Dr. Robert Cywes on true addiction, having a flexible mentality and so much more!

What's going on ladies and gents Robert Sikes keto Savage.com and today I have a very special guest dr. Robert service, I met him at the keto Summit Omaha, and he was speaking on the topic of carbohydrates as an addiction. And I really just resonated with every single thing. He said, I appreciated his mindset, and Outlook towards the whole topic. And I really knew that I had to get on the podcast, because I love diving deep into mindset.

And we did, we went into so much more in that we went into parent to me, went to performance-enhancing Drugs performance, reducing drugs, you know, being athletic on a low carb diets, having a healthy, sustainable lifestyle, living the full length of a proper human lifespan. There's just so much good information here. I know you're going to enjoy it. So without further Ado, sit back relax, learn something dr. Roberts Davis And we're lab, dr. Silas, how are you today, sir?

Oh, great. Robert. Thank you very much for having me on. I'm thrilled and excited and honored to be here. I am honored to have you sir. I listened to your presentation at the keto Summit here in Omaha few weeks ago and I was blown away by just your approach to it because I feel like you have a very unique perspective. In the fact that you're talking and referring to carb carbohydrates. Take as an addiction, which I think we all can agree with.

But the way you Illustrated that point was very, very eloquently done. So, hats off to you on a great presentation. Well, thank you very much. And I think there's so much crossover between athletes and sports people, and kind of that, that side of things, the work part that this will be a, very interesting conversation.

Both about what we do know that perhaps the general public is not as aware of, because it's kind of a secret that's being Without hitting up near the open and then also certain things where I can tell you that I'd love to have some knowledge and feedback from your audience, beyond the Obesity side, the diabetes side, the athletic side, the endurance side, we're

growing every day. Every single day, we're learning more and I would love feedback in terms of what results people are finding and all the beauty about this is that the folks are doing what we're going to be talking about are incredibly invested in passionate about this. So the data comes forth, very Ridley.

And a lot of the studies that we're seeing, the formal studies that we're seeing are either paid for by industry looking for a particular endpoint or alternatively, there are really there to support people's biases and what I love about my audience, my patience and I'm sure your audience as well is that they are going to give us honest feedback and if you get a feedback from a variety of different individuals and it's all kind of in the same track in the same park way, you can

really Synthesized relatively bias, free information, that is of value to people in that Arena. So as we go through this, I'm not just going to be the expert. I'm also going to ask some questions and perhaps get some feedback over time from folks, as we highlight certain questions and certain things we just don't know. Myo means I'm all for that, I'd love to get a little back story on what made you so passionate about this in the first place, like what brought you into this Arena?

It kind of an interesting story. I, my background is on the Pediatric surgeon and we general surgeons, first, adult, surgeons, and pediatric, surgeons. And as part of that, I went into the laboratory, and did a PhD and my PhD with done in the 1990s on sugar in the liver. And I'll confess we were so full of misconceptions and incorrect thoughts. And there was a huge clash between the questions were trying to answer. You kind of have an idea. Of what the answer should be.

And lo and behold we did studies and we did experiments and they prove to us exactly the opposite. We thought that the look that livers performed poorly and transplantation when they didn't have enough sugar to live off. And so we created a small although we added sugar to the river and lo and behold we discovered we were directly under the microscope, looking at diabetes and action. We were looking at fatty liver in action.

We were looking at how sugar actually damages the liver rather than helps the liver and and the liver is an incredibly resilient powerful organ and yet you can destroy it in a few hours by feeding it sugar. And that just clashed so heavily with our bias and it took me a while to take me several years to understand that what we were looking at what our thoughts were were completely opposite and wrong.

And then if I correlated my findings in the transported liver with a broader subset of the population, the Obesity and the diabetes section, it just made all the sense in the world that the issue here was actually sugar and the injuries I saw in my livers, as I studied them, was identical to the injuries

happen in human beings. As they develop a behavior pattern of chronic excessive carbohydrate consumption, whether it was for performance under the misguided carb loading in the misguided carb-loading era or whether it was just because carbohydrates make us feel Dawn, good. And we eat more and more of them almost like a smoker smoking or an alcoholic drinking to the point of excess.

And then we ignore the excess to be the harm from the excess, the Obesity diabetes, hypertension, the metabolic syndrome. We Oh, that harm to continue the relationship. Well, what I just described there is the description of an

addiction. So not only were we seeing the injury from sugar to the whole human body from the hair to the toes, but we will also seeing the behavior patterns of people adopted and it really two streams there were people looking for a Health Advantage and I want to go down that stream with our athletes and certainly to notice is the quintessential Figurehead of it of the people that was heavily invested in the science of carb, loading, and he has, since

completely recanted and reverse that position in a very humble, but powerful way. And yet, endured immense criticism from the people that couldn't get away from the fact that carbohydrates are a valuable asset in Performance

training. And then, more importantly, for me, it really, we were looking at the disease spectrum and by far, the common most ubiquitous reasons why people die in the world will certainly in the in the North America in the current ERA is because of the consequences of chronic excessive carbohydrate consumption and yet nobody dies because their fact but they died because of the pattern by which they become fat and that's a so that's also a part that we've

been able to reconcile and as part of that, I began to practice on the surgeon, but we started to use a ketogenic Eating plan. First of all low carbohydrate eating plan. Then as we became more comfortable, a higher fat, eating plan and then also introducing intermittent fasting. It doesn't fasting is not something that You intentionally, do it kind of happens when you're on a ketogenic diet if you allow yourself not to eat when you're not hungry, right? That became the Paradigm before

the word, keto. Before the word is, before the words, kind of War existed in the late 1990s, early 2000s, that was our program and we had dr. Atkins as a powerful resource to lean on, he's kind of the grandfather and a mentor. And that was kind of our program that we built for helping people with obesity and diabetes.

Well, as some of our performance athlete, but there were still some people that like a smoker who just couldn't quit by themselves, they tried and tried and failed and failed, even though they knew that was the right way to change, and they did well when they did it. And as a surgeon, we then started doing bariatric surgery, not upfront, not to as an alternative to eating correctly, but a little bit like Chantix for someone who desperately wants to quit.

Smoking industry is struggling and we learned a huge amount. And from our bariatric surgical population and I still do some surgeries. But the coolest part is the more we invest in our patients in terms of taking personal responsibility, for themselves and adopting a progressive.

Ketogenic, not diet, better lifestyle of good lifestyle different than diet diet, all about removal and a lifestyle transformation is removal and replacement and the most solidly you replace the role of carbohydrates had in your life with better healthier more. Endorphin, alternative, the less likely you are to relapse and the more likely you are to sustain. This is a way of life being obesity and diabetes, free. So more and more.

My patients are able to do that and I become very heavily engaged and involved in. Now, the this nuclear genic movement but as I said, we've been doing the full or, you know, 20 plus years and there are mistakes that people are currently making that we've already made incorrect in the past. I'm not saying I'm better than anybody. I've just been down so many. Any branches of this of this tree and always come back to the

trunk. So maybe we can explore some of those things as we continue to talk. But that's my back story. And we've literally dealt with tens of thousands of people both on the surgical side as well as on the on the management side. And hopefully I can bring some of that experience to bear in terms of what the right things are to do and what the wrong things are to do. But ultimately the most important things is to

summarize. This Long introduction. Is that the problem with obesity and the problem with diabetes on the health side and metabolic syndrome, it's not a food problem. It's not a nutrition problem, it's not overeating problem, it's not a calorie problem. It is a substance abuse problem. Carbohydrates should be in the same category as crystal meth, crack cocaine, heroin nicotine, alcohol, vaping, which is nicotine. The reason why they should be there is number one, the primary

reason we eat them. Is not for health, it's not for nutrition, it's for pleasure, it gets as high immediate, they've given us an immediate sense of relaxation Tranquility gratification and then we have to pay the price for that off to it. So we look for instant gratification with a price to be paid for that reward on the back end and that's a very dysfunctional way to live life, but the other reason why carbohydrates are a drug is because they are not necessary. For human survival.

And therefore unlike protein and fat, the human body has no cyclical stopping point. And if you think about it, when you drink water, you're thirsty, you drink water. As soon as your thirst is quenched, you stop and there's very little incentive to continue to drink water. When you're drinking alcohol, you have to control how much you going to drink because you can drink all the way through to passing out or vomiting. That's not, that's not your body

telling you to stop. That's a toxicity. So you can drink all the way to harm when it comes to alcohol. You cannot do that with water. And the reason for that is because alcohol is a drug that has no necessary value to humans. We drink it for pleasure and therefore excess is possible in excess over time. We do harm. Well, exactly. The same with carbohydrates, we consume them for pleasure.

