#5 This week my special guest is Chris Kresser. Chris has been studying, practicing, and teaching alternative medicine for more than fifteen years.
Subscribe On:
About Chris: He is a globally recognized leader in the fields of ancestral health, Paleo nutrition, and functional and integrative medicine. He is the creator of ChrisKresser.com, one of the top 25 natural health sites in the world, and the author of the New York Times best seller, Your Personal Paleo Code (published in paperback in December 2014 as The Paleo Cure).
He has also released a new book, Unconventional Medicine.
We discuss everything from his new book, how he structures his hectic work load and staying sane, the effects our emotions has on the body and how meditation has impacted his life.
►Audio Version:
Links & Resources For Chris Kresser:
unconventionalmedicinebook.com
chriskresser.com
TRANSCRIPT
Guy: Hi, I’m Guy Lawrence and you are listening to the Guy Lawrence podcast. If you’re enjoying this content and you want to find out more and join me and come further down the rabbit hole, make sure you head back to the guylawrence.com.au. Awesome guys. Enjoy the show!
Guy: Hi, I’m Guy Lawrence and you are listening to the Guy Lawrence podcast. If you’re enjoying this content and you want to find out more and join me and come further down the rabbit hole, make sure you head back to the guylawrence.com.au. Awesome guys. Enjoy the show.
Guy: Chris. Welcome to the show!
Chris: Guy. Pleasure to be with you. Thanks for having me.
Guy: You’re welcome, mate. You’re welcome. I’ve got to ask you mate, before we start anything, like I just realized you’ve got a new book coming out as well. And you’ve got your practice. You got your teaching, you’ve got your podcast. How would you do it all, mate? It’s not like a magic formula. You’re not telling me about,
Chris: Uh, I am, uh, I don’t um, well, I don’t use social media to that. That’s one, uh, productivity tip that I’m always telling people about nobody listens. Um, I saw, you know, very early on, I said, this is, this is like, could be kryptonite. You know, it could be just a huge, huge time suck. And um, so that’s one tip actually. Um, another is that I’m kind of a productivity geek. So, you know, I spent, I’ve spent a lot of time over many, many years studying different productivity strategies and kind of developing my own system, um, that I stick to pretty religiously. Um, so if you look at my calendar and my days you’ll see that they’re pretty, uh, you know, pretty well planned out and pretty structured, including time for rest and, you know, exercise and meditation practice and, you know, time with my family. And, um, I do that. So I don’t have, because I understand the concept of decision fatigue, which we have a limited ability to use our cognitive, um, function for, to make decisions. And if, especially by the end of the day, if we have to make decisions, we get tired and we then make the wrong decisions. So by planning in advance, all I really have to do is look and see what I’m supposed to be doing, and then just do it exactly.
Guy: It’s interesting you say that because we don’t even schedule in the good times either quite often, do we just get caught in the hamster wheel and we just keep pushing, pushing, and then the next thing you know, we’ve done 12, 14 hours and the day’s gone.
Chris: Absolutely. And I, I had a lot of resistance early on to that. I was, you know, my, I was like, ah, I shouldn’t have to schedule in having fun. That’s ridiculous. You know, it should be more spontaneous. I shouldn’t have to schedule an exercise or time with my partner or time with my daughter. But the reality is if I want to be as productive as I would like to be, and I have as many things going on as I do. And those things are as important to me are more important to me than everything else that I’m doing, then I’d bet. Yes, I have to schedule them. And, um, you know, it also some stress, because I know that I’ve set the time aside for my daughter. We have, um, we call them my Friday adventures, our Friday adventures. So every Friday afternoon at two, um, or she has an early day at school, I pick her up and we go to a museum or we go to the beach or we, you know, we do something together. That’s just father, daughter time, you know, and I know I have that time set aside. It’s unassailable. My whole staff knows that not to bother trying to reach me on Friday afternoons. You know, I don’t schedule anything over that ever. And it’s just, you know, protected, sacred time so that I can, you know, and I know that no matter what else happens, we have that time. So it’s, I find it to be really powerful and a big stress reliever and it’s helped me accomplish what I have.
Guy: Totally, totally. You know, it’s interesting only yesterday, cause obviously I’ve stepped down from 180 and I’m starting a new business on, you know, there’s a part of me. That’s like, go, go, go, go, go. And then still trying to find the balance at the same time. And I found myself yesterday, almost four hours in without taking a break, having a laptop. And I was like, this is ridiculous. And I had the beach and 30 degrees outside. That was about 50 meters from me. And yeah, cool. And so I just stopped forced myself. And then all of a sudden I could feel the recharge. And then I was back in like, how much, how much do you think that affects our overall health? Cause I’m curious because you know, you, you know, your message was functional. Medicine is phenomenal, mate, and the work you’re putting out there. And I do wonder about that component of how much is it overlooked or was it factored in?
