 Also, when I look at blood sugar balance, starting your day with protein or breaking your fast with protein does the best job at keeping hunger hormones and check the whole rest of the day. So under eating protein at breakfast and eating a highly carbohydrate-based breakfast actually increases late night eating. It increases the three to four o'clock window where you crave caffeine and sugar. And it makes you have more obsessive thoughts about food throughout the entire day. So eating a high protein breakfast, they've shown effects the rest of the day, regardless. Exactly. So when you think about that, when you have a savory or a high protein breakfast, or if you have a protein shake, let's make sure it's not just like a fruit bowl, right, a blended fruit bowl. What that does is it's going to regulate those hunger hormones, but it also is going to support blood sugar balance the rest of the day. Boom, it's mind pump time. Here's the giveaway. Maps, anabolic, the program that started it all. And I'm giving away for free to one of you viewers. Here's how you can win. Leave a comment in the first 24 hours that we dropped this episode. Some of you wonder why we do that. Helps us with the YouTube algorithm, just being totally transparent. So leave a comment, subscribe to this channel, turn on notifications. Do all of those things. If we like your comment, we'll notify you in the comment section. You'll get free access to maps, anabolic. One more thing we got a sale going on right now. Okay. We have a shredded summer bundle, which includes maps aesthetic, maps hit, maps prime and the intuitive nutrition guide. So it's basically all the training programs and nutrition stuff that you need to get shredded. That bundle is 50% off. Now, if you just want to try one program, one mass program, maps hit is also by itself 50% off. So if you're interested, go to mapsfitnessproducts.com and then use the code June 50 so that June five, zero, no space for that discount. All right, here comes the show. Kelly, thanks for coming on the show. If you, some of our audience may not know who you are. If you give us kind of a brief background, kind of how you started. And because when I got on with you, I was on your show, I wasn't super familiar, but I was super impressed with our conversation. You're good friends with Max, Lugavere, who we love, and he just couldn't stop raving about you. So if you could give us a little bit about kind of how you started in this space, your background, and then we'll get on with the conversation. Sure. So I actually had a career in cancer and genetics for about eight years. Um, and then went back to school for nutrition and did my post graduate work at Berkeley and UCLA. I focused on blood sugar balance and hunger hormones. And I started my private practice be well by Kelly as a side hustle. And so that was in 2012. And in 2015, I took the business full time, seeing private clients in Los Angeles. And then in 2016, I wrote my first book, Body Love, which talked all about how to eat real whole foods to balance your blood sugar, regulate your hunger hormones and feel your best. Awesome. Now, when you, when you started as a side hustle was the intent for it to just to be a side hustle, because you had other plans to do something else. And then you eventually like, how did that happen? I was just so passionate about the science of nutrition and blood sugar. I was that girl at parties talking about it. I was, I was the girl with my friends, like rallying people to go for a hike. And then I was talking about, you know, intermittent fasting and bee pollen and people didn't know what bulletproof coffee was at the time. I mean, this is way back in the day when in LA, the thing was juice cleanses and smoothies that when I looked at these smoothies were a banana, a date, granola, orange juice blended up, and they put some kind of sprinkly superfood on top of that. And I'm going, wait a second. Nobody understands the nutrition here or the macronutrient profile and what's going to do to their blood sugar, what is going to do their insulin, what's going to do to their cravings. And so, um, yeah. So I felt like I was beating a different drum at the time when it was really a liquid, like the popular thing was a liquid based diet, plant-based diet, um, and some type of restrictive cleanse. And so, um, yeah, I just kept talking about it. One of my best friends was like, well, what are you doing? Go back to school. You know how to read PubMed research part of my job, my first career. And I'm thankful for the twists and turns of my career because I learned how to read PubMed research. I learned how to look for a significant P value to look at study design, to look for conflicts of interest and, um, and not to be kind of scared by headlines that were like, coconut oil is going to kill you. Red meat is going to make you die. Like I, I got to take a minute and I, I loved health and nutrition. I read all the diet books. When I was younger, I subscribed to women's health and shape magazine when my friends were reading Cosmo and doing quizzes. So I feel like it was in me for a long time, but ultimately went back and, and started the side hustle thinking, I'm just so passionate about this. I want to help people. And the first half a dozen people that I worked with were, you know, my, a friend of mine from college, his dad, who had, had a heart condition. And one of our best friends who's getting married, I helped her get ready for her wedding and, and it just kind of went from there. Like I worked with people for those first half a dozen people for free and had some amazing transformations and just felt really positive about it. Like I do it for free and I do it on the weekends and early I get up at five and work out with my friend who was training to, for her wedding and help her shop at Whole Foods. And here we are, you know, I look at it now and that was 2012. And we're almost 10 years later and from her wedding. And she's still around the same size as two little girls and being active and eating healthy is a daily practice in that life, in their life for her family. And it's just, I'm like humbled and thankful that I got to impact their life in that way. When did you write your first book? In 2016. In 2016. And that one was remind me. Body love. Okay. Yeah. So we talked about it being food freedom. There were some other working titles, but it's all about blood sugar balance. I wanted to teach people how to support their blood sugar through the foods that they were eating. And I was explaining in this book that there are certain foods that regulate your hunger hormones, that elongate your blood sugar curve, that slow down your digestion. So think about protein. Protein digest at a slower rate than carbohydrates. Now liquid carbohydrates are going to digest the fastest, like an apple juice versus apple versus a steak. Like a steak is going to digest at a slower rate. It's going to be real, those amino acids are released into the bloodstream at a slower rate when you start to mix macronutrients. When you add fat, fiber rich fat, like avocado to a meal, that's going to slow down the digestion. And even when you eat protein and then fat and then your carbohydrates say something like rice, you're going to blunt that glucose response. And when you're eating a carbohydrate that is cellular in nature versus Acellular, so cellular, meaning you're having a sweet potato or you're having rice versus rice flour crackers. The minute you have Acellular carbohydrates, these are flour based carbohydrates, carbohydrates in which the starch or sugar has been obliterated out of the fiber cell. It actually digests a lot faster. And if you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Throw, you know, rice in a glass of water or rice flour crackers in a glass of water, and then you're going to see that the rice flour crackers are already turning into that emulsification, that like, kind that our body produces when it breaks down our food with acid. It's predigested essentially. Exactly. Like we don't have the fiber to slow it down. And fiber is so beautiful. Like I think nature is amazing at supporting our blood sugar balance. When we're eating whole foods, all of the sugar and starch is wrapped up in that fiber cell. You have to chew through it. You have to digest through it. And then it's being released, passed through the epithelial lining, elevating glucose, and then insulin is bringing it back down. Now, when people hear controlled blood sugar, insulin, they think diabetes, which is definitely true, right? There's a connection there. But when I, with my experience, the most important piece of that is really, you know, working with people's behaviors, because it's behaviors that can lead to overeating or eating the wrong foods or not having the energy to be active, which then eventually leads to diabetes. So talk about this a little bit. Like you mentioned the hunger hormones. What are they and how do they affect our behavior? And then what does that mean? Well, first you have to understand how blood glucose works and how blood sugar balance works, because hunger hormones can either create satiety in our body. They can be satisfying hormones or they can be appetite-stimulating hormones, right? And so when we think about the food that we eat, we don't want to stimulate appetite. We want to stimulate, we want to feel satiety. We want to feel satisfied by the meals that we eat. And so in my first book, I talk about the Fab Four, protein, fat, fiber and leafy greens. And these