Well, ladies, gentlemen, to another episode every Day black Man podcast, a podcasts for any black man thoughts. Today we have a special guest, Kwame, who will share how he became the world record holder for most steps in a month April twenty twenty five, unless he's gonna tell us that he's more in the months since and Riker. I'm joined by my co host Sham Read the liberatory froming known as black as well as Armstead follows for Twitter, ev I D black Men, It scream every Day black Men
and every Day black Man Facebook page. We got some Patreon, eb and p All episodes may be there first, and we also have exclusive episodes and some drawings by Sham up there. Check them out last one at least our website at www dot Everyday black Men dot com. So paw me tell us the people a little bit more about everything that you have going on.
Yeah, what's going on? Y'all? It's good to be here.
My name is Kwame.
I'm from New Orleans, Louisiana, but I grew up in Houston, Texas. We came back to New Orleans for undergrad and graduate school, where I got introduced to pre med and public health and ultimately got into what I'm doing right now. It's kind of funny to think back now ten years ago when I started this journey that I wouldn't say that I planned to try and take two million steps in thirty days as a part of my agenda. But you know, you're not necessarily in control of how things ultimately play out,
and so that's kind of how I got here. I started off grew up in a family of runners. Four out of the seven kids in my family, we all competed in college in cross country and track and field, So endurance sports have always been a part of kind of what we do, and in health consciousness has also been part of that as well, because my dad there's always made sure that we were eating the right foods so that we could be properly fueled to perform as good as we possibly can.
So that's kind of like the baseline of it all. There's obviously more to the story, but we'll get into it.
Heylin Qualmi, thank you very much and welcome Stylish Now. I know that you said you know you didn't necessarily start out when you look back ten years ago, but what kind of made you aside or inspired you to make this journey to break the world record for steps in a month.
So it was actually inspired by some of my community members or the users on our app. So I run
a health platform. It gives you a health score kind of like a credit score for your health, and we always do challenges on the app where you know, if you take a certain amount of steps in a month, you'll be entered in for a chance to win something back in twenty twenty four, in February twenty twenty four, we did the Marti Garraos Steps Challenge where or it took the most steps in five days during Marty Garos
one five thousand dollars. So Walkin just became a big part of the culture within our community and now we have about twenty five hundred users on our app. Last year a doctor did one million steps in thirty days and he got taken off his blood pressure medication. He lost twenty pounds just in thirty days. Fifty four year old, regular every day guy. And so this kind of started this trend of people doing one million steps in thirty days. And so May twenty twenty four he did it. He
passed the baton to me. In June, another user did it in twenty eight days in July and two more in August, and another one in October in Puerto Rico, and so it just kind of we all just got to talking about what we thought. You know, what do you think the world record is and do you think that any of us can break it?
And when I'm as I'm.
Getting ready to prepare for the official launch of our app this fall because we've been operating on a beta app the past eighteen months, I just wanted to do something to garner some attention, and I just wanted to make sure.
It was aligned with the work that we do.
And uh, it rose the month, So I wasn't sure if I could actually do it. You know, obviously someone's done until it's possible, but I actually, I guess technically no one had done it at that point, but someone had had gotten close to two million, So I figured figured I have a decent chance considering my background and sticking one day at a time. It was hard in
the first five days. I mean, I was in pain every moment of the day because you know, so again I run, and so you know, you use different parts of your legs when you run compared to when you walk in especially if I'm walking thirty five thirty thirty five miles a day, sixty seven thousand steps a day, just yeah, just new pains. I learned about new parts of my body every day because because it was hurting.
I got a question, how long? Wait?
Wait, wait, what did you listen to? Like, were you listening to music as you did this? Or it was just I was I.
Was mostly working, so I started to run my company. Right, so now I'm walking like fourteen hours a day, and don't I don't really have time to like take meetings in the office.
So for the most part I was working.
Now, So like let's say in the morning, I'll wake up at five six o'clock, I would go do like a four hour walk along the levee in New Orleans along the Mississippi River, and you know, basically kind of do my checklist or do my to do list with my administrative specialists, and then I would start just working
on tasks, editing content, and then I get back. My phone would be dead typically by the time I got back, and then I would shower, go to the office, make sure everything was good, and then I would go to the fitness center here at Zavier University, Louisiana and just walk around there for hours, again working close to the office so that in case something came up, I was able to be there, and then in the evening just
walk around. It got to point where I really couldn't do anything but walk when I was walking, because I was just so tired and I was like trying to pick up the pace and so so it was harder to do work and walk like a seventeen minute you average miles. So yeah, for the most part, that was it working.
Yeah.
So I'm looking at these numbers, sais sixty six thousand, sixty six steps per day on average.
That's right.
That's a lot of states.
Yeah, a lot of sixties. Yeah.
I think I did that once when we were in Vegas and we walked up and down the rip.
Yeah, when we walked up and down the strip, that was the closest I've ever gotten to anything that you're describing. Kwame. Did you put on like after burners towards the end of the month and get up to like forty miles a day, forty five stuff like that?
I did a few. I did, actually, so a few days towards the end, I was doing like seventy nine eighty eighty thousand steps a day. My highest was eighty seven thousand, so I was about forty one forty two mm hmm.
I was just trying to get my mail earlier.
He's got my mail earlier. That's a few steps right there.
I take the off there in the day.
It's twenty two thousand, just when I was working security.
