re going through that, the kid’s already been hit.
What happens is a reflex basically happens that your amygdala kicks in, bang, foot on the brake, and then you catch yourself. You said, “Whoa. What just happened? I responded so quickly, luckily,” whatever. That’s good. So we need that sort of response. It’s life-saving. The problem becomes, however, when we constantly engage the amygdala, we enhance our moment-to-moment connection to the amygdala at the cost of our connection to the prefrontal cortex so that much more of our decision making becomes fight or flight, becomes fear-based, becomes tribal, becomes us versus them, becomes a response to a perceived or real threat. This tends to lock us out of being able to access the prefrontal cortex. That beyond simply having a role in our decision-making is the part of the brain that subserves empathy and compassion.
The more we lock into self-serving decision-making, narcissistic behavior, us-versus-them mentality—what we call tribalism—and impulsive behavior, the more we will act in that way. The more we will interact with the world around us from an amygdala-based perceptive point. How do we enhance our connection to the amygdala? Well, watch the evening news, don’t get a good night’s sleep, eat foods that increase inflammation, spend a lot of time on social media to lock you into one frame of reference, one perspective. The average American spends north of six hours a day in front of one screen or another, be it their tablet, phone, or computer, or television. That tends to fan the flames especially these days of fear, of doom.
It’s been said that when you’re doing one thing, you’re not doing something else. Spending that much of your waking hours in front of a screen means that you’re not then exercising, preparing your meals, interacting with other people, getting out in nature, doing all the things that tend to relinquish our connection to this fear-based amygdala and allow us to reconnect to the prefrontal cortex. These are the central tenets of our new book Brain Wash. We published this book on January 14, 2020, before there was a single case of COVID-19 in North America. How incredible it is that now we are experiencing a challenge that threatens our good decision-making, threatens our ability to look at long term consequences of the things we want to choose to do today.
When we understand that engaging things like social distancing, hand-washing, all the things that we are being to that can limit the spread of this virus, on the one hand, looking forward, as opposed to the ideas of simply, “You know what, screw it. I’m going to go back to work. I don’t care. I’m not going to wear a mask. Come what may. Because I want to do this today,” short-term decision-making. So it has really well characterized this disparity between short-term decision-making and long-term decision-making. It’s important, no doubt, for people to get back to work, and it’s also important for us to go through the behavioral modifications to help limit the spread of COVID-19.
Having said that, these are not mutually exclusive concepts. We can do both, and the key here that allows us to get people back to work, and at the same time, reduce the spread of this virus is forward-thinking by implementing testing as aggressively as we can. Let people go back to work who have developed antibodies who are probably immune, and certainly isolate those individuals who test positive in the molecular testing that looks for the activity of the virus. We can satisfy both camps on this one if we are able to amplify the number of tests that are being performed, at least here in America, by at least three-fold.
[00:25:49] Ashley James: I love that you said that we can do both, it’s not black or white. We can get the amygdala thinking, and start reflecting, and having three-dimensional thinking to solve this problem. That takes the prefrontal cortex. That takes getting out of the stress response that we are triggered in when we watch the news or spend time on social media.
[00:26:10] Dr. David Perlmutter: Let me develop this theme just a little bit more because I’m just thinking about something. That is, what are the major risk factors that pave the way for bad outcome as it relates to COVID-19 infection? They are chronological age, biological age, chronic degenerative conditions like obesity, coronary artery disease, type 2 diabetes. Now, the only thing here that it’s not a variable that we can control to any degree is our chronological age. We can’t erase the number of birthdays that we’ve had and that we’re going to have, but our biological age is certainly something we can modify especially as it relates to the immune system.
The point is that amygdala-based behavior, “I want to smoke. I don’t want to exercise. I want to eat crappy food.” All of these things open the door for these chronic conditions: diabetes, coronary artery disease, obesity, cigarette smoking, and all of these then are dramatically associated with worse outcome as it relates to this particular infection. So in a very real sense, what’s going on here is decision-making coming from the amygdala is paving the way for worse outcome as it relates to COVID-19.
Making better decisions—better choices—as it relates to lifestyle, as it relates to the food you eat, the sleep that you get, the fact that you decided not to smoke, getting some exercise are ways of reducing your risk or even reducing the worsening of these diseases should they have already been established. Therefore, reducing risk for a bad outcome as it relates to COVID-19. It was quite a surprise when this infection began affecting the United States because there was an interesting statistic that became obvious, and that was here in America, younger people were ending up in the hospital and having bad outcomes.
It was a great puzzle in the news because people were saying, “Why would our young and healthy individuals in America having such a bad outcome?” That is an interesting statement, isn’t it? Our young and healthy Americans. Understand that young, in America, doesn’t necessarily mean healthy.
[00:28:48] Ashley James: No kidding.
[00:28:49] Dr. David Perlmutter: That is very, very important because we have extremely high rates in North America of things like type 2 diabetes, certainly obesity, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease in younger individuals. These issues pave the way for a bad outcome. These are issues of immune dysregulation, and that is the cardinal point here. That’s where COVID-19 takes full advantage of an individual and paves the way for a bad outcome. That’s where COVID-19 insinuates itself into a dysregulated immune system and does its damage.
Understand that our immune system is represented in the liver, in the heart, in the brain, and in the lungs. This is why this in infection is having manifestations across the board through our various so-called systems. Yes, it affects the brain. Obviously, it affects the lungs, and yes, liver issues are becoming quite common in people who have bad outcomes, and certainly, the gastrointestinal system as well.
[00:30:01] Ashley James: Let’s talk about diet because the book that turned me on to your work, Grain Brain, focuses on the things that we can cut out and the things that we can implement into our diet that decrease inflammation, but that also, your diet prevents these diseases. The idea of going grain-free or gluten-free, for many people, is a shocking idea. Why is it that eating grains is lowering people’s immune system?
[00:30:37] Dr. David Perlmutter: What an excellent question. Why is it that eating grains is lowering people’s immune system? Think about that. In the context of where we are right now, eating grains, refined carbohydrates—that’s basically what most people end up eating when they’re so-called eating grains—the wheat products that people are assuming that make up 40% of the food that people consume in America. That this is generally in its refined ultra-processed form, and what does that do? It dysregulates our immune system through multiple mechanisms.
It disrupts our gut bacteria that influence our immune system through the permeability of the gut lining that then influences where 70% of our immune system is located—the gut-associated lymphoid tissue. That’s one extremely powerful mechanism, but in addition, perhaps through its effects on the gut and elsewhere, it dysregulates our ability to control our blood sugar. That has an effect on immune functionality as well.
One of the most powerful predictors of how a person is going to do once they’ve been hospitalized—good outcome or bad outcome—is their blood sugar when they come into the hospital. Higher blood sugars are dramatically associated with poor outcome. Another interesting report coming out of China several days ago calls our attention to one of their laboratory study that’s dramatically associated with a bad outcome, and that is a liver transaminase called ALT. ALT is a marker for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. A metabolic issue that’s for sure, which is extremely prevalent now in younger Americans who are eating diets that are higher in fructose and ultra-processed carbs of other sorts.
This all then fits together that we see this dramatic dietary shift that has been going on now progressively for the past 12,000 to 14,000 years since the advent of agriculture. Now that seems like an awful long time, doesn’t it? The reality is that for 99.6% of the time that humans have walked this planet, we did not consume any significant amount of grains. Truthfully, the idea of these highly processed grains giving us sudden spikes in our blood sugar, for example, is something that’s only happened really pretty much in the past couple of centuries, if not even the last century, to the extent that they’ve entered our food supply as we see today.
In a very real sense, what we are seeing is the response to COVID-19 very much reflects the types of foods that are eaten in a given country. That is particularly alarming when we recognize that this so-called pro-inflammatory Western diet is very rapidly becoming the global diet just as COVID-19 has become a global pandemic, so has this westernization of our nutrition, which bodes, therefore as we’ve connected these dots, for a worse outcome as it relates to being infected with the COVID-19. So in a very real sense, when I wrote Grain Brain and called out to get back to your question, the dangers at multiple levels to having higher levels of refined carbs, eating a lot of grain-based product that this is a way of increasing inflammation—the cornerstone of our chronic degenerations—which now are those diseases which pave the way for the worst outcome with COVID-19.
That also the idea of persistent elevation of blood sugar by a higher carb diet in general leads to a higher risk for insulin resistance that vis a vis the name of the book Grain Brain focusing on brain health, insulin resistance is devastating for the brain. We recognize that Alzheimer’s is, for the most part, a manifestation of a fuel issue fueling the brain, being able to allow the brain to use glucose appropriately that is front and center in terms of being looked at as an etiology player as it relates to Alzheimer’s as recently as January 2020 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
That’s what underscored the importance of diet as it related to general health, as it related to obesity, and certainly, as it related to brain health that we talked about so many years ago now in Grain Brain. Thereafter, we began looking at diet as it related to our gut bacteria, as we began to recognize how important the gut bacteria is in regulating so many of the parameters that are important for our health, our ability to resist disease, and even our longevity. That’s when I wrote a book called Brain Maker. Again, the importance of diet on determining the health of our microbiome, if you will.
Why dietary fiber is so important? Why diets high in refined carbohydrates and sugar threaten the diversity, health, and functionality of our gut bacteria, and as such, threaten both our immune systems and our ability to regulate inflammation. Now, we come to 2020 when our son Austin Perlmutter, an internal medicine MD, and I looked at this whole notion, as we talked about earlier, Ashley, of decision making, and realized that making the right decision in terms of lifestyle—like food choices, like going to bed on time—has a huge role to play in regulating immunity, regulating inflammation, and in even making good decisions.
That’s where we landed on this, and that is the idea that, again, our decision-making is a manifestation of our lifestyle choices, and that choosing a lifestyle that favors inflammation will cut us off from the prefrontal cortex. Inflammation, in and of itself, tends to allow us to make more impulsive decision, tends to amplify our connection to the amygdala, and therefore moving forward, our choices are poor, we make continued bad choices related to food and other lifestyle issues, fanning the flames of inflammation locking us more into an amygdala-based decision-making paradigm.
That’s what’s going on in America right now because we’ve eaten this standard American diet, fanning the flames of inflammation, locking us into poor decision making. We make poor decisions as it relates to our dietary choices, and thus, we continue to be in this feed-forward—what a term—feed-forward cycle where we really can’t get out of the idea of making poor decisions. What we are emphasizing now as we are beginning a training program using Brain Wash as really a course guide for physicians involved in functional medicine, and that is to first not give patients ideas in terms of what they should be doing for their particular ailment, but rather, at first encounter with our patients, give patients options that will enhance their decision-making ability.
Let me give you an example. A patient you are seeing with diabetes and obesity comes in, and at the first encounter with this patient, that patient is very surprised because at the first visit we didn’t even talk once about diet and exercise. Why? Knowing full well that these recommendations won’t be carried out, generally. What we do it the first visit is we work on the ability for that patient to regain the likelihood of making better decisions. We work on decision making at the first visit.
Here’s a patient, you’re seeing this patient. Clearly needs to be on a diet, clearly needs exercise, but at the first visit what do you talk about? Well, maybe it’s sleep. Maybe that patient sitting across from you in the office, what we’re talking about is, “Hey, let’s get you a better night’s sleep so that in two weeks, when you come back to see me, then you’ve regained better decision-making skills. Reconnection to the prefrontal cortex that then will allow you to make and stick to those decisions that have to do with diet, that has to do with exercise, etc.” Maybe our entrance ramp is sleep, or maybe it’s meditation.
Whatever we can do to reconnect to the prefrontal cortex, to offset what we described in Brain Wash as disconnection syndrome, will then pave the way through feed-forward activity to allow that patient then to move forward and engage the rest of the program. As opposed to say, “Here you go. Here’s a list of foods that are low in carbohydrates, high in fiber, high in good fat. Take it home. Hope for the best. That doesn’t work. We know that doesn’t work. Why do we know that doesn’t work? Because time and time again, that patient’s going to come back and have a higher blood sugar, their A1C is going to be worse, their insulin resistance markers are going to be deteriorating, and they’re going to be gaining weight. So that doesn’t work until we work on re-engaging better decision making by actually restructuring their brains.
[00:41:39] Ashley James: Absolutely. Sleep also has a huge impact on blood sugar. I was type 2 diabetic. I reversed it naturally with diet and lifestyle changes. I noticed that if I got poor sleep, for the next 24 hours, I was hungry, my blood sugar was out of control, and it was consistent. But if I got a really good night’s sleep, the next day I could be just smooth. My blood sugar could be stable.
[00:42:09] Dr. David Perlmutter: Ashley, I have to stop you there because what you just said is it’s worth the price of admission. I mean, that’s an e-ticket at Disney World. What did you say? You said you used to be a type 2 diabetic. First of all, just the notion that you are no longer a type 2 diabetic flies in the face of how mainstream medicine treats this problem. Mainstream medicine treats type 2 diabetes with drugs. What happens when you stop the drug? Blood sugar goes right back up. So you didn’t treat the problem. (A) You, on the other hand, treated your problem type 2 diabetes by dietary and lifestyle intervention. (B) You noticed a direct effect of your blood sugar of having a good night’s sleep or not, and that is absolutely profound.
When you don’t have a good night’s sleep that is a stress. What is your body’s response to stress? It turns on the production of blood sugar because you need it because you’re in a fight or flight scenario, or so your body thinks. Your cortisol level is higher, your amygdala is activated that very next day, and your food choices are less appropriate. It’s been demonstrated that people who chronically don’t engage in restorative sleep, night after night, consume at an average of 380 more calories per day without an increase in caloric burn in comparison to people who age match, individuals who do get a good night’s sleep. No wonder what you just said has such profound meaning. That’s take-home information. That’s great.
[00:44:04] Ashley James: You said the term restorative sleep. What is the difference between just getting sleep and getting restorative sleep?
[00:44:14] Dr. David Perlmutter: Another great question. I mean, there are plenty of people who will tell you I get 7 to 8 hours of sleep every night, and yet, their cortisols are high in the morning, their blood sugars are spiking, inflammatory markers are elevated, and their decision-making is poor. All of these markers that maybe that sleep was not as restorative as they thought. How would you know? Well you might not know—you will not know—unless you’re able to evaluate, not just sleep quantity, but sleep quality. How can you do that? You need to know that many people think they get a full night’s sleep but have constant interruptions of their sleep by periodic leg movements, by apnea—meaning that they stop breathing—by sleeping with a partner who may be bumping them, or kicking them, and causing their sleep to drop out of the deeper stages though they don’t fully awaken and recognize that their sleep is not restorative.
If you’re somewhat asleep, how do you know if you’re getting into the deeper stages of restorative sleep like a deep sleep, like for example, REM sleep? These are important parts of sleep that do good things for our bodies that are very, as we talked about, restorative. You won’t know unless you apply some technology. Now, this can be going into a sleep lab and having a formal what is called a polysomnogram that looks at your brainwaves, and looks at your EKG, that looks at your oxygen saturation with a little device connected to your finger, which I’ve done. That said, we know that there are some pretty darn good wearable devices that can also give you an indication as to the quality and the quantity of your sleep.
I use a device called an Oura Ring that downloads into my smartphone in the morning and gives me a very good sense as to how long it took me to fall asleep, how long did I remain asleep, how long was I in the various stages of sleep, and then it allows you to make certain lifestyle changes, to improve certain aspects of your sleep based on what you then know. I think in this day and age, there is technology available to us to not just determine how long we are asleep but what is the quality of that sleep. That is absolutely fundamentally important as it relates to things like our immune function, our blood sugar, our cortisol levels, how active our amygdala is in terms of decision making, etc.
[00:47:04] Ashley James: I just bought an Oura Ring. Actually, it was gifted to me, and I’m really excited to use it. I haven’t used it yet. I just got it in the mail. You mentioned that I’m like, “Oh, I’m going to start playing with it.” That’s really cool. You mentioned that when we don’t get restorative sleep, that we consume on average 350 more calories a day. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but when you add it up over a year that’s 36 pounds. If someone continued that behavior over five years, they’d have gained 180 pounds. What seems like, “What’s 350 calories a day?” It doesn’t seem like a lot, but this is where one bad behavior done over a course of five years can significantly impact the quality of your life, the longevity of your life can either contribute to basically being in an early grave and being in a disease state for the rest of your life.
Something as simple as going to bed an hour earlier, putting on blue-blocking glasses, not eating refined sugar, cutting back on the caffeine. These little tiny choices that we would not make if we were in the amygdala because we want the instant gratification. “I want to stay up later and watch more Netflix. Just one more episode,” or “Oh, I feel like a chocolate bar. It’s 11:00 at night. I feel like a whatever.” That’s when people start making really bad choices around snacking and staying up later and later and late because they’re in the amygdala, not in the prefrontal cortex. The more we lose sleep, the more we’re going to just make worse and worse choices, and we’re just spiraling downhill. It just keeps going and keeps going, and it just compounds on itself.
[00:48:48] Dr. David Perlmutter: Exactly. Keep in mind that this doesn’t have to take five years. If you gain 15-20 pounds—you’re going to gain about a pound a week if you’re not sleeping well, as an average. When you gain body fat, a couple of things happen. Of course, you increase inflammation, you increase your connection to the amygdala, but body fat directly translates into less quality of sleep. What happens? You have less quality of sleep, you eat more. You eat more, you gain weight, and you have less quality of sleep. That is a gross example of what is called a feed-forward cycle. That the problem worsens itself over time, and that’s the bad news.
The good news is that while in Brain Wash, we outlined eight different on-ramps that you can engage. You don’t have to. You can pick one, and it might be, for example, sleep, and doing the Amber glasses—blue-blocking glasses—cutting your caffeine consumption in the afternoon, getting perhaps more exercise, not snacking after dinner. All the things that we all know are important parts of sleep hygiene that you could say, “I’m going to do this for a week.” If you do, then you’re going to improve your decision-making, then the rest of the plan is far more easy to engage. That becomes a feed-forward cycle that works to your advantage. That’s what we’re looking for.
[00:50:21] Ashley James: I love it. My husband, when we had our child, we lost a lot of sleep. He gained some weight. It wasn’t a lot of weight, but he gained some weight, and all of a sudden he started snoring like crazy. I mean just really loud snoring, and he blamed our new mattress. We got this amazing Intellibed mattress. It’s the best in the world. I can fall sleep in one position, wake up eight hours later in the same position. I just was like solid sleep in that position because you don’t have to roll around. I love the Intellibed. In fact. I interviewed the founder, the creator of Intellibed. It’s really neat how much science goes into it.
My husband was blaming the Intellibed. Then he got really serious and cracked down, and he lost about 15 pounds or so, and all of a sudden his snoring went away. He also did some stuff with his diet to decrease inflammation. He did some fasting. Immediately, almost overnight, the snoring went away. It’s not like he had fat around his neck, it wasn’t like anything was pushing, but it was something about decreasing inflammation, losing a few pounds, and all of a sudden his snoring stopped, and he started sleeping better. Of course, then I started sleeping better. It was really interesting to see how some little changes—it all affects each other. Everything affects each other.
[00:51:39] Dr. David Perlmutter: That’s right. We can take advantage of your statement that everything affects each other in a positive way. Everything affects each other also in a negative way. Eat crappy food, gain weight. Sleep poorly, make worse food choices. Again, don’t exercise, you won’t want to get outside, you’re going to binge-watch, and all these things, and spend more time on social media. We can use feed-forward cycles to our advantage or to our disadvantage. It just depends on really finding, as we’ve talked about, an on-ramp that works for each individual.
It might be sleep, it might be exercise, it might be keeping a gratitude journal, it might be nature exposure—powerfully effective in reducing cortisol, reducing inflammation. That’s what we need today. We need to offset our risks for chronic degenerative conditions, and that will help us in terms of our outcome if we should contract COVID-19. Look who’s involved with this in terms of bad outcome. I’m sorry to say but it’s people who have unfortunately made poor lifestyle choices that manifest as these chronic degenerative conditions, and that will also cause manifestation of a bad outcome as it relates to COVID-19 infection.
[00:53:06] Ashley James: In the grocery stores I like to go to, there’s a few of them. I like to go to one’s a local co-op here that has all organic, and then there’s another one at Whole Foods. There are different grocery stores I go to, and I kind of do my little circuit to get different things from different ones depending on what I’m out of. I noticed that at all the grocery stores in my area, everyone I’ve gone to, the baking section is empty. It’s completely emptied out. In my local Facebook groups, people are saying, “Who bought all the baker’s yeast? I’m trying to make this.”
I’m seeing on Facebook all my local friends are baking like crazy. They’re all of a sudden baking and eating muffins and cakes. It was just on and on and on and they’re also drinking a lot of alcohol. I don’t know if you noticed that, but on Facebook, everyone’s celebrating at home with their alcohol. I’m thinking to myself. “You are worried about getting an infection—getting the virus—and you’re consuming exactly what your body needs to have the worst outcome in case you did get it.” Alcohol, and sugar, and flour are the worst things we could be consuming right now.
[00:54:24] Dr. David Perlmutter: There are two reasons for this. First is obviously pragmatic thought that these are non-perishable, so that’s why people buy flour and non-perishables, and then end up baking and doing all the things with them. I think more to your point, these are so-called comfort foods. During times of stress, people tend to gravitate toward—it’s why they’re called comfort foods. Because you’re satisfying your amygdala-based behavior, you’re releasing dopamine, and you’re satisfying the craving in the short run.
This is the time where you need to double down on all the right recommendations as it relates to the foods that you’re consuming and your other lifestyle choices because you desperately need a good functioning immune system, a balanced immune system that can rein in inflammation, for example, that can be so devastating with this infection. Now is the time when all of those lifestyle issues that we’ve all been talking about for such a long time need to be implemented to the highest degree possible.
It’s not like we’re cashing in our chips right now. If you do, you’re going to gain weight, you’re not going to sleep as well, your immune system is going to become dysregulated, and as such, you’re going to increase your chances for a bad outcome should you be infected by this virus. That said, it’s been predicted that’s somewhere between 60%-80% of people globally are going to catch this virus at some point.
[00:56:08] Ashley James: Right now, right now, your book is so relevant. Brain Wash is so relevant. In fact, all your books are so relevant because you’re teaching us how to support the body’s ability to mount a healthy defense, and to also, if and when we do have the infection, we could be one of the people that are asymptomatic. That the body is so healthy it moves through the infection, fights it, and mounts a response, and we don’t have to be hospitalized. Those who weakened their body by not getting enough for sort of sleep, by eating a diet that causes inflammation, that tears down the body instead of builds it up, by not getting out in nature, not exercising gratitude, or not meditating, not taking the time to actively de-stress.
If we don’t do that and instead we stress ourselves out, don’t get enough sleep, inflame our body with a poor diet, and stay in the amygdala response, we are guaranteeing we will have poor outcomes. You’ve really painted this picture. As you’ve been talking about the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, as they relate to our decision-making, I’m reminded of the old cartoons that I used to watch. The Looney Tunes cartoons where there’d be a little flying devil with a pitchfork—a little red devil on one shoulder—and there would be a little angel with a harp and wings on the other shoulder all dressed in white.
They would each try to get the cartoon character to do something good, or do something about it. It’s almost like spiritual warfare at this point. We have to think about every decision we make we are either giving in to that devil on our shoulder, that amygdala that wants the instant gratification, that wants us to fail and be sick in the future, or we’re taking a step back, we’re reflecting, we’re taking sides with the angel on our shoulder, and we’re building a better stronger body for our future.
We can, even though we might not be getting the instant gratification of the instant dopamine by eating that doughnut and staying up late bingeing on Netflix right now, the dopamine we could achieve through meditation, and gratitude, and nature, and starting to enjoy nurturing our body with delicious nutritious whole foods and also having really restorative straight sleep, that gives us dopamine too. But it’s not this roller coaster of highs and lows. It’s this constant even keel joy that we could fill our life with if we followed the prefrontal cortex path instead of the amygdala path.
So I love this picture you’re painting. I would rather have this nice smooth ride down the river of joy of prefrontal cortex rather than the highs and lows of the very short-lived life of the amygdala because we will shorten our life if we do follow the amygdala. Your painting this picture very well, and that you’re giving us the tools that we can take home with us, and we can implement. We start with one thing so that we can build our strength.
Talking a bit more about diet because I’ve come up against this resistance with people when it comes to going gluten-free or grain-free when cutting out barley, wheat, rye, and oats for example. Many people I’ve talked to say, “Well, I was tested and I don’t need to avoid those grains because I am not allergic to them.” Other people say, “Well, I went gluten-free for a month and I didn’t notice anything, so I’m not allergic to it. I don’t have to do it.” What would you say to those people who don’t believe, or they think either those grains are healthy for them, or they don’t believe that they’re excluded. That only a certain percentage, only celiac people need to avoid it, they don’t, and you see that everyone needs to avoid it for better health.
[01:00:15] Dr. David Perlmutter: It’s a good point. The actual risk of so-called wheat allergy as an allergic reaction is pretty low. Certainly, celiac disease is extremely infrequent in our population, though there are some genetic determinants. Ultimately a small bowel biopsy is done to confirm that diagnosis, but it’s somewhere south of 3%-4% of the population, that’s for sure. Celiac disease is not what we are talking about. Wheat allergy is not what we were talking about. We’re talking about some fundamental events that occur when we consume alpha-gliadin—a protein found in wheat, barley, and rye—it’s a component of gluten. How that leads to an increase in gut permeability or leakiness, and this may occur in all people.
Who has what is called non-celiac gluten sensitivity? Don’t know the answer to that in terms of percentages, but it’s perhaps 30%-50% of the population. Meaning that there are observable manifestations, symptoms that are generated when this group of individuals ends up consuming a product that contains gluten. That said, I think the best recommendation is that we go off of these products. There’s nothing wonderfully salubrious about the gluten-free aisle in the gluten in the grocery store. That is where you’ll find highly-processed, ultra-processed carbs, highly-refined grains of other sorts that will spike the blood sugar that will wreak havoc with the gut.
What we want to do is really start to re-emphasize what humans have eaten for almost our entire existence, and that is vegetables. If you choose to be someone who consumes animal products, untainted animal products if that is, again, your choice. It’s not just the gluten part of the story though, it’s the refinement of the carbohydrates, the effect that has on blood sugar, how that amplifies inflammation, how that degrades our effectiveness in terms of our immune response, how it leads to things like insulin resistance and other aspects of metabolic syndrome.
It’s a much bigger picture. As we go through that from Grain Brain to the microbiome in Brain Maker and now to Brain Wash, how then this affects the wiring of our brains, and our decision-making, and how that takes us to the current time of what will our response be to infection, which is likely going to happen to most of us—if not all of us—with this COVID-19 based upon the dietary choices that we thought were important over the years. It’s really very interesting that in a sense, this COVID-19 is selecting out individuals for the worst response based upon more amygdala-based decision making as it relates to lifestyle choices.
Our world is conspiring to lock us into our amygdala based upon the foods that we are eating, the fact that we think we need to stay up late at night to accomplish various things, the negative aggressive fear invoking nature of our social media experiences and news exposure. The world is a fearful place and this becomes a way of stoking the fires of our amygdala, which makes us make more choices that are not going to be in our favor.
Our mission this time around in writing Brain Wash is to give the tools to decouple this, to get us away from amygdala-based decision making and re-establish connection to the prefrontal cortex to offset what we described in the book as disconnection syndrome. It’s fascinating for Austin and me to observe that Brain Wash has now been picked up by 18 country, 18 languages around the world. It was just published here in America because I think people are getting this message that at the cornerstone of what’s going on here is our decision-making. Because it’s our decision-making that leads to these chronic degenerative conditions that leads to bad outcome.
That’s how we’re reading into why do 18 languages, why does Brain Wash coming out of 18 languages around the world? Because people finally get the fact that decision making is really important today more so probably than ever before in the history of humankind.
[01:05:26] Ashley James: That there’s a direct link between diet and how we function in life. Because I think a lot of people walk around, going through the drive-thru not seeing that there is a connection. There’s a big disconnect between what we put in our mouth and everything else in our life. That it could actually not only affect our health—our physical health—but it could affect how you do your taxes. It could affect how you treat your spouse. It can affect your behavior.
[01:05:53] Dr. David Perlmutter: Disconnection syndrome. We were very surprised early on in January this year, when Brain Wash came out, that it became such a big seller in England in the financial community. We did not predict that. We did not see that coming, but decision-making in terms of investments either is impulsive buy and sell because, “Oh, I feel this is going to be a good thing. I’m going to make money,” or take a deep breath, what’s going to work here by looking at data, and let’s be an investor for the long-term. That’s a prefrontal cortex. So we didn’t see that coming. It was really quite an interesting surprise.
[01:06:36] Ashley James: That’s so cool because you’re reaching people who’ve never really thought about enhancing their diet or their lifestyle, enhancing their health for their decision-making for their brain. So you’re reaching people who don’t normally look into the health space, which is really neat. Now, when you are researching to write this book, as you were writing it with your son, what changed in your life? How did this book change you?
[01:07:02] Dr. David Perlmutter: Yet another great question. I think it did a number of things to me in a very positive way. It certainly helped to reconnect me even at a deeper level to my co-author, who happens to be our son, so that was an interesting thing that happened. In fact, we just was with him this morning and his girlfriend. They’ve done everything right. They quarantined 14 days, and then came to visit, which was totally acceptable.
It also really transcended for me though the level of our messaging. Writing a book like Grain Brain saying, “Eat this, don’t eat that. It’ll be good for you.” Other books that I’ve written, other books that my colleagues have written about various diets and their lifestyle choices that we were working on something that was at a higher order. Whereby, “Yeah, it’s great to read all these terrific books, and watch these programs, and attend these summits, and learn all this information, but guess what, all the books are useless to you if you don’t implement what they’re talking about.”
We realized that we were dealing with a higher order overriding plan that could help people engage in whatever goal they wanted to achieve. Be it weight-loss, be it better health, be it being more financially sound, and having talked about that recently. It was a bit transcendent, and beyond that, it certainly helped me reaffirm why I do what I do in terms of day-to-day lifestyle choices, and really double down on so many of the things that I think are important. Double down on the value of meditation, of exercise, of eating low carb, of intermittent fasting. All the things that we think are very important. Now, with the recognition that this is affecting my brain wiring, not just helping me have a better insulin response. I think that was very enlightening.
[01:09:18] Ashley James: I love it. I love that you got even closer to your son who also chose to be an MD. Did he choose to become an MD because of you?
[01:09:27] Dr. David Perlmutter: Who knows? Did I choose to become an MD because of my father? I don’t know, but it’s given us so much common ground. We relate on so many other levels as well in the things we like to do together. We got to go fishing recently, which was quite wonderful. We’ve always enjoyed that. We looked at each other a couple years ago in a conversation and said, “You know, it’s the decision-making where our efforts are breaking down. It’s not that we don’t know a lot of stuff, and it’s not that we don’t teach a lot of stuff, it’s the patients and their decision making. That’s what we need to write a book about.” That began our research, and that was the manifestation of Brain Wash.
[01:10:10] Ashley James: I love it. I’m a trainer and Master Practitioner trainer of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). NLP is all about how what in our brain is affecting our results in life, and decision-making is at the root of it. I love that you’re laying this out with all the science. It’s brilliant. Because our mood, even just your mood, if you’re sitting there and you’re feeling down, people think that they’re a victim of their mood. If you wake up on the wrong side of the bed, “Oh, well the whole day is ruined.”
You’re in a mood because our mood directly affects how we’re going to behave. Whether I’m going to go do the dishes, or whether I’m just going to sit in front of the TV. If I’m going to go for that walk and make something healthy to eat, or if I’m just going to order takeout. We become victims of our mood. If we’re in a mood, we’re probably in the amygdala. There’s a way, like in NLP, we learn how to immediately change our mood. You are laying out these steps. If you someone were to go meditate, do a gratitude journal, walk around the block, get some exercise out in nature. Make sure you’re resting, go take a nap, but there are so many things we can do, what we call in NLP, a break state, and we can choose to activate a different mood. We can get out of a bad mood. From a mood where we’re excited, and joy, and happiness, then we’re able to more easily connect with the prefrontal cortex, we’re able to more easily make adult-based decisions, and then our results in life come from that.
Catching ourselves when we’re in a bad mood and going, “Okay, I’m not a victim of this mood. I’m not going to let this mood control me. I’m not going to let the amygdala, which is like this four-year-old terrorist in my brain, try to control me. I am going to switch over, and I’m going to do something right now. One thing I can do, one thing. What can I do right now to switch over from this bad mood into the prefrontal cortex? Picking one thing from your book Brain Wash. I love it. What do you eat? You sort of alluded to eating a whole food plant-based diet, and then you said, “If you want to eat animal products, then make sure they’re clean.” Are you whole food plant-based? How do you eat? What’s on your plate every day?
[01:12:33] Dr. David Perlmutter: Let me go back to Brain Wash for just a moment. We wanted to be as inclusive as possible as it relates to food. What we called for in Brain Wash was OMD, One Meal a Day, being entirely plant-based. Fully recognizing that in and of itself, that was a lot to ask. But for environmental considerations and health considerations, just to get people more into the mindset of the idea of plant-based. I think it’s ultimately better for people to engage in a more plant-based diet. Understand I said more, I didn’t say complete. I know plenty of people engage a fully plant-based diet, but not everyone does that, and I want to be as inclusive as possible.
I am on a mostly plant-based diet. I do consume eggs, pretty much every day, and we eat a lot of wild fish. I allow those things. I think they’re good for us. I mean, for my family based upon how we respond and based upon our genetic profiles, as we’ve seen. We try to put out in Brain Wash the most inclusive but good recommendations that we could.
[01:13:57] Ashley James: Based on science, based on results. You’re seeing that more whole plants, more vegetables. What about legumes? Grains, you talk about not eating grains, but what about whole grains? What about legumes? What about potatoes or sweet potatoes?
[01:14:15] Dr. David Perlmutter: The grains that we objected to are the ones you had mentioned early on: wheat, oats, and barley, and rye as well, of course, but oats are on the on the list where they can go either way. It really depends on where they are milled. If they’re milled in a gluten containing factory, then I wouldn’t include them. But not processed oats I think can be eaten along with other grains, which by definition are seeds of grass, so that would include some wild rice. Other things like amaranth and quinoa. We’re not necessarily talking about by definition grain, but I think there’s a place for these as part of a whole food kind of diet.
Here you are talking to the Grain Brain author, and I’m saying that plates should be mostly colorful above ground vegetables. Frankly, I’ve been saying that since day one. When Grain Brain came out so many years ago, “So this is this Atkins all over again. Dr. Perlmutter wants to eat bacon, and short ribs, and that’s all we’re going to eat.” Anything but. I think a diet, my personal opinion, is that a diet that’s based on mostly meat—a so-called carnivorous diet—that’s getting some attention these days, my feeling is—and I’m entitled to that—that’s not necessarily going to be a healthful diet for most people. Might there be somebody, who based upon his or her genetic polymorphism, that might be a good diet for? I guess so, but I think having spent so much time involved in understanding the role of our gut bacteria in terms of our health and disease resistance, to create a diet that is most appropriate for our gut bacteria is important. That means a diet that’s high in dietary fiber, which nurtures our gut microbes, our gut bacteria.
There is no fiber in any animal product whatsoever—zero. So a diet that’s focused just on animal products isn’t going to give your gut bacteria what they need, and therefore, I think that one should be concerned about a purely carnivorous diet. I think for me, legumes are acceptable if they are cooked. I eat legumes. We do eat a lot of dal, which is lentils. We’ve been doing that for many, many years after I studied Ayurvedic medicine. I think it’s a very calming dietary approach. Coupled with a carbohydrate can be a good source of protein. I don’t necessarily spend a lot of time worrying about lectins per se, but that said, our legumes are cooked.
[01:17:26] Ashley James: Awesome. Very cool. You mentioned that some oats, like gluten-free oats, could be okay. What about gliadin in oats, which is a protein similar to gluten? I’ve heard that could be the reason why we should avoid oats.
[01:17:42] Dr. David Perlmutter: I don’t think that it’s a big issue to worry about in oats. We don’t really use much oats, but my wife does make oat milk and almond milk that we use in coffee. I just think from all that I’ve looked at in terms of oats that are certified gluten-free, I don’t see that as a problem.
[01:18:08] Ashley James: Very good. I love that you say, “Fill your plate with a variety of colorful vegetables that grow above ground,” and then you can have the other things too, but make sure the majority of that plate is filled with a variety of colorful fruit vegetables. What you talked about genetic testing with yourself with some others, polymorphisms was mentioned, how important is it for us as individuals to get genetically tested, to speak with a functional medicine doctor? Is that something we should do? Is it really important to know, or if we ate the way you’ve outlined in your book, we should be good?
[01:18:50] Dr. David Perlmutter: I think in an ideal world it would be very, very helpful for each of us to know what our genetics are, what are the polymorphisms that we carry. I think it’s exceedingly valuable to know this information that what we might be at risk for, and more importantly, how we can offset that risk based upon this knowledge by making certain more aggressive lifestyle changes and interventions, changes in our diets, our supplement regimen, etc. based upon our uniqueness. This is the cornerstone of personalized medicine. I think understanding our genome, and perhaps even our microbiome, are extremely valuable.
I have done several of these studies, and have had my genetics interpreted by several algorithms, and have learned quite a bit about myself that I would never have known about risk for certain things, and about changes that I can make, whether it’s using a methylated b-vitamin or higher levels of vitamin D because I have polymorphisms for vitamin D receptors. My risk for inflammation. A higher risk for melanoma, for example, therefore going to the dermatologist with more regularity. All kinds of things good to know because knowledge is power. As it relates to knowing your genetics and your risks, this is exceedingly empowering.
I know that it is a bit elitist, especially in these times, to be having this conversation because clearly, people are not going to go out and get these tests as readily. But for the most part, these are things that may be able to be sent in the mail from a practitioner to a patient, and then forward it on to a laboratory, and then allow a virtual interaction with the treating physician to go through what it means. Therefore give a patient an individual some very valuable information.
[01:20:51] Ashley James: Right. Also, there’s going to come a time where we’re all integrated back into society, and the virus isn’t an issue anymore. We can just keep this information in our pocket for when it is easier to get this testing. I like that you have thought of a way that we could do it now. There is a way we could mail it in. There is a way we could have a virtual conversation. How does your son Austin or yourself see clients or patients? How would we go about finding the right practitioner to have this genetic testing done?
I’d like to see a holistic approach, so the practitioner doesn’t go, “Oh, well you need to get extra mammograms because you might get breast cancer more because of your genetics.” Not that standpoint, but the, “Oh, because of your genetics, you definitely want to eat even more antioxidants. Or here’s the things you could do to prevent disease so that we cannot have the epigenetic changes occur by having a bad diet, for example.” So a holistic doctor that looks at the functional medicine to support the person and their lifestyle choices, which is what your book teaches us. Is there a website where we can search for a practitioner?
[01:22:22] Dr. David Perlmutter: Sure. I would say first, though, you do want to have a practitioner who might consider mainstream interventions be it CAT scans, MRI, or mammography for example. You want to have access to good technology at the same time that you have access to this good nutritional information, lifestyle modification, supplementation, etc. I think a great place to start would be ifm.org. That’s the Institute for Functional Medicine. You can search that by zip code, by area, and determine who’s practicing in your vicinity, and then interview or at least visit their website. Determine if they do in fact employ genetic testing, if that’s where your interest lies.
[01:23:16] Ashley James: Yes. To clarify, I didn’t mean never have the mainstream medical approach, that kind of prevention where they’re screening for things, but unfortunately, I know some people who got genetic testing and their doctor said, “Well, we need to do a double mastectomy and remove your uterus. Do a whole hysterectomy to prevent cancer.” She was in her early 30s and this is their approach. They see, “Oh, your genetics show that you may be more at risk, so we’re going to remove all these parts of your body.” Rather than, “We’re going to screen you more, we’re going to get you on a really healthy lifestyle to help you prevent it.” Unfortunately, some doctors are taking the approach of screening and going in not in a holistic direction where they’re helping their patient create a whole lifestyle of health.
Of course, if someone went to IFM, they’d be finding a functional medicine practitioner or functional medicine doctor that looks at the body as a whole, which is what we want.
[01:24:29] Dr. David Perlmutter: That’s right. I would say that it would be very unlikely that a mainstream doctor would really be in a position to even offer up this type of genetic testing much less for counseling. Certainly, as it might relate to I think what you were inferring there the BRCA2 gene, for example, that might lead to hysterectomy, oophorectomy, and mastectomy. That is something that might be prompted by that type of physician who took care of this individual sister, or mother, or who knows what, but I think by and large by its nature, that physicians who are using genetic widespread screening and interpretation are generally more integrative/functional.
[1:25:24] Ashley James: Excellent. I do have one final question about grains because I think that this is one you’ve been asked a lot, and you have such a great answer. There are grains in the Bible. We’ve been eating grains for thousands of years. Why now go grain-free? Haven’t we always eaten grains?
[01:25:41] Dr. David Perlmutter: Give us this day our daily bread. I would ask you, when was the Bible written? When was it written? I don’t know. I mean it was written about 2,000 years ago, right? That probably represents less than one-quarter of 1% of our time on this planet when we weren’t eating daily bread. Our genome undergoes changes that are significant. It takes about 70,000 years for a significant genomic change to impart itself, and our genome is refined by our environment by environmental pressures like the foods to which we have access over time.
This just happened. Let’s go even 14,000 years ago when agriculture was developed. This happened in the blink of an eye, just happened. We’ve not had time to genetically adapt. So, that’s the explanation. We haven’t always had bread. We haven’t always had grains. We have almost always had none of this.
[01:26:54] Ashley James: I love it. I love how you just simply put, our genetics are not designed to, our bodies not designed to eat this way because we’ve just started eating this way. When we look at the history of our genetics, we just started eating this new way. Especially when you look at what you eat when you go through the drive-thru. All these refined oils and, all the refined sugars, and everything our body just doesn’t even know what to do with. Then we end up with a huge amount of our population obese, fatty liver disease, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease. All diseases of living in the amygdala.