four things are critical for supporting blood sugar balance because amino acids aren't going to break down to glucose in the way that a carbohydrate does. Fat is not going to have that effect. It's going to slow down the digestion of that meal. And then fiber-rich veggies and fruits and leafy greens, vegetables deep in color, these aren't really breaking down to much glucose at all. So you're seeing that elongation of a blood sugar curve. Now, if you're having, say, something like a piece of toast, you have a piece of toast in the morning, nothing on it. It's a processed acylinder carbohydrate. It's going to drive up your blood glucose. Insulin is going to be released. Insulin brings blood sugar down. And if there's an excess amount of insulin and blood glucose goes plummeting, cravings are induced. So we feel an increase in cravings when we go on these major excursions in blood glucose. And so if we can get that blood sugar elongated and we can start to eat the foods that regulate our hunger hormones, like protein, like fat, like fiber, we actually feel satisfied and we can go four to six hours between meals without thinking about food. And you're rolling into your next meal instead of crashing into your next meal, and that allows you to make those healthy choices easier. So things like, for example, um, for example, colocysticinane, colocysticinane was looked at. That's a, that's a satiety hormone. It's released in the presence of fat. So omega threes, conjugated linoleic acid and proteins like elglutamine. So if you're eating a protein and fat rich meal, if you're having a salmon, for example, or a grass-fed steak or, um, shrimp or, you know, pick your, pick your favorite protein and fat. Like even if you are taking your omega threes and then sitting down and having some chicken, like it's going to have that effect. And colocysticinane, I like to tell my clients is like a blanket. Like if you're just having boring, dry chicken and veggies and you don't have any like satiety piece, the fat piece that really regulates and releases colocysticinane, it's like putting a blanket around, you're like, Oh, that, that meal was so, it was so good, it was so satisfying and it's lasting longer. So not only is it slowing down the digestion and elongating your blood sugar curve, your body is now releasing colocysticinane. And a lot of these hunger hormones and satiety hormones are looked at by pharmaceutical companies as potential ways to create a drug to regulate hunger. Yeah. Isn't there a drug called somatic glide or something like that? An injectable one that. So there are drugs like metformin and trulicity. What's interesting is the most promising, the absolutely the most promising drugs when it comes to weight loss. And there's one in phase three clinical trials for Eli Lilly, which is like a trulicity are diabetes drugs. They're diabetes drugs that have a side effect of weight loss. Like the phase three trial, Eli Lilly drug is a once weak injectable drug and it's in phase three. People are losing 22% of their body fat and it's massive and it's like the best results we've seen. And it's working on glucagon like peptide one GLP one and GLP one is something that stops glucagon. So now your liver is not taking stored sugar and dumping it in your bloodstream. So it's bringing your blood sugar down. It's also an increased hormone, which means it really tells your body to release more insulin, which also supports blood sugar balance. So it's, it's interesting to me, but also a little bit frustrating that we're looking for all these quick fixes, these drugs that are acting on our hunger hormones that are when we eat whole foods, when we eat fiber rich foods, when we eat the foods that provide our body with the essential amino acids that we need, the essential fatty acids that we need. And we aren't using ultra process foods. We elongate that blood sugar curve. We naturally have high levels of GLP one from the foods that we're eating. We don't need to be injecting like GLP one pharmaceuticals to have that happen. You know, and I wonder what that, what the potential long term effect would be with injecting that and still eating, you know, a quickly digesting, pre digested, you know, carbohydrate or sugar. I wonder if, you know, because the body reacts to those foods in a particular way, because it's supposed to, right? It's a, it's an adaptation. So now we're blunting that response and we're still eating it particular way. We might end up with some weight loss in the short term, but what does that potentially mean in the long term is what I would wonder. Right. And I love functional MDs. I work with a lot of them. I have clients who I have amazing amount of just blood work on. And they are all like lab rats, right? It's interesting. But whenever I work with a functional MD, I love that they're looking for the root cause. Like we're looking for the root cause of the problem. And when you see people have low production of GLP one, a lot of times they have chronic inflammation in the body. And that points to the fact that they're probably eating a highly processed food diet. They are, you know, and there's no quick fix. All of these quick fixes that we've seen in the past end up having side effects and problems. And so for me, I am looking for the, I'm looking at the science, like one of my favorite classes in my postclinical work was food mood and behavior taught at UCLA by Michelle Vargas. And she was a dietitian for, for a soccer team in Europe and just really an amazing teacher. But what was interesting is people will take bits and pieces of like chocolate makes you feel good. And that is releases dopamine. And that's going to make you feel satisfied. But what was so interesting is we looked at all of them. Like closest to kinase is one hunger hormone. It makes you feel satisfied. Glucogon like peptide one that we just talked about GLP one. That is going to right, help support blood sugar balance. And then you look at something like leptin and leptin, right, is a hormone that's released from your fat cells. That's supposed to tell your brain, Hey, we're fat cells and we're full, right? But when we have insulin resistance, when we have chronic inflammation, we also have leptin resistance. And when we look at that as like a drug target, they did it. They used it with animal models. It worked in animal models to supplement a leptin like pharmaceutical and the animals got the signal, Hey, okay, we're full, we don't need to eat anymore. We feel satisfied, but it's broken in human models. Like we are so complex and not only is it hunger hormones, but you also have to look at what's the social setting because and when are we normally eating because there are hunger hormones that are related to your normal eating times like ghrelin. Like if you get up and eat at six a.m. every single morning and then you try to get up and not eat at six a.m. in the morning, your body is producing ghrelin and ghrelin is the highest before you eat and the lowest an hour after you eat. And so, you know, the physical stretching of your stomach is what calms ghrelin and in chronically inflamed and in research in obese patients, that ghrelin is never calming down, you know, so it is, it is really interesting to start to understand these hunger hormones and know like, hey, what's mental versus what's physical and the ghrelin piece is interesting because whenever I have clients come to me and say, hey, I really want to start fasting now, fasting super popular, I'm going to wait. I'm not going to eat until two p.m. But right now they're a mom of three and they wake up and eat at seven in the morning every day. Good luck with that. Yeah, like it's just not going to happen. And you may, knowing that it's mental, knowing that ghrelin is, ghrelin is really just sort of in your head a little bit and that we work to move that, move that time back. But we don't force it overnight and we don't say two p.m. is going to be the best time for you to eat. I may say, hey, you want the benefits of intermittent fasting, let's eat like my grandma. Can you eat breakfast at nine a.m. Instead of at seven a.m. And can you finish dinner by five or six p.m. and just eat in the daylight hours. But to get from seven to nine, I may push it back 30 minutes every single day and have them know mentally. It's almost like sleep training a baby or pushing yourself for something that just a little bit of time every day. Like everyone can do 30 minutes. Just push back 30 minutes, then eat, just push back 30 minutes. Yeah, you know, I also, because people eat because they have cravings or hunger, but they also eat because they have bad feelings. I see this all the time with clients. So irritability or I just don't feel good or whatever. Stress. Do these, do these, these highs and lows with blood sugar and do these other hunger hormones, besides causing cravings, can they also just make you feel crappy because I do, I see this all the time with, I used to see this all the time with clients. It's like, I see this with myself. I, this happens to me when I'm bored, I want to eat. So what about how they make you feel aside from the cravings? Well, you have to remember that any type of highly palatable food that has carbohydrates, sugar, fat, all wrapped into one is going to release dopamine. It's going to make us feel good. So it is absolutely normal. And I tell my clients, I, I empathize with them. I'm like, I get it. Like you're having a bad day. You're stressed, you're bored. You're looking for a way to distract yourself. Like