They are not necessary for human survival, except perhaps in the first year of life, and in utero, and then beyond that, we don't need them. And therefore, there is no entry. Intrinsic inherent biological stopping point for eating carbohydrates. You can be stuffed on eating steak or a salad or vegetables or chicken and you can't eat any more chicken or steak, but two minutes later using cheesecake using ice cream using

chocolates. You eating chips, you can even finish the mashed potatoes, you're not eating, you're getting high. And if you do that on a chronic, excessive on, a chronic excess of basis and it doesn't matter if you're an athlete or not. And this is the key thing athletes to carb load, even though it's not Done directly

for the mental benefit. Ultimately excess leads to harm an excess over time causes obesity diabetes, heart attacks Strokes hypertension, metabolic syndrome and all the common causes of death information leads to cancer. We can link The Chronic excessive consumption of carbohydrates, all those diseases. So a mind shift is necessary in the population to remove carbohydrates from the food category. And put it in the crystal meth category.

And once you do that and you examine your own relationship with sugar and starch, then you can decide whether you actually have control of the relationship, and you just want to relinquish that, that the relationship with carbohydrates in your life, or in fact, the relationship is, at a point where it is out of control, just like an alcoholic or someone who drinks heavily has to make the same decision with alcohol.

And if you realize that, oh my God, all these bad things have happened because of my relationship with kaabah. Drake and the best to influence of type 2 diabetes and obesity that relationship is out of control and then to try to control it on some diet is ridiculous. It's like too often an alcoholic to drink, two beers a day.

It's just not going to happen. Because by definition, you are asking someone who's lost control of their relationship to now, type the controller relationship, so it's absolutely ludicrous. And the reason why the ketogenic approach is so effective is because it really is if it Step correctly. In the words, the most important words are a well-formulated ketogenic diet. One of the really doesn't give you access to carbohydrates, so

we don't want to harm reduction. We all want an addiction methodology for obese and type 2 diabetic patients. Then if you can change that relationship, if you can break the relationship by not doing it and replace it with other thing. Then it has sustained but then it becomes a lifestyle. You cannot sustainably change something useful doing if you're not, it just doesn't work. You have to remove and replace

that addiction management. So that's been our approach and refined that strategy and we hold our patients by the hand and we kind of take them down that pathway and we do this telephonic you all over the world. I also do it locally in my practice in Florida in Jacksonville and in West Palm Beach and as athletes have try to migrate away from Carb loading. We've also been for certain group triathletes distance Runners, certain power performers, certain team sport

players. We've been engaged in helping those folks to transform themselves without losing a huge step. Any time you make a change in your diet as an athlete, you step backwards and how do we minimize that? Step backwards, a step sideways to gain the advantage and also the Health Advantage, so long introduction. But we can take it from there. No, no, I love it, I love it. I think, you know, there's so many people that they need to hear these bold statements.

I mean, putting carbohydrates in the same category as crack cocaine is a very, very ballsy statement but I think that's what we need. Because the current thought process that people are incorporating is clearly not

working or proving effective. And I feel like for myself personally having that shift in, you know, thought process towards the That I'm consuming as an addictive substance was a pretty a pivotal moment in me recover because I mean, I was right there with the best time I was, you know, carb-loading I would binge I would over consume and I would just be caught in this negative feedback loop that led to, you know, all my eating disorders and all kinds of issues when I started looking at

food for what it truly was and recognized that I could be much, much better off by removing that Source, everything got better. And I feel like if people View, View it that way, with that degree of severity, that's when their eyes can be open and actually make an improvement. You're exactly right. I think, let me ask you this question and it's an interesting question. If performance-enhancing drugs steroids, whatever it may be, were not banned substances.

That they were perfectly fine to use. Would you use them? No. Okay, a lot of athletes would. Yes. And yet, whatever Advantage, the performance enhancing drugs and we see we've seen, I mean, we all know people would have taken, performance-enhancing drugs and just become beasts, But ultimately, the greatest liability or the greatest asset value doesn't come from a performance-enhancing drug. The greatest asset value for most athletes is To give up what

I call a PR d--. I performance reducing drug especially if you're going to be in the game for a long time and the single greatest PRD that almost all athletes in the last 20 years have taken to excess has been carbohydrates. Carbohydrates, are a performance reducing drugs. And getting rid of prds is probably far more important than trying to solve your training, or your size problems with a

pea. A PEB and and yet most athletes don't understand that, that carbohydrates actually reduce and reduce not only your performance but your ability to train the endpoint of human biology are retarded via reduced by the consumption of carbohydrates on The Chronic excess of basis and a lot of distance Runners have suffered from that fatigue is a huge issue.

Wouldn't We use a big issue for the for the distance athletes and then the diseases that creep in the blood pressure issues, that I be these issues, the insulin resistance issues, all of those things, the cramping and it comes down to recovery, it comes down to muscle regeneration. It comes down to triage of protein to the right places.

It comes down to cutting. If you're, if you're a bodybuilder, all those things matter, when you consume carbohydrates as performance reducing drugs and once an athlete, And because athletes won every every single performance Advantage. Once you understand, that carbohydrates, may give you an initial high. They make you feel good and perform good for a short period of time but somewhere a price has to be paid and the price is

massive on the back end. The flip side is to put the effort in up front and get the reward on the back end and that's a far far more effective way to go but carbohydrates or PR. These are ubiquitous you used by athletes And they reduce performance, it's funny because I've been preaching that very message for the past five years that I've been key to adapted and I've been following this

diet strictly. But that, I mean, I've literally been beaten into everybody's ears that I can get ahold of, but nobody wants to believe that because I think a lot of it is just, you know, people that are athletic people that are they have the the performance they have the look, they're able to eat, copious amounts of carbohydrates and not look overweight. But they have this, you know, Veil over them. So to speak that people just assume they can do no wrong. Oh, it's working for them.

I mean, they put them on the cereal boxes to motivate people to eat more carbs to look like this individual. But when you stop and look at what's actually happening, I mean, even within the ketogenic Community. I mean, I've got so many people saying that my performance would improve if I was to incorporate a cyclical style, ketogenic diet, or a targeted style ketogenic diet. Because, you know, there's certain studies that illustrate,

that may be the case. But I've argued and will continue to argue that by allowing yourself to become Truly Deeply adapted over a long period of time. This doesn't happen overnight, but just continually day in day out, following this protocol and sticking with it and staying true to it. Your performance is going to be far and above anything that you could be achieved through some momentary high, from a cyclical, or targeted, or carb load.

I think you're absolutely right. And how long have you been been active? Professional. How long have you been on stage and psychically working yourself up for a competition? How many competitions over how many years have been competing? I started training that 10 years ago. My first competition was in 2012 and I went pro in 2017. And when would you like your last competition to be a planet? Be honest. I don't mean I'm gonna be dead sixty eighty, seven years old,

that's what I thought. But right. And and that is extremely unlikely. Extremely unlikely. If you were, chronic consumer of carbohydrate chronically on at least are psychically or not. Because if you think of the ketogenic lifestyle, I put a post on my Instagram few little couple of days ago about this. Is that Studies gets done in rats.

And this, this was on stage, a couple of couple of days ago, study gets done in rats and they looked at Rats on standard American diet and rats on the ketogenic diet and they found that the rats on the ketogenic diet. Or this is the statement. They said rats on the ketogenic diet live much longer significantly longer than Rats on the standard standard American diet. And that was the conclusion. Is that a correct conclusion?

It sounds like the if the pay if the paper said we feed these Rats from birth to death, we fed them one group on a standard American diet. 109 a ketogenic diet and the Rats on the ketogenic glad I've lived much longer. Is that a good conclusion for that paper And I mean I'm not a rat but I'll definitely take that over the carb approach. No. OK, so let's flip this around and I didn't I you know, announce that question. Most people don't. Don't get it.

Like I heard it and I'm not better than anybody else. This is just my world. That is a completely garbage statement. Here's the way, the statement should go. Is that rests on the ketogenic diet lived, a normal life, span Rats on the standard American diet, died at a younger age than they should have? I like that. You see the difference?

Totally? Okay, so 87. You should still be competing short of non-comedogenic disease because you are maximizing your omnivorous human potential people that called load, or use forms of the standard American diet. May perform well, one competition over another But ultimately, the longevity, the disease and we know this categorically is going to shorten both their whole life. If and their performance left side, now other smokers that live to 99 and are still

smoking. Of course, you're always going to find an anecdote, but, but statistically you are shortening your performance life and your real life, if you are cycling through carbohydrates, and I will go toe-to-toe with anybody on that fact. So that rat study actually showed that the ketogenic diet is normal. And people on the standard American diet or racks on the standard American diet are dying earlier and and the problem with it, With a lot of even the PV Evangelical people in the

supported ketogenic way of life. We don't understand that. We're look at all the illnesses, but we've got to understand is that the ketogenic diet is the healthiest diet out that, it keeps us healthy. And but all the other diseases that we're dealing with the diabetes obesity, all of Fallout are really aberrations or moves away from the healthiest diet for human beings. And every really have to flip our thinking in that regard. But is that does that make some sense to you? Absolutely.

