The Top Foods To Avoid & Which Ones To Start Eating Today EP 1345

Dr. Sten Ekberg covers health tips like healthy foods to eat, nutrition, weight loss, healthy keto diet, low carb foods, intermittent fasting, holistic health tips, lower blood pressure, reverse insulin resistance, reduce stress, how to exercise, thyroid issues, brain health, stretches & more to help you you master holistic health, stay healthy naturally, live longer and have quality of life by learning how the body really works. Dr. Ekberg currently resides in the United States where he works as a chiropractor and nutritionist at his office Wellness For Life in Cumming, Georgia. He educates millions of people around their health on his YouTube Channel, Dr. Sten Ekberg. In this episode you will learn,What foods you should eat and what foods you should avoid. The best natural ways to increase human growth hormone. Why more doesn’t equal better when it comes to exercise. The most common mistakes people make with their health. For more, go to lewishowes.com/1345Casey Means on How to Recognize and Fix Unhealthy Habits: https://link.chtbl.com/1252-podGabrielle Lyon on Why Building Muscle Is The Key To Lifelong Weight Loss & Higher Life Expectancy: https://link.chtbl.com/1267-podSal Di Stefano on How To Forever Change Your Relationship With Exercise: https://link.chtbl.com/1341-pod Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  So yes, top 10 foods would be like the ones we talked about. But then in addition to that, which is really hard for people to understand, the number one food to avoid for you is...

• 0:13Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:37Lewis Howes?

  There's so many new Frankenstein foods out there, you know, new manipulated foods, processed foods that people think are healthy, that maybe aren't healthy. So I wanted to dive in first and talk about really what you think the top 5 or 10 foods, or the categories of foods we should be thinking about eating for optimal health in all senses of the word, from mental health, brain health, to physical health, to spiritual health.

• 1:06Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:07Lewis Howes?

  What would you say are those top 5 to 10 foods we should be thinking about and categories?

• 1:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, so first of all, there's no difference between physical health and spiritual health and mental health. If it works for the body, it works for the body, right? And it depends on where people are. So the number one rule would be to eat real food. And people don't even know what that is anymore. 60, 70% of calories consumed are white. White flour, white sugar, and flavorless semi-synthetic seed oils that have been over-processed. There's no food value, nutritional value in those. It's all empty calories.

• 1:56Lewis Howes?

  60% of calories are from that?

• 1:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I saw some numbers. 60 to 70% of calories are from fake food.

• 2:05Speaker 00

  So then, and, and the rest of the, the thirty, forty percent aren't necessarily that great either. So the first part is just to teach people to eat real food. And if the earth produced it, if it walked the planet, or it grew on the planet, and you don't screw it up, then it's pretty good food. Right? And then, what I talk a lot about is low carb. Because, not because everyone has to have low carb. Uh, like China and Asia, they got around, they got along for, for centuries, eating a bunch of carbs.

• 2:42Lewis Howes?

  Rice.

• 2:43Speaker 00

  But, they didn't add sugar on top of it. And they didn't eat six meals a day with constant snacks. And they had physical labor. Right? So we, we have to put it in, in perspective, in context for the, the, the whole lifestyle.

• 3:02Lewis Howes?

  So, the sugar, the calories, the empty calories with sugar and white carbs, and then low carb, is what you're saying, is to think about to start?

• 3:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, and the reason I talk so much about low carb is that somewhere around eighty, uh, I think Ben Bickman quoted eighty-eight percent of the US, and probably a large part of the world's population, is insulin resistant today. And if you are insulin resistant, that only means one thing. You ate too many carbs for you. And that could be twenty grams for one person, or two hundred grams for another. But, if you're insulin resistant, you ate too many carbs. And that's, it's not a few hundred million, it's most people on the planet.

• 3:52Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 3:53Speaker 00

  I mean, it's billions.

• 3:56Speaker 00

  In the US, it's probably somewhere around eighty-eight percent. I think if you go around the globe, it's probably still sixty percent.

• 4:02Lewis Howes?

  Are insulin resistant?

• 4:03Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 4:04Lewis Howes?

  And what does insulin resistant mean? What happens to the body if you are that?

• 4:08Speaker 00

  So it's an adaptation, okay? The body will adapt to circumstances, to whatever conditions you throw at it. The body will make an intelligent adaptation. And if you eat a carbohydrate, it will raise your blood sugar more than other types of foods. And if you raise blood sugar, now the way to control that blood sugar and get that blood sugar into the cell is to release insulin. So if you eat carbs, I use my hands a lot.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  So this is why I tell people that if you eat a carbohydrate, your blood sugar goes up. And then your body produces insulin to get that carbohydrate into the cell. And now if you wait a few hours, that insulin will come back to baseline and you can start all over. But if you eat that carb and you produce that insulin to bring the glucose down, but then you eat again while the insulin is still high, now it's a stair step. Now you're just driving it higher and higher and higher. So insulin resistance is simply an adaptation where your body starts resisting insulin.

• 5:28Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 5:29Speaker 00

  And I've done a couple of videos where I liken this to a salesman, right? Or a friendly neighbor. You're new in your house. The neighbor comes knocking on your door and says, "Welcome to the neighborhood, here's a pie." It's like you go, "Great, I'm so happy, I feel welcome. Here, someone brought me something I need." So it's like the cell wants this fuel. If it's occasional, if it's appropriate. But then you have a thousand neighbors. And they're all just lining up outside your house. And every one of them brings a pie. So after a couple of hundred pies, you're pretty tired of this.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  You start developing a resistance to neighbors bringing you pie.

• 6:16Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 6:16Speaker 00

  Right? So anything that the body gets too much of, it starts resisting. It's just, it's the way it's supposed to work.

• 6:25Lewis Howes?

  And when it resists the thing, what happens to the body? Is that when you store fat? Is that what that's meaning?

• 6:31Speaker 00

  Correct, correct. So insulin is a storage hormone. It's an anabolic hormone. Its job is to get the glucose from the bloodstream into the cell. And whatever glucose the cell can use in the moment, it will use. But anything that's in excess of what it can use in the next near, near future, is going to be converted to fat. Because we can only store a tiny little bit of carbohydrates. And then the rest has to be stored as fat. So we can store somewhere around fifteen hundred calories as carbs. But we have an unlimited storage for fat.

• 7:12Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 7:12Speaker 00

  So like half a million calories. And I, I call that a fortune of, of energy reserves. Right? Because the body is smart. It wants to put on some extra weight for the winter when there's less food. So the body is super, super intelligent. And if you put on fat, there's a, there's a reason. But a lot of people would like a little bit less of a fortune.

• 7:39Lewis Howes?

  Exactly. So I want to, I want to talk about losing fat in a bit. But let's, let's. I could go off course there, but I wanna wanna stick to what I was originally asking about the the top foods we should be eating and the foods we should be eliminating.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:55Lewis Howes?

  So we talked about eating real food, low carb, and eliminating kind of the white, I guess, sugars.

• 8:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:02Lewis Howes?

  What would be the top foods you think are necessary?

• 8:04Speaker 00

  So I believe humans are made to eat meat, right? So I think that's a foundation for humans. I think our ancestors were hunter-gatherers. And it doesn't really matter what you eat. I think meat, lamb, pork, fish, poultry, it all has roughly the same protein and nutritional value. I think variety is is really good. But then I think there are lots of other things that we can eat. I think we should be very limited on grains. Humans, I don't believe, were really made to eat a huge amount of grains.

• 8:47Lewis Howes?

  Why is that?

• 8:48Speaker 00

  And I think it's because there there's this thing called paleo that most people have heard of. And paleo, some people turn it into a religion, and a lot of diets become religions, like keto and low carb and paleo become religions. But it's a philosophy. And the paleo philosophy says that humans have been around on the planet for a while. And during that time, wherever our ancestors were, how far ever you wanna go back to the to the African savanna, whether you wanna put that limit like a couple of million years back or or a quarter million years back,

• 9:30Speaker 00

  our DNA is mostly unchanged since that time period. So the DNA is what determines what kind of enzymes you can make, what kind of digestive tract you have to break down those foods. So if we go a quarter of a million years on a certain type of food, and then all of a sudden we change it, the body has no idea what to do with that. That's that's foreign. It's an experiment. So agriculture with grains was basically introduced some 10,000 years ago. And for most of those 10,000 years, we had what's called ancient grains,

• 10:12Speaker 00

  which were rye and spelt and einkorn and so forth. But then we got into the last 100 years, or even the last 50 years, which in the big scheme of things, in the evolutionary scale, it's not even a blink of an eye. And now, instead of four ancient grains, we have 25,000 different kinds. Really? Yeah, so when they've started hybridizing all these modern wheats, they're not looking for health benefits. They're not looking for what humans can tolerate. They're looking for what is sturdy to grow and what has the highest yield and so forth. Wow. So... So you're not a fan of grains?