it is normal to want to have processed foods. Now, if you've had processed foods, you've gone up that roller coaster on average, your blood sugar is going up for 90 minutes. And since being released and you're dropping down for 90 minutes, that crash can make us feel irritable. It can impede our ability to concentrate and learn. So we even see this in the research with children, which is why I'm so adamant that parents learn how to support blood sugar balance in their kids to serve up protein rich meals, to serve up nutrient dense meals, to really watch sugar and processed foods like before the today's podcast. We were talking about it, you know, when you have kids, it's you don't want to make them feel left out, but you also, you are responsible. You need to be in the adult in the room to help support their blood sugar balance because they love sugar, right? And that crash is absolutely going to impact their ability to learn and retain the information that they're learning. And it also unfortunately causes attention deficit disorder, like behaviors, and that can be a misdiagnosis based on blood sugar dysregulation. So it impacts everything. You know how frustrating it was to, you know, obviously being in the space. I've been in the space for over two decades. And to hear doctors say, oh, or even study someone. Oh, sugar doesn't cause kids to act crazy or whatever. I'm a parent. I'm like, yeah, it does. See you immediately. Oh, yeah. I see my kids. If they eat a bunch of sugar about an hour later, an hour and a half later, I don't want to be around them. Or, you know, on the drive home from the birthday party and they're having total meltdowns. It was really frustrating to hear medical professionals say, no, that doesn't, it's not. Well, you're, you're alluding to something I wanted to ask her about because when I went through all your content, one of the things I really enjoyed was I love the way that you communicate a lot of the science, very similar to like what we've been communicating this podcast for a long time. I don't know. It was like maybe six years, six or seven years ago when we came out and we had shirts made that said IIF when it sucks. And we stirred up a lot of controversy about that because at that time it was getting really popular. And this is kind of some of the stuff that we were talking about that we didn't like about it. And one of the challenges is there are a lot of PhDs on the other side that want to make this argument about a calorie is a calorie and is, you know, as long as your your calories are controlled and weight loss or building muscle, we can do all that and we are always trying to communicate to our people. Yeah. Okay. Yes, that's true. But then there's the behavior side and these cravings and all these other things that are happening. How you feel that why would you make it that much more difficult on yourself? If there is a natural holistic way to make it easier for yourself by just making better choices. So how do how do you handle that conversation? Because I'm sure that you get some skepticism and criticism in that direction. When you say blood sugar and insulin, you get those people that eye roll and be like, Oh God calories are calories. As long as I eat my macros. Yeah, I hit my macros. I'm fine. Yeah, you know, what's really interesting is that there are some studies that I lean on and I explained to my clients. There was one study, Aliyah Crum out of Stanford. She is a tenured professor. She is a clinical psychologist and she did a study. And and it's about what you believe. It's your belief system and in the belief response. And she gave two groups smoothies and she's told one that it was nutrient dense and satisfying and really good for them. And that the told the other group that it was, you know, gluttonous, highly caloric and not nutrient dense. And what actually happened was the belief system actually affected the physiology of the bodies. And what they were able to show is that the return of ghrelin for the people who believed that or the increase in ghrelin for the people that believe that it was nutrient dense and satisfying was actually further out in time based on fascinating. And so when you look at stuff like that or like, you know, there was a study that took macronutrients. It was it was published just about a year and a half ago. And it was looking at ultra processed food versus whole foods. And it was controlled. So it was in hospital set in hospital setting controlled for fat, protein, fiber and calories. And it was ultra processed versus whole food based. And what they looked at was feeding behaviors. And so exactly what you're talking about, the ultra processed food eating community. And I'm sure you've seen this study. They ate 500 calories more a day. And when when you look at that, that the natural satiety that happens, it's this amazing like orchestra in our bodies of multitude of hormones. And so when you talk about ghrelin, the physical stretching of the stomach, a protein bar versus like a piece of protein on some veggies with a starch. If you have a starch, if you're, you know, lean, low carb, or keto and you don't have a starch, fine, like I don't really care. What I'm looking for is nutrient dense whole foods that are full of fiber and water that are going to physically stretch your stomach so that ghrelin calms down versus something that's processed and small or low in calories. But there is some interesting research around belief system too. When someone believes that their diet is going to work for them, so say the guys that maybe troll me on the internet about calories and calories out. Your belief system, again, Aliyah Krum is showing through her research that it plays a big role in how your body responds to the foods you eat. And so if you believe, and this is so key in follow through for my clients, if you believe that something's gonna work for you or that you can do it, your follow through, your commitment, your consistency will always prevail and that is gonna outpace any fad diet that you do. So I always tell people like calories don't count, they backfire. But like, you know, I'm not discrediting the science but what I'm looking at is human behavior. I'm looking at the fact that like someone can calorie count but if they start their day with a highly processed bowl of sugary cereal, what are they gonna crave 90 minutes later? They're gonna start that crash cycle and they're gonna start craving highly processed foods or they're gonna crave more sugar. And then it's gonna be hard for them, they're gonna white-knuckle it, they're gonna try really hard not to eat and then they're gonna cave. And it's like my whole job is to get people out of their own way to have them stop thinking about food, to have them feel satisfied and relaxed, to roll into a party where there's a buffet in front of them and to say like, I feel good. And not because mentally they're really good at control because those people aren't having any fun at that party. They're focused on controlling their food choices. I want you to be physically satisfied and I want those hunger hormones to be, I want the hunger hormones to be calm and I want the satiety hormones to be flowing. I think what people need to understand is that our environment doesn't match our body. What I mean by that is we evolved in a particular way and then relatively short period of time our environment changed radically including our food and when we design food, we have a market-based system. What people pick food based off of is its palatability, how enjoyable it is to eat. By the way, this is true for all categories of food including health foods. You're gonna top five foods and wellness and health categories and it's the most palatable of all those foods, not the healthiest necessarily. And so it's just they've created with no understanding at first maybe now they do know but really no understanding of how it impacts these kind of ancient bodies that really were never exposed to these types of things and so we're just mismatched as what's happening and there's just kind of this belief that humans evolved to just eat whatever's in front of them because food was so scarce. Over eating 10,000 years ago was just as bad for you as it is today and obviously it was much more difficult but if you gorge yourself with food you could hurt yourself, you could actually die, you could cause digestive issues back then just like now and so these signals of satiety exist for a reason but we have completely hijacked them and made them haywire, right? So of course you're gonna walk around and things are gonna be screwed up for you because your body's telling you to do something and you're trying to discipline your way out of it which that doesn't last very long. At some point you give in and you're just like forget it because this sucks and then you pay the price. I wanted to ask you about the individual variances and I know that now we have technology like continuing glucose monitors and to be able to really like get more insight into those variances but also like when you're first starting out and you had clients and maybe weren't using this technology yet how did you teach them how to navigate through that process and really see how the body reacted to certain foods and how do they navigate and make better choices through that? Yeah, definitely. Well, I love like teaching people how to fish instead of handing them fish. I like them to understand the science. One of my favorite classes at USC in my undergrad was Nature of Human Health and