 Think Tech Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Aloha, Hawaii. I'm Corey Campbell, guest hosting today for the amazing Wendy Lowe, who is actually out in New Orleans having a party, and I'm here to drive your journey to taking your health back. We are coming to you live from the downtown Honolulu Studios of Think Tech Hawaii, and I'm very excited to tell you about who we're bringing on today and our topic, which is going to be on hot topics in health and fitness and reclaiming your energy, which I know I need a lot of help with. Our goal for today is for you to leave this show, realizing that it's consistency and balance in your diet and fitness that's going to allow you to have the energy to attack life and achieve all the things that you want. And it might start with getting a personal health coach to take you on that journey. Today we are very honored to welcome Christina Farias, founder and CEO of Farias Fitness LLC. She is a holistic nutritionist, personal trainer, lifestyle coach. She's got the whole package. You're not going to believe this. She's written her own cookbook. She's developed her own fitness app. She does her own fitness programming, and this is crazy. She traveled the world as Fleetwood Max personal trainer and cook for about four years. We are lucky that she has returned to Hawaii, calls this home now, and she is here to help the people of Hawaii take their health back. Welcome Christina. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. That's such a nice introduction. Yeah. Well, and it's all true. I've gotten to know her pretty well. It's amazing the amount of information that you know. So Christina, I mean, you're rapidly becoming one of Hawaii's top gurus on fitness and health and training. So I wanted to just jump right into this and give our guests some of the stuff they want to go. So I'm going to jump right into the topics. Awesome. Let's do it. What do you find is currently like the hot topics in health and fitness? Gosh. I mean, right now I think there's such a great shift going on. People want to be healthy. They want to get fit. They're spending their time. They're spending their money. They're talking about it. I mean, you go to the gym any evening and it's like happy hour now. I think the hot topic is, you know, how to eat, what to eat, when to eat and how much and how often to exercise. So I think those kind of questions are plaguing us with the confusion that's going on. Yeah. And you talk about how much to eat and when to eat. And so I've always been told my whole life breakfast is the most important meal of the day. And I personally don't like eating it. So I want to know, is that really true? Do we need to eat breakfast? So I think the big thing with food and food timing and breakfast specifically is in a nutshell, no. I don't think that breakfast is the most important day. Back to about the 1940s was when breakfast started becoming an important thing and breakfast of convenience, eating bacon and eggs for breakfast, and ever since then, that has been the popular thing. You need to wake up and eat first thing in the morning. You know, right now we live in a time where blood sugar issues, cardiovascular disease, obesity, these are real problems. And breakfast is often causing more stress on the body. When you wake up in the morning, your stress levels are the highest. You eat a breakfast of high sugary foods and your blood sugar skyrocketed through the day, which leads to that afternoon, you know, almost crash that people are experiencing. So while some people will benefit from eating breakfast, it's entirely independent to that person and what their goals are and what their health history is. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Breakfast foods are kind of that sugary stuff that you still don't want. Yeah. The grab and go, the pastries, the donuts. But so here's my question. When I go to Starbucks, even though I'm not really hungry, and then I look inside that pastry bin, I go, my mouth starts salivating, and I go, I want that. Why is that happening? You know, it's really nice that we have so much research that's gone on in the area of sugar addiction and what's causing those cravings. So if you look at the deli case, yes, your mouth starts to salivate. It's because sugar has been proven to be more addictive than cocaine even, which is a really, you know, a shocking fact. You look at that deli case and your mouth starts to water, your brain starts to crave that sugar. What happens is they've learned how to alter the mouth feel, they call it, the chemical composition of food in order to make it explosive, in order to stimulate your hunger hormones. Your ghrelin and your leptin, your ghrelin is that hormone that makes your body kind of stomach growl. Well, a lot of us have shot our system so much to the point where we look at that deli case, we want that food and we no longer have our hormone leptin, which is what tells us that we're full, firing. So now we're just living in a constant state of wanting more. We're addicted to sugar and your body craves it, it yearns for it, and once it gets it, it just wants more. Yeah, I think that's so true because I have one donut and then I want two and three and four. Yeah, it's vicious cycle. So I've heard that before, sugar is the enemy. I know fruit has a lot of sugar and I personally love apples and peanut butter, it's like my dessert. Is that okay? I mean is the sugar in fruit actually? So the fruit topic is such a hot topic right now and it is truly one that I think is so independent again to the client or to the person. I think if we go back to fruit and we look at the quality of the fruit, that could be most important, right? So fruit has also gone through its own journey in producing mass