Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight. This is Bleeding Daylight with your host Rodney Olsen. Welcome to today's episode. You can find and follow Bleeding Daylight on social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. Links, contact details and hundreds more inspiring episodes are available at bleedingdaylight.net. It's often said that we can't keep doing the same things expecting different results.
If we want to thrive physically, spiritually, emotionally and mentally, we sometimes need to make changes in habits and routines that are holding us back. My guest today is helping others shift mindsets and actions to set them up to flourish. I'll introduce you in a moment. I'm really excited about today's conversation. Ramsey Zimmerman spent nearly three decades working in sustainable energy before realising that the most important sustainability work was much closer to home, our own health.
After facing burnout himself, he completely transformed his path, becoming a nutritional therapy practitioner and launching the What's Worthwhile podcast which has now reached over 100 episodes. He's also the author of Stress Response, a practical guide for managing modern stress. Today, he helps people get better before burnout by focusing on the foundations, nutrition, sleep, stress and those simple practices we've somehow forgotten in our screen-filled lives.
Ramsey, welcome to Bleeding Daylight. Thank you so much. I'm really glad to be here, Rodney. Your previous career came to somewhat of a screaming halt when you noticed that things weren't how they should be with your health. Now that you've had the opportunity to actually look back and reflect, were there actually red flags that you missed much earlier? Yes. I think that growing up, I had a very standard Western diet.
I'm about 50 years old, so I'm a child of the 80s and there was plenty of packaged junk food and fried food in my diet growing up and certainly into my 20s and 30s. I was working really hard and just not paying particular attention to what was going on with my health necessarily. I was a bit round in the middle and had high blood pressure and was probably not nearly as healthy. It got more and more difficult to keep up on the soccer field when I was running around chasing people.
Lots of lunches out during my office days and things like that. It wasn't necessarily a priority for me. I suppose that a lot of the time we believe the lie that, oh, that's just getting old.
Obviously, there are things that come along with age where we're not going to be able to perform as well as we did when we were younger, but so often we seem to just take that as an excuse when we're not performing as we hoped we would, not realizing that we actually can be quite active and quite healthy much later in life than we'd previously expected. Talk to me a little about that. Yeah, it's really true. I think the best thing is to just keep at it.
Continue to be active, getting into middle age, continuing to get regular exercise, even if it's just getting up and taking walks throughout the day. For those of us who work in the office and spend a lot of time sitting at our desk in front of a computer, we might spend the entire day that way. The biggest walk we might get might be from the parking lot into the office. Maybe we pick the closest parking space, so that might not even be a very long walk.
Just getting up and getting a walk, getting multiple walks during the day, getting outside, getting some fresh air and daylight. Again, for those of us who work in the office all day, we might spend the entire day and not be connected to the outdoors. We might not know if it is sunny or cloudy outside. Our body clocks are really dependent upon that connection with sunlight.
Just getting up and getting outside throughout the day at regular intervals throughout the day to keep your body clock in line is really important. The other thing I'll mention is lifting heavy things. Physical strength, maintaining your muscular health and fitness, especially as we get into middle age, is absolutely one of the most important things you can do in order to remain limber and continue to be able to get up and get around and stretch.
It prevents injuries later in age, whether it's actively going to the gym to lift weights or if it's just being active and literally moving things around, it's important to get that regular exercise. What was the tipping point for you that changed your career and headed you towards this new way of living and becoming this nutritional therapy practitioner? I think what really changed pretty much everything for me in terms of my mindset was in 2020, the COVID era, as that began.
It's something that I think impacted pretty much everyone. I think it impacted people in very different ways based on their own experiences and based on where they were. I imagine it had a profound impact on just about everyone.
For me, it didn't have too severe of a personal impact, but what I did notice was that those who did get really sick and had three and four additional health problems that they were already experiencing, they called comorbidities, things like being overweight or having high blood pressure, additional other co-infections and things like type 2 diabetes. It really just reflected, it really drove home to me that the baseline health of our communities and society just really needs some help.
I was working in the sustainability industry for many, many years. I was moving around between different positions. I felt like each time I made a job hop, I was getting just a little bit further and further away from what I felt like was the most important thing for me to be doing. During that time, I reoriented around what I thought was really most needed and where I could be most useful and started to ask myself the question, what's worthwhile?
That is a good question for us all to ask ourselves, what is worthwhile? Because we can get caught up on the treadmill and we just start working. As you say, even those days in the office when we're just working the entire day without going outside, we kind of kid ourselves that we've got to get on with work. Yet you're saying that even those quick walks outside are actually going to help us and will probably help our work productivity as well when we start looking after ourselves.
