The Top 7 Belly Fat Burning Hacks For 2024 That Are PROVEN To Work!

As a holiday wrap-up, we’ve listened to you and answered one of the most popular questions; What is your favourite EVER episode? But, we think the more important question is what is YOUR favourite episode on the Diary of CEO of all time. Using our in-house data scientist and a group of analysts, we’ve found the most replayed and shared moments from 2023. This should be the most valuable episode you will ever listen to. 7th Most Replayed Moment, Dr. Giles Yeo. Dr Giles takes on some of the biggest myths about health, weight and obesity. His books, Why Calories Don’t Count and Gene Eating: https://amzn.to/3NFeUdE Twitter: https://bit.ly/3Y9IZF0 Instagram: https://bit.ly/3Rs5bIj 6th Most Replayed Moment, Dr. Mindy Pelz. In this clip we talk about intermittent fasting, the gut reset fast and the belly fat burning diet. Dr Mindy lays out how to eat and behave to improve our overall health. Instagram: https://bit.ly/461aBB0 Dr Mindy’s book, Fast Like A Girl: https://amzn.to/41y9Opr 5th Most Replayed Moment, Professor Matthew Walker. This is from my conversation with the Worlds Number One expert on sleep. He gives us a roadmap for how to sleep better, explaining the impact of our sleep on our overall health, happiness and everything in between. Instagram: https://bit.ly/3YsK1f6 Matt’s bestseller, Why We Sleep: https://amzn.to/3totIGS Twitter: https://bit.ly/3yI60V7 4th Most Replayed Moment, Dr. Daniel Amen. Taken from Dr. Daniel Amen’s second appearance on the show, we discuss how to grow a healthier, better brain. Daniel is the World’s Leading Neuroscientist who may have scanned and seen more brains than anyone else. The no.1 book on Brain health: https://amzn.to/3vbmXsh Instagram: https://bit.ly/3tHjm4r Twitter: https://bit.ly/3scQpgr 3rd Most Replayed Moment, Gary Brecka. Gary Brecka is one of the world’s most renowned human biologists. Our conversation covers the ultimate human wellbeing checklist. From Dana White’s transformation using the super human protocol to stripping fat, listen to transform your life. Instagram: http://bit.ly/3IVf6Dw Twitter: http://bit.ly/41w492P 2nd Most Replayed Moment, Dr. Tim Spector. A favourite guest on DOAC, here Tim busts myths about a frequently debated subject: diet vs exercise. Foor For Life, Tim’s book: https://amzn.to/3RTckDt Instagram: https://bit.ly/3CDRuQD Twitter: https://bit.ly/3VG0zil No.1 Most Replayed Moment: Dr Tara Swart. The most listened to moment ever this year is neuroscientist Dr. Tara explaining the brain and body’s connection. We dive into the influence the brain has on our health, relationships and well-being. Dr Tara’s book: https://amzn.to/47dokE0 Instagram: https://bit.ly/48hJ1k2 Twitter: https://bit.ly/46gqYZI Bonus Moment, Mo Gawdat: This is from episode 101 with Mo Gawdat, and it’s the most shared episode we’ve ever had of all time on WhatsApp. Mo explains to me his influential equation for happiness, and we discuss how to put it into practice. Mo’s book, Solve For Happy: https://amzn.to/489n5qJ Instagram: https://bit.ly/3qmYSMY Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Steven Bartlett?

  Here's the most important question. People ask me this question all the time. They say, Steve, what is your favourite ever episode on the Diary of a CEO podcast? And I think the more important question is actually, what is your favourite episode on the Diary of a CEO podcast of all time? And so I went out to try and answer that question. What is your favourite episode? What is your favourite moment on this podcast of all time? And using a data scientist and a big team of analysts, we've found the most replayed moments of all the hundreds of episodes we've produced this year to show to you today. These are the moments that you replayed and shared more than any other moment on this

• 0:45Steven Bartlett?

  podcast. Theoretically, this should be the most valuable Diary of a CEO episode you ever listened to, because it's a compilation of the most valuable moments that we've ever had on this show in 2023.

• 1:07Steven Bartlett?

  The seventh most replayed moment is my conversation with Giles Yo, where he takes on some of the biggest myths about health, weight, obesity. And he answers the question, do we have to get fatter as we age? Is it genetic? What are the easy ways to manage our weight? After I read it in your book about us gaining more and more weight as we age, I Googled it. And the Healthcare Research and Quality Agency said that we naturally tend to gain weight as we age to the tune of one to two pounds per year, according to their review. And that's from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which I found quite startling.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  But completely accurate. So the numbers, so what the numbers that we have is, yeah, I think that's right, actually. So between 20 and 50 years old, those 30 years intervening, the average person, average, will gain about 15 kilos in weight, which is 32. Yes, two pounds a year, one to two pounds a year. 15 kilos in weight is gained over 30 years on average. Some gain very little, others gain a hell of a lot more. We look at ourselves in a mirror. I look at myself in a mirror. But it's true.

• 2:15Steven Bartlett?

  I don't want to be that guy.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Mate, I don't know much choice you have.

• 2:20Steven Bartlett?

  What can I do to try and stay? Because for me, it's not really about the weight thing or how you look. It's more about like, I

• 2:28Steven Bartlett?

  I am, I don't know how to say this, but there was this big set of stairs the other day, really, really long set of stairs leading down to this lake. I was in Indonesia a couple of months ago. And I remember thinking about those stairs and thinking, God, if I wasn't, you know, athletic and strong and didn't have good knees and things like that, there's no way I'd be able to get down this long winding, hand carved set of Indonesian stairs so that I could go on this boat trip that I was going to go on. And I just thought about how, it was a weird thing. I know this is kind of a strange story to tell, but it crossed my mind. I got to the bottom of the stairs and I turned to the person I was with and was literally like, you know, that's why I've got to stay in shape for as long as I can, because I want to do these boat trips and I want to go on this little rafting

• 3:11Steven Bartlett?

  thing, but I won't even be able to access it unless I can go down, up and down those stairs, like 200 meters of stairs down this cliff. So that's what I care about. I care about being active and strong and fit for as long as I possibly can. And I, from what you've said about gravity and weight, being overweight is going to inhibit my chances of being able to do those stairs.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  So, so there, I think there are two elements there. First of all, there is doing the things that we want to do. Okay. Like that, because you're exactly right. These are the things which I can still do that. I can still walk up a mountain or down a mountain because I'm still fit enough to do that. And I want to stay as fit as long as I can to do that. And weight will inhibit that undoubtedly. But then there's a second element to actually consider. Now that's healthy. Look, none of us are going to live longer. We hopefully, and anyway, if we left, lived longer but was unhealthy, would you want to live longer? So you want to live longer but healthier for longer. Okay. And undoubtedly, the thing that is closest related to health when you age is not your total

• 4:13Speaker 01

  weight. There's a role to play there. The amount of muscle you have is your muscle mass as you age, independent of how much fat you have. Okay. That will determine how healthy you are as you age. So as, so now the moment, now I'm talking about going into the sixties into the seventies rather than when one is able to go down the 200 meter set of steps. Okay. So now, as you get older, the most Crucial bit of information is to maintain resistance training, not lifting. And that's not what I'm talking about. Sitting on a wall, getting up and down a chair, because that, the amount of muscle mass you have, really, really, really marks the level of health that you're gonna get. And then the science is startling. It is so, so, so related.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Independent of, independent of weight, you know, from, from, from there. So muscle mass is the most important for healthy aging the moment you get sixty, seventy plus.

• 5:05Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting. Okay, so I'll keep, I'll keep doing resistance training.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Correct. Always. Keep resistance training.

• 5:11Steven Bartlett?

  And lifting weights as long as I can.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  Lifting weights as long as you can. At some point, you won't be able to lift weights just because.

• 5:16Steven Bartlett?

  Don't write me off. Don't write me off, John.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  The hubris of youth.