I'm just amazed at how people can can hear This research know that it exists and still sway the opposite direction. I know that it is the because the addiction but it just it never ceases to amaze me where people place their priorities. I mean, I am very much so on the the side of a strict ketogenic, like, this is my lifestyle. I don't I don't dip my toe in

the water. I'm all in or all out and I'm all in like I don't Aunt, I don't play around with with the line because there's no need to cross that line. I don't feel like I'm sacrificing anything by following the strict Keygen protocol.

However, I can understand that there are certain people that would like to incorporate, you know, certain occasional foods every once in a while, like some type of sentimental value food which in the first place, I don't ever think it makes that much since to put such a emotional weight in any type of food. But that another Point entirely, when you look at people, Is a crucial point, and I kind of alluded to this little world while ago. Would you ever use heroin heroin and no plan on it?

But why would you not use heroin? Because I don't, I don't desire. I don't feel like I'm missing something in my life, there's no hole that I need to fill by desensitizing myself. Well, a lot of people won't use heroin because they're afraid of dying of the heroin killing

them. That is also this incredibly powerful instant high that you get from heroin, that's what addicts people But people, like you and me are never going to go there because of the risk Ryan. However people that use heroin are completely ignorant to the risk. So they are immune to risk, all they're looking for is the instant high and very willing to roll up their sleeve inject heroin into their veins even if the risk is turning blue and

dying, okay? Now that's a it's a very harsh example, but what you just said is exactly the same thing is that people A willing to consume carbohydrates for what they believe to be the instant satisfaction, not just the mental high, but the instant performance gratification, they wanted they wanted right now and they don't they're immune to the consequences or the Fallout down the road. Where's you are? Taking a longer term view at this, which is the right way to go.

You know, if you don't perform, so great in this performance is going to be another one and you're going to do better the next time. These guys are devil. Look down the road. They looking right now, what what can maximize my performance right now and if I have to pay for a price for it on the back end, so be it because they are very good at ignoring that price. You're looking at this long-term strategically and that's to my mind, the healthiest, cook best way to look at it.

People that are using these drugs are either ignorant to it were using it. Not believe that, the ignorance cannot be an argument anymore, they're using it because they're willing to ignore the consequences on the back. And to have the front end gratification and the positivity from the front end, just like it no different than a heroin addict who shoot up now for the high and if something bad happens on the back end, so be it. And I'm not being nasty to those folks, that is the reality of

the decision-making. And you've chosen not to take that risk both of her and, and with carbohydrates, and I commend you for that. And I just hope that more and more people understand. But this is about not only They but also tomorrow and if you're going to have today and tomorrow isn't that better either? I certainly think. So I'm curious to get your take on this because I'm I've come to find that. I'm just a contrarian on this subject because I am much more excited about the long game.

I'm always preaching about the long game like that's how I run my business, that's how I, you know, structure my nutrition my training. Like I don't care about tomorrow at the expense of ten years from now. Like I'm trying to be the best for the Long Haul. Why is it that you think people are so hung up on this concept of instant gratification like from a deep-rooted psychological standpoint? Why do you think that is the

case? You know, it's interesting because I thought it's a very good question. Let's look, I'm going to use an analogy here. Let's look at a guy who gets into the ring for a fight. There's two type. Let's say everybody's pretty good at fire at boxing but the guy that the two guys that go into the ring and these are two professional boxes.

The first guy gets into the ring and he's highly emotional, he's all pumped up and he's totally psyched up and he's adrenaline's running and he's just crossing adrenaline through his veins and he's pumped. He's practiced He's 50, he's a good boxer, and he gets in there.

He just goes ballistic for a little while because he's running on emotion, but he's ignorant to the technique to the strategy, his functioning of instinct, and his emotions are driving his Instinct and if he gets a knock off, having the first round, he's a winner. Fantastic. But what happens if he doesn't get a knock out a KO in the first or the second round. Now we're getting to the third and fourth, from the It's round and these emotions are subsiding. And now it's all about long-term

planning. It's about technique. It's about thinking, how am I going to hit this guy and analyzing what what his opponent is? Where the strengths are where the weaknesses are? And you can stay away from me strength. Here's his weaknesses that may exploit, that that is now thinking about intelligent intellectually. And in a non emotive way about how to win the fight and ensure

the Emotional boxes. Come out there, there my life people in the first round or two, but those are the guys who have very short careers because if the other guys able to get through the first two rounds, now, it's the long game and it's the intellectual game and it's the issue-driven, how do I win this fight with my skills game, not the emotion game, and the other guy gets in the ring and he says, okay, this guy's wired up, he's all over the place, but did he watch him let live?

And he's a thinker and he's the guy that gets in. He's got great skills, great. But his emotions are very tightly in check because this is his job. This is his business and he goes about the fight bobbing and weaving, and analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of his opponent. And the other opponent is coming with a flurry of Haymakers in the first round.

And if you can do that, if you can Bob and weave and miss those round, two round three round, four round five, all the way through, to round 10, he wins every round because he's thinking and is not firing off. Emotion that defines you as the thinking guy who trains hard to practice really hard but you come at the at this, with an intellectual intelligent game plan. There are other guys that direction to the gym that have iron like crazy. They willing to take a bunch of drugs.

They need that instant gratification very want to win round one. They want to be the biggest best in the first competition. They get into, where are they? In the second, third and fourth competitions. They're injured that in train hard enough. They don't feel it anymore. They're disappointed by the result that puff gone, but make some sense to you.

Yes, absolutely. I feel like we've in maybe I'm totally wrong in thinking this, but I feel like lately like over like in my lifetime, you know, I'm 28 years old. So like I feel like my lifetime. My generation is like, at the peak of this. I feel like the, the, the rise of just instant gratification and playing the short game, is that it Time high right now but I don't know why I like from a,

like a generational standpoint. I don't know why or when this shift occurred, but, you know, I look back and I'm pretty well read on like, old old Scholars. And I feel like everybody, you know, 200 years ago. They valued the long game, much more so than you're seeing these days. Like, people would be excited about becoming a master of a craft like they would, they would work at that craft tirelessly day in Day Out. A out until they are the world's

greatest at that thing. Whereas now you don't see very many people holding, you know they're their attention towards any one thing for longer than a week or two. I'd rather bet is the heart of what we do. That's called emotion management and ultimately the root cause of obesity of burn. Out of all, those things is how we were raised and what skills and what diversity we've developed to deal with our emotional needs. So if Me ask you this question. What do you do for pleasure?

What do you do for fun and build businesses? What else? That and bodybuilding. I'm a big hunter. I'm an outdoors and I love being outside and being in nature. Why didn't you tell me that? The first answer should have been you love to train, but it wasn't. And the reason is because training and performance is your job. And I'm not going. I'm looking at a picture of you right now, in a pose. And I'm asleep.

You clearly are Don good in your job that you job as hard as you work at it. And, and this is true for anybody not just a body builder or a lift or athlete. This is true in my job. When we invest a lot of effort into our work and, and we really, when it comes to productivity Excellence Perfection, top of the game is what we strive for, but, It's hard work and the byproduct of that hard work is anxiety, stress, depression, anger, fear,

frustration, boredom, pleasure. All of the emotional Spectrum together. I call that emotional tension. It's a little bit like when you drive your car and you drive your car hard and fast cause performance being productive, but the byproduct of that cause engine is heat.

And if you look under the hood of your car, you've got the bigger the engine, the more effective and the bigger the In system is because in order to keep the engine productive, you have to have a healthy cooling system and for you and for me, we train hard, we work hard, that's our job, but the byproduct is that emotional tension and then we've got a variety of things. And here's the quintessential statement that we do to offload that emotional, man, that, that

emotional tension. And when we do things for endorphin relief, for that serotonin, Loading for that. Just that relaxation, we have to put a little bit of effort in what we do. You go hunting, that requires effort up front, you got to load up your gear, you got to go for a walk in the woods and then you place a you shoot a deer but it's taken a lot of effort to get to that point and the reward is on the back, end of the effort and you feel great on the

other side. If you had a rough day and you come home and you down a bottle of Jack Daniels or you, as soon as you walk through the door, you open a tub of Screaming you eat it. You're getting instant

gratification. But on the back end of that instant gratification is negativity harm guilt and repression of some of the issues that are driving your emotions while you're walking through the woods, chasing the deer or hunting, the deer, your brain can kind of go into a little bit of a meditative space because the effort requires some time. And why are you walking in the woods? You're hunting, you looking for the buck. But you also Acting with and processing certain issues with

your life. It might be your business. It might be your next training session you resolving issues. It might be a fight with your wife or your girlfriend or whatever, how do you resolve some of that stuff? So by the time you come out of the woods, you feeling pumped because you either got the got the beer, you had a lot of fun

out there so you feeling great. The physical activity is relaxed you and you're proud of what you've done, but you've also got a game plan for dealing with certain issues in your life.