[01:27:41] Dr. David Perlmutter: Living in the amygdala, and all diseases that set a person up for a bad outcome these days as it relates to this pervasive infection.
[01:27:51] Ashley James: Well, I think your book would be such a great gift now that most people are at home. We could jump on Amazon and gift your book. We could send it to our friends and our family members who could benefit from reading it. Right now, we have lots of time. We can turn off Netflix, and listen, or read. Your book’s an audio book, they could listen to it because I know my listeners like to listen to things, or they could get the Kindle edition and read it right now, or they could get the hardcover and get it shipped to them, or they could ship it, or gift it to their friends and family.
This is the perfect time when our routine has been disrupted. I think you mentioned that. This is the perfect time to read your book, and implement these changes, and create a new routine, so when we’re able to integrate back into society, and start living life again, we’re not going back to the old way. We are adapting, and we’re elevating, and we’re evolving, and we’re going to create an even better way to live. I’d love that your book would help us to do that. Of course, the links to everything that Dr. Perlmutter does is going to be in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com.
You are so kindly gifting one of our listeners your book. We’re going to have a contest. It’s going to be in a Learn True Health Facebook group. All the listeners now can go in and comment under that post, and one lucky listener is going to be chosen to win your book. I’m very excited about that, but I think all of us should go and gift your book, start listening to it, or start reading it, and start implementing these changes. Whoever ends up winning it and if you’ve already bought the book, you could gift that physical copy to someone in your life. I’d love for you to leave us with some homework. Is there something that you’d like to tell us to go do today?
[01:29:52] Dr. David Perlmutter: Yes, I would. I’d like your listeners, if they feel so inclined, to over the next one week to everyday write down five things for which they are grateful, and just do it for one week.
[01:30:10] Ashley James: Beautiful. You know what, that’s going to be the part of the giveaway. That’s going to be in the Facebook group. Everyone’s going to write down what they’re grateful for, and then one person will be chosen at random. Sometimes I get my five-year-old son to come in and just point at someone in the comments and that person wins it.
[01:30:32] Dr. David Perlmutter: There you go. That’s pretty random.
[01:30:34] Ashley James: Yeah. He likes it. The last person that won something, because I like to do giveaways in the Learn True Health Facebook group, they were very happy that they were chosen by my son. So it’ll be a lot of fun. Awesome. It has been such a pleasure having you here today.
[01:30:50] Dr. David Perlmutter: Oh, it’s been a wonderful pleasure for me. Thank you so very much for having me today.
[01:30:54] Ashley James: Absolutely, please come back on the show anytime you want to come, and teach, and impart your information. We’d love to have you back.
[01:31:01] Dr. David Perlmutter: I’m delighted. Thanks again.
Song: Osheen & JayJen - Flying (Vlog No Copyright Music) Music provided by Vlog No Copyright Music. Video Link: https://youtu.be/DElsMp9Mp2M
Watch this video of Dan's 6 year old doing Algebra and see his homeschooling programs: EinsteinBlueprint.com/lth
Listen to my first interview with Dan: https://www.learntruehealth.com/homeschool
https://www.learntruehealth.com/homeschooling-crisis-schooling-and-distance-learning-amid-covid-19
Highlights:
More parents are now turning to homeschooling because of the new vaccination policy in the US. Recently, parents have also been forced to do some form of homeschooling because of the coronavirus. There are many approaches to homeschooling, which one should we follow? Should we be letting our kids learn from computers and cellphones? Daniel Louzonis is back on the show with us, and he gives us some tips on how to homeschool successfully.
[00:00:00] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 425. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have back on the show, Daniel Louzonis. Daniel was in episode 258. That was a really impactful interview. After I did that interview, I went and listened to it three times because I listened to it with my husband, I listened to it with my mother-in-law, and then I can’t remember who else I listened to it with, but I listened to it with other people. We would pause it, and have a discussion about it, and then play it again. It’s one of those interviews that really sticks in my mind because I have a child, because I’ve thought about the impact of homeschooling versus having my child be in a school system, in a schoolhouse with 30 children and 1 teacher. I’ve been thinking about that for a long time. Interviewing you was really eye-opening. Then I heard from other listeners that it was also very eye-opening. When the COVID-19 thing started to happen, they shut down the schools in my state—in the state of Washington. Now, it’s basically summertime. They started summertime in March, and the children will not go back to school until September. Because I’m friends with a teacher that teaches public school, the teachers are worried that they’re not even going to be able to go back to school in September. That this is going to keep going.
There’s mass panic with parents because they’re sitting at home with their kids and doing distance learning. Crisis schooling is what I’ve heard this new term being thrown around. Many parents are now turning to homeschooling. All the homeschooling Facebook groups I’m in are flooded now with new parents wondering what curriculum should they follow, should they join an online school, should they just let their kids have a summer. So many questions are being thrown around. You are an expert in homeschooling. I definitely recommend listeners to check out episode 258 with Daniel to get his amazing, amazing story.
I want to jump right in. First of all, I definitely want to hear what you’ve been up to since I had you on the show because I know that you’ve been up to a lot. I also really want to speak to the parents that are going through this crisis right now. Many of these children, their school year ended abruptly, and they’re at home. The parents have to figure out how to do some form of education with their children because of COVID-19. There are other reasons why people are choosing to go to homeschooling. Some parents didn’t choose to, it was thrust upon them. Some parents have chosen to go to homeschooling in the last year because of vaccine laws, for example.
There has been a very large shift, a very large movement towards homeschooling especially in this digital age it becomes easier. Daniel, welcome back to the show. I can’t wait for this very enlightening discussion. I hope that we’re able to empower those parents who feel that they’re in a crisis right now.
[00:03:47] Daniel Louzonis: It’s great to be here. We’ve been talking, you and, I have been talking back and forth about when I was going to come on next. We have a crisis reappearance. The urgency came. Everybody is now a homeschooler. Everyone now is a remote learner, and a distance learner, and a homeschooling parent. You put that in the context of all the other things going on. Transitioning to homeschooling is difficult. Oftentimes, the kids are reluctant. The spouse may not be supportive, grandparents, in-laws do what in-laws do and they’re just always unsupportive. In peaceful times, it’s difficult for most people to transition, and now you have the economic, and financial stress, and the fear that people have of—at least where I live—basically everyone. Everyone that walks within 6, 7, 8, 10 feet of you. By the way, now you have to figure out how to educate your kids.
Yeah, crisis is the word they are using. Nobody wants to hear the positive spin on it, but I will say, right off the bat, that this is not homeschooling. Homeschooling, you can actually go to the park. You can actually go to the museum. You can actually travel. We were trying to go to Florida a few weeks ago, and we weren’t going to go because the beach was closed, and the hotel pool was closed. I hope your audience doesn’t do what some people are doing is conflating what’s going on now with actual homeschooling. I’ve heard people say, “Well, I could never homeschool because my kids are crazy at home,” this, and that, and all these other reasons, all these other complicated reasons. This is not homeschooling. This is not even living as far as I’m concerned.
[00:05:37] Ashley James: This is captivity. We’re getting a taste of what the animals at the zoo feel like.
[00:05:43] Daniel Louzonis: Zoochosis, is that what they call it? Are you familiar with that?
[00:05:49] Ashley James: No.
[00:05:51] Daniel Louzonis: Zoochosis is something that anybody listening should go google and just get the dictionary—standard dictionary definition of it—and maybe even click on a couple of links. All these animals in the zoo, it’s well known that they’re miserable. What do animals taken out of their natural habitat—any animals—do when they are miserable? They mutilate themselves. They get depressed. All these zoo animals, this is a well-established fact, these zoo animals are getting injected with Prozac and the like all over the world because they need to sedate them. They have trouble getting them to mate.
Zoochosis, when I first read about this I said, “OMG. This is school. These kids don’t want to sit still in school. They’re medicating them just to pound that square peg into a round hole. It’s an unnatural environment. It’s not natural to have kids wearing shoes all day when they’re five and six, and sitting all day, and being indoors. This is not natural. What you see in school is just a human form of zoochosis.” It’s definitely worth checking out looking into.
[00:07:03] Ashley James: Very interesting. I’m from Canada, we call it cabin fever. Cabin fever is serious. If you’re snowed in for a few weeks, man, you want to tear the paper off the walls. You need to get out. We’re meant to be out there, and children are definitely meant to be out. I can’t remember what country did this, but they were able to cut ADD rates and ADHD. They were able to cut it so significantly it would blow your mind. They increased recess to two hours a day and ADD went down significantly, that was one. Then there was another study where they increased sleep by—and this is my friend who is a first-grade teacher—increased sleep in children by 30 minutes. Just going to bed 30 minutes earlier, and 60% I believe is what he told me, they were able to cut down the ADD symptoms.
It’s like sleep and exercise people. We’re making children sit in a room all day. They’ve cut down recess in a lot of schools. They get to medicate the children because the children are going crazy because they’re stuck indoors, they get zoochosis.
[00:08:30] Daniel Louzonis: We’ve already got huge overlaps here with everything. The other study talks about—and there’s an actual movement afoot to get schools to have later start times. It’s a little bit of fool’s gold. They’re finding that if they have the high schoolers start later, because basically, in school districts, the high school kids are expected to go to school early because they can get earlier. Then the buses, they want to use the same buses for the middle school and the elementary school. They don’t all start at 9:00 AM. They don’t all start at 8:30 AM. It’s a staggered start. They’re finding that once they delayed the start of school, that not only in these schools has academic performance gone up, but school suspensions have gone down.
That’s just one study, and I don’t think it’s actually tenable because anyone who has teenagers know, they sleep in later they’ll stay up later. They’ll just spend more time, they’ll have more energy at midnight to be on social media. With ADHD, homeschoolers, I’ve known this for over a decade. I can’t tell you how many parents I’ve heard this say, “My kid needed the ADHD medicine when they were in school. Once I pulled them out, they didn’t need it.”
The other thing about fidgety kids in school outside of their natural environment, they’re finding standing desks are going a long way towards behavioral control, focus, and all that. You can google the guy in California, Kelly Starrett. He’s got a whole movement about trying to get schools to have more standup desks. They’re also finding that if you say a seven-year-old kid is anxious, if they let him lay on the floor in his stomach, that he’s totally fine. If they force him to sit in a chair, his behavior is off the wall. One of the reasons I’ve heard bandied about is it’s something about core strength. These kids, they can’t sit or whatever.
There’s a huge overlap between physical health and academic performance. Physical health and what goes on in the brain. It’s so underappreciated. If you asked Richard Branson, the billionaire, why he’s so successful, he says, “Because I workout.” He said, “Because I workout, I have an extra hour a day of energy, and leverage, and all that.” Every single one of these high-performance experts is hacking their body to almost an extreme extent. You touched on already, they have removed recesses from school.
When I was a kid, we had three recess in school. Before you know it, it was down to two, then it was down to one. Now, I hear some schools don’t have any recess whatsoever. Even beyond recess, kids used to walk to school. There is research that shows that kids who walk to school have better grades. Wow. Oxygen flowing to the brain. A little bit of movement. It doesn’t matter whether they’re rich or poor, walking to school is highly correlated with academic performance. Not to say that academic performance is going to set you up for life. I can tell you firsthand that having an Ivy League degree, it doesn’t guarantee you anything in this world. There’ll be so many cans of worms opened up here, so many Pandora’s boxes that we’re going to be on air for about 24 hours straight if we don’t focus ourselves.
[00:11:58] Ashley James: Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s do a marathon, so a 24-hour marathon about homeschooling. I think we could do it. I’m just remembering all the grades where I walked to school or biked to school. I was about a half an hour for me to get to junior high, for me to get from grade 5 and up was about a half an hour I’m thinking. Then I was about a 15-minute walk for me to get to grades 1 and 2. Then high school was only about a seven-minute walk, but for me, those walks to school woke me up.
I remember the walks home helped me destress, especially the long ones. Even though I’m like, “Oh man, I wish I’d be home right now.” I would either ride my bike, or rollerblade, or walk, depending on the weather. It really helped me. It was just the solitude, it would help me to decompress from my day because I had a lot of social anxiety, and I was bullied, and it would help me just to work it out. By the time I got home, I felt refreshed, I felt emotionally recharged.
That time, to be able to just move your body really helped me. Then in college, I drove to college. I remember just feeling sleepy the whole morning because I just wake-up, get in my car, and go. I miss that. I miss that—moving my body in the morning, having to walk there. Yeah, that does make a lot of sense.
[00:13:35] Daniel Louzonis: Cars are killers. If you think about it, and I’ve heard people say this, television passive video consumption in the car. Those two innovations—if we can call them innovations—what they’ve done to the human body is pretty bad. You could almost get rid of all that stuff. If you turn off the TV, or throw it out, and don’t get in a car—I moved to London five years ago, six years ago and I was already pretty thin. I lost 26 pounds because I didn’t have a car. I wasn’t sitting at 90 degrees with my stomach disengaged for two to two-and-a-half hours a day. People used to be really thin. They used to walk everywhere. They used to walk to school uphill in the snow both ways. They used to walk. Nowadays, the kids are getting chauffeured to school—door-to-door.
The bus used to drop kids off at bus stops where kids would walk to a quarter of a mile whatever. The buses started picking up kids right on their doorstep, especially in wealthier areas like where I live in New York area. There are reasons for it. People think it’s safer, it’s less of a liability, but these kids are going from a bed, to a chair for breakfast, to 90 degrees sitting on a bus, to sitting in a desk all day long. They’re never ever getting that chance to decompress in nature, never getting a chance to exercise their body and be in nature at all. It could be for a month or two. It might be by accident.
[00:15:13] Ashley James: It’s such a shame. You, over the years, have become an expert in teaching parents how to homeschool in a way that best supports their child in their education. I don’t want to get too much into your bio because I want listeners to go back and listen to episode 258, but your experience with your two children’s wonderful. You’ve been coaching for a long time. Even parents who say, “I don’t know if I can do it. My child is too hyper. My child is this, or my child is that.” There’s a way to shape homeschooling for each individual child, but before we get into talking about this crisis and what we can do now, I’d like to just catch up. What has happened, what has transpired since we had you on the show in episode 258?
[00:16:12] Daniel Louzonis: I was trying to figure out what date that was, but I will say that—
[00:16:17] Ashley James: It was about two years ago.
[00:16:19] Daniel Louzonis: The last two and a half years, we’ve lived in Manhattan. Two and a half years ago or two and three-quarters years ago, we’re living in a 3500 square foot home in suburban Long Island. I knew there was something missing. It was suburban life, it was driving all day to homeschooling activities, and driving around to the community activities, the soccer, the dance, the karate, and I was going nuts. My kids were about 10 and 11, or 11 and 12 years old. They were at that stage where they needed some autonomy. I did this radical thing. There were other reasons too, health reasons.
My wife was commuting to Manhattan. She was getting up at 4:15 AM to go to CrossFit for 5:00 AM, to get on a train at 6:50 AM, to go into Manhattan—an hour commute there, just about. Then coming back late at night. I just knew that that wasn’t good for her body, it wasn’t good for our relationship, anything.
There were about five reasons that were all pointing towards me selling this big house. Another reason was I believe the stock market was going to crash. The real estate market was going to crash. It was an aggressive financial bet. I sold the house for an insane amount of money, and we moved three minutes away from my wife’s office, right next to the World Trade Center. Her commute went to three minutes—two elevators. If it rains, she just doesn’t even grab an umbrella. She’s a risk-taker. She thinks she can duck under and make it as she did this morning. My kids, like I said, they were like 10 and 11, 11 and 12. I wanted them to be able to walk places.
We moved into Manhattan next to the World Trade Center, a place that 10 years ago, I never would have thought I’d moved next to the World Trade Center especially seeing how my wife was downtown when the towers fell. Things change. Your mindset changes, and your approach toward certain types of risk changes, but my kids could walk to playgrounds. They could walk to Barnes & Noble. They could walk to the deli and buy something that they shouldn’t be eating. Soccer practice is 9/10th of a mile away right up the Hudson River. At 11 years old she was riding her scooter up the river with a bunch of her teammates, every single day, four days a week.
I said, “Try to put a value on me not having to drive my daughter to soccer.” I was literally talking about health. I was literally ready to blow my brains out at all the driving and the chauffeuring that I had to do. I killed so many birds. I killed a whole flock of birds with this one move, and it was the best thing that I did. Of course, we’re living in an expensive tiny apartment, it has its own challenges. But even in New York City, I wanted my kids to work. I could already see that there was more work in New York than there is in the suburbs.
There’s this expression, if you can make it in New York you can make it anywhere. I actually disagree with that. I actually think it’s easier to make it in New York. If you want to work nine days a week, 30 hours a day in New York, you can do it. A one-bedroom apartment, here in my building, a one-bedroom is $4000 a month. You could even pay $5000, but that’s a one-bedroom. The reality is, you could walk dogs just in this building and more than pay your rent. Even though the cost to be here is high, the opportunity is even bigger.
My kids, they’ve been working, let’s see, since we last spoke my son wrote a book titled Kid Trillionaire: How a Little Kid Can Make a Big Fortune. It’s just that. It’s about how kids can make money. What’s the template? What’s the process? What do they have to start doing, stop doing? Who they have to follow? All these things. Terrific, terrific book—Kid Trillionaire. We didn’t put it on Amazon. The only way he was selling it was he was standing on 6th Avenue with a table. I wanted him to stop heads, talk to people, figure out how to deal with whoever would talk to him. He spent many, many hours over the last couple years on the streets of Manhattan selling his book hand-to-hand, and he sold, I believe, over 1200 copies of his book now, not only that, he also got all sorts of media attention.
He was instantly on several TV stations, he had a full-page article about him in the New York Post. This is what is possible when you operate with extreme flexibility outside the system. You can literally move where you want to move. How many times have you heard somebody say, “I don’t want to move to disrupt my kids’ social life,” or “We moved into this house because of the school system.” We’ve never been beholden to any limiting beliefs like that. We moved to London for 15 months and our school goes with us. We go to Florida in the winter for a month or five weeks or so. Our school is totally uninterrupted, nothing changes.
They have libraries down there. We’ll bring the piano keyboard. We’ll do our math, and our chess, and our reading. We’ll go to the park at 2:000 PM, 3:00 PM when all the other kids are out of school. We go to the beach or whatever. Something I want to point out here, I might have pointed out in the last episode, is that I had two young kids. We go to Florida in the winter from Boston. It takes a massive bite out of the winner. For three years, with two little kids, they didn’t have a sniffle or a cold between them. I attribute that to a couple of things. One, being able to go down in Florida and get out of the stale indoor air of frigid New England. Also, they’re not going to school, which people are seeing more and more now that they—
[00:22:19] Ashley James: Petri dish.
[00:22:21] Daniel Louzonis: They’re a petri dish. They’re germ factories. Somehow, nobody knew that six weeks ago. That’s a little bit of what we’ve been doing. That’s John. Let me just say, Christine, she’s 13 years old now. She’s a little hustling entrepreneur herself. A year ago, she said that she wanted to go with her soccer team to France. There was a summer trip during the Women’s World Cup in the summer. Now, going to Europe in the summer is expensive, World Cup tickets, and they’re going to mark this thing up because that’s what they do. Nobody organizes trips for free. Four thousand dollars, we said, “Sure, if you go make the money you can go.” What do you know, in about a few months, she put ads up on the building forums. “I’ll babysit, I’ll mother’s help. I’ll teach your kids piano.” She made that money within, I would say, four or five months. That was just the start of it. Since then, even though I’m against all the smartphones and stuff, she bought her own for $800 with her own money.
My kids now, they are semi-fully launched entrepreneurs. I don’t have life insurance or more than, I don’t know, $50,000 worth. My life insurance, my wife’s life insurance, is that we’re arming our kids, we’re making them future proof, we’re making them socially intelligent, resourceful. At this stage of our homeschooling with teenagers, our focus is strictly on entrepreneurship. They’re not going to go to college. I’m not paying for it. They’d have to pay for it themselves, which I don’t think they would do.
What makes my homeschooling philosophy very unique is how aggressive we start out. We started out with up to three-hour math sessions when they’re four years old. That’s what I did with my kids at least. Very aggressive early on, very strict with the screens like no TV, no video games. Then at the end, an aggressive start and also an aggressive end. The end game is where a lot of homeschooling families lose it. They have 18-year-old kids who are well-rounded, and smart, and have hobbies, and this, and that, but they don’t really have any vocational skills.
They don’t really have any interest in the economy, and therefore, college becomes like a default choice. They just get sucked in. They’re more well-rounded, they’re more mature or whatever, but they’re still getting sucked into the college system. Look, I went to the University of Pennsylvania. I have an Ivy League education, and I didn’t major in impractical things. It was math and economics. I was trading derivatives and futures right out of college in 1995. I can tell you, they don’t really teach you anything about business even in the top schools.
I’m very pro-parent, very pro-education, I’m very anti-outsourcing it. There are certain things that you can’t outsource that you have to do yourself. Far too many people believe that they can outsource the raising in education of their kids. It would be great if I could punt my kids out the door and they came back mature, and well-rounded, and civilized, but unfortunately, what goes on in the schools has gotten so bad. We can talk about this, the last 10 years, it is escalating.
[00:25:40] Ashley James: It is so bad.
[00:25:41] Daniel Louzonis: It has gotten so much worse. With the iPhone, it has gotten so much worse. On the other hand, with the internet, with podcasts, with the bounty of the Information Age, with the ability to connect with anybody on the planet, with the ability to get chess lessons from a grandmaster in India for $10 an hour. The chasm between going in one direction and in another, going to college, going the traditional route versus going hard on entrepreneurship like Gary Vaynerchuk style. Mark Zuckerberg was a dropout, Michael Dell was a dropout, Steve Jobs was a dropout, Bill Gates was a dropout. People are missing it that the most successful people on this planet cannot attribute their success to education. There’s a whole new breed of people out there. The next Bill Gates, and Zuckerberg, and Michael Dell, they’re not going to be kids who went to college for a year and dropped out. They’re going to be kids who never even went to school in the first grade.
I have a good friend and she’s homeschooled her kids for years. Her son applied to MIT and Stanford, got into both, didn’t even think about going to them. The only reason he applied to those schools was because grandma, for years, was saying, “You’re not getting education,” nagging mom and dad. They should be in school. So MIT and Stanford actually applied to him. It wasn’t the other way around. They applied to him and he rejected them. I have stories. Because of what I do, I have stories and anecdotes like this one after another after another after another. Nobody’s really put them all together. It’s always between the cracks. People aren’t seeing it.
The kids who are educated outside the school system are dominating basically everything. In terms of chess, for example. Half of the top youth chess players in America are homeschooled—half. You literally can’t compete with the kids who were sitting home all day playing 11 hours a day and using chess engines. Spelling bees have been dominated by homeschooled kids for ages. Writing contests, you name it. The school system is proving to be an assembly-line from a bygone industrial era that is no longer compatible with the goals. It really never was compatible with the highest goals the parents have for their kids. It doesn’t have any chance or it precludes any chance of our kids discovering, no less reaching their full potential.
In the last 10 years, there’s a whole new reason to home-school. I’m not even going to get into corona. I won’t even put that one in there or the force vaccination schedule that’s going to come. You can’t control the technology in your kid’s lives when all their friends have smartphones. If you were to go back in time 20 years and say, “Hey, we’re going to give every kid, every 12-year-old boy, a device in their pocket. 24-hour television. 24-hour video game consoles.”
[00:29:00] Ashley James: No way. Absolutely not. We would say, “No way.”
[00:29:03] Daniel Louzonis: It also has a stack of porno magazines that goes to the moon. Go around and try to count how many parents, even if you don’t give your kid a phone, their peers all have it. It has become pretty much the dominant social force. There are 20 reasons to homeschool your kids, whether they’re getting bullied, or whether they’re going to be a tennis prodigy, or whatever. Any one of these 20 reasons to home-school is sufficient all by itself. The new one is now you can’t control the tech in their lives, and therefore, you can’t control a lot of other things. Go ahead.
[00:29:39] Ashley James: Their lives are at stake. When we look at ages, I believe it was, 10-24, this range that suicides went up by 60% in the last 10 years. It’s the second leading cause of death in that generation. Basically, in school-aged children, suicide is the second cause of death. I don’t know what the first one is. That’s ridiculous. Suicide is on the rise so much, and these are children who shocks the parents. They’re able to be constantly bullied. I was bullied as a child, but like I said, those walks home I could decompress. Then when I was home, I was away from the bullying, and I could call my best friend, and I could go escape into a book, or I could turn on the TV, or do my homework, or talk to my parents, and I could go bike riding with my neighbor. I could escape for hours until the next day. Whereas now, children are bullied 24 hours a day because they all have these devices, and it’s nonstop for them.
That’s just one reason why the environment of school is completely different than when you and I, because I went to school in the 80s, I’m 40. I’ve talked to some teachers. They said that in the last 10 years, the children are different. One of my friends who’s been a teacher for 20 years, and he has three kids of his own. I’ve talked to other teachers who have been teachers longer, and they said that the children are different. Maybe it’s because they have tablets. Maybe it’s because they don’t have the recess. They have the tablets. They watch way more TV. They’re way more sedentary. They have the ability to constantly chatter with each other through cell phones and through devices. It’s like the key latch kid of our generation.
I’d come home. I had a key to the house. I’d walk home, and I’d be 10-13 years old, somewhere there. No one was home until my parents got home later in the day. We had to learn how to make our own snacks, and do our own thing. We were independent at a very young age. These children are also independent because, in a way, the kids are going off and using these devices the parents aren’t part of it. There isn’t an adult looming over them monitoring the situation. We’re just seeing in the classroom there’s way more bullying. There’s way more backtalk. There’s way more defiance. The children are just rude. They’re becoming violent. It’s crazy.
[00:32:45] Daniel Louzonis: Let me jump in here for one second. You’re going to have people listen to this, listen to me. I’ve been me for a long time. They’re going to hear things like three-hour math sessions when they’re young, aggressive. You’re going to hear them, “Let them enjoy their childhood.” I’ve heard a lot without going into how I want them to enjoy their adulthood too or that whole argument. People say, “Kids aren’t developmentally ready to read until a certain age.” I completely disagree with almost everybody who says it. They have their mind made up.
[00:33:18] Ashley James: My son, when he was 18 months old—18 months old. This is when most children don’t form sentences. They can say words like car like, “Ca, ca.” “Oh, it’s a car.” My son, at 18 months old, knew the entire alphabet backward and forwards. We could pick random letters and he would pick it up, and he’d be able to say, “This is a C. This is a D. This is a Z.” He could say all of them, uppercase and lowercase. We weren’t doing three hour English sessions with him. We were just actively playing with him with letters. I was just blown away that an 18-month-old knew all the letters, and then was able to start recognizing more than letters—was able to start recognizing words.
By the time he was two-and-a-half, he was writing his name. He was holding a pen and writing his name. Then I met a four-year-old, a friend of mine has a four-year-old, who at age four did not know what an A was, did not know what a B was, wouldn’t recognize any part of the alphabet. She was just waiting to put him in public school. If every child has the potential to know the alphabet at 18 months old—he was having fun, it was play. He wasn’t suffering. If every child could know the alphabet at 18 months, could start to read and write by two and a half, and love it, and enjoy it, and it’s fun for them. Then by the time they’re three or four reading complete books and enjoying it and loving it, why not? What are we doing wrong that children are suffering? All of a sudden they start hating learning, and they start pushing back.
[00:35:10] Daniel Louzonis: Those are huge, huge great topics. First of all, the next time someone says the kid’s not developmentally ready for reading—to read now—why don’t you say, “Well, they’re not developmentally ready for the iPad or a television but that’s not stopping you either.” Those are dangerous, dangerous things. But about loving to read and loving your letters, my daughter, she had her letters and she’d carry them around with her all the time. I definitely fondly remember those years 10 years ago. If anybody hates exercise and nutrition, what does your body going to look like? This is just so obvious. People understand the health analogies, and I always go back to them.
If you hate healthy food and you hate to exercise, you’re going to hear people say, “I hate to run. I hate this. I hate vegetables.” Well, what’s your body going to look like? Well, what if you hate to learn? What if you hate to read, and write, and think, and focus? What is your whole entire life going to look like? Unfortunately, that’s the essence of education, right? You’re never going to achieve anything in life, you’re never going to even scratch the surface of your potential—your God-given potential—if you hate to think, and learn, and read, and write, and meet people, and experiment. You don’t even have a chance, but what school does is it makes kids hate to read. It makes them associate reading with coercion, with obligation, with sitting inside, with conformity, with all these stifling activities.
This isn’t proven, this is just like internet stuff. They say that 40% of college graduates will never read another book. When I first read that, I said, “Well, that’s true. After I graduated college, I didn’t read a book until I was about 29 or 30 years old.” Luckily, I actually discovered reading on my own, and I discovered that books were extremely fascinating. They could solve all my problems and open doorways to every path of abundance on this planet. Life’s treasure really is in books, but sadly, these kids are leaving the educational system with not just an unwillingness to read but active bibliophobia.
Stand next to my son on 6th Avenue, and when people say, “Hey, what’s going on? Hey. Who are you?” or whatever. He’ll say, “Oh, I have a book here.” You will see them actually take two steps back. The concept of a book is scary to people. In my world, Satan has won. What worse oppression can you will upon someone than making them think that they’re not intelligent, making them think that effort won’t be rewarded, and closing their mind? They don’t have to be in prison. They’re in a prison. They’ve got their hands cuffed. They’re in a straightjacket forevermore, unless something shocks them into a resurrection, or some type of reincarnation, or invigoration.
[00:38:16] Ashley James: Wouldn’t it be amazing if we all picked up a book? Most of us are isolated at home. We don’t have much to do. The parks are closed. The movie theaters are closed. The restaurants are closed. We shouldn’t go visit anyone. If we all picked up a book and reinvigorated the love of learning and love of reading. It might make it worth it. This whole—I don’t know. There’s a lot of bad going on, but let’s focus on the good because we can’t control. It’s out of our control, so instead of feeling helpless, let’s focus on what we can control. What we can control is the environment right now that our children are in and also our own mental environment, our internal environment. If we could all do things like pick up books and remember how much reading is fun.
I know that in the last year or so your business has really taken off because of the vaccine laws in your area, some states. It was because of the measles, right? That parents took their children out of school for multiple reasons. Some they’re not for vaccines, but some parents they had to because their children would be harmed from the vaccine because they were known to be susceptible. They had no choice other than to start homeschooling. Tell us about that journey.
[00:40:05] Daniel Louzonis: I believe it started in California where they—I think California got rid of the religious exemption for vaccines. In other words, kids go to school, they have to get punctured. I don’t know how many dozen times, how often. There was always a loophole that said if you have religious reasons to not get it you could still go to school. New York followed suit. I believe it was in August this year, so school in New York starts in September. In August, this law came out and there were all these families that under no circumstances we’re going to get their kids vaccinated and sent to school. It was public school and private school. There was a little bit of tyranny. There was nowhere to hide except in homeschooling. They are all reluctant homeschoolers much in the way that all COVID-19 parents have become reluctant homeschoolers.
The number of homeschoolers in Manhattan, or New York City, it doubled. We usually grow 5% a year, whatever. There’s a lot of organic growth every year in homeschooling, and it has been since the 1980, but it doubled. I mean a 100% increase in the number of people homeschooling in New York City.
[00:41:29] Ashley James: Because of the measles? Because of the removal of religious vaccination?
[00:41:35] Daniel Louzonis: Yes, it doubled. What you have was you have all these people who were reluctant homeschoolers. They didn’t actually want to homeschool, they just didn’t want to go to school. There are really two types of homeschoolers.
[00:41:47] Ashley James: They didn’t want to homeschool, but they had no choice because they didn’t want to have the vaccinations for their children, either because they’re against vaccinations, or because their children would have been harmed by them because they knew that they were susceptible.
[00:42:04] Daniel Louzonis: Yeah. Let me get into that. It was a culture clash to start out with. I even did a podcast, are they pro-homeschooling, or are they just anti-vaccine? Anytime you get an influx of people, a bunch of them move into the neighborhood, some people are welcoming, some people are not, some people are saying, “They don’t look like us. They don’t talk like us.”
[00:42:24] Ashley James: The culture changes, right?
[00:42:26] Daniel Louzonis: Right. There’s been an ongoing assimilation process in New York City for—the change is more for them than for us. Homeschoolers, they know how to self-quarantine. They know how to draw boundaries. No one’s forced to really do anything with anybody. I did get to meet some of these new people. Like I said, they were in nooks and crannies. You didn’t realize how many. I was astounded by how many people it was. It turns out, there were tons and tons of people and when you talk to them—I always ask people, it doesn’t matter if you’re sitting at the bar, or sitting next to me in church, or I bump into you, I’m always going to ask you, “Where you’re from? What’s your story?” I’m just interested. I will always ask people why they’re homeschooling. Nowadays, you can just almost say, “Do you have vaccines?” And half the people, it’s yes.
When you hear their stories the reasons why they’re homeschooling, they’ll talk about their sister who was in a coma for three months after this, or their son who had eczema so bad, all these things from vaccines. You and your people probably know, you might even know more about this stuff than I do, but it’s the vaccine injury Club that’s not publicized. That if you talk about it on TV you’re going to get audited and thrown off the air. You’re going to get delisted by Google and all this stuff. There’s a huge community of people out there that were just trying to get by and send their kids to school normally without the vaccine, and all of a sudden they couldn’t do that.
The worst thing now that’s happening is that this virus is going to probably—and I’m sure you have a lot of strong thoughts on this too—it’s probably going to make the vaccine enforcement even more militant. They’re talking about medical martial law and how you can’t go anywhere without showing your papers that you’re fully vaccinated, that you’re up to date.
[00:44:19] Ashley James: Yeah. They’re saying it’ll have an RFID chip, you won’t be able to get your driver’s license, you won’t be able to pay your due taxes. There’s just talk. It’s just talk at this point, but it is infringing upon our freedom and our rights especially when you understand the complexities of vaccines. Even people who are pro-vaccine. Again, I try to stay neutral because I’m not here to—I don’t know—fear monger. I’m not here to tinfoil hat anyone. I’m just asking people to please question things.
[00:45:02] Daniel Louzonis: Do their own research.
[00:45:03] Ashley James: Please, do your own research. Please, just question. I had someone message me once after a really great interview about vaccines. She’s like, “I’ve been listening for a while. I really love your show, but I’m really confused. Why isn’t the flu shot great? I thought it was the best thing in the world.” It’s just people believe what they’ve been told by their doctor, or by some TV commercial, or by some news broadcast, or by what their mom said. I remember, the last time I got a flu shot I was 18 years old. This is back in the 90s. I remember my chiropractor was giving them. She thought it was the best thing in the world. My mom said, “This is a new thing out. We can get vaccines,” this is in Canada, “We can get a shot and we won’t get the flu.” The thing is, my mom and I saw Naturopaths. We ate non-processed foods. We ate, it was like a Paleo diet at the time. They didn’t call it Paleo, but we didn’t eat processed foods.
We got a lot of sunlight. We took our vitamins. We never got sick. I mean never. I have no idea why my mom was so excited about the flu shot, but she was told by her chiropractor that it was the best thing in the world and we’ll never get sick if we get this flu shot. We both got it, and we got so sick from it. We were sick for two weeks. We were so violently sick from this flu shot. My mom and I just turned to each other and we’re like, “What were we thinking? This is ridiculous.” I had no idea that there were heavy metals in it. That there was a fetal tissue in it. That there was DNA from other animals in it. Just the list, you go down the list of ingredients. I had no idea, but it definitely didn’t make me healthier. That had me just a little back in my mind like, “Oh, wow. Interesting that that could happen,” because it was sold to us. They only talked about how it’s healthy.
My thing is when someone tries to sell you a man-made drug or treatment, and they only tell you the good, and they don’t tell you the bad—because everything has a side effect—and they only tell you the good. If you just question. If you just go, “Hey, that sounds great. Can you tell me about the bad?” or “Hey, can you tell me about the ingredients?” or “Hey, can you tell me about the studies that prove that it’s safe?” All of a sudden, people come at you and attack you personally. “Oh, you’re an anti-vaxxer.” You start getting attacked personally just by asking questions. You weren’t attacking the drug or the treatment, you were just wanting more information. If someone is attacked for asking for information, then you know that there’s something up. There’s a culture that’s been created that it’s not safe to ask questions around vaccines.
[00:48:07] Daniel Louzonis: It’s the expert culture.
[00:48:09] Ashley James: What do you mean?
[00:48:11] Daniel Louzonis: You can’t get on TV unless you’re somehow seen as an expert. They have a degree from here, a Ph.D. from there. Just because someone’s on TV—I’ve been on TV, that doesn’t make me an expert. What makes someone an expert is the results that they get, and who needs experts? “Oh, people who can’t think for themselves,” or who can’t think for themselves? Well, people educated by a system. People who never even planned out their own day until they were 22 years old, if ever. The school system is an obedient system. It has lobotomized brains where people can’t think for themselves. We all have friends and family members, but if you ask them their opinion on something, every single word that they say you’ll know is straight from a certain publication. They literally can’t form their own opinions. It’s called received opinion. This is what experts need. This is what people in power need. They don’t need or want anybody who can think independently.
Going back to what type of kids are we going to raise? If we don’t teach our kids to be able to think critically and understand that people on TV, people in the media, politicians, that they have an agenda. If they don’t see that, then they will take a lot of things at face value. The flu shot you’re talking about. Do you know that they actually pay you to take to get the flu shot now? Did you know you get a $25 Amazon gift card?
[00:49:40] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.
[00:49:42] Daniel Louzonis: They started out saying, “Oh, it’s only $60.” Then it was only $25 or $30. Then it was only $17 at CVS. They got it into the retail establishments. Now, if you get a flu shot, they will give you a $25 gift card. That started I believe this year. Your viewers can google that. Yeah, they’re literally paying you for this loyalty oath, and it is a loyalty oath. It’s a faith in science, faith in doctors. It’s its own pseudo-religion. Meanwhile, what they know about the body is still zero.
The body is a mysterious thing and nobody should ever speak with certainty about a treatment, about a medicine, or anything because they really don’t know. This is—my brother taught me this term years ago—a god complex. I had to look it up. This was before Google, but a god complex is a belief in infallibility. If you go to a doctor and say, “Hey, well what about this, this, and this?” Not only are they going to call you an anti-vaxxer, are they going to call you a Google mommy. There are a lot of complicated reasons.
First of all, that doctor has been giving that vaccine to thousands of people. In his own mind, he can’t one day think, “Maybe I’ve been hurting people.” When a person’s income, and their livelihood, and their ego depends on them doing a certain thing, they’re not going to be easily moved or easily encouraged to reevaluate that. It’s just human nature. We all kind of dig ourselves in, and so there’s that too.
A friend of mine in Florida, in Naples Florida, his son got a round of vaccinations when he was really young. His son came home and started staring at ceiling fans and just dazing out. He says, “Oh boy.” He didn’t know what it was. He’s googling. He became a Google Daddy. He found out that it looked like his son—he saw him, he’s craving carbs. I’m just telling you what he told me. His son got a diagnosis out on the edge at the autism spectrum, okay, whatever.
Daughter comes along next year-and-a-half, same doctor. He says to the doctor, “I want to pass on this round of vaccinations.” The doctor started dropping f-bombs on him, and told him to get the bleep out, and go find a new bleeping doctor. You talk about being called a Google mommy is one thing, but trying to find a doctor who will take you, that’s a whole other. The homeschoolers in New York have had a hard time finding doctors who will even take them on, finding pediatricians. Even before they started ramping up the forced vaccinations, they were going up to doctors and saying, “Well, we’re not going to give you insurance if you don’t have a 98% or 99% vaccination.
[00:52:33] Ashley James: Premera actually pays a bonus. In certain states, Premera pays a bonus if they have a certain percentage of vaccines. It is such a good bonus that it keeps the lights on. It’s the difference between profitability and loss for these pediatricians. I’ve had this covered in an interview, but it was covered a little bit in The Truth About Vaccines, which is a docuseries. I have had a few interviews worth that went into detail. I think Dr. Paul Thomas talked about it, off the top of my head.
Listeners can go to learntruehealth.com and type in Paul Thomas. He’s a great pediatrician in Portland who wrote a book called Safe Vaccines. He’s not anti or pro. He’s actually pro-informed consent. He wants to give you all the bad. You’re told all the good, here’s actually all the bad, and you should know. You should know both sides, and you should know what to do instead. Half of his practice chose not to vaccinate or actually maybe a bit more. During flu outbreaks, when I interviewed him, there was a massive flu outbreak. The hospitals in Portland had six-hour wait times. This was about two winters ago, I don’t know if you remember.
[00:54:00] Daniel Louzonis: 2018.
[00:54:01] Ashley James: There was a big flu scare, and all the hospitals in all the cities were just completely slammed with influenza. His clinic has four doctors and a few nurse practitioners. It was a big clinic. They have thousands and thousands of patients, over 10,000 patients. Friday afternoon, they’re expecting because they called around. They found out that every hospital in Portland was like a six-hour wait because of influenza. They said they went home early Friday. They got zero phone calls from the parents. None of their patients were sick with influenza.
They actually went home early because they were just like, “Okay, we can wrap it up. Everyone’s fine.” Whereas they were expecting to be slammed also, but he said he attributed that to the fact that the children take vitamin D, they get plenty of sunlight. He educates his patients on how to eat healthy, not junk food, but how to eat healthy, real food, and they choose not to vaccinate, and they choose to do alternative things other than vaccinations. He just saw, he sees it in his practice.
You say expert opinions, he sees it in his practice that the children who get to run outside, who are homeschooled, who get to eat real food, and who aren’t put on a ton of drugs, they’re the ones who have really healthy immune systems.