Chris: Well, I think it’s huge. I mean that is technically a part of functional medicine, but not, not all functional medicine practitioners focus on that stuff and not, you know, uh, not all people certainly are focusing on that stuff. I mean, look, I actually think I’ve been writing a lot lately about technology addiction and I think it’s one of the most important determinants of our health in the modern age. And yet it’s the one that is, is, um, least often recognized, you know, the statistics in the US and I’m sure there’s similar in Australia about how much people are using smartphones and other electronic media is absolutely insane. I just read, uh, the average American now uses interacts with a screen for over 10 hours a day. Um, that, I mean, and I’m talking about any, you know, so your computer, your smartphone, your iPad, TV, any screen.
Chris: And so that’s just the average. So, you know, that’s, that includes, you know, people who do manual labor who are probably hardly interacting with the screen at all, or bringing that way down that tells us that there are other people who are spending 18 hours a day in front of a screen. And that’s so far outside, what’s evolutionarily normal for us as human beings that, um, it’s almost impossible to determine what the health impacts of that are, but from what we do know already, uh, we know that increase in that, that amount of time, you know, that amount of time associated with screen use, um, causes all kinds of health effects from not just like things like eyestrain, but actually, uh, depression, anxiety, um, changes to gut health. And, you know, just physical wellbeing increases in chronic disease. And this stuff is it’s pretty intense, man.
Chris: You know, these apps are designed to be addictive. Uh, our brains are relatively helpless in the face of these kinds of influences. They activate the same dopamine reward system, that drugs and other addictive activities like gambling do. And I think a lot of people are just, you know, whereas if you see somebody and they’re totally addicted to drugs or alcohol, that’s, that’s not socially acceptable and it’s on people’s radar. Whereas with technology addiction, I think a lot of people are addicted and don’t even actually realize that they are and how it’s impacting their life and their relationships.
Guy: Totally. You only have to make a mental note to how many times you check your phone the day. I mean, I mean, I’ve certainly changed a lot of that since I got into, I guess, internet marketing and from the house perspective, but you know, it was so easy to just check your email first thing in the morning, like before you get going and you got an email coming in that you didn’t want to read, like the shoots you off completely in a different direction. Yeah. It’s are, you know, people who are, uh, the other day I was, um, you know, my wife and I were on a walk and, uh, we haven’t read fortunate enough to live next to a regional park, beautiful hiking trails, everything we passed about four or five people on the trail that were just like this, you know, looking at their phone, going like that. I’m like, you gotta be kidding me. We’re in it. Like a regional park is beautiful Redwood trees. You know, the sun is shiny and they’re just like this on the path. I mean, it’s, that’s not gonna have the same restorative effect that just walking and just enjoying the moment
Chris: You’re feeling the sun on your skin. And you know, when we go to the beach, I’m sure you see that where you are now that people are sitting there on their phone the whole time at the beach. It’s, it’s just, it’s a big problem.
Guy: Yeah. It blows me away. It was quite like this. I actually flew to Melbourne a couple of weeks back cause I was doing a workshop down there. Um, how the workshop, but we all caught up my mates afterwards. There was about 10 of us. And the first thing we did is what we all had to put our mobile phones in the middle of the table face down. And it was like the first person that if it rings, it picks it up, but you’re buying the bill, you know, good one. That’s a good strategy. Yeah. And you said, it’s why you see like a, I don’t know about down there, but um, here, their digital detox
Chris: Retreats have become quite popular. Um, which is like you, you, uh, the, the explicit purpose of the retreat is to help people to decouple from their electronic devices. So you actually have to check your phone in with the retreat organizers, when you get there, then they like lock it up and put it in the safe so that you’re not even tempted to use it. They shut down wifi. You know how wifi is usually advertised as a benefit. You know, they actually shut it down on the property so that you can’t like have a second device that you didn’t check in and go off and sneak and check your email or something. And people are paying money for these retreats, which I think is smart on their part. They recognize that they have such a problem and they can’t do it on their own. So they, they actually enlist the support of an accountability partner, the organizer of the retreat, and also in community, you know, doing it with other people who are trying to do the same thing.