• 10:57Speaker 00

  I'm not. And I think some people can tolerate some grains. And I think if you do reasonably well with them, then I think you can eat some. But if you have any sort of sensitivities, or digestive issues, or allergies, or brain fog, or anything that isn't quite right, I think grains would be the first thing to go. Really? Where does oatmeal fall into that?

• 11:22Speaker 00

  Oatmeal is, it's a grain. It is one of the friendlier grains because it is, it does have some benefits. It is naturally gluten-free, which is... And it's not the only thing that people react to in grains, but it's the number one offender, so to speak. So normal oats are gluten-free, but it's still a carbohydrate. It's still almost all starch. And again, it goes back to the 88%. If you're insulin resistant, then you need to avoid oats. If you're not, if you're super insulin sensitive, then you can probably have some oats. Right.

• 12:08Speaker 00

  And so does all carbs turn into sugar at some point? Yes.

• 12:13Lewis Howes?

  Or most carbs or some carbs.

• 12:14Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, they do. Now, there's this thing, I might look into this and do a video on something called resistant starch, right? Cause there's a lot of talk about it. I've kind of kept it in the background for a while. But yes, basically all carbohydrate turns into glucose. And what the argument with the resistant starch is that, well, some of it doesn't get digested and becomes food for your bacteria in the large intestine. But the key word there is some. So if if thirty percent reach the large intestine, that still means seventy percent becomes glucose.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  So again, it's the people who are insulin resistant need to watch it. And you need to understand where you are on that scale so that you can monitor. And if you're getting results, fine, then that's kind of what it's all about. If you're getting the results, then keep doing what you're doing. If you don't, then get a little stricter.

• 13:22Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. So what about the, you're saying meat is kind of the main category you're saying, or one of the top foods categories. What about all the different people coming out in the last five, 10 years, talking about vegetarianism and veganism and the benefits of that, eliminating meat? Cause I see different sides. I see people saying the lion diet only, it's like all meat. And how they've, you know, gotten rid of certain diseases and skin conditions. And I see other people are vegetarian and vegan who eliminate things, but also people that go that far extreme and have more issues. So, you know, what are your thoughts on that perspective?

• 14:01Speaker 00

  I think people find the arguments that they want to find, right? So a lot of this is philosophical and ethical. So I was a vegetarian for seven years.

• 14:12Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 14:13Speaker 00

  Back in the late nineties. And I read a book and it was very convincing. And one of the arguments was that, I mean, there were lots of them, but one of them that I've later sort of had a different perspective was that, look at World War II. There was no meat around and people had way less heart disease and they had way less problems and they lost weight. Well, they didn't have much of anything.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  They didn't have any sugar, they didn't have any white flour, they didn't have any processed food. So you can't, and that's the argument that is made erroneously so often. They pick something that's not a causative factor, but just a correlation. So vegans versus carnivore. I believe that plant food can have some cleansing properties, right? So if you have cancer, for example, and you have a toxic liver, that it's a fatty liver, it's an overwhelmed liver, it's just congested and toxic in so many different ways. I think that you should go vegan, right?

• 15:25Speaker 00

  I think you should try that for three months, six months, maybe 12 months until you can reevaluate. Cause I think there's some powerful cleansing properties. But animal products are more rebuilding, right? So what are we looking to get from food? We're looking to get fuel to turn into energy. We're looking for building blocks to become tissue. Cause your body constantly breaks down and you have to rebuild it, right? So you need what I call genuine replacement parts.

• 15:59Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 16:00Speaker 00

  Okay. And if you're gonna build a house and you, a tree falls on your house and, and the brick wall is damaged, you don't rebuild that with foam, right? You need the right stuff. And, and we are built from the foods that the planet produces. So we need genuine replacement parts. And then we also need vitamins and minerals. Those are the catalysts that help us convert the fuel and the building block into energy and tissue, right? And we get way more of that from animal foods, right? They have a higher food value, much more of the genuine replacement parts.

• 16:43Speaker 00

  And, and it kinda makes sense if you think about it because you are meat, right? Your body is, your tissue is primarily meat. And if you eat something that's close to your tissue, it's gonna be less of a transition for your body to turn that into your tissue. So, yes, your body can turn vegetables and plants into protein and body parts, but it doesn't happen nearly at the same percentage of conversion or absorption.

• 17:15Lewis Howes?

  I mean, you're, yeah, you were an elite world athlete, you know, champion of the athlon, arguably the hardest sporting event there is in the world. You ate meat during that time, I'm assuming, and then, you know, after your career, you went vegetarian for six, seven years, you said.

• 17:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:33Lewis Howes?

  And now you're back on meat.

• 17:34Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 17:36Lewis Howes?

  You've probably, I'm assuming you've studied and seen all the documentaries about veganism and these elite athletes that turn into vegan athletes and they have this superpower and then other people that are meat eaters. And you've done it yourself as an elite athlete, as a doctor and a nutritionist. So what did you notice when you became vegan for seven years or vegetarian and then now back on meat after that?

• 17:59Speaker 00

  I did fairly well on it. The biggest challenge for me was that when you don't eat meat, then you tend to be more limited. So if you're out somewhere traveling, now you're eating a lot of bean burritos and french fries instead of real food.

• 18:15Lewis Howes?

  Carbs and, yeah.

• 18:16Speaker 00

  Correct. But I didn't, I don't think I really, I don't know that I really suffered, but what happens with a lot of people is that it might take six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years before they really become deficient in something, before they become anemic, before they're missing vitamin D and B12, because you have reserves of most of those. And in my case, I wish I'd known half of the stuff that I know now because I was not an educated athlete.

• 18:50Lewis Howes?

  Right, well, back in the eighties, they weren't really teaching this stuff.

• 18:52Speaker 00

  Back in the eighties, you were taught to eat carbs.

• 18:55Lewis Howes?

  Eat your Wheaties.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 18:57Lewis Howes?

  Eat your carbs for breakfast.

• 18:59Speaker 00

  I kid you not, I probably ate more than a thousand grams of carbs per day.

• 19:04Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  On average. I mean, I was working out four, five, six hours a day, eating five, six, seven thousand calories. And you burn it all off, so you think that, hey, there's no problem here.

• 19:18Lewis Howes?

  When you stop working out, you keep eating that way, this is what happened to me.

• 19:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, I, I never really gained the weight. I mean, I gained some.

• 19:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 19:26Speaker 00

  I got a little, little fatter than I was because I didn't maintain 3% body fat exactly, but

• 19:34Speaker 00

  I didn't really learn about food until much later when I was in chiropractic school and started putting it together.

• 19:40Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, that's interesting. So you may not see the deficiencies in the first number of years, but you're

• 19:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:47Lewis Howes?

  What I'm hearing you say is you're probably

• 19:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:49Lewis Howes?

  Eventually going to be more deficient.

• 19:51Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 19:52Lewis Howes?

  It's just going to be harder.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  And what, what you see as a clinician is that there is no black and white.

• 19:59Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 20:00Speaker 00

  Everyone is looking for, well, just tell me what to do. Well, you can't do that. You, you have to understand where you are on the scale. And for some people, I'm sure there are super strong weightlifters who are vegans. Because their body can tolerate it, at least for, for many years. But then I, you have all these people have been vegetarian for, or vegans for, for 10 years and they start having all these issues, especially thin females who might have stress issues and digestive problems and so forth.

• 20:42Speaker 00

  So on, on the other, so, so yes, top 10 foods would be like the, the ones we talked about, but then in addition to that, which is really hard for people to understand and which we test a lot in the offices. The number one food to avoid for you is the one that you react to. Right? Because that creates

• 21:03Lewis Howes?

  It's different for everyone.

• 21:04Speaker 00

  That creates inflammation, that wreaks havoc. It doesn't matter how healthy that food is for someone else. But if you can't tolerate it, if you have a reaction, a hypersensitivity reaction, that's the absolute worst food for you. Okay, which brings us to the carnivores. And I don't, I think meat is a great foundation.

• 21:30Speaker 00

  And this is just like a personal feeling. I don't think that carnivore is optimal forever for most people. It might very well work, but I think for most people, I think a good variety is probably better.

• 21:47Lewis Howes?

  You mean only carnivore?

• 21:49Speaker 00

  Correct, correct. But the people who get results from carnivore, the reason it's such a huge movement and it undeniably produces results is that if you eat something you're sensitive to, you get inflammation, then those are the worst foods for you. And some people are so sensitive that they react to everything except meat.

• 22:13Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 22:14Speaker 00

  Right? So it's the ultimate elimination diet. So now you've eliminated, like if you go paleo, you're gonna eliminate dairy and processed foods and sugar and grain because our ancestors didn't have any of that. But if you're super sensitive, you might still react to lettuce and bell pepper and all of these things. So the people who get the tremendous life-changing results on carnivore, they're the ones who only tolerate meat, right? That's the ultimate elimination. So now for some, someone, it might be that they ate meat and lettuce and it still didn't work.