How did you start to reorient yourself towards looking after yourself, looking after your health? Some of the things that I did first was started to take a look at what supplements I might be missing in my diet. That's very significant. I started to take some multivitamins and supplements and just felt more energetic at that point. Another thing I did was clean up my diet. There's a few things that we can do that are extremely significant that you might not have really even thought of.
For me, it was sugary drinks, processed starches like white bread and things like that, and seed oils. Cutting out fried foods, those three things really had a profound impact. The sugary drinks tend to give us blood sugar spikes which then are hit with insulin and then we have blood sugar crashes. There's just an enormous amount of empty calories in sugary drinks like sodas that you really don't need. Same thing with white bread and sandwich buns and crackers.
Again, those are just those empty carbs. Then the issues with seed oils, they are really not the same energy sources as natural fats, whether they come from animal sources or from plants. Things like avocado oils and olive oils are really a much better way to get the omega-3 fatty acids that you need in your diet. But really what it comes down to if we're going to talk about eating is eating real food. Nutrient-dense whole foods are the way to go.
That's the best way to get all of the macronutrients and micronutrients, vitamins and minerals that we need to be energetic and also healthy. I know that someone listening might be saying, you've just told me I'm not allowed to have all my favourites. They're the things that taste good to me. They're the things that I want to consume. And yet we so often miss the fact that we've actually trained our palate to enjoy those things.
And yes, eating right may take a while to get used to, but actually we can train our palate to enjoy those things. Has that been your experience of having to retrain your palate, retrain what actually tastes good? Yeah. I learned this term called hyper-palatability, which is quite a word, but basically it refers to things that taste really good.
If you think about your favourite snack food, this is going to probably drive our listeners crazy, but think about your favourite snack food and it's probably sweet and salty and spicy all at the same time. And very few foods in nature like real actual foods are all of those things. They're usually maybe one of those things at a time, but ultra processed foods have been literally engineered to taste all of those things at the same time. But here's the good news.
If you take some time and invest some time to eat whole foods, the need, the desire, the craving for those other foods actually goes away because your body wants and craves the nutrients. As it gets those more effectively, the cravings that you have for the snack foods, they go away because they're not really what the body needs. You're not really deficient in snack foods. You're actually deficient in real vitamins and minerals and macronutrients.
For those people willing to go on that journey, how long is it going to take to retrain ourselves so that actually what our body needs, what our body wants, actually tastes good? Well, I'm sure it'll be different for everyone. Probably the best approach is to take some time and start out by observing your own habits and behaviors. A lot of times if we haven't really done it before, we don't think too much about the things that we eat perhaps.
Probably the first step is to really pay attention to what you're eating. One of the first steps we do as an NTP, a nutritional therapy practitioner, is do a food and mood journal. We work with people to catalog all the things that they eat and drink over the course of maybe three to five days and also get a sense of how people feel before and after they eat. A lot of times just the act of paying attention, just the act of writing it down and being aware, that might change your habits.
When you realize, gosh, I thought I was only drinking two sodas a day, but I actually just had five. You know, that sort of a thing because you don't necessarily notice how many you're doing, whether it's sodas or cups of coffee or bags of chips. After you do that, it's good to sort of pick some high priority items. Try those things out one at a time.
So whether it's trying to get more water during the day or whether it's switching to whole wheat kinds of breads and crackers or whether it's trying to get more protein with every meal, pick maybe one or two of those things that are the most significant, that feel the most significant. You try that out for a couple of weeks and see how you feel. You know, it's likely that you'll start feeling better really quickly.
And once you have some success with one or two things, then you can build on that and move forward to that. And just remember that nothing is ever perfect. No one is ever perfect. You're going to have days when you're going to go back to old habits, but that's just the way it goes. The quicker that you realize and understand that, and the quicker you try again, then you can start to make more headway again.
We've talked a fair bit about nutrition, and I know that people will get a lot more pointers towards that through your book and through the podcast. But one of the other things that you talk about is sleep. And that's one of those things that we seem to think we can do without. So what do we do to start building a good sleep habit? I think a lot of us are run, run, run all day. And then when we get done in the evening, we have maybe a couple hours to do all the things that we think are fun.
Maybe that includes watching our favorite shows. And we do that until we're tired and it's time to go to bed. But maybe it's actually 45 minutes after when we're supposed to go to bed, and we just sort of shut it down. And then we think that we can jump into bed real quick and fall asleep. And it's just not like that. Our bodies have a pattern, and we need to ease our way into sleep.