quantities of it. So if we look at the way it's harvested now, it's traveling great distances. They're oftentimes picking it before it's ripe, it's being waxed, it's being treated with pesticides, it's being treated with ripening agents. So it's no longer really that awesome fruit that we picked off the vines that was bitter and salty or sour rather. It's now so incredibly sweet that it's almost become its own addictive food. I would say that someone's blood sugar and where they are with their weight loss goals is dependent on how much fruit I would suggest them eating. With fruit I would say go for organic, find what's local, find what's in season, berries are going to be their best bet. Go to the farmer's market that's local and freeze them so that you really are getting good quality fruit. And track your sugar. I work with clients to track the grams of sugar. A lot of people think they're not eating sugar, but they're underestimating how much sugar is in the food that we're eating. And we classify fruits and vegetables in the same food group when in fact their nutritional value and what they do to our body and our homeostasis is completely different. Yeah, that makes sense. So we can enjoy, I can still have my apples and peanut butter as a dessert. You can, in moderation. In moderation. Okay, I like that. You know the other thing I've always been told is that we need to eat three balanced meals through the day and then it was five balanced meals throughout the day. Is that true? At the end of the day, foremost people with a well functioning body and a healthy metabolism without any diseases, it's going to be calories in, calories out. Okay. Now what we do there is from there is we look at strategies for success based on the goals. If someone's trying to lose weight, eating smaller meals could be a great benefit. If someone is trying to gain weight, eating smaller meals could be a benefit. If someone has binge eating tendencies, eating small meals could be a great idea. What I would suggest is creating a meal timing schedule for your week that you can be consistent with. Okay. With the same amount of food at the same times of day for every day of the week. Avoiding these massive meals at one time of the day and a massive meal at the other time of the day and just looking for consistency. So at the end of the day it's not ultimately, there's no right answer. You're not going to keep your metabolism boosting by firing it with multiple meals. It's going to be creating something that works for you that you can be consistent with that avoids this erratic eating. Yeah. So I guess if I skip breakfast and then eat three slices of pizza at lunch, it doesn't really do me how much good. No, it doesn't. But we would look at the way you're eating the rest of the day. Some people could eat pizza and have no problem. Someone like you who's so fit, healthy, active, working out, you're going to have a great metabolism and be able to accommodate a lot more food than someone that's struggling with losing weight and whose system isn't efficient at burning fat. Yeah. And that's one thing I've loved ever since I've met you that I feel you're very realistic about how you approach health and wellness. You know, the other one that obviously pops up for everybody is, well, I like to have a drink every so often. So tell me about alcohol. Is that allowed if I want to really regain my energy and become super fit? Yeah. You know, I think what makes me a really good coach is the fact that I have empathy. You know, I understand that food is emotional. You can't control much, but you can control what goes into your mouth, right? So with alcohol, you know, it's a social thing. It's part of our culture. And I don't think that it is something that should be avoided altogether. I do, however, think that education is key in enlightening people to the physical effects on your health that alcohol has and creating, I like to create, again, schedules for alcohol. We look at your schedule for the week. If you have a social gathering, we set a goal. How much are you going to drink that week? How much are you going to drink that month to cut back on your intake? Alcohol is essentially poison. What happens, one of the biggest things I like to tell people is, alcohol, when you eat alcohol, it doesn't digest like your other food groups. Your body is going to have to put all its energy into just metabolizing that alcohol. Well, if you have a constant state of alcohol with a lot of people that drink regularly, what in turn it's going to block your body's ability to absorb the nutrients it needs. You're going to become nutrient depleted. So even though you're eating plenty of healthy food, your body isn't going to get that. So that's what happens with alcoholics that start to get, you know, you lose that ability to get nutrients to your brain and you almost start to feel crazy, withdrawn, emotionally unavailable. It's because alcohol truly takes over your body and your hormonal system. All right, everyone, you're hearing it here. Alcohol is not the answer. I guess we've already known that. Not all the time. The bottle is not always your best friend. Not all the time. You know, you bring up kind of how we balance our nutrients and things like that. The thing I hear a lot about is this idea of macronutrients and carbohydrates, proteins, fats, and I've never been one to go, I'm going to weigh my food and measure this out. Do I need to do that? You know, the whole, the macronutrient movement is fascinating and it is wonderful. And learning about nutrition is something that everyone, you know, especially parents, even doctors, people can really learn from. Your macronutrients are your proteins, your carbohydrates, and your fats. Proteins are the building blocks