Chris: And, um, the feedback that that people give at the end of these retreats is pretty amazing. You know, they haven’t done that. They haven’t had a period of a week with no interaction with their phone or email or social media for, for years. So it’s life changing. It’s almost like a persona, but absolutely. You know, I do these digital, I’ve been doing these digital detoxes for several years now. I do probably two or three 10 day periods a year. And I, I look forward to them and to tell you the truth, the hardest part for me is coming back. It’s not, yeah, it’s not unplugging. It’s like at the end of that 10 day period, I don’t want to turn my phone back on. I don’t want to open up my email. I don’t want to come back to that, you know, to the way of life.
Chris: Um, and, and each time that I do come back, I do it a little bit differently. Um, like last few times, for example. Yeah. When I first started doing that, I would experience this dread of coming back to hundreds of emails, you know, that had piled up when I was gone. And so I can’t take credit for this idea. I actually stole it from somebody else. But I, at one time I emailed somebody and at the bottom it said, you know, I’m away. Um, I’m off, you know, on retreat or something like that. And I’m not, I’m not even gonna bother to check my messages when I get back. Cause there’s going to be so many of them. So if you have to contact me, just do it, you know, send another email when I get back, cause I’m gonna delete everything. And I was like, that’s the way to do it.
Chris: That is gold. Yeah. Now I’ve been doing that. And I just, you know, on a vacation, I say, I’m on, I’m on vacation. Life’s too short. I’m not going to check emails when I get back. If it’s really urgent, here’s my assistance, you know, information. And if you really need to contact me, try again in 10 days, you know, and if it’s that important, people will email me again in 10 days. And so now when I come home, I, I, I have this, I’ve actually set my email client to delete any email comes in during that time so that I’m not even tempted to like go back. And
Guy: That’s amazing, mate. It’s funny you say that because I literally just changed contracts on my phone and I had to set up a new voicemail and my voicemail literally said, Hey, I’m not here. Hopefully my phone is turned off and I’m in nature somewhere. Just try call me back in a few days, time. There’s literally like something like that right now, Chris, you got, you got a new book, come out. Let’s just come up with a little Christmas unconventional medicine. And I was, I was plugging through the stats last night that you had on there. And it blew my mind and I’m thinking it’s similar to Australia. It has to be, you know, but I I’ve just pulled a couple out, made one in two Americans has a chronic disease. One in four has multiple chronic diseases that along blew my mind. Like interestingly enough, we’re in the world of where information is readily readily available. It’s almost like we almost know what to do now to a degree, even though it’s forever evolving. Yeah. But it doesn’t seem to be working.
Chris: No, that’s good. Cause the problem is an information. I mean, if anything, we have too much information, I would say the problem most people are suffering from is not lack of information, but information overload, right. You know, just being overwhelmed with too much information and not having the ability to process it. Um, the problem is behavior. It’s not, it’s not lack of information. So it’s most people making the wrong choices about diet lifestyle, most of the time and, and a very large percentage of our behavior. Some say up to 95% of our behavior is driven not by conscious decisions that we make, but by habit and a lot of habits are driven by our limbic system and our lizard brain, if you will. So, you know, basically hardwired evolutionary or biology, biological mechanisms that drive our behavior. And so if one of the arguments of, of my, in, in my book was that if we want to really reverse the chronic disease epidemic, we have to change behavior.
Chris: And if we have, if we want to change behavior, we have to get smarter about how we do that. It’s not just telling people what to do that doesn’t, uh, that’s not going to cut it. It never has cut it. You know, we all know that. I mean, if I tell you what to do, you’re, you know, like most people you’re not going to do it. Most of us, don’t like to be told what to do, even if it’s the right information we’re going to naturally resist it. That’s just a human thing, you know, for better, for worse. Like, um, that’s how it goes. And, uh, instead we need to discover our own motivation for change and even often come up with our own strategies for change. And so, um, you know, health coaching be a big part of that. I write about that in my book, how I think that’s going to be a big part of the future of medicine.
Chris: Um, because it’s time for us to wake up and realize that just telling people that you last and exercise more is, is, you know, no matter how many times we say that it’s not gonna not gonna make a difference. Yeah, totally man, to get clear as well. What’s the difference between, I’m just thinking of everyone listening to this between functional medicine and almost a traditional conventional health care. Yeah. There are a lot of differences, but I think what it really boils down to is, um, conventional medicine is mostly focused on managing disease after it’s occurred, usually suppressing symptoms with drugs or, or surgery and functional medicine is oriented around addressing, uh, identifying the underlying cause of, of disease. And then addressing that. So, I mean, a couple of simple analogies would be, if you have a rock in your shoe and it’s making your foot hurt and you go to a conventional doctor, they’re often going to give you some ibuprofen or something for the pain and yeah.