If you are living on the emotional edge of a substance or a Babel, if you go to Vegas, you gamble and you win or you lose, those are all forms of instant gratification with a price on the back end, but because there's no meditative time component, you're not solving and connecting with the issues in your life, you're repressing them and more, and more we get Disturbed and more and more. We build up all this emotional

tension and more and more. We look for the highs of instant gratification to Repress those tensions in those issues that we don't want to deal with and it's extremely erosive to our self-esteem and to our self-confidence, if you look at a lot of the athletes with you perform, again, there's going to be the people like you whose career it is.

And then the other the other guys that have extremely fragile, self-esteem and self self confidence, it all pumped up, they've worked really hard, but they're totally emotional. And they get on stage and and if they don't win, There's so deflated that they walk away from the game because they've looked for the instant high. But they haven't invested the effort and found the ruled on the back end.

They're looking for the immediate High upfront and they've got no way to process their emotional needs. And in fact, people and I, by the way, when I quit my sport, I gained a bunch of weight because I went from using sport as my emotion management system to carbohydrates. So always in the background but never prevalent. So we were looking for that. Instant ratification.

And over time, the excessive use of an instant gratifying pathway leads, not only to the harm from the drug, but also to repression of dealing with issues in your life. So you become a less effective human being, and that is incredibly erosive to your self-esteem and your

self-confidence. So now if you can't generate emotional well-being from within, you have to turn externally to more and more drugs, and more and more risky behaviors to You that same high and eventually the whole show collapses down, it implodes on you and that's addiction. And how where do you learn effective effort and time based emotion. Management strategies. We learn it first and foremost from our parents.

And the effective endorphin or endorphin Alternatives or the emotional judgment, strategies are physical activity, create a box, spirituality meditation, and empathetic human connection. Now, if you look at younger kids, that's happening less and less as our parents focus on productivity. In other words, if Little Johnny of four years age or Julie says, hey Mom, I really want to play soccer.

The first thing we do is we put them on the soccer team and they go to training and they Play hard and they're either good or bad. They sitting on the bench if they win, they feel great. If they lose, they feel terrible. You basically turn this wonderful endorphin experience called physical activity into a Dharma as test and guess what, the avian lose physical activity as a source of emotional management. Or if Little Johnny or little Jilly draws, a painting and and

sit there. And painted comes look mom, look Dad, I've drawn this painting and you say, oh, that's fabulous. You going to be the next Picasso. It's brilliantly. Put on the fridge. What you've done is, you praise the Excellence. You haven't connected your child to the effort of the painting. The right answer is, hey, that looks great. I bet you had a lot of fun drawing that, because the problem is, when Giglio Johnny

thinks, they're excellent. Now that it is school in, they go to art class and they paint and they expect the same response from the art teacher, and the art teacher looks at that and says man, did your dog show up on the piece of paper or what? Exactly happened and you've completely deflated them because their entire emotional situation is tied into the result, not the pleasure from the effort and they lose that creative art as a source of emotion management.

If you're the authoritarian parent and always raising the bar on whatever your kid did, there's no empathy and if a child doesn't develop empathy as the primary site of human connection, then they'll become either. This aggressive or passive. What you want to do is to have an assertive child one, who can State their case. But he's willing to listen to reason and willing to explore things and work things out. Help, use human connection to

process issues. If you take your child at 45 years of age, and you stick them in Sunday school. You stick them in religious school at a church. And after supplied be listening to somebody, talking at them for an hour or two every Sunday, they learn to dislike Like or recore never connect with religion. The right way to do it is to teach your child, how to use a connection with a higher power to sort through stuff in their

lives. And we're doing that, less and less and less in the electronic era, in the productive era to these kids develop an absence of emotion management. And for the first time in human history, we are now feeding our kids, a highly mural active incredibly To toxic drug before. The children weren't even born. It's called imprinting. So, when moms pregnant, and she had a rough day and she wept on

a cup of ice cream. And some Eminem's be hormonal milieu in that baby is creating exactly the same. At first, the catecholamines, the adrenaline, everything else are stressing that baby out just like Mom's dress and then she eats the tub of ice cream. A blood sugar screams through the roofer instruments going through the roof that crosses the placenta. Ah, and the mom relaxes instant

gratification, guess what? That is imprinted that fetus to connect with sugar and starch, even before that baby's born. Now, the baby's born and Mom can't breastfeed. What is she feeding the baby? The formula. It's called a baby milk. Shake it is a high carbohydrate low fat mmm, irrelevant protein milk shake And and that baby before it even knows it's human has connected with sugar and starch as a way of life, as a way of emotion management

babies. Crying mom plugs in a bottle of milk shape, battle are older and the kid gets to be a toddler. What are we calling it? We're calling a treat. We're giving a child, crystal meth As a treat. I want to say I agree. I just know that my mind when I talk about this. No, I totally. I'm on the same page. I don't have kids yet, but I look at what you're saying and like, how I would foresee myself raising children? It's, I mean, I think you're

hitting the nail on the head. I would there's been several people that argue that the Obesity epidemic is a result of, you know, hormonal imbalances. Some people say it's all caloric. You know, you're not exercising enough and you're eating too much all about calories and energy expenditure the color of the best Coke.

Amazing job with that, it sounds, it sounds like you were arguing and I am tending to agree with you right now, that the reason we're in an obesity epidemic on a grand scale, if you dive deep is more likely than anything a result of bad parenting. Well, I think I wouldn't, I don't like the word bad because nobody teaches a parent how to parent, right? Right. Just you know and and addiction the vulnerability of addictive behavior gets past generation to generation.

It's not genetic but we get raised a certain way. Even our parents are doing the best they can and they do the best, they can give them the tools they have, but all the tools they have is how they were raised. So we raise our kids a certain way and we want all kids to be successful, we want them to be productive, but we don't understand the You have a healthy diverse cooling system, so we write we get ready to certain way. We become that person. We raise our own kids the same

way and it repeats generation. So if you look back at our parents, a lot of them were smokers because smoking was the prevalent drug in the 1950s and 60s. And perhaps, their parents were alcoholics, who had were heavy drinkers. Because 120 years ago, we had prohibition for a reason because Americans are drinking and let me Circle back to. This is a very important point this whole garbage about physical activity. How how much exercise should somebody do when they're trying

to quit smoking? How much I should try? Quit smoking. I mean you could do no exercise correctly, right? And when you're trying to lose weight and I know this flies in the face of what everyone's is, it is unnecessary, it is not necessary to do exercise. So this whole concept of calories in calories out came from Coca-Cola in the 60s and 70s, particularly the 1970s Coke in the soda industry would be blamed for obesity. You got all these calories in your in your dreams.

All this sugar in your drinks and that's causing obesity and diabetes and Coke said oh no, no no, it's not the sugar not drinks. It's just an American to become fat lazy slugs and Coca-Cola invested in a very some, these guys were brilliant. They invested billions of dollars in what they called, the move more campaign and they told Americans you guys are fat and lazy, you need to move more. And if you can drink our drinks, as long as your exercise, you

won't get fat. That's like telling a smoker to smoke three cigarettes and go for a run to breathe out the nicotine, but Coke was incredibly good at this. And they sponsored sporting events and even today, if you look, the majority of sporting events are are sponsored by manufacturers of drugs, sugary drugs and perhaps alcohol. So a simple little reason, why Coke was completely wrong.

And just a couple of weeks ago with Martin Luther King day and I happened to see a number of people marching in the Martin Luther King parade in the 1960s and The majority of the men would he send black ties and they looked like their ties, they were skinny black minutes. Not because they were impoverished to poor or didn't have access to food.