M Yeah, it's tough. I mean, people will come and walk with me. It definitely. It definitely helped out. But we walked for four hours and then you know they'd be laid out on the couch like you pretty much done that. I'm like, actually, no, I gotta gotta do that about two more times today. And you know you get twenty thousand steps about in four hours, okay, yeah, which is obviously way more than the average person's doing per day.
It was I was, you said, that's so casually, like you do about twenty thousand steps, Like, I don't know how many steps I do.
I'll be honest with you, I don't think that many.
Yeah.
I did the math.
Uh, fifteen days in I had done as many steps in those two weeks as the average American does in a year, and.
We don't even walk like that's that's crazy. But if you are stand and read, want to do all them in steps in a day, in a week, y'all go on right ahead. You know what y'all need to sign up for that. Y'all need to sign up for that app.
So our beta app is called dakkuld DO. It's d A C A d O O. That's our technology partner. And after this podcast, you'll be able to use access code everyday black man.
All lowercase all one word. Get into the.
Platform and then you'll complete The first thing you'll do is answer some questions about your height, weight, age, things like that, so we can start generating your health or and then when you finish creating your account, you'll complete the initial health score assessment, which will be about twelve questions get related to overall health and wellness. So we track over one hundred different metrics across seven categories of health.
So that's physical health, so blood pressure, cholesterol, glucose, things like that, nutrition into wellbeing, physical activity, sleep, mindfulness, and self control or like substance use or indulgence. So you get a score in each category and then you get an overall score between zero and one thousand, and it changes in real time depending on how you change. Right, So if you go on a run or a walk one day, score goes up a few points, get three
hours of sleep, score goes down. And then based on those changes, we make recommendations for how you can improve, as well as connect people with health care providers, resources and experiences and challenges.
Are you know part of those experiences?
For sure?
I think y'all all could do a million steps in a month.
Sure, Okay, we'll take that challenge. We will take that right here.
What you mean, wet? Yeah, I'm interested in the app. You got Hey, let's don't take the biggest challenge? Yeah, we got it.
No, he got it.
There were there were six people who did it last last year.
Last year.
There's a sixty four year old woman about to do it right.
Now this month on that app.
Got medicated.
She's retired.
But it's that one is about five hours of walk in a day, thirty three thousand steps a day. But the thing about that challenge is, you know, and again, this wasn't something that I expected when we started, but it's actually a pretty accessible challenge and it's very transformative.
Everybody that's done, it has lost at least twenty pounds. Again, I don't know where you all are and your health journeys, but that's a pretty significant amount of weight in a in a healthy in a healthy way in a short
period of time. And then again he the first guy walked off his blood pressure medication, and there are some users who have literally walked off their medications, not necessarily having after having done a million steps, but just just through walking and participating in our challenges on a monthly basis.
They increasing physical activity compared to what they've norm and living.
As far as their sedentary life.
Yep, that's sense.
Qualm.
I love what you're doing. The only qualm I aver is and that much cardio don't kill?
Take that are they're going to kill?
What?
Uh? This depends on your goals, right, I don't think that you need to do one million steps a month to be healthy like that. You don't need that much cardio. You're like, you know, be in optimal cardio fitness. But yeah, it ultimately just depends on your goals and in balancing how much you're eating with how much you're burning wherever you know, wherever you're burning it, whether you're burning it in the gym or you're burning it pavement.
I think it just depends. I think.
Most of us are on the lower end of the spectrum as it relates to cardio than we should be, whether whether we're in general good fitness or not. And so and honestly, the majority of us need to lose some weight at some pounds and so yeah, ultimately just depends on it depends on your goals.
I tell you really take this seriously, because I mean, not that we don't take things seriously, but we certain people here probably call people fat supposts saying they aren't where they want to be on their weight loss journey.
Yeah, no, that's that's fair. You know, you gotta It
just depends on, honestly, on the person. Like there was somebody that we h that was at our Roun Club meet up in DC a couple of weeks ago as a part of the Black Health Connect conference, and it was like it was like six of us out there and we did maybe like a little two mile two miles job situation two and a half or so, and we would stop kind of like at different different intersections, and one of the girls was she was super out of breath, man, I mean like about to fall out,
you know, And she asked, She's like, I don't know what's going on. I'm like, honestly, it's not in great shape a right, Like, you know, she looked at me, and I felt bad because honestly I didn't even it was awkward because that's that was just the truth. And I didn't have time to process like a political answer.
And the thing is I.
Follow her on Instagram and she's on the app, and ever since then, she's been running every day. We'reing two miles straight for the first time since high school last weekend.
So it just depends.
Like and that's the thing about especially early stage startup companies and why they're able to all of a sudden take, you know, grow bigger to bigger than one of these major companies, is that they're talking to more people who are dealing with the problems that their solutions are trying to solve, and then they test more solutions against those problems than anybody else, and then ultimately something pops and
and then and then you start to scale. Yeah, that was that was on some level, like a test, like Okay, let's see if this this type of messaging works and so when we send push notifications also in the app, like we we test different uh different nudgets, right, Like one one night we sent message out at like ten o'clock, like put that phone down, whatever it is, go wait till tomorrow. Some dude came up to me next day, Hey, well, I literally put my phone down. I was on TikTok
and I put my phone down. So that's really like we're just trying to stay as close to the problem as possible so we can be as responsive to people's needs and ultimately be the be the best solution.
Lingo was black and cared about your physical health. I feel like that was.
Just about to say that.
Yeah, yeah, I definitely like that concept. Maybe not quite as like toxic, but.
Almost strangely colored haired cartoons, you know, like my yeah, we.