[00:55:36] Daniel Louzonis: What about stress too, right? How much does constant stress reduce the immune system? I’m not an expert on it, but I’m pretty sure that there’s a high correlation between vulnerability and the amount of stress that kids who are studying for math tests every week, and being woken up early, not getting enough sleep, who are on devices all the time, and who are just constantly being pushed, poked, and prodded.
Stress is a big deal. I tell my kids all the time, I could yell my head off at them all day long and they wouldn’t experience the natural organic stress of being in school, being under a microscope having kids. I’m 100% serious. Always worrying about, “Are my pants a little too purple? Or this, or my hair. Do I have big zit on my face? What’s this person going to say? Is this person going to…?”
The constant accumulate micro stresses of being in school. Look, every personal development expert knows the concept of a mastermind is that you go join a group of other entrepreneurs or other social circles where people are operating at a high level, and just by being in that group of fast-charging achievers you level yourself up. They level you up. What happens in school on so many different levels is that because it’s age-graded, the students all pull their ignorance.
[00:57:12] Ashley James: It’s the lowest common denominator. It’s the Homer Simpson model. You look at the Simpsons. I choose the Simpsons because I learned the idea of the lowest common denominator back when the Simpsons were really popular.
[00:57:31] Daniel Louzonis: Wait, not in math class?
[00:57:33] Ashley James: Its ideas that why is it that Fox, for example, or whatever, or CBS, why do they put out shows that are so dumb? They’re funny but they’re really dumb. It’s this idea that they need to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Let’s dumb down everyone down so that everyone can participate in the entertainment that’s dumb instead of trying to raise people up. This idea that’s like, “Let’s get everyone like Homer Simpson where we’re all dumbed down together instead of challenging people to and pulling them up.”
[00:58:24] Daniel Louzonis: What’re low expectations, right? I think it was Condoleezza Rice. I think she was working with Bush—the Bush two. She’s talked about an expression or she bandied about an expression, “The bigotry of low expectations.” If you have low expectations of people they will never break through that ceiling. You have to have high escalating—even if you’re a parent. If your kids were doing the dishes and making their bed this month, well, what can you add to that next month? You have to be pushing people. They have all this potential. They respond to it. They feel respected when you ask more of them. It’s not just the TV. The newspapers, I remember years ago them saying that, going back into the 80s at newspapers were now written at a fourth and fifth-grade level.
Online, they say, “Oh, keep your videos short. Use one-word sentences. Use one-sentence paragraphs because nobody has any attention span.”
[00:59:25] Ashley James: My shows are two hours long. I probably could get more listeners if it was like a five-minute show, but it would be, again, appealing to the lowest common denominator. I want to raise people up. I want to dive deep into these discussions, and pull information out of the brains of the guests, and enrich the listener as much as possible. We have to challenge ourselves so that we can rise up.
This brings up my question for the practical application. My five-year-old son, back when he was two and a half he loved doing this—picking up a pen, start writing, but now he’s fighting me. This idea and I’m watching my friends’ kids who don’t want to do chores. You’re saying, “What could you add to the list next month?”
What about the children who are defiant, or the children who don’t want to do that? They don’t want to sit down and do math work. They don’t want to do the dishes. They don’t want to do their bed. How do you get to the point where they’re excited to do it, and they want to do more, and they feel that the responsibility is you respecting them, and they’re excited about the responsibility? How do you flip it so that they go from defiance to excitement?
[1:00:45] Daniel Louzonis: Some children are actually that ODD, that oppositional defiant disorder. There are some children who feel so uncomfortable doing anything that they’re told, that if you say, “Up,” they’ll say, “Way down.” If you say, “Yes,” they’ll say, “No way.” Even to their own self, like destruction. This will be hard for you if you do it this way. They don’t care. They really have trouble. The good thing about those kids is that they will not just listen to the authorities. You probably heard the expression, “The strong-willed child.” I’m sure there are books about, “the strong-willed child.” One thing we say about my daughter because my daughter is in this category.
My kids are the opposite. My son will do anything that you ask him, but only what you ask him. My daughter will do nothing that you ask. I actually have two polar opposites. He needs to be a little more self-motivating, and she needs to be a little more receptive to people who are wiser than her and even people who pay the bills. Maybe you should do this one thing. What we say about her is that, euphemistically, “Well, she has leadership qualities. She’s not a follower.”
To answer your question specifically about Brave, some kids don’t like math because of the curriculum. Some kids don’t like math because they’re just testing whether or not it’s optional. You get tests, they get tests, you get tests. Sometimes, the kid may, this is like a 5% chance, they may have dyscalculia where they have trouble seeing three fingers is three really quickly. But in my experience, there’s a lot of things you can do especially if you have the ultimate leverage and flexibility that is homeschooling. There are a lot of things that you can do with him.
For example, if he’s five—I’ll even walk you through specifically what I would do with him. I would have him count by twos. He can count, I’m sure. The first thing when you start with young kids—count to 30, great. Count to 60 by 2s, great. Now, count by 3s to 90. Count by 5s to 150, 10s to 300, and we just skip count over and over and over and over again. This is a karate kid drill that can be done verbally in a car while you’re driving, when you’re walking, it can be done on paper, and we can add many, many layers of complexity to it. We would say, “Well, how do we add 10? 17 plus 10, well it’s 27. The kids can pick that up. Well, how do we add 9?” Well, we go up 10 and we come back 1, great.”
“I want you to count by 9s to 270.” We start with 9 and we say, “Well, it’s not 19, we come back 1 is 18. It’s not 28, we come back 1, 27,” and they learned to count by 9s up to 270. Then they learned to count by 8s, and then we learned to count by 7s, and 11s, and 12s, and then we count backward. We say, “Count from 270 to 0 by 9s. We do these same self-mastery drills over and over and over and over again. We time them. There’s a time component. To count by 9s, it took them 4 minutes you write it down. They can see. Now it took them three minutes. Next thing you know it’s a minute and a half.
They feel good about what they’re doing. They can see their progress. They know they couldn’t do it. They remember they couldn’t do it a week ago, and now they’re starting to own the numbers. This is all without word problems. It’s all without common core, and it just keeps it very simple. Math is very, very important. It’s become lost on the public with the common core mishandling of it that math is a foundational skill.
My whole life was built on math. I was captain of my math team in high school, and we won the New England championship, which at the time, one of the most competitive leagues in the country. I look back—my kids, everything I’ve been able to do with them: read thousands of books, win chess tournaments, play multiple instruments. All these things that we’ve been able to do build entrepreneurship. It’s all built on math. Like I said, school is ruining kids for reading, it’s also ruining everybody for math.
The homeschooling world does not do a good job with math because they don’t know what to do. They don’t know what’s different about school math. They tend to use a lot of manipulatives and stuff, but the rigor of school math is important. We have to infuse our homeschool math with some rigor. The number one tip I have for infusing rigor is to do it every day first thing. If you try to do math at 3:00 PM after he’s been running around all day, or 8:00 PM after you’ve been working all day at night, it’s not going to happen.
My top tip for, not just everyone else but myself included, is you get up and you do math right away. The first academic subject you do is the toughest one. Even if it’s 30 minutes, or 40 minutes, or 20 minutes, you just do it right away, and then the rest of the day will run downhill. I can definitely give you all these—what would we say? I can give you some videos to watch on this skip counting, and I can even give you a link so that your listeners can see exactly what I’m talking about. It might not come over the ear so expertly.
We do basic drills with paper and pencil, and this skip counting drill will teach your kid addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and even factoring all in one swoop. It’s the most powerful drill that I have all my little four and five-year-old math genius students doing and really enjoying. That’s the building block that I have for math before we even go on to algebra and stuff. We have this one thing here. What else do you want to know? What else can I help you with? Is it the pen that he doesn’t want to touch, the pencil specifically?
[01:07:06] Ashley James: Oh, no, no. It’s the act of now sitting down and doing it. It’s like he would rather be doing something else. We’ll do one page of schoolwork and as we’re going through he goes, “Can we just do one page?” I’m like, “No, we’re going to do more.” He’s halfway through the next page, “Can this be the last page?” It’s just the constant, “When’s this going to be over? When’s this going to be over?” Any time I go, “Okay. It’s time to do schoolwork.” He’s like, “No,” and he runs away from me. It’s funny though because he started out really loving it, and then something shifted, and now he doesn’t like it.
I see it in other parents and other kids. I thought it’d be great in general, especially parents who are now stuck with their kids at home because of the COVID-19. They’re not used to getting their kids to sit down and do work. Then they’re finding that their kids are, “I’d rather watch TV. I’d rather go play my video game. I’d rather chat with my friend. I’ll do that later. No. I don’t want to do that right now.” Instead of punishing them, because the thing is I started saying like, “You’re going to get a timeout.” I started bringing out the stick instead of the carrot. Now it’s a punishable offence to not do school work so now school work is punishment. It’s like, “Geez, how do we get this to be fun again?”
What he loves doing is leave him on his own. He’s like, “I’m going to go do a science experiment.” All this morning he was playing with baking soda and vinegar. He really, really wants to make science experiments, and he wants to make things explode, and make elephant toothpaste, and stuff like that. We’ve got the ant farm. He’s all about finding bugs and worms. He helps me in the garden. He’s really about learning about insects. If it’s something that he’s really excited about, we could do that for hours, but when it comes to the things that he isn’t excited about. He’s just fighting me on it, which I think it’s kind of normal for some kids.
If other parents are struggling with that, how can we turn it around? How do we help the parents go from crisis schooling to homeschooling where it’s really getting the child excited and motivated about their education?
[01:09:39] Daniel Louzonis: Look, all that stuff he’s doing with science experiments, that’s awesome. You have a lot of currency to play with, and there are a lot of people who could never get their kids to show such enthusiasm, and such curiosity, and focus. That’s good, but I maintain that if you add in the rigor of the math, and I’ll give you a couple of tips on how you can get it in, that that stuff will go to the next level. This goes back to what I was saying, math is incredibly important.
All of our life we’re trying to figure out problems. We have to put them on paper, we have to deal with abstract issues, and try to identify variables, and solve for unknowns. Math is actually a powerful tool. Actually, doing algebra itself is not, but the mindset, the discipline that you need to have to do that, that’s transferable into everything. Again, in the morning, I call it math for breakfast, you do math right away. With some kids, they say, “Well, you’re not eating breakfast until it’s done or until half of it’s done.”
For some kids you only have to do that once, and they realize it’s a lot easier to do it. I understand your reluctance to use punishment, but the reality is that the world punishes our lack of discipline. We’re preparing our kids for the outside world. The real world is going to be way harsher on our kids than we could even ever—I mean, you’re 40 years old too. You know the real world will chew you up and spit you out a million different ways. Having your kid do 20, 30 minutes, an hour of math, that is not going to destroy their love or learning. What that’s going to do is that’s going to say, “Hey, in the real world, sometimes you guys do things you don’t want to do.” Again, you would use incentives.
With my son John, we have a Lego set on top of the refrigerator when he was young. I said, “When you finish these three workbooks you could get that Lego set with Star Wars or whatever,” so he had some little thing to work towards positively. Negatively, if my kids didn’t do like I say, “We’re going to do four pages,” we’re on sixteen, I turned the page, I circled the fourth page. Any lip whining, bad job, distracting the other kid, whatever, “Now we’re doing five pages.” You just do it like you would do all disciplining. The way that all these experts teach. Just do it dispassionately. You do an extra page, that’s it. If they complain, it’s another extra page.
You have to let them know that they can’t go out into the real world and complain about things that they don’t want to do. You’re raising your expectations every week, every month, or whatever. 20 minutes, 30 minutes of math, he can handle it. He sounds like he’s very bright. As a homeschooling parent, math is a major pain point because it involves a lot of stress. People feel like they’re failing their kids if they don’t do math. Math is the one subject that you have to generate momentum in because everything is built upon that which comes before it. You can’t take a month off from math.
In school, they take two months off in the summer from math, and every year, the kids slide back 2.4 months. This is why if you buy a Kumon book, or any of the math workbooks, if you buy a 3rd-grade math book, you’ll see the first 15%-20% of it is review. They assume you’re going to constantly slide back. Math is my only thing. If I would say there are two things you can’t do without, it’s math early on, it’s for the kid as a building block, it’s also for mom and dad to generate some self-confidence, and then they can do whatever they want the rest of the day. I’m sorry, math and then reading, and they can do whatever they want the rest of the day.
If they just sit an hour of math, and an hour of reading, and or writing — like writing, like freewriting, transcript of writing —from 8:00 AM-10:00 AM. If they just did that, they would probably be qualified to almost get into Harvard. Just those two habits, but you can’t take the summers off. You can’t take weeks off. We’re on spring break this week, “Well, look, mommy’s not on spring break. Mommy has to do dishes.” You don’t get breaks, just two hours a day, and it’ll be automatic. They wouldn’t even know that it was optional to not do it. A fish doesn’t know that it’s wet. It’s just normal to get up every day, and read, and whatever.
The reading thing, look, not enough people understand that reading is like the homeschooling parents’ secret weapon. I used to drive to Florida from Boston in New York with two little kids in my car and my wife wasn’t with me. We wouldn’t put a movie on or anything. They would read the whole way. The homeschooling families who have done the complete screen detox and have turned their kids into raging bibliophiles, they have so much leverage because they can take their kids anywhere. I used to take my kids on consulting gigs. I would sit and I would work with other families, and my kids would sit on the couch for 3 hours, 10 feet away, and not move. My client just couldn’t stop looking at my kid like, “How do you get your kid to sit like that?”
What parent doesn’t want their kid to be able to sedate themselves, to fire up their imagination, expand their vocabulary, and all those great things with a book? They’re sedating kids with devices and with over-scheduling.
[01:15:05] Ashley James: Dumbing them down.
[01:15:07] Daniel Louzonis: Over-scheduling too. Some sign them up for activities. It’s two days off from school. It’s one day off. “It’s Martin Luther King Day, I got to sign them up for something.” Really? One day?
[01:15:20] Ashley James: I love it. I love that idea that the children are jumping into books instead of jumping in the screens, and that’s enriching them. What do you think about learning from screens? Because I see in some homeschooling groups, “Oh, ABCmouse is so great. My son is doing a lot of tablet learning.” What do you think about that?
[01:15:45] Daniel Louzonis: It’s not good. It’s definitely not good.
[01:15:47] Ashley James: Can you cite studies or what’s your experience to show that it’s not good?
[01:15:53] Daniel Louzonis: It’s that books are so much better. It’s that moving their bodies is so much better. Anything that gets between a child and bibliophilia I want out because books are so, so important, right? I was just telling my wife this yesterday. Someone was saying, “Oh, my kid. I was showing him the flashcards, and they were identifying numbers 1, 2, 3, 8, 9, 10, and when it came to the 11th number they said pause.” They thought 11 meant pause. They’re saying at kindergarten, they come in, they give them a real book, and they don’t know how to turn the page. They’re trying to swipe to turn the pages of a physical book.
Look at a child who’s on a tablet, look at their posture.
[01:16:40] Ashley James: Oh, it’s horrible.
[01:16:42] Daniel Louzonis: They’re not going to blink. They’re not going to be moving their bodies. We haven’t talked about it but this is a health podcast, and I should definitely bring it up. Fine motor skills. Fine motor skills is something that people don’t have any clue about. I honestly had no idea either. I thought that cursive handwriting was utterly useless, and then I saw some guru talk about how it’s been proven that nothing fires up the brain like cursive handwriting. They put the electrodes on the head, and they show that when you write the cursive handwriting—ideally cursive handwriting on a blank sheet of paper—is a very powerful intense brain exercise.
I saw this guy, and then I went down into this rabbit hole of hit the guru behind the guru. Not only did I start changing my homeschooling approach and incorporating more writing in cursive, but personally, what I do every day is a form of active meditation is I do cursive handwriting. What I’ll do is I’ll write out famous quotes by Einstein, or Lincoln, or Oprah Winfrey, or whatever. I’ll write it out with my best cursive— right-handed—and then I will take the pen and put it in my left hand. I will write it out going from the right side of the page back to the left in reverse mirror-image cursive.
What I’m doing when I do that is I’m using both sides of my brain, and I’m cultivating ambidexterity. The gurus behind the guru, they’ve basically proven that all these geniuses—like going back to Leonardo da Vinci—were ambidextrous. That the rest of us are using half of our brains when they’re using their whole brain. I think it was Michelangelo when he was painting the Sistine Chapel for hours and hours and hours, paintbrush overhead, hoisted up there, when he got tired with his right hand he would just switch to his left hand.
Leonardo da Vinci could write with one hand and draw with the other one. Some people consider him to be smarter than Einstein, but he could write with one hand and draw with the other simultaneously. Lost in what’s going on with this shift to screens is that kids don’t get enough time wielding a pencil. You and I took it for granted. How many times did we get a piece of paper and write our name and our date and just go? Nowadays, with Khan Academy, and with all these online classes, and with millennial teachers who are giving kids forms, and multiple-choice stuff, bubble tests because it’s easier for them to grade, the kids are not using their hands. They’re not using their hands to knit and sew, and they’re not exercising their fine motor skills whittling things. They’re just not using their hands.
The net effect of that is that they’re not developing their brain with the most powerful tools they can. Like I said, it’s been proven that cursive handwriting is like the best thing, best exercise you can do. I started teaching math, I don’t know, 10 years ago—officially—to other kids, and I started noticing their pencil grips. They had these caveman grips. You couldn’t even understand how they could wield the pencil that way. This was my introduction to it, and I started to see. You don’t notice anyone’s a parent until you’re pregnant and have a kid yourself. You don’t notice anyone has a Toyota Camry until you start shopping for Toyota Camrys. I didn’t notice anybody’s pencil grip until I started doing this, and it’s gotten worse and worse over time.
One of the reasons is these kids aren’t getting enough time with paper and pencil. One reason is not getting enough reps. The other reason is that the hyperstimulation of video games, and Spongebob, and TV, actually fries the part of the brain that controls fine motor skills. The video games are making it so these kids, not only can’t use a pencil or a pen properly, but they hate it. You think they hate books? They hate writing like you would not believe.
Then they get to math, and there are a lot of kids, and I’ve had a lot—especially boys and girls who are good at math. They know that 8 times 7 is 56. They’re just good with it, they understand it, but then they get to pre-algebra. In algebra, they have to write out step-by-step. You have to use scrap paper. You have to do a lot of work—multi-step calculation and computation. Because they hate the pen and the pencil so much, they won’t write 3x + 7 = 85, 3x = 78. They won’t do it because, again, they have this weakness. It’s almost like somebody who has no wind, no stamina, they’re out of shape. They can’t play soccer if they don’t have the cardiovascular training to move to get to the ball.
These kids that can’t wield a pencil or a pen, they don’t have the fine motor skill cardio to be able to sit down with paper and pencil. There’s a reason why the top—I wonder if you know this or not—but the top-selling book categories on Amazon are adult coloring books. The reason is, it’s a form of active meditation. You’re forced to focus. It’s taking you out of that multitasking, a hyper-distracting state we are where we have inbound on social media, text messaging, and whatever. It’s really, really good for the brain.
I’m dead set against all this fake tablet education. I have yet to see a kid, and I’ve met a lot of kids who were super accelerating geniuses who were on the device a lot. I have never seen one. All my kids who were at super high levels four, or five, or six grade levels above normal, they’re not on screens at all. I know they’re not necessary, and I actually believe that they’re pretty bad on several fronts. Hopefully, in that long-winded answer, you could catch wind of a couple of those fronts where I see it’s risky, right? You’re opening a Pandora’s box.
You give a kid an iPad, and they tilt it away from you, and your friend shows them how to do this or that. Their ability to be sneaky on that is it’s like sending letters by rabbit. It’s not going to get there. If you’ve seen this at the airport where you’re going through airport security, and a kid has a device, and they have to put the device through the machine. I’ve seen it multiple, multiple times where they have to take the device from the kid, and the kid has an absolute meltdown because they don’t want to put the device through the metal detector for a minute. I’m a little bit of, I don’t know. Your viewers can put their own label on me, but I will go up to people in public where I have done it and I’m like, “Why are you giving that kid the iPad? They’re two years old. Why do you have a mounted iPad on the stroller?”
[01:23:36] Ashley James: It drives me crazy when I’m at the grocery store that parents give cell phones to their children and young—young children. I’ve never handed my cell phone to my son to sedate him at a grocery store. I don’t hand my cell phone to my son, but I’m just saying, it’s an opportunity for learning. The whole time I’m talking to him. He’s sitting in the cart. He could walk but it’s a lot easier to have him—he could walk now. Sometimes he helps push the cart, but I actually prefer him to be—him and I can look at each other, we can talk, he can see what’s going into the cart, and he can help pick things out because he can see all the produce because he’s above it all, sitting in the cart facing me.
We’re talking the whole time about what’s going in the cart, and about what we’re going to make for dinner, about what he wants, and we’re having a discussion. He says, “Oh, what’s that?” I said, “You want to try this? What kind of new vegetable do you want to try? Do you want to try a new fruit?” Sometimes he’ll just start eating the kale raw before we bought it because it’s not weighed, it’s by a bushel, like $2 a bunch or whatever, not a bushel. He’ll just start eating it, so he’s engaged.
I remember, this happened recently, him and I are talking, and I walk into the produce section with him, and there was a mom with a kid. Maybe about a year, year and a half younger than my son. That kid was just hunched over, neck totally hunched over, playing on a phone, and the mom was not talking to the kid at all. It just blows my mind because no matter how hyper your kid is, you can get through to them, and you can have this really meaningful conversation with them when you’re doing things like grocery shopping. It can be this incredible educational experience.
My son points out things that—he goes, “Oh, grab a turnip.” I’m like, “Which one’s the turnip?” He knows which one the turnip is. I always get them mixed up with the rutabaga. They all look the same to me, these root vegetables. He knew which one the turnip was, and so I grabbed it, and then I had to google it. I pulled out my phone and I’m like sure enough. My husband and my son and I, we all go grocery shopping together because it’s a fun family experience. We were guessing which one’s the rutabaga, which one’s the turnip, which one’s the parsnip—I know what a parsnip looks like. The rutabaga and the turnip I always get them mixed up and my son doesn’t. He knows. He learned it once and he figured it out. He was the one that got it right. The three of us were having a bet like, “Okay, who’s got it right? Let’s all guess which vegetables these are.” He wanted us to buy it. He goes, “Can we make pancakes out of these?” He comes up with these crazy recipes.
If your child is on a cell phone, they’re not making meaningful connections. They’re not learning about the world. They could be learning about food and how that nourishes the body. He’ll actually point to stuff and he’ll say, “Does that have sugar in it? What’s in that? Can I have this?” I’ll read the ingredients, and he’ll tell me, “Can you read the ingredients of this?” I’ll say, “Oh, no.” I’ll list off the ingredients and he goes, “No, I can’t have that.” Because he knows. He doesn’t feel good when he eats certain things, and he wants to feel good.
We don’t do foods that are high in sugar or any sugar. If it’s fruit, that’s one thing. There are natural fruit roll-ups and that’s a treat for him. There’s no sugar in it, it’s just fruit concentrate. He gets those kinds of treats, but he knows to ask to read the ingredients. I show him. I’m like, “Do you see the word sugar?” I’d show him the ingredients, and he looks through, and he tries to read it. He’s getting word recognition, and he’s also allergic to weird things like garlic. We have to really be careful, and I’ve shown him the ingredients. I say, “Do you see the word garlic here?”
Going to the grocery store is learning. Even now, this is the only place we can go is the grocery store, but we can use every time we go out the door. Even at restaurants. We look over and there’s an entire family on their cell phones, the kids included. I always look at them, I’m like, “How is it that every child in that family, plus the parents, all own a cell phone? These things are expensive.” Whereas you can be having a meaningful conversation.
We were given to it for Christmas by a friend. It’s all these magnets that you can put together to make a robot. Just a little stuff. You could bring these puzzles. You could bring word games. You could bring things to the restaurant, or to wherever you’re going, or you can have the kid read the menu with you, or you can just talk about what you want to eat, or talk about what you want to do next. Just want to engage with your child versus the children that are just glued to the screens. They’re not learning how to communicate and how to engage.
I don’t want to shame the parents who do that because I know that they’re doing it for a reason. Maybe they feel that it’s made it easy for them, or they’re stressed out, and it gives them a break. I get that, but I think what gives us a break in the short-term—kind of like drinking a glass of wine every night to calm down. What is helping us in the short-term is harming us in the long term. “Oh, I just need this alcohol to relax. Oh, I just need my son to hold a cell phone to relax, to have a break.” It’s the short-term gratification that actually creates a far greater long-term problem.
[01:29:54] Daniel Louzonis: Well, here’s a quote for you, “Talking to children is as important as feeding them.” When you think about that, we didn’t get into language skills and language acquisition. One of the huge predictors of kid’s success in life is what their vocabulary is when they’re four, or five, and six years old. You almost can’t change it. Here’s the data point. I might have given it to you way back when, I’ll give it again. I think it’s 1950, the average working vocabulary by this one study of a five or six-year-old kid was 4,000 words. Today, it’s not 4,000 words anymore, it’s closer to 1,000. There are only two things, two reasons.
One is actually preschool, daycare, and the other is the change since the 50s is television. The problem with preschool, daycare, and television is that they crowd out conversation. There are no adults talking to kids. There are no kids asking questions. Everyone’s on a device, or everyone’s being sedated by a device, or three-year-old kids are off at daycare amongst other three-year-old kids. You can’t learn any new vocab words from one of your peers. You learn vocab words from somebody speaking directly to you personally about something you can relate to or put in context and that has a bigger vocabulary than you.
We didn’t even talk about language acquisition. A lot of people meet homeschool kids, and they can’t believe how mature they look, and act, and sound. The maturity thing is because they’re not being raised amongst kids their own age. They’re spending a lot of time with adults, but the rest of it—the rounded out education—is books, and it’s the vocabulary that they are acquiring from being around complete sentence wielding people. People who don’t speak in emojis and illiterate YouTube comments.
Now that iPad, everybody has to understand that that iPad was designed to be addictive. The people who design it are Harvard psycho whatever neuropsychologists. They are watching, and trying to figure out, and trying to hack what makes an app addictive. They did this Sesame Street back in—
[01:32:27] Ashley James: Gamification.
1:32:28] Daniel Louzonis: Back in 1970, Sesame Street actually pioneered this. They would have three groups of kids, and they would have one in this room, and they’d be watching them like lab rats. They would have music, and sound effects, and a purple graphic versus a blue graphic. They would figure out what they had to put on the screen to keep the kids more glued to the screen. Spongebob is considered to be the worst. It was rated the worst cartoon for kids because of the number of rapid scene jumps and the overall anti-intellectual level of what goes on.
Spongebob was built on Sesame Street. It was built on an industry that has figured out that getting you addicted to watching it is money in their pocket. They don’t get you addicted, they actually don’t have a product. That’s what’s going on with this iPad. Even the marketing. Go look at the marketing for all these apps. They’ll tell you that it’s been proven to advance, teach kids reading, and this and that. It’s all baloney. It’s all hogwash. I don’t see any kids coming off apps doing anything great. If anything, you’re introducing massive, massive risks into their future. I consider that personally, and it’s a little bit harsh. I consider giving a child an iPad an act of child abuse. Just like when the doctor tells you if you don’t give your kid 900 shots that you’re abusing that child. I think giving a kid an iPad is also setting them up to struggle in school, in terms of their personal self-esteem, and all of that.
What you’re doing with Brave is awesome, but imagine if you had eight kids, right? If you have eight kids—and I know people who can handle eight kids with no screens, and no crutches, and whatever. I only have two kids, it’s a lot easier. Some people, they could be a single parent, they could be working a job and a half. It’s not so easy to resist the call of these screens. It gets very hard to fight with your kids and have them be the only one that’s not playing video games, the only one that’s not on the devices, the only one that doesn’t know what happened on Friends last night. Because I don’t know if you know, but apparently, Friends is a new show according to the 13-year-old kids who found it on Netflix. Did you know this? It’s been resurrected?
[01:34:51] Ashley James: That they what? Did they come up with a new Friends? I don’t know.
[01:34:56] Daniel Louzonis: Walk around New York City you’ll see all sorts of young kids wearing Friends t-shirts. There’s a location up here in lower Manhattan that has all these people standing out in front. I guess it’s where the Friend’s apartment was scened and these bus tours. Because in Netflix, Friends has been rejuvenated. The Office has been rejuvenated and so is Friends. All the young kids.
[01:35:24] Ashley James: Are into it. That’s funny.
[01:35:26] Daniel Louzonis: If they’re all talking about that, and look, I have a 13-year-old daughter. All her friends are talking about that stuff, and there’s no TV, there’s no Netflix here. She’s like, “Why can’t I watch it, this, that?” “You know, it’s not good for you. It’s inappropriate.” But it’s very hard. I’m a very tough person, but not everybody can fight and win that battle or has enough bandwidth to do that. Life is hard. Let’s go back to entrepreneurship and homeschooling education like our whole overall mission. What I’ve discovered is that life is really hard. It gets more complicated. Problems multiply and they compound.
The things that you don’t know—what you don’t know about your career, or your body, or relationships, these grow. They grow, they metastasize in our lives, and we end up with kids, and aging parents, and financial difficulties—possibly or not. We’re trying to figure out all these things for ourselves when the root of all of it is that we didn’t learn about these things. Brave probably knows what xanthan gum is. I still don’t know what it is. We didn’t learn about these things when we were young. There’s no reason why you can’t learn about personal development and nutrition when you’re young. There’s no age minimum. There’s no reason you need to go out into the corporate world and burn out in order to learn about entrepreneurship, no. There’s just a crooked path that everyone else is following basically to nowhere, and we’re all just like going along with it. I remember I was 10 like it was yesterday.
You wake up, you’re 40-45 years old, and you’re playing defense, you’re playing catch-up, you’re trying to read books, and learn things. It’s not good. I don’t want that for my kids. I want them to be playing offense from early on, like aggressive early offense. I want them to be future proof.
[01:37:24] Ashley James: When is it a good time to introduce a computer? I’m sure someone’s thinking, “Well, we’re only moving away from pens and paper, moving more online, moving more digital.” We just bought a car a few months ago. It was 100% digital. They had just transitioned. It was Volkswagen. I love our GTI, by the way. It’s the best car I’ve ever owned. I love this thing. If you’re looking for a cool car, man, it’s so great. It’s so great. I’m really happy with the purchase, but the entire experience was online, it was digital. We sat there at the dealership for a few hours signing papers on an iPad, and walking through everything on an iPad. They said, “Yeah, we just transitioned. All of Volkswagens transitioned to digital.” I said, “Well, what if there’s a power outage?” She said, “We can’t sell a car.” Maybe they’ll break out the old papers for that, but basically, the whole world’s going digital, so are we doing a child a disservice by not having them learn how to use a mouse. Having them learn at a young age how to type on a keyboard and use a mouse. At what age should they learn how to use a computer since their entire future is going to be on a computer?
[01:38:51] Daniel Louzonis: Did Jeff Bezos grow up on a computer?
[01:38:54] Ashley James: No.
[01:38:56] Daniel Louzonis: No, he didn’t, and he still figured it out when he needed to. He grew up with a very strong traditional academic background in a massive work ethic. The idea that they’re going to fall behind—this is a fallacy. These kids, they have these neuroplastic brains. You could be five years ahead of them on say Adobe Audition—I don’t know if you use that for your podcast. You’d be five years ahead of them, they could catch you in like three months. There’s no risk of them falling behind. In fact, they will get further ahead because they can sit down and they can operate with paper and pencil.
I have a great book recommendation for your audience. It’s called The Revenge of Analog. I can’t remember the author’s name, I’m not going to look it up right now, but The Revenge of Analog. You can put a link to it. Apparently, if you go to Google headquarters, everyone’s walking around with a Moleskine notebook. The idea that these people aren’t using paper and pencil is absolutely untrue. Jeff Bezos, if you work at Amazon and you want to call a meeting, I believe he demands you write a six-page paper to hand out to everybody before the meeting. You have to have writing skills to work for him. What do writing schools require?
Well, you need to have some clarity of thought. He doesn’t want you calling a meeting with some random agenda that might or might not be based on a good idea. The idea that these kids—they need to be on a device otherwise they’ll fall behind is absolutely misplaced, so don’t let that enter your mind. When should you put them on a computer? When should you give a child a gun, right? Say you’re on a frontier 200 years ago. Your child needs that gun to hunt, to protect the family. Even if they’re 11 years old, your 11-year-old needs to know how to use that gun in case pa is off a field doing something. When that 11-year-old learns to use a gun, pa is right behind him —like right over his shoulder. It’s a dangerous weapon. He’s really not developmentally ready for all it entails.
If you’re going to use computers, I strongly believe you should use PCs, desktops. That’s my first choice. If you saw my house, back when we had a house, we had three PCs in a row, and I sat right next to my kids. They couldn’t turn the monitor away from me. It wasn’t a laptop, they could disappear into the basement or anywhere, but I was right next to him the whole time. My son learned Adobe Audition. They played chess online. They did Khan Academy math and IXL math. My kids both have blogs. Now, my kids, they work online. Right now, Christine is running an online book club. A new business she started about two weeks ago where she has a bunch of kids read a book or first five chapters of a book, and she has a slide show, and she’s doing it over Zoom. You can’t keep them off the computer. It’s very hard, unless you want to go ultra-Amish or whatever. When they’re on it, they’re not on it with free-range. They’re not just googling randomly, they’re not watching cat videos, and you are in the room with them. It’s a must.
The best is a desktop PC next to mom or dad. The second best is a laptop, but I don’t like those either. Then the iPad and the iPhone, they get to where you’re just playing with absolute fire. They can learn coding on a PC. There’s nothing that they need an iPhone or a tablet for that they can’t do on the computer.
[01:42:48] Ashley James: Now we have online as the best way to—especially because of all the libraries—I mean, I don’t know about every state in every country, but where I live, every library is closed right now for the foreseeable future. It was like until May 4th but we might extend it longer. They’ve been closed for well over a month. In some places in the world, we can’t just go take our children and go do homeschooling in libraries and in public, so the best resource for a lot of people is online. What subjects work best online? You talked about interacting with math, but you also just mentioned Khan Academy. You’ve mentioned, in the past, people can take music lessons online or play chess online. Of course, the parent is looking over the child. What should we do offline, and what are some really good online resources?
[01:43:53] Daniel Louzonis: Let me just tell you, math is good online in the sense that if your child filled out a worksheet—just say addition or multiplication—they could get all the answers wrong, and they can be doing it incorrectly. Someone has to manually correct it, and then come in and say, “Hey, you did it all wrong. Redo it.” If you do math online, the major benefit is what I call instantaneous negative feedback. You get corrected right away, like ooh, the buzzer goes off. That is definitely good.
If you have multiple kids, you kind of have to use—if you have five or six kids, they’re all at different levels—you can’t have one math class. Some of my drills, you can use simultaneously at different starting points, but you have to use the computer when you have a lot of kids. Math lends itself well towards that. Khan Academy is—anything that’s got Bill Gates money in it is always a little bit messed up. There are sections to skip and best practices. If you use it incorrectly you can end up thinking it’s stupid, but guess what, it’s free and it’s not stupid. It’s not fatally flawed. It’s just imperfect like everything else on this earth. I have almost all my students, except for my super high-level math genius students on Khan Academy. There’s no risk to using it.
If you were a chess teacher, and you went and hired someone, and they met you, they would be constantly moving pieces and setting the board up back and forth. It’s very labor-intensive to create all sorts of positions to get the child to study or to think about what would happen here, or what’s the benefit, or the risk here. On a computer, they can preload all sorts of positions in. They can hit the forward button and the back button. Chess actually is way better. The teaching power of chess online is far superior to anything that could ever be done online.
One-on-one instruction, not necessarily apps because I don’t really like Duolingo that much, but you can hire somebody overseas to teach your kids a foreign language very, very cheaply. Ten dollars an hour you could do really, really well. My brother hired a Ukrainian professor to teach him Ukrainian for something like $3.50 cents an hour. You’re not using it like ABCmouse. You’re using it for one-on-one lessons. I would even encourage parents to use it for research. How often does a kid ask you something and you say, “Well, let’s google it.” Google image is the coolest thing in the world for kids. I had them make up flashcards. You can go to Google Slides, and you just drag a picture of a huge rock—a quartz rock— and the next slide it says quartz. You can create your own flashcards.
I actually had my kids blogging when they were 4 and 5 years old, and they were just sharing what they were learning. They had to Google one thing a day. You don’t need the apps. The library, we suffer from the closed libraries here too, but you probably have books in your house that they can read and that Brave can read. Everybody has books in their house or their neighbor has books in their house. You know what, not long ago, people used to have one or two books, and they used to read it over and over and over and over and over again. Real bibliophiles, which my kids are, they read the same books over and over and over and over again without any loss of enjoyment.
It’s like everything else, you got to make do with what you have. You’re camping for a little while. You can’t get to the libraries, and that does stink. Personally, I’m looking at my bookshelf right now. I have a lot of books on my bookshelf that I bought or someone gave me and I haven’t read yet. Just work through what you have. Resourcefulness, right? The confinement, there’s a virus, whatever you want to call it. This is a constraint. Even Jeff Bezos is a big believer in constraints. He’s like, “You got to have constraints around you so that you can invent your way out.”
[01:48:08] Ashley James: This. I love this. I love this because I read this amazing article about Dr. Seuss that he was challenged to write a book. I’m sorry. I don’t remember his actual name. His name isn’t actually Dr. Suess. He was challenged to write a book with I believe it was 50 words?
[01:48:32] Daniel Louzonis: Yes, you’re right.
[01:48:35] Ashley James: The 50 most common sight words for children and the constraints of that led him to write the number one bestseller kids book ever. He actually talked about how the constraint of being given 50 words, “Okay. Here’s the list of 50 words. Write a book.” And write a good book. That actually improved his creativity. That in constraint—so imagine if I were to only give you two colors. I said, “Okay, paint a masterpiece. Here are two colors.” If I give you a constraint, and I love these challenges when chefs are given a mystery box. There are only five ingredients. “Make a three-course meal with these five ingredients.” I love that. I do that all the time in the kitchen. It’s my favorite thing, I love opening the fridge, and grabbing some ingredients, and just making a totally new dish with mystery ingredients. “What’s about to go bad that I need to cook?”
Give someone constraints and it can improve their creativity. That’s the thing though that I find that parents—and maybe I’m experiencing also—is that we don’t have any constraint. As a homeschooling parent, we’re left with this endless possibility. I’m in this overwhelm—we have this huge miasma of just there are so many things we could choose from. We could choose all these apps, all these things online, all these things offline. You google homeschooling kit or whatever and you could buy hundreds of dollars-worth of different curriculums. There are just too many choices, which one’s the right one, which one’s right for my child, which one’s right for me as a parent? There isn’t a constraint necessarily.
With the COVID-19, we do have more of a constraint because I can’t go out and meet up with other homeschooling groups in person and also go to the library. I think we have too many choices and that leaves us feeling like the grass is always greener. No matter what I choose, there’s probably a better program out there. Am I doing this right? Could I be doing it better? I know that there’s sometimes this feeling that there’s too much. You have so much experience. You not only homeschooled your own children—who are doing phenomenally well—you’ve coached other families to homeschool and dial in their homeschooling. You’ve created a program to teach parents how to do it. You’ve created a package for the listeners. The link is going to be in the show notes of the podcast, einsteinblueprint.com/lth. That link is going to be in the show notes.
Can you address this, this idea that there are so many choices? How do we know as parents we’re on the right track, we’re making the right choice? Should we do this free schooling, or should we go buy a curriculum somewhere? Should we go buy an online curriculum, or a physical curriculum where there are 20 books and textbooks mailed to us? I’ve seen this. You join a few homeschooling Facebook groups and there’s always some of them trying to sell their curriculum like this giant box. I’ve seen this, oh my gosh, this one parent had a room full—a room full of textbooks. They homeschooled all their kids and now, they’re selling all of them. It’s overwhelming. That might be out of date. Is that the right program to use? Maybe common core, not common core. We just end up having these millions of questions, which one’s the right program for us? I’m sure you’ve been asked this before.
[01:53:08] Daniel Louzonis: Sure. First of all, the book is Green Eggs and Ham the Dr. Seuss book.
[01:53:14] Ashley James: That was the first book I ever read, by the way. I remember it clicking. Remember when you were riding a bicycle, and you’re falling off, and falling off, and falling off, and then you remember that moment you got balance? I remember because I was a late bloomer. I was about seven years old. My husband was riding a bike at age three so he thinks it’s crazy that I couldn’t ride a bike until I was seven, but I had my training wheels on until I was seven because every time we took them off I just fall over, fall over, fall over. Then one day, I got balance and it just clicked. I went, “Oh, that’s what you wanted me to do,” and I never fell off a bike again.
The same with reading. It’s like I didn’t get it, I didn’t get it, it didn’t click, didn’t click. I was holding that book and all of a sudden everything fell into place, and I could read full sentences. I went from not knowing how to read to just everything clicked. I remember that moment. I was sitting in the car, we were on a two-hour drive up to the cottage, and I was holding the book, and it was a sunny day. It was a sunny morning on a Saturday morning, and everything clicked. I read that book. I was like, “Oh my gosh. Sam I am. I got it. I was so excited.
I’ve been looking back on my childhood analyzing it—now that I’m a parent, obviously, we do this. I now realize I wish my parents had given me more books and less TV. I was put in front of the TV so much as a child, and I wish I was put in front of a book because I loved reading.
[01:54:54] Daniel Louzonis: Let’s talk about that because I had the same parents that were just a couple years ahead of you. The TV was the iPhone of its time. My kids don’t understand this. If you missed a movie at the theater, you could never see it again. They would actually come back three years later. You’d see Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back comes back at the theater, so you couldn’t see it. The movie theater was magical, and the TV was limited. Then there’s this new thing called cable TV, and it had a couple of movie channels. They had this thing called Home Box Office, and they had the movie channel. You could actually see movies that you couldn’t see before.