Chris: That’ll help. Right. You know, your, your foot will hurt less for sure. But if you go to a functional medicine doctor, they’re going to say, Hmm, I wonder why your foot hurts. Let’s take off your shoe and they take off your shoe and, Oh, there’s a rock here. Okay. Let’s dump that rock out. And you know, your foot is going to feel a lot better now and guess what? We didn’t have to use any drugs to, to do that. So, um, that’s probably the simplest way of describing the difference.
Guy: Yeah. Fair enough. And another question that popped in there as well, that cricket, when you go on about the stats was why do you think we wait until the pain is great enough before we then go and do you know, it’s almost like we wake up when they go, you know, we don’t get fat overnight. We don’t get sick overnight. Right. But we generally wait until it disrupts. Yeah. And then all of a sudden that little can feel like Everest sometimes.
Chris: Well, yeah, there, there are some, I think there are different explanations for that. Um, from, from a kind of evolutionary biology or, you know, uh, um, evolutionary perspective in general, I think humans are really quite wired to detect short term threats. You know, we see basically to the horizon, we’re scanning our environment. If you think of us in a natural environment, looking for predators, you know, assessing threats and we’re, we’re not as, as well, a wired to deal with longer term challenges like, you know, uh, obesity, for example, or, you know, gradually gaining weight that over 20 or 30 years time starts to increase our risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, et cetera, because those were, you know, again from an evolutionary perspective, those, those weren’t the primary threats to our health, the primary threats to our health, we’re getting eaten by a lion, starving, a war, a war war warfare with local, uh, um, other groups, tribes, uh, exposure to the elements, you know, uh, dealing with famine.
Chris: Those were more short term, acute challenges. And we were more, I think the, the, um, mechanisms that were selected for, you know, with each generation were ones that were more better at dealing with those kinds of challenges. So I think from like a, a 30,000 foot view where we have, we’re not Mmm. Set up for dealing with those longer term challenges as well from a more kind of recent perspective. I think our paradigm for how we look at health and wellness, um, is unfortunately oriented again around managing problems after they occur rather than preventing them. And this, it hasn’t always been this way. So that, um, the earliest medical texts that was ever discovered is called the [inaudible] gene, which is, um, a book that it came out of China 2,500 years ago. And in that book, there’s a, there’s a quote that I’m going to roughly paraphrase.
Chris: It goes the wise physician treats disease before it occurs. So they knew even back then that preventing a disease is way easier than, than treating one. Uh, Ben Franklin in the U S you know, one of the founding fathers said an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So we have these sayings in our language there in our medical texts that go way back. But in the last hundred years, the focus of, of medicine has been overwhelmingly on addressing acute problems like in the year 1900 in the U S the top three causes of death. And I would venture to say, it was the same in Australia, were acute infectious diseases, typhoid, tuberculosis, and Anya. And the reason that other people would see the doctor at that time were also two problems like a broken bone. And, you know, they were working in a factory and they broke their bone, or they had a gallbladder attack or an appendicitis or something like that.
Chris: And they would go to the doctor. It was just one, one problem, one doctor, one treatment, they were done. You know, it didn’t always work if you had a diet of those infections, especially before antibiotics, but it was pretty straight forward, you know, not very complex. Now you fast forward to today when, um, the average person has not even just one disease, but multiple chronic diseases, they might be seeing multiple doctors and these problems, chronic diseases, unlike those acute challenges are complex and difficult to manage. And they often last for a lifetime. So it’s a, it’s a totally different set of needs. And yet the, the paradigm that we’re using for that is one that emerged at a time when acute challenges were the major issues. So you can’t just take that paradigm and then drop it on top of the chronic disease environment that we live in and expect it to work.
Chris: It’s like using a hammer to screw and screws, you know, it’s it, doesn’t, it kind of works. I mean, if you bash it hard enough, go in there, but it’s not going to be very elegant and there’s going to be a lot of side effects. You know what I mean? Like a broken, a big hole in your wall.
Guy: Yeah, totally, totally. You know, and I had, um, a guy on the podcast the other day I was interviewing, and I think he’s actually done your functional medicine course, but they practiced on in Melbourne and they’re in the CBD. The thing that struck me when I asked him, because he’s in the firing line, he’s seen a lot of people every day. And he was saying about 80% of them are coming in stress, the eyeballs, but they don’t even, they’re not even aware, not that actually carrying that stress. It makes me think that a lot of people are not even aware that they might not be eating the right foods or like they’ve already told themselves, yeah, I’ve got this, but yet there’s still problems at the same time.