• 22:56Speaker 00

  And when they cut out the lettuce, then they got the results. But it doesn't mean that carnivore is the best for everybody. I think anyone who has some issues that haven't been resolved and they have some autoimmunity, they have digestive issues and brain fog, I think they should try carnivore and see if it changes something.

• 23:17Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 23:18Speaker 00

  But again, then we, then we go and we turn these things into religions and we say, it worked for me, so you should do it too.

• 23:25Lewis Howes?

  This is the answer for everyone.

• 23:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:27Lewis Howes?

  But that's not the case, right?

• 23:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:29Lewis Howes?

  So what are some other meats that you recommend that we should be eating? Meat is, I'm sorry, foods that you recommend we should be eating, yeah?

• 23:36Speaker 00

  I think then the next best would be tubers, like roots, sweet potato, rutabaga, parsnip, turnips, et cetera.

• 23:46Speaker 00

  Because they are, they're generally fairly low carb.

• 23:52Lewis Howes?

  Sweet potatoes are?

• 23:53Speaker 00

  Sweet potatoes are a little bit higher in carbs. They're, they're way less than, than grains. But a lot of these, like the rutabaga and so forth, they're, they're fairly low carb.

• 24:03Lewis Howes?

  Sure, gotcha.

• 24:04Speaker 00

  And they're also gluten free and they pretty much fit into any regimen. So if you're, if you're on an autoimmune diet, if you're on a lectin free diet, if you're avoiding nightshades, the, the tubers are still safe.

• 24:22Lewis Howes?

  What are the top tubers? Sweet potatoes?

• 24:24Speaker 00

  Sweet potatoes, potatoes, rutabaga, turnips, parsnips. What's the other one? The celery root.

• 24:38Speaker 00

  So those are generally pretty good. And again, if, so the, the sweet potato is generally more safe than the potato because the potato is a nightshade. So if you, again, have those sensitivities and you're avoiding nightshades, then potato has to go as well.

• 24:55Lewis Howes?

  Okay. So we got the tubers. What's the next category you really like?

• 24:59Speaker 00

  So then, assuming that you're not sensitive to nightshades, then I would go with all of the non-starchy vegetables. So now we got eggplants and bell peppers that, that I think for most people are good foods. But again, they're, they have some lectins. Then I think the broccoli and cauliflower are like staples in, in my house for sure. That you can-

• 25:29Lewis Howes?

  Those are low, those, I mean, those are like very low calorie.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 25:32Lewis Howes?

  Nutrient dense, but also low carb too, right?

• 25:36Speaker 00

  Yes. Broccoli, cauliflower, they're like four, five percent net carbs. So it's very, very low.

• 25:45Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 25:46Speaker 00

  And of course avocado, which is really a fruit by, by definition, but it has quite a bit of fat and very, very low carbs. It's like two, three percent net carbs.

• 26:01Lewis Howes?

  Okay. And what's the deal with the nightshades? Cause I know there's a big- You know, conversation about that right now where these, these foods are actually are hurting you, you know, these nightshades, or it depends on your sensitivity levels.

• 26:14Speaker 00

  Correct, they're hurting some people.

• 26:16Lewis Howes?

  The plant paradise, right?

• 26:18Speaker 00

  Correct, yes, so then I don't know what the percentage would be, but I would not, I think gluten hurts everyone, right? But I don't think lectins hurt everyone, not at those doses. Again, it's, it's all about.

• 26:34Lewis Howes?

  Smaller doses.

• 26:34Speaker 00

  Dosage. So nightshades have lectins, and if you are sensitive to something, if you have inflammation, if you have some issues, then I think sort of like the carnivore, carnivore is more extreme, but before that, you want to try cutting out the lectins, cutting out the, the nightshades.

• 26:55Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 26:56Speaker 00

  But again, it's not, some people sort of pick their little niche and, and say, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be the lectin guy, I'm gonna be the nightshade guy, and they, they promote that as the solution for everyone, but it, it's not.

• 27:12Lewis Howes?

  Got it.

• 27:13Speaker 00

  And, and low carb is not the solution for everyone. I have some skinny patients that need to eat carbs.

• 27:20Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  Right? They don't need to eat sugar and white bread, but they, they would probably do better eating seventy, eighty, hundred grams of carbs.

• 27:30Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:31Speaker 00

  Because they're very, very insulin sensitive, their body has trouble putting on some weight.

• 27:36Lewis Howes?

  Right. Are there any other categories you think we should be eating?

• 27:41Speaker 00

  The, the leafy greens are kind of in the, the non-starchy vegetables, but they're, they're sort of a little subcategory. And then I think, uh, some people kind of count the, the eggs with, with the meat, but I, I think it's a separate category because very few people are sensitive to meat, a lot of people are sensitive to eggs.

• 28:05Lewis Howes?

  People are sensitive to eggs.

• 28:06Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. And, and again, it's not a majority, it's not like, not like with wheat or, or pasteurized milk, but I don't know, five, ten, fifteen, twenty percent.

• 28:19Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:20Speaker 00

  And, and then. It's hard to tell because the people that come to my clinic, they're the ones who have the problems. So they're probably way more sensitive than than the general population.

• 28:33Lewis Howes?

  Sure. Are you a big fan of eggs yourself?

• 28:35Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 28:36Lewis Howes?

  As a food group?

• 28:37Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 28:38Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 28:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I think quality is huge. I think a lot of problems develop because people eat really, really poor quality. So I think if the if the chicken or the hen had a healthy life and produces a healthy egg, I think you're much less likely to ever develop a sensitivity. But if that chicken is eating chemicals and hormones and was raised under horrendous conditions, I I think your body is much more likely to develop a sensitivity to that because of whatever might be in there.

• 29:17Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. Any other final category you like as a food group? The the most nutrient-dense foods?

• 29:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I do think even though dairy is a very common allergen, I do think a lot of people do well with some forms of dairy. So I typically recommend yogurt and sour cream because it's very rewarding if you're doing a low-carb diet, then adding a little sour cream to something is is super tasty. I think cheese is okay for a lot of people, especially if it's like a good quality cheese, not the the melty singles and all that.

• 30:01Lewis Howes?

  Not the nacho cheese dip at the movie theater, which tastes so good, but it's not that good.

• 30:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't even know about that.

• 30:07Lewis Howes?

  It's not even cheese, yeah.

• 30:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think I've trained myself into just associating chemicals with with that stuff.

• 30:14Lewis Howes?

  I know.

• 30:15Speaker 00

  But yeah, I I try to get things as close to nature as possible. So if I have the option, I'm gonna get pasture-raised eggs. I'm gonna get raw cheese with as few additives as possible because nature made things for us. We we are nature, right? And all the other animals on the planet, they graze off the planet. They don't process things. They don't alter things. So as soon as we change it, we Increase the likelihood of screwing it up. And the more we change it, the more we screw it up. So the closer we can get to the source, the better.

• 30:54Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. What would be three foods that you would recommend everyone eliminate? If you could eliminate or have very, very little every once in a while, but if you could almost eliminate these three foods from your diet, it would help you in a big way.

• 31:08Speaker 00

  So I don't know if we can call them foods.

• 31:12Speaker 00

  But obviously, sugar.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  Sugar, in the quantity, refined sugar in the quantities we eat is absolutely toxic to the body. Number two would be processed fats. So healthy fats are natural fats, butter, meat fat, pork, avocado, olive oil, et cetera. Because we don't change them, we don't mess with them. But anything that we make an oil from that doesn't necess, that doesn't come easily, like a seed or corn. Corn has just a couple of percent fat in it. So it takes a lot of heat and chemicals and processing to get any oil out of it.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  So it tastes terrible. And then you have to bleach it and deodorize it and all that. It's not a food anymore. And those foods are extremely toxic. So soybean oil, corn oil, canola oil, all of those processed oils. And especially if they're turned into a food product like margarine or shortening or something like that.

• 32:24Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 32:25Speaker 00

  So I put, I'd say, sugar and seed oils. And then something, again, that's not really a food, but I would, I would put it up there. And every time I make a video on this, I get a lot of backlash. And it's artificial sweeteners.

• 32:42Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man. Why are, why are artificial sweeteners not good for us?

• 32:48Speaker 00

  Because they are chemicals. They're foreign substances. They were developed by companies who made pesticides. And, and the latest and greatest, so aspartame got a bad rap. So then they had to hustle to come up with something else. So they came up with sucralose. And they were very careful to name it in a way that sounded, yes. Sucrose, sugar, sucralose.

• 33:15Speaker 00

  But the fact is, and then they said that, well, you know, it's just like sugar. And then it just has some chlorine, just like sea salt. Well, in nature, sodium chloride is only bonded through like an electrostatic charge. I forget exactly what it's called, but it's not like a tight bond. So yes, sodium chloride, perfectly natural. But when we bind chlorine to a carbon, nature never does that. Basically, every form of a chlorocarbon is a pesticide.