Our parents, your mom and dad, my mom and dad, they were fascinated by this thing. It’s the iPhone of its time. They didn’t have any manual. They didn’t know that that color TV that started out with 32 cable channels was going to go to 57, and then 200, and 1000. They didn’t know that it was going to lead to obesity, and it was going to lead to bibliophobia, and it was also going to create distortive narratives about men and women, and what to expect in life, and defer to [inaudible 01:56:06]. They didn’t know. Technology is always disrupting society at the frontier, and nobody knows what the effect is.
Let’s go into the curriculum question about what do you do in the face of all these options. When most people start homeschooling, they say, “I don’t know what to do. What do you do? What do you do?” That’s a little bit of a joke where it rapidly becomes a joke because pretty soon they get in there and they said, “There are all these great things I want to do, I don’t know what to cut out. I don’t know what to cut out.” The reality is that when we’re 12 years into our home school here, we have to cut out some really, really important good things—carefully chosen things—in order to do anything new. That’s just how it goes. It’s an embarrassment of riches on some levels, but it’s just also very hard. I said to my son at one point, “All right. No more hour a day on the piano. You’re down to a half an hour.” I’m like literally cutting him down on the piano, but that’s the type of real currency and leverage that you have to play with once you get going.
Pinterest is what I call fake homeschooling. You see all these pictures of these beautiful homes and no mess in the background. That is not a successful or a real homeschool. That is staged, and I understand why people do it, the same reason anybody stages anything on deep-seated insecurity, marketing, whatever, fear of what other people think of them, or some type of conformity, “This is what it’s supposed to look like.” No. You try to create this beautiful homeschooled that’s ripped from Pinterest, I guarantee you that it will stress you out. You will never feel like you’re doing it right, and it will be contrived. It won’t be real.
What you’re doing with Brave, and having a real conversation, and doing experiments, that’s homeschooling. That’s homeschooling at its absolute best. So no, stop thinking the grass is greener, the homeschool is better somewhere else. It’s easy for me to say, “Stop looking around,” but practically, what you want to do is you want to generate a lot of self-confidence and a lot of security in what you’re doing. There are a couple of ways to do that. So that when you look around there and you look at Pinterest— I look at Pinterest and it doesn’t move me because I know that it’s actually not true, and not real, and those kids aren’t on a steeper track than mine as if it’s a competition in the first place. How can you get that confidence?
This is why I strongly advise parents to get their kids accelerate with reading and math right away. Nothing gives a kid self-confidence, and nothing gives a parent self-confidence like seeing their kid go vertical very, very quickly. That is something that the parent—that’s confidence that the parents can build on. Then people are meeting your kids and they’re like, “Whoa, whoa. What am I doing wrong? What are you doing? Can you help me?” Be more aggressive with what you’re doing. That will help you worry less about what everyone else is doing in any field.
Look, in terms of buying a curriculum, everyone, when they start at homeschooling, says, “I need a curriculum. I need a curriculum. I need a curriculum.” The reality is you don’t. You need a library card, and a little bit of discipline, and you need a philosophy. You need an understanding of what education is, what it’s not, what your goals are, and then it’s very simple. When I meet with coaching clients I said, “Well, what are your goals? We’re not going to talk about math, or reading, or college, or anything without having some goals. What are your goals?” A lot of people just don’t have any goals.
My goal, when we started out, was raising academically accelerated kids. Now, they evolved. At some point, I said, “You know what, I want to raise extremely well-rounded kids.” Then they evolved again, and I said, “You know what, I want to raise kids who are entrepreneurs. This way that they have maximum time and money leverage in their life, and so that they can really do as much as they can possibly do.” Your goals will evolve, but you’ve got to have goals. You have to set your own agenda. You can’t look at what everyone else is doing. No matter what that boxed curriculum says, no matter what those testimonials say, they never work.
I call them curriculum hoppers. People would rather buy a curriculum than actually read a homeschooling book and learn about the principles of effective homeschooling. They would rather buy a curriculum than sit down with mom, and dad, and the kids, and say, “Well, what are our goals? What are we afraid of? What do we want to do? Where do we want to go?” They’d rather just buy something as almost like a placeholder, as almost like fake work—fake effort. People do the same thing with fitness, “Oh, I’m going to join a gym. I’m going to buy $100 Lululemon pants. I’m going to buy Peloton bike.” We’ve got a lot of Peloton bikes coming into my building here in the past couple of weeks.
At its root, all education is self-education. It’s all going to come down to reading, writing, and arithmetic. It’s all going to come down to what Albert Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge. Everyone wants to complicate things. Usually, when people complicate things, that’s the lazy way out—saying something is complicated. No, it’s not complicated, and you don’t have to make it complicated. Pinterest, you can pull that up and you can definitely feel inadequate, or you can feel like you’re going down the wrong path, but you have to judge people by their results. This is what I talked about earlier with these experts and these doctors.
Who do you want to take fitness advice from? From somebody who used to be hurt, and is now 50 years old, and ripped, and overcame all sorts of problems, or do you want to take exercise advice from some doctor who’s never run a quarter marathon? You have to look at the results. It’s very, very important to have models to see, “Hey, look at this family over here. Look at how well-behaved those kids are. Look at how,” if they’re religious, if they got God first, “I want a family like that. Look at these kids over here. Look at how helpful they are around the house. Look at how advanced this one is in math. Look at how advanced these people are with getting their kids selling lemonade on the street and hustling and grinding. I want that.”
Pick and choose, find people that have achieved what you want manifest, and then just plug into them. That’s the whole philosophy behind having mentors and role models. It’s way, way more effective than trying to purchase stuff, right? It’s hard to do. You could just go to my website. All these people have told me, “I wish I met you 10 years ago. I wish I met you 10 years ago.” I hear it all the time. “Had I known that you could be homeschooling that way I would have done it five years ago, but I didn’t meet you.”
Look, I had nobody at all to guide me. Google was very underdeveloped 12 years ago. A lot of homeschooling parents don’t put what they’re doing out on the web, they don’t share it, and so you don’t even know. You can’t even plug into them, but now, there are lots and lots of people out there homeschooling and sharing. Just find the ones who have teenage kids, who are college kids, and plug into them. Ask them for advice. Read their books. You’re better off as a homeschooling parent reading a book on the philosophy of homeschooling than you are at buying any ABCmouse, or math curriculum, or complete curriculum. That’s the ultimate magic pill. “I’m going to buy a complete curriculum for my kids with a day planner and this and that. We’re going to check all the boxes and all the subjects.”
It doesn’t work. Ideally, as a homeschooling parent, you will cobble together a curriculum. You will have a philosophy, you will have goals. You will have do’s and don’ts, you will have habits, you will have role models just the same way if you’re running a business. It’s the same success. The success principles are the same whether you’re talking about trying to run for a marathon, training for the Olympics, run a business, or run a family. You have to use eclectic resources.
The more work you do on it, the more work you do in terms of gathering research, in terms of reading books, in terms of experimenting, the more work you do on your own mind, and unpacking the mistakes you made, the mistakes our parents made, the regrets that we have. The more work you do on yourself—in research in general—that’s all leverage for what you can do with your kids. That’ll give you confidence and clarity on what you’re doing.
If you’re suffering from confidence, you’re suffering in confidence or a little low on that, it’s because you’re not getting the results that automatically give you confidence. Then, it comes down to like, “All right. Well, how can we improve our tactics?” Not what else can we buy. Is that a good enough answer or scratching the surface?
[02:05:19] Ashley James: Yeah. I like it. I really, really like it. I like it. You mentor people and you also developed a program. When listeners go to einsteinblueprint.com/lth, tell us a bit about the different programs that you offer so that they can understand the resources that you provide.
[02:05:39] Daniel Louzonis: Okay. Well, I have a homeschooling consultation, which if you consult with me for an hour and you buy that, I give you basically the skeleton—the overview—of I think I have about five or six hours-worth of videos and content. I just basically tell you everything that I’ve done. That’s at the lower level. I have that introduction to homeschooling, but it’s still powerful because more than half the people who buy it have been homeschooling already. They get stuck. They hit an obstacle. They hit a ceiling. Homeschooling is like marriage, it should get better every year, you should get closer to your spouse every year. If it’s not, you’ve got leakage. You’ve got dangerous, dangerous leakage.
I also have my overall—my flagship product—is called the Einstein Blueprint. It’s not the Dan blueprint, it’s the Einstein Blueprint. It’s what would the ideal education look like? Well, what did Oprah Winfrey say about what was key to her success? What does Abraham Lincoln, what wisdom has he bequeathed to us? Einstein, da Vinci, Michelangelo. The whole point of the Einstein Blueprint, it’s broken down into 116 modules, is reverse engineering extreme success. That’s it.
What does Jeff Bezos say about writing and about constraints? Things we touched on. How can you incorporate that into the education of your children? Literally, within the Einstein Blueprint, we have our kids brainwashed, inculcated in what did Tony Robbins say about momentum? “People who succeed have momentum.” If you say to your 11-year-old kid, “People who succeed, blank.” Brave knows what xanthan gum is and all this other stuff, you want him to know that he needs to have momentum in whatever he’s doing in life. You want his operating system, you want him to be pre-programmed with all the wisdom of all the most successful people so that he can accelerate, he is going to be totally hyper-accelerating on every front.
Again, it’s not the Dan blueprint, it’s not even what I did with my own kids because quite honestly, I didn’t know this stuff when I was flying by the seat of my pants with my own kids. I’ve learned this over the years, and through copious research, and extensive work with a lot of families. All sorts of economic and financial, I mean, I’ve had billionaires that I work with, and I’ve had single moms. Guess what, the single moms do a better job, you might suspect. It’s not money that people need. It’s grit. It’s really constraints. It’s focus. I’ve worked with a lot of people.
My Einstein Blueprint, it’s powerful stuff. I read it. Even though I’ve been doing this for years and years and years, I read my own blueprint. I go back constantly to my own blueprint, to my own like—I wouldn’t say ten commandments because there’s about 116 of them—but that’s what I use on an everyday basis. Someone asked me, “Why is there so much personal development for the parents in the Einstein Blueprint?” Well, parents are teaching their kids. More is caught than taught. Whether you’re homeschooling or not, you’re setting an example. You’re letting the technology in the house. You have the expectations. Honestly, we know a lot of parents who spend more time helping their kids with homework than some homeschooling parents spend with their kids overall.
Look, your moms and dads are responsible for their kids’ outcome no matter how bad the teacher is, how bad the school district is, or Common Core, or whatever. Principally and ultimately, we’ve been given these children, and we have a responsibility to give them more opportunities than we were given. I think it’s a very exciting thing. A lot of people meet me and they get depressed. I overwhelm them. Well, yeah. This is a big deal. At the intersection of the big three categories—the big three marketing categories: money, relationships, and health. They tell you, “Oh, pick a category, and then pick a niche within a niche. Don’t try to do it all.” Guess what, if it was a Venn diagram, at the intersection of money, relationships, and health, at the very intersection would be education. This is where the Einstein Blueprint resides. We cover everything.
Everything that we have and don’t have, everything we can do, can’t do, haven’t done it, we can all trace it back to something that we learned, or didn’t learn, or were misinformed about. Education is everything. Lost in all these complaints about common core, and in vaccines, in college, the price of college, and what everyone else is doing, lost in all that is the sheer power, the atomic, like nuclear, power of what education can do for kids. What’ll happen if they don’t learn? If they become lobotomized in any way, shape, or form.
[02:10:43] Ashley James: You had mentioned in our past interview—definitely recommend listeners check out if they’re interested in homeschooling or improving their homeschooling—episode 258. You said that you experience this and then everyone that you coach experiences this. Every year you do homeschooling it gets easier. You’re less and less hands-on. A four-year-old obviously needs your undivided attention, although you can leave them alone with a project. A two-year-old definitely needs your undivided attention when they’re learning math, and writing, and stuff like that.
A six-year-old who’s reading on their own, you can hand them something to do, teach them something new, hand them something to do, they can go, like you said, write a blog, they can make a slideshow, they can read a book, they can write a book, they can build a science project, whatever. They’re more independent. You obviously are monitoring them especially, like you said, if they’re on a computer and they have access to the internet, they should absolutely be monitored. You just find though that as they get older and every year that you do homeschooling—and you should do homeschooling even during the summer, even on weekends. It should be a 365-day thing that you don’t take breaks from, but you also don’t have to do it six or nine hours a day.
If you do it two hours a day every day until they move out of the house, until they’re at the point where they’re old enough to move out, they’ve actually gotten an accelerated education because you don’t have to spend those two and a half months, like you mentioned, before catching up from the summer. They accelerate much faster because it’s an immersion. Every year that you do homeschooling, it’s less and less hands-on as the parent because they can pick stuff up and go do it by themselves like go read that book over there, good do that project.
I think the fear for some parents is, “Well, I don’t have the time to do that because I work from home now. I can’t spend six hours a day with the children. I can’t spend six hours a day with each child.” Before someone even gets into homeschooling, they put up a brick wall. “I can’t do it because. I can’t do it because I don’t have money. I can’t because I don’t have enough time. I can’t do it because I don’t think it’s going to work for me.” They come up with these limitations, but now, we’re at the point where they have to do it, they literally have to do it. That’s why they’re calling it crisis schooling. People have to do the homeschooling either from mandatory vaccine laws, or from the COVID-19, or for other reasons.
They’re at this point where this restriction has been placed upon them will actually increase their creativity. They’re going to start problem-solving. The light at the end of the tunnel is that the first year is probably the hardest, and which is what you expressed in our last interview. The first year or two is the hardest, and if you buckle down and get disciplined, especially learning from the Einstein Blueprint, which I love your program. I love the personal growth in the program and the discipline.
If we as parents buckle down with the principles you have in your program, if we buckle down now—it’s the marshmallow test. It’s the emotional intelligence for the future because if we can really invest now for the first one or two years of homeschooling, then it actually gets easier, and easier, and easier because we’re handing off the education to the child. Because a child is able to take on more, and more, and more, and more by themselves.
Like you said, right now as we’re having this interview, your children are in their rooms doing their own entrepreneurial homeschooling programs. You don’t have to stand over your child for six hours a day per child to do your homeschooling. How much time would you say you actually are with your children instructing them on homeschooling in any given day?
[02:15:15] Daniel Louzonis: Right now, it’s 4:49 PM and I haven’t done anything with the kids. John taught a chess class this morning. He produced and edited a podcast for one of his clients. My daughter is actually not in the other room. She’s at my wife’s office, on the 42nd floor, across from my wife. While my wife is working, she is doing her work—her math, and she’s running her book club. I texted her and I said, “Don’t come home. I’ve got an interview here.” I haven’t spent a minute with them. Now, we have expectations. We say, “You’ve got to have four hours of math done this week for Christine, and John has books to read.” He has deadlines with his clients. He has clients that he actually has to answer to as well.
We have structure, but the structure is like say you had a business and you have the business, and systems, and a virtual assistant, and all sorts of processes in place. The goal is not for mom to go from teaching her 3-year-old phonics to teaching her 18-year-old whatever. The goal is to teach him to fish. Like I said, you want them reading because when you can throw books at them—big, ugly, nasty, books written in Old English, or written in science, or about things they don’t even want to read, if they can read, you can just throw a book to them.
Just to give you an example, we don’t teach history or science, we just throw books at the kids—book, after book, after book, after book. It’s a far superior education—science and history education—than anything you’d get with a common core textbook, and questions at the end, and quizzes, and the stress of quizzes and tests. You want to get it running on autopilot, and this is why these single moms and stuff—these people, they have constraints on them—they do a good job because they crack a whip and they say, “Look, you got to do it. I got to work, you got to work.” There’s nobody lounging around.
The goal is to unlock their full potential, but also, the sign that it gets—I wouldn’t say it’s easier every year because I think life, in general, gets more complicated every year. As we age, we thought it looks so simple back when we were 25 and doing one-and-a-half things. Homeschooling is not—going back to the limiting beliefs—people think it’s a lot of work upfront. It can be, and even if it was, it’s way worth it, right?
My kids are not going to college so that’s going to save me whatever college is. It’s almost $600,000. Between the two of them, we would have to earn $1 million in income to pay for them to go to college to learn stuff that’s irrelevant. We have the confidence to not send him. We have the option to not send them. I could have been earning more money when my son was four or five if I did something else, but I was investing just the same way you’re investing in Brave when you have long conversations with them even if you’re tired.
Homeschooling parents are investing in their kids early. You don’t want to buy Microsoft in the year 2020, you want to invest in Microsoft in 1992. You need to invest early. Starting early is one of the core components of the Einstein Blueprint. It’s a concept that doesn’t go away. I’m going to introduce logarithms to kids who are eight, nine years old. Why? Because when they learn when they’re 15 on Monday what a logarithm is and have a test on Friday on logarithms, it’s extremely stressful. They could have been introduced to that concept way back when.
Kids can learn about marketing, and the stock market, they can learn about social intelligence, and shaking hands, and making eye contact, and writing thank-you notes. They can learn all these like powerful tactics early. We’re just pulling everything forward. Like I said, instead of waiting until someone’s 45 years old and burnt out in the corporate world, I’m going to go find Tony Robbins. Go look at Tony Robbins. You’ll see all sorts of bald people in the audience, which is awesome that they’re still learning, but you should also see kids there because there’s no age minimum.
We’re just accelerating the learning curve. Get them to travel sooner, get them to learn about xanthan gum sooner, and all other things, and is there sugar in that, huge, huge things. I didn’t know how to read a food label until I was in my 20s. I didn’t even think they had food labels until my future wife pointed out to me. I still didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know what it was.
[2:20:05] Ashley James: My husband keeps asking me to make a course on how to read food labels, and I keep saying, “Everyone knows how to read this.” He’s like, “No, they really don’t.” You’re just affirming that I really should just sit down, and make a course, and teach people how to read labels because I guess I just assumed that everyone is a food detective like I am. It’s really important.
If you’re going to eat processed food, you need to know what’s in the processed food. Don’t put your head in the sand, man. That’s like every molecule that goes into your mouth is building healthy cells or cancer cells. As far as I’m concerned, reading a food label is detecting whether there’s cyanide in the food like. Seriously, it’s that important to me.
My husband jokes because I’ll go into the grocery store for one item, and I come out half an hour later. He’s like, “What took you so long?” If he’s in the car like our son would be taking a nap, and he’d have to stay in the car because we don’t trust to leave our son alone napping in the car while we go inside. He would just be like, “Oh, you read the labels.” It’s true. If I go to the grocery store, and I’m buying anything that’s just one ingredient like there’s broccoli, I’m going to read the labels. To me, it just makes so much sense, but to other people, it doesn’t even occur to them.
You have that same mindset around homeschooling. It’s just like it’s second nature. It’s like you just wake up and start breathing oxygen. It’s just like you said, the fish doesn’t even question water, but for other people, it’s very foreign. It’s very, very foreign this idea of homeschooling. I love your program because you get into the mindset because the first thing we got to do is handle the mindset. You keep hedging Tony Robbins.
I was surprised to find out some people don’t know who Tony Robbins is. He is a personal growth guru, a great guy. I do recommend following him. He has a podcast too and lots of YouTube videos and stuff out there. Some of his stuff though—he swears or brings up sexual references, so I wouldn’t say it’s PG. You’d have to watch it first before your children can watch it. He does that for shock effect to break up someone’s pattern.
If they’re stuck neurologically in a victim state, he’ll say something shocking to do a break state, which neurologically interrupts the synapses so that we can start to reprogram the person. They stop going to that old problem and start actually coming out of it neurologically into a new solution. It’s called the behavioral pattern interrupt, and it’s part of a neurolinguistic programming method. Unfortunately, a lot of times, he uses foul language, or sexual references or things that can really—it’s a shock-and-awe effect. Of course, there are lots of videos where he’s PG, but you have to monitor first before children can watch it.
This has been wonderful having you on the show. You mentioned that we could have a 24-hour marathon. I’m pretty sure we could easily go six hours without blinking. Einsteinblueprint.com/lth. You’re creating a special page for the listeners. I want you guys to go there and check it out. You have these wonderful resources. You’re very passionate. You’re, obviously, well-educated and well-versed in this subject.
For parents who want to improve their homeschooling and for parents who are now stuck homeschooling because of the world events—the current world events—you really are going to help cut through so much of the BS. I’m watching some of my friends sit back and wait for the public school system to come up with an online way to distance educate the children. It’s very tedious and slow.
They’re trying to do Zoom calls with the children. They’re trying to implement something. It’s up to each state to come up with a system. For the children who are like in Washington State had to leave school, the children are not going to get the last half of this school year. If we just sit back and wait for the public school system to come up with a way to handle it, it is like the Homer Simpson effect. It’s like the lowest common denominator. We’re just sitting and waiting to dumb ourselves down to the lowest common denominator.
We can’t leave our children and leave our children’s futures up to this broken system. That’s why I love the work you do because you’re going to make it so easy for us. We don’t have to get overwhelmed with the millions of homeschooling programs and curriculums out there. Like you said, we can get really distracted by all those online programs, or just throwing our children in front of a tablet. “Here, learn whatever Khan Academy on this.” We need to get really clear on our goals, on our philosophy, and create a schedule that we do every day with our children in a way that is motivating and encouraging, in a way that enriches them and strengthens our relationship with them. We encourage them as they grow, it will motivate the whole family.
The work that you do at einsteinblueprint.com allows us to cut through a lot of the chaos and dial in the right program for the individual family. You have this program that we can do as parents, and then you also do coaching with children, and you have, like you said, about five hours of educational videos as well. You’re going to compile all of that with a special for the Learn True Health listeners when they go to Einsteinblueprint.com/lth.
Daniel, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show. I know we touched on a lot of stuff, and I want listeners to follow you. Your kids do stuff too, which I love. I love following your kids. Your son produces podcasts for clients. Your daughter has a book club for children. How can listeners plug into what your children are doing as well?
[2:27:28] Daniel Louzonis: If they listen to my podcast the Einstein Blueprint podcast, I’m always talking about and sharing the links for those. John has a podcast right now. It’s the second podcast. It’s called the kids get rich podcast. It’s very good. We’re always letting people know what we can do to help them. We’ll put a link to it on your LTH page.
One thing I didn’t mention is I do have a dedicated math program, which is nearly 100 hours of me teaching math to my students—one-on-one instruction. It has all the drills I use, and it basically is an extremely low price. We’ll have a link to that. We call that 100x math program. We’ll have that because math is a pain point, and everybody needs it. I haven’t met anybody who doesn’t need my math program. We’ll have a link to that. It’s currently closed, but we’ll put a link for your listeners to get in on that. It’d be at a negligible cost too.
[02:28:27] Ashley James: They can’t buy it if they go to your website, but if they go to Einsteinblueprint.com/lth, they’ll be able to get it?
[02:28:34] Daniel Louzonis: Yes. I closed it. I launched it. I always launch things at a very low price, and then I build them up, and work intimately with the group that’s there, and then I add more value, and I raise the prices. But yeah, they can get in on that at the price that I launched today, which is very negligible. It’s like $80 a year or something like that. We’ll have a link to that.
The last thing that I want to say is—the reason this is such a big deal—parenting—when we were in high school or whatever, it was popularity, it was sports, it was all these things going on, boyfriends and girlfriends. But right now, at this stage of our life, our past—our entire past—our whole present, and also our incoming future, it’s all wrapped up in our kids. This is why it’s such a big deal. There’s an expression, “No other success can compensate for failure in the home.” I believe it was David O. McKay. He’s a Mormon who said it. I’ll say it again, “No other success can compensate for failure in the home.”
We could do all these wonderful things, and have a great marriage, and whatever, but if our kids are going to struggle in this world, it’s going to haunt us to our last days. At the same time, being a parent and having kids, it sheds a light on so much of what went wrong, or let’s call it our imperfect past. All these things come to the fore. I hope that none of your listeners are getting stressed out by anything that we’re talking about here.
We’re talking about it with such passion and with such certainty because it’s so, so critical. It’s not, like Ashley said, to condemn or to shame anyone. If you saw me when I was in my—I call it—deformative years, I was very far off course. This is the wonderful thing about human potential and about life is that we can break bad habits, that we can tap into our inner genius. I never thought I was creative for a minute my whole life. Now I have more ideas, more creative self-confidence than I even know what to do with. I grew up in a box.
This is an exciting thing. Having kids and being in control, being able to listen to a podcast is something that our parents couldn’t do. Having the internet, being able to buy things on Amazon Prime, being able to work from home. We are so blessed in this day and age to do so many things. It’s only right that we channel all these assets into our kids today, this very minute.
02:31:15] Ashley James: I love it. Thank you so much, Daniel. It’s been such a pleasure having you on the show. I know you’re also active in our Facebook group, Learn True Health Facebook group. If any listeners have any questions for Daniel about his programs, they could ask it in the Facebook group. I’m sure we could have a discussion about it there. Of course, we can go to einsteinblueprint.com/lth.
It’s been a pleasure having you on the show again. I can’t wait to see what the future holds, especially I love following your children. I love watching their success because it gives us hope that our younger children are going to be as awesome as your kids are because you gave them such a wonderful opportunity of homeschooling. Now, they’re able to grow in such a beautiful way, that they’re not constrained. I love what you do. I love what your children are doing. I’m really excited to see how it grows over the years. Please, please come back on the show every few years and continue to teach and share with us.
[02:32:21] Daniel Louzonis: I look forward to that. Thank you for having me.
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https://www.learntruehealth.com/messages-eric-thorton-covid-19
Highlights:
Fear and anxiety have weakened our heart chakra over the years. When we have a weakened heart chakra, we have a lower immune system, and it’s harder for us to fight diseases. Eric Thorton is back on the show with us to help us understand how a weakened heart chakra relates to COVID-19 and how to get our heart chakra back in balance. He also tells us what we should do to eliminate the COVID-19 virus.
[00:00:00] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 424. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have back on the show Eric Thorton. This is your ninth time being on the show. I’m pretty sure this is your ninth time.
[00:00:23] Eric Thorton: Yeah, I think it is. It’s pretty amazing. I get a lot of great feedback from people too. I enjoy doing it. The guides have a lot to say, and that applies to us particularly right now.
[00:00:40] Ashley James: Right, right. So for listeners who are tuning in for the first time and haven’t heard our past eight other episodes with Eric Thorton, Eric is an exorcist. He was born with the ability to talk to and see—communicate with angels and guides. He is a spiritual—it’s like a spiritual health coach. I’m a health coach, you’re a spiritual health coach.
[00:01:09] Eric Thorton: That’s right, and a healer.
[00:01:12] Ashley James: Right, yes. I like to say on the show, “I’m the biggest open-minded skeptic.” I’m like okay anything. I could just keep my mind wide open, why not? Why not just be open-minded, but I’m also very skeptical. Our first interview was really cool, but there’s the back of my mind going, “Well, maybe it’s just him saying he’s doing this stuff.” My husband had a session with you before I had a session, right? My husband was going through something and so he said, “Can I go first?” I’m like, “Okay. So I dropped my husband off, he works with you for a few hours, and I came and picked him up. His voice dropped like two octaves. It was really neat. It was very interesting.
He was in constant background anxiety, constant fear, constant worry was running in his body at all times. His voice was a little high. The things you guys worked on spiritually and energetically turned off the stress response and it healed. Whatever you did that was like, I don’t know, six months ago, eight months ago, something like that. He had a great first session. Then I had my session with you, and I had an outstanding totally undeniably amazing session. Really, really, really got that the work that you do is real. I had first-hand experience of it several times. Since then, my husband and I have worked with you several times, and you’ve also worked with several of our best friends. They have all had great experiences with you. This is something that not every therapist is meant for every person.
[00:03:13] Eric Thorton: Correct.
[00:03:15] Ashley James: That’s why you do an intake at the beginning when you work with people, and you talk to the guides, and talk to their guides, and see if it’s a good match. The work that you do is so broad because you’re working on emotional, mental, spiritual, physical issues on a different plane of existence that we’re used to handling things on. It’s the unseen, but we definitely have an effect. We can feel it. Sometimes we can hear it. I’ve talked about that in my past interviews. We can feel it.
[00:03:49] Eric Thorton: Right, it’s also helped past lives and how past lives affect us too. It gives us stressors and makes us vulnerable to take you on other people’s words, energies, thought forms, etc. We work on a very different level than most healers. I’m not invalidating anyone here. It’s just the levels we work on are different. We need healers of all types. It takes a village. I am very, very open-minded and encourage everybody to, you got a problem, find your village. If I’m a part of it, great. If I’m not, that’s fine too.
Sometimes my job is to unlock one little key in someone. They may not be really happy with the session, but then they go on to another healer and it works.
[00:04:54] Ashley James: Because you untrapped things, you got things moving. You removed blockages that were stopping them, and then other things can work. My son all of a sudden developed some very weird allergies out of nowhere. I asked you to check on him and you received the information that he had activated some trauma from a past life, and it made total sense as to what he was experiencing now. We were able to work on that for him. I’ve been taking him to doctor after doctor after doctor, and of course, these doctors are looking at what medication—either a natural medication like homeopathy, and what herbs, and what vitamins can we give him, what things can we do with his diet? Then an MD is like, “What drug can we give him?”
Of course, we want to obviously look at physical health on the physical plane. It’s not resolving if the root cause is in the spiritual and energetic realm. You’ve mentioned before on the show is that—for thousands and thousands of thousands of years—we used to have healers like you in every village—the shaman, or the priest, or the energy healer. In the last 500 years, it’s really been suppressed. Our power’s been taken away. Now, the healers are starting to pop back up because information is free now. We’re not suppressed like we were 100 years ago. Information is free.
[00:06:41] Eric Thorton: In our country, be careful. We got to remember that. It is in our country. We still have a lot of persecution and things in our country. The beautiful part is, science has helped us in many ways. It has taken us from burning people at the stake because a cow or a series of animals had mad cow disease or something that they didn’t know. There were these tiny microscopic bacteria so they blamed the person and called him a witch or something like that. It’s taken the mystical out of our lives, and so we can actually get to healing, and get to understanding, and full understanding of what’s going on the planet—or a much fuller understanding—so that we can look at it as a whole.
Where we go—I feel we go wrong—as a race is we try to say ours is the only way. Western medicine, it’s only this way. Naturopathic, it’s only this way, etc. I’m here to say, “No, it’s all of it. There are benefits to all of it.” If you have a block in any of them—let’s say you’re allergic to a medication that a Western medicine person can’t give you, it isn’t going to work. You’re allergic to it. If you got something that’s causing you to be allergic to it that’s energetic and we remove it, all of a sudden the medication works. That goes for Naturopathic, that goes for acupuncture, Reiki, on and on and on, all modalities.
That’s why I’m very much encouraged all kinds of village to help people heal. Maybe with your son, us removing that block made it so his body can heal, can look at it in a different way, and the Naturopath can help him where maybe they couldn’t have before. He was young so hopefully, we were able to reduce his allergies quite quickly, but like I said, I haven’t talked to you about that until now. Anyway, there are many, many things that go into our daily lives. It is not one single modality. When I’m talking, like today, I sometimes will use information quoting somebody, but most of it’s coming from my guides. I quantify that. I do not diagnose, I do not claim to know the whole truth in any way, shape, or form.
These are ideas that I get from my guides. The work seems to be proven out by science or an end results, that’s what I like. Like with what’s going on today, there are many, many reasons energetically why we are weak and susceptible to the COVID-19 virus. There are many reasons. Today, I want to like to discuss a few of those.
[00:10:06] Ashley James: Sure, sure. There are people on both sides of the fence right now. In terms of the COVID-19, there are people who are demanding that our rights be taken away, that we have more restrictions on us, that we should become even stricter to force people to stay at home nationwide and in other countries as well. There are people who want martial law essentially because we have to stop the spread. There’s this school of thought, and then there’s another set of people who are upset that our rights are being taken away. That no one’s protesting that, and they believe that this is hurting more people than saving people by forcing people to stay home and shutting down businesses.
We have both sides, right? Then you see there are so many articles out there with opposing views, with information that conflicts itself. Some say that the common flu, influenza—Influenza A, whatever influenza it is—more people die each year of that. “Why don’t we take these kinds of measures for influenza if more people die of that than the coronavirus?” That’s what they’re saying, and then other people are saying, “Well, look at the rate at which it spreads. It’s much, much, much faster.”
I think it’s like almost 10% more, but they’re showing that you’re much more likely to be infected by the coronavirus. It spreads quicker, it has a higher death rate, but the numbers—the problem is—there’s not enough testing. There’s definitely not enough testing. Studies today or articles written by doctors today talking about how they believe—and this was like in Yahoo News or something, this is mainstream. This isn’t just someone somewhere saying this in a blog. There’s a belief that millions of people have had it, and are already immune to it, and this has actually been around a lot longer—the COVID-19 has been around a lot longer.
Anyway, there’s so much opposing information. I don’t necessarily want to say disinformation because I think that there’s a lot of people trying to pull together very quickly, because this is happening very fast. It was March 8 in the state of Washington, all of the bars and restaurants were shut down. This is just a few weeks ago that my state was starting to take action. The government was starting to implement actions, so things were starting to crack down and get serious just a few weeks ago. We’re scrambling to try to make sense of the numbers because the death rates, Italy being the highest, something like 9% now, I just read in an article, whereas a few days ago they were saying it was 4% death rate.
If we’re not interesting enough people, we’re not testing, we’re only testing the people who are sick. What if millions or more people actually had it and just didn’t have it so it wasn’t really severe? Again, we want every death to be prevented. I’m not saying that we should just all go about our business. The point is that lots of information, lots of conflict, and it’s a stressor. Again, because society has something to fight about and to shame each other for. One of my friends is really afraid to leave her house and go for a walk because she doesn’t want her neighbors to be angry at her because people are actually being angry at each other for being outside.
You are not going to spread the virus if you’re going for a walk. That’s not how it works. You’re going for a walk in nature, you’re in sunlight, that’s actually recommended. The misinformation, people are taking it to the extreme. What I’d like is just to cover, gain some clarity. What information have you received or can you receive from your guides, from angels, from the spiritual realm that can help us to understand. What could we do? What could we do to create the Goldilocks effect? Should we all stay in our homes? Is this something we should be really worried about? Is this going to blow over like the H1N1, and Zika, and all those other ones where it gets really big and then blows away? Is it worse than we’re thinking, or is it not as bad as we’re thinking? What information are you receiving from the spiritual realm?
[00:15:37] Eric Thorton: I’m working with a number of people that have been exposed but not have it. Some people have it. The information I get from the guides is the reason this virus has taken such a large hold—and it is real. We do need to take care, but we need to not panic. The reason we’re panicking and in ego is because of the years we’ve had of heart chakra issues. This is what the guides have pointed out very clearly to me—a number of times with a number of different guides too—is for the last three and a half years, we have had a tremendous amount of political unrest.
I’m not siding with either side—both sides in our country have problems—but there has been so much political unrest. We were through 9/11, which directly affected the heart chakras. We were through the 2007-2008 crash, which directly affected our safety which affects our heart chakras. Now, remember, the heart chakra concludes the lungs. We go through these cycles where we are informed, misinformed, things like that through the news media through our own interpretations of what is being said out there. That affects us and give us anxiety. Remember, anxiety is in the heart chakra. After this three and a half, four years of this, our heart chakras are like with any chakra—if it was affected that much—the physical tissue within that chakra becomes weaker.
We’ve had this political unrest for all these years. I don’t care which side of the aisle you’re on, you got the political unrest, so our heart chakras are weak. Any virus would affect our lungs very easily. Because we’ve been under this stress and this anxiety, it hasn’t led up. Now we’re in the middle of a political campaign, and all this crap that’s coming out in that—and excuse me I’m using word crap loosely here.
[00:18:13] Ashley James: It’s a technical term.
[00:18:16] Eric Thorton: It’s a technical term describing a whole lot of things that I don’t need to discuss right now, right? It’s their agendas, and it keeps us all in turmoil, and then this hits. It’s not a man-made virus. The coronavirus has the CDC it’s very clear that it’s been in animals in the United States for the last 20 years. It started transferring—just as though it’s what the CDC said—and it was proven out by what’s occurred, which I’m just going to go quickly with this. That it started to transfer from animal to human. That’s generally not a problem—at least through history.
In history, you have an animal that’s sick, it dies. We try to keep the animal alive, we keep them in herds, the disease spreads within their herds because we eat meat. Animal husbandry is what keeps the animals together, which keeps viruses together, which builds the viruses within the animals. That also includes parasites which is something else we’ll talk about later as well, other diseases. The virus has been there just like every other virus we’ve ever had. Neanderthal Homo Erectus had no viruses. They had bacterial infections from the earth things like that, but they had no viruses. They died from bacteria from getting cuts just like a leopard would or a giraffe.
If they got a big cut, they would from the abscess, or die from malnutrition, or starvation because they couldn’t get food at the time. That’s what killed them. Today, we keep animals in groups. It’s been proven—beyond any shadow of a doubt—that eating animal flesh, there’s a little bit of benefit to eating a little bit some people, but most of us animal flesh causes 180 of our major diseases. Then all these viruses: the bird flu, the avian flu, all the measles, all of polio, things like that all coming from eating animals. Just saying, I’ve been shown that we should be reducing that to keep the health of the planet going.
[00:20:51] Ashley James: When you say the health of the planet, it’s not just pollution or global warming stuff agenda. The spread of viruses is from animal husbandry.
[00:21:04] Eric Thorton: Right, when it’s a problem, the way Western medicine looks at it, when the virus transfers to a human, they better get a vaccine. Now, vaccines have their problems. I don’t want to discuss that here right now, but when it goes from an animal to human, that’s when they start doing the research. When it transfers from one human then to another human, that’s when we get a problem. They started studying the coronavirus and doing work at the UW that’s called the Kaiser Permanente Lab and the CDC lab in Shoreline, as well as all around the world. The pandemic organization within the CDCs around the world, tell people when these viruses have transferred to a human, so they can all work together to create a vaccine. Well, it happened.
In our country, which is a major amount of money goes to this, generally speaking. It was being done at the University of Washington here in Seattle at the Kaiser Permanente—what’s called now Kaiser Permanente Lab—because they’re funding and they’re paying for the sign on the outside. I don’t know what it is. When number 45 became president, they were ready to test the vaccine on humans. They also had that massive ability to build good quality testing for mass quantity testing ready to go as well. They put that, and then they lost the funding, and it shut down completely.
Within a week of March 8, if you recall, the UW Lab announced that they were, it was within 10 days, that they had announced that they were revamping this thing that had been on nitrogen—this vaccine. Within a few days, they were testing it on people.
[00:23:30] Ashley James: They didn’t just invent it, they invented it a while ago.
[00:23:33] Eric Thorton: No, they had it. They invented it when Trump was going coming off this 2012 or what? No, this is 2019 so it was to 2016, it’s when they lost their funding. So it was just sitting there on ice ready to go, and now it’s going. It takes years to develop a virus to get it to the point of being able to try it out on humans.
[00:23:58] Ashley James: You mean a vaccine?
[00:23:59] Eric Thorton: A vaccine, excuse me. To try it on. You’re right. They were already doing it because it was sitting there on ice because the money was taken away. They’re trying it. It takes at least a year studying it to see if it does harm, or how much to do, and how much to give people? Again, vaccines aren’t the greatest thing in the world, but if a bunch of people gets the vaccine and it stops the virus, then it protects everybody. Now, ethically, there’s a whole lot of questions about that, and there are other ways of creating vaccines rather than having heavy metals in them. That’s proven by other countries of the world, but it’s still—if we had a vaccine—it would help slow this. We don’t have the vaccine so we have to keep apart.
We don’t have a way of stopping it yet for a large portion of the population whether you agree with vaccines or not, have one yourself or not. A lot of people do, and they do work very well. They can cause other things too—again, I don’t want to talk about that right now, but they do work.
There’s a threshold—and I forget the name of it, and I’m not going to recall it right now—of the amount of people that need to be vaccinated in order to stop like TB, or measles, or the chickenpox, or whatever else. There has to be a percentage, and they’ve got to figure it out. It’s like measles is highly contagious so 93% of the population—they figure—should be vaccinated in order to get rid of the measles around the whole planet. I believe it was polio they needed 70% of the population vaccinated to get the same effect. So different things, different diseases require different amounts of the population to have these vaccines.
Do I wish they made the vaccines better? You bet you. Didn’t put the heavy metals in them big time, but we don’t have that now. The virus is out there. It is irrelevant where it came from at this point. It is irrelevant—in my opinion—who started, who’s blaming, this and that and the other. If we can get out of our ego and get our heart chakra back balanced, we’re not going to fight this. The only way to fight a pandemic—if you don’t have medicine for it—is to not spread it. When our heart chakras out of balance, our integrity goes out of balance, our anxiety goes up. Like you said, your friend won’t go out of the house. Well, why not? It’s because she’s full of anxiety, and so her integrity is out of balance. Then someone says something and their brain is going to fill in the blanks and turn it into—let’s say someone says, “You need to be 40 feet from somebody to not get it.”
Well, a person full of anxiety is going to go, “Oh my god. It’s got to be 40 feet wait,” and they’re going to take that as God’s truth. Yet it’s just hearsay. We got the younger generations. Younger generations will be listening to this. Well, frankly our generations too. We’ve been spoiled by our own work, our own efforts, our own technologies, etc., and we don’t like to give them up. So people sit there and go, “I don’t want to do that. It sounds all about me.”
The more anxiety we have the more it’s about me. We’ve had this three-four year build-up of anxiety, and this is like a big fat cherry right on top of a sundae of anxiety. The anxiety they’re having—I have noticed, and the guides have said—this is from the political agendas around the world, and the disruption to the matrix of the human matrix around the planet. They’ve shown me—very clearly on many people through the years, not just with this—that when we have anxiety our immune system goes down. This is also proven scientifically. You can go look it up. I’m not going to quote anything right now because there’s so much proof with that.