Chris: Yeah. I agree with that a hundred percent, I would even extend that and say, and this, this is a little bit depressing. Um, but it’s just what it’s reality. It’s, what’s what we’re up against. And I think it’s important for people to understand that. And we don’t, you know, we don’t sugar coat, this, the entire modern environment is, is actually antithetical to health. And so what I mean are the modern ultra processed, highly refined foods that are loaded with sugar and other anti-nutrients and toxins, and just, and not, um, it have enough of the nutrients that we really need. You got, you know, a third of American sleeping fewer than six hours a night now, which is totally, um, catastrophic.
Chris: You know, most people need seven to eight hours. Electronic media is interfering with sleep, um, in a way that has never happened before historically artificial light exposure, artificial light at night makes it very difficult for people to sleep. You’ve got, um, an epidemic of physical inactivity that’s caused in part by people sitting in chairs and working at desks all day inside of a room staring at a two dimensional computer screen. They’re not exposed to sunlight, which is, you know, for the vast majority of our evolutionary history, was it up until only about 50 to 75 years ago? It was normal for us. You’ve got, um, uh, a breakdown and social, uh, the social fabric, social connection, um, you know, humans lived in close knit, tribal social groups for most of our history. Now we, we typically live alone or in isolated, single family units. Um, there’s less time for leisure, less time for play less time for an actual embodied experience of pleasure.
Chris: I’m not talking about distraction, like going to the movies or scrolling through a social media feed. I’m talking about actual embodied experience of pleasure, um, that has become increasingly rare in our culture. And then you, you have unrelenting stress for many people that is in part caused by just the accelerating pace of life, the access to even more information that our brains don’t really know how to process technology addiction. Like I talked about that means that no matter where you go, you’re always going to, you’re carrying an interruption device with you. You know, you’re always at risk of being interrupted if you have your notifications turned on. So, I mean, one way to look at it is it’s a miracle that we’re even still here. I mean, like it’s facing all of those challenges. It’s a miracle that it’s only one and two Americans that have chronic disease.
Chris: And not everybody. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s, so that’s what we’re up against and it makes it even more important to understand those challenges and then to rearrange our lifestyle. So not yet. I mean, we’re not going to be able to, I’m not talking about like, going back to living in a cave, I’m talking about what are the changes that we can make on a day to day basis that can mitigate some of those impacts. Yeah. Yeah. We can’t escape it a hundred percent and we don’t need to, we just need to, you know, if we get 80% of the way there, you know, the 80, 20 rule we’re going to, we’re going to get most of the benefit.
Guy: Yeah. We’re gonna do all right. It’s it is amazing. Like, cause you know, I’m in a bit of a bubble, if you like, you know, I kind of worked for myself, um, um, being engrossed in these conversations for the last five years, Chris and the daily, I still struggle and have to tackle things and make changes and I’m fully aware of it, you know? So I do think about the people that I’m, uh, not in this, you know, unique position, which can be difficult. I, you familiar with, um, the blue zones, the done button.
Chris: I am.
Guy: Have you looked at that much?
Chris: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s some interesting, the problem with that kind of research is it can be, it can be too easy to extract causal relationships when we’re, when you’re just looking at correlations and associations. But I think the trends, there are very interesting and very much consistent with what I’ve talked about for years, which is that, you know, those are people that are living more, uh, more closely in alignment with what the, the traditional human life would’ve looked like. And that includes not just diet, but also social connection, you know, physical activity, sleep, et cetera. Um, you know, another great, uh, sort of case study or microcosm was, um, some researchers recently went down to Bolivia to study the sea Manet people and their subsistence farming Hunter gatherer population that is largely retained their hunt, their, their, their traditional, um, they eat mostly meat, fish, fruits, and vegetables, nuts and seeds, and some starchy plants, you know, kind of a paleo type of diet.
Chris: Um, they’re very active. They walk about 17,000 steps a day on average, both the men and women. So that’s about eight miles punctuated by some brief periods of more intense physical activity. They live in a close knit, tribal social groups. Um, and despite the fact that they have very high rates of infection, parasite infections, cause they live by a river river, they do a lot of fishing in the river and the river’s got parasites. They are healthier than Western people, industry people living in the modern industrialized world by almost every measure. Their rate of, uh, atherosclerosis is about 80% lower than what the rate is in the U S a nine and 10. They actually did, um, CT scans and nine and 10 of the [inaudible] had completely clean arteries with no evidence of, of heart disease and the, and the average C Manet person between the ages of, uh, who is 80 years old, um, which kind of debunks the idea that Hunter gatherers don’t live long.