of muscle and they fuel your body. So we really need them. You've heard of amino acids. People can really benefit from taking some time, whether it's a month or a couple months, to track your food, to learn how much of those food groups you're eating. If you don't eat enough protein and healthy fat, you'll have cravings, you won't be able to lose muscle, you won't be able to burn fat. We live in a constant state of sugar influx. Carbohydrates are going to be your body's cheap gas, your body's going to crave them. We don't necessarily need them, but they're the most easily digested energy source. So by tracking for someone like you who potentially wanted to put muscle on or someone that wants to lose weight, you need to build lean muscle. A lot of people turn to starvation diets, to depletion diets that causes extra stress, extra inflammation, and in turn inhibits your goals. So tracking your macros and tracking your food and having an idea for the portions that you're eating can be hugely, hugely beneficial. You mentioned wanting to build muscle, I do always want to build a little muscle. You also mentioned starvation diets, which I think is really interesting because I just started intermittent fasting about six weeks ago. So far I'm in love with it. I only eat from about 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. But tell me about that, is intermittent fasting a good thing? Is it healthy or is it a starvation diet? Yeah, one of the first things I ask clients is how do you feel when I say the word fasting? A lot of people think starvation, like, oh, this coach is going to try and starve me. I love that intermittent fasting, fasting, meal timing schedules have started to almost take on a new light. They've taken on popularity in medical settings and now also in real life settings. I think fasting is absolutely wonderful. Who it's not going to be good for is someone who has eating disorders, binge eating tendencies, negative relationships with food, extremely high stress diets. So it's not for everyone. So again, it's going to be something that we look at. Now intermittent fasting is creating a feeding window in a time of not eating. Breakfast is breaking a fast. We're meant to have a little time between that dinner and breakfast in order for your hormones and your body to reset. So fasting has benefits like helping your brain, decreasing bodily inflammation. It's been known to increase your immune system, to strengthen your immune system. So it can be really, really, really wonderful for someone who has blood sugar issues and you give your body that break for your insulin to start to decrease to settle things to achieve that homeostasis. Eating and eating and eating your body uses about 30% of its energy just digesting food. By allowing that fasting period, now you're going to deplete those sugar stores, those glycogen stores down, in order to ideally mobilize fat and use fat as fuel. Instead of using, I mentioned carbohydrates constantly as your fuel source, the gas tank is never getting low enough to use fat for fuel. So fasting can be great. It can be so great, especially for people that are looking to lose weight and reverse diabetes, blood sugar issues, cardiovascular disease, mood disorders, behavioral disorders. I'm pretty sure I have some of those disorders that you just mentioned. That's what makes us like you. Thank you. Yeah, I really loved the fasting thing. I think it helps me sleep better, I think partly because I'm not processing food and one of my tips for everyone is I need systems because I have trouble without a system. So this idea that I only eat from this certain feeding window, to me, really helps me out a lot. Guys, this is so entertaining and so amazing. We are going to take a quick break, show you some of the other programming on Think Tech Hawaii, and then we're going to come back and dive into more hot topics with the person I think has the most brilliant brain I've ever met on this, Christina Farias. We'll be right back in about 60 seconds. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea is on Think Tech Hawaii every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join me where my guests talk about law topics and ideas and music and Hawaii Ana all across the sea from Hawaii and back again. Aloha. Hey, Stan the Energy Man here on Think Tech Hawaii, and they won't let me do political commentary, so I'm stuck doing energy stuff, but I really like energy stuff. So I'm going to keep on doing it. So join me every Friday on Stan the Energy Man at lunchtime, at noon, on my lunch hour. We're going to talk about everything energy, especially if it begins with the word hydrogen. We're going to definitely be talking about it. We'll talk about how we can make Hawaii cleaner, how we can make the world a better place, just basically save the planet. Even Miss America can't even talk about stuff like that anymore. We got it nailed down here. So we'll see you on Friday at noon with Stan the Energy Man. Aloha. Aloha, guys. Welcome back. It's Cory Campbell again with Taking Your Health Back. We are with Christina Farias, CEO and founder of Farias Fitness LLC. She is enlightening us to all the things we need to do to take care of our body better and get our energy back. And I wanted to jump right in this show and get into some of those hot topics, but now I'd like to kind of wrap back a little bit and just hear Christina, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got here today. Yes. Well, I have journeyed about 6,000 miles from home. I grew up in a 26-acre organic farm, Italian and Boston, and I was a jock, a total jock. I mean, I grew up out in the fields running around, picking food off the vines and went to college in New Hampshire, played field hockey and studied