• 5:21Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. That's the naivety of youth. Yeah, you just assume you'll always be able to do what you can do now. I, I, yeah, it's something I think a lot about. And I think a lot of people will watch this podcast because probably, especially this time of year, we're in January, they'll probably be trying to find ways that they can cut fat. They wanna be a bit skinnier. You said, I think you said half a stone you wanna lose. I'm in the same place. I think most people wanna lose a half a stone or something. What is the way that you would suggest to do that? The simple way, you know, not the like, like in complicated, go buy this guy's course and do three million sit-ups, whatever. The simple advice you would give someone that's hoping to create sort of sustainable weight loss.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  So the first is the amount of protein you eat. And you need to try and focus on trying to keep to about sixteen percent of the energy in your day. Okay, from protein, sixteen percent. And there's a sweet spot. So if you eat too much and you're not lifting, you're stressing your kidneys because your kidneys have to get rid of the nitrogen from the protein. Okay? So sixteen percent is a sweet spot. And it doesn't mean steaks only. It can mean beans, tofu, any kind of protein from, from anywhere, sixteen percent. Second is fiber. We need to eat as much fiber as physically possible. Okay? Thirty grams we wanna aim for. Although we're looking at the moment on average in this country, we're probably only eating fifteen grams. We need to double the amount of fiber we actually eat.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Third, we need to limit the amount of added sugars into our diet. Added sugars, meaning sugars not tied up in fibre. Pouted stuff, maple syrup, algarve, nectar, all those are added sugars you put in. Keep it to five percent or less of the of the energy content in your day. And those are the three numbers that that I want you to think about. So sixteen percent of protein, thirty grams of fibre, five percent or less of added sugars. Apply that to whatever you want, what keto, whatever you want to do. Apply that, and I think that will be a sustainable, healthy way to eat.

• 7:22Steven Bartlett?

  The sixth most replayed moment is a conversation I had with Dr Mindy Pelz, who talks about the belly fat burning diet. Nutrition is a huge thing at this time of year. And so she lays out exactly how to eat and behave in order to reduce belly fat and to improve your overall health. You told me about the first two styles of fasting. The first one was intermittent fasting, which is twelve to sixteen hours, which is good for weight loss, brain fog, that kind of thing. The second is autography.

• 7:53Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  Autophagy.

• 7:54Steven Bartlett?

  What did I say?

• 7:54Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  Autography, but I like it.

• 7:56Steven Bartlett?

  I said autophagy.

• 7:58Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  It works for me.

• 7:58Steven Bartlett?

  We can play that back. I definitely said autophagy. And if I didn't, we'll fix it with AI. Autophagy fasting, which is seventeen to seventy two hours, good for balancing sex hormones and preventing illness broadly.

• 8:09Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 8:09Steven Bartlett?

  Number three, we haven't spoken about gut reset fast.

• 8:12Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 8:13Steven Bartlett?

  What's that?

• 8:14Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, so that's based off a study that came out of MIT that showed twenty four hours without food and your intestinal stem cells inside your gut actually start to reboot themselves. Now, a stem cell is a cell that can go to anywhere in the body and repair itself. But at twenty four hours, you get a plethora of them in your gut. And in the gut, we've got a damaged microbiome from everything that we've just been talking about. So what I discovered in this 24 hour fast is I could take women that have been on birth control pill for years, people that have been on multiple rounds of antibiotics, people who had been eating horrible food, and I could actually put them through a 24 hour

• 8:57Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  fast once a week, once every couple of weeks. And these stem cells would come in there and they would start to repair. And so now if I teach that person how to eat right, their food is actually starting to build a better microbiome in the gut. So that 24 hour fast became this go to in my clinic where I could take all these gut challenges and I could start to unwind them just because I knew the body had this capability of making these intestinal stem cells. And it was crazy, like we got people off supplements, we got people that were didn't weren't making serotonin, which affects moods, comes from the gut, all of a sudden started to become happier, people who hadn't had bowel movements in like three days, all of a sudden

• 9:41Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  we started to put in these this gut reset and it was like a miracle. It was incredible.

• 9:46Steven Bartlett?

  Number four, fat burner fast.

• 9:49Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  So the fat burner fast is probably my favorite for those people who want to lose weight. The research was done that 36 hours without food, followed by 12 hours of eating and then another 30, they actually did it over a 30 day period, but we've been using it in our community, just dosing it in, that at 36 hours, what happens is that's enough time where the blood sugars come down, where all of a sudden the body, it's so smart, it goes, okay, blood sugar's not coming. We've been in this fasted state, we've triggered autophagy, we've brought inflammation down, we've made you ketones, we're trying to go find food, but this extra weight, it's not serving you. You, because remember, you gotta go find food. So it drops weight.

• 10:34Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  And it's the most beautiful way to get a person to unstick any kind of weight loss resistance. But most importantly, you know where it dropped the most amount of weight from? Where does everybody want to lose weight?

• 10:47Steven Bartlett?

  Belly.

• 10:48Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  Yep. So it is the, I probably should have called it the fat burning, belly fat burning.

• 10:53Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, the belly fat. Yeah, that would have banged.

• 10:55Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  But yeah, and so that's what they showed is that actually a 36 hour fast started to unstick weight loss and it was started with weight around the belly.

• 11:05Steven Bartlett?

  Compelling.

• 11:07Steven Bartlett?

  Number five, the dopamine reset fast?

• 11:10Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, so number five, I've found some research showing that when people go without food for forty eight hours, the whole dopamine system will be rebooted. So what's important to know about the dopamine system is it is our molecule of happiness. It is the thing that it's actually a motivation molecule. And it's a neurotransmitter that allows thoughts, happy thoughts, to go across from neuron to neuron. And so what happens, and I'm sure you've talked about this on your podcast, that we're so dopamine saturated right now. But specifically people who are overeaters, they actually are finding, the study I quote in the book, is that

• 11:50Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  they found that people who had food addiction, people who had extra weight, like obese situations, they were not getting as much happiness out of their food because their dopamine receptor sites were saturated. So they had to eat more food to get more happiness. And you know, food is a state changer. It does make us happy. So what they found is if they put them into a forty eight hour fast, that they actually rebooted the whole dopamine system and new dopamine receptor sites appeared. So that when they brought food back in to the equation, they actually got more enjoyment out of food with less food.

• 12:28Steven Bartlett?

  This kind of got me thinking about a conversation I was having yesterday with some of my team here. We were talking about how

• 12:35Steven Bartlett?

  it almost feels like sometimes if I've eaten sugar, I can go into a bit of a sugar cycle. And what I mean by that is I'll have some sugar and then like a couple of hours later, I'll have another craving for sugar. And then a couple of hours later, I'll have another craving for sugar. But then at other times, specifically, for example, when I did keto, I was, I did the keto diet for about eight months, uh, eight weeks, bloody eight months, I wish. Eight weeks. And throughout that period, I didn't have any cravings for sugar.

• 12:58Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 12:58Steven Bartlett?

  I would, we had some chocolate come into the studio and I walked over to the chocolate and I smelt it.

• 13:03Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 13:04Steven Bartlett?

  And I didn't want any of it.

• 13:05Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 13:05Steven Bartlett?

  It had gone.

• 13:06Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 13:06Steven Bartlett?

  But then when I'm in my, what I call like the sugar cycle, I'm eating sugar, maybe, you know, once or twice a day. And I'm getting like the craving for it, where, which I just can't seem to resist.

• 13:15Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  Yep. Well, dopamine's the molecule of more. It's not the molecule of enough. So what it does is when you get sugar, you get this dopamine rush.

• 13:25Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 13:25Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  And the brain goes, woo, love that. Give me more of that.

• 13:28Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 13:29Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  And so you can't, you, it's, it's endless. You will never be fully satisfied. It constantly wants you to come back for more and more and more. So when you start to go off the ketogenic energy system, you're getting the same euphoria. You probably felt the same high, the same mental clarity, but you've totally taken this molecule more out of the, out of the picture. It's, it, in fact, dopamine will actually, you know, you, you get those receptor sites that will be repaired. But you're not getting a big dopamine buzz when you're in a ketogenic state. You're getting ketones.

• 13:59Steven Bartlett?

  I was, I was mulling it with my team, how long I had to stay away from sugar to kind of get out of that vicious, give me more cycle.

• 14:07Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. My experience has been it's about three days.

• 14:10Steven Bartlett?

  Three days? That's what I thought.

• 14:11Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 14:12Steven Bartlett?

  I think I said four or five, but it's just from experience as well. If I haven't had sugar.

• 14:17Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 14:17Steven Bartlett?

  For three or four days. I mean, like a, like a chocolate, but something significant in terms of sugar. Then after three or four days, the craving for it seems to, to vanish.

• 14:24Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, yeah. It's not, it's not, if you think about that, it's not hard if you're trying to overcome a, a sugar addiction.

• 14:31Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 14:31Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  Like just bear it for three days and then that dopamine stops barking at you. And then if you tack fasting onto it, now you're getting ketones. And so you're not needing that as much. Ketones kill hunger and they make you so mentally, mentally clear. They give you this euphoric feeling. So you don't have that urge to go for the, for the sugar.