Figure on the almost that you did this, Publee, it's really cool.
Congratulations by the way, him, Yeah, yeah, thank you. There's your Does your app just do like cardio pick up and does it like a just to people's lifestyles and how they live or you know, when you're gathering that information on them, or does it run rubrics off of the expected lifestyle of somebody and what I mean by that, just to clarify, is most people work at eight to five and then they work out after.
Maybe during lunch. Does you go off of that rubrick or.
Maybe there are other people who have different types of black styles and they works out at two in the morning, you know what I mean, Like does your pick up on that?
Yeah.
So again, we track over one hundred different metrics across seven categories of health and you can you can track exactly how many, but there might be a couple of hundred different activities on the app. So we integrate with Fitbit, Garmin, Apple Health, Google, Fed, Samsung, he pretty much every fitness tracker and integrate with our app. And so you can log your workout, whatever workout you want to do, whether it's weightlifting or cardio, and then that'll.
Send to the app, right.
And the algorithm, the Helsequare algorithm is just based on general It's just based on essentially like workout time, resting, heart rate.
You know, obviously the calories burned just depends on.
You know, how hard you're working during that workout, whether it's a run or it's a weightlifting session. But yeah, it takes into consideration the individual and so you're gonna get scored on your sleep. So if you are working out at two am, for example, and maybe you only got where I was to sleep that night, you're going to get a bump for doing your work like an improvement for doing your workout, but you're going to get a knock for for not sleeping, you know, and and
it essentially balances out. And then what we'll say is in that case, for example, I always recommend that if you have to choose between working out and sleeping, choose sleeping.
Thing is the most.
Important part of your health before or after after community and purpose, and yeah, you just got to be non negotiable about that and get that right first before anything else, mainly so you can be in the right mind and have energy to care about all of the other stuff.
And that relates to health.
IM about to say it's not an attack on you, Sham. We know about your situation.
I wouldn't say that, but.
Uh, the straightforward is that you have kwalme. It very much sounds like Houston, Houston as far as our experience with it through Sham is basically very straightforward. People like, hey, this is this is what it is like. I'm sorry if you feel offended, but I mean I'm not going to not tell the truth.
Yeah yeah, well, I mean it's an emergency, you know, the Black health problem at least that's how I regard it. And I don't know, nothing has worked so far at scale, and we just don't really have time to beat around the bush about it because people are losing their lives to preventable conditions in their forties and leaving their their children and are for situations than they have to be the consequence, and so I would like to stop as much of that from happening as possible.
So I agree. I was pretty diabetic, just so you know.
I mean I was pre diabetic and I have high blood pressure m h and maybe like two and a half years ago if put off pills and I started working out like consistently since then, mm hmm. Like see, they want to see it down like like super normal, my blood pressure super normal. So like I try to speak to that all the time, that people should just be healthy, workout, go to the gym as part of your life, just because you know, you don't want to get a foot cut off for anything.
I'm starting to tell you, like a lot of stuff that we do like leg stuff.
Leg workouts really improve and that has to go with cardio, really improve your your sexual album, right, how long you last, how strong you are instead of you having to take all these pills.
Like I'm anti medicine one hundreds And.
I know you're in a medical field, so you probably hate me for saying that, but I'm super anti medicine. Think with intimate and fasting and working out, you can improve yourself, repare yourself, and become a healthier person.
One hundred percent. No, I'm with you. I would medicine has its place. Like our healthcare system is.
Really a disease management system, right, I don't. I don't agree with the terminology actually of the system. It shouldn't be called the healthcare system. It's the disease management system and an acute care system, and it does a really good job of that, right.
And it's profitable, it's very profitable.
But only ten percent of your health health is determined by you engaging with the healthcare system, right, So like going to the primary care doctor or you know, specialty doctor for different situations, only ten percent of your health is determined by that. Another ten percent is determined by your genetics. Rest is depending on how you engage with the world, how you live your life. So I actually spend the majority of my time in that eighty percent.
And like you're saying, like, how do we make health a part of your life, not necessarily this extra thing that you have to do, And how do people make it a non negotiable in their life kind of like as the foundation of it's like their vision for their lives. If anything else, I'm going to be healthy and well so that I can give myself the best chance that whatever it is I want in this life, and my family whatever they want it this life, that's like our job and duty and a sense to me.
And so what I noticed in the black community, sorry to cut you off, is just that we have a not so much the black community thing, it's an American thing. America cares more about what they can get out of you than what they can do for you. So that goes through jobs and businesses. They want to work you to death. They want you to commute to work, you know, commuting alone, going to the job, dealing with family and health issues. It creates little time for self improvement, self work, health,
all of that. So I think we have a societal issue that is anti keeping you healthy, but more so just keeping you alive, leaves your thrive.
Just you know.
And when I always used to be confused by the idea that like, the country is willing to let all of its people become sick, right and it can't even walk a mile without getting out of breath. And I don't know if they're allowing this to happen, then on some level they probably.
Don't care.
Because they don't need us or won't need us in the future. And that's a you know, a bit of.
A morbid thought, but.
I means probably not going to not the country anyway implement any systems that start to mitigate that. Now you know here that they're they're making noises about removing certain chemicals and stuff like that from foods, and I hope they do those things. But the entire half of the country, half of the adults in the country have one or two, one or more chronic conditions hypertension, type two diabetes, some
form of cancer. And that's an adult population, and that's just not it doesn't have to be that way, all right. So my grandfather, he's eighty seven years old, he doesn't have a single chronic health condition.