Everybody in the marches were skinny, they went outside people and then I looked at one of my favorite time of that era coming kind of coming to to adulthood Ira's with the Woodstock era. You look at pictures of Woodstock, everyone's got their shirts off. Every kid is skinny and they will get six packs. I can assure you. They were too busy doing doing LSD to ever to ever be exercising. Those kids didn't get their six

packs from exercising. They just didn't have all this lard the came from sugar and starch in the subsequent generation covering their six pack. That's expect is there we human? It's there. It may not be a stick in as beautiful as yours, but the six pack is still there. Okay, you can enhance it but even if you do very little physical activity, it's about the carbohydrate. So the role of physical activity

in addiction, man. Mix is not to burn off the calories, they are toxic when they go in your face. But physical activity is one of the four cornerstones of healthy effective, emotion management. And yes, it's got subsidiary benefits of muscular Health, longevity Mobility, those types of things, but it is not necessary to exercise to lose weight. And that's an important read. This connection, that we have to make after Coca-Cola, made that

connection. And I know that flies the face of a lot of athletes, but I'm not saying don't exercise, but use exercise as part of your image of your of rebuilding, your emotion management system, not to lose weight, not to burn off calories because then you become a fact. I like, I was okay, I'm 300 pounds and I was and I go for a

run on a treadmill. Well, I feel like crap when I'm running because I'm basically dragging another body with me, but at the end of my little job, the machine says, about 2,000 calories, But I feel awful. And if I screams only 50 calories, it's going to make me feel better. How the devil is that going to work? Okay, calories in calories out, and I'm still down eight

hundred. Nine hundred fifty calories, but I'm still fat know the physical activity replaces at an endorphin level at a relaxation level. At an emotion management level. The role of instant gratification from the consumption of carbohydrates, is a drug I totally agree. It's funny. I look at I look at my father, you know, you're talking to him and I'm thinking of my dad because he is not overweight at all. He does not give a damn about

exercise. I don't think he's ever picked up a dumbbell in his life, but he eats. I mean, he'll eat carbohydrates every once in a while but the vast majority of his food is just quality food. Like we raise our own lamb. You know he eats a lot of deer that he hunts. I mean he eats quality food heavy and animal-based proteins and vegetables that he grows. He's in the garden and he has like he's a, he's a PhD

professor of biology. He's a master at his craft there, but he also sales like his thing right now is sailing. He's huge into like sailing, and that's his emotional, disconnect his relaxation and meditation. And he doesn't, he's not, you know, any health issues, any health concerns whatsoever and he eats decent food doesn't exercise. And I feel like a lot of people can resonate more with that than me. It's weird.

Like I say, say you don't have to exercise with people just assume that I'm lying to him because I'm a bodybuilder normally fit the description but like my father farthest thing from a bodybuilder but a very healthy individual and I feel like that is so much more obtainable and within grasp than people give it credit for but it's like they don't want to open their eyes to the fact that it is an addiction they're dealing with You're exactly right now, Robert.

You are so, so fortunate. I hope pretty much every evening you, if you are spiritually, you say a little prayer and say, thank you for giving me the granting me, the parents that raised me because it sounds like your father is a very authoritative person. What do I mean by authoritative personality? It is one that raises their children, well, with a diversity of emotion Management Systems.

Clearly, he's raised somebody who's highly productive Is highly skilled but also is able to enjoy the return of the investment of effort when they do things for pleasure irrespective of the outcome. You know if it's five nights or just to be in the woods hunting than to have to kill a back. Yeah. If you get something, if you

kill it, that's wonderful. But it's about the pleasure of being out there and too few people hate hunting because they don't always get something and I think you should be so thankful to your sitting from that description of Add because that is a rarity in modern America and we really just have to scription as parents. We can learn so much from that description. I'm sure if you're blessed one day with a child and I hope you are because Lord knows that's moving. Darwinism forward, not

backwards. We if you raised your child, the way you were raised you most likely will you building for the future? And and that's just become such a rarity in parenting. Mostly we see the authoritarian parent, who is really totally focused on productivity and Excellence or we have the permissive parent who really has no boundaries, no structure. They have the Nike problem.

They just don't do it and they don't put effort into anything that don't pull up. Self-esteem self-confidence or you'll fart, Aaron, people who never ever credit effort, they're only focused on excellence and Perfection. And no matter how hard that child tries to achieve that always falling short and that Little Gap is filled with a sense of failure. That is highly corrosive to self-esteem and self-confidence. So at least from that brief description, and this is kind of my job.

I can tell you that for the most part you should be very, very thankful for the way you were raised. I very much. Remember he and I definitely butted heads grown up but you know when I look back now it's like I really understand his approach to things and I respect the hell out of him as a person and I appreciate how he raised me and my brother And I'm a human my mom both I mean I'm very blessed to have the family and the parents that I do

without a doubt. I'm curious like with with earlier you mentioned I think you rattled off for or was it five different Outlets that people need to have like the spirituality, the physical and ever there was a for, right? Yeah. The, the for effort based ones are and if you have visas fundamental parts to your life because you know the question I asked a lot of my athletes is

and this is important. To go to, I'll cover the for the, for our physical activity and it's not exercise physical activity slightly different than exercise exercise your job. When you walk in the woods, you being Physically Active, when you training in the gym, you're doing your job. They slightly different creative arts, which is anything from Fashion photography, music, art gardening, anything creative,

spirituality or meditation? It can be a connection with a higher power or it's more just a meditative experience a night. I put passive, yo, Agha into that not necessarily Act of yoga, which more goes to the exercise of the physical activity side, and then empathetic human connection. And it is where you can share your story without without criticism or condemnation. And you can work through things

with friends or family members. Now, if you've got those for or sore pieces of those for the Cornerstone, then if you have a rough day and you come home and you have a glass of wine, it's a

very healthy way to dissipate emotional. attention because you can have a glass of wine and take your dog for a walk, but if you have none of those for Cornerstone and you get all this emotional tension built up and you come home and you have that glass of wine and it relaxes you at a subconscious level, you start to bond with the relaxation of that alcohol and slowly over time, you use it more and more to the point of harm and that is a vulnerability to dictate Behavior or if you

have no other emotion management tools, you discover Rate, you discover gambling, those are the instant hides or dysfunctional,

sexual behavior. Sex is a one, you know, physical sexual relationship is one of those cornerstones is part of the in pathetic human connection, but it can also be part of this function just like an athlete who trains to a point of harm to the point of injury and then cannot get their butts out in the gym or somebody that over trains and never give themselves a break because they're not training for their bodies anymore. Very training for the high for

their mind. And so even things in the realm of of the healthy and often Alternatives, can be taken to the nth degree, if there's no diversity. And it's important understand that. I'm sure you've met and know athletes that have destroyed themselves because they couldn't get out of the gym when they had a small injury. Totally, I used to be one Right? So and you had to find out this to the end, it's okay, nothing. Bad is going to happen. If you don't go to the gym,

nothing bad is going to happen. If I don't eat a tub of ice cream tonight, and it's the realm is very, very similar but you found diversity. And, and that is such a valuable asset to have. It's funny because I think, you know, they're definitely some ignorance out there in the world. There's a lot of it, but I feel like people inside deep down inside, they know if they're Contributing to their overall well-being over there or their

overall demise. And when people have a tub of ice cream just for that quick fix, like, they internally know that they're not contributing to their health like it's not bettering them and either. Anyway, I don't believe anybody is able to just maintain like I look at life through the lens of you're either getting better or you're getting worse. I mean, that's just the way it is.

That's just life. And I feel like when you, when you go for these quick fixes, when you go for these short-term highs, It's like you kind of alluded to earlier it just it winds up beating you down, internally start to lose this confidence in yourself. This motivation to be better and that is a dangerous dangerous thing to play with because you only have one life and if you do that for too often for too long you are you are in a pretty deep pit of despair.

That's very hard to crawl out from You're absolutely correct. And two points that you brought up there. The first one is that at exciting, the addicts are immune to risk. You can train with a guy and you can hook himself and you see him in the gym the whole time, hobbling around, and still training, you know, that that person is kind of addicted to his training or her training and. But when you go up to talk to them about it, they're totally ignorant to the fact that maybe

they need to rest. Exactly. I mean everybody knows that smoking a cigarette is a bad idea, everybody knows. If you're fat and you're eating a tub of ice cream, it's probably not a good idea. However, addicts are immune to risk. That's the first thing and the second comment you made is such a important. Comment maintenance is the guy that fixes the but the boiler in a hotel in a hotel or an apartment building, that's the maintenance man.

There is no such thing as maintenance in life, it doesn't exist. So, the way I look at this, is this way. I bet you you've in your life walk to run on a treadmill. Yes. okay, so if you walking on a treadmill, what happens if you're walking along and the treadmills moving and you suddenly stop, I fall out the back of the treadmill, right? It shoot, you off the back and you crash. That's maintenance the minute you stop. Moving forward. The to the tread life is moving on.

You don't just stop and step out of the pathway you stop and addresses you backwards. And you crash life is specially when it comes to improving ourselves self-improvement and and really what it's called is self-care. Self-care is like walking on the treadmill. It can be a lot of fun, but it It stops. And the key thing about walking on the treadmill, really self care in life. There are no goals there.