• 14:52Steven Bartlett?

  And the ketones come from fasting.

• 14:54Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 14:54Steven Bartlett?

  Which is when your body switches metabolic state. Got it. The last and final fasting style, immune reset fast.

• 15:02Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, so immune reset was built off of Dr. Walter Longo's work. And he did a study on people who had cancer and were going through chemotherapy. And one of the challenges we know about chemotherapy is that it wipes out the whole immune system. And so he wanted to see, well, what if I put somebody in a fasted state as they went through chemotherapy? Would there be a difference? And what he found is after three days of fasting, the white blood cells in our system actually reboot themselves. So what they do is all old white blood cells are sloughed away and new white blood cells emerge. So people were able to come out of that chemotherapy experience and have a stronger immune system as opposed to what we were seeing was that it was wiping the immune system out.

• 15:48Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  So that launched the whole three day water fast sort of craze. At least here in America, we're seeing a lot of people that are just going after three day water fast to prime their immune system. But you also, also at three days, get stem cells, full systemic stem cells. So all of a sudden, your body's got in, surging with stem cells going to all parts of the body repairing it. The great example I always use on this one was I had an Achilles tendon injury and nothing was, nothing was helping it. So I threw a five day water fast at it. On the fourth day, I felt this buzz in my Achilles tendon and I was like, oh, I wonder what that is. And it stayed all the way through. I went five full days.

• 16:33Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  And about the fifth and sixth day, so sixth day I was entering the food back in, all the pain completely went away and it never came back. I tried everything. I tried everything and that was the only thing that repaired it.

• 16:48Steven Bartlett?

  It does make, again, evolutionary sense that if our body senses we're injured because we're not eating or, you know, some other signal that we are.

• 16:59Steven Bartlett?

  On a course to not survive, to put it nicely. It does make sense that it might set about to repair whatever needs to be repaired.

• 17:07Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  You're getting it.

• 17:08Steven Bartlett?

  You know, because like if I was a wounded human back in on the savannas of, I don't know, Africa, wherever we came from. Um, and I'm laid there and I'm not eating. My body should probably go, okay, Steve might need something fixed. So he can get back to.

• 17:22Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 17:24Steven Bartlett?

  Hunting.

• 17:24Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  So you're getting it. So survival, that is the number one priority of the body. So when you go without food, you amplify every resource it has to keep you alive. And if repairing my Achilles means I can now go hunt for food, it's going to do that. It's going to make me stronger. And I, in the book, I, I stumbled, when I was writing the book, I stumbled upon a really cool hypothesis. It's called the thrifty gene hypothesis. And it said that what, it's a theory, obviously, it's hypothesis, it's a theory. That the people, the humans that evolved out of the primal days had a very specific genotype.

• 18:07Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  And this genotype allowed us to metabolically flex and, and be stronger in a fasted state. Because we had to survive. And the people that didn't make it from that time period didn't have that gene. But think about this for this moment. So they think we all have this gene inside of us right now. This thrifty gene where we can go long periods without food and we can survive. So what happens when we're eating all day? What happens when we're ignoring and we're not actually activating that genetic profile? So what they are now believing is that diabetes, metabolic syndrome, all of that is largely happening. Because we are going against the, the genetic profile that we are now seeing in humans.

• 18:52Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  We're like on the opposite end of the spectrum.

• 18:55Steven Bartlett?

  We're overloading our bodies.

• 18:57Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 18:59Steven Bartlett?

  Which is meaning that the survival gene you referenced there is not being activated to help us.

• 19:04Dr. Mindy Pelz?

  That's right. That's right.

• 19:06Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting. The fifth most replayed moment is a moment from my conversation with Matthew Walker, who is the world's number one expert on the subject of sleep. He explains the importance of sleep on our overall health, on our weight and everything in between. But most importantly of all, he gives us a roadmap for how to sleep better. And I know so many of you are struggling, so I'm not surprised that this is one of the most replayed moments of the Diary of a CEO of 2023. I've had a lot of health experts on this podcast recently, but none of them have really talked to me about the role that sleep or sleep deprivation plays in. Wait, is there a relationship?

• 19:45Speaker 03

  It's probably one of the most well-defined relationships that we know in all of sleep science. And it is at least a three-part story. So the first emerging evidence came in terms of hormones. So there are what we call appetite-regulating hormones, and the two principal ones of concern here are something called leptin and ghrelin. Now leptin, when it's released, will signal to your brain that you're satisfied with your food, you are satiated, and you are no longer hungry. Ghrelin does the opposite. When ghrelin is released, it says, no, you're not satisfied with your food, you are not

• 20:29Speaker 03

  full, you still want to eat more, you are still hungry. And some of the first studies, they started to just limit people, restrict people's sleep to six hours or five hours or four hours. And what they found was that there was firstly, that signal leptin that says, no, you're satisfied with your food, you don't want to eat anymore, you're full. That signal of fulness, satiation, was decreased by 18%. If that wasn't bad enough, ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone, that leapt up by 28%.

• 21:08Speaker 03

  Overall hunger levels rose by about twenty six percent. So firstly, you are, it's almost like double jeopardy. That you are getting punished twice for the same crime of not sleeping enough. Once by losing the signal of I'm full. I don't want to eat anymore. And once again for the no, I'm much more hungry and I'm just going to overeat, which is gremlin. So what that produces is a profile of increased eating. So on average, underslept individuals started to eat in those studies about three to four hundred extra calories at each sit, at each sitting by way of insufficient sleep.

• 21:54Speaker 03

  Then what they discovered is that it's not just that you want to eat more. It's what it is that you have a craving for when you are underslept. And this is the problem. What they found is that when you are underslept, you eat more of everything, but you especially eat more of these heavy hitting, stodgy carbohydrates, bread, pasta, pizza. The, the next thing that you started to eat, have a preference for was simple sugary foods, sweets and chocolate. And then finally you started to crave very salty food and high sodium food intake will increase your blood pressure. So that was the first of the, the three mechanisms.

• 22:36Speaker 03

  Then we did a study where we said, perhaps it's not just the circulating hormones in the body. The brain is the ultimate arbiter of your food decisions. So what's going on in the brain? So we took a group of perfectly healthy individuals and we put them through the experiment twice. Once when they'd had a full eight hours of sleep and once when we deprived them of sleep. And the next day we placed them inside an MRI scanner and we showed them images of lots of different foods that range from being sort of, you know, very healthy to being very unhealthy and sort of ice cream and, you know, chocolate and pizza and things to leafy salads and nuts and greens and vegetables.

• 23:15Speaker 03

  And we asked them to rate how much they wanted that food for each item. Now, we did something a bit sort of dastardly to make it more ecologically correct so that they weren't just saying, okay, they probably think I should probably say that's healthy. We said, we're going to randomly select one of these images, these food images that you see, and after you get out the brain scanner, we're going to give you that food and we're going to politely ask you to eat it all. So it made it a bit more realistic so the choices were more, you know, as much as that we could. So what we found is that when they were sleep deprived, the deep hedonic centers, the emotional centers of the brain, these desire centers, these reward centers, they ramped up in their

• 23:57Speaker 03

  activity in response to these highly desirable, highly unhealthy foods. So these more basic sort of, you know, guttural parts of the brain, as it were, these reward centers were lighting up much more strongly when you're sleep deprived. Worse still, the impulse control regions in the front of the brain, what we call the prefrontal cortex, they were shut down, they were taken offline. So as a consequence, you lost your impulse control and that's why you start to then say, you know, when I'm sleep deprived at the food sort of buffet, I'm not, I'm not going to do salad, I'm just gonna, that pizza looks awful good, or that pasta with the cream, I'm just gonna go into that, all go.

• 24:39Speaker 03

  So, so you're, it's what we call a pattern in terms of brain activity in neuroscience of hedonic eating, that your brain goes into this hedonic desire profile. So now we understood it's not just hormones in the body, it's also changes in the brain. Then came the finding that there's another chemical in the body that's responsible. And this comes on to cannabis. When people, when people, when people that you may know have smoked cannabis, they'll often say, I get viciously hungry, I get the munchies, I get really hungry. That's no coincidence because cannabis will stimulate appetite.

• 25:23Speaker 03

  Now, we all have naturally occurring cannabis compounds in our brain and our bodies. They are called endocannabinoids, endo meaning comes from inside us, whereas the cannabis that comes externally when you sort of smoke it or take edibles.

• 25:42Speaker 03

  So.