Wow, but that's not common.
But just because something is common doesn't mean it's normal, right, And so we almost normalized taking pills to treat medications. And then doctors on some level I think are responsible for this, but maybe think they're doing the right thing
or just trying to make people feel okay. But they'll go in or a person will go into the doctor, they'll get diagnosed with, you know, pre diabetes or diabetes or something like that, and then the doctor's like, well, you know, you know, you know it runs in African Americans.
It's you know, it's hereditary, all this stuff. And again, your health outcomes are only ten percent of your health outcomes are determined by your genetics, right, But just because your parents have something or your siblings have something, doesn't mean that you have to have it. And I think that the doctors do this to pacify people, make them feel a little bit better or less yeah, less bad
about themselves for having the condition. But type two diabetes, hypertension, mini cancers, heart disease, those are preventable things like they're preventable, period.
These are not conditioned.
Like again on the whole, not talking about you know, different cases type one diabetes for example. These these are entirely preventable, and.
It keeps people passive. Say that again, it keeps people passive, you can say, oh.
It and allows people to continue living the way that they are.
The process profitable, you know, push more medicine.
M hm, that's there. That's their prerogative. My job is to shift that whether people want.
It or not, one stemp at a time.
I mean, that's that's why it's called the startup, Right, You're disrupting the current status quo, which is, uh, we have a cute healthcare system and uh, we just want to have you be sick enough to be able to pay us money, but not so sick that you die immediately. Mm hmm.
That's expensive to them.
Oh, it is, because there needs to be a certain amount of people to keep everybody else in line. But besides, you know, crushing people's understanding of the government. Can you tell us more about kind of the health gaps that are in like underserved communities, because I think your app is like the first that I've heard aim specifically at a problem within the black community.
And so I did my master's in public health as Xavier with the concentration of health equity, and so just to kind of lay the land. Public health is the art and science of prolonging life. So as a public health practitioner, my job is to help human beings live as long as they possibly can and as healthy as they possibly can, well they are alive.
In the United States, there is a about a.
Six to seven year life expectancy gap between black people and the rest of the population. So like people are living on average stage seventy two seventy four, the rest of the population seventy eight eighty.
That gap doesn't necessarily sound that big.
To some people, but when you extrapolate that out to the entire black population, right, so it's fifty million plus in the US now, it comes out to like two hundred and sixty million years of lost time in the black community. That's time with you know, money and index funds. That's time with your family and mentorship. I mean, there's so much opportunity that we're missing out on because largely driven by really death to preventable conditions and that's created
bare health. To recapture that life lost, that's our that's our mission because fortunately these conditions and kind of the trajectory that we're on can be slow stopped and even reversed through lifestyle intervention. I'm really transforming communities to where they're health promoting, and that's ultimately what we're trying to do. We're not necessarily trying to close the life expectancy gap. I'm not necessarily interested in how we compare to others.
It's trying to maximize health in the black community. What is our ultimate potential? That's what I'm most interested in, and in creating a blueprinting path for people to achieve that.
He said, six to eight years.
That's enough to get to know a small child.
A great grand kid, and that can make all the difference.
And you know, I mean some gaps are even more stark, like here in New Orleans, average life expectancy in like the wealthier neighborhood in the city, it's eighty and less than three miles away, there's a community with the average life expectancy of fifty four years. So we can get gap can get even wider.
You know, Yeah, that's that's large, really really large. Not to cut you off too much there, but looking at like I'm looking at something from few research and showing like black men versus black women, Like, we start out pretty even then around like thirty to thirty four, we just start dropping in comparison to black women. Is there any component, especially since this is the podcast where primarily a lot of our audiences are black men, Is this like the call to action for us?
Yeah, you know, we.
Women are going to the doctor more. And again I'm not saying that you necessarily have to go to the doctor to be healthy. You do need to get some checkups to make sure that you know, again your blood pressures, in check, your blood sugar level, so on and so forth. Again, most of your health is determined about how you engage with the world. But early detection is like the number one tool we have for dealing with really any condition,
especially for menable ones. And because black men aren't going to the doctor the rates nearly at the rates that women are, there's catching things earlier. We don't catch these things until, like they're at later stages because for different reasons we're putting it off. You know, we don't trust talk if we don't feel like me nobody, you know what I'm saying, like different things like that, And you know,
I get it. I have the same kind of cautions but if we can somehow put the fear in front of people like that, that like it's gonna have to We're gonna have to draw on fear to me, like the idea of promote like being healthy me isn't enough a motivator.
If you guys heard about that that mouse.
Study where they had the basically the mouse had to go get to the peanut butter or the cheese or whatever, and so they time the rat the mouse with just the cheese or the peanut butter as the driver get through the mains. They did that once and then they did it another time where they wafted cat oder behind it and had the change.
So much faster.
And that one right because it was scared scared of something too, And so I think you need both, yeah, to make commitment. And oftentimes people don't change until they have a heart attack or you know again until until the problem is here. And yeah, we we just we just have to flip that that motivation to where it's.
Getting ahead of it.
Like both the goal and fear of some form of.
Loss absolutely.
Absolutely bad.
Noe Uh what part you say you from Houston? Were you born in Houston then moved to Louisiana.
Or yeah, I was born in New Orleans, grew up in Houston.
Ah what part of Houston grew up in?
I grew up in Kingwood, South, OK.
Don't see too many Houston people around these parts.
Say you say that like I don't go to Houston all the time for.
Work, going to and being from a very very different statements.
I know, I know, I'm just saying, like, I see.