• 33:56Speaker 00

  And one of the most famous ones was DDT, which was banned as a cancer-causing agent. It almost wiped out the national bird, the eagle. And it's so toxic, it's in our environment 50 years later. So chlorocarbons are pesticides, and that's what sucralose is. It's a chlorocarbon.

• 34:18Lewis Howes?

  Wow. So eliminate refined sugar, eliminate processed fats, which is mostly seed oils and artificial sweeteners. Are there any non-sugar sweeteners, natural, that you like or recommend that in the right doses are okay for you?

• 34:36Speaker 00

  Yes. So I use quite a bit of stevia.

• 34:41Lewis Howes?

  Uh huh. That's not an artificial sweetener, or it is?

• 34:43Speaker 00

  No, no. So some people bundle it together with artificial sweeteners just because it's a non-calorie sweetener. But it is a plant product. It's just a refined leaf, basically. And the thing to watch for, though, is that they don't mix it up with a lot of other chemicals, that it's the concentrated version.

• 35:06Lewis Howes?

  It's one ingredient, not 10 ingredients.

• 35:08Speaker 00

  Correct. Yeah. And another similar one would be monk fruit. That is also. Very similar in the way it tastes and looks and so forth. It's super, super concentrated and it's also a plant extract.

• 35:23Lewis Howes?

  So if you're gonna add something to a coffee or a drink or something.

• 35:27Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 35:27Lewis Howes?

  Stevia, monk fruit.

• 35:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:29Lewis Howes?

  You say is okay in the right doses.

• 35:31Speaker 00

  Yes. And then in the gray zone, I would also put sugar alcohols.

• 35:37Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 35:38Speaker 00

  Right? Some of them are better than others. I think the best one would be erythritol. Because it is very slightly metabolized by the body. So it doesn't really affect blood sugar, but it doesn't really cause any other problems. Some of the other sugar alcohols, they sort of stay in the digestive tract for a while. And then those sugar alcohols become food for your intestinal bacteria. And that's where you get a lot of bloating.

• 36:09Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 36:10Speaker 00

  So I would say sugar alcohols are okay if you eat them in moderation. So this is always the trick in recommending food. When you make a list and people wanna know the best one and so forth. And you categorize it and rank them. And now they say, that is a good one, I'm just gonna eat that. Or Dr. Ekberg said sugar alcohols are okay. So now I'm gonna eat that every day. I'm gonna bake with it, I'm gonna buy the ice cream with it. And that's the thing, everything in moderation. So sugar alcohols, if you eat a teaspoon or a tablespoon here and there, I think it's totally fine.

• 36:54Speaker 00

  But if you start baking with it and doing the ice cream and you start getting half a cup a day. Now you're definitely gonna upset the biome a little bit.

• 37:04Lewis Howes?

  Now, what matters based on your.

• 37:08Lewis Howes?

  Age range, you know, if someone's in their twenties versus I'm in my late thirties, almost forty, you're in your, I believe, fifties, you said.

• 37:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:16Lewis Howes?

  Does it matter based on how old you are, of what you should be eating, how much you should be eating, types of foods? Or is it pretty consistent throughout the decades?

• 37:28Speaker 00

  I would say it's pretty consistent throughout. And one analogy would be that, I mean, there's so many people, they say that women should fast this way, and teenagers should fast this way, and women over forty or under forty-seven. It's like, we love to complicate things, right? But are there different foods on the savanna for one giraffe versus another?

• 37:54Lewis Howes?

  An older giraffe and an younger giraffe.

• 37:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. Does the male and the female giraffe eat from different trees? It's like, not really. So I'm not saying that there's no value to that. But I think we tend to overcomplicate things. I think we, if we just understand that it's like ninety-nine percent the same, and then that last percent is where if we want to really pick it apart, then there may be some benefit there.

• 38:22Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha. What about when it comes to fat loss? You know, I think, what is it? Over a third of the US is now categorized either prediabetic or obesity or something like that, right? It's statistics?

• 38:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, obesity is somewhere around forty percent.

• 38:39Lewis Howes?

  Forty percent now?

• 38:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:41Lewis Howes?

  In the US?

• 38:41Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 38:42Lewis Howes?

  Do we know what that is globally, or is that just?

• 38:45Speaker 00

  I keep looking it up, I keep forgetting.

• 38:47Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 38:48Speaker 00

  But it's increasing everywhere.

• 38:49Lewis Howes?

  Because I thought it was thirty-three percent like five years ago in the US. And now it's forty percent.

• 38:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:55Lewis Howes?

  That's kind of scary.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  It is, it is. And what I talk a lot about, though, is the prediabetic, that's the gray area that nobody understands. So we have, we have ten percent diabetics. And over a certain age, it's more like twenty-five, thirty percent. But that's ten percent of the entire population is, is full-blown diabetic. And then they say, I forget the number, I think it's like a third of the population is prediabetic. But they base that off of blood sugar only.

• 39:33Speaker 00

  But the only way that you really know where you are on the scale is to do some form of insulin resistance test. And there's some complicated ones that you could do if you want, like oral glucose tolerance test and all that. But the simplest insulin resistance test is just to measure fasting insulin and see where you are.

• 39:55Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 39:56Speaker 00

  And this goes back to the model that I use my hands for, where glucose goes up, insulin goes up, and pushes glucose back down. So you could have a person who is, has a good glucose and a healthy insulin level, but then they eat too much carbs for them. And 10 years later, their insulin is three, four, five times higher, but their glucose is still normal. So that person is not going to make it into the statistics for the insulin resistant or the pre-diabetic. It takes 20 years to get there.

• 40:41Speaker 00

  So if we actually, if we actually measure the insulin and we say we're a little bit more sensitive to the gradient, now we're going to see that probably 80% of the population has some degree of insulin resistance.

• 40:58Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 40:59Speaker 00

  Right?

• 41:00Lewis Howes?

  Wow. So how do we eliminate that? Is it through, I mean, how do we, how do we burn, is it burning the fat? Is it changing the foods to eliminate that? Or what is that?

• 41:11Speaker 00

  It's, it's reducing the insulin.

• 41:14Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 41:15Speaker 00

  Because the insulin is ultimately the fat storing hormone.

• 41:18Lewis Howes?

  How do we reduce the insulin?

• 41:20Speaker 00

  By eating less carbohydrates. And, because carbohydrates are the foods that stimulate the insulin. And the other thing is to eat fewer meals. Because insulin rises in response to food. So when you don't eat, you're giving the body a chance to drop insulin. But most people, the only time they don't eat is when they're sleeping.

• 41:48Lewis Howes?

  Right, otherwise they're eating all day, snacking and...

• 41:51Speaker 00

  At best, they get eight hours of fasting. And then during their waking hours, they just keep topping off the insulin. But if you can just extend that fasting window by a few hours, you've already made a huge difference. So if you go, instead of eating your last meal at 11 and your first meal at 7, what if you just skip that evening meal? What if you don't eat after dinner at 6 o'clock? Now you've just extended that period where insulin could drop by five hours. More than 50% increase, right? So those are some simple tools. And that's why intermittent fasting is so popular.

• 42:36Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 42:37Speaker 00

  And I would say it's even more powerful than low carb, because fasting is zero carb.

• 42:45Lewis Howes?

  Now, like most diets and trends we see out there in the health world, you know, all these different names of diets. Is intermittent fasting going to be another fad for a decade and then go away? Or do you think this is something that people will actually use? Because there's so much pain with, you know, prediabetes and fat storage.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  I think when people learn to eat real food, then intermittent fasting almost becomes natural. It becomes so easy, it's such a no-brainer. And everyone who tries it, who gets to the point where they might eat twice a day. They might have lunch and dinner. And then there is no, there's no temptation, there's no urgency to go back because it feels so normal. And if we look again, we go back to our ancestors quarter million years, how did they eat? Well, they didn't wake up to a stocked fridge.

• 43:49Speaker 00

  They, they might have had some nuts or, or a little bit of meat left over from the day, but I don't believe that they would eat it because they had a healthy metabolism. They were metabolically flexible. So they woke up and they went out to catch something before they ate again. So I think it's very logical to assume that we ate once or twice a day for almost all of human history.

• 44:17Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm, until like a hundred years ago or something.

• 44:19Speaker 00

  Correct. And, and even less than that, and that's why we've had this explosion, even into, through the nineteen fifties and sixties and even into the seventies, people ate mostly three meals. And that, and then is when they told us to eat low fat. That's when the low fat craze came. And what do you do?

• 44:45Lewis Howes?

  High carb.

• 44:46Speaker 00

  When, exactly. When you can't eat the fats, now you gotta eat something else. And those carbs are very transient, right? They raise the blood sugar and your body has to get it out of there. And as soon as blood sugar drops, now you're hungry again. So this is part of what got us on this, this roller coaster.

• 45:04Lewis Howes?

  When did, when did diabetes become a thing in the U.S.? Like, when did this start to becoming a real problem?