• 25:44Speaker 03

  Endocannabinoids do many things for the brain and the body, but one of the things that they do is control your appetite and your hunger. And what we found is that when you sleep deprived individuals, these naturally occurring endocannabinoids rocketed up by over 20%, cranking up people's appetite. And so these three ways lead you to start packing on, you know, when insufficient sleep is occurring, when sleep gets short, your waistline typically starts to expand. And we now understand the reasons. If that wasn't bad enough.

• 26:19Steven Bartlett?

  It is bad enough.

• 26:20Speaker 03

  The funny, yeah, I know. You just stop, Matt, please. Honestly, I'm really, the, the last thing that we discovered is that, let's say that you're trying to be really careful and you're trying to diet and you're trying to lose weight. If you're not getting sufficient sleep, then 60% of all of the weight that you lose will come from lean muscle mass.

• 26:42Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, God.

• 26:43Speaker 03

  And not fat.

• 26:44Steven Bartlett?

  Not the muscle.

• 26:45Speaker 03

  I know, exactly. So in other words, when you are dieting, but you are underslept, you lose what you want to keep, which is muscle, and you keep what you want to lose, which is fat. So again, it's

• 27:01Steven Bartlett?

  I'm sold.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  Not an ideal situation.

• 27:04Steven Bartlett?

  Sleep is important, I get it. I'm sold. How do I, my question is, what are the things that in the modern society are standing in the way of sleep? We've touched on some of them loosely, but some of the like big, obvious things, the things that you would suggest doing, very actionable things we could do straight away to improve our chances of having that healthy, deep sleep that we need to be optimal in every regard of our health and performance?

• 27:33Speaker 03

  There's probably, I think, five standard tips, what we call sort of sleep hygiene that you can do. And then I'll come on to maybe just some unconventional tips that we've sort of touched on. And we've spoken about many of these. The first thing I would recommend people to do, and this is why when some people say, what about this new sleep supplement or, you know, it's, it's 40 quid for this bottle of these sleep, new sleep natural medications, I'm going to give it a try. I would say, try these tried and true things first before you spend your money on supplements. The first thing is regularity. Go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time, no matter whether it's the weekday or the weekend. Your brain expects regularity. It thrives best under conditions of regularity.

• 28:16Speaker 03

  When you give it regularity, you can improve the quantity and the quantity of your sleep. The second thing is get some darkness at night. As I said, we don't get enough darkness in the modern world. And so the trick I would offer, and I don't use it, I don't like the word hack, but the suggestion would be in the last hour before bed, try this experiment for everyone listening for the next week. Dim down half of the lights or switch off half of the lights or even a three quarters of the lights in your home in the last hour before bed.

• 28:51Steven Bartlett?

  All of the lights in every room?

• 28:53Speaker 03

  In all of the rooms, you know, switch off almost all of the light. Now, I'm not suggesting be unsafe and walk around in the darkness in the last hour. That's not what I'm saying. Just dim down, you know, switch off half of the lights. You will be surprised at how sleepy that darkness will make you feel. And it's also an incredible behavioral trigger

• 29:15Speaker 03

  to signal to your brain that it is time for sleep, that darkness is around me. That's the second tip is darkness. The third tip is temperature. Most people sleep in an ambient bedroom temperature that is too high. And you need to aim for a bedroom temperature of about eighteen, eighteen and a half degrees Celsius, around about sixty five to sixty eight degrees Fahrenheit. If I'm probably butchering the mathematics there on that, but you need to get cool. Now, you can wear thick socks, you can have a hot water bottle. That's fine, but the ambient needs to be cold. Because you need to drop your core body temperature and your brain temperature by about one degree Celsius to fall asleep and stay asleep.

• 30:01Speaker 03

  And it's the reason that you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that's too cold than too hot. So make your bedroom cold, make it dark like a cave. The, the fourth question would be sort of what we've, or fourth suggestion would be walk it out. And we've spoken about this, the thirty minute rule, you know, get up, do something different or meditate. Don't lie in bed awake for too long. Then the final two things we've spoken about, well, we've spoken about caffeine. We haven't spoken about alcohol, but let me just say as the kind of headline of it, alcohol is not a sleep aid. Many people use it as a sleep aid. It is not your friend. Alcohol, again, is a sedative, so it knocks you out. The second is that it fragments your

• 30:45Speaker 03

  sleep. So you wake up, your sleep is littered with all of these small awakenings. Most of them you don't remember because they're too brief, but it makes for miserable, lousy quality sleep. And the final thing is that alcohol is very good at blocking your REM sleep or your dream sleep, which we know is critical for many other functions as well. So alcohol's not your friend. That's the sort of the final tip. Again, you know, just if you're with friends, have a glass of red wine. Just know, okay, my sleep's not going to be great.

• 31:13Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you, Matt.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  You know, I'm not, yeah, I'm, whatever. It's just, you know, live life too.

• 31:21Steven Bartlett?

  Of course.

• 31:21Speaker 03

  I'm not saying that.

• 31:23Steven Bartlett?

  The fourth most replayed moment is a moment from my conversation with the world leading neuroscientist, the man who has scanned more brains than anybody else, Dr. Daniel Amen, who is a favorite on the diary of a CEO. And he tells us very, very clearly how to grow a healthier brain. I can change my brain.

• 31:42Daniel Amen?

  It's the most exciting lesson that I've learned. You're not stuck. I'm not stuck with the brain I had. You're not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. I can prove it. In fact, every day, what I've come to believe, you're making your brain better, or you're making it worse.

• 32:05Steven Bartlett?

  Let's start there.

• 32:05Daniel Amen?

  By what you're doing.

• 32:07Steven Bartlett?

  What things make the brain worse? What are the common things that most of us do without thinking that make the brain worse?

• 32:15Daniel Amen?

  When my daughter Chloe was in second grade, I went to her classroom and I wrote 20 things on the board. And I went, separate them for me. Good for your brain, bad for your brain. Seven year olds, they got 19 out of 20 right. So most people know.

• 32:34Daniel Amen?

  The only thing they got wrong was orange juice. They put it in the healthy category when, in fact, when is it rational to unwrap fruit sugar from its fiber source? Because it turns toxic in your body. So I'm not a fan of fruit juice. I'm a fan of fruit, not fruit juice.

• 32:55Steven Bartlett?

  What's bad about sugar for the brain?

• 32:57Daniel Amen?

  It's pro-inflammatory.

• 33:00Steven Bartlett?

  Which, what does that mean?

• 33:00Daniel Amen?

  It makes you diabetic.

• 33:02Steven Bartlett?

  But I mean, as it relates to the brain, why is like orange juice or the ice cream bad for my brain?

• 33:08Daniel Amen?

  Because it's ultimately gonna give you high blood sugar levels, which erode your blood vessels. And you're gonna have lower blood flow to your brain. That's a bad thing. I mean, there's so many things about it. So it's addictive, it's pro-inflammatory. It makes it more likely you're gonna have diabetes and obesity. So 72% of Americans are overweight, 42% are obese. I've published three studies on 35,000 people. As your weight goes up, the actual physical size and function of your brain goes down. That should scare the fat off anyone.

• 33:53Daniel Amen?

  I used to be chubby. But when I figured out that connection, I'm like, oh no. It was that that gave me the motivation to drop about 25 pounds. And so, sugar is the gateway drug to diabetes and obesity. And so, not to mention inflammation, which is the cause of depression and dementia. So you wanna avoid things that cause low blood flow? Caffeine, nicotine?

• 34:27Steven Bartlett?

  Caffeine?

• 34:27Daniel Amen?

  Caffeine constricts blood flow to the brain.

• 34:31Steven Bartlett?

  And what does that do to my brain?

• 34:33Daniel Amen?

  Well, constricts blood flow. So you're gonna get less blood flow. And remember, I showed you that progression with age? No, you don't want that. You want to do things that increase blood flow to your brain. So, exercise, Ginkgo. This is one of the supplements I'm going to give you. Eat foods like beets, oregano, rosemary, cinnamon. They increase blood flow. While we're on blood flow, 40% of 40-year-olds have erectile dysfunction. 70% of 70-year-olds have erectile dysfunction. What that means, if you have blood flow problems anywhere,

• 35:17Daniel Amen?

  it means they're everywhere. And so, like, no. And it means either you're too sedentary, you're overweight, you're smoking, or having too much caffeine, or using marijuana, because marijuana lowers blood flow to the brain. And so, just in that one of the 11, it's exercise, Ginkgo. And for you, not for everybody, but for you, hyperbaric oxygen, those three things will make a big difference in blood flow. Ginkgo? Ginkgo. What is that? It's a supplement. What does it do?