Disease where I wrote a paper. Like my thesis, the end of that class was on type two diabetes and I thought it was so fascinating because it really opened my eyes to blood sugar balance and so for me teaching my clients to manage their blood sugar with their food choices was really important and so a lot of it started without technology in 2012, right? It was, hey, when do you feel hungry? So anytime I sit down with a client, I asked the question like put me, I want to live in your body. Like put me in your body. What does it look like? What is it like when you wake up in the morning? Are you energized? Are you tired? Do you need caffeine? When do you feel hungry? When you eat, what do you eat? How full do you feel when you're done eating? Was your energy level look like 90 minutes later, three hours later? When are you craving snacks? Are you able to make it from breakfast to lunch? Without snacking. And are you focused? When are your, what times in the day do you feel the most focused? So all of those questions are probing to understand how they're digesting their food. Is it giving them energy? Are they feeling full and satisfied? Are they feeling bloated? And so a lot of times, especially in the clients that I work with, which are primarily like 25 to 55 year old females and I have a lot of women who are, I just found myself working and living in LA where I was helping people get ready for movie roles or red carpets and there's this, there's in this space there's a real push for deprivation, calorie counting, juice cleansing and things of that nature. So for me, it was the goal, the goal was food freedom and for them to feel their best. So it's really asking those questions around how do you feel? Because if you're eating a meal and after you're done eating, you still are sort of thinking about food, I may probe and question, well how much protein did you eat in that meal? That is actually the most satisfying macro nutrient from a scientific standpoint in regards to its ability to regulate the majority of your hunger hormones. You have a hunger hormone called neuropeptide Y and I always joke it's like, why don't you just eat more? Because it's from the top down, it's a hormone that makes you crave more sugar and carbohydrates. You finished a meal and this hunger hormone is still raging in your body. You might not have eaten enough protein because protein is something that calms that hormone. So I'm always looking for low hanging fruit of, are you gonna send yourself up and down a blood sugar roller coaster with this meal? Are you suboptimal when it comes to protein intake? Or are you having a hard time digesting your food for example? It really, I mean, everyone is different but I'm looking for the easiest points of entry to get the biggest bang for my buck. What's the theory behind why protein is create so much satiety versus let's say carbohydrates? Is it because in nature protein containing foods tend to also come along with lots of nutrients and carbohydrate containing foods in nature tend to, you need to eat more of them to get the same amount of nutrients? Is that the prevailing theory or is there something else? Well, there's a lot there. So when you look at glucagon like peptide one, GLP one, when you look at, when you look at ghrelin, when you look at leptin, when you look at neuropeptide Y, when you look at glucose response to eating protein and insulin, a normal insulin response, it regulates the majority of those hunger hormones. It also is interesting because you have nerves that innervate your gut that are scavenging for essential amino acids and they're scavenging for essential fatty acids. So there's a protein satiety theory of you guys talked about that on the show. There's a belief that we will stop eating as humans when we have gotten the amino acids from the food that we're eating and that we feel the most satisfied by that. That's why high protein diets are so effective at helping with calories. Exactly, like you, there's no way around the fact whether you're raw vegan to paleo somewhere in between that you have to get essential amino acids from your food and you have to get essential fatty acids from your food. You cannot synthesize these or produce these in the body and they make everything from our muscle cells to cellular repair, neurotransmitters, hormones, everything. And so I, you know, when I, and also when I look at blood sugar balance starting your day with protein or breaking your fast with protein does the best job at keeping hunger hormones and check the whole rest of the day. So under eating protein at breakfast and eating a highly carbohydrate based breakfast actually increases late night eating. It increases the three to four o'clock window where you crave caffeine and sugar. And it makes you have more obsessive thoughts about food throughout the entire day. Wait, so eating a high protein breakfast they've shown affects the rest of the day regardless. Exactly. So when you think about that when you have a savory or a high protein breakfast or if you have a protein shake let's make sure it's not just like a fruit bowl, right? Blended fruit bowl. What that does is it's gonna regulate those hunger hormones but it also is going to support blood sugar balance the rest of the day. So instead of starting with say something that is highly processed that is dense and carbohydrates that spike and crash it's almost like you don't recover. That first meal of the day especially coming off of a fast they've been able to show when people fast and go into a high glycemic meal they actually have higher glucose excursions. They have more inflammation, inner-lucan-6, C-reactive protein is higher. And then when someone has a protein-based breakfast or breaks their fast with protein. So when someone says I'm intermittent fasting so that I can roll into John and Vinny's and have a huge pizza I think to myself you would have been better off to get up, work out, lift, have an egg scrambled and then go have that pizza because you actually would have done a better job of regulating your blood sugar than if you would have fasted and rolled into that pizza. So fasting is not a free ticket to a high glycemic meal. It's actually more detrimental to your body when you do that. So how you break the fast is very important. So critical and that first meal of the day can be everything. So even if I don't have control over say for example my kid's meals at school or what they're eating at a birthday party you better believe Sebastian and Tasha are having a protein shake or they're having eggs or they're, I mean like whatever it takes like it's the bacon, it's the sausage. It is, I am, it is leftovers. They can have salmon from the night before. I don't care if they want a chicken wing. It's a good hack. I just, yeah, like sending your kids to school or sending them to, and my kids are like protein points. Plant points, you know? Not to say that we've like totally gamified it, but Sebastian's three and a half, you know? I talk to him and like to educate him on what is in his food even if it's a little bit over his head because he, I mean like most humans we feel good accomplishing something and I'd rather even from my toddlers to my clients I want people to feel really motivated to put something on their plate than to try and use all this willpower to keep something off. The minute you say, you can't have this, you can't have that, you can't have this. We talk about this all the time. All you want are those things, off-limit things. I've heard you actually talk about how you explain this to your kids and we do the same thing. My wife's really good at this about like carrots good for your eyes and you know, proteins good for the muscles and like there's that association so they know like to seek those types of foods to build up their body. And I think that's like a great way to kind of connect all those choices to them. Thanks, yeah, same right back at you. Like being a parent is tough. You want your kids to feel motivated to, I'm sorry. No problem. I was going to cough my way through that, but. Oh, it's all right. Gets me emotional too. And I do this to every guest. Yeah, woo. Off a Clint. No, Ray Pack at you, I think being a parent is tough, right? You like, you don't want to demonize foods. You don't want to label foods because you don't want kids to seek those out or think that, you know, I don't know. You just, there is some psychology around off limit foods and we have it as adults. So most of the time, let's say we do have those like meltdowns on the way home from a birthday party. I empathize. I'm like, oh, those cookies are so good, right? They make us feel really excited and really energized because it's a really fast energy. But then sometimes it's like we climb up the slide really fast and then we're sliding down and we're like, whoa, I'm feeling tired. I'm feeling a little out of control. Like that's normal, but I know what makes you feel better. A little bit of protein. So I may have like a beef stick or I may have like a nut pack for my kids. And I like to teach them to eat their way through it with nourishing things. And it isn't an atonement for their sins. And I talked to my clients about this because there is that thing like, oh, I'm gonna, if I'm gonna eat that pizza, like, I'm gonna go work out or make up for it. It's a really hard, it's a sticky space, right? Because you're like, no, I want someone to be like, I'll have fun at brunch, but then yeah, I'm gonna get a workout in. It's not, I don't want you to have the mindset