You're taking this Drake thing a little bit too seriously. You can't just go to a place a couple of time people from there.
Look, man, first and foremost, you don't have to bring that up. You can just let that go. He's not even in Houston. He's in whatever the part is where all the rich Nigerians lived.
You would know where that is before I would.
I mean, yeah, no, we we we always have that that fun banter.
But worried about my boy Drake though, I mean you.
Don't need to be worried about him. I mean, he seems like he's finally realizing you released music and people to stop dancing to the songs that they'll probably still be dancing to it people's weddings in five years, right. I mean, I've seen more not like us at weddings, and I've seen it anywhere else, and it's like, it's a very very interesting, uh interesting place to play this song.
At my wedding. Nothing but Kelly is going down.
I mean, look, bro, I saw somebody play a Diddy song the other day and I was looking at them like, don't you like give us some time here?
Sir?
He was like many songs really bright.
Listening to did Bro you know exactly?
That was it?
That was yeah? Exactly bad boys like that was it?
That was a song that every step.
No, that's that's more Faith Evans than than Diddy.
Diddy raps. She just did the hook, Yeah you care about it? Nah? It was his verse, bro, he was he was in there.
Yeah yeah, repeat his verse then me.
I'm pretty sure Jada Kits wrote that, but.
Yeah, probably verseig.
I can't repeat a verse.
That's what I thought.
How much do you think Diddy has done for health in the black community?
Mental health? Like like terrible, he's been killing us all right, I want to at least tie back in.
I mean, as your attorney, I can tell you complete the fifth on this one. You don't have to answer this at all. This is solishness.
If you don't, you gotta go down the baby or slip and slide.
He does not, sir.
We do important talking about that one brother on the trip because then when.
Somebody's like, he's gonna be a long rapist, I mean philanthropists now.
That joke from always Philadelphia never never gets older, but definitely does date you. And people are not going to get it because they didn't see the ship.
Not about who gets it, but I give it. It's kind of like that reference self satisfaction. Yeah, okay, apartment, but you got I'm.
Going instead of going off into our normal tangents. So has a plant based lifestyle enhance your physical and mental performance?
You know?
So I started eating the plant based about ten years ago after my senior year of college. Started off really just for the environmental impact you want to that's one light area where I just think we're running an interesting experiment with the with the planet. And I'm not saying that there's necessarily anything that we can do for sure, but if there's anything I can do to like reduce my contribution to us getting put in a bad situation sooner than later than, I'm gonna try to do that.
And my concerns with the environment aren't necessarily that, like the environment is going to get so bad that you know it like just like we burn up or get washed away, but the storms and stuff are going to become so frequent, Like the disaster is going to become so frequent that it displaces more people at once than like all of our safety net systems have the capacity to kind of mitigate. And then we get all you know, tribal well taken care of human beings are good people
not well taken care of human beings. You are trying to eat and protect their families. And so anyway, that's my brant on. That's why I started. It didn't really become about health until about a couple of years later. I started going to different conferences related to health and play based eating. But I didn't really notice much at first because I'm still, you know, pretty young and indecent shape, because I just finished my collegiate career as are running well.
What I will say is that most of the problems that my friends are dealing with now that people deal with day to day, I don't deal with that at all.
Headaches.
I haven't had a headache, well outside of a late night like a bachelor party or something like that. I don't have like headaches on a regular basis. I work about fourteen hours a day with no problem, don't get tired,
no naps needed. And then when it comes to like eating plant based die, specifically a whole food plant based died, Yeah, my body's not having to work as hard to process the food as as it would if I was eating say a standard American diet, you know, high and fat, high in processed foods, and so just essentially I'm not having to burn as much energy to process food, and so I have a lot more energy to do everything.
Else that I spent my time doing.
But yeah, it's when it comes to the plant based eating. I don't know if you guys are familiar with blue zones. Blue zones are these areas where people are living into their one hundreds more than other parts nearby, so they're think about eight blue zones. I forget the exact number some people so or some areas are no longer blue zones because you know, not as many people are living into one hundred because they're becoming westernized. But there's one
in Low Malinda, California. There's one in Costa Rica, one in one in Japan. Basically they go and study these these communities, these populations and try to identify why they're living well until they're one hundreds and all of them eat ninety five to one hundred percent plant based sides. So my first thing when it comes to plant based and the message is you have to understand that you can absolutely live healthy and long and strong without eating meat.
And this isn't this isn't like a message to get people to stop eating meat, but to drop the idea that it's a necessity because especially here in America, like everybody's big on protein and protein and protein, but again, we're not living nearly as long as these people, and all they eat is plants for the most part. And so that's really what I draw on because my focus in my goal is longevity. So what are the longest lived people doing? And we go do what they're doing.
And that's kind of why I've been able to stick with it and the message that I have for people with that.
Thank you for kind of expanding on that. I know for some people, you know, they hear the plant based thing and they think, oh, I can't whatever, But eighty five to eighty to ninety five percent. I think that's that's entirely doable. It's something where you're not giving up everything, but you are making a priority to eat more food that are plant based. We've had a couple of people from doctor mccayba Mooring. We also had gosh, what is the guy's name?
Yeah, yeah, something, I know what you're talking about.