When we have anxiety, the immune system doesn’t work right. Our adrenaline is through the roof. Our endorphins are low because we have so much adrenaline that’s firing off to get the hormone cycles. We need a dopamine that it doesn’t come through joy. When you get the hormone cycles through joy, the end result is endorphins, which kill viruses, kill bacteria, kill funguses, kill cancer, but when we get our hormones through the adrenal cycle, we get very little endorphins. Those endorphins are part of our defense system. Then, also, anxiety makes us digest food wrong. When we digest food wrong or we eat the wrong food—as many people participate in as looking at the grocery stores today—we eat junk food, our immune systems can’t operate correctly.
It’s interesting, everybody knows—because of many things in my life—I became whole food plant-based and learned a great deal about it, and I promote that because it is the only major science on nutrition. I go to the grocery store these days, and you look through the stores because there are so many people that are hoarding, the shelves are empty of all the junk. You go over to the produce department, it’s full. That’s what we need to eat to kill the viruses.
[00:30:24] Ashley James: Yeah, I just did a two and half hour interview with a really good Naturopathic physician, and we talked about that. We talked about exactly what you can do to prevent, I don’t want to say prevent getting it, but it’s how can you set your body up for success so you can be the 80% of the population that is asymptomatic. That will get the virus and have zero symptoms, and the body mounts a response, the immune system figures out its antibodies, figures it out, kills the virus, gets it out of your system, and you’re done. Now, your immune system knows what to do when the virus comes back around. It knows exactly what to do.
The 80% of the people out there that are completely asymptomatic are not deficient in zinc, are not deficient in vitamin C, are not deficient in vitamin D, are not at high, high, high cortisol stress, are not sleep-deprived, or eating a balanced diet. They’re taking care of their body—they’re the ones eating the nine cups of fruits and vegetables a day, or taking some vitamins.
He talked about exactly what we can do to build our health from the ground up. His first thing, the number one most important thing you should do is a whole food plant-based diet to support the immune system. He says it’s absolutely the most protective. Out of all the diets out there, it’s the most protective of the immune system. He is not against using other diets therapeutically, for example, like a green ketogenic diet or whatever. He uses other diets for specific people, specific instances, but in the general broad, if you want to build your immune system, whole food plant-based no processed food, so no sugar, no processed.
[00:32:25] Eric Thorton: No processed foods, no sugar, no oil. No oil, no meat. No oil outside of what’s in fruits and vegetables and they’re full of oil.
[00:32:35] Ashley James: Nuts, and seeds, and legumes, and whole grains.
[00:32:40] Eric Thorton: Right, right. It’s because these items are God-given and antioxidants. That’s where we get them from. When you get them in whole food, your body uses them better. Yes, you can get them in supplements, but the body can’t use them as well as if you get your zinc from your spinach.
[00:33:04] Ashley James: The thing is though—I agree with you—and with one exception. One caveat is minerals are hard to make sure that you get enough because if that spinach has grown in soil that’s low in zinc, you’re not going to get the adequate amount of daily zinc. If you eat a variety of fruits and vegetables every day, and a variety of color, and you’re eating nine cups of fruits and vegetables, you’re definitely getting 1000 different phytochemicals, you’re getting lots of vitamins. In these times of uncertainty, you could definitely fill in the gaps. Supplements are like the mortar food is the bricks, you can fill in the gaps with some minerals, take some zinc. You can also go to a Naturopath. There are some lab tests you can do. There is an interesting way of telling if you’re mineral deficient. There are certain symptoms we have that are really easy, but if you’re eating a whole food plant-based diet, there are very few people that end up being deficient in nutrients.
[00:34:12] Eric Thorton: Yeah. As you know I recommend vitamin patches for that very reason especially in the wintertime. Our fruits and vegetables have been sitting around oxidizing for weeks oftentimes. The minerals and stuff rust away basically. Yes, you need those. At this time, add a supplement or two, but if we put too many supplements in us that overloads the kidneys and liver, and that causes problems. That lowers our immune system. That’s why I particularly recommend vitamin patches where a lot of other people will do it in pill form, which is fine too.
I have noticed when it goes through the skin, our bodies use it better. That I’ve noticed in the blood testing that Naturopaths do that it actually raises the blood levels of these essential nutrients because most people’s digestive systems can’t handle a major influx where a vitamin patch gives it to you a little bit all day long, and it doesn’t go through the stomach and the intestine, so it’s a little easier on us.
I work with a lot of very sensitive people though, and that’s why I don’t want to say don’t take vitamin pills. Because I work with sensitive people, a lot of their bodies have been overwhelmed for so long they can’t these vitamins anymore, but the patches work well for them because they’re soft and they’re very gentle. I don’t want to poo-poo anything else. It’s just the population I work with sometimes the patches work better for them.
I’ve been very much shown that the end result of all of this chaos has been the very much weakened chakras and weakened immune systems. Our work, we dumped this chaos that each individual has. You’ve heard me call it on your shows before—wheelbarrow loads of things we’re hanging on to. That lowers the stress on the body and the immune system picks up. Oftentimes, people—after work here—will go into what’s called herxing, which is when the body starts to detox and it starts to feel a little bit sick because the immune system is actually working better.
It takes a few days, and the body’s, immune system is working, getting rid of these toxins, so they can fight off new ones. Whenever you relieve a load on anybody for anything, the body can repair itself. If you have less anxiety from energy in your energy field, you’re going to sleep better. You’re also going to process food better. You’re going to process your ego better if you’re not in anxiety. You will learn to turn off a lot of this hearsay. Today, I heard somebody say, “If you eat lots of ginger all day long you’ll never get the coronavirus.”
[00:37:40] Ashley James: I got a text today from one of my friends saying, “The Russians have solved it. They eat ginger all day long, and they don’t have the coronavirus.” There’s so much misinformation going on.
[00:37:51] Eric Thorton: Right. There’s another one the other day. It’s basically saying along that same lines, and this part of it is actually true, “If you are constantly salivating and swallowing, if you’re drinking lots of fluids, when the coronavirus, if it gets in our mouth, not our eyes, but if it gets in our mouth we then swallow it, and it gets killed by the stomach acid.” If you’re eating ginger all day long, it’s going to make you salivate. If you do get it in your mouth, ginger is an antiviral, and it makes you salivate because it’s very powerful. Then you’re going to swallow it, it’s going to get killed in your stomach acid, but it’s not going to solve it coming through your eyes or your skin.
These are hearsays that are out there that there may be an inkling of truth to it, but we add our own. “Oh my god. Everyone run and get ginger.” Well, you could just have a glass of water. Sip on water all day long, or a little nice tea, anything to keep your moisture moving in your mouth to prevent it from entering your system through your mouth. All this information is causing this chaos. This is one of the interesting things that the guides were really big on talking about today, and I don’t know how this will work out, but they showed me when I was doing some healing work on myself with my assistant and friend Judy, lovely gifted person.
They showed me what the new-age calls the matrix, which is the energy generated by all humans that is circling in on the planet at all times. Psychics can reach into this information and get intuition about different people in different places. People who do remote viewing use the matrix to view places that are of distance. I can sit here, and tap into the matrix, and feel the chaos of the whole planet. I teach people about the points of pathology so they learn to shut this down. In this matrix, it is so chaotic that it can’t heal itself at this point. What that means, the way they explained it to me is like this, if you take—I used the example with you earlier, what do they call this soybean stuff. Put a mark on this.
[00:41:02] Ashley James: Tofu.
[00:41:03] Eric Thorton: Tofu. You scramble it up in a blender, and you put it back in the dish, and you just let it sit, it’s going to make itself solid again. It’ll make itself solid in an entirely different arrangement even though it looks the same. Any bacteria that have been in it have been disrupted. The tofu can actually last longer in your refrigerator or on your counter because the bacteria, and viruses, and things like that deteriorate the tofu has now been completely disrupted, and yet the tofu has reassembled itself in a healthier place. I’m looking at that I’m going, “Ah, the energy of disruption.” Another friend showed me there are dowsing rods that are called disruption laws. You use them around people or animals and it can disrupt their energy field, and it’ll reset itself, and they can get over diseases. They’re saying, we need to do this as a planet.
[00:42:10] Ashley James: Your guides are saying we need to do this as a planet?
[00:44:58] Eric Thorton: As a planet, we need to scramble the matrix—whatever that looks like—and let it reset itself so that it can heal. They pointed out to me, we’re all trying to—healers of all sorts around the world, and intentions, the gift of petition, prayers, things like that—are all trying to help heal someone through our own personal point of view, our own cognitive biases. Some people think you need Jesus to heal, some people think you need chlorophyll to heal so they’re going to send chlorophyll, some say you got to send some aconite the palace in a homeopath, some people think you need steak to heal, some people you need the prayer of a thousand people, the power of eight, the this or that, or the other, which is all harnessing thought and sending it. Biblically, it’s called the gifts of petition. You’re asking for healing, but you’re asking through your own agendas. We can’t help it, we’re human.
Where Gaia, the planet, has this amazing ability to heal itself, but the human matrix above the planet is now so full of anxiety from these years of disruption and unrest that it’s not able to organize itself and to disrupt some of these viruses. What they’ve said is basically we need to ask people to put the effort out, in their mindset, throughout many times throughout the day. If we could do it in sequence at night like at 9:00 PM every night throughout each time zone throughout the planet. That everybody who hears this or words pass, at that moment, they astral travel if they travel, put the intention out of scrambling the atmosphere.
It’s not going to scramble physically, but what they’re saying is it’s scrambling the energetics, so it will reorganize itself like the tofu did, comes out looking the same, but all the viruses and bacteria have been disrupted, and the levels can then start to fall. I don’t know what that looks like.
[00:44:57] Ashley James: Can you ask them?
[00:44:59] Eric Thorton: I don’t know what it looks like in that how people will play it out. How it would look like if everybody did this is the coronavirus would then be susceptible to the energy of Gaia killing it.
[00:45:18] Ashley James: What’s protecting the coronavirus from not being susceptible to dying off like it should?
[00:45:26] Eric Thorton: Ego.
[00:45:28] Ashley James: What do you mean?
[00:45:29] Eric Thorton: When we’re all in anxiety, that’s a state of ego, and we’re putting out all this fear into the matrix. So that’s what we’re going to manifest. It’s literally called manifesting. You put out fear, you put out anxiety, you’re going to manifest the reasons for fear and anxiety.
[00:45:51] Ashley James: The fear and anxiety that we’ve had mounting up globally for the last 20 years are manifesting plagues, our collective mass hysteria is manifesting pandemics?
[00:46:16] Eric Thorton: Right. That’s what they’re telling us.
[00:46:17] Ashley James: I like to mention the power of 8 because I just interviewed the author of that recently, and we started a power of 8 group. Any listeners who want to join, go to the Learn True Health Facebook group. We started a group, and we’ve done two little groups together so far. It’s really cool. There’s eight of us or whatever, and we all come up with one thing to focus on for 10 minutes for one of the people in the group. Then we discuss the results. We all have a very similar experience, and the person really feels it. There’s only a handful of people that are focusing the same intention, so we’re all focusing the same intention for that person, and that person is getting results. One woman has MS, and she started feeling tingling, she started feeling sensations. Another woman has had a really chronic, a really bad sinus infection. She started to feel her head, warmth, and energy, and things were clearing.
[00:47:24] Eric Thorton: How hard was it to get eight people or however many you had to even be quiet for ten minutes?
[00:47:32] Ashley James: We have a few thousand people in the Facebook group, but only eight out of the few thousand decided that they wanted to join. Maybe the timing was off or whatever. Very small percentage of people will sit down for 10 minutes and do a collective thought experiment.
[00:47:56] Eric Thorton: The guides are saying the same type of thing.
[00:47:58] Ashley James: If you could get a small percentage of people to all—
[00:48:03] Eric Thorton: To all scramble this matrix—it’s an imaginative thing, I know that—but put the intention of scrambling the energy on the planet, it can then reorganize, and see, and it’s very similar to the power of eight. Humans are very hard to actually put their intention for any length of time together, but when we do, it’s amazing.
[00:48:34] Ashley James: It is, it’s absolutely amazing. She did experiments and they were able to—long-distance—make plants go more. They were doing it in universities. They had universities plant a bunch of seeds and then labeled them seed A, seed B. The universities all watered them the exact same, treated them all the exact same. They didn’t know which ones the intentions were being sent to, but 100% of the time, the ones that were getting the intentions from the groups were growing exponentially more.
Then they also sent negative intentions to some seeds. They did not do as well as the controls. They also did experiments where they would get a group of people and send good intentions, and then send a bad intention, then a good intention, then a bad intention. The students were reporting the findings, and sure enough, it was a zigzag: good then bad then good then bad. This is part of quantum physics.
Quantum physics is trying to explain this. I love the movie What the Bleep Do We Know because it goes into this in a fun way. Kids can watch What the Bleep Do We Know. Your whole family can watch it. It came out in the early 2000s. What the Bleep Do We Know, definitely get that movie because it connects spirituality with quantum physics, with science. They’re trying to explain how we actually do as humans with our intention, with our emotions, where we focus our intention and attention. That we affect our physical reality, but we also affect—like you call it—the matrix. We’re tapping into the—
[00:50:32] Eric Thorton: Unconscious collective.
[00:50:33] Ashley James: Unconscious collective. Yeah. That energy net that we can tap into. Even though we think we’re physically apart, we’re connected. We’re all really, really connected. We’re all driving blindfolded like we don’t know that we’re driving and we’re just running around, so we’re creating chaos when we could be creating harmony by harnessing our gifts.
[00:51:09] Eric Thorton: I mentioned it earlier, when 9/11 happened, like anybody else, I was shocked. It really hit the heart chakra. I said to my guides—I don’t impose anything I do on anybody, I wait for guidance. I don’t think it’s ethically right to look into anybody’s energy field to help out. I think the universe has plenty of help. If they want the etheric energy of somebody to anchor something or the astral energy, they can ask, and that’s what healers are for. When 9/11 happened I said, “If you need some help somehow over there—I can’t imagine how you would need help—I’m happy to help out whatever you guys say.”
About four days after the tragedy they said, “Eric, what’s going on over there?” I said, “Really?” They go, “Yeah.” We astral travel. We’re above the area, and they told me just to observe. I sat there and I observed. I was seeing all of these wonderful intentions from all these healers. People praying for the aid workers, for the people that have died, for their families, for all this stuff, and helping to move people to the other side. I sat there and I just went—I had this huge realization. I was watching all this wonderful intention cause complete chaos. All this intention—a lot of your listeners are going to go, “Huh?” But people have guides and angels. When we die, they’re there for us. It doesn’t require a healer to help you to the other side.
If you’re not going to go to the other side it’s an egoic issue. That would be a ghost, and it can go on to other things, which is another subject. It doesn’t require the matrix if you will. The universe knows how to do this. All of these people with these wonderful intentions were actually making people—the aid workers, the firefighters, etc.—more tired. They were actually holding back souls from moving on because, no you have to do it my way, the Catholic way, the Presbyterian way, the new-age way, then whatever, it has to be my way. Yet the universe has been doing this for trillions of years, but somehow the egos of people sit here and, “It must be my way.”
This is what the guides are pointing out is happening now. We’ve got so much chaos. It can’t organize and help stop the virus from spreading and help calm down the anxieties of the individuals. It’s building up and building up and building up, and we fill in our own blanks. I mentioned a book to you earlier which I’ll mention now because it’ll be a terrific interview for you. It’s called Nerosculpting for Anxiety and we had talked about this. She points out how we fill in the blanks of partial information, and we swear it’s God’s truth.
For example, if you have a crowd and you make some statements that are odd or not complete, and you put it out into a crowd—whether the crowd is together or the crowd is individual around the planet—you make a statement that is not like—you say some beautiful statement that your intention is for. I’m trying to think of an example. We talked about one with something I read to you earlier about how the virus is a great equalizer, well it’s not, but it sounds beautiful. People will read into it, “Oh, yes. We’re the same as rich people,” except it didn’t say that. The statement didn’t say that we’re the same as rich people. It was a great equalizer. There’s a lot of celebrities and stuff that have gotten the coronavirus. Well, they get to afford a whole bunch of care, but the poorer people don’t. It’s not a good equalizer, it’s a divider, but we read into the statement made by a very famous person, “Oh, that’s so sweet and lovely.” We filled it in.
Our brains consciously—when we are in fear—think one in two-dimensionally. We fill in the blanks consciously that are not there. You have a crowd, you make a partial statement, and the crowd is seated with people to say words. I don’t want to get into the political agendas and stuff like that now, but they plant words out there or they make a statement, “Oh, yeah. He means this,” and everyone goes, “Yeah, he means that. Yes, he means that. He’s wonderful,” and he didn’t do anything. He or she makes a partial statement.
We do this more when we are in anxiety. We sit here and we go, “Okay, eat ginger. Oh, that’ll cure it. Quick, everybody run and get ginger.” Where the statement, “Eating ginger cures the coronavirus,” isn’t proven by anything. What’s proven is if you keep your mouth moist, and you keep swallowing, if the coronavirus goes in your mouth, it goes down into the stomach acid and gets killed, but it can still come through your eyes. Everyone figured, “Oh, it’ll cure if I eat ginger.” Well, this just makes it all day so you don’t get it through your mouth, but you can still get it through your eyes, and skin, and through your nose.
We filled in the answer, and it was untrue, or it was a partial truth. The news, the political agendas, we’re all doing this, and it’s causing us more and more conflict, more and more information in the matrix, and more and more anxiety, which is also going into the matrix, weakening our heart chakras, and taking our defense systems down. Our personal defense systems and Gaia’s defense systems are down. The guides are asking everybody, I would put it at each time zone at 9:00 PM, start doing the intention of scrambling the matrix, and let’s see what happens in a week. If nobody does it, maybe nothing will happen. Maybe if 80,000, or 200,000, or 1 million people get a hold of this thing, maybe it’ll change it. It’s worth a try. It gets people to focus—like with the power of eight—on one thing.
I’ve worked with you in another situation with the power of eight and got some great benefits from it. It’s difficult to focus. It’s difficult to get people to even do anything. Except these days, rushing for toilet paper. I get a kick out of that one. Anyway. I’m putting it out there, 9:00 PM every time zone all the way around the planet. Everyone work at scrambling. However, you think you can, scrambling the matrix so it can reset itself. Let’s see what happens.
[00:59:57] Ashley James: That’s what the guides showed you?
1:00:00] Eric Thorton: That’s what the guide showed me. They also showed many other ways that our immune systems are dramatically affected. We’d already talked about meat and oil. We tried to have another conversation before about parasites, chemicals in our bodies, food probiotics, and the signals they give us that keep our immune systems from functioning correctly.
There are so many chemicals in the environment that the parasites and things like that have actually gotten out of hand. Chemicals generally don’t kill parasites, and we eat parasites, we breathe parasites, and viruses, and bacteria. Our body generally takes care of them, but when they get overloaded, our bodies can’t do a good job.
Our bodies are alive because of symbiotic relationships with what we call beneficial parasites. If we ate naturally, which would be more along the lines of what we already discussed—whole food plant base—we get fewer chemicals in us because of whole food plant-based. We should be eating organic—if you can possibly afford it—but also the chlorophyll in things help remove pesticides and such from our bodies—amongst many other things.
Eating proper minerals, like we discussed, help remove toxins from the bodies. But we get parasites and all that stuff. In North America, we get most of the parasites from our fruits, and vegetables, and from meat. We get loaded up with them. As you move to the warmer climates you get more and more parasites that come in through the water, and through the air, from bugs lining on us, planting their eggs in us, and things like that.
Well, these are problems for us because each parasite—when it gets hungry just like humans or if you ever watched a cat get hungry—they start getting aggressive, and they start running around. They’re giving you a signal to feed them. Well, scientifically, they have proven this. I’ve looked it up one time. There are tens of thousands of studies on the biochemical signals that a parasite gives you to feed it.
Let’s say you get a parasite from a cow from eating beef, and the parasite’s running out of cow to eat. It’s going to send a signal that it’s hungry. It’s like a dog that’s trained to tell someone they’re going to have a grand mal seizure because this dog can smell it. Your body is starting to give off a biochemical signal that a dog can smell. This is how animals become service animals because they’re trained to react to these smells.
Parasites do the same thing. They give off these biochemical signals, they go to our brain, and they say, “Eat more meat.” If you quit eating the meat, the parasites die. It takes a number of months. Then all of a sudden you eat meat and it tastes like ugh. I’m not a hypocrite. I thought meat tasted great. Now, I taste meat and it tastes like, “Ugh. I don’t really need that anymore.” I don’t have anything in me giving me the signal to eat the meat.
Well, if you take things like sugar. Sugar ups your anaerobic probiotics. The anaerobic probiotics, I suppose to be between 10% and 20% of our probiotics, preferably around 10%. The more sugary things you eat or eat processed food, the more that those anaerobic probiotics get to eat, so their numbers go higher and higher and higher. Those probiotics are alive like a parasite. When they get hungry, they tell you to eat more of the food that they want themselves. They tell you to eat more sugar, more junk food, go to the places to get the things that feed the anaerobic bacteria. You can look at most of your grocery stores full of the things that eat that because it gives us cravings and we buy more.
Once you’ve been off of these foods, the anaerobic bacteria goes down, the quantities go down, so your cravings go down. There’s a book called The Pleasure Trap by Dr. Goldhammer that explains these biochemical signals that our own probiotics give us and parasites give us to eat the food that keeps us sick. When you stop eating these foods, the anaerobic probiotics levels go down.
They talked about, in the movie Game-Changer, what meat does to our vascular system. As long as you’re eating that meat, it rots, you don’t digest it very quickly, so it starts to rot in your intestine. The rotting meat is what the anaerobic bacteria eat. They’ll eat the rotting meat so you do eventually digest it, but the anaerobic bacteria has gone way up in numbers. Now you’re low on meat and it asks for more, so then you crave meat. When you’re craving meat and oils, it kills the aerobic bacteria. It smothers it like if you take an apple and you wash it underwater, the water beads up. If you wash it under olive oil, the olive oil coats the apple. If the apple had to breathe air, it would die.
Well, aerobic bacteria have to breathe air. Every time you swallow food you get air with it. That aerobic bacteria is what digests the grains, the fruit, and the vegetables. With a low number of that, we can’t get the nutrition from those foods, and that’s where we get the wheat belly. That’s where we get even from ancient wheat. That’s where we get problems digesting the grains, and problems digesting the plants and the fruits. If you treat them correctly, they have the least amount of parasites on them.
We don’t crave them. We crave the things that grow the parasites and grow the anaerobic bacteria. The aerobic bacteria just sits there and waits for more oxygen and to do its job. When it runs out of oxygen, it dies off. Then the anaerobic levels go way up, and we get stuck in these cycles of eating very bad food that drops our immune system, which makes us so we can’t fight off viruses, and bacterias, and funguses.
Between the bacteria in our intestines, and the parasites that we eat that come from food that is easy to digest—because parasites like food that’s easy to digest too—we have this pleasure trap, if you will, that we can’t get out of. That’s why even during this coronavirus outbreak, what’s on the shelves? Everyone’s taken all the junk food off the shelves. That’s what they brought home to eat. That you go over to the fruits and vegetables, it’s full. Nobody’s eating that stuff because nobody’s craving it. Nobody’s trying to satisfy anything and lead these urges that we get these chemical signals make us want the Oreo cookie, “Well, cookies taste good,” but if we’re craving them, there’s something wrong.
We’ve talked about this eating zero cookie in the situation before, but it applies again today. People need to eat fruits and vegetables like your previous guest said. They need to eat whole food plant-based. They need to have some vitamins and mineral supplements, they need to get their antioxidants up, they need to get the anaerobic bacteria up, and their aerobic bacteria down, then your immune system can handle it.
When you swallow the coronavirus, you want something in there that’s going to kill it. That’s your digestive enzymes, your prebiotics. A digestive enzyme is when your pancreas gives out, so we want it to come from our pancreas—if possible. That goes down and goes down through the digestive system, and makes it so that nothing’s going to live. The coronavirus isn’t going to live in your body.
If you don’t have the antioxidants in your body, you swallow the coronavirus, they’ll probably live and you’ll get the disease. This is why people that eat better are not getting the disease or getting very minor cases of it. That includes older people. I’m here today. Guys, eat better. Eat your fruits and vegetables, and cut down or eliminate the meat, and the removed oil from vegetables. Don’t eat that if you can help it. Help your immune system come up.
The whole food plant-based group recommends a 21-day challenge. Well, in 21 days you’ll see your whole body change dramatically for the better, and your immune system comes up. It’s amazing. Even in my household, there are three of us that eat whole food plant-based, and there are two that don’t. Well, the ones that eat whole food plant-based, when the other two get sick, we don’t get sick. We giggle too. We look at them and go, “Well, you know the solution.”
It doesn’t mean you’re not going to get it, it just means you’re not going to get a bad case of it. So once in a while, the ones of us who eat whole food plant-based will get the sniffles, will get a little bit, but we don’t get the full-blown thing. Our bodies fight it off correctly. Anyway. I recommend everybody do parasite cleanses, and liver cleanses to get the parasites out of your system.
[01:12:17] Ashley James: What do the guides recommend as being the most effective ones, or does each person is kind of different?
[01:12:28] Eric Thorton: I have noticed they like the typical, they like the natural anti-parasite things. You’re going to want—what is it cloves, wormwood—and there’s another one. Let me recall what it is.
[01:12:45] Ashley James: There’s one out of India, which is mimosa pudica. I did two interviews about this, really effective protocol by Dr. Jay Davidson. Listeners can go to learntruehealth.com/cleanse for that one.
[01:13:03] Eric Thorton: Gaia has provided many different things to kill parasites. I use one that doesn’t have grapefruit seed extract because that’s not good for my body right now. I use one called Parastroy. It’s cheap, it’s easy. There are many combinations, and I’m sure you have lots of recommendations. Ashwagandha works at killing certain bacterias, and viruses, and parasites. I know that’s one of them. Organic or not, if you can’t afford the organic, it’s better to just do it anyway with not organic just to get these parasite numbers down so your body doesn’t have to fight the parasites.
Believe it or not, remember, a parasite is alive. They have excrement, and your body’s got to fight all that off. That’s literally poison in your bloodstream that your body has to fight off first before it’s going to fight the coronavirus. Lower the parasite—the non-beneficial parasites that you have in your body, the more energy your immune system has to fight this incoming disease. The better your intestinal tract is operating, the higher your aerobic bacteria is—that’s the first part of your immune system is your intestines. It’s the aerobic bacteria that do the work. The higher that is, the higher your immune system can function.
Also, when you digest food right, it heals your large intestine so you don’t have leaky gut, so you don’t have all this what’s called triglycerides going through your intestinal wall and going into your bloodstream, and then your immune system has to fight all that off too. Our immune systems are amazing. They do so much work 24/7 keeping down systemic diseases, keeping down the incoming, taking care of chemicals we breathe, or get on us. It’s an amazing thing. If we can give some relief, it’ll focus on the things we need it to focus on. That’s what we’ve talked about today so far, how to give it some relief?
If you can reduce your anxiety by not listening to the news so much, yes we need to know what we have to do at this point.
[01:15:53] Ashley James: Don’t put your head in the sand, but you talked about that we fill in the gaps. I want to address this because I teach. I’ve been teaching since 2005 how to eliminate anxiety. That’s one of my strong suits. What you were talking about is a different way of describing what I teach.
[01:16:12] Eric Thorton: I remember you telling me something. It was really interesting. It was really good.
[01:16:16] Ashley James: Thank you. The body—the physical body—is always listening to the mind, and the mind is always filling in the gaps. I give the example of we’re driving in traffic, and everything’s fine. We’re driving to work and all of a sudden we see red lights ahead of us, all the brake lights turn on, and all of a sudden we have anxiety. Like boom, sweaty palms, the body’s freaking out, heart’s pounding, shallow breath, and we’re going, “What is going on?” Maybe a knot in your stomach or a frog in your throat. You don’t even realize that what just happened in that split second is your mind filled in the gaps and went, “Oh my gosh. There are brake lights. There’s going to be a traffic jam. I’m going to be late for work. My boss is going to fire me. I’m not going to be able to pay the rent, or pay the mortgage, or pay the grocery bills,” or whatever. We’re going to all end up homeless and dead.
The mind perceived those brake lights as a direct threat to your survival right now, and turned on the stress response of the autonomic nervous system’s fight-or-flight response, the sympathetic nervous system response. Because we’re either in cortisol response, or we’re in oxytocin. We’re either in feel-good, healing, relaxed, in a loving state, or we’re in survival, fear, worry. We become so used to, like you said, our heart chakras had taken such a hit—gosh, you just keep thinking back—the last 20 years, right? But think about before that, and think about before that. We’re under constant threat and the media loves, loves to feed on this.
I was just having a conversation the other day with a very intelligent friend of mine who said that this is a spiritual war, and then just today, before we hit record you said that. I thought that was very interesting because this is a spiritual war, and it’s been waged much longer than before we were even born. Our heart chakra is constantly taking it from all sides, keeping our heads in the sand, keeping us dumbed down, keeping us living in a low vibration state, fighting over toilet paper. Because if we’re fighting over toilet paper, then we’re not evolving, we’re not empowered, we’re not taking control of our own destiny. They’re keeping us in a low vibration, fear state.
My friend was even talking that they feed off of this energy of fear. It’s like a parasite that they feed off of keeping the masses dumbed down, fluoridated, and buying into junk food and drugs, and keeping them doped up on the dopamine—the pleasure trap. Go through Vegas, it’s close now, but go through Vegas when it’s not closed—because I used to live there. Walk through any casino and you will see.
Plato wrote the Allegory of the Cave where he describes a person who breaks free of the chains, of the reality that constrained him, and that he comes back to warn all the people who he was in this prison with, and they all try to kill him because they could not even perceive being out of the matrix, being pulled out of the matrix. I think it’s a 33,000-year-old or 35,000-year-old story. It’s basically what the matrix was based on, is this idea that when you pull your head in the sanding, you look around, and you go, “We are all buying into this system that keeps us suppressed and keeps us sick. What are we doing?”
On social media, people are all in their homes, sharing videos and pictures of how much alcohol they’re drinking, and how much junk food they’re eating, and they’re celebrating ill health, and yet if you go out for a walk in the sunlight—not near anyone—but you go for a walk in the sunlight, and you share that, then you would be condemned. There are so many people angry about that because, “How dare you leave your house?” It’s this wacky world where we are not celebrating health.
[01:20:39] Eric Thorton: [Inaudible]
[01:20:41] Ashley James: Exactly, exactly.
[01:20:43] Eric Thorton: It’s like you were saying. You hit the brake lights and your subconscious mind thinks of all these different things. Like you said, if you change the script like, “Thank God we got brake lights here so we didn’t cause a car accident. That’s wonderful. What a great invention.” Your immune system is still working. If you’re in the other one. If you’re in the, “Oh my God. I’m going to be late from work,” your immune system has to go and take care of that. You just manifested how many minutes of your immune system not functioning correctly.
[01:21:22] Ashley James: Absolutely. The doctor I just interviewed about that said, “When we’re in cortisol, when were in a stress response, our immune system is 100% compromised.”
[01:21:30] Eric Thorton: 100%.
[01:21:31] Ashley James: Our brain is doing this all the time because this is how we were raised.
[01:21:36] Eric Thorton: It’s part of our culture now.
[01:21:38] Ashley James: But it’s part of the global programming to focus on what we don’t want to have happened. It’s also genealogically. Basically, the pessimists were the survivors, and the optimist didn’t think there’d be a bear in the woods so they were the ones that got eaten. So really, genetically, the people who are the most cautious were able to survive and pass on their genes. If we just blindly follow our basic instincts, “Oh, I feel like Oreo so I’m going to eat them. I feel like this, I’m going to eat them.” Who’s telling you to feel that? Is it your gut biome because there are so many studies, and you pointed to me, you showed me this.
There are studies that prove that the gut biome hijacks the brain, sends chemicals to the brain. If we have a bad gut biome, like the Homer Simpson of gut biomes that have been created by eating—I keep picking on Oreos. If we go through the drive-thru every day, even one meal a day, and you eat that kind of food, you’re creating a gut biome that’s going to hijack your brain and make you want that more and want the kale less.
I’m not even saying go vegan. I’m not saying cut out all meat. I’m just saying eat more plants, more and more and more plants, and more vegetables. More variety of vegetables, fruits, more whole foods.
[01:23:05] Eric Thorton: Right. Every bit helps.
[01:23:08] Ashley James: Yeah. You cultivate a gut biome that then tells you it wants that more.
[01:23:13] Eric Thorton: Dr. Goldhamer, when I was there, he goes, “If you eat this way,” they recommend 100% eating this way, but if you’ve eaten 70% of that way, you cut down your meat 70%, and your oil 70%, you have 70% less stuff in you damaging your immune system. So your immune system can work better. If you can go 80%, go 90%, you got that much more working for your health instead of for the corporations for the corporate profit. This is where we bring up the idea of enlightenment. Enlightenment is when you can look at these things and make a choice that says, “No.” Enlightenment is when you have a problem. You got to go to Jack in the Box because you’re craving their lovely food, but your brain goes, “You know, I don’t really need that today. I can choose something healthier.”
Enlightenment is when you look at the negative things and find the positive things out of that. We know scientifically that these junk foods are terrible for us, and we know these other health foods are healthy for, us but we keep choosing the ones that feed the corporate ladder and this biofilm within us. Someone who is enlightened is going to look at the problem and go, “Well, okay. This is going to hurt my body, so we’re going to override those cravings until we don’t have those cravings anymore. We don’t obsess about it.” It’s like, “Yeah, that’s what my body is craving because I put all this crap into it for all these years.” This is why Buddhist philosophy teaches enlightenment. It takes every negative that we could think of and turns it into a positive.
Enlightenment doesn’t mean not having a Jack in the Box, McDonald’s around, it means being able to make a decision for the health of your body. It doesn’t mean not having the issues, it means we can make a decision to help our bodies. In the case of the coronavirus, an enlightened person is going to—because there is no other way to stop this now that it’s out there, no matter how it got out there, it’s there. An enlightened person’s going to go, “Yeah, okay. That’s what we need to do.” A person who is not enlightened is going to go, “Oh my god. I got to have so much TP. I got to have the cookies. I got to have the Jack. What am I going to do?” They’re stuck on their greed and their habits instead of what is non-egoic, what’s good for your body, and what’s good for the planet.
[01:26:34] Ashley James: I don’t know if I’d call it greed because those people are so—they have been living in that vibration of fear for so long without knowing it. They’ve been living in that survival mode that they need to feel a sense of control. When we’re hit with chaos, we need to feel like we’re in control. When my mom was diagnosed with cancer, my dad and I—how we processed it—we immediately went to the health food store and bought her a juicer like that moment. When I really should have just stayed home and like hugged her, and held her, and not left her alone. I don’t know what we were thinking.
The moment we needed to feel like we were doing something. We needed to do something to help. People need to react and feel like they’re doing something to help their family and themselves whether it’s buying two cases of toilet paper and four boxes of Oreos. Obviously, those weren’t the decisions that were best supportive of their immune systems. Now, there are some supplement companies that have completely run out of supplements. Some people are buying up supplements, some people are buying up Oreos. We need to take a step back and go, “What can we do to support our family and our body mentally, emotionally.
[01:27:56] Eric Thorton: And our community.
[01:27:57] Ashley James: Yeah, and go beyond just our household. That’s right. Go beyond just our household. First, we got to feel like we’re not under threat. Have a week’s worth of food. Everyone should always have a week’s worth of food anyway in case there was any kind of emergency like a tornado, or something, earthquake. We should always have some. I lived in the part of Canada where this was somewhere in the early 2000s. The entire eastern seaboard lost power for I think it was a week. Something in Niagara Falls. Niagara Falls gives energy to a lot of Canada and the United States, and there was no power in Boston, there was no power in New York City. I think it was a week, I mean we could Google this, but I just remember having a ton of fun because my friends and I go camping all the time, so we just went camping.
We’re like, “We already have all the food.” It was several, several days, and there are people who were stuck. If there was no electricity, some people can’t cook, some people can’t get down 50 flights of stairs because they live in an apartment building, so there was a lot of chaos. Back then, we didn’t have the cellphones we have now, we didn’t have the internet. We all managed, but if you have a week’s worth of food for your family, that makes sense, right? Make it the right kind of food that supports the immune system—just moving forward. People were in reactionary mode, and I think now, they’re settling down and looking at, “Okay, what can I do to protect ourselves?”
So many people will not have money next week because there’s a large percentage of people who live paycheck to paycheck. I was just talking to my friend, he goes, “I have $30.” He’s a music teacher. He does his private classes. He goes, “I have $30 to last me until this is over.” There are so many people who are now in that state of fear. We have to get out of fear even though there are real threats to our survival right now, we have to get out of fear in order to support our immune system, and in order to support our ability to solve the problems because we cannot solve problems when we’re in the state of fear because the autonomic nervous system shuts down the frontal cortex in order to have us make reactionary decisions for survival.
In the long term, it is not good because we cannot think clearly and make critical decisions, which is something that you’ve talked about. How can you today help the listener? All the listeners are listening that are worried about the COVID-19, what advice do the guides give? What can we do today right now to support ourselves, our family, and our communities?
[01:31:08] Eric Thorton: Well, to pull this together. One, eat right if you can. Two, support your community. If you’ve got someone that’s got $30 and you got more, help them out. The government’s trying to get checks out through their system. It’s going to take a little longer. If they need driving or they need to get help getting to unemployment offices to get money. If they need help with their business to get, like you and I are private businesses, how do we keep our income coming in, or do we need help?
When you’re in safety mode, if you got $30 left, talk to people. Let them know that there’s a problem. Maybe, if people can get out of their own fear and their own—I use the word greed earlier—greed, that they’ve got to have it. They don’t want to be in that guy’s position and only have $30 left. There have been many stories around the area I’m at where people are buying people’s groceries where they don’t have enough money to pay for their groceries and other people are coming up and paying for that. That’s a wonderful thing. That heals the heart chakra. That makes us feel, everybody feel good. If we can pass that forward or what do they call that? Pay it forward.
If we can remember the good things we have. When I get into fear—I’m human too. When I get in the fear, I think of all the people that I get to help. They’ve proven that energetic medicine kills viruses. I’m a healer, and I get to help do that. Each individual has the ability to harness healing energy even when you’re in fear. If you can sit there, and someone’s got the coronavirus, and you can sit there and feel the love that you have for that person, and put your hand over their heart chakra, don’t touch it, just put it over their heart chakra, and just let them feel your love. Like you said, one of you should have stayed home and just held your mom when she was diagnosed. That is huge. This is why bringing families together from being separated. We can help our community that way.
I get to help people on a regular basis doing that, but we all have the ability to conduct love. We all have the ability to conduct Gaia, which is peaceful harmonizing energy. If we just put our hands over the top of someone’s heart chakra between the lower sternum and the top of the sternum and just send love. You can do this from a distance. If you have a friend that has the virus. I was working with someone—I work everything long-distance right now and I was working with them. I just said, “Can I send you healing energy?” Because I will always ask. They said, “Sure,” and then I’m able to just put my hand where their heart chakra would be—duplicated in my mind’s eye—and just send them that love. They felt better immediately. That’s something we can all do.
If we can all do the 9:00 PM scramble of the matrix in our own mind’s eye, let’s do it. The power of 800 million maybe, or the power of 8,000. The power of anything to put our intention instead of fear. To put it to love in our humanity, our fellow human beings, and touch each other through the energetics whether we’re with them or not. Call, I have been calling friends. I check up on people that I know. I know thousands of people, and I text them, and email them, and things like that. I want to know how they’re doing. Anyone I’ve worked within sessions, I can send them healing energy very easily. It seems to shorten the time and severity of any virus.
Everybody can do that. I can do it differently, really well, but everybody can still do that. That calms the soul. It calms the heart chakra for both people and all participating. So let’s do that instead of watching all the hearsay and listening to it all the hearsay. It’s here guys. The only way we’re going to stop it—it isn’t through eating ginger. It’s going to be through love. It’s going to be through holding each other in that space of love and not shoo.
[01:36:38] Ashley James: Well, love turns off the stress response.
[01:36:41] Eric Thorton: Exactly.
[01:36:42] Ashley James: You also mentioned things that could be described as gratitude. The thing is we have to catch ourselves because we unconsciously automatically fill in the gaps. A really good practice is triviumeducation.com teaches you how to do critical thinking and listen for linguistic fallacies. When you listen for linguistic fallacies, you realize how much we fill in the gaps, and we always need gaps in a way that may threaten our survival and so it turns on the stress response a lot of the times.
You and I have talked about this. It’s something that at first, it’s like unconscious incompetence, and then we become conscious of it, and now we’re consciously incompetent. Now we’re catching ourselves every time we’re in anxiety, or worry, or stress, or fear, and we catch ourselves and we go, “Oh, there. I’m doing it again. There, I’m giving in to the worry and the fear. I’ve been giving in to it. How do I break this cycle?” We have to start breaking the cycle and it could be 20 times a day focusing on what’s good about this.
[01:37:56] Eric Thorton: One of my therapists and also a doctor told me this. He goes, “Eric, you have a busy life, you have stressors,” they all know what I do for a living. They go, “Instead of trying to answer consciously the issues you’re having, Eric, why don’t you do this? Do a little visualizing so you can pull in both halves of your brain.” When you’re in the fight-or-flight, you’re in the conscious effort, you’re using the logic side of your brain, and it’s only 5% of your brain’s power when it’s used alone. When you combine it with the artistic side of your brain, you can now use 95% of your brain’s power.
They suggested this, “Eric, put your problems,” they suggested a visualization. They said, “Put your problems on a raft and you’re going down a river. You see the waterfall coming up, and you see the rapids before the waterfall. You can make a choice. You can get off that raft with all your problems, and go to the side of the river, and sit there, and watch that raft and all your problems go down the river and off the waterfall, and then you can go down to the end of it. Get on the raft again if you want.” What you’ve done at that moment is you’ve included the artistic side of your brain in your thinking process, and you’re watching this thing happen through your mind’s eye, so you’re turning off the conscious fight-or-flight—the part that turns on the cortisol.