of like, yeah, you don't want it to be a complex. You don't want to like make up for it, but you also want to say like, how do I keep my pendulum? Like if you think of a ball on a pendulum, I always say, I have a client who is hardcore cleansing. There is gonna be a minute where she's gonna swing to the other side and binge. And I'd rather get her in a place where she can have the cookie and then not miss the workout and then decide to go to the farmer's market and make some healthy food. And you're bouncing off the mid-light, you're never gonna be perfect. The ball is not gonna stop. So like, this attainment of I'm gonna have the perfect day really throws people off because the minute they, you know, have shame or guilt or belief system around something that they've eaten and it's bad, then the whole day's off. Yeah, now you're speaking our language for sure. Now what about the difference between men and women? Because we're talking about hormones and although we're far more similar than we are different, men and women are different when it comes to hormone profiles. Obviously men, everybody knows higher testosterone, much more consistent, whereas women have estrogen and progesterone higher and those alternate throughout the month and they sometimes one's higher than the other. What about the difference between men and women and cravings in food? Have you found big differences or are those not really? Well, I would say gender wise when we're just making generalizations and what I've seen in my clients. Women are definitely a little more emotional when it comes to food and we're more sensitive to food. We also, we wanna maintain our menstruation and so we need to have a specific amount of fat to do that on our body and on our frame. When it comes to men, you have higher levels of testosterone, you have a larger muscle mass which means you have more ability to manage glucose. You have, you're gonna have more mitochondria that can create more ATP, that can burn more glucose and create and break down and burn fat substrates. So there is more of an ability for my male clients to fast easily, for example, and wait until 2 p.m. to eat or set their mind on not eating a specific thing and maybe feeling less emotional about it. So I think context matters. I also think, and this is my belief system, that women are a little bit more people pleasing and when it comes to making sure that everyone else is okay and not trying to be the best at something or to achieve something whereas certain men don't feel bad if they're like, I'm gonna eat this. I don't care if everybody at the party isn't eating what I'm eating whereas women might be more inclined to eat what everyone else is eating to not make someone feel left out so it maybe not isn't hormone related, more like social behavioral generalities, but yeah, most often I would just say for men, it's a lot easier for them to balance blood sugar if they have higher levels of testosterone and if they have higher muscle mass. Yeah, the muscle mass ones are an interesting one. So when I've read about this, one of the best ways that I've seen in literature to help with insulin and blood sugar is just to build muscle. There was one study I read where they took obese individuals, had them lose no weight, they just built some muscle and you saw these really significant improvements in blood sugar regulation. So maybe we could talk about that a little bit. Oh yeah, well, when you think about glucose or blood sugar, you eat a carbohydrate, you digest it and it breaks down, it passes through your epithelial lining of your intestines, it becomes blood sugar, your blood sugar goes up. Well, where is it gonna go when it's coming down? Insulin is released, its job is to pick up that glucose and put it away. Think about your tanks, you have your liver tank, that's gonna suck up some of the sugar and then you have your muscles. And your muscles are, I think these are the active tanks that suck up sugar. So how do we bring blood sugar down? Well, we don't eat things that break down to blood sugar or we put muscle on and that's tank, right? You cannot change the size of your liver and if it's getting bigger, not probably great. Bigger or fatty, not really great for your health, right? But when it comes to muscles, that is your metabolism. That is, those are the tanks in which you store sugar. So I always say, if it's not going in the gas tanks, your liver and your muscles, it's going in the trunk, right? It's being converted to triglycerides and it's storing us fat, right? And so what we can do is put more lean muscle mass on and for a long time, I think women were really afraid of putting muscle mass on but I will tell you time and time again, the clients that have the most flexibility in eating that don't have to think about their food as much. They have lean, insulin-sensitive muscles that suck up sugar and allow them to decide to have that rice crispy treat at the party or make a more high glycemic or processed food choice without impact on their body composition. Speaking of muscle metabolism, there's a lot of controversy around exactly how many calories a pound of muscle burns more in your body and this is something that we've battled with even on this show because I think early on, I think I remember hearing estimates as high as like 40 to 50 calories for every pound and then I've seen other research that said, oh, it's more like four. Now in my experience, if I could take a male or a female client and add 10 to 15 pounds of muscle on their body, we have dramatically changed the amount of calories it can eat and it doesn't line up with what I've read. And so we've had the chance, can you explain that or have you, I mean, what are your thoughts on that? Well, I think you have to look at the entire experience there, right? So you're putting on muscle mass, you're raising your metabolic rate, you're also raising the, you're increasing the amount of glucose that that person can eat, you're clearing glucose faster, right? And you're balancing blood sugar in a more effective way which is also gonna sport those hunger hormones that we talked about. When we have elevated levels of glucose and blood sugar constantly in the body, not only does it increase cravings, it increases insulin, it increases the chances of metabolic and chronic lifestyle diseases, type two diabetes, polycystic ovarian syndrome, it's gonna impact fertility, it's gonna, I mean, everything. So when we just say, oh, putting on a little bit of muscle is just gonna have us burn more calories, it's a whole change in our- How you feel. How you feel our energy levels, our ability to perform in our job and be the best version of ourselves. So I'm not one to fight when it comes to calories burned for a pound of fat, three to five or a pound of muscle, 40 to 50. I look at that and I say, you've increased someone's metabolic health and longevity, not only that, but every single time that they are activating those muscles, they're releasing myokines which are, those are anti-inflammatory chemicals that are released from the muscle after three minutes of muscle contraction that are amazing for the body. So we think about that, it's counteracting these cytokines or these inflammatory chemicals that are all in the body. So I think, I mean, no doubt in my mind that putting on muscle is one of the best ways to support blood sugar balance. And we also know that movement after a meal, even movement before a meal or after a meal, if you wanna have a glucose excursion is one of the fastest and best ways to bring glucose down. That go for a walk after eating. Yeah, tag it to store as energy and to store as glycogen in the muscle versus having that blood sugar elevated for the long haul overnight, whatever the case may be, causing inflammation, waking up with elevated blood sugar. Now you have cravings, now you're setting yourself up for potentially having all these chronic lifestyle diseases. And most doctors aren't talking, especially to women in, when you're fasting blood sugar is in the 90s, you're doubling your chances for Alzheimer's. And Max and I talked about that. You know, we've talked about that on his podcast a lot because it's when we're focused on cardio-based activity as a female and we are not focused on holding on to lean muscle mass, you are constantly gonna fight the scale and what are you gonna do? Oh, just eat less, work out more, more cardio, less food. And then they get to a place where it's unsustainable. Yeah, and Alzheimer's, some people refer to it as type three diabetes. It's exactly right. Yeah, and strength training is actually the only thing that's been shown to halt the progression of the beta amyloid plaques from a non-medical intervention standpoint. And as far as the calories are concerned, I've read literature, you know, what's interesting is that you have a range of calories you could burn with the same lean body mass. So if you're sending the signal that you need to build muscle, even if you don't, your body becomes less efficient with calories or more efficient depending on your activity and how you feed yourself. So it's not as easy as saying a pound is. Right, well, I think Kelly did a good job of touching on some of the other factors that these controlled studies don't bring in, right? So it's like a controlled study of just measuring how many calories. Does it give you a whole picture? And I mean, and I've talked, I've shared on the podcast many times some behavior or a part that I've noticed about weight training for myself. When I am