• 36:01Daniel Amen?

  Increases blood flow. To the brain? The prettiest brains I've ever seen take Ginkgo. There's actually a spec study. They gave people 120mg of Ginkgo twice a day. Significant improvement in blood flow to the brain. And so, and one of the supplements I'm going to give you, we have Ginkgo. I've taken it every day for the last 20 years, at least. And then, this is where the US government got an F for the pandemic. Loneliness accelerates dementia and brain problems.

• 36:40Daniel Amen?

  And so, when they isolated us, the whole significant increase in brain problems. So, get connected to other people.

• 36:51Daniel Amen?

  The I in Bright Minds is inflammation. So what increases inflammation? Low omega-3 fatty acid levels. And we are deficient. Ninety-three percent of the population is deficient in omega-3 fatty acids. Ninety-three percent. So all of us should be either eating more fish or taking an omega-3 supplement like fish oil. Gum disease. Like, who knew? Like, I wasn't really that good at taking care of my gums until I started reading the studies. You have gum disease, you have inflammation. You're more likely to get depressed and have dementia.

• 37:32Steven Bartlett?

  The third most replayed moment is a moment from my conversation with Gary Brecker, where he lays out how you can become a superhuman, strip the fat off your body, and get yourself healthy with free, easy, simple exercises that will cost you nothing at all. When I heard the story about Dana White, and I saw he had gone from respectfully being a man that had a little bit of weight to having these six-pack abs on Instagram. Of course, the six-pack isn't the outcome. It's, as you've said, it's the stuff going on inside him. That's really the transformation. But what can someone who's just heard that at home, where do they start with extending their life by triple and getting the...

• 38:12Gary Brecka?

  So, you know, he also started something called the Superhuman Protocol. And Superhuman Protocol is using magnetism, oxygen, and light, right? So the only things that we really get from Mother Nature, the big benefit we get from Mother Nature is we get magnetism from the earth. We get oxygen from the air. We get light from the sun. The truth is, most of us are not contacting the surface of the earth that much anymore. So he bought $150,000 worth of equipment, a PMF mat, an oxygen, what's called a Hypermax oxygen to do exercise with oxygen therapy, and a red light therapy bed. And I had him use that equipment every single day, seven days a week. But if your listeners want to do it for free...

• 38:54Gary Brecka?

  You can take off your shoes and contact the surface of the earth. And I'm talking about bare feet on soil, dirt, grass, sand. Because earthing and grounding is a very real thing. We actually discharge into the earth. We actually, human beings, build up a charge. Do you know that pH, the acid alkaline scale, pH stands for potential hydrogen? It's a charge. It's a complete fallacy that you can get alkaline by drinking alkaline water. That's the biggest marketing myth ever sold to the public. But you can get alkaline by contacting the surface of the earth. So if you don't have 150 grand, which I don't expect anybody listening to this podcast to spend 150 grand, but he did, I said, you need a PMF mat so you can be alkaline.

• 39:34Gary Brecka?

  You need to spend 10 minutes a day breathing 95% O2 under mild exercise, and you need to lay in a red light therapy bed. So in the absence of the superhuman protocol, you can become superhuman by contacting the earth and by learning to do breath work. Let's talk about breath work. I spend eight minutes every day doing a very specific series of breath work. People do not realize the power of something that is so accessible, so free, and so easy to do. Right? They, they want things to be more complicated, but it's not. And when I said the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease, it's absolutely true. Remember that every elevated emotional state that a human being can experience

• 40:15Gary Brecka?

  actually has, in its molecular structure, oxygen is a component of that emotion. So if you look at the difference between passion, elation, joy, arousal, libido, and anger, for example, it's usually only one neurotransmitter and the presence of oxygen. The reason why no human being has ever woken up laughing is because you don't have the oxidative state to experience laughter right out of deep sleep. But can you wake up angry? Yes, because anger doesn't require oxygen. So every morning, contact the surface of the earth and then spend eight minutes doing, I do a Wim Hof style of breath work. I give credit where credit's due. He's the father of breath work, as far as I'm concerned. So I do three rounds of 30 deep breaths, like obnoxiously deep breaths.

• 41:00Gary Brecka?

  And I start by trying to take my belly button and pull my belly button out towards the wall. Imagine there's a string pulling your belly button towards the wall. And then you, you fill from the lobes of the lung to the apex of the lung. And then you exhale and just relax.

• 41:22Gary Brecka?

  God knows what they think we're doing out there. Right outside this podcast. They're like, a bunch of freak. I knew it was a cult. I knew he was a cult leader. But um, so you do three rounds of 30 breaths. On the 30th breath, you exhale and you hold. Allow the carbohydrate receptor to reset. When you don't feel you can hold anymore, you take a deep breath in.

• 41:44Gary Brecka?

  You hold again and then you let it out slow.

• 41:48Gary Brecka?

  And you start again. I would suggest that you start with three rounds of five breaths. Then work to 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30. If you get lightheaded, this is a good sign that the oxygen tension is changing in your brain. If your fingers and toes get tingly, this is a good sign that you're changing the oxygen tension. If you feel some kind of heat, temperature change in your neck, these are all great signs. You will get to the point where you can actually hold your breath for two or three minutes, sometimes four minutes between rounds of breath work. And then the last thing is to expose yourself to natural sunlight. First thing in the morning, the first 45 minutes of the day, God gives us a very, very special type of light. It's called first light. There's no UVA, there's no UVB rays in this light.

• 42:30Gary Brecka?

  So that it's not the damaging rays from the sun. It still generates vitamin D3. It has a positive effect on cortisol, on vitamin D3. First light is the best way to reset your circadian rhythm. So by contacting the surface of the earth, doing breath work and getting first light, you can get to the same place that Dana White did with 150 grand in equipment.

• 42:50Steven Bartlett?

  What about oxygen masks? Because I, I'll be honest, when I read, when I read about the Dana story, I went on Amazon soon after and I was like, I'm just gonna buy an oxygen canister. Good idea, bad idea?

• 43:00Gary Brecka?

  So what you want to do is, you know, you get an oxygen concentrator, which takes 21% oxygen from, which is what the concentration at sea level. It turns it into 95% O2 and it fills this bag. And it can refill this bag over and over and over again. Okay, I use one called the HyperMax. You can see it on my Instagram. And you plug it in, you turn it on, it fills this bag. And then you go in, you put an oxygen mask on and you exercise for 10 minutes, only 10 minutes. Cycle for three minutes, sprint for 30 seconds, cycle for three minutes, sprint for 30 seconds, cycle three minutes, sprint 30 seconds and you're done. And what this does is it raises something called the partial pressure, the storage of oxygen in your blood. The only two-time Nobel laureate prize winner in medicine, Dr.

• 43:43Gary Brecka?

  Otto Wahlberg, won both of his Nobel prizes for his work in exercise with oxygen therapy. You want to be a superhuman, do mild exercise every day while breathing 95% O2. It's important that you're exercising. And then after that, you move into a red light therapy bed, photobiomodulation. So, you know, if you don't have access to a Hypermax oxygen machine, just do the breath work, get the breath in, you know, exchange the oxygen tension in the tissues and expose yourself to first light. What about cold water plunging? So I'm a huge fan of cold water plunging, but probably not for the reasons why you think. You know, I also sit on the board of the NFL Alumni Association Athletica as a health service director, you know. There was a time when we used to think that putting athletes in cold water after exercise

• 44:27Gary Brecka?

  was good because of its anti-inflammatory effects. We know now that that's only about 15% of the benefit. The majority of the benefit comes from something called a cold shock protein. If you really want to be fascinated, Google cold shock proteins. These are reserve proteins that are in your liver. They're dumped into the bloodstream in an effort to save your life when you put yourself in cold water. They scour the body of free radical oxidation. They increase the rate of protein synthesis, muscle repair. They are free. You get them when you put yourself in cold water. I don't know what the Celsius conversion is, but I use 50 degrees for three minutes, minimum, six minutes maximum. Cold? Yes. It's actually not that cold. I mean, you know, I see people getting in 37, 38 degree water. There's no evidence that I've read that shows that colder is better.

• 45:12Gary Brecka?