exercise science and nutrition in college. And through there, after college, it just became passion study. Holistic nutrition became my thing, became my passion, the gastrointestinal system, diseases of inflammation, autoimmune diseases. And then I moved out to Maui, and that was about 2011, 2012. And stopped drinking, didn't know anyone and really started studying a lot and adapting. Hawaii just became this place where I just felt alive and inspired and the people were healthy and the environment and started working on my cookbook and really focusing on healthy alternatives to the things that people love. Why can't we really eat well, these Italian chicken farms, and make them gluten-free and make them healthy and make them clean? And that led to my E-Clean lifestyle, E-Clean programs. And then started a fitness business when I got to Hawaii, a mobile gym, working at some of the hotels and really just putting my heart and soul into becoming an entrepreneur. Wow. Okay, I got to put you on the spot. You said you're from Boston. I don't notice any Boston accent. If you put me in front of the Patriots game and spike my soda water. Okay. I haven't lived in Boston in a long time and if you go home with me, my family has the accents. Yeah, I just want to protect all the Bostonians watching. I know they're going to be asking about it. Patriots fan then? Patriots fans, Celtics fan, Go Socks. I'm a Dolphins fan. They beat me. It's a shame. No, but Christine, I think it's really amazing what you're doing and I've gotten to learn a little bit about your business. So tell us a little bit about what you do when you get a new client that comes to you and wants to improve their health. Yeah, so I launched my fitness app. It's only been about five months and I've done, it's kind of encompassing everything that I think is important. So we all know that exercise is important and we all know that diet is important and the thing that is often overlooked is the importance of lifestyle, the importance of stress, of inflammation and understanding how much to do. How much to eat, how often to eat and how much to exercise and it's entirely dependent on the person. There's no one size fits all. So lifestyle coaching is helping people create strategies, I call them road maps or schedules for success in order to achieve their goals in an attainable amount of time to encourage patients to educate along the way, to prescribe an adequate and appropriate amount of exercise. So yeah, so it's kind of sort of all encompassing coaching. I think it sounds so neat, you know, I'm pretty active myself, but I honestly, when I talk with you, I feel ignorant about what I, my body composition, my makeup and my eating right for my body type, all those types of things. So you know, a person comes to you, how do you assess them? Like how do you know how to direct them in that area? Yeah, so the first thing we're going to do is look at the health history and your body type and a lot of people don't understand their body type. They know if they eat carbs they blow up, or they know if they don't eat enough they get hangry, but they're sort of just, you know, following these starvation diets or kind of loss. So the first thing we're going to do is go through health history. We're going to find out what they exercise. Oftentimes people underestimate the amount that they're already doing. We live in this time where it's more and more and the stress of thinking you should be doing more and not exercising and more and not eating right causes more stress, which causes more cravings, which prohibits problems. So ideally we're going to put a Fitbit on and then we're going to start talking about what's worked in the past, what hasn't worked in the past. We're going to find a program that someone's going to like. My workout programs are brain games, I call them. Brain activities are so important. Your brain can stay young if you use it. So I have, my background is in everything from traditional strength training and power lifting to yoga, Pilates, mobility. So the workouts are online with videos and I call it active meditation because you're using a TRX, a BOSU ball, dumbbells, everything at the same time and have created progressive workout routines. Then we look at your week. If you've got a crazy week you're not going to get five workouts in. So we're going to make a workout schedule each week, week by week, that's going to be realistic. And then we're going to look at the amount of food, we're going to look at your body type. Are you a mesomorph? Someone that builds muscle really easy might be a little bit more prone to storing fat and we're going to put you on a little bit of a higher protein and a more balanced diet. And then we're going to work on what to eat. Meal prep recipes, strategies for success, what to eat when you're going out to restaurants. And we go week by week with small wins. And from there, each week we check in and we try and just keep the stress levels low. I love it. By the way, I had a Fitbit once and I learned that if you do the Jim Carrey from Dumb and Dumber and you go like this, that you actually count steps. Can I do that and just up my step intake that way? I think the Jim Carrey would probably be burning a lot of calories. Yeah. Yeah, you know, tracking energy output. We are so blessed right now that there's so much technology available to us. We can really get an idea for how much we're sleeping, the quality of sleep, tracking our water intake, tracking our steps. Making sure you're actually taking a rest day. Sometimes having a trainer tell you you need a rest day is the most beneficial thing. If someone, a woman is struggling with losing weight and she's going to, she's working out seven days a week, she's barely eating, she's over