When we're looking at the best ways to get to sleep, we should be stopping things like caffeine, alcohol, blue lights from screens. We should be stopping and even eating any kind of food a couple of hours before we want to go to bed. As you're easing into bed, maybe read. There's these things called books. They're made out of paper, like actual paper that you can flip through. These are excellent to look at and read before you fall asleep.
You want to have a space that is very dark, very quiet, that is a little bit cool, not too hot, that is really focused on sleep, that doesn't have a lot of distractions. I think there's lots of us who our phone is maybe in bed with us. Maybe it's sitting next to us. Maybe it's still going off with notifications. Maybe we have the TV on in the bedroom. Maybe we have a light on. But we're really demanding a lot of ourselves to think that we can get to sleep immediately.
Instead, we need to ease our way into sleep. Then we want to keep a consistent sleep schedule each day. Getting to bed at the same time and getting out of bed at the same time, even on the weekends. Because if you're creating enough sleep time for yourself on a typical night, then you don't need to really catch up on that extra sleep on the weekends if the sleep is going well during the week. What we're talking about so far are some fairly wholesale changes within our own lifestyle.
And I can imagine some people saying, look, that sounds like too much. But then I guess we need to ask ourselves the question, but is what we're doing at the moment actually having the effect that we want? Is it providing us with a healthy life? Are we enjoying the life that we're having? And are these habits that we're trying to cling on to, are these really what life is all about?
How do we make that mind shift to start realizing that, yes, this is going to involve some changes, but it's actually going to change a lot of who I am, how I live, and how healthy I am. I think everyone sort of has to ask themselves the question of, are they in the right place? Are they happy with their situation? Do they feel like things are going well? Are they essentially healthy and happy?
Perhaps that answer is yes, and perhaps that answer is no. But it often takes some soul-searching to see if you are ready and looking for a change. And then also realizing that the best changes in life are usually slow and incremental. They're not immediate. They're not overnight. Dare I say they don't come inside of a prescription bottle? It's a matter of living in a healthy way, and it's a matter of priorities. If your health is a priority for you, then you can make it a priority.
It's also an issue of mindset, realizing and understanding that things are possible to do, that they can be done, and that changes can be made. Because what we believe, what we look at, what we look forward to, what we focus upon, those are the things that really happen to us, and happen within us, and that resonate. There's definitely a mental shift that needs to take place going in and during.
And then just building on incremental successes as you begin to experience some successes, you can see that it is possible and that there's a whole lot more things that you can do to feel better. Of course, we know that we're not just physical beings, and looking after the physical side of things is very important.
But when we start to do that, for instance, in your own case, did you find that slowing some of these things down, looking after yourself, actually gave you greater time to connect to the spiritual side of life as well? Yes. It was in both directions, in the sense that feeling better helped my connection with God, but also my connection with God enabled me to feel better. Both of those things work together.
And yes, I agree completely that we are all mind, body, and spirit, and that those things are inextricably linked and interconnected. They directly impact each other as we go along. During that time when I was sort of drifting in my priorities, it certainly was a time where I was just asking God, what is up? What's going on? What's important? Who am I?
Through some prayer times and group work with other people, I really connected with God in new and meaningful ways and had more effective, deeper prayer time and really sensed that my identity in Him is as a beloved Son, ready and prepared. I didn't feel ready or prepared at the time that He gave me that message. But I guess I was in the sense that I asked. I asked Him, God, how do you see me? What do you think of me? And who am I? And that's how He responded.
And once I sort of got that message that I was ready and prepared, then I began to believe it. Believe that I could make changes and that I could find again what was important to me and get back on track in terms of helping others specifically to be more healthy and joyful and have more vitality. We talk a lot in Christian circles about stewardship, stewarding the things that we've been given. Why do you think it is that we so often neglect stewarding our own bodies and our own lives?
Such a great question and idea. I think it has a lot to do with the idea that I need to take care of everybody else. Lots of us feel like we want to help out. We want to give other people grace. We want to be of service to those that we care about, to our families, to our communities. And I don't know why it is, but we often have difficulty seeing that we need to hold that same amount, that same level and care for ourselves.
I think a lot of parents, they go all out for their kids, but it's difficult to see. And if we just stop once in a while and think about, all right, if I was someone that I cared about, or if someone that I cared about was in my situation, would I want for them to take care of themselves? Would I want for them to have these good things? The answer is going to be yes. Things like self-care, not selfish. Self-care gives us the ability to take better care of others.