  You get a peripheral vasoconstriction, so it forces all the oxygen into the core and up to the brain. And you get an activation of something called brown fat, right? Thermogenesis comes from brown fat. And for the women that are listening, for some reason I seem to ensnare the women when I say this, remember that the definition of a calorie is a measure of heat. Right? I mean, the definition of a calorie is the amount of energy it takes to raise one cubic centimeter of water, one degree centigrade. So if a calorie is a measure of heat, then this means that when heat's leaving your body, calories are leaving your body. So if there is nothing, nothing, no amount of exercise hits cardio, no type of cardiovascular or weight training that comes anywhere close to immersing yourself

• 45:54Gary Brecka?

  in cold water in terms of what will strip fat off your body fast. If you want to strip fat off your body, get in cold water three to six minutes a day.

• 46:05Steven Bartlett?

  That's fascinating. Because the oxygen rushes to my head, that's why it has a really profound impact on mood.

• 46:10Gary Brecka?

  That's why it has a very profound impact on mood. Because if you think about it, what's the reason why we need deep sleep? What happens in deep sleep that's so special? There's a secondary oxygen transfer. We transfer oxygen from the periphery, from the extremities, to the brain. Remember, the brain's a non-metabolic organ. So in other words, it's unlike a muscle. If I pick up a weight and start to work out my muscle, my arm, my body will send more blood, more amino acids, more oxygen to that muscle because it's working. Well, if I'm sitting at my computer and I'm watching reruns of The Simpsons, or I'm sitting at my computer and I'm solving the most complex joint venture agreement, partnership agreement with all kinds of mathematical equations, my brain gets the same amount of nutrients, same amount of blood flow, same amount of oxygen. So it eats the same meal, whether or not it's in a dead sprint, or whether or not it's

• 46:54Gary Brecka?

  just chilling on the couch. Except in deep sleep, and when you're in cold water, because it's forcing the oxygen up to the brain.

• 47:04Steven Bartlett?

  The second most replayed moment is a moment from my conversation with Dr. Tim Spector, a favorite on the Diary of a CEO. And here he talks about health more holistically, and some of the biggest myths that most of us believe that are currently standing in our way. We've got a fitness group amongst some of my friends, there's about 10 of us in it. And we've been tracking how often we work out, and how frequently we work out, and the workouts that we do. And one of the things I have to say is, pretty much no one in the group has lost any weight. We've been doing this for a year. And that kind of bucks what you would think. So the only time that I lost weight was actually when I went on the keto keto diet. I went from fourteen stone eight to thirteen

• 47:45Steven Bartlett?

  stone eight in roughly in several weeks. But exercise and exercising for almost religiously for the last two and a half years doesn't really seem to impact my weight at all in a, you know, in the way that the fitness experts might tell me on Instagram. What's your stance on the role that exercise plays in weight loss?

• 48:04Tim Spector?

  There's very little role in weight loss. All the studies, such long term studies show it doesn't help weight loss. And it's been grossly exaggerated as an easy fix for our obesity problem.

• 48:19Steven Bartlett?

  Exercise doesn't help weight loss?

• 48:20Tim Spector?

  No. All the studies show that. The only caveat to that is if you have changed your diet, improved your diet, and you've lost some weight, maintaining some exercise does help prevent it going back up again. But as on its own, if you don't change your diet, it's of no use. And that's well known now by all the obesity experts and all the studies.

• 48:46Steven Bartlett?

  Does sugar make us fat? Is that the culprit? Is that one of the main things that's contributing to?

• 48:52Tim Spector?

  No, again, that's that's reductionism, you know, we the but the reason the reason exercise doesn't work is it's important to realize this is because we all know this that, you know, you go for a walk, build up hunger before a meal. That's what your parents told you, you know, and everything about exercise is after it, your body slows down, your metabolism slows down, and it tries to regain the energy that you've lost. That's just what our evolution. And so that's why it's a you're not gonna it's great for your health. I know I exercise, fantastic for your mood. It's great for your heart, anti

• 49:36Tim Spector?

  cancer, all kinds of things. We should all do it. But absolutely not if your goal is weight loss. You have to do something about changing your diet. And I think that's that's the big, a huge myth, particularly perpetuated by gyms and fitness apps and everything else. And it is complete nonsense.

• 49:54Steven Bartlett?

  I read that you when you looked at studies over thirty years and you looked at how many studies had been done on the relationship of exercise and weight versus. Things like sugar and weight, there was twelve more, twelve times more studies done on the relationship of exercise and weight versus sugar and weight. And why, why is that? Why is there less research done on the latter?

• 50:16Tim Spector?

  Um, I think that's the influence of governments and the food companies and the drink companies. So, uh, a lot of the exercise research done in the last twenty years was sponsored by, uh, large corporations who wanted to make this link between, uh, exercise and weight loss, so that they could continue to sell sugary ultra-processed foods and drinks and just say it's, you know, childhood obesity is because we've, we don't have playgrounds and we don't, uh, encourage this. And that's why the Cokes and the Pepsis are always there

• 50:58Tim Spector?

  at the Olympic, sponsoring Olympic events and associating themselves with sport. And they gave hundreds of millions to various physiology departments, sports departments, nutrition departments to do research in this area. Basically, it was really hard to get anyone to do research into how sugary drinks make you, uh, gain weight or cause problems. Because they, the amount of money for nutrition has been abysmally poor, you know, in, from, from governments. And that's why, you know, we, the only, the first ever study of ultra-processed food in a controlled trial was only about three years ago. And it's been around for,

• 51:40Tim Spector?

  you know, thirty, forty years. So such is the power of that lobby, that it, it doesn't necessarily distort the research in a sort of, you know, evil way, but they point it to make sure that the researchers are working in an area that they want, uh, people to work in and distracting them, keeping away from talking about sugars or even artificial sweeteners, which in my view are nearly as bad, because they're sort of, you know, hidden. Um, and deflecting us from the idea that, yes, giving kids sugary drinks or even artificial sweet drinks is going to be bad for them and, and cause obesity.

• 52:19Steven Bartlett?

  Wait, so I'm, I've been, I've cut my, I cut out sugary drinks about a year ago. I still have the same brands, but I have the no sugar version.

• 52:29Tim Spector?

  Oh dear.

• 52:30Steven Bartlett?

  Oh shit, what do you mean, oh dear?

• 52:32Tim Spector?

  Well, all the, all the summary of the trials shows that if you take uh young adults, young adults and kids and they were say on two cans of, you know, full sugar sodas and you change them to the diet version, there's no real difference in, in weight or um metabolic um changes in their blood. Uh you, you will go to the dentist less, so you don't get as many fillings. But the, and yet, you know, you should be gaining three hundred calories, right? If you were doing two cans a day. So it doesn't work out as it should do. And

• 53:12Tim Spector?

  that's because of the extra, these chemicals are not inert. So the sweeteners, in kids, they change their, their brains to give them, uh, they want more sweetness in their food. Okay. So it, it could reflect your wish for your, your late night milk chocolate, who knows? Um, and it, it makes it very difficult to train kids to have more bitter foods or sour foods if they've got these artificial sweeteners in their diet all the time. But

• 53:41Tim Spector?

  they've now shown that all these sweeteners actually affect your gut microbes. So even stevia, you know, these sort of so-called healthy ones have an effect on your gut microbes and they're not inert. So we know that saccharin and sucralose also cause spikes in your blood sugar. Uh, when I did it, you know, I have a trace, they're not supposed to, but they, they actually do things they're not supposed to. So we know very little about these, these products. And my view is that they are harmful, probably not as bad as having the sugar, but they are absolutely not a health drink. And we should be encouraging

• 54:21Tim Spector?

  people to have, you know, teas and kombuchas and uh more bitter tasting, interesting flavors and foods than just this ultra sweet uh chemical concoctions.

• 54:34Steven Bartlett?

  Is this, this sugar conglomerate that have been funding much of the research that points towards um some of the things you're talking about there?

• 54:42Steven Bartlett?

  That's also the conglomerate that wants us to believe the calories in, calories out approach, because if I just view all foods as kind of equal and on this sort of calorie number, then I can drink some of the sugary fizzy drinks and some of the processed foods. As long as I keep it within that sort of calorie deficit, I'll be fine. And so is that sugar conglomerate, is the processed food conglomerate for the calorie model?

• 55:07Tim Spector?

  Absolutely.

• 55:08Steven Bartlett?

  They need that, right?

• 55:09Tim Spector?