No end point. There are just Milestones along the pathway and the parkway of self-care only ends about 10 minutes after you die. Because it's an ongoing process and the minute you say, hey, I'm at my maintenance weight or hey, I've been maintaining this. You that guy that just stop walking on the treadmill. And it ain't gonna last very long. You're going to rush back and crash and burn. And the number of times that I've picked people up who have done a keto diet or they cut out

carbohydrates for our. And now I've lost weight, my maintenance. No you're not. And six months later they come in with a head down. I should have listened to you the first time big Keith the reason why they're like the word diet when it comes to a ketogenic lifestyle is because there is no such thing as maintenance. Maintenance is relapse and every time you put a carbohydrate in your mouth I love about this. I can eat some ice cream tomorrow. Be fine. Tell that to an alcoholic who

had his first beer? It doesn't happen. Alcoholism wouldn't exist. If someone got get hammered tonight and be sober for the year after that, it doesn't happen. And that's why every alcoholic nose. Don't go there. It's about the word permission and a large part of dietary management because we so focused on calories uses, a concept called harm reduction. You reduce how many calories you

consume. So you lose weight but you're not addressing the fundamental reason the cause of why you gave the weight in the first place which is a dysfunctional emotion management system to replace a deficient one. And so therefore if Every every calorie content controlling died, including keto, diet, keto diet, give most people a small allowance of carbohydrates per day.

Oh, you've got to be under 30. Well, I'm going to save up all my 30 like Weight Watchers. So I can have some cheesecake tonight, or am I saving my all up? So I can have a key, do pizza, or Aikido donut or whatever. But do not cut me into trouble. I don't care what it's made of, it's the concept. Yeah. And what are the key things that we teach our patients is to develop arrogant Integrity rather than a sense of deprivation? Why do you think?

And I'm going to say something that may sound Blasphemous up front. But why do you think vegans stick to their diet or stick to a vegan way of life? Far better than the majority of people stick to a ketogenic diet? I don't know. That's a good question. Okay, it's very simple. The reason people go on a ketogenic diet is either to lose weight or treat their diabetes for the most part. Okay? And when you do that, you're giving up something, you feel incredibly deprived.

So, when you offer someone, a ketogenic diet, a piece of cake, the responses, you do know, I'm not allowed to have that. It's a very different facial response and then it's just that one big unexpected, emotional event, Way from accessing that take again, because they feel deprived when the murder. The majority of people that start a vegan diet, don't do it because they're fatter diabetic. They started out of care, out of misguided, but out of care for the planet.

Oh, climate change. We're going to kill apply climate tomorrow. The Earth's going to explode or the prayer animals, how can you kill the animals and their Evangelical, about the protection of the climate on the animal. So they're willing to make huge sacrifices because Cuz they're arrogant about the fact that that any meat. So, when you offer a vegan mistake they don't say, oh no. I'm not allowed to have that. I'm a vegan. They say, damn you. Why the hell do you kill an animal?

You bad person, you killed Bambi. They're arrogant about the fact that they don't eat meat and their arrogance. Sustains them the same way that an ex-smoker will tell you, that's disgusting how the devil can you smoke? They don't say oh, I wish I could have one buttermilk smoke record smoke. No, they're arrogant in their integrity that they don't do that thing and if we can build up the same arrogance about carbohydrates, as people on a ketogenic way of life, that's

disgusting. How can anybody eat ice cream? You're far. Less vulnerable to going there. So does that make sense to you? Totally agree. I tell people all the time. You have to change what you prioritize like if for me, I prioritize how much better I feel Function following this ketogenic lifestyle. Then I do from the momentary high, from any other type of

carbohydrate based food. So like my priority is such that I don't feel like I'm deprived or I'm sacrificing anything because I'm winning more than I'm losing and that to me is a greater, you know, underlying win. And when you don't feel like you're sacrificing, its I mean, it's actually sustainable. Otherwise you're going to feel like you're always deprived You're exactly right. But that's that's the whole point is that the concept of the

diet? Here's your diet or if you go cut off carbohydrates, don't eat except once or twice a day intermittent fasting. Off you go that is for most people unsustainable primarily because they removed not only the harm, the carbohydrates do that the asset value, anything that we do that's addictive has an asset value, carbohydrates make you feel great and when you remove them, You have to carbohydrates are unique in the addiction world.

When you quit smoking. The only value of a cigarette of nicotine is as a an emotion management, a dysfunctional, emotional management tool. So, when you remove cigarettes from your life, you're leaving an emotion management Voyager, 21, 21 replacement could adapt the same for almost every other drug. You know, nobody tells an alcoholic what they should drink that's kind of natural.

But when it comes to carbohydrates as a bit Of substances when you remove them, they unique in the fact that they leave to avoid, they leave a nutritional void and they also leave an emotion, management void. And if you're going to remove them in the sustainable way, you have to replace both voids. So, the ketogenic diet is heavily focused on replacing carbohydrates, with a more effective healthier, nutritional whole range.

So, the ketogenic diet foods that Nutritional whole, but it still leaves a massive, emotion management, hold, by the time you are obese or diabetic. If you look in the defectors who are diabetic person that I usually factors, because that's who I am. My body may not be fat anymore, but by head. Sure is. But the point that point is that, if you look in the factors for type 2 diabetics, emotion management toolkit, by the time

they got. There you open up that toolkit, there's carbohydrates in cobwebs. And if you take out the carbohydrates, they've got nothing. And if you don't help them. The stand that it's just a question of time either before they go back to carbohydrates when they find another dysfunctional drug. So for example, people have successfully quit smoking the majority of them gain weight because they didn't go, they didn't just quit smoking. They didn't in fact they didn't quit smoking.

They just did a drug transfer. They went from nicotine to carbohydrates. The reason why you've been able to sustain this in our successful with it is because you've got a variety of I open up your emotion management toolkit. It. It's like a jack-in-the-box everything. Just jumps out, you've got all this abundance of things that you do for pleasure, for fun, for emotion management. And the problem is people like me had to build that we had to find that, and it's taken me two decades.

And I'm still pretty pathetic at putting things into that emotion management toolkit. So we're vulnerable to a muscle memory of going backwards and that's why I try to isolate myself with insulate myself from access to carbohydrates, particularly in places. Has where I'm emotionally

relaxing. I can tell you this, absolutely Robert, if there's ice cream in my fridge tonight, I'm going to eat it. But I also know absolutely that it's not there and because I understand my vulnerability to that addictive behavior, and if you think you've beaten the addiction, it's just a question of time before you factor diabetic again. So, stimming off of that, I've

got a question for you. I'm definitely a believer in, you know, elimination is better than moderation when you're struggling with any type of addiction whatsoever. I mean, it's just better to get it out and remove it entirely and then, you know, build yourself up from ground one. But if you're no longer addicted, like, for me, for instance, I have never been an alcoholic and I never will and I don't really drink at all. However, once in a blue moon

I'll have a glass of wine. Like, when I got I'm married. I had a glass of wine. So with someone like that, you know, in the context of whatever it may be, whether it be food, like, my, my dad, for instance, he's never been addicted to carbs but every once while have some carbs, I inherently know, going back to my wine example that I'm not benefiting. You know, physically my performance is not going to be enhanced whatsoever from that glass of wine.

Like nothing is moving the needle forward. If anything is probably going reverse, what would you say like, in your And in your perspective, what is that? Like I feel like for me, you know, knowing that I'm not a dick to knowing that I have no struggle there.

It's like that is my idea of just having the symbiotic moment where I know I'm not that's just like my, my Bliss relaxation point, but I'm curious to see what your perspective is on, things like that, whether it be food or drink or whatever. I mean, I wouldn't want to do heroin anything by any means. But something that if it's done in moderation, And if you don't have an addictive behavior towards that substance.

Maybe it's offering some type of emotional benefit that outweighs the decrease in performance or whatever, right. I think you just touched from the fundamental issue in the entire nutrition. Diet weight loss world and Gary taubes is a friend of mine actually has a great little talk about this and and this is, you're exactly right. When fat people went up Two diabetics, get advice from otherwise. Healthy people who have never ever experienced addiction and don't understand the concept of

carbohydrate addiction. Then their whole life is about moderation. They can those are the people can have one or two chips from the bag and fold it up and eat some more tomorrow. They do not have any realm of understanding of how someone like myself and other fat people and type 2 diabetics function. That the only way I can stop eating chips is when the bag is empty. A and your bag is empty. And and that's an uncontrollable Behavior to start to ask me to control that is irrational and

impossible. And I think the whole Gayatri debate. This whole issue of moderation comes about because people giving other people advice base it on their own realm of ability. So that if they're capable without even thinking about it all moderation, very going to say that. I just assumed that everybody is capable of moderation, and then you're telling somebody that they're pathetic that they're weak that they're terrible. You really are stomping on an already extremely fragile eroded.

See yourself when you try to tell a fat person that moderate Is the way to go and we can try, they put a lot of effort into moderation, but because we can't do it. We cannot do moderation period. And then we try we successful for a little while and then we crash and burn. And then we get beaten up psychologically for being what we are added, and it is incredibly rosoff.