• 45:11Speaker 00

  Originally, when they talked about diabetes, it was type one diabetes, right? Because that's a failure of the pancreas to produce insulin. And those people used to die. There was no treatment, there was no cure. If they ate extremely low carb, they could live a little longer. But basically, type one diabetes is, is starvation in the midst of plenty. That your blood sugar is seven hundred, but you can't use it because you don't have insulin. So insulin's not a bad thing. But type two was unheard of. Even at the

• 45:50Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 45:50Speaker 00

  Even in the eighteen hundreds, they may, they might have known what it was. But it was so rare that it wasn't like a concept or anything. And it really wasn't until the nineteen seventies that it became like a problem.

• 46:08Lewis Howes?

  The seventies.

• 46:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:09Lewis Howes?

  So we're talking fifty years ago.

• 46:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:11Lewis Howes?

  Type two diabetes.

• 46:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:12Lewis Howes?

  Wasn't a thing before then.

• 46:14Speaker 00

  They, they knew what it was and they, they had some insulin to treat it, but it was such a small percentage. That it was, I wouldn't say they didn't exist, but I mean, it was such a small issue compared to what we have today. The, the stats are, it, it's exponential.

• 46:32Lewis Howes?

  Hmm. So do we have a metabolism problem where people aren't able to metabolize as efficiently? What, what they're, they're bringing into their body and their system? And that's why the, the, you know, the weight, the belly fat, the, the obesity is happening? Or is it an insulin problem? Or is it a lack of movement problem?

• 46:53Speaker 00

  They, they all tie together.

• 46:55Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 46:56Speaker 00

  They all tie together. And the, this, the sad part is that it, it's so much harder to reverse the manifested problem. And I've, I've talked about this in some, some videos. I call it, you, your body has a carbohydrate tolerance or a carbohydrate processing machine. And it works to a point, but if you break it, now you're out of luck.

• 47:28Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 47:28Speaker 00

  Right? So if you've, if you've broken your machine now, it, you have to be so strict. And, and this is where you're, you're, you're talking about the, the metabolism problem. Now it's so difficult to get that body to start working healthy again, to become insulin sensitive and, and heal your metabolism. And that's why there's so many people who have trouble losing weight. So many people have stubborn weight. And stubborn weight is basically that you broke your carbohydrate processing machine, if you will.

• 48:06Lewis Howes?

  So how do we get rid of this stubborn weight then?

• 48:09Speaker 00

  And that's the trick. And this is, this is like the last few percent of the population. Like if you check the, the comments on, on my videos, there's all these people say, hallelujah, this works, this is so great. Um, I lost 60 pounds in two months and, and all I did was just, I followed your advice. I cut out the sugar, I cut out the white bread. But then there's, there's this other group that I really, really sympathize with. And they're the ones who go keto, they go low carb, they do intermittent fasting for years and they lose like three pounds.

• 48:53Lewis Howes?

  Really? Why is that?

• 48:55Speaker 00

  Because their bodies are so stubborn. And, and part of it, I, I do sympathize with them. Part of it, I think, is that it is so tough for them that it's challenging to be consistent. That if they truly, truly were consistent on the low carb and the exercise and the intermittent fasting, they would probably see some changes. But then there, there are these people who get close to zero results, even though they're, they're meticulous. And now we get into, some of the things I'm testing in my, in my clinic is to try to figure out some of these patterns.

• 49:35Speaker 00

  And, and I find that there's these relationships between the, the stored body fat and the hypothalamus, for example, and between the pancreas and the hypothalamus, between the liver and the pancreas, where

• 49:51Speaker 00

  The the organs are kinda stuck. They're just not talking to each other properly. And then, of course, there's there's hypothyroid, which is pretty common. Uh, but yeah, I I do feel for those people. And and there is a small percentage that just have so much harder time than the rest of them.

• 50:11Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. And what about the connection to losing weight, healing the body, with psychological traumas, emotional heartache?

• 50:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:23Lewis Howes?

  Or other things that have hurt you in the past?

• 50:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:27Lewis Howes?

  There's a great book, The Body Keeps the Score.

• 50:29Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 50:30Lewis Howes?

  Um, you know, is relationship trauma, childhood trauma, you know, breakups, breakdowns in life tied to losing weight as well?

• 50:44Speaker 00

  Yes. Um, everything is tied to everything. It's like, that's the first thing that you learn when you're in in clinical practice and you do the stuff that that I do is anything can cause anything. Uh, and what I try to teach people is the holistic approach. I call it holistic health. And some people, they they say, oh, you lost me when you said holistic. Now they think it's about burning incense and and crystals. But holistic simply means addressing the whole, right? You are a whole body. You want your body to be whole.

• 51:25Speaker 00

  So you need to look at all the aspects that tie into that. And some people, when it comes to weight, obviously, they look first at the food, which is like the the chemical, the biochemistry. And then some other people talk about the exercise, which is the physical, mechanical. And then now you're mentioning the third, which is the emotional. We have to understand we are chemical, structural and emotional. It's like three legs on a table. And for some people, they might have enough of a balance already that they just address one thing and they get results.

• 52:04Speaker 00

  But to truly get optimal health, we need to address all three for a period of time to get the results. When you do all of it for a period of time, that's when you can get that optimal health.

• 52:20Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 52:20Speaker 00

  So with weight loss, I don't think it's ever, well, I shouldn't say ever. For most people, it's not the primary component, but it's definitely a contributing component. Because we know, for example, that stress contributes to a hormone called cortisol, and the purpose of cortisol is to raise blood sugar. If you raise blood sugar, you're going to trigger more insulin. The more insulin, you become more insulin resistant. So I mean, this is so plain and so documented that you give someone cortisol and they become insulin resistant.

• 53:00Speaker 00

  So if you are stressed for whatever reason, now you will become more insulin resistant. It's more difficult to reverse these processes if you are stressed at the same time.

• 53:13Lewis Howes?

  So high blood sugar, let me make sure I'm understanding this, does not necessarily come from the foods you eat, but it can also come from the stresses you have with your thoughts?

• 53:24Speaker 00

  Yes, absolutely.

• 53:25Lewis Howes?

  Does it also come with foods also, or is it more from thoughts turned into stress and emotions?

• 53:30Speaker 00

  It's definitely more from food. And I don't think, I think it'd be a very, very rare case of someone who is metabolically healthy and insulin sensitive and has stressful thoughts to become, to create a metabolic problem. That by itself is probably not going to do it. But for people who are insulin resistant, now if they have stress on top of that, that becomes a very significant factor. And same thing with exercise. I've done some videos on this where Too many people think that exercise is all about blood, sweat and tears.

• 54:14Speaker 00

  That, yes, if you're gonna be an elite athlete, you need to go through some pain. You need to challenge your body to become better. But that's not necessarily the healthiest way, and more isn't better. So for the person who has stressed their body, they depleted their body, they got this, this mid-weight gain, midsection weight gain, those people should not go to a boot camp in the gym. Right? That's not gonna help them. Because this, this midsection weight gain is too much cortisol.

• 54:52Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 54:52Speaker 00

  Right? You can gain weight everywhere, but if you have it in the midsection, that's very indicative of cortisol. So now, if you go join a boot camp and they, you got this motivated, great trainer to whip you along, then you're just gonna make tons of cortisol that's gonna make the problem worse.

• 55:13Lewis Howes?

  Really? So what type of physical activity should we be doing to lose the midsection weight?

• 55:17Speaker 00

  We should do truly aerobic exercise. And aerobic means with air, which means that it's at an intensity low enough that we can breathe comfortably and supply the oxygen. So as soon as you start huffing and puffing, that's not a bad thing for short duration. But if you go and you do a forty-five minute spin class every day and you're just huffing and puffing, you're gonna make way, way, way too much cortisol.

• 55:48Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 55:49Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 55:50Lewis Howes?

  So you might be hurting your chances of losing the weight.

• 55:53Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 55:53Lewis Howes?

  If you're doing that intensive of workout every day.

• 55:56Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 55:57Lewis Howes?

  If you're doing a HIIT training two, three times a week for forty-five minutes, is that okay? If like that's still intense.

• 56:04Speaker 00

  If it's forty five minutes, it's not hit.

• 56:06Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 56:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. Hit, high intensity means that it's so int- to me, my definition.

• 56:13Lewis Howes?

  Ten fifteen minutes.

• 56:15Speaker 00

  It's not, well, maybe the total duration would be ten fifteen minutes. But if you do interval, high, high intensity interval training is what hit is. Then the intervals should be so intense, you can't even do them for more than thirty seconds. Like, they, they should be so intense, provided you're fit enough to, to do that, of course. But if you do thirty seconds and then you do thirty second rest and then thirty seconds, you should be able to bring your heart rate up to maximum in maybe four or five intervals. That is hit. Okay, now, now you're done.

• 56:54Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 56:55Speaker 00

  Right, you've, you've created your.

• 56:57Lewis Howes?

  Five minutes, yeah.