And it's like that old cliche of the oxygen mask dropping out of the airplane. Put your own mask on before you help your neighbor. That's really true with our health as well, because we need to stay healthy in order to do all the things that we want to do, both for ourselves and for other people. Your podcast, What's Worthwhile, tell me a little about that and the sort of topics that you've touched on in it. Yeah, What's Worthwhile began for me as a question.
It was a chance for me to explore a bunch of my different interests beyond just the renewable energy. I'm interested in how people connect with one another, building bridges between people. I'm interested in health and fitness, and also just in the idea of truth. How do we even know things are real anymore?
As I explored that, I came to the conclusion that what's worthwhile is mind, body, and spirit wellness, and how we need to really look for solutions, health solutions that support all of those things at the same time so that we can be more successful. The podcast really has two formats. One is short messages that I prepare ahead of time and that are on a specific topic or a point of interest.
And the other format is longer, full-form interviews, a lot of times with health practitioners or with people who have walked through different health experiences and come out on the other side, and just generally people who have asked themselves that question, what's worthwhile, and have come up with an answer for themselves. Because certainly every one of us is going to answer that question differently.
These days I'm really focused on this notion of how important it is to consider the things that we consume, believe, say, and do. It's so difficult these days to really figure out what is real and true, and people don't agree on things. Often we just get into big fights about how things ought to be.
So I think it's really important to stop and think about what we consume, whether we're talking about foods and drinks or whether we're talking about ideas and narratives, because those things affect who we are and what we become, what we believe. And then from there we can have intelligent, loving conversations with other people, and we can act appropriately to improve our health or improve our friendships, improve our communities.
What's worthwhile, really enjoy doing that podcast, and it's really a way to explore that big question. A lot of times we will put off making big changes in our lives because we're just so busy, our life is so full of stress. Talk to me about the book Stress Response, and how we can actually start to reduce that stress. Yeah, the whole premise of the book is that stress is a part of our life, and that we're never going to get rid of stress.
One of the big reasons why I think everyone is so stressed out is because our innate stress response was really built to deal with physical challenges. When we get faced with danger, we have that fight-or-flight mechanism. We get boost of heart rate and spike in blood pressure and inflammation and things like digestion and reproduction that gets turned down because we don't need to do that right now.
We're just all ready to burst out and do that, but most of the stresses that we have these days are mental or emotional or virtual. They're happening across a screen, and our bodies just are not designed to respond effectively to that kind of stress. So the book is all about how to respond effectively to the kinds of stresses that we have today, which we ought to respond to much differently, much more thoughtfully, and with a lot more calm and precision.
The book is all about how to change and impact the way that we respond to stress instead of trying to completely run away from it. I know as a cyclist that if I want to get better at riding, I need to put more stress on my legs as I push. I need to build that up, and it's the same for those who go to the gym. They need to add extra weights, and that increases the stress.
How do we start to turn around, as you say, realizing that stress is an everyday part of life, and actually it can be helpful if we respond to it well? Well, the first thing to really do and understand is that we should be mindful. We should pay attention to what's really happening and what our own response is to it, and so that we can do things like breathe through it, calm ourselves down, take a minute, take a beat.
You know, if it's an email or a social media post that really riled us up, take a step back and not respond immediately, but instead think it through. We spoke already about getting up and taking a walk, getting some fresh air. When we get stressed out based on that innate stress response, the best way to burn that off is by getting up and moving around and getting some exercise.
That's an effective way to do that, and then also we're better able to deal with stress if we have a better foundation of health, and also if we're more on an even keel. Something we haven't talked about too much yet is blood sugar. When you are experiencing blood sugar spikes and crashes, that really throws us off. That old Snickers commercial about being hangry is right on. Having the right kinds of foods throughout the day and eating at the right times are really important.
Smoothing out your blood sugar by getting protein and avoiding high doses of sugar is really important. As well as getting that regular exercise, getting that good sleep, that foundation will carry you through and give you the ability to respond to stress much better.
I know that people would want to get a better understanding, so look out for the book Stress Response by Ramsey Zimmerman, or look out for What's Worthwhile, but I will put links in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that people can find that easily, so that they can get a better understanding and dig deeper into a lot of the things that we've just, as I say, scratched the surface of.
Ramsey, I just want to say thank you so much for taking the time to spend time with us today and for spending some time on Bleeding Daylight. It was my pleasure. Thank you so much, Rodney. I appreciate it. Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight. Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others. For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net.