You’re turning it off, and you’re pulling in the artistic side of the brain, so then your brain is actually doing a full three-dimensional thinking subconsciously. That’s when your answers come to you. When you’re constantly trying to figure it out, like you said, different ideas have different words for this, but it’s the cortisol response from your adrenal glands. When you include the artistic side of your brain by launching it to the moon. We talked about the energy exchange.
Everyone who’s heard my talks, we talked about the energy exchange where we are visually giving back the person their stressors. It’s telling our brain consciously, “Oh, that’s not mine,” and subconsciously it’s like, “Oh.” You can think about them, how to actually help this person by supporting them and letting them figure out their problem. If you answer their problem, you’ve prevented them from learning and growing, but if you sit back and you go, “You know that’s their problem, it’s not mine, but I can hear, and I can listen to them, and I can be here for them, and I can just keep giving it back to them.”
Your immune system doesn’t get compromised then. Your thinking power goes into a 95% use of your brain, and you can come up with solutions for ideas to present them, but not demand, so that this person’s brain can think. Their imagination can think. We have a problem. We start listening to the news today. Launch it to the moon. Take it, and throw it into the matrix, and just scramble it up in your mind’s eye.
Imagine clouds and you’re up there and you’re just scrambling them up. That’s pulling in the artistic side of your brain and logic centers, calming the reaction down so you don’t feel hopeless, you’re not in the fight or flight, and your immune system, again, works better. These are doctors. This is my MD that told me this, and I already knew it, but it was amazing that he actually said that, and a therapist. Again, I knew this. It’s common knowledge is the point, but we don’t do it.
[01:42:18] Ashley James: We’re listening now.
[01:42:21] Eric Thorton: We need to do that. Right. We need to do this. We need to sit there and go, “Yeah,” whatever we’re in the middle of the seat COVID-19. We’re in it. We’ve got to do the distancing whether we like it or not, and if we don’t like it, shoot it to the moon. Go climb a tree if you don’t like it. Go hug a tree. Go for a walk. If people glare at you, give them their energy back. If they’re glaring at you because you’re within 10-feet, okay, accept that. Get away from them—or I guess it’s 6 feet. Other than that, it’s their problem, it’s not yours. Give it back to them. Go admire some moss. Ever looked at moss with a magnifying glass? It’s amazing.
[01:43:03] Ashley James: Moss is so cool.
[01:43:05] Eric Thorton: It is so cool. You ever just sat there for an hour and watched water run in a brook or a river? Or imagine yourself sitting there in a river that’s warm, and there’s no crocodiles or anything, any fish that are going to eat you. You’re just sitting there enjoying it and enjoying the smells. All you imagine is the smells. Maybe you can throw in any smell you want.
[01:43:34] Ashley James: Of nature.
[01:43:34] Eric Thorton: It just smells amazing. Of nature.
[01:43:35] Ashley James: Not of the Hudson River.
[01:43:36] Eric Thorton: Yeah, I’ll agree with you there. I’ve only flown over the Hudson River. I never swam in it. Anyway. If you can clean your imagination, it turns off the things that are going to give you all the cortisol. Helping, imagining running the energy into your friend’s heart chakra. Imagining the Sun coming up in the middle of the night. Tomorrow’s going to be another day. The sun helps cleanse the earth and gives Gaia. There are so many things to do that pull in all of the brain so that we can relax, and unwind, and get over, get through this yet another pandemic. It’s not the end of the world.
[01:44:33] Ashley James: Do they have any information right now? Because they know who’s listening because there is no time for them. What information do they have for the listeners who are listening right now?
[01:44:50] Eric Thorton: I’ve been listening to the guides through the talk, so do the things we’ve talked about. Use your tools. Use your tools. Use the things you’ve learned from your healing group. Connect with people and talk about things and imaginative. Talk about joy. When this is done, what we’re going to do? How we’re going to have fun? When this passes, there comes a time of peace and prosperity.
[01:45:29] Ashley James: Is that they’re saying?
[01:45:31] Eric Thorton: They’re saying, yes, use the tools you’ve gotten from your healing team. The people that listen to you have healing teams. It’s not a time to panic, it’s a time to rest.
[01:45:48] Ashley James: Yeah, mandatory staycation.
[01:45:52] Eric Thorton: Mandatory staycation.
[01:45:54] Ashley James: Go chill. Netflix and chill.
[01:45:57] Eric Thorton: If you can help someone that needs money, help them, buy them food. The other day I was at Whole Foods near us. This older guy, clean-cut, you can tell he didn’t have a lot of money, but he was clean, good shoes. He was just desperate. He came up to me. He goes, “My wife and I are waiting for a check from the government. It was supposed to arrive today. We have to sleep in our car tonight. Here’s our car.” Not a new car but it showed they were getting government help. He had a decent hat on, and it was clean so he wasn’t just a drug addict or anything. You could just feel they were hungry. My heart just went, “Oh my God.” I thought, “Well, okay.” My heart felt this and I needed to do something for this person. I thought, “I could.” He didn’t want money, he wanted food.”
I was coming out of Whole Foods so I thought to myself, I go, “Well, I don’t really have a meal here for him.” I thought, “What can I do?” I just said, “I’m sorry. Let me think about this.” I literally got in my car and I drove to a place. I got a meal, a good-quality meal for him and his wife, not a banana, or an apple, or a bag of something, or cream corn that everybody likes to give their junk to food banks. I got them teriyaki food. I asked him if he ate meat and he said yes. I got both of them a full teriyaki chicken dinner with all the trimmings. I brought it back to them. I drove through the parking lot, and he was still there. I opened my window, and I said, “Here.” I handed in the bag. I said, “I bought you and your wife full meals because you are worth it.”
He looked at me and he started to cry. I did too, I’m crying right now. It was a heart connection. He needed some help, and he wasn’t a drug addict. He wasn’t begging for money to go get another hit. It helped him through the night. I bought him that, and I bought him potato soup because maybe one of them was allergic to wheat or something and I didn’t know. I bought him something without any wheat in it. It still touches my heart. That’s what we need. The guides just reminded me of that story. We need to do this. That’s how we open up. That’s one of the ways we open up and repair the heart chakra. I hope he can pay it forward one day. I hope I can do this again for somebody else, and I will. It helps everybody.
[01:49:36] Ashley James: Beautiful. I love it. In my neighborhood, there are 270 something people in a Facebook group, just our little neighborhood. Just our little one-mile radius kind of thing. We already have posts of people saying, “Hey, let me know if you need something. I can go to the store.” Every day, there’s been a post like, “Okay, who needs something? Who’s at risk? I can run to the store for you.” I’m in a bunch of other communities, Facebook groups of other areas in my area. I’m seeing this, I’m seeing people reach out. Instead of posting fear-based scarcity posts, post love, gratitude, helping posts. Look to help others because that will get you out of stress response.
[01:50:39] Eric Thorton: I have friends that are older, and we keep in contact with them. They’re not poor. We brought them some homemade granola. I just set it on the bench in front of their house, and they had made some rosemary organic sourdough rolls, and they left a bag of that out there for us. Just an exchange, just to show we care. That opens up and heals the heart chakra.
[01:51:18] Ashley James: Yeah. The one caveat would be if either one of you would be high-risk, you could technically give each other the virus. Although you would work energetically to remove it.
[01:51:31] Eric Thorton: I also took precautions, did the precaution.
[01:51:35] Ashley James: The Naturopath I just interviewed said if you have bread, for example like those rolls, to kill a virus, you have to freeze it for three days. I didn’t know that. I thought that was really interesting. If it’s in a package, then you can wash the package. To make sure you’ve killed a virus, you have to freeze something for three days.
[01:51:57] Eric Thorton: That’s after it’s been cooked though. Cooking kills the viruses.
[01:52:01] Ashley James: Right.
[01:52:01] Eric Thorton: If you’ve handled it after you’ve cooked it and you have the virus on your hand, then you’ve got it on the rolls. There are several steps here. We took precautions in that case, and we should. I happen to know because these are friends that are also clients, so I knew they didn’t have the virus and they’re taking the precautions. I know I don’t have it right now. No one in my family has it right now. We’re good, but we still took the precautions anyway. The door didn’t open. I just rang the doorbell, it was there. I was using gloves, and we did the exchange. Those things help the heart chakra, and yes, do the precautions.
If you can help someone that really needs it, do it. It’s just a kind gesture and just to allow people to feel you’re above, and you’re caring, and allow you to express it, and to receive it. That’s how we strengthen the heart chakra, and we strengthen the lungs, and we reduce anxiety. All of these things we’ve talked about today are all in the same line. We’ve heard it how many times—it’s love that cures all. It is. Without the heart chakra functioning the third chakra suffers, the second chakra suffers, your first chakra suffers, and you get sick.
Yes, do everything you can to help your fellow humans and take the precautions. Because no matter what anybody says, it’s here. Stop paying attention to all the hearsay about why it’s here. It is just here and deal with it. Turn off, listen to music, read a good book. You know how beneficial reading is. Write. Creative imagination, write if you’re a writer. Even if you’re not a writer, write. It’s fun. Just don’t post it on the Internet.
[01:54:49] Ashley James: Why not?
[01:54:51] Eric Thorton: Gee, it might get lost in the crowd of crap.
[01:54:57] Ashley James: I have a list on my fridge I wrote. There’s like at least 50 things of really positive activities to do that raise my vibration, and I want to give homework to all the listeners to go sit down with a piece of paper and a fun pen and write out a list. I didn’t even use line paper, I just used a blank paper. I just wrote columns. You can write more than one page, but write out a list of everything you can do in your home or around your home that brings you joy.
It could be out in nature. If you can get out into nature, if you can get out to, because a lot of the parks are closed, so you have to get creative to get out there. If you can go out in your backyard and sunbathe in your backyard. Right now, it’s spring here where I am. I know it’s still cold like on the East Coast, but you can still bundle up and get out in the sun. Write a list of everything you can do that brings you joy. I was really surprised. I gave myself this homework, and I started writing, and it gave me so much clarity to write this list.
What happens is you’ll get about 7 to 12 down, usually around 9, you’ll get 9 in and you’ll draw a blank. That’s because of how the brain works. We usually only hold about 7 different thoughts in our heads.
[01:56:30] Eric Thorton: In our conscious mind.
[01:56:32] Ashley James: In the conscious mind. It clears, all of a sudden you draw blank. You ask yourself the question again, and you start thinking about it, and then another 7 will come. You’ll just have that really interesting experience of the brain emptying out and then refilling, and emptying out and refilling because your unconscious is bringing it to your consciousness.
[01:56:52] Eric Thorton: Right. One way of doing that we already talked about. You’ve come to your list of say 7 or 9 and you’re at a blank. Think about climbing that gorgeous tree out there, and all of a sudden you have a whole bunch more ideas. Think about doing cartwheels when you were a kid, or giggling until you were out of breath, and all of a sudden you got more ideas. It is because you’re pulling in the subconscious mind, the artistic part of your brain, and giving the conscious mind the ability to write something down. It’s amazing. If you just had the list of nine and you went through and visualized them all in your head, another bunch would show up, so the same thing we’re talking about.
Those to-dos are real. They’ve proven it, quantum physics. They’ve proven this stuff, and we can do this, and we need to do this for our own sanity so we can all get back to, hopefully, a calmer better and life. We’ll have learned, maybe, we need to stop paying so much attention to the frustrations around the planet and pay more attention to the things that are beautiful, the things we have in common. That will help the heart chakra and our immune system as well. There’s a lot to do folks, there’s a lot to do. It’s not like we got nothing.
I’m sitting here with the same fear as anybody else has. I tell people, “I will work on anybody who’s been here having a session before because otherwise, I’m going to be overrun. If you’re a client of mine and you get the virus, let me know or something else.” Because again. I am only one person, so, unfortunately, I have to set up boundaries. Maybe we can help you out and maybe we can teach you to help yourself out. I take time with you. With clients I’ve had, I don’t charge for the time. I would never take advantage of the situation. I would never charge someone to work on the pandemic because that’s completely immoral to me, but I will help anybody who I’ve worked with before.
Again, that’s just a filter. It’s not an elitist thing or anything else. It’s just a filter, otherwise, I get overwhelmed, and I’ll die. If you hear this, if you got a problem, I’ve worked with a number of your listeners. I am happy to help out if you think you’ve got a problem or you know you’ve got a problem—if it’s the virus type of thing. If it’s other things, you need to process and work on things, you need another appointment. Again, I’m not going to charge to send someone healing energy or healing vibrations to work on the virus.
Sometimes, I will work with people, and someone will be sick, and I’ll say, “Look, I need other people around them. I need family around them.” I said, “Call me back when you have anyone around that’s family or friends in the vicinity. If they got the coronavirus, they’re obviously not going to be in the same room, but we want to meet at this and such time because we need to harness everybody’s energy for this.” It really opens up all of their hearts and helps them all deal with this stuff, so that’s why we do this sometimes.
Again, the more people, the more the intention. The more clarity, the more the person feels it, and feels held, and supported, which helps their immune system again, and opens up their heart chakra. We do different things for different people in different situations, or even the same situation will be different for different people. I’ve had someone with a child that was ill with it. I had the mom at a distance, because we’re not doing anything in person, hold the child a certain way, and then we ran the energy through it. The mom could feel it. The child could calm down. Again, I can’t make any claims here, but it goes away. It goes away. That’s what we like. For whatever reason. That’s what we want. Anyway. I don’t know where we go from here.
[02:02:20] Ashley James: I think we can wrap it up.
[02:02:23] Eric Thorton: Okay. I really hope people can do this. I’m going to work on it every day at 9:00 PM. I’m going to spend about 10 minutes. I didn’t mention the length of time on that. Maybe we should do that.
[02:02:43] Ashley James: Okay.
[02:02:44] Eric Thorton: I’ve asked everybody to, at 9:00 PM, the guides have said this to me. At 9:00 PM, your standard time, whatever time zone you’re in, 10 minutes. Just like with this book, the Power of 8. Put the intention of scrambling the matrix so it can reset itself and heal itself so that it can help Gaia kill the virus.
[02:03:12] Ashley James: Because we’re trying to override the amount of fear that has sickened the matrix, essentially.
[02:03:18] Eric Thorton: Correct, exactly. The fear is weak. You scramble it like a bacteria, it dies. Love is strong.
[02:03:28] Ashley James: So we’re not going to love into it when we’re scrambling it? We’re just scrambling it and letting Gaia reset it? This is what the guides have told you?
[02:03:38] Eric Thorton: The guides have said, “Let Gaia reset it.” No intention except to scramble it. No intention of putting healing in it, no intention of anything. God made this system for a reason, whatever you want to call God, and it works. Just like they showed me at 9/11, we can really mess things up because we think the universe needs us specifically and it doesn’t. The universe—our planet—works very well without us. We die every hundred years or so, and it’s amazing how the planet keeps going on without us in-between lives. It doesn’t need us all to do this.
Sometimes we have to help the planet reset and set itself. Just put out the energy of scrambling the clouds maybe, if that’s what your imagination needs. For 10 minutes at 9:00 PM your time zone. I’m just getting it and they’re giving me 10 days. Let’s see what happens. See if there’s enough energy here to harness it. See if we can get the coronavirus numbers to start going down throughout the whole planet. See if some of the tension and the disconnect that all of these countries have right now, see if some of that goes away too. See if some of our own anxiety drops when we do this.
I think it would be an amazing experiment, never done it before. I mean I helped yet the other day with it but never done anything like this before. I’ve never heard of anybody doing this, and this is what the guide said to do. Have your listeners pass it on to everybody. If the word could get out and everybody did this, I don’t know how long until this is published, but if everybody did this, it’d be an amazing thing. Just the commonality would help heal everybody’s heart chakra without even trying because of the commonality. We’re the human race working together in every country of the world. That would be pretty amazing, and I could see, energetically, the power or something like that.
I’d like to see what would happen. That’s just my opinion. It’s an idea from the guides to do to suggest to everybody. I’d like to see it. I would be just as amazed as the next person.
[02:06:35] Ashley James: To wrap it up, I’d love to hear a bit more. Tell me what the guides have shown you when this is all over, that you said there’s going to be peace and prosperity. Can you elaborate on that?
[02:06:48] Eric Thorton: Whenever the human body gets out of tension, we get the massive oxytocin. Say we’re done with this in July, or June, or something like that, we still have the political problems, but the world has conquered then a major thing. There’s a common humanity there. That alone is going to give us—even the political leaders—it’s going to make them think again, “Oh my God. These people are all working together. We better be careful. We better do the right thing.” If we’re all thinking similarly and we’re all on the same thing, we all start to get back to work, and we can appreciate more than what we are having. When the appreciation goes up, the heart center vibration goes up, and everything starts to prosper more.
When we’re in fear, we’re in cortisol. In those types of hormones we make wrong decisions, or misinformed decisions, or decisions we filled in the blanks on as we’ve talked about. When we come through a stressful situation, there’s a period of aura, of release, of—what’s it called when you’ve had a lot of tension—even afterglow, I guess you might call it. There is, there’s that afterglow that comes, and it lasts for quite a while. There can be a lot of prosperity, and it’ll have nothing to do with our politicians that are currently running the planet. That will only have to do with one human being helping another. That is prosperity. People feel that euphoria, and they feel free, and they start moving, and shaking, and having excitement, and ideas start to flow when this type of thing, tension ends.
That’s why there is always a period of prosperity after any worldwide problem. That includes wars as well as pandemics and whatever else people can think of. Just hope we won’t screw up humanity. There’s always a period of euphoria afterward. If we pay attention to the politicians, they’re trying to get it back to the way that they have it. Where if we pay attention to what our cells, and our love, and we keep the love going, then we’re going to create a new political environment as well because they’re not going to fit it anymore. They’re not going to fit the matrix if we scrambled the matrix, for example. They will be voted out of office, and new people will come in. Good or bad, it’ll be different. There will be prosperity. Anyway.
[02:10:11] Ashley James: I like it. I like it. I said in an earlier interview this week that this last few months and the next few months, from January 1, two quarters of 2020, is going to be studied for years to come. Because we now have the ability to have such a global response and global media with the internet, with social media, with the way we’re interacting with each other, communicating with each other, and the way we’re able to share studies, statistics. We’re able to share things faster, get things done quicker. We’ll see this and we also are experiencing this meme, the whole world.
I was just talking to a friend that lives in Mexico, and I asked him, “What’s the climate like?” He’s from Mexico. He’s lives near Panama, and he’s in an area I’ve never been to Mexico so I didn’t know what it’s like. What’s the culture like down there? I said, “Yeah, what’s it like down there?” He described to a tea what Seattle’s like. People are afraid. They’re stuck in their homes. They’re hoarding huge amounts of different kinds of things. He says, “No one’s freaking about toilet paper, but everyone’s buying up the Lysol. When you go to the store, you’re only allowed to buy one per person.” They’re actually enforcing people stay indoors. There’s great panic, fear, and hoarding of these items.
When he was describing what’s going on down there, I was like, “Wow, that’s exactly what’s going on here in Seattle.” I just wonder how many other places in the world, how many other countries in the world are experiencing something very similar because we’re able to share these experiences around the world. When we, as a globe, conquer this virus and get to go back to “normal,” that huge relief will feel like we won almost like when we won World War II.
Unfortunately, there was part of the world that didn’t win, but this time, all the countries are fighting a war. That we all have a common enemy. We’re going to have this huge relief. You’re saying that your guides have showed you a world soon where we, as a global population, have a sigh of relief, and it’s going to bring us into it a time of peace and prosperity. Hopefully, it’ll allow us to really gain perspective because we’re look back and reflect on what happened over the course of the last few months. We’re going to see how our actions impacted the ecology of the planet. Hopefully, we could learn them.
[02:13:27] Eric Thorton: Hopefully, we can learn from it. This is the one thing I’m hesitant about. Mark this because I don’t know if you’re going to want to put this out there or not. The political system is trying to—they’re saying, “Okay, we’re going to send you something in the United States. We’re going to send your money. We’re going to take care of your business so you don’t go out of business, so we can keep the economic system going, so we can keep what’s going politically.” They want to hold their political power. They are afraid. You can see it in some of these, people I can see it. They are afraid that when this global unity comes together and this euphoria from conquering this as a planet, we’re going to throw out these people that are based on fear. They want to control us with fear. They are afraid we are going to overrun them.
Frankly, it could happen because once people realize that this fear has contributed to this pandemic and this division within our own families, within our communities, within our state’s in our countries, they’re going to be thinking about this going, “This isn’t how to solve the problem. The problem is to do it with love.” That to solve a problem we do it with love. We do it by supporting one another. I see this as if you look at the polling numbers, as the virus goes up, the popularity of the people in power is going down. In times of prosperity, the people that are in power, when it wasn’t prosperous, are thrown out.
If you look at history, Winston Churchill was a hero during the war. Since the war was over, his point of views were based on fear. He was voted because the euphoria voted to be Prime Minister and then gone because his political points of view were no longer valid. All the politicians that are running the world right now realize that happened, and that didn’t just happen to Winston Churchill, it happened all over the entire world after World War II. This is why the politicians are going, “We got to get back to work. We’ve got to get the country back to work.” Because they’re afraid of exactly what we just talked about.
[02:16:39] Ashley James: Once we’re out of fear will let turnaround and not resonate with these fear-based messages they’re trying to sell us.
[02:16:47] Eric Thorton: Right. That’s a huge thing. That’s why you see the medical system arguing with the political system. The political system wants this, “No, no, no, no, no,” so people don’t have time to deal with this. They want a solution, they want an immunization, so people can’t solve it spiritually through love. They can keep controlling them. The medical system is going, “No, this is going to take months. The political system is going, “No, we got to be back on target by Easter.” It’s like, “Well, okay.”
They want it on target by Easter so that they can maintain the control, the political control. Because the longer this goes and it’s out of control of these people in politics, it makes them look really bad. People will look at that and they’re going to change the regimes. Again, I don’t know if you want this portion in there or not.
[02:18:07] Ashley James: Oh, yeah. That’s interesting. I think it’s all very interesting. It gives us a good perspective, get the 30,000-foot view. We’re going to pull out of this. We need to do our part now to rise above the fear, help our communities, help ourselves. Practice the social distancing so that we protect those who are vulnerable: the smokers, the people who are over 65, people who are nutrient-deficient, people are immune-compromised. They’re going to be ones that are hit hard.
What’s interesting—one of the things that one of my guests said earlier this week is—they need us to self-quarantine as much as possible so that they can catch up and have enough ventilators. Most of the population will be asymptomatic, but the percentage of people—and they keep throwing around numbers, we don’t know the accuracy of them. 20% that end up in the hospital, 5% and up in ICU, and they still don’t have enough ventilators. They’re busy making them.
[02:19:26] Eric Thorton: Right, but that’s what the numbers they have.
[02:19:27] Ashley James: Those are the numbers they have.
[02:19:28] Eric Thorton: One of the things I’ve seen with them dragging their feet with testing is if they tested everybody they could create a graph showing just how big this has become, and everybody would panic. When most of us don’t have symptoms, and they won’t be a problem, but we would still test positive. It creates even more panic.
[02:20:00] Ashley James: Right. Because the majority of people will be asymptomatic. There are also false positives. I’ve been looking at studies. That there’s something like 9% of the coronavirus tests are false positives. Plus, they can’t, they don’t have the ability to test the whole population. Those are billions of people. We can’t test everyone.
[02:20:30] Eric Thorton: It’s not necessary, and it would panic everybody anyway because most people are going to be asymptomatic. If they find out everybody has it around them, everyone’s going to be panicked even more, and then more people will get sick because it causes so much anxiety. I’m going, “Heck, if you don’t have symptoms, don’t be tested. Just stay away in case you have it, to social distance.
[02:20:58] Ashley James: Social distancing, focus on gratitude, focus on love. If you live in a household with other people and everyone’s healthy in your household, do cuddling and hugging because that also increases the immune system. We need to protect the vulnerable in our population, and deliver them food, keep them safe. The doctor I interviewed said, “By July this will be gone because this virus—viruses in general—is very sensitive to heat. That’s why in Hawaii, which they’ve shut down Hawaii. No tourism, they’ve shut it down. I just yesterday spoke with a woman, one of my guests who lives in Hawaii. She said you have to be under quarantine for 14 days before you’re allowed to come to Hawaii, and you can’t really do anything or go anywhere when you’re in Hawaii now because it’s shut down. There’s a very low proliferation rate.
[02:21:56] Eric Thorton: Right. It doesn’t like heat or humidity.
[02:21:59] Ashley James: It doesn’t like it. Whereas in Boston, they’re getting more of a spread. Here it’s been very cold. It’s been irregularly cold for this time of year for us in Seattle, and so it’s spreading faster in the colder regions. If you’re in Las Vegas, for example, you’re always in AC. There are places where you think it’s warm, but everyone’s always in buildings spreading the virus with each other. Get out in the heat. When it heats up in the summertime, it’s going to die down. This is something we need to tell help each other for the next few months. Get in gratitude and love.
[02:22:39] Eric Thorton: Right. If people go back to work too early, the way the politicians want it, it’s just going to start another round of it. That’s why the head of the CDC is telling our leaders, “Probably won’t happen by Easter.” It’s got to be long enough that we don’t reinfect when we all go back to work. It may take a few payments from the government. Anyway. Set the intention for 9:00 PM your standard time, your specific time, and scramble the matrix, however, you can imagine it in your head. Do it for 10 minutes.
[02:23:30] Ashley James: Ten minutes and then focus on love as much as possible throughout the day, gratitude, write down a list of everything you could do in your home that brings you joy, figure out how you can help your community, stay safe, and stay sane. Don’t give in to the fear but give in to the love as much as possible. We will get through this.
I love that the guides have told you, we are going to come into a time of prosperity and peace after this. I learned something from Tony Robbins several years ago that’s really helped me in my life, and my husband as well. It’s in times of desperation asking what’s good about this. It’s not to belittle it, you know what I mean?
Let’s say I had cancer—knock-on-wood, thank God I don’t. Let’s say I had cancer, asking, “What’s good about this?” is like, “What can I learn from this? How can I shift my mind from it?” This virus is like we’re all affected by it in one way or another, but what is good about this?
[02:24:36] Eric Thorton: That brings in the whole brain’s thinking power when you ask that question. It calms you down, it calms the conscious fears down. Soon as you ask a question like that, Tony Robbins understands how three-dimensional thinking works. He’s saying, “Get away from your fears.” He’s got human problems like everybody else, okay, but he’s right on this. If you bring in your imagination instead of sitting there trying to figure it out, you bring in just like what you said, all of a sudden you’re thinking three-dimensionally, it calms you down, and brings up your immune system.
He is correct, and that’s beautiful. That’s exactly right. There are a few other groups like Tony Robbins used to do, I don’t know if he’s still doing it, that promote the imagination. You get a full three-dimensional thinking process so you calm down. Do that. Do all the things that we just suggested. We’re having this ride. You have a choice. You can either be angry, upset about it, or you can be neutral about it, or you can find everything positive you can. It’s your choice.
That one second is going to go by and so is the next one, and so is the next one, and so is the next one, whether you choose A, B, or C. If you need help, don’t be afraid to ask for help. If you see someone that needs help, help them. It heals the heart chakra, and it increases your immune system, drops all the cortisol, and all the things we’ve talked about.
We need to be kinder, we need to be softer, we need to step back from this machine that has been going on for three and a half years and go now. Sit back, launch it to the moon, and yeah, you need a little information, but you don’t need to dwell in it. Anyway.
[02:27:21] Ashley James: Just to clarify with the practice of scrambling, what about people who are like Reiki masters who want to send healing love to the planet? Is that helpful? Because we’re all adding our own intention, which is just making it worse.
[02:27:41] Eric Thorton: Right. What one person thinks is healing love is different than another person’s because we’re all different. Every one of us is a different frequency. We can’t literally put out the same frequencies. We have to trust, have a little faith that the universe will work in spite of human interference, and if we can lessen the human interference.
I’ve been shown this so many times like the story I told of 9/11. I’ve been showed it so many times that our egos prevent the universe, if you will, or work against preventing the universe from straightening itself out. It is designed to do that. The universe does not need me, it doesn’t need you, it doesn’t need any healer on this planet in any way shape or form in order to heal people.
We are points of contact between the angels—healers are points of contact between the angels, and guides, and humans, and other beings because we live in this realm, so we operate best in this realm. Like me, when I astral project somewhere, it takes me a while till someone can actually see me. It’s worked for an angel to be in our realm so we can see it. It’s harder for it to work, so they use healers all over the world basically as a fuse between that realm where they exist in the realm where we exist. If we let it work instead of thinking the almighty human is going to solve everything in the universe and God has to have us in order for the universe to heal.
If we stop that egoic thought, and we stop putting our own agenda to the energy we’re putting out here is what they’re asking us to do. Just a unified agenda of scrambling the matrix so it can reset itself, so that it can heal the virus, and the planet, and the people within it. Again, I’ve never heard this thought before. The guides just gave it to me.
[2:30:14] Ashley James: Yeah, the guides just you, right?
[02:30:16] Eric Thorton: They told it to me. It was three days ago. I was just phenomenal. I was literally—what is it called—gob struck or something like that.
[02:30:27] Ashley James: Gobsmacked.
[02:30:28] Eric Thorton: I was like, “Oh my God.” I just went, “Oh my god. That’s what you’ve been showing me over the years, but now you’re putting it on a larger scale,” and they’re going, “Yeah.”
[02:30:43] Ashley James: Cool. All right. Let’s do it. Let’s do it and see what happens.
[02:30:46] Eric Thorton: Let’s do it.
[02:30:47] Ashley James: Thank you so much, Eric. It’s always a pleasure having you here.
[02:30:51] Eric Thorton: Thank you. Thank you.
[02:30:53] Ashley James: Yeah. Just getting out there. My show Learn True Health podcast focuses on health, but health is not just physical health, it’s emotional, mental, spiritual, energetic, and its health of your whole life. I have had interviews with wonderful marriage counselors, with physical therapists, with Naturopathic doctors, with you. It’s encompassing everything to do without your whole life.
Having you on the show, really, I was so worried that people would take it the wrong way, and instead, I had a flood of listeners saying that your interviews have been the missing key in their life. That your interviews have been so significant to make their life make sense. I definitely encourage listeners to go back.
[02:31:46] Eric Thorton: Thank you.
[02:31:47] Ashley James: You’re welcome. Go back and listen to my past interviews with Eric. You can go to ericthorton.com. It’s Eric with a C, ericthorton.com. There’s a tab or something that says interviews, and if you click there, you just get actually redirected back to my website, which shows you all of the interviews that we’ve done together. You can just search Eric Thorton on my website at learntruehealth.com, and it allows you to go back.
Listen to the earlier ones, especially the first one. All of them are great, my favorite one though is when you share the story of your life. What a unique life you’ve lived. It’s very cool, but it gives us hope that there’s more here than the mainstream wants us to focus on. This is a spiritual world, we are spiritual beings, and that we can use our intention, our attention, our focus, prayer, energy, thought. That we can use all of that to affect our health and the quality of our life.
[02:32:56] Eric Thorton: I want to say something to you too. Without you doing the interviewing, it wouldn’t be here. You’re doing a wonderful service to the world.
[02:33:06] Ashley James: Thank you.
[02:33:08] Eric Thorton: I think your listeners need to appreciate that too. They need to tell you that.
[02:33:13] Ashley James: I feel the appreciation. We just got to keep sharing it and getting it out there. Got to help as many people as we can.
[02:33:20] Eric Thorton: We’re not perfect. People comment this, that, or the other. Nobody’s perfect, but you know something? You’re doing a service. I’m a part of it, and so are all the other people you’re interviewing. It’s a wonderful service and keep doing it. It’s great.
[02:33:41] Ashley James: Thank you. I’d really like to see this get as big as it can and help as many people as possible, so please share these interviews with those you love so we can help as many people as possible. For me, I want to see this take off. We are reaching thousands of people, and I want to reach hundreds of thousands of people so we could help more people. Because more people need to know this information that the body has an amazing ability to heal itself. That they can heal. They can use food as medicine, they can supplement, and fill in the gaps. That there are natural remedies out there that are even better than drugs.
[02:34:23] Eric Thorton: Yes.
[02:34:25] Ashley James: I’ve had listeners write to me and say, “I never knew what a Naturopath was, but now I’m seeing one because of your show.” I’ve had several emails over the last four years. I’ve been doing this podcast since 2016. I’ve had several emails say, “I was in pre-med to become an MD and I’ve switched. I’m now going to become a Naturopath. I never knew that Naturopathy was a choice, but I learned about it through your podcast.” That to me is such a big win that people are learning about chiropractors, about acupuncturists, about in Naturopaths, about osteopaths, about functional-based medicine. They didn’t even know those tools were available to them.
[02:35:11] Eric Thorton: That’s why I’m so glad you’re doing this because it truly takes a village. It’s not just a cliché statement. It truly does, and it takes a global village sometimes. Right now is one of those times. I hope you can get this podcast out real soon.
[02:35:35] Ashley James: I will, yeah. It’s going to be episode 422. I’ll get it out next week, so listeners who are listening know that it’s really fresh. We’ll get it out there. Thank you so much, Eric, for coming on the show. As always, it’s a pleasure.
[02:35:49] Eric Thorton: Thank you. Thank you. It’s been great.
Educating the Souls, Spiritual Healing and our Eternal Psychology
Episode 386: Microdosing Psilocybin Mushrooms Therapy
Episode 380: Understanding Your Aura
Episode 375: Spiritual Healing In The Real World
Episode 359: Lives Of Discovery
Episode 336: Energetic Boundaries (Part II)
TrueHealthEating.com
https://www.learntruehealth.com/how-to-stop-nighttime-eating-cravings
Highlights:
Are you finding yourself eating more and more throughout the day because there’s nothing much to do these days? Are you struggling with overeating or nighttime eating? In this episode, Dr. Glenn Livingston is back on the show with us, and he talks about his pig and pigula. He also shares some tips on how to overcome overeating
[0:00:00] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 423. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have back on the show Dr. Glenn Livingston. Glenn was in episode 56, 249, and 231, so it’s been a while since you’ve been on the show. Although it just feels like yesterday. It’s amazing, time—although linear—doesn’t feel linear, does it Glenn?
[0:00:41] Dr. Glenn Livingston: It goes by so quickly. I think the last time I was on this show I had all my hair and teeth.
[0:00:48] Ashley James: And you still do?
[0:00:50] Dr. Glenn Livingston: I still do, yeah.
[0:00:52] Ashley James: Okay, good.
[0:00:55] Dr. Glenn Livingston: It was back in the days when I had all my hair and teeth. Time goes really quickly.
[0:01:02] Ashley James: Yes it does. When we had you on the show last—episode 231—you had just published your second book. Now listeners can get a free copy of your book Never Binge Again by going to truehealtheating.com. That’s truehealtheating.com. Your book is fantastic. One of our listeners—I should have pulled up the actual quote in our Facebook group. We have a Learn True Health Facebook group. One of our listeners—after listening to episodes with you—said, “Tonight is the first night I ate dinner without anxiety.” She was like, “This is no kidding. I have never felt at peace while eating. This is my first experience feeling at peaceful while eating.” She made me cry. She was so grateful for the information.
Some people don’t even know their constant anxiety around food. There’s the constant pressure and stress around food, and all the emotions wrapped up around food, that’s their norm. When they go through your literature, your workshop, all your information, your free book they gain a sense of peace with food.
[0:02:21] Dr. Glenn Livingston: Does my heart good, really does my heart good. There’s misinformation in the culture about how to develop a peaceful relationship with food. Most people think we’re supposed to use guidelines like, “I avoid chocolate 90% of the time.” It’s a good guideline. It’s a good idea in theory. It’s like a good North Star to shoot for, but the problem with it is that every time you’re in front of a chocolate bar there’s this little voice inside you that says, “Is this part of the 10% or is this part of the 90%? Am I being good or am I being bad?”
It’s almost like having a little kid and they see a candy bar in your hand. “Mommy, can I? Mommy, can I? How about now? How about now? How about now?” Because they know that sometimes they can. Whereas if you use the hard and fast rule and you said, “Well, I’ll only ever have chocolate on the last three days of the calendar month.” You’d still be avoiding chocolate 90% of the time but your decisions would have been made for you, and there’d be no reason for that little kid to keep asking all month long until the 27th.
You’d have a newfound peace with food having made really hard and fast decisions about what role the chocolate was going to play in your life. You wouldn’t be constantly struggling with all these thoughts of maybe I should and maybe I shouldn’t, which is what ruins people’s relationship with food. I think that information is just that out there. When people adopt it, and they create a very clear rule, and they declare themselves confident they actually become confident. That voice shuts up eventually.
[0:04:06] Ashley James: To be able to have that peace where the voice isn’t all the time there. Some people have had that for so long they don’t even believe that’s possible. You’re saying that going through the work they can get to a place where that voice doesn’t control them anymore.
[0:04:22] Dr. Glenn Livingston: I suffered for 30 years. My life was about, “When am I going to get to the deli? When can I get to the pizza place? How much chocolate will I have? How will I stop? How will I make up for it? How will I hide the evidence? How much weight am I going to gain? Will anybody notice? Will I be able to see patients when I’m all charged up on chocolate?” That was my life. I’d be sitting with a suicidal patient and I’ll be thinking, “I want a chocolate Pop-Tarts.” Thankfully, I never lost anybody. I was really dedicated, but really I was not 100% present because I was very drained and distracted by these constant thoughts about food.
Once I discovered that there is a way to find peace, which it didn’t require me to solve all my emotional problems. Yeah, I was going to chocolate because I was lonely and depressed. I was in a bad marriage. I didn’t really have a lot of satisfaction in my life. That was all true, but it didn’t have to solve all that to stop bingeing on chocolate. I just had to be really clear about the rules, be clear about what that underlying voice of justification was that said, “You worked out hard enough so you can have chocolate even it’s not the last calendar three days of the month.” Or “Chocolate comes from a cocoa bean, which is a plant and therefore it’s a vegetable.” Or whatever that voice was saying.
Once I learned that I could hear that and ignore it or logically refute it, then I found peace. I wish I had love in my life. I wish I was coupled at this point. I still struggle with some of those things. I still have loneliness and brokenhearted moments and everything like that, but I don’t have to binge anymore.
[0:06:15] Ashley James: You don’t have to go to food to medicate it, to numb the pain of feeling lonely.
[0:06:24] Dr. Glenn Livingston: Yes, that’s true. I think that the self-medication paradigm is only half the story. I think that in it of itself it fuels overeating. The actual paradigm that I’m eating for comfort, I’m eating to numb myself out because I’m unhappy, and uncomfortable with my life, and it’s the only thing I’ve learned how to self-soothe. When people tell me that, for example, they’re eating too much chocolate to numb out, I’ll say, “That’s really interesting. Have you ever been to the dentist to fill a cavity?” They all say, “Yeah.” Because most people have had a cavity. I say, “Well, did the dentist say to you, ‘I’m out of novocaine. I think I’m going to inject you with some chocolate instead, is that okay?’”
The point of that is that chocolate is not really something that has a numbing effect. Donuts, dentist is not going to inject you with donuts either, or bagels, or potato chips, or any of the other things that people supposedly turn to for comfort. The point I’m trying to make is that there’s another impact of the artificially counterfeited sources of pleasure we call comfort. That impact is a food high. You’re having chocolate because it’s a concentration of theobromine, and caffeine, and sugar, and fat, and vanilla, and all sorts of other good-tasting neurological stimulants that give you the feeling like you’re in love and really change your perception of the world like a drug.
It’s perfectly legal. I’ll fight for your right to do it if you want to do it. I’m not saying we have to eliminate chocolate, but it is a drug. Part of the reason that we’re having it is to get high with food. We’re not just numbing out we’re getting high with food. That is a paradigm people need to shift to if they really want to stop overeating. Because if you think you’re just eating for comfort or to numb yourself out, you’re going to want to be empathetic to that lizard brain voice inside of you. When it says, “Eat, eat, eat,” you’re going to go, “Here you go, poor baby. Poor baby, you need a hug.”
There are two problems with that. First of all, the part of the brain that responds to food addiction—which is the same part of the brain that’s responsible for the feast and famine response, for the fight-or-flight response—it’s a very primitive reptilian part of the brain. When it evolved, it didn’t really know love. Here we are thinking that food addiction has everything to do with not being loved enough, not offering yourself enough self-love, but the lizard brain doesn’t really know love. It looks at something in the environment and it says, “What am I supposed to do with that thing? Do I eat it, do I mate with it, or do I kill it?” That’s the level—that’s the primitive level—at which the lizard brain operates. We’re all here trying to love it out of its impulse.
What we should be doing is dominating it instead. It’s like your bladder. Your bladder forces for expression. It says, “You really got to pee. You got to pee right now.” You say, “Oh, wait a minute. I’m in charge. I’m in a meeting now. I’ll definitely take care of you later, but I’m going to do it in a particular way at a particularly time of my choosing.” I’m very comfortable with that impulse, not at all frightened of it. I know that I’ll give myself a bathroom break in an hour and a half or so if I need it or sooner if I have to. As a civilized human being, I go about my day. I don’t compulsively pee in the street or in the middle of a meeting.
People are very mixed up about how you’re supposed to handle the impulse to overeat. They don’t think of it is a pure biological impulse that they’ve developed a very bad habit around. They think of it as the manifestation of an emotional conflict. They think of it as associated with all these loving memories with their mother, or the grandparents, or their dad. As a result, you could spend 30 years in psychotherapy trying to work through all your innermost conflicts. You might get a lot of benefit out of working through your innermost conflicts in psychotherapy, but if you’re like me, I did that. I became a very soulful person. I think it’s a big part of who I am, but it didn’t stop me from overeating.