• 56:58Speaker 00

  Your, your positive hormones. And your, your growth hormone to stimulate fat burning. Your growth hormone to stimulate muscle building, to produce and, and to stimulate new brain synapses to enhance learning and focus. All the good stuff in the brain depends on, on hormones. And two of those hormones are human growth hormone and B D N F, which is brain derived neurotrophic factor. And those two hormones are necessary to make new synapses. Alright, so your, your brain is constantly remodeling.

• 57:39Speaker 00

  And every time you learn something, whether you're twenty years old or eighty years old, you make new synapses. And the synapses you use, they get stronger. The ones that you don't use go away. But these two hormones, which some of the strongest ways to produce them is high intensity exercise and fasting.

• 58:03Speaker 00

  Are pretty much required to build a brain and and to learn.

• 58:08Lewis Howes?

  Really? So what type of high intensity exercise are you doing on a weekly basis?

• 58:14Speaker 00

  My favorite to really get the heart rate up is I go to my favorite mountain in in close to where I live, where there's a trail and it's like four, four miles around. And I walk a little bit, I jog a little bit, I walk a little bit, jog a little bit, just kind of enjoying the movement. And my heart rate probably stays around hundred to hundred and twenty, hundred and thirty maybe. And then I, there are some hills and then I do some sprints up the hills. So now I push it a little bit and thirty second push and my heart rate's a hundred and sixty.

• 58:58Speaker 00

  And then I walk a little, jog a little, there's another hill and I push it a little bit more and my heart rate hits a hundred and sixty, five, hundred and seventy. And and then my, I might do that in thirty seconds or it might take a minute to to get to that heart rate and then I'm done.

• 59:16Lewis Howes?

  You do a few hills?

• 59:17Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 59:17Lewis Howes?

  What if you did twenty hills?

• 59:20Speaker 00

  Then.

• 59:20Lewis Howes?

  Too much, a ten to thirty second?

• 59:22Speaker 00

  That might be okay if you're twenty, twenty-five years old, you're an elite athlete and that's part of of your event. But if you're forty-five, fifty, sixty and you just try to stay as healthy as possible, I think that's too much.

• 59:39Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 59:40Speaker 00

  And in any event, it's unnecessary because it's not about the quantity. Quantity is good for fitness, but not, not necessarily for health.

• 59:51Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. So you only need a, you know, a few sprints every couple, is this every day or every few days?

• 59:59Speaker 00

  It's, I, I would say it's no more than twice a week.

• 1:00:03Lewis Howes?

  Twice a week.

• 1:00:03Speaker 00

  For the, for the average person now and we, we have to, if, if you're watching this, you, you have to understand if you're in, in the elite athlete category or in the fifty-year-old trying to stave off.

• 1:00:18Lewis Howes?

  Living life.

• 1:00:18Speaker 00

  Degenerative disease.

• 1:00:20Lewis Howes?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:00:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:21Lewis Howes?

  So if you're more of a, you know, if you're an athlete, even in your forties and fifties, you could push it a little farther if you're competing in stuff or doing triathlons or marathons or. Just wanted to stay lean. It's important to be doing that a little bit more.

• 1:00:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, there's no doubt, I mean, I talk a lot of my videos about moderation. Like, you do these HIIT exercises, you do it twice a week, you keep it short. But, obviously, that doesn't apply to someone who has a goal in an event. If you're going after fitness, there is no substitute for punishing yourself.

• 1:01:00Lewis Howes?

  Right. You gotta do it.

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. Because if you're gonna perform in an event, you need to do something similar to that event at that level of intensity and duration.

• 1:01:12Lewis Howes?

  So fasting and high-intensity exercise, but it's not doing a, you know, CrossFit every day, five days a week.

• 1:01:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:20Lewis Howes?

  Because that creates too much cortisol.

• 1:01:21Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:01:22Lewis Howes?

  Especially if you're older, you know, past thirty or something, it's probably not as good to do that. Is something like that, you know, a forty-five to sixty-minute CrossFit type of training once a week, you think okay, or is it still creating too much cortisol?

• 1:01:37Speaker 00

  I think that's, I think once or twice a week, for the average person, if you feel good, I think is fine.

• 1:01:44Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:44Speaker 00

  But again, I, when I have people come in to my clinic, those are people who have been to twenty different doctors. They have tried vegan and carnivore and low carb and yo-yo dieting and gluten-free. They've done all that. So, these are people with challenges. And now, if you're a little frail, now, that's where you really have to be careful and get everything right. But, yeah, if you're in your thirties, forties, fifties, you're feeling fine, then go for it. Do one or two of those spin classes.

• 1:02:26Speaker 00

  And what I would caution, though, is pay attention. Notice how your body is reacting. How do you feel after the class? Are you exhausted? Are you stiff in the morning? Do you have trouble getting out of bed? Do your joints hurt the next day? Then you're probably doing too much.

• 1:02:47Lewis Howes?

  Doing too much, yeah. And what about, you know, we talked about fasting a little bit here. What are the top three benefits of intermittent fasting or longer fasting? A 24-hour, 48-hour fasting that you've seen in your research?

• 1:03:01Speaker 00

  So number one is lowering insulin.

• 1:03:07Speaker 00

  Number, and with that, lowering blood sugar, losing weight, et cetera. The other big thing is that you induce something called autophagy. But that's with, that's with longer fasting. Autophagy is, it's called self, autophagy stands for self-eating. And that's where, if you're putting food in your body, if you're putting especially protein in your body, there's plenty of resources. Your body knows, hey, there's some, there's some more coming. I can just use that to, to build tissue and to, to do the stuff I need. But if you stop putting it in, now it becomes a very, very scarce resource.

• 1:03:52Speaker 00

  So now your body has to figure out where else can I get this? And that's where autophagy, self-eating comes in. So now your body up-regulates its recycling mechanisms.

• 1:04:07Lewis Howes?

  How long does it take to fast before autophagy starts?

• 1:04:12Speaker 00

  So, again, that's what everybody asks, and it's not a black or white. It's a continuous, it's a gradient. I would say that it barely starts around 16 to 18 hours. That's where you get like a trickle, but then it increases pretty fast. Where there's a significant change between 18 and 24 hours. And then it, it sort of takes off from there. So 48 hours into it, it's, it's very significant.

• 1:04:46Lewis Howes?

  48 hours into it. So the longer you can go every, you know. Extra few hours, it continues to self eat.

• 1:04:54Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:04:54Lewis Howes?

  The fat stored in your body more and more.

• 1:04:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the self eating now, part of what it eats is is fat, obviously, because you're not adding any fuel. But the key with autophagy is protein. Because you need protein to to build the tissue. Your your cells have so much of a lifespan, they break down and then you have to make new ones. And you need protein for that. So when you don't add any now, you have to go look for some. And a lot of people will say, oh, well, that's where fasting is dangerous. Because you're going to eat up your muscles. The body is too smart for that. Because you need your muscles to go on the next hunt. So we have all these mechanisms to spare muscles.

• 1:05:42Speaker 00

  And that's why growth hormone increases also exponentially along with autophagy. And growth hormone is muscle sparing. It's basically telling the body, one of the mechanisms that tell the body. Don't use the muscle, go find something else. So now it gets much better at recycling these broken cells. It gets much better at finding any kind of resource like virus and bacteria and parasites. That may also be made out of protein.

• 1:06:17Lewis Howes?

  Really? And and kind of eating those things, the bad things first. Interesting. What's the longest you've gone fasting?

• 1:06:25Speaker 00

  The longest I've done is five days or four, four and a half.

• 1:06:30Lewis Howes?

  No food, water only?

• 1:06:31Speaker 00

  Just water.

• 1:06:32Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I've done three days.

• 1:06:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:34Lewis Howes?

  And you see the benefits a lot after a day and a half, you really start to see and feel the benefits.

• 1:06:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:39Lewis Howes?

  By day three, I went the total, right up to three and I was like, okay, I need, I was starting to get a little tired. And I think I pushed it because I worked out twice, which you're probably not supposed to do, but I did like a. An incline walk for an hour and I, you know, which I don't recommend, but I was trying to be.

• 1:06:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's, that's probably too much.

• 1:07:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:01Speaker 00

  And this is where we come into this muscle sparing thing.

• 1:07:04Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:05Speaker 00

  That I'm all in favor of doing some exercise while you're fasting.

• 1:07:10Lewis Howes?

  Walking though.

• 1:07:12Speaker 00

  Because you're going to increase your ketones, you're going to increase your, your growth hormone. But if you're not adding any protein and you do something intense enough to break down a muscle, now your body has to sort of juggle the resources. Like it has to repair those muscles and where's the protein going to come from? So it might break down some other muscles to repair that.

• 1:07:38Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:07:38Speaker 00

  Okay, I haven't seen specific research on this or anything. It's just kind of common sense. What, what would the body do?

• 1:07:45Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 1:07:46Speaker 00

  So I, I would exercise, but I would keep it to purely aerobic. I wouldn't even do HIIT, not even brief HIIT during those times.

• 1:07:56Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. What did you do for those four and a half, five days?