And if you look at the amount of depression, the amount of anxiety, the amount of suicide because people are telling us how pathetic We are that we cannot tolerate moderation. I love and and just, I'm so envious of people like you that are able to do this in moderation. I just know. I can't and the challenges to be able to tell people that moderation isn't a feasible way to go. And I think that's the

fundamental part. If you read all these blogs by these so-called dietary experts, and I think the whole nutrition education system is based On the concept of moderation tolerance, you can have a little bit because I have a lot that's why I never measure anything I eat steak and planful I don't need ice cream at all. That's my measurement. And I eat once or twice a day when I'm hungry. It's not a difficult system to follow but they have to measure

everything. You can have this amount this amount because moderation is possible for them. Now, on the flip side, I'm a fat guy. I have an out-of-control relationship with God. Carbohydrates that ways will have but I'm not an alcoholic. I've seen drunk, I've abused alcohol from time to time but I've never ever lost control of the relationship. So therefore for me, if I have some of those other things that I do on a regular basis, I go for my walks with my dog, I run

from time to time. I do a little Jim. Welcome Physically Active. I'm spiritual. I'm I have good empathetic human kinetics connections. I have the like you the most wonderful wife as a human being in my life. I I just I she is my emotion management system when it comes to human human beings and I'm very thankful for that. I have some creative things that I do. So therefore when I have a relaxing day or a rough day, I can come home and have a glass

of wine or a beer. And I'm not going to go ballistic with it because I've never gone ballistic with it before. And I don't have the need to do those other things to go ballistic with it. Now, I have very cognizant awareness. Is that I am vulnerable to addictive behavior.

So I never drink when I'm alone. I never drink when I'm really depressed or upset, and I try to have very tight boundaries around my drinking or at least have somebody else in my presence that's going to take care of me and help me with those boundaries. And and if I'm responsible way that I can enjoy the benefits of alcohol within the realm of a diverse and often management system to the point that it doesn't cause me harm, but does that make sense to you?

Yeah, totally. I think all this Kind of the summed up, like people just need to have self-awareness. Like, if you have self-awareness as to what your addictive personality traits are where your strengths are where your weaknesses are and then mitigate those in the best way possible, like, like people just need to be self-aware. Boom, you're exactly right, you're absolutely correct.

And you know, I think that is a piece that we don't talk to people about and part of it is stepping back from your busy life, where's yourself? Phone right now. That's probably dead somewhere. I think it's dead. Okay. Okay, so stop right there. That wasn't the answer. I was expecting, but I would like every member of your audience when they're listening to this to look around and see where their cell phone is.

What you just given is such a rare answer these days that you don't even know where it is. People cannot escape from something simple like their cell phone, and there's a concept that I spoke about in Boca at the low carb USA conference last weekend. The title of my talk was dopamine fasting, and serotonin loading. We are so focused on productivity on connectivity.

And, you know, if our self-worth look, we don't like in the old days, go to work and then leave work and go home to And rest our cell phone comes with us. So we blamed work and social life. Continuously how many times do most people not put as social engagement, a chat with their wife or their family on hold to take a business call or put their social life on hold to go and send an email or to do something, you know, more and more.

We're blending productivity into our social life and into our emotion management life and that's a highly highly toxic situation. Ation because we never completely relaxed. So the title of my talk was called dopamine fasting and serotonin loading and essentially if you look at it this way but all that productivity is where the dopamine is the hormone that could route gets released into your brain. That helps you to focus helps you to be productive.

Helps you to concentrate. And the normal way that the human body works every system in the human body works in a homeostatic feedback negative feedback Cycling way. So we're focused and concentrating on a subject dopamine, builds up for about 15 to 20 minutes, maybe 30 minutes and then it we need a relief. We need a brain cells, need a momentary break. Think about it, like driving in the rain, you're driving in the way in the water, spilling onto

your windshield. It's getting increasingly opaque, you hit the windshield wiper and suddenly the windshield is clean and then the rain gutters again. And then you hit the windshield. That's how our brains work. So we build up dope. I mean when you focus and then we need a windshield wiper and the windshield wiper is something called serotonin. It's a homer. It gets released that just rapidly, get rid of dopamine, you flushed it open and then you rebuild it to you refocus.

And the problem with most people in the modern era is we never effectively give ourselves serotonin moments. Or if we have one, we've overused it to the point that the dopamine system no longer Respect. So we've developed something called dopamine resistance and all drugs, are things that activate that serotonin system at first. So if you have a glass of wine every now and then it relaxes you.

But if you're an alcoholic drinking all the time the way your body starts to protect itself is to become resistant to the effects of alcohol. They need more and more alcohol to have the same effect and eventually that even wears out and that's cool, dopamine resistance where we are no longer able to To relax the dopamine system because we don't recognize a feel the serotonin high and under those conditions at part of the addiction methodology.

But it happens in Blended productivity where productivity spills over into your relaxation life. So, the title of my talk was dopamine fasting where, and this comes out of the Silicone Valley, I didn't invent the concept of a dopamine fast, but it's every now and then maybe every quarter, every month, whatever, you can afford.

You take a morning or afternoon or ideally, you take a All day from, when you wake up to, when you go to sleep and you do nothing, you drink water, if you want to put a bit of salt in it. That's okay. You want to walk around, you do that. No cell phone. No books. No contact with other people. No major physical activity. Nothing no computers. No internet, no connection. You dumb down completely you shut down your entire productive life. What you can do is write on Not with a pen on paper.

And with the goal of the dopamine, fast is to reconnect you to the inherent issues in your life because we're battling a busy all the time. We're incurring pain, we have physical pain, you may have that from time to time from training and we have emotional pain, we have emotional tension that builds up and we never ever get relief from those two things.

So don't mean faster. The morning and Or a day when you take a complete break from your entire life, but you sit down with a pen and paper and you get inside your head and you connect with the painful issues, be they physical pain, or be, they anxiety or stress or depression. And you name them, and you write them down and then you're also write down, how they happened? You look back, you reflect that you analyze. What happened over the last few months, how you've gotten to this point?

And it also, you analyze what's going to happen? What strategy, you can develop starting tomorrow to give yourself. Those de regular serotonin breaks with dopamine. So the beautiful description that this guy uses. Easy says, it's a little bit. Like somebody riding a donkey if you riding a donkey for life, the way to get the donkey to move is you put a small carrot on a stick in your hold it in front of the donkey and the donkey took be should move toward the character.

The problem is that if The last week, the donkey has been stuck at a carrot Buffet where it's just got inordinate access to

everything. That makes the don t feel good, this off while the donkeys feeding at that, Buffet at that trough and you dangle some pathetic little carrot in front of it. The donkey's not going to move because it's full from the trough and if you look at our, this productive Blended life that crosses over into our relaxation period, that's like the character faith for the donkey, the dopamine from fast is a day where you remove the

buffet and you starve your donkey and if you can starve the donkey for a day and figure out What happened in the past to get to this point and what's going to happen in the future and you are intersected in, you relax, then tomorrow, when you hang that little carrot in front of the donkey, the donkey starts to move again and it's a way to reset yourself. So, in the back, end of the first day of dopamine frosting, is the reset that starving the donkey.

And the next day, you do the same thing. Except on the second day, you don't work. We going to feed the donkey you Do some exercise. You do something charitable. You connect with an old friend that you haven't spoken to preferably in a humble way. You maybe give away to charity, something that you value. Something that's precious to you. You may do something. Artistic your garden to the yard, and you, and your weed a little bit or you draw your

paint or you sing. The result is irrelevant, but on the serotonin laid, loading day, you do the specific thing. As you engage in the specific and dolphin releasing things, that make you feel wonderful. And the first thing you do preferably, get out of bed is pull the covers up at do not

make your bed perfectly. However, as soon as you pull the covers up stand back from that pat yourself on the chest and say, damn, I'm good because self recognition of effort is self-care and the problem is, we become so competitive in our And so results-focused, we forget to enjoy the return of the investment of effort, which should be a wonderful sense of well-being. A wonderful sense of Pride,

irrespective of the outcome. And in little increments that sense of Pride from effort in little increments builds, up our self-esteem and self-confidence and most people have forgotten to do that. So the dopamine fast serotonin A load today. Reset is a wonderful way to get back to the basics of effective, diverse effort, based emotion management. I love it. I love it. And how often do you recommend doing that? I can I be awesome if you need

to I do it in small fractions. Probably once a week once a week. I'll take an evening. We're just opening fast and the next morning I may go for do a couple of things that I love to do. Sometimes probably once a season, or if you Twice a year. You know, you've heard of this essay D or the in the winter, where everybody gets, how occurring, what the essay b stands for. But it's a, it's an affective disorder where just the winter bugs you down.