Yeah, yeah, we had. We had both of them on the podcast and they're also talking about the same thing. And with doctor Kable Warren like I kept up, yeah, Ki, thank you appreciate it well, Doctor Michable morning. Like after that episode, I really did start eating or did stop start skipping a meal every single week. I did that until basically about this year when I decided that I wasn't getting the exact same benefits out and that may
be more so me than the actual diet. But you know, like taking that twenty four hours off, like you know, after a while, you get kind of used to it. Because people at like my company now that I work, they're like, hey, like you going to lunch. It's like, yeah, I don't take lunch till three. They're like, why don't you eat until three? It's like because I don't feel like I have to eat till three, I'll drink water and stuff, and I'm trying to get better at that
because Sham will throw a bottle at me. But you know, at the same time, like, you know, it's That's one of the things I think Sham does that he doesn't give himself credit for, is Sham religiously drinks water like all the time. And it's like maybe to ninety percent of what he drinks and the rest is gin, but it's mostly water.
Mm hmmm. A simple man, they say, They say Jen is a healthier, healthier liquor.
You know. Shoot, so you're saying Sham was better all along.
Yeah, it's a bit cleaner, but I know so. I'm actually a big proponent of fasting. Fast thing is actually the most powerful thing you can do to extend your lifespan, mainly because it's given your body a break from processing work.
You're right, exactly work and focusing on repair. And so when you fast, you you trigger what's called autophagy auto fager, depending how you want to pronounce it, and it basically is where your body, you know, uses stored energy or energy and it's our bodies are so smart that when they're in this state, they go and use old damaged cells and proteins first and break those down and turn them into new, younger cells and proteins. So essentially like
cleaning up the body. And most of us are eating around the clock, right We're eating first thing in the morning, and then we're snacking until we pass out, and so we only have like this six hour window where we're not and so you people are never entering the state
where their body is cleaning itself up. And when you think about things like cancers or again, the majority of these conditions cancer cells are really just like mistakes that mistakes in replication, and these mistakes come from you know where and tear just like any other system. And so fasting gives your body an opportunity to go clean up and get rid of all of these mistakes and so ultimately reducing your chance of developing these conditions.
And so not to bring the mice.
Back into it, but they did a study where they had one group of mice eat this whenever they wanted basically, and then one group eight between twelve and eight pm. And this is actually where that twelve eight pm, you know intermittent fasting window came from. It's not necessarily based on human results, it's just that was just the window that made sense for the researcher.
With that study.
Anyway, they ate the same amount of food and they ate the same type of food. The group that ate between twelve pm and eight pm lived thirty percent longer. Like with that, that's that's so significant. That's such a significant amount of time. And when you know, all of the mechanisms that turn on in those mice that we're living longer turn on in us when we fast as well.
So to me, the real silver bullet, because you know.
Obviously I've been trying to figure out exactly how to get people to eat better. To me, if we could just give people to skip a meal, skip breakfast, or skip dinner have tremendous impact. It doesn't also doesn't cost any money to skip a meal or do you save money.
In fact, I know about that.
It's just so powerful. So I'm glad you guys brought up fast because there's anything that if we get adopted at scale, that would that would transform health outcomes into black community to be that.
Definitely definitely thinking back kind of about what you were saying as far as kind of like changing like not just our health outcomes, but what do you think from a community standpoint, I would having a better handle on our health impact the Black community.
I mean, I will say that community is part of health. So I'll say first, I think again, the longer we can be here, the more we can do, and the more we can leave for future generations. Again, to me, it's a non negotiable that that we that we start with health because everything is dependent on it. Think about it. Think about how how disease and unhealth shakes up families, especially you know when when it happens in an unexpected way,
it can can really disrupt the financial situations. Puts a lot of people in debt, a lot of people file bankruptcy. I think I think it may be actually be the number one the double check, but I think it maybe the number one cause of like personal bankruptcy. So when people go talk about like, oh man, I don't want to eat healthy because it's expensive, well eat unhealthy. There's a health tax that comes later, right, and it takes
a lot of people out and takes families out. So in order like you want to be in the best position you can, because life is always going to be throwing, you know, obstacles at you. And so just like the COVID nineteen pandemic, right, this that's what actually motivated me to start Bare Health. When you think about the people who had the most severe outcomes with the COVID nineteen pandemic,
they were already in a compromise state. They were dealing with high pertension, type two diabetes, and because their defense systems were so focused on those conditions or just tired from dealing with those conditions, when they when they encountered the COVID nineteen virus there they could get everything just
kind of started to fall apart. So you just have to be ready because you never know what's going to come and and sometimes it'll be a pandemic, or sometimes it'll be to run across the street, and it's just it's just fundamental to to be ready for for whatever challenges we face as a community, so we can all be as sharp and as as astrong as we need to be in these situations.
Well, you are correct. It is the number one reason for bankruptcy in the United States medical expenses. So yeah, if we can eliminate that, then that that could keep a little more money in Big Mama's pocket, which hopefully she can pass on to future generations. Absolutely, like we're hoping that, you know, you don't lose a leg, as you heard from Quarmbing, like his grandfather still out here, no problems whatsoever in the seventies. I mean that's how eighties.
My grandfather was eighties, sorry, eighties, that's how what's my grandfather as well? Like you know, no problems, no, no, nothing, just his only thing was that he just got older and a little bit of other things. But you know, everybody's got their thing. If you could change one thing about kind of how we start our days as black people, what's one thing you would change, and I'll give you full car blanche.
I mean, it's got it.
The first thing that's coming to my mind is the phone. If we could just like sit with our thoughts like ten fifteen minutes when we first wake up, as opposed to grabbing the phone, it's like put the world down for a second. I think that we can be a bit more intentional about the rest of our day. Thataca skipping men's in particular, skipping breakfast, women, skipping, skipping dinner, make a bigger breakfast.