• 1:08:00Speaker 00

  Uh, I probably not, didn't do much of anything.

• 1:08:03Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 1:08:03Speaker 00

  Probably just, yeah, maybe a little bit of walking, but basically just my, my everyday activities.

• 1:08:10Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Did you feel pretty sharp after two, three days? Or you start to feel a little slower towards the end?

• 1:08:18Speaker 00

  I don't feel as great as people tell me they feel.

• 1:08:22Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I've got so, so much energy.

• 1:08:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, so I, I do okay. I don't feel any, any dramatic improvement in, in focus. But I do know that, that it happens because I get the testimonials. And, and I do know, especially for people who might have insulin resistance, when they fast, they're going to increase their ketones, which becomes the, the alternative brain fuel.

• 1:08:49Lewis Howes?

  Right. And it also kind of helps heal certain things. The, if you've been driving the insulin, it's allowing that to recover more, right?

• 1:08:57Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:08:57Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, you, yeah. Your, your whole carbohydrates.

• 1:09:03Speaker 00

  Processing machine is recovering because you're not, you're not adding anything.

• 1:09:07Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 1:09:08Speaker 00

  And, and one more thing about autophagy and fasting is for brain trauma. And, and this, I've hardly ever heard it spoken about. That the brain is, is kind of its own little world up there inside the cranium. We have the blood-brain barrier and a lot of things that go on in the brain are different than the way they work in the body. So the reason, for example, that, that spinal cord injuries are so devastating is that the nervous system is really poor at repairing itself.

• 1:09:47Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:09:47Speaker 00

  Right? It's not, it's, it's encased in bone for a reason. It's not supposed to get damaged. You're not supposed to crack your skull or, or break your spine. And, and that sense that, that tissue is a little different, is sensitive. And it doesn't have the capacity to repair itself very, very well. But the, if you have a concussion, for example, you get some, some tissue, brain trauma, you get some inflammation. And about the only way that the brain can clean that up is through autophagy. The self-eating.

• 1:10:23Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:10:23Speaker 00

  Right? So when people have a, a brain trauma, traumatic brain injury, that's the number one time that they wanna absolutely not have any sugar.

• 1:10:35Lewis Howes?

  Really? Fast at that time?

• 1:10:36Speaker 00

  Yes. And if they can throw in a 24-hour fast or something, then that's gonna be huge for the, to reduce that, that inflammation.

• 1:10:46Lewis Howes?

  And what about when you hear like, you know, sometimes you might feel lightheaded or a little tired or lethargic? And people, you'll hear people say, well, I have, I have low blood sugar. I need to like have a piece of candy. It gives me more energy in that moment.

• 1:11:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:01Lewis Howes?

  What is that scenario?

• 1:11:03Speaker 00

  That's when you have trained your body to depend on carbohydrates. Right? If you go year in and year out and feed your body sugar or carbohydrates every two hours, your body is gonna up-regulate all of the pathways to deal with carbohydrates. It's gonna down-regulate any pathway to pull from fat. So now, after so many years of that, you cut out the carbohydrates. You have no fuel source because the backup system is dormant. Your body doesn't know, now what do we do?

• 1:11:40Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:11:40Speaker 00

  Right? So it's because you trained your body into depend on carbohydrates. And it's so easy for most people. The vast majority of people can get out of that in three to four days just by cutting out the carbs, eat more protein, eat more fat, teach your body to up-regulate the other system, which is fat burning. And that is where you have metabolic flexibility.

• 1:12:07Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 1:12:08Speaker 00

  So most people probably gonna take a few months to get like totally back to metabolic flexibility. But you'll break a huge part of that carb dependence just in a few days.

• 1:12:22Lewis Howes?

  Hmm. What would you say the top three ways to increase human growth hormone?

• 1:12:30Speaker 00

  They're pretty simple, other than injecting it, which I'm not a fan of.

• 1:12:35Lewis Howes?

  Right, right, naturally.

• 1:12:36Speaker 00

  Yes, naturally. So fasting is the most powerful.

• 1:12:40Lewis Howes?

  Human growth hormone occurs when you fast over, I think you said 18 hours or roughly around there?

• 1:12:45Speaker 00

  It's the same as autophagy. It increases gradually. I think you hit the maximum somewhere after four or five days.

• 1:12:54Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:12:55Speaker 00

  Or up to seven days, then I think it's pretty much plateaued at a high level.

• 1:13:01Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 1:13:02Speaker 00

  So fasting and the other one is the exercise, the high intensity exercise.

• 1:13:09Lewis Howes?

  Sprints.

• 1:13:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:10Lewis Howes?

  Is that also with like heavy lifting or is it just more sprints?

• 1:13:13Speaker 00

  Yes. So here's, here's how I want to think about this. Why, and, and this is what I encourage people to do. This is what I'm trying to do with my videos is try to think like the body. What would I do if I was the body? Why is the body doing this? So what's the purpose of growth hormone, right? It's to grow tissue. And why would the body want to do that? Because there is a need, right? So if you're sitting on the couch and you're eating potato chips, why would the body make growth hormone, right? But if you challenge your body, if you push it,

• 1:13:55Speaker 00

  if you do pushups until you fail, like you get a million dollars if you can do one more and you can't do it. That's pushing your body till it fails to exhaustion. And now what's the message? The message is I gotta get better. The body says, if he's gonna do this again, I want to be prepared next time he does this. I better build some, some muscle. And to do that, I need some growth hormone. Same thing with, with fasting. Okay, they're not putting in any other fuel right now. I have to be smart about this. I have to get my energy someplace else from fat. So growth hormone is fat burning.

• 1:14:40Speaker 00

  I have to protect my muscles so I can go on a hunt tomorrow. So let's, let's protect the muscles. So when you challenge your body, when you, when you scare your body, you're telling it, you're, you're, what you're doing right now isn't quite good enough. You gotta get better tomorrow. That's it. And there, there's so many other little ways like Wim Hof breathing. That's a stress. Anything that's stressful is going to increase growth hormone. You can even just sit and hold your breath for as long as you can and you're going to increase growth hormone.

• 1:15:21Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:15:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:23Lewis Howes?

  Don't pass out, but yeah.

• 1:15:26Speaker 00

  And it's probably not at the magnitude that you get with fasting and high intensity, but there's all these different things where you challenge your body, your body has to get better.

• 1:15:35Lewis Howes?

  What about cold showers, hot?

• 1:15:37Speaker 00

  Same thing.

• 1:15:38Lewis Howes?

  Hot steam?

• 1:15:39Speaker 00

  Same thing.

• 1:15:39Lewis Howes?

  Anything that stresses the body, but you don't want to be stressing it for hours is what I'm hearing.

• 1:15:43Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:15:44Lewis Howes?

  Because that creates cortisol, which is spikes your insulin.

• 1:15:47Speaker 00

  Yes. And there is, there is you stress and there's distress. And the founder of, the guy who came up with the stress and the adaptive stress response was Hans Selier. He did tons of studies on this and he found that short-term stress. I mean, you stress is good stress, right? Your body needs stress to get better. If, your body constantly breaks down. You have a turnover of cells. So it's going to break down. Now you need a reason to make new cells. That's the you stress, right?

• 1:16:32Speaker 00

  You need to use your body, you need to use your brain, you need to use your liver. Every, every tissue needs to have a purpose, use it or lose it. So that's the you stress. We need a moderate amount of different kinds of stress like gravity and weight bearing and so forth. That gives the body a reason to make new healthy tissue. But this stress is when we're stressing the body too much or in a chronic way. Now it becomes, instead of adaptation, it becomes mal-adaptation. And it's like exercise, so many people, they say, they think that exercise is what makes you strong.

• 1:17:17Speaker 00

  But it isn't. Exercise breaks you down. And it gives the body a reason to build a better body, right? So it's it's not the exercise that does it, it's the recovery.

• 1:17:29Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, the sleep recovery.

• 1:17:30Speaker 00

  Yes. So after a really, really hard workout, like if you if you beat your body to pulp in the gym, you need seventy two hours to recover before you do that again.

• 1:17:43Lewis Howes?

  Seventy two?

• 1:17:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:17:44Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:17:45Speaker 00

  I mean, it depends on how how much do you break it down? Like, how many fibers do you break? But you can typically tell, and I'm sure you you know this, that the day after you're sore, the second day, you're more sore.

• 1:18:01Lewis Howes?

  Uh huh, exactly.

• 1:18:02Speaker 00

  Right? The third day, it starts to go away. Your body hasn't healed in that time period.

• 1:18:09Lewis Howes?

  So you shouldn't push it again, the same muscle groups.

• 1:18:12Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:18:12Lewis Howes?

  The next day or two.

• 1:18:13Speaker 00

  Correct. Depending on on the intensity again.

• 1:18:16Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. You can do some, if you're doing a leg day, you can do some, you know, walking and stretching, I guess, the next couple of days. But you don't want to be doing another leg day back to back.