I binge my way through 30 years of psychotherapy. That’s why I think we need to shift paradigms from self-medication to getting high with food and from the love yourself thin paradigm to the alpha wolf paradigm which says, “Look, this thing in my brain—this primitive part of my brain, my feast or famine response—it’s challenging me for leadership in the same way that a lower member of a wolf pack might challenge the alpha wolf. When the alpha wolf is challenged in a wolf pack—challenge for leadership—it doesn’t say, “Oh my goodness. Someone needs a hug. Come here you, poor baby. Let me take care of you. Let me feed you.”
The alpha wolf growls, and snarls, and says, “Get back in line or I’ll kill you.” My big discovery was that I had to break out of this love myself thin paradigm and into this alpha wolf paradigm where I just refuse to let my lizard brain take control.
[0:12:19] Ashley James: This part of the brain that is responsible for mating, killing, and eating for survival because that’s all we have to do to make sure that we can pass on our genetic code to the next generation. Eat to stay alive, and mate to reproduce, and then kill to survive, and eat. Why does that part of the brain want to overeat? Why doesn’t everyone overeat?
[0:12:54] Dr. Glenn Livingston: Most people do overeat at times beyond their best judgment. There are other people who choose other vices. People do too much marijuana, or they get involved in negative sexual relationships, or they get involved with gambling, or some other type of impulsive vice. Most people struggle with the lizard brain’s expression in some way. What was the first part of the question again? Why doesn’t everyone overeat? Ask me the question again, I’m sorry.
[0:13:28] Ashley James: That part of the brain that’s responsible for us to mate, eat, and kill—that very basic instinctive level—why does it want to binge?
[0:13:42] Dr. Glenn Livingston: There are several reasons. It’s a really good question. They all involve the idea that a biological error has been made. The reptilian brain has been made to think and made to really believe that the binge food is like oxygen and it’s required for survival. If you think about where we evolved in the tropics—kind of depends upon your theory of the world, I’ve done a lot of reading on nutrition and the human diet—and I really believe that we were evolved to eat mostly fruit, leafy greens, and an occasional handful of nuts or seeds. That’s what I think we really evolved to. Some people would add wild game in there.
It’s very rare that you see people bingeing on fruit and leafy green vegetables—whole, fresh, ripe for our fruits and leafy green vegetables—very few people binge on that. Most people binge on industrially concentrated foods. A bag of potato chips, or pizza, or pasta, or some concentrated form of starch, or sugar, or fat, or salt, or excitotoxins that wouldn’t be found in nature, is triggering the part of a brain that says, “This is where you can find an ultra-dense source of calories and nutrition,” even though the nutrition isn’t really there.
The brain makes a biological error, and it says, “Well, why would I continue going after fruits and vegetables when there are so many more calories available for so much less effort in such a much smaller space over here.” Then these things are made to be convenient, and they’re packaged up to look like they’re nutritious. One of my classic stories is working with the VP of Marketing for a major food party manufacturer.
They told me that their most profitable insight was to take the vitamins out of the bar and put the money into making the packaging look very diverse and colorful instead because in nature, a shiny diversity of colors would indicate a diversity of nutrition that was available. Think of a salad with purple cabbage, and yellow carrots, and deep green arugula, or spinach, or romaine lettuce, or something like that, and blueberries, and cherries, whatever you want to put in that salad. Those colors are a signal for a diversity of nutrients that are available.
What this guy was telling me was that they actually figured out a way to trigger the part of the brain that responds to that diversity of nutrients but they did it with less nutrients. That happens all over the place. The brain finds the calories. If I see calories and so it says, “There’s got to be something.” It says, “Well, wait a minute. There’s not enough nutrition.” It creates this pleasurable but empty experience. That’s why I say people are looking for love at the bottom of a bag, or a box, or container. You can’t ever really find satisfaction there, but you can find craving that creates more craving that creates more craving. That’s what drug addicts would call chasing the dragon.
You can’t really get to the satiation level and so you just keep craving more and more and more. There’s this loop of confusion. What tends to happen is because the brain has made this biological error and is now going after the wrong stimulus, it’s not actually getting the nutrition that it needs which sets up more craving. Since the brain has now learned that it’s supposed to go after this alternate source of craving, it starts to down-regulate its interest in fruits and vegetables where the real nutrition is. Most people who are struggling with obesity or overeating will say they don’t really love fruits and vegetables.
They know you have to eat more fruit and vegetables to really lose weight but they don’t love them. It’s just a downward cycle. Then the advertising is really strong to support that notion. The addiction treatment industry says that you can’t quit even if you want to. The best you could do is abstain one day at a time, which is not true. People can change their addictive patterns if they want to. It’s nothing more than a very, very, very bad habit that’s in a very, very, very well worn [inaudible 00:18:57]. The experience of addiction is the experience of powerlessness. You really believe that you don’t have a choice, but you do have a choice. That’s what’s going on in our world today.
I’ll give you a very practical solution. You probably find that after you eat your binge food that you’re presently thinking about the next time you’re going to have the binge food and you’re craving shifts more towards that food. If you want to retrain your biology to crave what it’s supposed to crave, if you force yourself to have—assuming there’s no medical reason that you can’t have, there are some people who can’t have greens—but if you throw away half-pound of leafy green vegetables—I like romaine lettuce or sometimes with kale juice—you throw that in the blender with some water and you drink it down like it was a vitamin just like medicine, you’ll find that suddenly you’re craving the binge food less.
The reason for that is you’re showing your survival drive that genuine nutrition is actually available and you’re showing where it’s available. It stops the obsession. It’s another way that you find more peace with food. Part of the philosophy is to intervene and make rules for yourself that would dictate healthy behavior and eliminate decision-making, like we talked about before. The other half of this to figure out, “What is the biological error that my brain isn’t making, and what does my body with authentically need instead?”
That’s why I always say that I got off of chocolate, not just by saying, “I’ll never have chocolate again.” I started out with 90% of the time, but I eventually evolved to never having it again. I didn’t really do it just by saying, “I’ll never have chocolate again.” I also did it by running to a banana kale smoothie whenever I had the chocolate craving.
[0:21:08] Ashley James: Even if people say, “Oh, I hate vegetables,” or, “I don’t like vegetables,” or whatever. You take it like a medicine, suck it up, and throw it in a blender, and drink it fast, or whatever. It’s telling the brain, “Here’s where the good nutrition is,” and then you start getting less and less cravings. Sometimes, people start noticing that they’re craving kale, they’re craving greens, they’re craving oranges, and tomatoes. They just start craving plants because that’s where the majority of our minerals and pretty much all of our vitamins are going to come from. By eating whole plants, we could retrain our brain, but that’s where the nutrition is going to come from. Of course. They have created Frankenfoods that hijack the brain because salt, sugar, and fat all trigger the brain to want more of it. They figured out how to hijack it.
I interviewed a woman—I might have mentioned this before in a previous interview with you—but I interviewed a woman who called herself a food sommelier because she was actually a chemist who for many years worked in the food industry—something like four Doritos, one of those companies. There’s this new flavor of—I’m just going to say Doritos because it’s one of these brands that’s like Pringles or something. Everyone knows this brand—Cheetos—whatever it was.
Her team was responsible for creating new flavors. They did experiments and they were very excited about this. I asked, “Was there any point like an evil like maniacal overlord come down from the CEO office who clearly had a pact with Satan. Like there’s some evil about these companies. They really want to hurt people. Was there ever a time where you felt like there’s this evil agenda?” She said, “No. The scientists geek out on how can we make this food craveable? How can we make this food addictive? How can we make this food trigger the brain even more, hype up the excitement centers of the brain even more? How can we make this food be edible crack?”
They weren’t looking at the ethicacy at all. They were encouraged and they were rewarded for making something fun. They felt like they were making an amusement park for the mouth. This is innocent and it’s very compartmentalized. These scientists work together and they got so excited when they could figure out that the certain chemical makeup—this new chemical makeup, new flavor, new type of oil mixed with some kind of hybridized salt and sugar could trigger us in an even more addictive way. Then the food company gets so excited because they’re making lots of money and people are you know wanting to eat more and more of it. Then the scientists feel like they’ve done the job.
She eventually left that company coming to her wits, coming back to reality, realizing that she was a part of a system that was definitely creating harm in the world when she looked around and realized that one in three people are obese, or have diabetes, and we’re going down the wrong path. She started getting into whole foods and started getting into plants, but she saw that you could then take the same principles as they did in the lab and apply it to eating healthy food. How can I make this kale be so delicious and so healthy? We can. We can do that.
We have to understand that these packaged foods are delicious for a reason. They have scientists who study our brains and figure out how to make us be addicted to it. It’s like the cigarette industry and the alcohol industry. I just feel like maybe 100 or 500 years from now, eventually, they will have the same restrictions, the same warning on packaged food as they do on cigarettes. It’s already happened in California. People are going to get it. We’re going to wake up one day. People have to wake up one day and see that these packaged foods are harming them and they’re trying to hijack that part of our brain that wants to overeat.
It’s our responsibility to be in control of our brains. You give us the tools on how to do that in a very systematic way. One thing I wanted to address is something you brought up in a past interview. It was a really big aha moment for me and for many listeners. You’ve talked about your story and how you have a memory that made you love chocolate or had you associate chocolate with love. Then you spent years and years trying to heal it, and years in therapy, but when you figured out your system for just being in charge of, like you said, the alpha wolf. Just commanding the urges in you and being able to override it and logically have rules set up so that in your mind you control it.
You noticed that it didn’t matter whether you’d healed the past or not because you could stop bingeing without actually having to do the work. Although doing the work is very rewarding and we should all invest on our own personal growth. What I got was that in the brain—let’s say it’s some event that you associate love with chocolate when you’re 5 or whatever—that root cause is still in there with all the work to be done on it. But then you start a habit of eating chocolates—let’s say overeating or binge eating. That habit—although may have originally come from this root cause when you’re five—actually separates from it in your mind and they become two separate things.
So if you heal the root cause—you heal that thing that happened when you were 5—you still have the ingrained habit. So it’d be two separate things. For so many people, we’re told that if only you heal the root cause then you would stop doing these behaviors, but it’s not the case. The hardwired behaviors that we need to override and reprogram ourselves become separate things from their root cause. We should work on both. Let’s first work on gaining control of the system and then doing hours or years of therapy to heal.
[0:28:33] Dr. Glenn Livingston: It’s like if there’s a raging fire in your house the first thing you do is not to say, “Well, who set the fire? How did this fire start?” You don’t want to spend a year figuring out how the fire started. You don’t want to be a detective at that point, you want to be a fireman. You want to put out the fire. Then, if you want to go look and figure out what caused the fire that’s okay. The fire has a life of its own once it’s burning. You need to put out or contain the fire. That makes sense?
[0:29:06] Ashley James: Absolutely.
[0:29:08] Dr. Glenn Livingston: What I wanted to say—which really struck me—was the idea that there’s some evil CEO who’s coming down and saying, “Yes, I will take the blood and tears of all of these people that I’m addicting so I can laugh all the way to the bank.” How it’s not really like that. It’s a byproduct of the capitalist economic system. Winston Churchill once said that capitalism was the worst form of government except for all the others. I don’t know of a better form of government than capitalism, but I do know that it puts the onus on the consumer to be aware of what the motivations of the people on the other side of the transaction are.
Of course, scientists who are getting rewarded for geeking out on how to maximally excite these centers of the brain are going to focus their life energy on doing that. They’re thinking even of themselves as good people. They’re saying, “This is just really fun. Anything in moderation is okay.” Ignoring the fact that they’re making it difficult for anyone to moderate it. What you also need to know is that the market as a whole—consumers in particular—they like good news about their bad habits. They’re asking to be lied to.
They want and they want an excuse to have as many calories in the smallest places possible for the least amount of money possible. They want to be told that it’s healthy. That’s why you could find some potato chip that’s made with avocado oil, and people think that that’s healthy for you. They ignore the fact that every study that’s ever done on heated fats says that it’s carcinogenic. That the acrylamides that were formed by frying the chip are also carcinogenic. That the particular kind of oil—once it’s fried—might clog your arteries anyway.
Say, “Now with avocado oil.” They want to say, “Avocados are healthy. I could do some avocado oil.” It’s very easy to get that by consumers because consumers want to be lied to. Where this leaves us is with the necessity of doing some serious thought for ourselves. An investigation into what’s healthy, what’s not, and then where’s your personal line. Everybody draws a line between live fast and die young—the Hell’s Angels philosophy or I think James Dean said, “Live fast die young and leave a good-looking corpse. Live slow and enjoy the ride.”
Most people will say, “Well I don’t want to be an angel and if I died five years earlier or if I suffer a little at the end of my life because of the choices I make in my 20s then I want to enjoy my 20s more. I think that’s okay. Everybody’s got the right to make that choice, but you need to think through what trade-offs are you making and what role do you want these foods to play in your life? I’m not saying we should never have chocolate. There are a lot of people who can have chocolate on the weekends. My sister can take two little squares out of her purse and say, “I’m going to fold the wrist up for later.” She puts it all back in her purse. I don’t understand how she does it but she does that. God bless her. She likes the trade-off. It works for her.
Certain chocolates are better than other chocolates. There’s dark chocolate, and there’s chocolate with dairy chocolate, without dairy. I’m not a nutritionist, I’m not going to make those arguments. What I’m saying is that you can’t rely on industry and government to protect you from their profit motive that is an industry and government. You really need to think through what role you want these foods to play for yourself. You need to investigate to figure out what the truth really is because the more you investigate, the more surprised you’re going to be at what’s actually healthy versus what you’re being told is healthy.
That’s why I love the brand of your show by the way—Learn True Health. We’re just in a situation where it’s a perfect storm. Part of it is because we’ve really embraced freedom. You really can’t have a free country without the capitalist system. You can’t have it be overly controlled. A byproduct of a capitalist industry is things that are not necessarily good for the populace, they’re desired for the populace. Industry will make whatever’s most desirable, not whatever is healthiest. It’s up to you as the consumer to decide where that healthy line is for yourself.
[0:34:12] Ashley James: We must vote with our fork. There was once a time when there is some weird hormone. There’s four letters like HR something BC or whatever. I can’t remember the name of it right now, but it’s on all the dairy products. It says no such-and-such a hormone. I don’t buy dairy products. I’ve been dairy-free for a long time. If I did buy dairy products I’d probably know this name, but this hormone used to be in all the dairy because they would put it in all the cows. They would basically hop the cows up.
They do give cows other things that are in your milk that are very, very scary, but this one particular hormone was shown to cause negative health results to humans. It was passed on through the milk and then whoever was drinking it or eating the dairy products was getting that hormone. It was making it so they could make more milk. The industry wanted to keep this hormone in, but the consumers didn’t. Now, how do you think us as individual consumers changed the entire dairy industry?
We voted with our fork. The largest a voice in that will surprise you—Walmart. Walmart noticed that their consumers were not buying the dairy products—significantly less sales were going on with the dairy that had the hormone in it. So Walmart was one of the companies that lobbied to only provide the hormone-free—this specific hormone-free dairy. As a result—because we voted with our fork—the companies took notice and they followed the trend.
We have to—as individuals and also—spread this information. We as individuals need to vote with our fork because it does matter because these companies will follow suit. So just to recap, when we have cravings, we can take food—maybe we don’t necessarily like kale. I use kale as an example because some people really hate it. We can take a healthy vegetable and feed it to ourselves even though we don’t like it. We’re adults, we can suck it up for the three minutes we’re tasting the flavor. We can just do it.
[0:36:38] Dr. Glenn Livingston: It can be three seconds in the case of a blender full of romaine lettuce and a little water. You can get a half a pound of romaine lettuce into you in three seconds if you blend it up and drink it down.
[0:36:50] Ashley James: So for the seconds that we’re tasting it what we’re really doing is retraining our neurology to start enjoying or to get that the nutrients are actually coming from over here and then you’ll start to enjoy it more. I had this experience with kale, never really liked kale, and then my friend started making it. So I started trying it because in the last few years it’s been the superfood. Then I started noticing that when I saw kale in the grocery store I’d have a Pavlovian response that I’d actually start salivating. I think about kale, “Oh, I’m going to make a kale boat for lunch,” and then I start salivating.
I noticed that my body was actually getting excited at the thought of having kale. I make this great kale boat where I take Dino kale, which can be like a taco, and then I do some kind of stir-fry sometimes with maybe a handful of cashews, and some beets, and some celery, and some cabbage, and mushrooms and some seasoning like taco seasoning or whatever, and maybe some onions. Just stir fry it up, and then you put it in the kale like it’s a taco, and then you eat it. It’s very crunchy. It has lots of beautiful flavors.
[0:38:03] Dr. Glenn Livingston: I’ll be right over. I’ll be right over.
[0:38:05] Ashley James: It’s so good.
[0:38:06] Dr. Glenn Livingston: I’m on my way.
[0:38:08] Ashley James: Then I just started eating kale raw. I remember not liking it like just detesting that the taste of kale, and now I actually love the taste of kale. I’ve witnessed this. I think I’m picky with a lot of things, and I’ve just noticed that my palate has really changed because I forced myself to just eat it. Because I thought, “Okay, this is a superfood. It’s healthy. I got to get into me.” But then my palate changed. I also cut out the foods that contained the chemical, salt, sugar, oil because I knew about how much they’re hijacking my brain and they weren’t good anyway. I just noticed that over time, my palate changed, and my cravings changed, and my neurology changed. I really had that experience that you’re describing, which is really exciting.
[0:38:59] Dr. Glenn Livingston: Has doing your podcast changed your life? It sounds like doing your podcast changed.
[0:39:03] Ashley James: Yeah. I think I share a lot in the show about my experience of how it has changed, how I’ve evolved. I’ve always been on a road of personal growth. My whole life I’ve been really excited about personal growth. Before the podcast, I healed type-2 diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue, chronic infections, polycystic ovarian syndrome, and infertility. I did that with natural medicine. That’s why I started the podcast because I healed so many things. We have a healthy five-year-old. I was told by an endocrinologist I would never have kids. I was completely infertile.
We conceived naturally with only natural medicine, with food, and supplements. Supplements being herbs, and vitamins, and minerals, not specific for conceiving but just to create health. To be able to basically go against all these MDs that said I would always be diabetic, I would always have polycystic ovarian syndrome, I would always be infertile that’s what they said. If I believe them and listen to them I would not have our child. I would not be happy. I don’t even know if I’d still be alive.
So using food as medicine and supplements to fill in the gaps when needed, that changed my life so much that I want to start the podcast to help others. I knew that it wasn’t just physical. It had to be emotional and mental because I recognized that I had overeating, and binge eating, and that there was emotional stuff around that, there are other factors. We’re not separated. Our emotional and mental body affect our physical body and vice versa. So we have to just get that true health is about all aspects of our life, and wanting to improve them, and seeking the information to improve them, and being willing to try new things. So every time I interview someone it’s like I’m trying new things and implementing them in my life.
[0:41:13] Dr. Glenn Livingston: I love it.
[0:41:14] Ashley James: Your work has been monumental. You really, really help me. Actually, listeners can check out your podcast because I was on your show. You did your system, like a little taste test of your system.
[0:41:27] Dr. Glenn Livingston: I coached you for a session.
[0:41:29] Ashley James: Yeah, you coach me for a session. You helped me breakthrough something that I felt like I had no control over. In one session—it was very cool. Listeners can hear that. Give a plug, what’s the name of your podcast?
[0:41:47] Dr. Glenn Livingston: You could find that at—just go to neverbingeagain.com and click on the blog and all the podcast episodes are there. If you go to truehealtheating.com and you sign up for the book, you’ll get copies of full-length coaching sessions that I did where you can not only hear me coach Ashley but other people too. It’s all free. That’s over there.
[0:42:11] Ashley James: Cool. So truehealtheating.com and then you sign up for the free book. Then in addition to the free book, you’re getting recordings of these coaching sessions.
[0:42:22] Dr. Glenn Livingston: You get recordings of the coaching sessions, you get free food plans starter templates for every type of dietary philosophy—low carb, high carb, vegan, point counting, calorie counting. We’ll show you sample rules that people use for different dietary philosophies. So truehealtheating.com and sign up. That’s the best thing you can do. Click on the big red button, sign up for the reader bonuses, and you’ll get a free copy of the book, and you’ll get the coaching sessions, and you’ll get all the other goodies.
[0:42:56] Ashley James: Nice. When we had you on the show last—episode 231—so it’s been a while, I can’t believe it. It’s been just under 200 episodes ago. That doesn’t even sound right. I’m friends with Glenn on Facebook since I had him on the show the first time. I guess I just felt like I had interviewed you more recently since I feel like we talk every day through Facebook. By the way, Glenn is a really fun person to follow on Facebook. He’s got probably the best Facebook posts I have out of every single person I’ve ever followed. I’m serious, I’m serious.
Your posts are so fun, and sometimes very insightful, and sometimes very silly, but they’re always really beautiful. So I appreciate that. While everyone is complaining, and griping, and there’s so much drama in the world, you bring such a lightness to it that’s also sometimes very contemplative. It’s light. I definitely encourage people to follow Glenn Livingston on Facebook as well. Since we had you on the show of many moons ago you had just published your second book. You have done a lot since then. Update us, what’s been going on in the world of Glenn Livingston since then?
[0:44:25] Dr. Glenn Livingston: The first book contains everything you need to stop overeating, it really does. Like I said, you can get a free copy of it on the site where we told you. What I found though—after I published the book—there was a great desire for coaching. At first, I started doing the coaching, and then I developed a program, and then I had coaches that were coaching underneath me or with me—it’s more accurate—who I train and supervise. We heard all these very specialty stories like, “I managed to never binge again with everything except for nighttime eating. I can do really well until 10 o’clock at night and then I blow it,” or “I’m really good except when I have my period,” or “I have the hardest time when I’m traveling. I have the hardest time when I’m super, super tired.”
We recognized that there was a need for a book about very specific situational triggers, so we wrote a book called 45 Binge Trigger Busters. That’s probably the most popular alternate book that we’ve written so far, but then we wrote a book on nighttime eating. I say we, I have a business partner. I’m the primary author for most of the books, but he really does help me tremendously. His name is Yoav Ezer. He’s the CEO of my company. I’m old enough and mature enough to know that I don’t make a good CEO. I’m more of a mad scientist, and psychologist, and a marketer.
We wrote a book about nighttime overeating, which has some very specific protocols associated with it that seemed to help. We wrote a workbook for people who either couldn’t afford the coaching program or were more do-it-yourself kind of people. That actually has turned out to be—we just launched it about a month ago. It’s been extremely popular. I had no idea how much even demand there was for a workbook in the market, but we thought through a lot of the exercises we were doing with coaching clients, we put it in there. Whatever books did I write? I wrote my autobiography as it pertains to food called Me, My Pig, and I.
[0:46:46] Ashley James: Oh my gosh, that’s so cute. Did you come up with that one yourself?
[0:46:53] Dr. Glenn Livingston: I came up with that myself, yeah.
[0:46:53] Ashley James: Did you come up with the title before you wrote the book? Did you have an aha moment? I want to know, how did you come up with that one?
[0:47:02] Dr. Glenn Livingston: Jim Carrey has a movie called Me, Myself and I and it happened to be on Netflix or something as I was writing the book. I said, “That’s it. It’s Me, My Pig, and I.”
[0:47:14] Ashley James: Love it. Isn’t it Me, Myself and Irene or something?
[0:47:18] Dr. Glenn Livingston: Is that what it is?
[0:47:19] Ashley James: Something like that, yeah. I think so. I saw it ages ago. But that’s so cute. If they haven’t heard the past episodes, tell us a bit about the pig for those who haven’t heard about it.
[0:47:34] Dr. Glenn Livingston: I went through the whole story in this episode about the difference between loving yourself thin and being an alpha wolf that takes charge. The way that I took charge was I decided to call my reptilian brain my inner pig. This was before I was a vegan or knew anything about the treatment of pigs in the world or anything like that. It was not something I was going to publish. It was going to be a private journal—just my way to overcome my own food problem. I named it my inner pig.
I would make a rule that says, “I’ll never have chocolate Monday to Friday.” Then if I heard a little voice on my head that said, “Come on, Glenn, you worked out hard enough,” even though it’s a Wednesday. “You’re not going to gain any weight, you might as well.” I would say, “That’s not me, that’s my pig. I don’t want chocolate. Chocolate is pig slop during the week. I don’t eat pig slop. I don’t let farm animals tell me what to do. Stop squealing. Go back to your cage.” That’s how I got better.
All the years of sophisticated psychology—for the people that don’t know, I was also a corporate consultant. I was doing these million-dollar projects. I was publishing all these papers. I was on TV and radio. I had all these sophisticated things to say, and I think I’m a compassionate person. I’m joking around a little with you today, but I usually come off as more compassionate. The way that I recover was to say, “I don’t eat pig slop. I don’t let farm animals tell me what to do.” It would wake me up at the moment of impulse, and it would give me this extra microseconds to remember who I was and why I wanted to make that rule in the first place.
It wasn’t a miracle. Sometimes I make the wrong decision anyway, but it eradicated the sense of hopelessness and powerlessness. It eradicated the sense of you failed a thousand times before so you’re going to fail forever. I started to feel like I have the ability to make choices. I made choices and I got better. If you look at my top weight versus about where I am now, it’s about 80 pounds different. My triglycerides went way down and my psoriasis and rosacea went away.
I developed the ability to stick to the plan that I would make for myself. I wouldn’t take anybody else’s diet or rules. I don’t recommend anybody take my diet or rules. I guide people in the principle to autonomously decide what they want to eat and how to stick to it. That’s where the pig comes from. You don’t have to call it a pig. I kind of wish that I didn’t in retrospect.
[0:50:12] Ashley James: No, I think it’s brilliant. I think it’s brilliant. Some people could get confused because they have a different perception of pig. Of course, you’re using the Western stereotype of the pig that just binges, and just can never get enough, can never be satiated. It’s also used as a negative insult, but that for you was a break state. That allowed you to just stop the old pattern long enough to take control.
[0:50:47] Dr. Glenn Livingston: But you can call it your food monster or your food demon. What you don’t want to do, you don’t want to think of it as a wounded inner child or a cute pet. It’s not an alternative part of your personality. You’re not trying to reintegrate this. Most forms of psychology will say, “You need to own your shadow. You need to look at these disowned parts of yourself and recognize that this is part of you and love it also. That way you won’t be so frightened of it and it won’t be able to act out on its own.”
That’s not the solution that worked for me. The solution was to disavow these impulses. To define pig squeal as any thought, feeling, or impulse would suggest that I will ever break my rules between now and the day that I died. By definition a squeal is destructive. Why would I want to identify with those destructive urges?
I cast that out of my identity. I assigned all doubt on uncertainty about my ability to stick with the plan. I got a lot of this from Jack Trimpey, by the way. He wrote a book called Rational Recovery. I had to remodify an awful lot of things to make it work for food. I found that that empowered me to develop a success identity because all of these destructive thoughts were no longer me. They were just neurological junk as Kathryn Hansen says, and I became a different person.
After a while, it was not just white-knuckling it and sticking to rules. It was changing my identity about the kind of person that I was with chocolate, and pasta, and pizza. I didn’t have to think about it after a while. Just like the first couple of months you’re learning how to drive. You’ve got a concentrate on the rules or road, but then after a while, you can daydream, and listen to music, and talk to your friends.
I want to tell you a funny story about the pig. The one place that it’s not good that I really wish it didn’t—people don’t always know my name because the idea of pig, and pig slop, and I don’t eat pig slop, and I don’t let farm animals tell me what to do. That’s so salient that they think of me as, “Oh, he’s that doctor who has a pig inside him.” Once in a while—I used to like to do this if I go on a first date or something—I’ll be in a bookstore and someone will come up to me look start pointing like I’m familiar to them but they don’t know my name. They just go, “Pig guy, pig guy, pig guy.”
[0:53:15] Ashley James: This happened when you’re on a date?
[0:53:17] Dr. Glenn Livingston: Yeah.
[0:53:18] Ashley James: No way. Tell me. Tell me what happened.
[0:53:21] Dr. Glenn Livingston: She thought it was funny and I explained it to her. It’s not really the impression you want to make on your first date.
[0:53:27] Ashley James: Did you guys go out on a second date?
[0:53:29] Dr. Glenn Livingston: No, but I wouldn’t have gone out with her a second time either. I hope she doesn’t hear this.
[0:53:37] Ashley James: It’s all for the greater good. It’ll all work out in the end. I really do believe that there’s some kind of serendipity that happens. The universe sometimes—it all plays out for a reason.
[0:53:54] Dr. Glenn Livingston: She was not an awful person or anything, we just were not a good match.
[0:53:58] Ashley James: Right, right, right. It’s so funny that you’ve been known as the pig guy. Glenn Livingston’s a really easy name to recall—for me at least.
[0:54:09] Dr. Glenn Livingston: Dr. Livingston, I presume.
[0:54:11] Ashley James: Yes. Of course, of course.
[0:54:15] Dr. Glenn Livingston: Something you’ve never said, thank God.
[0:54:17] Ashley James: Dr. Livingston?
[0:54:19] Dr. Glenn Livingston: Dr. Livingston, I presume.
[0:54:21] Ashley James: I presume that’s who you are. Sure.
[0:54:24] Dr. Glenn Livingston: I’m older than you. I’m older than you. There’s a famous story about an explorer that goes to Africa named Dr. Livingston. When his assistant/friend finally finds him he says, “Dr. Livingston, I presume.” Ever since I was a kid there are about eight doctors in the family.
[0:54:46] Ashley James: Oh, people are using that. I have a friend named Forrest and he actually loved the Forrest Gump movie. He grew up with it and everyone used to yell, “Run, Forrest, run.” He thought it was funny. I’m just surprised he didn’t grow up scarred from it.
[0:54:59] Dr. Glenn Livingston: Because by the 47th time someone else says it you think, “No one else ever said that to me before ever.”
[0:55:09] Ashley James: When you talked about your inner pig in our past interviews I actually got the name of my inner thing right away. It just came to me that I have an inner brat. She’s an inner brat.
[0:55:23] Dr. Glenn Livingston: I remember that.
[0:55:25] Ashley James: Right. She wants what she wants when she wants it. She’s like a little nasty five-year-old that is hopped up on sugar. She throws tantrums—little inner brat. When you made that distinction it was like the light went on like, “Oh, okay. I have a little inner brat. I need to tell her, ‘No, we’re not having a second serving of pasta or we’re not going to go through the drive-thru. We’re going to eat kale. You’re going to enjoy a kale smoothie and you’re going to stop nagging me.’” It’s been very clear to me that by putting it in that context—and you said like with the pig.
It’s good to like make it a little bit comical because I feel like it’s part of that break state and part of you getting control back. But like you said, it’s not about reintegrating, it’s not about loving it. It is a part of our brain that wants to kill things, eat things, and sleep with things. The thing is we can’t, like you said, you don’t pee on the street or pee in a meeting. You have control of your body. Good, good, good that you do, but we also don’t run around just having sex in the street or killing people—thank God. I’m knocking on wood here. That we all keep control of these urges, but the one urge that we let go is food because it’s socially acceptable.
If we say that bingeing is that same part of the brain that wants to just mate with everything it’s like, “Okay. Well, I’ve been able to my entire life control the urge to just randomly mate with something in the street or kill someone just because they made me angry. I’ve easily, easily been able to control that and I can figure out how to control that urge to overeat because that’s part of the same mechanism.”
[0:57:24] Dr. Glenn Livingston: It’s just another element of being a civilized person in society.
[0:57:29] Ashley James: Right. Yeah. Tell me more about this not eating at night or this nighttime eating because that’s the thing I’ve been working. I’ve heard people say—guests have said on the show—we only have a certain amount of willpower. I think even you talked about it. By 11:00 PM we have no more willpower left. For me, I’ll eat really healthy during the day, but if I’m staying up past a certain hour I get hungry again and then it’s like the willpower is not there.
[0:58:04] Dr. Glenn Livingston: There’s an eight-part protocol that we came up with after having—we paid some researchers to do an exhaustive secondary research survey, look at all the research that’s been done. Then we did our own research into our own population. We did either surveys, and we talked to everybody. We figured out that there were actually eight things that people were doing who successfully stopped eating after a certain time at night. The first one was they knew the difference between nighttime and daytime. This sounds kind of silly but there was a very clear demarcation point.
If you think about a vampire movie, the characters always know the difference between sundown and the daytime. They know when the sun sets. There’s a variety of activities that they go through. They might put garlic on the door. They might pour salt around the house. They might prepare their secret wooden stake weapons or something like that. They might post a [inaudible 00:59:09] at the door. The heroes in a vampire movie—and the music always changes when the sun is down and the mood of the movie is much different because everyone’s on high alert. There’s a very clear demarcation point and there’s a ritual that people go through in order to punctuate that demarcation point.
We found that the people who were successful, they adopted some type of ritual. It wasn’t necessarily at the same time every day. It could be as soon as dinner was done. Some people will say, “I’ll stop eating at 8:000 every night unless dinner doesn’t start before 7:00,” and then they’re allowed to go a half-hour later or something. There’s a ritual. One of our customers Liv—I have permission to say all this. She claps her hands and she goes, “Dinner and done.” The dishes are away. She goes, “Dinner and done.” Saying that out loud ritualistically moves her from her lower brain to her upper brain. She knows that now she’s got to protect herself from we call it pigula. Pigula whispers at night.
The pig squeals during the day and pigula whispers at night. Pigula is more seductive. Then once you’ve done that ritual, another ritual could be clapping your hand three times as if you’re dusting them off and saying, “Kitchen is closed.” Other people have more physical rituals where they’ll change clothes, or take a shower, or go through a moisturizing routine, or do something to their body—which feels like it’s in a physically different state so they know that they’ve entered the decompression time living night time before bed when you start to let go of the day and wind down to go to sleep.
Those were the most obvious things that people were doing, but then we found that the people who were overeating at night—who stopped overeating at night—most of them had not been breakfast eaters beforehand. Most of them didn’t like to eat until they were 11:00, 12:00, 1:00 in the afternoon. They would say that they just don’t like breakfast, and part of the reason they don’t like breakfast is because they’re eating late at night and they’re too full in the morning. They discovered that they had to move their first meal to earlier in the day and that needed to be more substantial. They couldn’t let their pigula be saving calories for late at night. They needed to keep their blood sugar up in the morning, afternoon, and evening.
That was something that when we work with people, they have to force themselves to do this. It’s something that comes naturally to them, and most of them don’t want to. A matter of fact, a lot of people try to shut me up when I tell them that. A lot of people are very involved with intermittent fasting. I will tell them that—I don’t dispute the medical benefits of intermittent fasting. I think that it’s very valuable in many ways, but I prefer that if someone’s involved with binge eating that they don’t do that for six to twelve months after they recovered from the binge eating.
The reason is I think there’s an evolutionary mechanism in the brain that says, “If calories and nutrition are not available for a period of time when they are available we need to hoard them.” I think that’s the essence of the feast and famine environment that we evolved in. I think that overcoming binge eating involves signaling the body—and the brain in particular—that there’s a regular reliable course of nutrition and calories flowing through at all times. That’s part of why we’re finding the people that overcome nighttime overeating are eating more in the morning. They also have a more satisfying lunch.
We came up with a saying that says, “Add some crunch to your lunch.” Can you put some celery, or carrots, or peppers, or something that makes you feel like you’re actually chewing, and crunching, and getting some of that oral aggression out while you’re eating. I’m actually not joking. It is funny but it feels like a meal. It feels more like a meal. If you’re having a good solid breakfast, and you’re having some crunch with your lunch, by the time you get to dinner, you’re not quite as overwhelmed.
The other thing has to do with self-care. It goes along with the fact that there are only so many good decisions we can make during the course of the day. See, it turns out that your decision-making tank about food is also impacted by your decision-making tank about non-food items.
[1:03:55] Ashley James: How so? That’s very interesting.
[1:03:57] Dr. Glenn Livingston: If I make you do math problems before I offer you a marshmallow, you’re more likely to have the marshmallow than if I didn’t make you do those math problems because I engaged you in thinking and decision-making about the right answer. If you’re spending an awful lot of time doing email during the day, every email is a decision, “Is this spam? Do I delete it? Do I delegate it? Is it critical? Do I have to respond now? Can I defer it?” There’s a lot of brain glucose that gets burned up while you’re figuring out what to do with each email.
If you’re living in an environment where you’re constantly impinged upon for decision making—and those kinds of decisions could involve, “Mommy, who’s taking me to soccer practice? Mommy, are we going to have pizza or hamburgers for dinner tonight?” If you’re constantly impinged upon to make decisions all day long, taking two ten-minute breaks during the day or even two five-minute breaks during the day where you put down your phone, and you turn off your computer, and you walk away from people, and you just breathe, or walk outside for a moment, and get away from all the input. Get away from all the input. Get away. Don’t make any decisions at all for ten minutes twice a day. You can restore the decision-making capability to a certain extent.
It would be better if you can go for a jog. It would be better if you could take a nap. It would be better if you could do something a little longer, but those two 10-minute breaks a day can make a difference. You’ll find that when you get home at night it’s easier. The other thing that people do is since our decision-making capability is worse at the end of the day than the beginning of the day, decide what’s for dinner and prepare it before you leave in the morning. Put it in Tupperware, have it sitting in your refrigerator so that when you get home you can just put it in the microwave and go to town. You don’t have to make any more decisions. You’re eliminating a lot of that willpower draining energy at night that you’re not good at.
[1:06:03] Ashley James: Delete the word microwave, replace with stove because I don’t promote microwaves.
[1:06:15] Dr. Glenn Livingston: I don’t even use the stove. I’m a raw vegan for people that don’t know. I don’t force this on people.
[1:06:24] Ashley James: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, totally, totally. I was just teasing because you’re like put it in Tupperware. I’m like, not plastic. Put it in a microwave, no microwave.
[1:06:31] Dr. Glenn Livingston: I’m trying to speak in the language of the masses because I don’t want to put up too many barriers for people. I want them to stop bingeing first and foremost because if you stop having 20,000 calories a day and you microwave a bowl of brown rice and peas, I think you’re a lot better off.
[1:06:49] Ashley James: Yes.
[1:06:52] Dr. Glenn Livingston: But I agree with you, Ashley. Look, my ideal is that I eat fruit and leafy green vegetables. I actually have a dehydrator on top of my stove because I don’t use the stove. I don’t understand why people think that the byproducts of fire are good for us in any way, shape, or form. Didn’t we learn our lessons with cigarettes? It’s a whole different story, right? No microwaves, no stoves. If you were to come live with me for a month you’re going to be shocked.
[1:07:21] Ashley James: Oh my gosh. I think I’d love it. If you do all the food prep I think I’d love it. I was raw vegan for six days and it was great. I did it during the summer. Easy to find all the fresh produce, but I got bored with eating the same food over and over again. I got bored. So day seven I’m like, “Oh, man. If I have to eat another zucchini noodle bowl with marinara,” which was so delicious. I think I just figured out how to make one good dish and it was delicious. My husband was like, “I could eat this way the rest of my life,” but I don’t know if I’m cut out to do raw vegan but I definitely eat raw sometimes.
[1:08:04] Dr. Glenn Livingston: I don’t push that at all. I work with people on all sorts of diets.
[1:08:07] Ashley James: No, no, you don’t. You don’t. It’s interesting that some people find liberation in restriction. Back when I lived in Toronto, I was friends with a woman. I could see her face. I think her name was Jen—beautiful, wonderful woman. I was a teenager and she was in her 20s. We were taking a leadership program through Landmark Education where we had to meet once a month on the weekends. We met weekly on Tuesday nights. Saturday—for those of the Jewish faith—is the day of rest where you’re not supposed to do anything. You’re not supposed to carry anything but the Bible. You’re not supposed to drive a car, turn on a light switch, and she was transitioning to Orthodox.
She was going to marry an Orthodox Jewish man, and she was transitioning to Orthodox. She said, “I want to attend on Saturday but I have to walk if I want to go.” She lived on the other side of Toronto—the other side. I volunteered to walk with her. I got to her house before the sun rose, and we walked clear across all of Toronto and got there in time for our course. The whole time we talked about this because I was really fascinated. She was a dancer. She had long hair. She was very free and why was she going to choose to be in a relationship with a man where she had to shave her head, make a wig out of her own hair, never allow anyone to see her hair again, never dance with people other than women, never show any skin beyond the wrists or something like. Just the restriction after restriction.
Why was she happy and excited? Beyond the fact that she was in love with this man. She was actually excited to become an Orthodox Jew. She explained to me in our very long walk that in the amount of restriction—she was raised in a setting where she had no restrictions, and she was loose, and could do whatever—she found that she just ended up not really liking herself. But with these restrictions in her faith, it actually gave her more room to be who she was. She actually found more comfort in the rules that she decided to take on.
That twisted my mind because I always thought that freedom and no restrictions were the ultimate way to live, but people—in certain circumstances—find that restrictions forced them to become more creative, and more self-expressed, and feel more comfortable, and at ease. Your example is your system, you create rules around your food. That ends up giving you more freedom. It’s like restriction could equal freedom in a sense. It’s really neat.
[1:11:21] Dr. Glenn Livingston: I don’t think of it as restriction necessarily but you could. I’ve got a lot to say about this. Can I talk for a moment or two?
[1:11:28] Ashley James: Absolutely. Please do.
[1:11:30] Dr. Glenn Livingston: First of all, I believe that freedom sits on top of discipline, it’s not opposed to it. It’s only because of the discipline of the engineers who put together my car that when I turn the wheel 30 degrees to the right and I press on the gas pedal that it goes in that direction. I can open up my radius of locomotion and travel all over the city. It’s only because of the discipline of the city planners who put stoplights in the most dangerous intersections and yield signs in the ones that weren’t so dangerous. They organized it and really looked at the whole city in the way that was laid out that I can freely move about. It’s only because of my discipline, and having learned the rules of the road, and abiding by them that I can go about the day and do all that.
Anybody who’s more than 16 years old knows the tremendous freedom that comes once you learn how to drive, but there’s a discipline you have to develop first. It’s only because—I’m a jazz musician—I studied the scales exhaustively and I know the structure of music that I can improvise outside of them and express my soul. Jim Rohn said, “A life of discipline is much better than a life of regret.” What I think is that either you’re going to be free or your pig is going to be free. Either you’re going to be the master or the pig is going to be the master.