Chris: I’ll come back to that. The average 80 year old in the tsimané population had the same vascular age as an American in his mid fifties. Wow. So, you know, this is a people with almost no access to emergency medical care. No, they’re not taking multivitamin. They’re not, you know, um, doing the things that we’re doing and yet they’re remarkably and they have high rates of infection and yet they’re remarkably healthy. So that’s, that’s a very good example of how just living in a line, more in alignment with what our genes and our biology are hardwired for can make a huge impact on our health.
Guy: I truly believe that for sure. Um, another question that occurred to me about, uh, be interested to hear your intake and it is about emotions itself. Like how much of that do you think impacts the body as well?
Chris: I think it’s, um, it’s crucial. I mean, I, uh, I don’t know how far this might be a little bit of a rabbit hole, but, um, I think even talking about emotions is separate from physical or the body is, is a misnomer. Like it’s, it’s a, it’s an unfortunate consequence of our Western language and way of talking about it. Um, one of the first things that stood out to me when I studied Chinese medicine was that they didn’t really have a separate term for the mind and the body [inaudible]. They don’t look at it like that. They don’t even see the mind as being clear. They can’t tell you where the mind ends and the body begins or vice versa. Um, and they don’t also see emotions as being separate from physiological States. So if we think about it, it’s really impossible to experience an emotion without it, that being related to a physiological state, how do we even know we’re feeling an emotion, if not for the physiological cues and sensations that we have, you know, we say, I feel scared.
Chris: Well, how do we know? Okay, our heart is racing. We feel constricted in the chest and our muscles are tensing. And you know, that, that comes with all of these sensations that we identify as fear. Um, you know, on the other hand, happiness, you know, we might feel expansive. Our heart might also be beating fast, but in a different way. And we might feel lighter. And, um, and if you just extrapolate those sensations that are associated with those emotions over time, you could see that if someone was constantly experiencing fear and clenching their muscles and clenching their jaw and all of those sensations over time, that that would actually have a real physiological effect. And so it shouldn’t surprise us when we see studies that link chronic stress and anxiety with things like irritable bowel syndrome, because the gut is just one big bundle of nerves.
Chris: It’s a, it’s a, some people have referred to it as the second brain. It’s actually, uh, an uh, a part of our nervous system. So if we’re experiencing stress or anxiety all the time, that’s going to affect our gut. And it can cause symptoms like gas and bloating and diarrhea and constipation that have really not, it’s not necessarily anything to do with what we’re eating or, you know, even the status of our microbiome. It’s just, it’s a nervous system response. It’s a can of worms. And then even we haven’t even mentioned the gut today, like, right. Yeah. I mean, yeah. So again, I mean, it’s not, it’s not, it doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to be healthy in this current environment, but it means that you have to understand that just going with the flow and, you know, following along with the default way that things are happening in the culture is almost a guarantee that you won’t be healthy.
Chris: Yeah. That’s, that’s the way I could put it. It’s like the matrix, you know, if anyone’s seen the matrix movies, you know, you’ve got to wake up and become aware that you’re in this matrix and you’re like, you’ve got a choice, which pill do you take? Do you take the one where you just go back to sleep and you’re just kind of, you know, going on autopilot with the flow and, and, and then you get a bunch of chronic diseases and, you know, suffer over the last few decades of your life. Or do you kind of wake up out of the matrix, realize that you don’t have to just go with the flow, that you can make choices that will support your health and that you have, that you have to continually do that over and over again. Um, in order to stay healthy, that’s kind of the way I look at it.
Guy: This is spot on, you know, speaking for myself when I woke up from the matrix, if you like 10 years ago, you know, mentally, physically, emotionally, like every aspect has just improved out of sight. And, uh, and it’s so rewarding, even though it’s been a roller coaster, it’s hard work, you get frustrated, there’s more things to think about and so forth, but there’s definitely, I mean, you might not turn into a Kung Fu bad-ass like down at Reeves, but it’s certainly true that your ability, like it, it can feel like that you have an unfair advantage, you know, like that you’re, you’re operating in a, at a, at a level that’s way higher than what you previously were doing because of, um, you know, the, the clean nutrient dense antiinflammatory diet and getting plenty of sleep. And if you do all those things, you will have an unfair advantage because the vast majority of people are not doing those things.
Guy: Yeah. Yeah, mate. Um, another question I wanted to ask you as well was, cause I know you’ve got a regular meditation practice, is that it’s other daily practice for you seven days a week, or is it,
Chris: um, you know, at times in my life it has been rigidly seven days a week, rain or shine, you know, no matter what is happening, um, having a kid can tend to throw a wrench in that. Um, because frankly, you know, I mean there were a few things ever in my life that have been as important to me as maintaining my, my meditation practice, um, because that supports everything else that I do that I feel passionate about. You know, obviously there are lots of things in the world that are more important than my meditation practice. My meditation practice helps me to contribute to those things. And I just know it’s been one of those non-negotiable things.