exercising, she's going to CrossFit and hot yoga, three kids. And you know, I put a Fitbit on her and say you're over exercising. That's more common than you would think. Yeah, it's interesting that that idea of the rest day that I need to take a rest day, I think eludes a lot of people and they go, I need to work out more. That's definitely something I know I've been working on myself. You know, along with rest, along with eating, I also wanted to ask about supplements because people always ask me that, should I be taking supplements, vitamins, what's your view on supplements? Yeah. So I, and again, everything that I talk about is my, you know, my opinion and whatnot. There's a lot of research and a lot of controversial opinions on the topic of supplements. So my personal opinion is, do I take them? No. I eat a balanced diet. I eat the rainbow every day and I don't think I need them because I'm tracking my macronutrients. There's synthetic vitamins and then there's natural vitamins. And what you have to look at is how they're making those vitamins. Most, I think it's 90% of vitamins are going to be synthetic, could potentially be labeled as natural because there's kind of loose restrictions on the labeling of vitamins. So what you're looking at is how they're going to harvest those chemically made mock-ups of whatever the supplement is. Oftentimes they're heating them and in that process of heating them to put them into this vitamin, they're often losing their nutritional value. So looking for a good quality vitamin, there's not a lot of research on what happens when you're mixing vitamins with each other. So that can be risky. And ideally, in my holistic opinion, your body's going to recognize whole, real foods, process them the easiest and take the least amount of energy. Once we start getting into all these supplements, oftentimes they're creating chaos for the body because it's happening to identify what's in this. Yeah. You know, it certainly seems to me to make sense. The more I hear about fitness and health that I need to reallocate where I spend my money because I need to buy better food or more organic food. Even vitamins. I had never thought about that with vitamins. That's kind of crazy. And then you also think about, where do I spend my money with fitness? And I wanted to ask you about that too because I'm a cross fitter. I love it. But everyone always goes, should I do cross fit, should I do boot camp, should I do orange theory? What's your take on some of these new fitness fads and is there one that's better than the others? Yeah. So I just turned 34 and I think one of the most amazing breakthroughs in my career has been understanding the critical detriment of overexercising and overstressing. Yeah. If you look at exercise, you're going to look at its response. So inflammation is your body's response to stress. Some inflammation is great. Okay. You're going to need a little bit of it. When your body goes into a state of chronic inflammation, it leads to disease. It leads to a myriad of problems. Wow. Exercise methods like cross fit, hot yoga, HIIT training, orange theory, Barry's boot camp is if you're going all the time, it's going to be overstressing the body. The good thing about exercise is it causes a little bit of stress. It increases a lot of our happy hormones. Yeah. The negative about exercise is that it increases our stress and can decrease those hormones if you haven't slept properly. So I would say what I work with my clients in doing is coming up with an attainable and realistic workout goal where maybe you're going to that HIIT training once a week and supplementing it with yoga and pilates. So I would say balance. Wow. Yeah. Balance. There is so much to think about and so much to know from sleep, from fitness, from how you eat, from consistency, from balance. You know, Christina, if you were going to give our guests three things that they could take away and implement today to improve their overall health and fitness. What would you suggest those three things? The first thing I would do is understand food addiction. Understand that processed food is addictive and when you have not rested properly and you're tired, you will have zero willpower to fight it. So get your sleep. Get your rest and avoid processed food. Eat clean. Yeah. It takes some time. A couple weeks. Put yourself on a program. The second thing I would say is make a workout schedule. Stick to it. Each week. Equal energy output. Each week. Yeah. And the third thing I would say is check your food. Give yourself a gift of understanding how much you take in and eat that same amount. You know, for a month, give yourself a gift of one month of eating the same amount of food and you'll notice crazy changes. Yeah. Wow. It's so much. Guys, we've had Christina Ferrius with Ferrius Fitness LLC. If you want that additional help, please reach out to her. Again, my name is Corey Campbell with Akamai Training and Consulting. I've got one final question for Christina before we end the show and that is, how did you get those guns, girl? Gosh. Eating clean. Tracking my macros and working out really hard and being happy. Wow. You know, everybody looks in the mirror and, you know, we could see one thing the next day and one thing the next day and the struggle is real. We're all in this together. So choosing to have positive thoughts about yourself will translate into attracting that energy and giving that energy off and your body will respond. You'll glow. I love it. So you guys heard it right there. Smile more. Be happy. Do all the things that Christina has said. Thank you so much for joining us today. We've had a blast and we will see you again. It will be windy low next time and we're taking your health back. Thanks so much. Aloha.