  Absolutely. It's vital, you know, zero calories or one calorie, you know, on the can, that's what you see. And, you know, you're fooling people into thinking this is a healthy drink. And, oh, you know, if I used to have full Coke or Pepsi and now I'm having the diet version, I'm getting 300 calories less a day, I should lose weight. It's exactly what they've been doing. And they're also desperate to show that artificial sweeteners are really healthy and they come down on anyone who tries to say that they're, you know, could be in any way dangerous. And yet they're not obliged to test them. So none of the chemicals added really go through rigorous testing on how they affect

• 55:53Tim Spector?

  our gut microbes. And this is, you know, their testing mechanisms haven't changed in 50 years.

• 55:59Steven Bartlett?

  And here is the single most replayed moment as it relates to health on the Diary of a CEO of 2023.

• 56:06Dr. Tara Swart?

  So the first thing I came up against, because this was around the time of the financial crisis, was the lack of understanding of the brain-body connection. So these high performing executives were kind of acting like their body was just the vehicle that was moving their brain around from meeting to meeting. And both disrespecting their physical health, but also not understanding that what they were actually really being paid for was to use their brain, and they weren't creating the best conditions for that brain to operate in. And I'm talking about really basic things like sleep and a good diet and hydration and not being sedentary, managing your stress, et cetera. So, you

• 56:51Dr. Tara Swart?

  know, this tiny organ. If it's not in an environment that is giving it the best chance of doing its job, it's not going to, and a crack's going to appear somewhere. And the first time I really kind of had a big confrontation with a bank was when people were dropping dead on the trading floor of heart attacks. And they asked me to work more in my capacity as a former medical doctor to help with the physical stuff. And I said, I can't do that if we don't address the mental and emotional piece, because that's what's causing this. And they just could could not get that.

• 57:29Steven Bartlett?

  What did you want to do with those people in a specific and practical sense? If you could have, you know, been in charge of preventing them from dropping dead on the trading floor, where would you have started?

• 57:40Dr. Tara Swart?

  The understanding that stress, so everything that you're experiencing mentally and emotionally that's challenging, and things like a lot of travel, which is challenging of your body, that that raises levels of the hormone cortisol, which comes from your adrenal glands. And that cortisol courses around your blood through your entire body and brain. And the brain has receptors for understanding what's going on in terms of threat to your survival. So in a 24 hour cycle, depending on your age and your gender, there's a normal range for cortisol. So it can go up and down like this, you know, if something challenging happens, we need to adapt and rise to meet that challenge.

• 58:23Dr. Tara Swart?

  But when that level is above the top range all the time, these receptors in your brain basically think that there's an imminent threat to your survival. So there's this whole cascade of hormones. And that basically cortisol causes inflammation in the body. So inflammation of your vascular system, inflammation around your heart, and everything else, gut and, you know, other things. But particularly around that time, we were seeing a lot of heart attacks caused by stress. This was in the absence of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, smoking. It was all stress.

• 58:58Steven Bartlett?

  Once upon a time I Googled, because I had a thesis, I Googled, is stress contagious?

• 59:04Dr. Tara Swart?

  Mm hmm.

• 59:05Steven Bartlett?

  And it came up and it said it was contagious.

• 59:09Steven Bartlett?

  Is it contagious? In what circumstances do we need to be aware of that contagion? And more importantly, how and why is it contagious?

• 59:16Dr. Tara Swart?

  Okay, I will tell you the answer to that, but I'm going to ask you a question first. Have you ever walked into a room with someone? And by the time you've left that meeting with them, you just feel so drained.

• 59:28Dr. Tara Swart?

  Okay.

• 59:28Steven Bartlett?

  Of course, yeah.

• 59:29Dr. Tara Swart?

  Yeah, you know, so you know the feeling. So I'll tell you how it works physiologically. I'm going to start with something else to like build you up to this story. So did you know that women who live together or work closely together will synchronize their menstrual periods within two or three months? So whenever I want to explain something that's complex, or I don't actually know the current neuroscience, I always take it back to what happened in ancient times. So when we were living in the cave, the men hunted and gathered and lived quite nomadically. So sometimes they would go away for months at a time. And in those days, the most fundamental important thing for the survival of the

• 1:00:11Dr. Tara Swart?

  human species was that the alpha male must pass on his genes. So if he was going to be away for months and he couldn't, you know, that there weren't men there to defend the women from predators, maybe there was going to be a spell of the Ice Age and they would all freeze to death, or they wouldn't have food.

• 1:00:30Dr. Tara Swart?

  He needed to make sure that at least five women were impregnated with his sperm at the same time, so that if there was a food shortage, or there was like stillbirth or miscarriage or whatever, at least one out of five would survive. So to be able to do that, they had to be fertile at the same time. So that's why that mechanism exists. Now, we don't need that mechanism now, but it's still wired into the way that we operate. So those sex steroid hormones, like estrogen and progesterone, they leak out of our sweat about this far around us. And that's why if you're living with another woman, or if, you know, you're sitting across

• 1:01:09Dr. Tara Swart?

  the desk every day, then particles of hormone from my sweat would go into the, through the skin of the other woman.

• 1:01:18Steven Bartlett?

  If she's within what distance?

• 1:01:20Dr. Tara Swart?

  I mean, it's not, you wouldn't have to be sitting next to each other. If you live together, then that means you're interacting enough that it would happen.

• 1:01:25Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:01:27Dr. Tara Swart?

  So particles-

• 1:01:28Steven Bartlett?

  But not if you work together.

• 1:01:30Dr. Tara Swart?

  If you work together and you sit right next to each other every day, then it does happen too. So, you know, in a small office, it's got like six girls in it, that the menstrual synchronization will happen. Interestingly, it's led by the alpha female. So, yeah. So you can, you can work out if you don't know already who the alpha female, well, if you, you know, basically, let's say my cycles don't change and everyone says, oh, I got my period earlier, or I haven't had my period yet, but now it's started. Then that would mean that probably I was the alpha female.

• 1:02:01Steven Bartlett?

  How does the body know who the alpha female is?

• 1:02:03Dr. Tara Swart?

  That will be to do with levels of testosterone.

• 1:02:06Steven Bartlett?

  Why, why did the body, why does that matter, who the alpha female is? Why does it matter that they sync up with her?

• 1:02:11Dr. Tara Swart?

  I, I don't, I don't know if it really matters. I think it's just a case of physiology. So it's a little bit like in the troops of gorillas. The stress levels of the silverback gorilla affect the other gorillas more than gorillas who are peers to each other. So there is, we have a natural hierarchy and it must be related to survival as well.

• 1:02:34Steven Bartlett?

  So she was probably the person who the alpha male was going to impregnate first.

• 1:02:41Dr. Tara Swart?

  Probably.

• 1:02:42Steven Bartlett?

  So everyone needs to kind of fall in line because when she starts having sex, they need to be ready.

• 1:02:46Dr. Tara Swart?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:46Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:02:47Dr. Tara Swart?

  And also it'll probably be to do with things like, you know, survival genes. So it will be the people with the hardiest genes because that's what you'll want to pass on as well.

• 1:02:55Steven Bartlett?

  Mm hmm. Okay. Makes sense. Most resilient. Okay.

• 1:02:59Dr. Tara Swart?

  Okay. So where were we?

• 1:03:00Steven Bartlett?

  Stress and contagion. We've done all the hormones and the menstrual cycle stuff.

• 1:03:03Dr. Tara Swart?

  So basically cortisol is a hormone that works in that same way. So cortisol is the main stress hormone. And this one doesn't matter if you're male or female, but it does matter where you are in the hierarchy of the organisation, as I just mentioned. So.

• 1:03:19Dr. Tara Swart?

  Usually in that conversation I mentioned to you where you go into a room and you just feel completely drained afterwards, usually the person that comes out feeling drained is less senior than the person that's had that effect on them. And that's why this is so crucial to leadership, because your stress levels as a leader, as a CEO, are going to have more impact on everybody else than the rest of the people put together, basically. So managing your stress is obviously important for you, but it's important in terms of what happens to other people. And the first issue I came up against was CEOs and CFOs that said, well, I won't show them that I'm stressed. I won't, I won't tell them what's happening with the

• 1:04:03Dr. Tara Swart?

  numbers. I won't display emotions in front of them. And I said, they're still going to know physiologically, it's going to impact them. So now you really have to do something about it. And the other thing about cortisol, which is quite funny, well, one of the side effects is quite funny, is that as a survival mechanism, it will help you to store fat around your abdomen. So, you know, again, in the cave, if you were potentially going to like not find food for a month, then if you had extra fat around your abdomen, you could digest that and survive till you could find food. So with my clients in financial services, it got to a point where as soon as I walked into the room, they just lift

• 1:04:47Dr. Tara Swart?

  their t-shirt up and say, now you know how I've been in the last month.