consistent with my lifting, my need naturally increases because I just, I feel better. I come home and instead of feeling lethargic from not working out and I'm tired, I wanna come home and just sit down and not do anything versus I come home and I'm in this mood where I wanna help my wife out around the house. I can help clean, I do more dishes, like I'm just a better partner because I got my lift in. And so that's not gonna translate in a study that's measuring just my muscle and how many calories it's burning, but that's counting towards me burning more calories for the day, which is going to help with overall. So yeah, we talk about in our experience when we can add five, 10, 15 pounds of muscle, it dramatically changes their ability to lose body fat. And I know that doesn't line up with some of the studies that people tout out there that's always a challenge. The long term, their success rate goes through the roof. What about how our bodies or brains adapt to the, I don't know, for lack of a better term, the sensation of hyper-palatability or sweetness? Like I notice when I avoid heavily, like highly palatable foods, that whole foods become more flavorful. Like if I don't eat any candy, for example, or no sugar, fruit tastes much better. If I eat a lot of candy, fruit starts to taste more bland. Like what about the science on that and how we perceive sweetness and how we perceive palatability and how it affects us down the road in terms of how we start to perceive the foods that we eat? Yeah, well, what we can point to is dopamine, right? So when we eat highly palatable foods, dopamine is released. And dopamine can be released in any type of addiction behavior, right? So smoking and sex and whatever it is that you're like, yes, right? So eating highly palatable foods, you have the release of dopamine. Excess dopamine causes down regulation of dopamine receptors. So then you need more of that food to get that same high. And so when you take a break from any of these types of behaviors and you allow for that regulation system to recalibrate and then you're eating naturally sweet foods, they're gonna taste better and you're gonna enjoy them in a whole new way. And so there is something to be said about abstaining. And I always tell my clients, if you are going to say, for example, try to white-knuckle it, let's say you do love ice cream or you love cookies and you buy them once at the grocery store and then they're in your cabinet. You are gonna need to say no every single time you open that door versus just once at the store. No at the store is better than no every time you open that cabinet. So if you don't have to abstain forever, but having those breaks and creating a system is one thing to talk about it. Oh, just don't eat that food. Oh, just say no. But have a system for it. Like we have a system around screen time. We have a system around sugar in our house with our kids. And that comes down to having on the weekends, right? And it is something where we might get like a small pint of Vedder's ice cream, which is an awesome like little local place down where I live. And we'll get that. And it's made with dates and really awesome. So shout out to them. But we'll have it. And if it's done, we don't keep it around so that Bash can open, Sebastian, we call him Bash, open the freezer drawer and go like, I want this on a Monday morning, right? Like don't put it in front of yourself to naturally create those breaks in time so that you can experience the joys of whole foods that you're talking about. And this is the real value, in my opinion, of fasting. I think the real value of fasting is the, I don't know, lack of a better term, the spiritual aspect of abstaining, giving yourself time to deal with how you feel, to deal with these cravings. Then you get these receptors to upregulate again. Then you can, of course, this is, I also talk about this, how you break the fast is very important. Then you find all of a sudden foods that maybe were more bland or more enjoyable. You have less cravings for those super sweet types of food. In fact, I found after a long fast that really sweet foods are overwhelmingly sweet, where I'll eat and get almost nauseous from it because my brain has changed itself. Speaking to the overwhelmingly sweet, in terms of artificial sweeteners and maybe some downstream effects of behaviorally, if people think that they're not really getting the calories necessarily from these artificial sweeteners, have you noticed any behavioral red flags as a result of maybe incorporating that in your diet? Yeah. We haven't seen it in research when it comes to natural sweeteners like stevia and monk fruit, but we haven't studied it in the same way as we've studied artificial sweeteners like aspartame with diet soda. So there was a study done looking at diet soda versus regular soda and they gave people a diet soda or a regular soda and then they gave them a burger and fries and they watched the behavior of the quantity of foods that they ate after a diet soda versus a regular soda and they were eating almost a third more of the meal when they had a diet soda. So I think what we think is, your brain is waiting for the payoff, right? You taste these sweet foods, you're waiting for the payoff, it's not coming and then we end up overeating or almost looking for those foods, looking for that sweetness or looking for those calories in the food that we're eating after. So like I said earlier, there's no quick fix, right? If you need something sweet or you wanna enjoy something sweet, if you can fruit natural and nature's candy, that's a cellular carbohydrate, it's locking up the sugar, it's you have to chew through it through that fiber, you're getting all the phytochemicals and antioxidants present there, the polyphenols, amazing research coming out on how that is supportive of our gut health, like really cool stuff there, but I get it if like you need a cookie sometimes, it's just, I think there's this mindset that people have that they should be able to just have a box of cookies in their cabinet and be super human, never think about it, never eat it and it'll just be there for their kids when their kids want it but they're gonna be able to control themselves because that just is, I think it's unfair. You wouldn't tell an alcoholic who potentially is looking to be sober to go have a soda, soda water, Topo Chico Perrier, you would go have it at the bar that you used to drink at, that's really unfair, and why spend that mental energy there when it could be spent doing amazing things for your career, doing amazing things with your kid, like productive energy versus, I think it's just energy being used in the wrong space. The problem is that when we do that, we're in a motivated state of mind, oh, I'll totally be able to say no with the cookies in my cupboard and then you're not always gonna feel that strongly about your discipline and you're gonna end up giving in, that's why I don't have potato chips, for example, in my house, because that's my food, that's the one that I can't say no to. Now what about, so the brain models itself a little bit when you expose it to a lot of dopamine, but when you're an adult, your brain isn't quite as plastic as when you're a child. Do we have any research showing how there may be some bigger or more permanent changes to a child's brain when they're exposed to lots of these foods versus an adult? Like, are there anything that, do we see anything from, you eat a lot of sugar as a kid versus just when you eat it as an adult? Well, it is really interesting that most parents will say, my kids can handle a lot of sugar. But what they're thinking of there, what they're looking at is that their child can eat sugar without metabolic impact, without gaining weight, but they're not looking at their ability to learn, retain information. They're not looking at their microbiome development. A child's microbiome, there's something called the first 1,000 days. And this is the most critical time from when a child is growing in utero through the first, from literally egg and sperm coming together to create an embryo from there to the first 1,000 days, how critical it is for that child, whether it's still growing in the mom or out in the world to have access to the most nutrient dense foods and to be protected from endocrine disrupting chemicals, from pharmaceuticals like antibiotics. And obviously antibiotics are life saving when needed, but it is such a critical developmental period of the brain and the microbiome and the body in general, that we wanna protect that as much as possible. So steering clear of things that break down the body and really focusing on the most nutrient dense brain building and body building foods is critical. Yeah, so when my wife was pregnant with my son, we, she ate a lot of egg yolks. She ate salmon roe a lot. We had organ meats. Were we on the right track? Are these a lot of the good foods? You're making me so happy right now. Okay, great, great, great. Yes. Any other foods that you recommend for somebody who's, we're pregnant now? By the way, this one's much. Congratulations. Very challenging though this time because the first trimester, she was like really nauseous, like terribly, couldn't hold anything down. So this is a little more challenging, but what other foods can we add to that list if someone's listening, they're gonna have a baby or they're planning on it? What are like some of the best foods that you can eat? Right, so you wanna look for mineral dense, iron rich, vitamin D rich, omega three