I want to be the master of my fate. In order to do that. I’ve got to accept the adult responsibility of controlling my impulses with discipline. It’s a fact of life and I think that people are confused about freedom versus discipline. They think that they’re giving something up. My pig could say, “You can’t give up chocolate, that’s way too boring. You can’t live without that stimulation and pleasure.” By giving up chocolate, I have largely lived free of any major health concern. I am 80 pounds thinner than I used to be. I could walk on the world as a thin, confident, healthy, handsome man, and be a leader in my field. I can hike a mountain a lot quicker, which means I get to spend more time on top enjoying the sunset, or the fresh air, or the view, or feeling the bit of hike a tall mountain was the feeling of owning the mountain when you get to the top.
It’s only because of all those disciplines that I thought I can do that. If I continue to eat chocolate, then I would be depriving myself of all of those things. It’s never really that we are depriving ourselves of pleasure. It’s a question of which pleasure are we depriving ourselves of, and have we made a fully informed choice? Well, because the pig will concentrate you on, will focus you on the short-term pleasure that you’re giving up. But that’s not all there is. There’s long term pleasure too.
[1:14:46] Ashley James: Instant gratification.
[1:14:48] Dr. Glenn Livingston: Right. Maturity involves recognizing that sometimes we sacrifice short-term pleasures to pursue longer-term pleasures. Sometimes we give up the roller coaster of highs and lows for more of a contented life. That’s the difference between going to an amusement park, and having these adrenaline rushes, and then having to wait in long lines between them versus floating down the river in a kayak, and enjoying the fresh air, and watching the breeze float the willows back and forth. As we get older and we mature, we usually opt for more of the contented sustainable pleasures in life rather than the fleeting pleasures that burn us out quickly.
We move more from the live fast and die young end of the continuum to the live slow and enjoy the ride, which is necessary when you get older because there were fewer years left, right? So you want to make them last as long as you can. The last thing I want to say, Ashley, about that is that your pig will tell you that boredom is intolerable. We live in a world of excessive stimulation. Go count the number of scene changes on any television show or movie. How many bombs, and naked women, or scantily clad women, or car chases, or fireworks are you seeing when you are looking at a coming attraction?
We’re led to believe that we need this constant input and constant overstimulation of our senses. The natural experience when you let go of that is the experience of boredom. When you experience life the way that it is meant to be, it seems boring because you don’t have all that stimulation. There’s just you, and there’s nature, and there’s other people, right? It takes a while for your nervous system to adjust to that. There’s a phenomenon called down-regulation, which means if you overstimulate the nervous system in some way you will stop responding.
If you live underneath the subway, after a couple of weeks you don’t hear the trains going by anymore, you sleep like a baby because your nervous system has been overstimulated and it doesn’t respond to that noise anymore. If you have a chocolate bar every day, you stop enjoying the taste of it as much as you did when you first started, you don’t get the same level of pleasure, and you certainly don’t get this pleasure from an apple like you used to. Thankfully that process reverses itself in a phenomenon called upregulation.
If you stop having sugar, for example, then within six to eight weeks your taste buds double in sensitivity, and your neurological system starts to produce the dopamine that it used to in response to apples, and produce, and that kind of stuff. The upshot of this is that the experience of becoming unaddicted from food is always the experience of going through boredom. On the other side of that are two things. First of all, there is the enjoyment of the way that life actually is. There’s a calming of the nervous system. There’s a satisfaction, and contentment, and peace that comes into your being.
We started this whole conversation by saying this woman has found peace at dinner when she never had that before. That’s on the other side of boredom, not that far away. Maybe six to eight weeks you start to feel that, but on the other side of that is your life purpose. See, when you’re not distracted by the overstimulation, then your libido—your life’s energy—can start to go into what’s really important to you. You’ll start to want to take on some other project.
Maybe that just means spending more time rolling around on the floor with your kids. Maybe it means tidying up the house. Maybe it means applying for a promotion. Maybe it means volunteering. I don’t know. For one way or another, you’re going to find yourself inspired to channel the pleasure-seeking energy that you used to channel into excessive taste stimulation. You’re going to channel it into things that feel very worthwhile to you. When you do that, pig slop looks pathetic. It’s much less interesting in contrast. So your pig doesn’t want you to get there so it says, “This is way too boring.”
Now the truth is, I don’t mean to push you to be a raw vegan. I don’t have any need for you to do that, but the people that do it successfully, they spend a lot of time researching at first—different ways to stimulate the senses with raw vegan things. There are all types of recipes. You can make where I’m eating pizza. You can make raw vegan mac and cheese. There are all kinds of things that you can do and they’re pretty darn good if you put the time, and energy, and you got the equipment to do it.
Over time, even that starts to seem too stimulating, and you gravitate towards what most people would think are very boring meals. More days than not, I have bananas and romaine lettuce for breakfast and lunch. More days than not. Then I’ll make myself some kind of special salad at dinner. I’m not bored at all with it. I really look forward to it. I don’t really want the excessive stimulation because then I spend more time thinking about food. Over the years, I’ve gotten so much more excited about all these other things that it doesn’t seem natural to me to find all my pleasure from food anymore.
I feel like I spent 30 years looking for all my pleasure in food. I want to spend the balance of my life making a difference and putting my energy someplace else, which is not to say I don’t get pleasure from food anymore, I do, but it’s not the same. I don’t have the same proportion of my libido dedicated to the food pleasure as I used to. Does that make sense?
[1:20:51] Ashley James: Absolutely. Everything you said, I was thinking about we’re all going through COVID-19 right now. This is what’s happening now, although people listen to these episodes even years after we record them because they’re still relevant information. At the moment, the whole world. I was just listening to Al Jazeera. I find listening to foreign news even more interesting than our news because you get like just a little bit of a different spin sometimes. There’s Artie. I like listening to many different news outlets and just seeing the different opinions, but there are countries that are shutting down in Africa.
There are several countries shutting down cities—completely shut down. There are some cities that made it illegal to travel. It’s just the crackdown is happening more and more. I’ve lived just outside of Seattle with my family so we’ve been in quarantine and only leave the house—well, we get out in nature go, go for walks. Even now, the governor of Washington is starting to say—he was saying like a week ago, “You can still go for a bike ride. You can still go for a walk.” A few days ago he said, “Don’t leave your house no matter what even if it’s just for essentials.” Now he’s saying don’t even go outside to walk your dog. It’s just getting to the point where people are people are stir-crazy.
Luckily we live in a house, but if I was living back in our old apartment, man I would be going nuts. I had no room in that apartment. I’m feeling, I’m feeling for the people who don’t have a yard to walk in. At least I can go in the backyard and garden. I can get in the sun. Our kid can run around.
[1:22:36] Dr. Glenn Livingston: Can you imagine what prisoners feel like?
[1:22:39] Ashley James: Yeah, exactly. Or what animals that we put in the zoo. I’m thinking about people or animals who are always held captive. We are all going through that. We’re all affected by COVID-19 in one way or another, but I’ve noticed in the last week my eating habits shifted because I’m home more. I found myself eating because I’m bored. I’m not doing anything because normally, we’re always out and doing stuff.
[1:23:18] Dr. Glenn Livingston: You’re sinking the input.
[1:23:19] Ashley James: Then I just noticed I was walking around the house because I had to move around. I always end up—the kitchen is in the center of the house and I’m like, “Oh what’s in the fridge.” Look in the fridge for the 50th time today, “Oh, look in all the drawers. Oh, yeah. Okay, all the avocados are still there. What should I make for dinner? What should I make now? It’s 4:00 PM, too early for dinner. What can I eat now?” It was just food becomes an event because there’s nothing else to do.
I watched this happen because I like becoming the observer, and watching the behavior, and then going, “Ah, isn’t this interesting? This doesn’t need to control me but I can observe it.” Then that’s when it hit me, “Oh, good. We’re interviewing Glenn in a few days. We get to talk about this because I bet a lot of people have noticed bingeing or that justification. That little voice that wants to mate, and eat, and kill is getting a lot more attention now because we’re stuck at home.
[1:24:19] Dr. Glenn Livingston: Our business is actually up a little bit.
[1:24:21] Ashley James: I thought so.
[1:24:24] Dr. Glenn Livingston: I feel guilty about it because everybody is suffering. I’m working super hard. I’m working to help people. I don’t take much money out of the business.
[1:24:35] Ashley James: Glenn, Glenn, you have such a kind heart. Who else would feel guilty? You are helping people. Just think of the woman listener who said that through tears in her eyes that, “I have peace now. For the first time ever I ate dinner without anxiety and I have peace.” The money that you and your company make is a reflection of how many people you’re helping, you’re touching lives. Your book—although you give it for free—is the number one bestseller on Amazon. There are tons of fantastic reviews. Thousands and thousands of people have been helped.
[1:25:13] Dr. Glenn Livingston: We just crossed 4000 reviews today.
[1:25:17] Ashley James: That’s amazing. Congratulations.
[1:25:20] Dr. Glenn Livingston: That was the neurotic Jewish person in me, feeling guilty about making money and stuff.
[1:25:28] Ashley James: No, no, no. It’s so human. I’ve been looking around at these companies that are blatantly making a profit off of people suffering and the COVID-19 crisis. I’m in a lot of Facebook groups, but I’m in a marketing Facebook group and someone said, “Okay, covidpreneurs out there. What are you doing to turn a fast buck in this?” Because of this situation. I got angry. I said to myself, “I don’t want to make money off of anyone because of this.”
[1:26:06] Dr. Glenn Livingston: The truth is, it’s actually more unethical for me not to make money because I have to support a bunch of people in the company. We have to keep expanding the advertising. The banker doesn’t tell me at the end of the month, “Gee Glenn, you’re a really good person. You’re helping all these people. You don’t have to put your mortgage.” I wish they would.
[1:26:30] Ashley James: In your situation, your money means you’re helping people. There’s a direct correlation. Right now, people are stuck at home. They’re suffering and they’re seeking an answer.
[1:26:41] Dr. Glenn Livingston: It’s a good time to get a coach. It’s a good time to buy some of these books and look into it.
[1:26:46] Ashley James: Glenn, it has been such a pleasure having you on the show again as always. You can come back any time. Every time you publish six books just come back on.
[1:26:57] Dr. Glenn Livingston: I think I’m out for a while. I have those six books in me because we’ve done thousands of coaching sessions. I knew what all the issues were and we developed the answers. I not only do this myself, but I work in concert with these four other coaches plus my business partner, Yoav. They’re always coming up with insights, always looking at situations, and so I had all these answers in me from all the specialty situations. Never Binge Again was a book that really took me eight years to write because I did eight years of journaling before I turned it into a book. If you looked at it, it was only a month in the actual writing but it was eight years in development. It’s kind of the same thing for these six books. There were about four years and thousands of sessions in development, and I think that I’m out. I think I have to see another few thousand people before I come up with more.
[1:27:48] Ashley James: Very cool. You’re welcome back on the show any time. If a listener wants to work with you or wants to join your coaching program and become a coach, should they just go to truehealtheating.com and get the information there?
[1:28:00] Dr. Glenn Livingston: Everything starts at truehealtheating.com, sign up for the reader bonuses, and you’ll be led to the podcast, you’ll be led to the coaching program, you’ll be led to the Facebook forum, you’ll be led to the free copies of the book, and Kindle, Nook, or PDF format. If you want the physical copies, you can get them. There is a charge for those. Yeah, truehealtheating.com.
[1:28:21] Ashley James: Awesome. Thank you so much, Dr. Glenn Livingston, I presume. It’s been a pleasure. Stay safe. Stay healthy, everyone. Thank you so much for your beautiful episode. I just know this is going to help a lot of people.
[1:28:35] Dr. Glenn Livingston: Thank you, dear. It went by quickly. Thanks.
Rational Recovery by Jack Trimpey
Episode 249: The Impact of Eating Right
Visit learntruehealth.com/hand and use coupon code LTH for your gift
https://www.learntruehealth.com/all-natural-hand-sanitizer-against-coronavirus
Highlights:
Proper Handwashing is one of the primary defenses against COVID-19, but what if you’re out and about and can’t wash your hands right away? In this episode, Faith Flatt shares with us the hand sanitizer that they formulated that doesn’t only kill coronavirus and germs, but it also conditions the skin.
[0:00:00] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 422. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have on the show Faith Flatt who is the Head of Merchandising of a US-based company that normally produces all-natural pain creams, but since COVID-19, they formulated a hand sanitizer. Because let’s be honest, I cannot find any hand sanitizer anywhere. I’ve been to every store, even online. It is all sold out, or they jacked up the prices on eBay and Amazon. People on OfferUp are making homemade sanitizer, I mean it is crazy right now. When I found out that one of my favorite all-natural pain cream companies had formulated an all-natural hand sanitizer that kills—what is it like 99.9% of germs?
[0:01:12] Faith Flatt: Yes, it does.
[0:01:15] Ashley James: Not only that because we could all just douse ourselves in alcohol, which would just dry out our skin, make it crack, and bleed, and then we’d be more susceptible to germs. You guys produced a hand sanitizer that actually conditions the skin and moisturizes the skin leaving it protected on many levels. You guys are producing 30,000 units a day so that people who are like me in hot spots—I’m just outside the Seattle area where there is zero hand sanitizer available in any store—that I can gain access to hand sanitizer.
This is so important because yes, of course, we should all wash our hands, but when we go grocery shopping, we’re constantly touching things. We want to just have that extra level of protection for ourselves, and our family, and our loved ones—who are elderly and more susceptible—by immediately using hand sanitizer so we don’t bring a potential virus home with us and infect someone who could potentially die.
So a little bottle of hand sanitizer can save a life at this point. Your company is providing these all-natural hand sanitizers. So that’s why I’m very excited. I’m excited to have you on the show to tell us about this hand sanitizer. Listeners can go to learntruehealth.com/hand to buy some right now. When you go to learntruehealth.com/hand, it gives you the ability to also get some discounts by buying in bulk or buying a whole pack of them. If you use coupon code LTH you also get a gift, so that’s great.
I want to hear more about what’s in the hand sanitizer, why is it that it’s natural and that it actually conditions the skin? Because when I use it—I have it, I’m holding it right now. My son who has really sensitive skin—I’m going to put some of my hand right now so I can just describe the sensation because it feels like I just put cream. I can smell the alcohol because, of course, there’s 70% alcohol in this, but it doesn’t feel like I put alcohol on my skin. It doesn’t feel like all those other hand sanitizers. It actually just feels like I just rubbed cream on my hands. My hands feel moisturized, and smooth, and soft. I want to know why is it that your hand sanitizer is the bomb, first of all. So we’re going to talk about that, but first, is Tim your father-in-law?
[0:03:52] Faith Flatt: Yeah. This is a family business, and he’s my father-in-law.
[0:03:56] Ashley James: Right. I had Tim on the show—I don’t know, maybe about a year ago—to talk about Real Time Pain Relief—your company—and the natural pain creams, and their benefits, and the amazing stories of success of people actually reducing pain medications because of how effective your pain cream is. When listeners go to learntruehealth.com/hand, they’ll also be able to see your other products—if they’d like to try your pain creams. Right now, the focus is on the hand sanitizer, which is really exciting. Tell us a little bit about you and your story. We heard about Tim’s story, Tim being one of the founders of Real Time Pain Relief. Tell us a little bit about you and how you got into working with Real Time Pain Relief and the history of your family-based company.
[0:04:50] Faith Flatt: Well, with all family businesses if it’s something that people are passionate about, everyone in the family kind of gets sucked into it, into the vortex. The Flatt family and their business partner Ron Snodgrass—the Snodgrass family—are just very consumed and passionate about helping people with topical pain relief. I married into the family about a decade ago, but even before I married in, this was a passion project for them. They were really focused on making sure that people had better alternatives to pain relief.
So about 20 years ago, Real Time Pain Relief introduced their first pain relief formula, and it was developed with the pain relief habits of their children and their sports teams in mind. Pretty soon, they found out that it wasn’t just children and their sports teams that were needing a better alternative to pain relief. Everyone really needed an alternative to popping OTC pain pills as if they were harmless. That was very concerning to the Real Time Pain Relief family. Soon we found that parents, grandparents, they were some of our more predominant users of the Real Time Pain Relief formulas, and that was how a company was born and a business was built.
One of the founding pieces of Real Time Pain Relief and our commitment to our customer base from then and to this day is that all of our formulas would be rich in nature’s ingredients and that we would always steer clear of the synthetic fillers that are in most of the formulas that you’re going to find on OTC shelves inside of stores. So parabens, SLS, artificial dyes, NSAIDS, acetaminophen, all of the Real Time Pain Relief formulas steer clear of that.
For me personally, getting to step into the family business, I have gone out to so many farmers markets, and state fairs, and eventually Boston Marathon, New York City Marathon, just places where we would go and personally sample the formulas that Real Time Pain Relief carries. It’s so fun to watch—through the years in the last decade that I’ve been involved—how the consumers out there are becoming more conscious, and how you’ll even have younger people much more interested in alternatives that are good for them.
So for me personally, getting to work in the merchandising and helping to communicate all of the wonderful features of the Real Time Pain Relief formulas and now our new hand sanitizer is really meaningful and very enjoyable part of my family life.
[0:07:38] Ashley James: Absolutely. Yeah, I’m looking at the bottle, no parabens, no SLS, no artificial dyes, and no fragrances. You guys decided not to even put essential oils in here. Someone could just add essential oils—a few drops to their hand if they want to, but there is some chamomile in here. Like I said, when you put it on I briefly smell the alcohol. Now it’s been a few minutes, I’m smelling the hand, I don’t smell anything. It’s very, very, very faint if anything, but my hand feels very soft like I just got a hand treatment.
There’s something about this that is very—it says it’s a hand conditioner. There’s not even a better word than hand—it’s not a moisturizer. It really conditions the skin. It left my skin feeling very moist, it’s not cracked anymore because my hand was getting dried out from all the other alcohol-based hand sanitizers. I’m really enjoying it. I think I mentioned this but my five-year-old—who has sensitive skin—doesn’t react to your hand sanitizer, so that’s really exciting that some people with sensitive skin would also be confident using your hand sanitizer.
Then, of course, you have a hand treatment in addition to this they could get if they have really, really dry skin. We need to protect our skin right now more than ever. It’s our first line of defense when it comes to our immune system because it keeps germs out, but if there’re any cracks in your skin—even if your cuticles are cracked—that’s a potential for where the viruses can get in. We just want to protect your skin as much as possible. Obviously, sanitize it and then moisturize it. That’s why I really like this stuff. When did you guys develop the hand sanitizer? Was this years in the making or did you guys just see the need and jump on it?
[0:09:42] Faith Flatt: We work with a wonderful chemist, and we have access to wonderful ingredients from nature. We have—in the past—dabbled with hand sanitizer, but it wasn’t really an essential like it is right now. It wasn’t the commodity that it’s become, so it was never a part of our permanent product line. We had the ability to very quickly adjust to what the market was needing, and we realized very quickly that our customer base was in need of this essential. If we could make it available to them that that was what we wanted to do.
While we normally spend many years developing a formula, we developed this one and brought it to market within about a week and a half. That was about three weeks ago, so it was a very quick turnaround time as the crisis began to really unfold and make hand sanitizer, like you said, really a first line of defense that everyone needs.
If you’re at home it’s nice when you can just wash your hands with an antibacterial soap, but almost everyone still has to go out to get groceries and things like that right now. If you leave the house without a hand sanitizer you’re really walking out unarmed. So realizing that, our customers—who because of the way our product was founded and the ideas behind our product—that basically if you are a Real Time Pain Relief customer you’re a member of the family. Our formulas were formulated for family at the beginning. As our customer base has grown, we’ve always just felt anyone who was turning to our formulas was someone that we considered family. So if our family members all across the US we’re doing without hand sanitizer, we wanted to make this first line of defense available to them.
All of those nourishing ingredients that you’re talking about in the formula and that feeling you get afterward is very intentional. Certainly, it makes it more fun to use the formula if it doesn’t leave you cracked and dried out at the end of the experience, but at least you know, okay, if it has 70% alcohol then its killing 99.99% of the germs. Also, on that note, according to the CDC,` I’m sure a lot of people are aware of this at this point, but even the CDC says that if your hand sanitizer contains 70% alcohol that it will kill 99.99% of germs including human coronavirus. That gives you a really strong sense of security when you have hand sanitizer, but the question right now is do you have it in stock?
So us making it available to our customers was the first step, and the second step was to make sure that it still lived up to our customers’ values. That we kept it clear of the unwanted fillers that are in most hand sanitizers right now. That we infused it with ingredients that would prevent that cracking because as you’ve said, Ashley, that opens your skin up to the infection. That opens your body up to any type of disease and infection when you have a cut. So right now, this is definitely not the time to back down on your health principles or those things you look for inside of your formulas normally. So we wanted to make sure that those rich formulas were available to our customer base, so glycerin, chamomile, vitamin E, aloe vera, things that if you don’t have our formula you want to look for some lotions to put on after you apply a hand sanitizer, but when you can get it all in one application that’s really a lovely spot to be in.
So our hand sanitizer, we went ahead and named it Hand Sanitizer + Skin Conditioner because we wanted you to recognize—our users, our customers—that they would be getting a full-range experience. This is really a hand sanitizer unlike anything else in the marketplace. It’s an antimicrobial gel that delivers the perfect solution. Since alcohol does dry out your skin, this moisturizing experience in conjunction with the alcohol is really the perfect duo, and it conditions even as you clean. So it’s the best of both worlds.
[0:14:13] Ashley James: I read somewhere that you only need it to be 65% alcohol to kill the coronavirus, is that correct?
[0:14:20] Faith Flatt: There are two different types of alcohol. One type of alcohol it takes 70%, and that is the type that we use inside of our formula.
[0:14:33] Ashley James: Got it, got it. Do you know the reason behind choosing the type of alcohol you guys chose over the other type?
[0:14:41] Faith Flatt: I’ll tell you that I’m not the person who directly oversees our alcohol purchases, but it is very difficult right now to obtain alcohol. I’m sure that perhaps that had something to do with our decision, but we are committed to getting alcohol in stock and keeping it in stock because we think this is so necessary and important for our customers. One interesting thing as well is that the price of alcohol has more than doubled since the crisis began.
So we’re really in a battle for the commodities and essentials that everyone needs and that we even need to make this formula, but we are committed to making this available to our customers. We really want to bring all of the resources that we with our FDA-monitored facility, our ability to make FDA-approved labels to give people a formula they trust from a brand they trust in this—what is really a—warlike effort right now where all small businesses, all-hands-on-deck need to come together to help fight the crisis that we’re in the middle of.
As a company, for us, this is our positive action. We’re willing to fight and find the alcohol that we need to source for this formula.
[0:16:06] Ashley James: Awesome. The very first ingredient is aloe juice, which I think is really cool. Everyone knows that aloe juice is very healthy for the skin, it’s anti-inflammatory, it’s very soothing. I had an expert on the show about aloe and the healing benefits. There are several scientific studies that show that aloe increases healing time so much so that it almost doubles healing time.
So when you put aloe on a burn or a cut, you will see it heal in half the amount of time it would take. If it would take, let’s say, three days to heal a burn, you put aloe on it it’s only going to take a day and a half. You have the first ingredient is medicinal, it’s something that helps to heal the skin, condition the skin, and keep it healthy. It’s like a layer of protection. Can you tell us about the other ingredients?
[0:17:06] Faith Flatt: Sure. Most of them are ingredients that the average person is going to be familiar with. Aloe vera—as you were mentioning—chamomile, vitamin E, and glycerin. While those ingredients have really positive connotations and I absolutely believe what you’re saying about aloe vera and love those types of ingredients for my own personal use with my family, we are very limited in what we’re actually able to say that each ingredient specifically does inside of the formula. We mix those in so that you do get nourishing effects, but as far as the individual benefit of each ingredient, we’re limited in what we can say that it actually does for you.
[0:17:52] Ashley James: Oh, right because you can’t make health claims as a company. You can’t say, “Buy our hand cream and your psoriasis will be gone.” You can’t make health claims, whereas if someone were to take these individual ingredients and they could go search the NIH or PubMed, they could find the scientific studies showing that these individual ingredients are safe. That they’ve been proven to be safe, and some of them are proven to actually be medicinal and healing, but combined together it’s made a hand sanitizer, that it protects your hands, and it also protects your skin.
[0:18:27] Faith Flatt: Right. We can promise you that this is going to condition your skin, and it’s going to leave you feeling nourished and moisturized. Certainly, I encourage you to do some research on these ingredients and see what some of the extra benefits to you could be.
[0:18:46] Ashley James: Right, right. Well, it’s funny because you’re at the grocery store and some of the grocery stores still have hand sanitizer to offer the customers, not to buy but just like a giant jug. We were at Whole Foods and they had this giant jug of this just regular run-of-the-mill hand sanitizer. I’m pumping it to my hand, giving some to my son, and my husband turns to me and he goes, “Isn’t that carcinogenic?” I look at him, I’m like, “Yeah.” We normally don’t use this stuff—the generic hand sanitizers—because you look and there are parabens and there are all kinds of carcinogenic, like you said, fillers, and preservatives, and whatever that is known to cause cancer, that is known to cause damage to the body. We normally—as a family—don’t touch those with a ten foot pole, but now it’s like, “Well, either that or we might accidentally get the coronavirus.”
Of course, we’re self-isolating now, but back when we were seeing our son’s grandparents a few weeks ago I was worried. I was like, “Well, what’s going on? What’s going to happen?” I’d love to get them because they go grocery shopping, and I’m just worried about them. They’re almost in their 80s, I’m worried. I’m worried that they might catch the germ when they’re out grocery shopping because they don’t have access to hand sanitizer. So I’m definitely going to get them. I’m going to ship them a tube of this for sure. How much do you use, because it’s only like a pea-sized amount? This tube is going to last me forever because you just put a pea-sized amount. Because it’s a gel, it covers both sides of your hands really quickly. Is there a recommended how much you should use on your hands to make sure that it works?
[0:20:39] Faith Flatt: No. The only recommendation, really, is just to make a little drop. A lot of people don’t know this but you do want to rub your hands all around your hands until it’s dry, and then that will make sure that the alcohol gets a chance to activate and to actually kill the germs. Right now especially, we want to make sure we’re using the hand sanitizer properly. I’m glad you mentioned the tube as well. That’s one of my favorite features of this formula. The container makes it very easy to share with your kids, or if your friend or somebody around you wants to borrow some hand sanitizer—you don’t necessarily want them touching your pump bottle—so the tube just makes it really easy to drop a little bit on the top of their hand and not share germs in that way.
[0:21:30] Ashley James: Pump bottles waste so much because you end up getting way too much in your hands. That’s what everyone thinks they need that much, but I think it’s intentional that these companies do that so that you go through it faster and then you buy more. Whereas with yours, you get to squeeze out however much you want and it’s, like you said, a gel. I squeeze out about a pea-sized—maybe a large pee, maybe an edamame size—and then I rub both sides of my hands, and in between my fingers, and then it dries really fast—within seconds. That’s actually good information about rubbing your hands until it’s dry, but I use so much less with yours versus the pump ones, so I really like that.
Now you said your company—for years—has been dabbling with so I’m sure you guys had like a formula in mind or did you kind of go back to the drawing board and start from scratch three weeks ago when you were inventing the hand sanitizer?
[0:22:33] Faith Flatt: I think we knew the base of what we wanted to do, and then just getting it into that finalized position, and getting all of the marketing material, and making sure that we were able to communicate clearly, that we had the correct label on the formula. That was really what the focus was over the last week and a half, but we certainly had a good idea of what ingredients would work well so that you do get that wonderful experience you’re sharing with us. We’ve got some wonderful testimonials from some early users of the formula, and I just wanted to share some of those with you.
Let’s see, Elisa, she said, “That the smooth finish and silky filling are delightful,” which is not something you commonly hear after using a hand sanitizer. It’s usually a dry icky feeling. Joe said, “Clean hands with no dry feeling. Perfect.” Bethany loves that it’s not scented. Then Ryan said that it doesn’t dry his hands out. We’re definitely getting the results we wanted from this formula, and the feedback so far is that people are happy and happy to have it. Like you mentioned, you want to send this to members of your family. It’s a strange time to live in where hand sanitizer is probably one of the best gifts you could get right now, but it’s so hard to find and it’s so essential as a first line of defense against this disease. That we’re happy to be doing it. It really fits back into who we are as a company.
Real Time Pain Relief’s primary goal is to make sure that individuals have a first line of defense when pain enters their home, and so that’s what we’ve been passionate about with our topical pain reliefs for a long time is to make sure that you have an option that doesn’t have those fillers inside of it, that doesn’t lead you to popping a pain pill anytime pain enters your home. Because one of the best ways to avoid a bad habit or to make good health choices is to make sure that you have an alternative. So we’re happy we’re able to provide that non-carcinogenic hand sanitizer to our customer base because everyone needs it right now, and now you have another alternative.
[0:25:02] Ashley James: Absolutely. Yes, I’m loving it. I started thinking about all the families I know that are multi-generational like my dear, dear Aunt Sally—who I love to bits—lives just outside of LA. She’s in her 80s—I think she’s 86—and she lives with her grandchildren, and her son, and her son’s wife. These kids—well, now they’re not going to school—they might be going to the park, they might be running around, maybe they’ll have a playdate, maybe they’re on lockdown I don’t know. They might go out and maybe they see a friend in the street. Maybe they accidentally catch the virus, or maybe they go to the grocery store. If they don’t have access to hand sanitizer, they might bring it back and in fact my aunt who is in the vulnerable population because statistics are showing that those who are seniors are much more likely to have severe effects of the virus versus youth.
So think of all the people you know where a senior citizen lives in a family, where there are maybe younger people, they may be asymptomatic if they catch the virus, but if they bring it home it could be fatal for someone else in the home. That’s why this hand sanitizer is so important that the younger generations use it to protect the older generations right now. Of course, the older generations should use it too. Everyone should use it. I just think that people—like teenagers and people in their 20s because I remember I was there—we kind of feel invincible. Like, “Oh, whatever. If I get it, it won’t be a problem.”
What if you get it and you’re asymptomatic, and for two weeks you’re shedding it and giving it to everyone you come in contact with. That is potentially murdering people. I know I’m being extreme and normally I’m not a fear monger—I feel like I’m being one right now—but just to paint the picture, something as simple as keeping a hand sanitizer with us at all times can save lives. Just like people are saying, “Well, masks in certain situations can save lives.” Hand sanitizer, I think, is more important because you are going to touch something and then you touch your eye. That through the eye—they’re saying is one of the biggest ways that we can catch the coronavirus.
Obviously, through eyes, nose, and mouth, but even if you’re wearing a mask—if you’re wearing a mask and you’re wearing gloves—and then you touch the virus, and you don’t realize it, and then you accidentally rub your eye—even with gloves on—you’re still potentially putting the virus in your eyes. That’s where hand sanitizers are the most important thing to do. I know we’re not going to make a huge long interview on hand sanitizer, but I wanted to just cover it as much as possible to let the listeners know that I was so excited that it’s available.
So listeners go to learntruehealth.com/hand. That’s learntruehealth.com/hand and grab some. Grab some for yourself, grab some for your neighbors, grab some for your loved ones. Your company will ship it to them. How fast is the shipping? You gave me the information that you are producing 30,000 units a day. Are you able to produce more than that or are you shutting down making your other products? Could you make more than 30,000? Are you selling out? How fast does it ship? Is it selling out or is there any fear that you’re going to sell out? We want to know.
[0:29:01] Faith Flatt: We started out really slowly even though—like I said three weeks and then a week and a half later it’s available—it doesn’t sound too slow, but we’ve taken it cautiously. First of all, no, we’re not stopping producing our topical pain relief formulas. So to anybody who uses Real Time Pain Relief, don’t panic. We’re still doing that because pain relief is an essential service, and we definitely know you need that. We’re just taking more precautions, and cleaning our facilities, and making sure that you’ve got a clean delivery every time.
We have transitioned a portion of our production line into putting out 30 units a day. At first, we thought, “Okay, that’s really going to be enough to supply our customers. Get them all caught up and we’ll be in a good spot,” but what’s interesting, Ashley, is within about 48 hours of releasing this formula to a limited group of our customers at first—because we wanted to make sure we had our stockpile good before we released it to all of our customers—we were being hit up by major organizations and businesses across the country saying, “Hey, we need this too.”
So we realized quickly that we could service and help in this fight, not just by making hand sanitizer available to our customer base but also to supplying America’s workforce. By this, I mean organizations and corporations who are really keeping America running right now. We hear so much right now about the heroes who are our nurses and doctors. They’re getting a ton of attention, and they deserve that so much, but there’s another segment that really has become a hero—all of the grocery store operators, all of the truckers, all of the takeout deliveries services. These people are literally risking their lives much more than those of us who are able to isolate at home, and they need hand sanitizer. They’re low on hand sanitizer.
I live in a small town in New Hampshire so you get to know everyone at the cash register and they become your friends. You realize they’re still out there right now, I’m isolating at home with my children and their heroes. It just almost brings tears to your eyes to recognize that some of them don’t have access to hand sanitizers. So when we started getting those calls we realized we were going to make this a big priority. We were able to put together a large enough supply, and we believe we’ll be able to maintain it. We are able to offer wholesale packages to businesses and organizations starting at 42 units—depending on the size of the company. Maybe you have friends or family who own a business or organization, 42 units all the way up to 100,000 units.
If you know somebody who’s in need of a large quantity of hand sanitizer, we want to help. We want to make that available to you because we believe that everybody deserves to have access to hand sanitizer as a first line of defense from this disease.
[0:32:27] Ashley James: I love it. You started out making 30,000 units a day, what’s your production now?
[0:32:33] Faith Flatt: Right now we’re still producing 30,000 units a day. We do have it in stock at the time of this recording, but just for peace of mind for customers, we do have an estimated ship date on the landing page. So whenever you go to order it’ll indicate when your hand sanitizer will ship.
[0:32:58] Ashley James: Yeah, and it was fast. That’s great news. Shipping right now is kind of—like Amazon, for example, I ordered something and it said it’s not going to arrive until April 21st but then it arrived the next day. So I’m like, “What’s going on?” I think shipping’s being a little weird for other companies like USPS, and FedEx, and UPS. I’m not sure if they’re limiting their staff, or if they’re maybe overloaded because everyone’s home so they’re ordering online, or if they’re limiting their staff because they have to do social distancing. What I do know is that I got my shipment from you guys superfast. I was really excited about that, and so far, all your customers that you released it to were able to get it, and start using it, and give feedback so that’s great.
[0:33:57] Faith Flatt: Yeah. We’ve actively been able to fill orders, and we have enough right now to be filling very quickly, and we’re still servicing large accounts that are calling us and needing the supply. Our first priority is to our customer base, but we do have everything in place to be able to service these organizations and unsung heroes with hand sanitizer as well. One thing I wanted to throw out as well is that we’re not the only company contributing in the hand sanitizer realm right now. There are a lot of small businesses lending a big hand. I’m sure you may have heard that a lot of distilleries right now are making hand sanitizer. One thing about those is the distilleries are not licensed to both produce and sell the formulas. So that influx of hand sanitizer doesn’t necessarily make it out to the general population.
What most of that is going to—most of those hand sanitizer supplies—are being donated to first responders, and government officials, and nurses, so that’s wonderful. We’re really happy that the distilleries are helping to fill that gap there. Then we’re happy to be here helping just the everyday consumer. One thing for healthcare officials compared to just the everyday person, you have to wash their hands up to a hundred times a day—so much more than we do—they’re going to be going through that quickly. So it’s nice that we can all partner together in this really warlike effort to help make sure that everyone is taken care of.
[0:35:39] Ashley James: I just thought, wouldn’t it be cool if you have the means—the listener who’s listening right now—to buy ten bottles, for example. If you have the means to do so, give a bottle to your mailman, give a bottle to UPS driver. We have a Facebook group of 270 people that are just our neighbors in our little neighborhood of maybe three square miles, and our UPS driver joined our Facebook group, which just blows my mind. He posted updates. He’s like, “I want to let you guys know that I am sanitizing my hands in between every single delivery.”
Back when we had the snowstorm where no one could get out of their driveway for over a week—unless you had a four-wheel drive—he posted that because he couldn’t even get into our neighborhood. He would stay for an hour by the gas station near our area, and for those who could get out, he’d be able to give their packages to them. He’s been in communication with us in times of crisis, but he said, “I promise you, I am doing everything I can to make sure that your deliveries are safe. That I keep myself sanitized.” I’m just thinking these postal workers who are actually taking the time to buy their own hand sanitizer—if they can, which no one can find any—so I would love to get him a bottle because everyone’s running out.
So your mailman, the checker at your grocery store if they don’t have any, the people that you run into even though we’re supposed to be self-isolating, but the people that you do run into when you go like the checkers, and the mailman, and the delivery people, and your neighbors, and your loved ones, obviously. We could—if we have the means—buy some extra bottles so that we can give it to those who have to be out there. Like you said, delivery people who have to be out there and don’t have access to it. That’d be really cool to pass it along.
One of my friends posted on Facebook that their church is encouraging them to leave toilet paper out on their front porch. Obviously, not in the weather, but underneath the roof or whatever. Leave some toilet paper out on the porch, and so if anyone needs some they’ll see some toilet paper and they’ll get it. Then other churches I heard were encouraging people to make a clear plastic bin with essentials like food and toilet paper with a sign that says, “If you need some please take it.” That way, we’re helping our community, we’re helping each other especially those in need because there are those in our community who lost their jobs, who were living paycheck to paycheck. Now they have to figure out how to make ends meet.
If even just buying one bottle of hand sanitizer for that person because now they’re going to do Uber Eats or something, and they’re going to be a delivery person just to make ends meet that’s supportive of them. If we can get together and figure out how we can support the people in our community who aren’t being supported by giving them some extra toilet paper, or giving them some food, or giving them a hand sanitizer then we will all help each other. Arising tide floats all boats. I love that saying because I imagine all the neighborhoods being lifted up because we are all the tide that’s rising. We are all doing that effort together.
So if we can think about how we can help others in our community, if we have the means, if you have the means help. Do what you can. Do it safely, but do what you can. Just because we’re such a social distancing doesn’t mean that we don’t still help each other and still care for each other.
It has been so great having you on the show to talk about this. I’m really excited that you’re providing this really essential service. Is there anything else that you’d like to say about your company, about this hand sanitizer, just any of the science or the studies? Is there anything that you really want to make sure that you got to say today?
[0:40:21] Faith Flatt: I’d love to thank you, first of all, for having us just to talk about this new formula that really can make a difference. I want to say, “Make sure you are practicing good hygiene and utilizing any hand sanitizer, but of course, the Hand Sanitizer + Skin Conditioner from Real Time is wonderful, but first of all, we believe that everyone deserves the ability to fight off germs.” As you said, Ashley, we all have our part to play to protect those around us, so hand sanitizer is just very important right now. We’re excited to be doing our part.
I want to say one last time that if you’re an organization, or a business, or you know of one that’s a need of hand sanitizer, or you yourself just want to share it with others, as Ashley recommended, we’ve got some wonderful bundle options available. We’re just looking forward to partnering with you to get Hand Sanitizer + Skin Conditioner into more people’s hands.
[0:41:25] Ashley James: Awesome. Listeners can go to learntruehealth.com/hand. That’s learntruehealth.com/hand to buy the hand sanitizer—either individual or like you said the bundles. You can also use the coupon code LTH to get a fun gift. It’s been such a pleasure having you on the show, Faith. Thank you so much for all you do. I know you’ve been working like a fiend the last three weeks to help get this hand sanitizer out there. I’m really impressed that you guys could turn around in that short period of time and produce such a high-quality product, but I shouldn’t be surprised because that’s what you guys do. So it’s been pretty awesome.
I also recommend—if listeners do have any pain—check out their other pain creams. I am a big fan of the MAXX Pain Cream myself, but you guys also have other formulas. George Foreman has his own formula, which has everything in it. I haven’t tried that one yet, but I’ve heard that it’s now everyone’s favorite formula.
[0:42:32] Faith Flatt: It’s a knockout, I’ll tell you.
[0:42:36] Ashley James: Well, I loved everything George Foreman’s ever done, so I wouldn’t be surprised. So listeners, when you go to learntruehealth.com/hand and you buy your hand sanitizer, then if you do have any pain, or if you know a friend or family member that has pain then also check out the different pain creams, the George Foreman pain cream. I looked at all the ingredients, I was really, really impressed with everything that was in it. That it actually does work. I have even given some of your pain creams to some friends who are in chronic pain with fibromyalgia and with osteoporosis. They were so thankful. I’ve heard nothing but good feedback from experiencing your pain cream so I was really happy.
The fact that people significantly reduce their pain meds when using your pain creams is so beautiful because those pain meds are so harmful to the body. If we can do it naturally then we’re really protecting that person in the long run. So, thank you for everything you do. Keep up the great work, and I look forward to hearing from the listeners. Listeners can go to the Facebook group—the Learn True Health Facebook group—and share with us your experience with this hand sanitizer. How you and your family are enjoying it. I would also love to hear from the listeners—in the Facebook group—how you gifted this hand sanitizer to someone in your community. I think that’s so inspirational. I love those stories of pay it forward.
So if you do buy the hand sanitizer for someone else please post it in the Learn True Health Facebook group. I’d love to hear that story. It’s like one of those Christmas tales where the whole town doesn’t have any presents or something really bad happens. We all come together and we end up making a Christmas miracle. So we’re all going to come together, and give each other hand sanitizer, and support each other in this really crazy time.
Faith, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for producing this hand sanitizer. I am going shopping today and I can’t wait to bring it with me. I feel very happy that I have this tube right now when I go grocery shopping today.
[0:45:05] Faith Flatt: Well, I’m glad you have it too. Thank you for having me, Ashley.