• 1:18:24Speaker 00

  Correct. And and this is the trick for athletes to find that balance of, yes, you have to break it down, but then they get they get into the blood, sweat and tears mentality, no pain, no gain mentality. So they always think that more is better, which it isn't. It's like it's the recovery. Yes, you need to break it down, but it's the recovery that makes you stronger.

• 1:18:47Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm. So much has happened in the last decade in the health, nutrition and exercise world that is seem to be evolving, new science, new research, different fads that have come and gone. What do you see is coming over the this next decade with nutrition, the science of health, optimizing the body?

• 1:19:09Lewis Howes?

  All these different things. Do you see anything new emerging that is actually going to be beneficial? Or do we just need to keep doing the same? You know, eat real food, work out consistently, recover well, and take care of your emotions?

• 1:19:25Speaker 00

  If I have anything to do with it, which I hope I will, then we're gonna start developing some common sense. There's always gonna be fads that people want the quick fixes, which is why the yo-yo diets. They think that you can, I've abused my body for five years. Now I'm gonna do something for three days to reverse all that. I'm gonna lose my 20 pounds because it says so on the tabloid. And then I'm gonna go right back to abusing my body and I'll be fine again. That makes no sense to anybody and yet we do it. So I think my, my, my mission is to teach health, to teach some common sense.

• 1:20:10Speaker 00

  And that's where we wanna go back to historically, what have humans done? What is our DNA designed for? What does a human body need? Right? It needs the replacement parts. It needs fuel. It needs vitamins, minerals. It needs stimulation, use it or lose it. It needs a productive mindset. It needs a purpose. It needs joy. And it doesn't matter if it's a rat in a lab or it's a human. If you stress it continuously, it will break down. You cannot get health in that situation. So again, chemical, structural, emotional,

• 1:20:54Speaker 00

  and then we need to find that, that balance.

• 1:20:57Lewis Howes?

  I love it.

• 1:20:59Speaker 00

  And it's, and it's not, it's not optional.

• 1:21:03Speaker 00

  It's not like do this if you get around to it. It's a human requirement. It's a law of nature. You can't, you can't fight it or, or ignore it any more than you can gravity. Like the human body has requirements in the chemical, structural, emotional aspect. And if we understand what those are, then we can do something good with it.

• 1:21:30Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely. I've got a couple of final questions for you, Dr. Ekberg.

• 1:21:34Speaker 00

  All right.

• 1:21:34Lewis Howes?

  But I want people to follow you first over on your YouTube, Dr. Ekberg, and also your website, DrEgbergAsWell.com. You're all over social media, but YouTube is the main thing and your website. You've got so many great informational, educational videos, teaching how to optimize the health, diving into the research and the science of these things. So I want people to follow you over there. We'll have it all linked up as well. How else can we be of support to you today before I ask these final questions?

• 1:22:05Speaker 00

  I would say, look at my YouTube channel and take an active interest

• 1:22:15Speaker 00

  and then share that information. I, I tell people often in, in the office that, see, here, here's the thing with health.

• 1:22:25Speaker 00

  It's like air. We, we don't value it until it's gone, right? But when it's gone, nothing is more important. So people will give lip service to the fact that, well, you want to be healthy. Is healthy important? Everyone's going to put it number one on their list. And then they're going to ignore it until they get a scare, right? But all these processes that we're talking about, the insulin resistance, the, the cancer, the di, the, the dementia. They hit people at an epidemic scale in their sixties and seventies, but they start in the thirties.

• 1:23:08Speaker 00

  And yet, we don't care until it's too late. So that's, that's what I would like for people to understand is that these things take. Here, here's the problem, they don't kill us fast enough, right?

• 1:23:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:27Speaker 00

  The, if you eat poison and, and it kills you, if you have an anaphylactic shock to peanuts, you'll know about it. But this stuff takes twenty, thirty years, so everyone ignores it. And until it's too late or much, much harder to change.

• 1:23:43Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:44Speaker 00

  And all these things, a hundred years ago, people died from infections. And poverty and starvation and natural disasters. Today, we don't die from that. Ninety-five percent, there's still some, some unfortunate places, but most of the world. We die from man-made conditions. We, we die from things that ninety-five percent of them.

• 1:24:13Speaker 00

  Are degenerative disease that could be avoided if we just understood what to do. And why don't we care about health? Because we shouldn't have to. The body is so magnificent, it is so incredibly smart. That it fixes almost everything for us. It's just not invincible and it takes thirty years to, to break it down. But the reason that we can't afford to just trust the body anymore. Is that the world has changed more in the last fifty years than it has in the previous fifty thousand. There's no other animal on the planet that has to worry about it because they live in their natural environment.

• 1:24:58Speaker 00

  And they graze off the planet. We don't do that. We spend half our lives in front of a screen. We eat chemicals and processed foods, we have no connection with, with nature. We have changed the world so much, we can't afford to take health for granted anymore. And that's. And that's the message that I want to get out there. But I don't want to sound like a doomsday prophet either. I want people to understand that if you do something with this while there's plenty of time, I think we can have quality of life into our 90s and beyond, right? Instead of, people, people say that we live so much longer today. It's like, no, we don't.

• 1:25:43Speaker 00

  We die longer. For so many people, life is over at 60, even though they hang around for another 30 years.

• 1:25:52Lewis Howes?

  They can't move the way they used to.

• 1:25:53Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:25:54Lewis Howes?

  They don't enjoy life the way they used to.

• 1:25:56Speaker 00

  Exactly. They can't go do things, they can't play with their grandkids, they can't, can't reach up and take something off a shelf. And there's, there are huge numbers of people who just don't have that quality of life. But we have to understand that it's, it's in our power to do something. If we just learn what the body needs and we don't take it for granted.

• 1:26:18Lewis Howes?

  Wow. That's beautiful. Well, I want people to follow you on your YouTube, DrEggberg.com as well. We'll have it all linked up. But I've got a couple of final questions for you. This is called the three truths question.

• 1:26:30Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 1:26:31Lewis Howes?

  So imagine a hypothetical scenario. It's your last day on earth, many years away. You live as long as you want to live, but you gotta call it quits on this world. And you've accomplished all of your dreams, you've created everything you want to create, but for whatever reason, we don't have access to your creations. All your content, your videos, anything you make, for whatever reason, it's gone in this scenario. But you get to leave behind three lessons to the world. Three things you know to be true, and this is all we would have to remember, your information. What would be those three truths for you?

• 1:27:05Speaker 00

  You have been gifted the most incredible healing machine ever devised. Your, your body is a representation of, of infinite intelligence. And I don't know if I can come up with three things, but the second would, would be respect it and, and understand what it needs.

• 1:27:34Speaker 00

  And this carries over to prosperity in every way. Because they're not isolated principles for health or wealth. It's like when your body is working, when you feel good, you're more productive. You feel more worthy, you can pursue things better. So it's like everything ties together.

• 1:27:57Lewis Howes?

  Yes. That's beautiful. Was that the third one or was that the second one? Respect your body. Is there one more?

• 1:28:05Speaker 00

  Well, here's a... We kind of talked about this, but I'll... And it's sort of a repeat, but I tell people that the healing is a law of nature. So it's sort of like water flowing down a hillside. That the water is going to flow because of gravity. And it's going to keep doing that no matter what. It's not optional, it's not going to do it sometimes, it's going to do it all the time. Because that's what it does. That's how healing works also. Now, you can build a barrier. You can build a dam on that hillside.

• 1:28:49Speaker 00

  And you can slow the water. You can keep it from running for a while. And that's what the obstacles, the stress, the toxicity, the lifestyle that we have. But if you, on the hillside, now if you remove that obstacle from the hillside, the water's going to start running again. Healing is going to just pick up where it left off. You don't have to teach the water to do what it does. It's built in. It's the only thing it knows how to do.

• 1:29:30Lewis Howes?

  That's beautiful. Just remove the obstacle.

• 1:29:32Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:29:32Lewis Howes?

  Allow your body to heal.

• 1:29:34Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:29:35Lewis Howes?

  Dr. Ekberg, I want to acknowledge you for a moment for everything you've created in your life and how you were an elite athlete, you know, and then you use that knowledge to continue to serve and help more people become athletes of their own life, you know, maybe not as elite as you, but the athlete of their life.

• 1:29:52Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:29:53Lewis Howes?

  To realign to their natural habitat.

• 1:29:55Speaker 00

  Health champions.

• 1:29:57Lewis Howes?

  Health champions.

• 1:29:57Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:29:58Lewis Howes?

  I love that. And I want to acknowledge you for your consistent dedication. You know, you continue to learn, you continue to develop, you continue to serve so many people. So I appreciate all that you do for the world and how you help so many of us get back to that habitat. My final question is, what is your definition of greatness?

• 1:30:15Speaker 00

  When you are honest with yourself and you realize what you can be and you go after the ultimate version of you.

• 1:30:31Lewis Howes?

  There you go. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on Apple Podcasts as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.