There are some differences.
When it comes to like the fasting or eating eating schedule. But yeah, just like get get the dairy, get the get the process, meet and get the all that out of the out of the first part of your day and and swap it out for like fruit and then some some fibrous foods for singing in the morning and so the meditation and some fruit in the morning.
That's what I was saying.
Yurt.
Say that again.
Are you against yogurt? I don't mean that like an aggressive way.
Yeah, no, I mean it's a dairymall.
Yeah.
So, I mean eighty percent of black people are lactose intolerant now, the degree to which varies, but.
We shouldn't be eating here earlier.
You have to bring that up, bro, You had to bring that up, that stuff anyway, uh.
Mister king lactose and tolerance.
Sham uh huh, yeah, yes, Skip.
I mean again, it's better than you know, osage and egg and cheese and biscuits. I would say yogurt is better than that for sure.
I mean yogurt specifically, not like you know your play mm hmm.
Yeah again I stick with with yogurt is a dairy, but I'll take again, I'll take that over with. Most of us are eating for a thing in the morning, cereal, you know, high sugar cereal, things like that, but I don't consider it a health food for black people. Be mm hmm.
Sorry, ok ahead, No, I was gonnas.
And this may be a big crash on my part, But have you considered weaponizing women, uh as far as trying to shift the ideas of help?
Yeah, I mean I think I think women specifically like shifting the ideas of health for men.
Yeah, because men often do whatever the women think is fancy or fancy bull at that time.
I mean, everything that men do can be can be tracked to getting women. So that's yeah, I agree with that. And you know, like so I run a round club here and there are a lot of attractive women in the club, and men are who don't run are coming to the club and now running just to you know, be around and then and they get value out of the community that we built, beyond you know, the potential opportunity they might have with a woman there. But yeah, I mean this one guy who like like one of
my she's actually my former athlete. Now kind of like family member at this point. But she you've been coming to our run clubs, you know, since we started last year, and this guy who you know, wanted to be with her. She she's not interested in him. But he started showing up every day. And now they they've kind of moved on, moved away from the idea of them having anything. He still shows up. Now he's part of the community, you
see what I'm saying. So if that's the hook or that that's what gets people in, and then we get in the stick because of the other additional value, then you know, I think women are the strongest motivated for what men do. Do do anything, or to motivate them for health.
Honestly, that's what we told you. Writer, you should have been here to defend yourself start a runk club.
Yeah, a lot of a lot of value comes out of runk clubs, that's for sure.
That says a writer here.
Oh no, no, I just I just could not resist a dig at Ryder just because of whatever he has going on right now. Same thing for white collar Sugar. But he at least was kind of enough to tell us ahead of time and also understand, you know, being a parent is definitely gonna be first priority, Like we're not everyday black men. Forget your kids, forget your wives.
When it's podcast time is podcast time. But at the same time, I mean, you know, hey, you actually you're telling what's going on, Like I understand that, Like I appreciate that everybody could come and do stuff like you see stylists here. Man, he probably right now I'm raising goats. But at the same time, he's still here for moral support.
Well, man, I'm not gonna lie to you. He has this captive.
He has threatened to deport two of us, and all of us are American. If you can get us help, you ain't you ain't.
Worth a gosh dar for that one. I am not the Prime Minister of America, right, We have presidents here and we find legal processes.
She knew all the best. That gets important.
Well, but not either man. It's it's a hard road. You know, we say you're the best country in the world, but then you look at our healthcare system and you're like, I don't know about that.
Yeah, we're definitely lacking in a lot of areas, even outside of health.
Happiness in particular.
Yeah, like when you see like Norway's happiness, people are like yeah, you know, like I can feel it life and I'll still have a house and a wife and kids and the government will take care of me. And it's like no wonder of y'all. Europeans be smiling so hard because Norway guys they got like a freakish smiles. But I guess when literally you can't fail no matter what you do, I'd be smiling too, like, hey, life is ground.
Like you hate from outside the club, but.
I'm hating all the way outside the club, all the way outside the club. Plus they take two months off. Oh my god, I'm so glad we don't hire those people because I would be that not only do you get all the holidays that are related to our holidays, but you also get two months. And he basically just tell me, like, I'm taking off the month of October, Me and the family are going to uh visit Malaysia. We're gonna go for an entire year or for entire month and see y'all when we get back.
And were you going for the Nigerian accent there?
It just kind of comes out. I've been part of the Nigerian culture for too long.
They walk a lot.
I mean, yeah, it I mean again, the whole thing is when you marry into a culture, you're supposed to adopt it. Like now I see them becoming more Americanized and cynical. It's like, yes, I knew I would break this Nigerian hopeless optimism thing.
It just took America. Broye. You might have help speak alone, but you get like one good generation from wherever you come from, and then your kids is American.
They still they still have a lot of it. But we'll see. I mean, we haven't seen the whole second generation play out. We've only seen the first. We haven't seen we haven't seen the whole. Uh, although I sometimes see you know, like with my knees. Like sometimes you'll say things it's like, oh you sweet summer child. That is not going to go like that in America. But you don't want to be that guy to crush the
child's dreams. And if you do imagine crushing child's dream read, uh, don't don't do it, bro, Like, come on, we need black kids to actually feel safe and secure. They're unprotected on multiple fronts.
I think there's there's size for that, but.