So sometime in the winter, sometime in the summer, at least twice a year, I isolate two days. That's what I do. Leave me alone, don't go there and, and more and more. The dopamine fasting has taken hold. In places, like Silicon Valley, where those guys are on all the time, that's where the dopamine fought concept originated. And if you really want to hear it, all you have to do is go to YouTube and type your dopamine fast. And it's about an 8 minute

YouTube video, it is phenomenal. You jam packed everything in it. And I, the guy I can't find out what the guys name is. I'd love to give him credit for it and giving credit to him and as an anonymous person, but it is a great video. However, that's only the first part.

The second part is The second day or the second moment is to figure out and identify and plan what you're going to do on a regular basis to serotonin load, and it shouldn't involve drugs or drug like Behavior. You know it's a hard sell at first for someone that's like really type A driven to think that they're going to take a couple days off without any you know quote unquote work or engagement with the cell phone.

I used to struggle with it. I used to you know be resentful towards that I would shy away from it but then I really started diving deep into all of what you just described.

I would I would make my time in the woods this outlet for me and I would go to into the woods for, you know, a few days and hunt with 0, cell phone, 0 internet, Zero interaction and my level of productivity after coming out of that was so much greater than it was going into that that it more than made up for the two days that I'd be gone. But actually right and you know, there are places where variations of this is happening, for example, Google didn't

experiment. And it seemed crazy at first just like dopamine fasting seems crazy. They reduce themselves to a four-day week. And I gave the employees an extra day off. I guess what happened to their productivity. It went through the roof. Because people were more productive in a shorter period of time when we've got longer periods of time to do things. Are we doing things continuously? And here's a word that was

created. When I was in medical school yet small group and we created a friend of mine, shown Mortimer, who lives in England, created this word, he called it wedding and Wagga blabbing wab, be ing is work avoidance behavior. So that we're at work, we look like a working really hard but we're not doing anything and and our productivity. He goes down when you web and if you shorten your work periods that you're focused on the task. And when your task is done, you

take a day off. You're not petrified that you're not connected and you're much, much more productive? If you're not webbing, let me ask you this question. Do you train every single day? No I did like an eight-day rotation in which I have two days off. Oh my God. Don't. Don't don't you like collapsing, your muscles. Just wither away on today's know quite a bit. The day you come back is probably one of the Your best most powerful training days, without a doubt.

The dopamine fast. I love it. I feel like I'm a I'm cutting into your dopamine fast right now. This is a Sunday. We're recording. This is no, this is serotonin for me. This is what I love to do. Okay, and I'm blessed that I can do this for a living, but I know we've gone on for a long time. So, I know you've got things to do. Well, I definitely certainly do appreciate the time, dr. Cyrus.

I mean, this, I love diving into the mindset and like deep diving into psychology as to why people do what they do, why they think the way they do because at the end, End of day. It's all stemmed back to mindset and, you know, after hearing your talk at keto Summit, I knew I wanted to get you on the podcast because I just recognized and can really relate with everything you were saying. And then you certainly haven't disappointed a because, I mean, literally everything you said.

I've just really resonated with and could not agree more with. So you are definitely fighting the good fight and I encourage you to just keep doing exactly what you're doing because you're doing it, right. I really appreciate and thank you very much for having me on Robert if you don't mind. Can I just ask? Can I just One thing out there, which is completely off the based on this topic.

But I think very, very important because this is something that we don't have knowledge of just briefly. A lot of athletes are focused on protein intake as part of their dietary regimen and they take an extraordinary amount of protein in and and everybody is obviously very fit and very lean and good-looking but we don't know. Biochemically what's happening in those people.

I would love to be able to do an experiment where athletes It's who protein load a lot or eat huge amounts of protein for the expected result of bodybuilding or muscular building or tissue repair tissue building. I would love to know what those folks fasting insulin is. I would love to know how insulin resistant they are, or are not based upon their protein intake and while we could design a trial and get an IRB and spend a million dollars during a trial and then skew the results or

whatever. Maybe I would ask that if Athletes are high protein, Edith. The CrossFit is the bodybuilders, endurance athletes. If you eat a lot of protein and you are a fat adapted, ketogenic athlete. If you have health insurance, ask your doctor or you can contact me, and I can Skype anywhere in the u.s., I can write a script for for an insulin c-peptide check. I would love to know because this is very important

information. I would love to know What the insulin level is because if athletes are taking a lot of protein and it's resulting in insulin resistance and we don't know this, if it is resulting in insulin resistance, that's

harmful. That's a very harmful state to be in potentially and we need to be able to either say not an issue at all, eat your protein or hey, we've got to do something different, and the other response would be to protect the protein by eating, a high fat diet because that'll put you in ketosis and lower that insulin.

So, I I would like if there's anybody interested in, knowing letting me know what your fasting insulin is, or alternatively contacting me are you can either message me or contact me through my office if you if you need me to send you a script to check your insulin and and I appreciate you just hanging on on for that because that's a that's information that we really need. No totally. And that's a topic of interest in mind as well. I think you're just speaking any directly for a second.

I used to eat a ton of protein. I mean, coming from traditional bro, dieting bodybuilding background, you know, I would be eating 300-350, sometimes 400 grams of protein and a lot of people in the keto sphere, they kind of demonized protein and eat far too little. And that is not good either. I feel like most of the population probably under eats protein, however, within the athlete realm.

I do believe there is this massive overconsumption of protein and me personally, since going keto, I've you know, increase my dietary fat Take significantly, but I've moderated my protein intake. I don't think there's any inherent benefit to over consuming protein. Your body can only assimilate so much protein anyway, so once you cross that threshold, there is no advantage to it.

So finally what advantage? And that's the issue there might be a disadvantage to protein loading exam that would be mediated through hyperinsulinemia. Yeah. So I think you know especially if your key to adapted knowing that you can down regulate that protein. I mean you don't under consume, but if you're getting adequate Eat protein and you're able to continually build muscle and recover, then there's no need to have three times your body weight in protein.

Right. And that's the intellectual argument. But the knowledge is going to come from what your biochemical metrics are. And as you said, everybody's going to slightly different threshold and we tend to underestimate how much protein we eat when we believe protein is important. You're right. We protein should come along for the ride. When you eat meat and and got a nature is taken care of the ratio pretty darn.

Well yeah. So the fact does in a ketogenic diet a well-formulated, ketogenic diet affect does balance out the protein. But a lot of guys still use protein supplements and protein by itself.

And I I'm just interested to know because Tim noakes and I were talking about this, a few weeks ago, a couple of months ago, where a lot of highly trained athletes, especially triathletes, the finding them floating in the water after the swim their dead and at it's become a big concern, not just that but athletes in the prime of their existence dropping dead when they shouldn't be. And there are certain metrics that we're looking at, we know that.

That carbohydrates in your vascular, blood vessel cells and can cause heart attacks and strokes which which are in the fifties and athletes in the not in their 50 and 60 Fifth and six decades. That's what happens to a lot of

those. But for guys, like yourself, I'd love to know what their insulin is because insulin is then triaging the protein toward sugar not toward the tissues, like you wanted to be and and that may make you hyperglycemic and that may be a concern in some of these These guys training and may affect them down the road in terms of their health after they when they get a little bit older.

So I it's just a number that I would love to know so that I can increase my concern level or decrease my concern level. Well I will certainly send you my blood work where can people reach out and get in touch with you and inquire upon this further? Yeah. So the easiest way to get, hold of me. I'm on YouTube. My channel is called addiction dark, and I'd love people to subscribe. You can get me through there or through Facebook.

Facebook or Instagram carbon diction dock, on Facebook, Robert, Stivers accommodation, documentary on competition dock on Instagram and you can message me directly on either of those or you can text me 256 1610 by you know what, five six, one, six, two, seven four, one zero seven and if you call or text that number, I can get you a script to get your see peptide.

Check and some of that blood work and I do that for patients all over the country because those are important starting metrics whether you starting a ketogenic diet or whether you want to know what effect your protein is having awesome. Well, I will definitely link at that. I'll put that in the show notes that people can easily find find you, getting getting contact and get these metrics to. Because I think that is definitely valuable information.

I feel like not enough people in the athletes Vector specifically. They just assume that they've got perfect health and they don't really Dive deep. You know, people have outward issues that are very visible. It's obvious that they need to, you know, dive deeper and see what's going on. But I think a lot of athletes kind of hide behind this veil of just how they look and feel. They don't think anything's internally wrong but everybody needs to kind of know what these metrics are.

Exactly right. Exactly, right. And you know, we just discovering this realm, we now have the carbohydrate side of things, pretty well worked out but we really haven't worked out what the appropriate. Conditions of eating protein and fat are and more is not always better. Totally agree. Well dr. Robert Stivers. I cannot thank you enough for your time. I've learned a ton and I really, really do appreciate the conversation because I think we see eye to eye on most things.

Thank you very much and you know, you and I do this because we care not because of any other reason. And if anybody needs additional help or additional Deep dive, please contact me. Absolutely. Well, thank you again.