rich foods. And so those are primarily going to be in animal protein. So you're mentioning things like organ meats and Force of Nature is an awesome company. They do a meat blend with organ and liver. So heart and liver. And so 10 to 20% of that ground is going to, it's 100% pasture raised. So it's ground beef with. It looks like a pound of ground beef and they've already mixed in all the organs and the livers for you. Sneak is great, I like it. I have never once. Bring down that flavor a little bit. I have never, it's not too gamey. I have never once been so consistent with organ meats. Like I know how healthy it is and that should be motivation enough but I'll get a liver and try to eat it, chop it up and when it's frozen and try to swallow it frozen, I'll try to grind it myself into some ground beef. It's just, this is the first time I've ever been consistent with my family eating it and not taking it as a desiccated liver capsule. So what you're gonna get from that is vitamin A, you're also gonna get iron, you're gonna get copper, all the minerals. So anything that has selenium, zinc and that is truly in things like your organ meats that you're talking about. When you talk about egg yolks, that is the multivitamin of the egg, right? So that's your B vitamins, that's choline, that's vitamin D. If you can get a pasture raised egg, it's gonna be higher in vitamin D and omega-3s. So when we're talking about omega-3s, not short chain, plant-based seeds, we're talking about long chain omega-3s. Those are the only ones that have been shown EPA and DHA to have IQ and brain development cognitive benefits. Let's pause there for a second. So the short chain ones, you're talking about when people will take plant-based omega-3s or plant-based fatty acids. I think where you need to be careful is the short chain fatty acids from plants like flaxseeds. So chia seeds, you're gonna see it on the side or like anything that uses canola oil, right? That you're gonna see like rich in omega, I'm thinking of like Hellman's mayonnaise. It's gonna say rich in omega-3s and you're like, that's short chain omega-3s. Your body needs to take those and needs to convert them to a long chain omega-3 and we do a really poor job of doing that. Only of all those short chain omega-3s that we ingest, we're really on average, depending on it changes between a male and a female, but on average, it's like five to 10% of those are being converted to long chain omega-3s. So if someone is 100% plant-based, I absolutely recommend they're taking an algae-based omega-3. That's the only plant-based long chain omega-3. It has to be taken in supplement form. Did not know. Now when it comes to long chain omega-3s, these are what's so cool is chickens, they eat those flax seeds, they're pretty good at converting that short chain to a long chain. So their egg yolks are gonna be rich in those long chain omega-3s, right? And the same goes for most of the animals that you're eating, whether like, you can think about a pasture-raised cow, like the omega-3s present in there are gonna be long chain and in fish salmon, salmon roe really dense in those. So those are amazing sources of long chain omega-3s. Now you could take a fish oil, you could take krill oil and all of that and those are gonna be the long chain omega-3s. But just do not get sold if you're at a grocery store and you see like flax oil and you're like, I'm gonna add that to the top of my oatmeal or in my sm- That's not- It's like 5% of that's gonna get- That's not, that's a waste of your money or just pour it down the drain. So you know the omega-3s and pouring out down the drain? I've heard that if like, let's say you have like a really poor diet, fast food, processed foods like crazy. And then you take these omega-3s that the 6s and 9s out-compete the 3s and you don't even get the benefits of the 3s. Is that true? Well, when you look at, when you look at what it's supposed to be on a cellular level, I'm sure you guys have talked about this. You want a one to one ratio omega-3 to omega-6. And when you look, when we start to look at human studies, it's really like one omega-3, 25 omega-6. 75 omega-9, like the comparison and the quantity ratios are really, really off. So I always recommend an omega-3. It's really hard to out-compete those fried foods, those industrial seed oils, all the things that your fast food restaurants are frying up. They're, I wouldn't say that we haven't seen a decrease in inflammation levels and we haven't seen an adjustment in the ratio. When you take omega-3s, that's not like throwing it down the drain. I still think people should be taking those. Also, because when you think about cholecysticinane that we talked about earlier, that satiety hormone that makes us feel. It still affects that. It's gonna affect that. So if you don't, if you aren't getting any source of omega-3s. So still value in that. There's value there, absolutely. Now what about one other thing that eggs contain, which was demonized for a long time, but now we're realizing it's not so bad is dietary cholesterol. And I know that's like one of the building blocks of hormones and it's super, super dense in the brain. And so this is one of the other reasons why my wife would eat lots of egg yolks while she's pregnant is because we're developing a brain. Like what about that? Is that something important to you want to consume, especially during pregnancy? Absolutely. I mean, when you're thinking about things like choline, cholesterol, omega-3s, like these are critical for the body. And cholesterol is really interesting in that it does support hormone production. And when is a critical time to think about hormone balance, fertility and pregnancy. And also I think it's being demonized because we're not recycling our cholesterol. When you think about getting rid of old cholesterol, the old cholesterol that is corrosive, that is being demonized, like if we're going to the bathroom every single day, the job of your body is to recycle old cholesterol and to poop it out and to get rid of it. And if we're not going to the bathroom because we're having a highly processed food diet and you also want to think about how cholesterol works, right? So if you look at someone's triglyceride levels and their cholesterol ratio, a lot of times their triglyceride levels are a reflection of what the last 72 hours of eating look like. Did it look like a highly processed, high fructose added sugar three-day binge? If it did, you're probably going to have elevated triglycerides because your body is trying to manage all of that elevated glucose. It's looking for places to store. It's going to put it in your liver. It's going to put it in your muscles. There's no space left. It's got to package it up as a triglyceride, kick it out into your bloodstream and then cholesterol is the uber vehicle that drives that triglyceride around. So a lot of that cholesterol is not going to be recycled in the right way and it then becomes corrosive. But when we're eating a really whole food forward diet we're eating a high amount of fiber. I mean, there's really interesting, there's some really interesting research and I have to give credit to SEED which is a probiotic company. We work with them, love them by the way. We name it all, plug in all our companies today. That's the best probiotic. I swear we didn't know this going into this. I've never used a probiotic so effective as that one by the way. It's an incredible thing. Well, they have some amazing research showing that they are in trials to show that it improves cholesterol ratios. So we have to remember that our microbiome is playing a critical role in keeping balance when it comes to cholesterol and that we can't just think of these chemicals or I want to call them like blood markers as bad for you or good for you. Okay, okay, interesting. Now, maybe a bit of a left turn, but... Wait, wait, wait, don't take left turn yet then. I want to keep her where you're at right now because you're so, okay, we're actually in the middle of trying to have another baby right now. I wanted to know from you, how does your nutrition change from trying to get pregnant, being pregnant and then post pregnancy? Is it consistently the same or does it change? Well, you always want to focus on blood sugar balance and nutrient density. That said, prenatal nutrition is, it's really important to focus on, I don't always like to say, focus on the things you want to remove, but when you think about trying to get pregnant, the development or for your sperm, for example, it takes 72 days to develop sperm and people think, oh, I just, I'm going to eat healthy for a week and then we're going to go for it, right? Oh, so it's what he ate 72 days ago. Yeah, so we call it trimester zero or the prime ester. It's three months leading up to conception. It's critical for egg development and sperm development. And so what you want to do in this period of time is you want to focus on antioxidants. So there's an amazing company called WeNatal and it has a prenatal for men and a prenatal for women. And what that's going to do is make sure that your nutrient density, so you have your vitamin D, vitamin A, vitamin C, but that they also are going to give you some antioxidants like CoQ10, right? And what that's going to do is it's going to give you the nutrition or the nutrients you need to fight oxidative stress. So oxidative stress is what breaks down cells. It also breaks down eggs and it breaks down sperm. So if you have the antioxidants or the phytochemicals to fight reactive