I agree, I mean, yeah, you're not you're not entirely wrong. But Bomby, we don't want to take up too much of your time. You've been here with us about an hour. Any final things you want to say, you want to tell people, want a little more about the app and the code or anything else that you wanted to plug while you're here.
Yeah, for sure.
So we've been working on our in a app for the past eighteen months called Dakka Do. So that's what we've run our platform on the majority of our users are on now, but we receive some significant funding over the past year that's going to allow us to migrate to the official Bear Health app. So and say it's in the beginning with Bear stams for Black Electronic Health Records.
So all of the user data goes into what we call the Black Electronic Health Record, and on a monthly basis, we're looking at the elective health trends of our user population, which ultimately our vision is for that to be the entire Black community. So each month we'll see the average health score overall, we'll see the average health score by underage different category that we track and be able to use that data to inform and drive different community health solutions.
We can do it by community.
Right, so we'll be able to see the average healthcore in New Orleans compared to the average healthcore in Atlanta to Detroit. And let's say the average healthcore in Atlanta is much higher than it is in New Orleans. So then okay, let's go explore Atlanta to find out what's going on there that we can apply to the city New Orleans and then give those interventions had any impact when we look at.
The data the next month.
So my goal was to first communicate clearly to the black community our current health status, and that's why we came up with the idea of a health score. But then I wanted to create a system of follow up whereby after people become aware, now we can track changes over time and identify when we can intervene right when people need a certain message.
Right.
So where the official launch of the Bare Health app this October, we're doing We're going to attempt to we have two goals. The first one is to cover enough distance as a community on what we're calling Barrathon Day
to reach the moon. So the theme for the Barethon this year is Bare Health to the Moon, and the moon is about two hundred thirty nine thousand miles away, so we're trying to get as many people as possible to come onto the platform when the official app comes out so that we can try and again cover this distance. The ultimate goal of the Barethon is can we break the world record for the most people participating in a virtual run slash walk event across multiple venues, which is
currently seven hundred and seventy thousand. Our goal is to one day get a million people on Barethon day walking across the world, across the dass b and so yeah. To be a part of the Barethon, it's free to participate and it'll be free to participate on the app when it comes out in October. Just go to our instagram at bare health be ehr health and then click
on the link tree. There's a link to the Barethon there and sign up and then when the official app comes out, we'll send you some text messages and emails. Come on the platform and then just log a mile wherever you are. We're gonna have satellite stations nationwide at different run clubs, so if you don't want to run by yourself, you can go run with one of the participating hubs and we'll do a specific event or we'll do an official event here in New Orleans in October
as well for the Barrathon. That's our main focus right now. Is our main campaign that we got going. We want every black person in the country to know their health score and we want we want everyone to be a part of the Black Electronic Health Triger so that we can work together to improve health in the black community and then have the data to know that we actually didn't awesome.
We'll make sure to include the links on the Instagram. Is there a website as well as that people can check out or is it just through the Instagram primary way for them to contact or reach out?
Yeah, I mean that's our primary channel, but we do have a website as well, Bear health dot com. You can you can find a link to download the app there that you need to use the access code that you guys that I gave you guys.
Well, thank you. We really do appreciate it. We see like all the stuff that's on the link tree. So looking forward to that as well. But Kalman, it's been
great in like having this real conversation. We definitely gotta have you come back to talk about this, especially saying if we can help get to you know, the moon in October, because that's I think are opportunity for us to have fitness for a reason or fitness on purpose as opposed to it being something that's just kind of like, well, I do this thing because like people told me to do this thing, and that's something that we definitely need
more of in the black community. But any final thoughts before we close it out.
Yeah, just just to build on your last thought when it comes to like what do you need to stay motivated around your health? And I think there are three components. In particular. Is one, like you're saying some sort of time bound goal related to some type of fitness, So this is walking in this case, it could be a five k. It could be like I want to bench this much by it's time, Like you need some sort of time bound goal related to fitness. The second thing
that you need is a community. Again, and these aren't any particular order. You need a community of people who are also working toward a related goal because it's just too hard to do it by yourself. Then you need well, I think I might have bridged two of them together. You need a specific goal and it needs to be time bound. And with that again you focus on like
the experience. So instead of again like you're saying, telling somebody to go do something, go walk ten thousand steps a day, we create an experience, a challenge where the focus is the chance you have to win a certain prize or the competition of the challenge. The ultimate outcome is ten thousand steps to day for everybody in the challenge. But that wasn't the focus. Same thing with like run club meetups and.
Stuff like that.
Hey, we could tell everybody just go run, but or we could say come to our roun club meet or come to our meditation meet up, our yoga meetup, and again hitting these different factors of health that are important, specifically community. So that's what I would say, Fine, get a goal, make a commitment, and find a community, and then you'll be less likely to fall off your plan. I'll guarantee you.
Though.
Yeah, thanks so well, thank you. I think that's a really great thing to close out on, give us things to think about and definitely looking forward to, you know, participating with that and downloading it. You can follow us on Twitter at ev i d black Men, Instagram, every Day black Men and then every Day black Man Facebook page you have the Patreons, E, B, and P All
episodes debut there first we also have exclusive episodes. Really appreciate your kwame for coming out to the podcast today, and then also appreciate everybody for rocking with us and ask us some awesome questions. If anyone has any questions. Further for him, I'll include everything as far as his win tree, and then you can get to the website. You can get to the all those fun things. And
last but not least, let's let's be healthy people. Let's stay healthy because I don't want us to have a six to eight year difference between black life expectancy and general life expectancy.
Thanks for having me, guys, going on with
A bas