Chris: Um, when my daughter came along, it became very clear to me that that was, you know, there was nothing more important than having time to spend with her. So if, if it comes to choosing between spending time with her or choosing my meditation practice in a given day, um, and I usually don’t have to make that choice. I’ve set up my day so that I have time for both, but if it does come to that, I choose time with my daughter. Um, so, you know, I would say these days, it’s probably six, six days a week on average, um, some seven, sometimes four or five. Uh, you know, if I’m traveling, I’ll often, here’s a little tip. Um, I always meditate between the time that I get settled on the plane and, you know, people are all sitting next to me, so I’m not getting up anymore.
Chris: And when you, uh, they turn the seatbelt sign off. So that’s usually about a half hour. Um, and that’s a great time where you’re not supposed to be using any devices anyways. And, you know, I can just close my eyes and do my meditation practice. So, and it, you know, if I find out I have a busy schedule on the other end, I get off the plane. I know I at least have time to do that. Um, sometimes I’ll do that on the way down when I, when I’m landing as well. Um, so yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s something that I’ve been doing. It’s now I started when I was 17. I’m 43 now. So 26 years, uh, it’s hard, hard to imagine life without it, your life, without it being where I am without that practice,
Guy: I’ve got to ask you Chris, because meditation was like a foreign language to me for a long time. Right. I’m, I’m a devote meditator now. Like, you know, I’ve practiced daily, most days. I don’t have a child yet, for sure. That’s not far away, but, um, what would you say to people listen to this that don’t meditate. If you could summarize, I guess the impact is hard on you by, by having that daily practice for that long.
Chris: Yeah, I think meditation, um, it gets, uh, wrapped up in the whole religious discussion because meditation has been a part of some religions. And, um, you know, I’ve heard from some people who are Christian, for example, who don’t, um, want to meditate or try meditation because they believe that it’s not consistent with their faith and they choose prayer instead. And, uh, you know, I think all of that’s valid and they’re there. I don’t, I respect everybody’s, um, choices around their faith and their, their, um, you know, relationship with it.
Chris: My understanding of meditation is, is not through a religious lens or religious context. It’s actually just a practice of cultivating awareness. That’s the simplest way that I can describe it. So, um, you learn to become aware of your own thoughts and feelings and sensations, and also of what is happening around you. And you learn to become aware of those in such a way that they are not in control of you anymore. Um, that you what, what is some called sometimes called disidentify with them. You learn to watch your thoughts and feelings and sensations as if they’re clouds passing through the sky. Um, and that enables you to then make a different choice about how you respond to those thoughts and feelings and sensations. And so it starts to open up a lot of different possibilities in terms of how we relate to ourselves and how we relate to the world around us and other people around us.
Chris: And, uh, I always say that, um, awareness is the precondition for change. You cannot change any habit or any behavior if you don’t, if you don’t first have an awareness of how you’re currently behaving what your current habits are and why, why you engage in those behaviors, if you can’t identify the thought, the feeling the, the, um, the, the whole belief systems that lead to your actions, then you have no hope of changing them. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Well put my, yeah. Being the observer, it’s, it’s amazing. And, um, I found just, just that awareness alone through my day, as over the years, you cultivate, it just kind of creeps up on you, you know, and then you start to make better choices. Everything’s more conscious, you know, it makes absolutely. Yeah. And there are lots of, I call side effects of meditation that are positive side effects, like increased mental clarity and, you know, deeper relaxation and better sleep and, you know, um, more ability to focus.
Chris: But I, I feel like it’s important to know that that’s not the purpose of meditation. Those are, those are great side benefits of meditation, but the purpose is really to cultivate the witness, as you said, or, and to, to increase our awareness, um, of how, of how we relate to ourselves in the world around us. And if we can all increase our awareness in that way, the world would be a much different place.
Guy: Yeah. Yeah. Love it. Love it. But I’m aware of the time when, um, I want to change gears a little bit and ask you a few questions. I’ll ask everyone on the show. And, um, the first one is what’s one of your, I guess, low points in life that you’ve had, but later in life turned into be a blessing.