oxygen species or the things that break our body down, it's almost like armor. You're protecting your sperm and your wife is going to protect her eggs by loading up on this. Now, as you move into the first trimester, you don't want to be taking loads of antioxidants because that is, they're active in nature. You really want to focus on nutrient density. You want to focus on blood sugar balance because once your wife gets pregnant, then in the beginning first trimester, you could feel nauseous, right? And nausea is exacerbated by glucose excursions. So even though you have, someone might have food aversions, they don't want to eat animal protein. They, all they want are crackers or bread. They go to reach for those things. Those fast acelular carbohydrates take them on a blood sugar roller coaster and that crash. And then it gets worse. Doubles down on their nausea. So I always say, is there a way I get it? Like I wrote a whole pregnancy course on this because I think it's important for people to understand how to focus on nutrient density. First, how to protect their fertility and the quality of egg experiment in their body depending on if they're male or female. Then it's like, how do we get through trimester one? Also knowing that a lot of it has to do with how she ate in trimester zero or in the primeester because your body is relying on those nutrients or stores in your body. And so in the first trimester, we don't, they may, you may not feel like eating loads of veggies and antioxidant rich foods and grounding foods may feel better. So I always say, can we find a way to have a little bit of protein? Maybe it's an egg taco, scrambled eggs in a siete tortilla. It's a little bit more of a low glycemic hit or if you're having triple fermented sourdough or a paleo style almond flour toast, can you slather on some avocado, throw an egg on top? If there's no egg, okay. How are we getting protein in or bland proteins? This is where I might lean on dairy or I might not use dairy a lot with clients. The, it's amazing for vitamin D, calcium and minerals too. So you may use a bland cold cottage cheese or a plain Greek yogurt as a way to get a good quality protein in to support that blood sugar balance so that we're not riding that roller coaster even when we maybe don't feel like everything kind of sounds gross. Yeah, we did that. We led into, I mean, well, we weren't necessarily trying but we knew we would eventually. And so my wife ate a particular way leading into and then we had this first trimester which was just, you've just thrown up all the time. But I think we protected ourselves a little bit with the, you know, leading into actually this isn't a left turn anymore. You brought up, you know, fertility and sperm. Creatine is a supplement that, you know, people in, you know, fitness have been taking for a long time, it was for building muscle. Now we're seeing it's got health benefits. If fuels mitochondria improves sperm motility. Like what do you, are you up to date with any of the new research or do you recommend it to people to use as well? You know, I have, I have male clients that I've used creatine in the past and are currently using it. I'm not, I'm not at a speed on sperm motility with creatine use. I'd have to look into that research. But we do know that even having just critical, like baseline levels of vitamin D and antioxidants like CoQ10 and vitamin C to promote testosterone. Anything that's going to promote testosterone levels is going to improve sperm quality and motility. Okay, so test, a good testosterone, good fertility, typically is what we're looking at. So now what about when we lead into post and breastfeeding and things like that? I would imagine there's things that you might kick up. Like I remember we had success with the sodium like increasing, like we use. Oh yeah, that's Jessica too. She drink, she would drink the element. Yeah, she was producing more milk. Well, what's so interesting. So that is a company that I invested in. I've been friends with Rob Wolf for a long time and his co-founder James. And I just, it's such a beautiful product because they think in the market where you have things like Gatorade or other powdered electrolytes that are loaded with glucose levels. Most of us don't realize that we have suboptimal levels of sodium and that we are dehydrated. And women think, and I think men too, like I'll just drink 120 ounces of water today but they don't have the electrolytes to hold that hydration in their cells and hold it in their body. And one of the number one reasons that a woman is sent to be induced in her third trimester is low amniotic fluid. And low amniotic fluid can be prevented with proper hydration. And so for me, I drank element in my pregnancy and especially towards the end and it really helped with fluid retention. You think that it would cause you to have cankles or retain so much fluid, but it made me feel amazing. And it plummeted my cravings and anytime I got an ultrasound in my third trimester and the women who've been in my pregnancy course feel the same way is it, my amniotic fluid levels were great. And so that's where your baby is floating around in amniotic fluid. And then in postpartum, when we think about, when you think about a milk production, right? It's going to be- That's how we used it, so I didn't know that. Oh yeah, I'm still breastfeeding and I'm still drinking it. And I actually forgot it this morning and was like, oh. We have some here. I'm gonna get some before I go then. I literally shook some salt into my water at the airport because that's how much I notice a difference in everything from the way that I feel to my ability to focus and feel my best, energetically. Yeah, what about the like, because when you're pregnant, you have increased blood volume which would make me think you probably need more, even more sodium, kind of offset that a little bit. Is that true or am I just making that up? Well, I think what you want is you have increased blood volume. You want to maintain that increased blood volume and you also don't want to be dehydrated. What I think people don't realize is when you think of it, I always say like, if you have balsamic vinegar and then you have balsamic reduction, what's happened there? You've just evaporated some of the water. Like it, and that, you can think about that like blood sugar. If you're not properly hydrated, your milligram per deciliter of blood sugar is actually higher. Oh, wait a minute. So dehydration, you have worse blood sugar then? Wow, that makes total sense. Exactly. So for me, one, when someone is properly hydrated and they have the electrolytes that they need, they have the sodium that they need, they're gonna have less cravings for sugar and they're gonna feel more energetic. Then when you think about blood sugar in the body, like in your body that needs to be regulated, you're actually, technically, you're decreasing milligrams per deciliter because you're increasing the amount of deciliters of blood that you have in your body. Wow, interesting. Wow, that's fascinating. Do we see that with CGMs or someone's dehydrated and they hydrate and you see better responses without changing diet? Oh yeah, and you know what's so interesting is that anytime you have any type of hormesis, right, you work out really hard, you get in your sauna, people will see their blood sugar go crazy. And I get in my infrared sauna and I drink element and I can pretty much regulate that response. Wow, okay, so literally what's happening is when you measure blood sugar, it's a percentage of the overall fluid. If the fluid is down or you have less water in there, now it's automatically a higher percentage. I had no idea but that makes perfect sense. Yeah, my wife feels way better with element in her water now as pregnant. And so we started using it when she was breastfeeding with my son because she was having trouble with milk production and it was actually Rob that told me that and we started putting in her water and she was producing so much more milk as a result. Well, what's so interesting too is the only research we have on this is on dairy cows. And when they add salt to their diet, the production of milk goes up. Wow, that's fascinating. I should have known that. I know, right? We had the salt licks for that. You milk cows wouldn't you? I know, man, we would. You would want to milk those salt licks so that they would produce more milk. That's great. Well, this has been amazing. This is really fun. Yeah, thank you so much. It won't be the last time. We'll do this again for you. Yeah, we'd love to have you back on. I think you've communicated very, very well and I think you brought us a lot of knowledge. I just want people to have fun, balance their blood sugar, protect their kids. You do a really good job of how you communicate that because I actually, and I think what you're communicating, it can be challenging. And I think that it gets challenged a lot on the other side that I was alluding to earlier with the IIFIM crowd and the calories and calories out crowd. They don't want to talk about blood sugar and insulin. They just want to say, oh, I mean, your calories are all the same, we're fine. Anti-animal product crowd. Anything coming from animals bad for you, which is totally... But we always try and bring it back to behaviors. I feel like that's so important. It's like, I mean, why make it harder for yourself if there's a way to make it easier, right? So really... That's the key. Yeah, excellent. Thanks for coming on. It was a pleasure.