• 1:04:50Steven Bartlett?

  So stress causes belly fat?

• 1:04:52Dr. Tara Swart?

  Belly fat that's really hard to shift. So again, what I would see with people is that they would say, oh, I've put on a bit of weight around the middle, you know, had to loosen the belt a bit. So I've started eating less, I've started like exercising more and I still can't shift it. And again, that's when I would explain this is the impact of cortisol. As long as you're still leaking out extra cortisol, nothing's going to change.

• 1:05:14Dr. Tara Swart?

  And like I said, even exercising more or eating better, less or differently, whatever it is, wouldn't shift that fat. You had to get to the root cause. You had to reduce the cortisol.

• 1:05:27Steven Bartlett?

  For any of you that are still here, I have a bonus moment for you. I often get asked, what is my favourite episode of the Diary of a CEO of all time? And I often try and avoid that question because I don't want to pick one particular episode. It's kind of like picking your children. However, because you've gotten here, I'm going to reveal it to you and I'm going to play you a moment from that conversation. My favourite ever episode on the Diary of a CEO of all time is episode 101. And it just so happens to be the most shared episode we've ever had of all time on WhatsApp. And I know that sounds a little bit obscure, but the interesting thing about WhatsApp is it's one to one typically.

• 1:06:10Steven Bartlett?

  So it's typically one friend sending it to a family member or to a friend or something like that. And for it to be the most transferred between one person and another, I think is telling about the value of that conversation. Here is one of the most important moments from my favourite episode on the Diary of a CEO of all time. To understand what happiness is, you have to understand the cause of it.

• 1:06:34Mo Gawdat?

  Yes.

• 1:06:34Steven Bartlett?

  And you write about that extensively in Solve for Happy. So what is the cause of unhappiness as you see it, especially if you're building sort of machine learning applications that are going to, you know, solve, you know, make people arrive at contentment or happiness in a personalised way? We must be able to know what's causing this lack of happiness.

• 1:06:52Mo Gawdat?

  Allow me a bit of time to explain it because it's simple when we get it, but it's not simple to get to it. So happiness is very predictable. Okay. If you look back at any point in your life where you ever felt happy, there is one commonality across all of those moments that can actually be documented in a mathematical equation. Okay? You've never felt happy because of a specific event in your life. Okay, take for example rain. Rain doesn't make you happy or unhappy. There is no inherent value of happiness in rain. Okay, rain makes you happy when you wanna water your plants, and it makes you unhappy when you wanna sunbathe, right? And so it's not just the event, rain. It's the comparison between the event

• 1:07:36Mo Gawdat?

  and an expectation in your mind of how life should be. Okay, if you're worried about your plants, then life should be generous to me and get me rain so I can water the plants. And if life does that, then life meets your expectations and you're happy. Okay, and so happiness in that sense becomes equal to or greater than, so it's really mathematics, that your perception of the events of your life minus your expectations of how life should be. Okay, and apply that to anything. Apply that to anything. So, you know, my favorite example is nature. We're all happy in nature. Why are we all happy in nature? I mean, you go out there and there are ants and there are flies and, you know, trees are crooked and there are, you know, shrubs everywhere and bushes

• 1:08:21Mo Gawdat?

  and it's just really not that hedged and organized. But that's what we expect. So, you know, nature's chaos is what we expect nature to be, and so we feel happy. You know, nobody ever sits in front of the ocean and says, "I like the view, but please mute the sound." Okay, you just take it. You know, it's the monotonous sound and the view and the wind and the sun and the whole experience, right? And because of that, happiness becomes very different than what was defined to us. Okay, what was defined to us is that happiness is found in gathering at the pub or a party or, you know, an activity

• 1:09:05Mo Gawdat?

  or some kind of pleasure or fun or elation or whatever that is. That's not at all true. These, I call these the state of escape. Okay, happiness, as per the definition of the happiness equation, is events equal to or beating expectations, life going my way. Okay, and so basically happiness is that calm and peacefulness you feel when you're okay with life as it is. It doesn't really matter what life is. Okay, what matters is that you can be okay with it. Right, so, so you take, you know, the, any example, if your boss is annoying, and your expectation is, yeah, bosses are annoying, this is what life is about, they become bosses because they're annoying, right?

• 1:09:46Mo Gawdat?

  And, and so if, if that's your expectation, you're gonna look at it and go like, yeah, I need to learn the skill of managing annoying bosses, okay? And if that's the case, then you're not gonna be upset about it. Hmm? Uh, uh, uh, similarly, anything else, if you look at it, then it's not just the event. Hmm? It's your perception of the event, so you have a, a, something to influence. It's not just the event, huh? Your partner might say something hurtful on Friday at 4 P M. That's the event. My partner said something hurtful. At Sunday morning, you tell yourself, he or she doesn't love me anymore. Okay? That's your perception of the event. That's not actually the event. The event is, something hurtful was said.

• 1:10:29Mo Gawdat?

  But your perception of the event is your work, is your, is your brain adding color to it. And then you compare that to your expectations, right? You compared, my boss is annoying, to, my boss shouldn't be annoying. Where did you get that from? Right? So, we blur the happiness equation, we break the happiness equation because of what I call the six and seven. Okay? Six grand illusions and seven blind spots. Hmm? Which are, the six grand illusions are basically, uh, call them pathways that the modern world teaches us to navigate the modern world, that are illusions, are not true. Okay? Uh, take for example, control. Everyone knows that to succeed in the modern world, you have to learn to control certain events.

• 1:11:14Mo Gawdat?

  Right? So you start to believe that the way to succeed in life is to control everything. But the truth is, even if you go down to the basics of physics, that we never are in control. That the absolute design of nature itself, of the universe itself, is entropy and chaos. Right? That's the actual design. And so if you try to control it, you're bound to be disappointed. A lot of events are gonna miss your expectations. Okay? And yes, I'm not saying don't control anything at all, but start to understand that you're gonna be selective, because you have a finite amount of effort. And by the way, even if you're selective and you try to control everything, sometimes things will fall out of control. Okay? And that should be your expectation.

• 1:11:59Mo Gawdat?

  Once you get that right, that was one, that was my biggest illusion. Okay? I'm a mathematician, I'm a software developer, I am a physicist, I am an engineer, and I am a senior executive. It doesn't get worse than that. Okay? I'm like the worst, absolute the worst. I used to give my wonderful wife, I swear to you, Steven, don't judge me, I used to give her a spreadsheet that would tell her when to wash the colors and when to wash the whites, based on our average consumption as a family, to save the environment. And poor Nibel would actually smile at me and say, "Sure, baby, I will use this."

• 1:12:37Mo Gawdat?

  Of course, and ignores the hell out of me, because that's how crazy you can be when it comes to control. Now, these are the illusions. If you live your life through the illusion of control, good luck finding happiness. So, six grand illusions. The illusion of thought, the illusion of self, the illusion of knowledge, the illusion of time, control, and fear. Okay? Now, that's one side. And that disrupts your entire view of what to expect from life, because you're expecting life to behave through a lens of an illusion. The other side of it is what I call seven blind spots. Okay? And the seven blind spots are not really defects in your brain. As a matter of fact, they are the very design of your brain. Okay?

• 1:13:22Mo Gawdat?

  Your brain is designed to tell you what's wrong. Okay, it's not designed to, you know, if a tiger shows up right here now, my brain has no use whatsoever in telling me, oh my God, look how majestic that animal is, right? Yeah, it's a beautiful animal, but my brain will say, we're gonna die. Okay, and we're gonna die is the idea that basically makes our our our our brain constantly look for what's wrong, blur the events of life, huh? You ask a mother, hmm, and and she will say, oh, my daughter's been sick all winter. Now, she just had two episodes of flu, three days each. But to the to the caring heart of a mother, that needs to be exaggerated to exaggeration is one of the blind spots.

• 1:14:07Mo Gawdat?

  Hmm, your your brain is trying to get you to take action, so it pushes you. Hmm, it pushes you by exaggerating the event a little bit, so that you jump in and take action. And accordingly, the event you're comparing to, you're comparing the wrong event to the wrong expectation, and the happiness equation falls apart.

• 1:14:25Steven Bartlett?

  Do you need a podcast to listen to next? We've discovered that people who liked this episode also tend to absolutely love another recent episode we've done. So I've linked that episode in the description below. I know you'll enjoy it.