Chris: Oh yeah. That’s, that’s easy. Um, so, uh, let’s see, in 1998, I came not too far from, from you guys. So it was an Indonesia on, on symbolic, um, surfing at Lakey peak, which is, uh, any of your listeners are surfers. So they’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. Um, and I got really sick with, uh, you know, intense tropical illness, parasites, and dysentery, and that actually turned into a decade long journey back to health, which became the impetus for moving in this direction. At that time, I was not a healthcare practitioner. I wasn’t even considering being a healthcare practitioner. Um, and you know, life has a way of, uh, presenting you with new opportunities and that presentation is not always easy and smooth and friendly or what you were planning on at all. And so I, I, you know, through that experience, which really, um, brought me to my knees and was, uh, the most challenging, uh, thing that I ever have gone through in my life, that then became the seed of everything that I am doing now, the work that I’m doing now.
Chris: So, um, uh, yeah, at least 10 years, and, you know, to a certain extent, I’m still dealing with some of the repercussions of that and always will, um, because not all, not all problems are 100% solvable. Um, but even that continues to be informed my work and, you know, my research and how I, how I relate to my patients. Um, many of whom are dealing with similar struggles. Um, so I, I think it’s something that keeps me honest and has always, you know, um, helps me to, to know where to go next. Yeah. Fair enough. Do you have a, do you ever think about what you would be doing if you never go to, I’m not sure I’d still be alive right now, to be honest, I think in, in many ways this, um, it just, it was like the cosmic two by four, you know, it, it really, I don’t know where I’d be, but I think I was, um, on a, uh, a pretty, um, yeah, I think this was a way of grounding me and keeping me connected to the earth, myself reality.
Chris: Like I had a, um, a way of just kind of spinning out of control. Um, not, not in terms of drugs or alcohol, but like the, the level you were saying, like, you, you just got so immersed in what you were doing, you know, five hours later, you look up and you’re like, Oh, I haven’t taken a break. I mean, I, I could do that for five days. And, you know, at that point, and, um, so this was like a, almost like a break breaking is like I had a car with, I was at a car with no brakes. That was my kind of default operating system. And this experience was like installing the brakes.
Guy: Yeah. Fair enough. Do you still surf?
Chris: I do actually about to head down to Baja, todos Santos area to do some more, do some surfing in a few, few weeks, a few few days here.
Guy: Amazing, amazing. Another question, mate, if you could have dinner with anyone tonight in any timeframe time, you know, past present, whatever, who would it be and why?
Chris: That’s a tough one? Um, you know, I would say the Buddha would probably be pretty high on my list. Um, I think that would be a pretty fascinating conversation and I’m just so curious since he was a real historical figure, um, what he was like, and for that matter, any religious figure, you know, Jesus Muhammad, um, those people, those people obviously had some kind of, you know, extremely penetrating insight into the human condition that, that was, um, that, you know, far surpassed what other people in history have had access to. And I’m just, I’m really curious to see what that would’ve looked like and felt like in an, in the embodied, in an embodied person. Yeah. So, um, that, you know, one of, one of those figures would probably probably be high, but.
Guy: you’re the second person to say, put it on the podcast. Yeah. Um, the other class question, what’s the one thing about yourself most people wouldn’t know?
Chris: Um, I’m not sure I’ve, I’ve speak pretty freely about my, you know, my, my path and my history, what I’ve been through. Um, I, for many years I was really into, um, dance, a form of dance called contact improvisation and, and other, other kinds of dance as well. And that’s how I met my wife and, um, and also, um, acting and improvisation. And, and it, you know, if that was kind of the path that I was on, um, you know, at an earlier time in my life and, uh, prior to all of this stuff happening and changing and deciding to go back into healthcare, um, um, I may have ended up pursuing acting and improvisation and instead of, or something in that the theater arts, um, rather than being a healthcare practitioner, so.
Guy: amazing, very different careers, very different, very different skill set.
Guy: So great skill sets may tend. Um, is there anything else you’d like to leave with all this semester ponder on with everything we’ve kind of covered?
Chris: Um, just that even though the deck is kind of stacked against us as we spent a lot of time talking about that, um, that needn’t be a, uh, uh, a reason to, to not do anything it’d be discouraged. I think there is a real risk of that. Just be like, Oh man, it’s, you know, it’s hopeless. It’s just so many environmental toxins and diet and, you know, technology and all this stuff. Why, why even bother the, the thing, the good news is that, um, and kind of the silver lining is that we now know that 85% of the risk of chronic diseases is environmental, not genetic. Um, and that, you know, even 30 years ago, I think doctors and researchers thought that genes played a much bigger role in disease.
Chris: So the fact that our modern environment really makes it hard for us is actually good news, too, because if we understand that most diseases caused by environmental factors, we actually have a chance to do something about it. If it was mostly genetic, we’d be screwed. You know, we would just have to wait around for them, you know, doctors and researchers develop therapies and that’s it, you know, which is really disempowering, but when we can do something about it and it can have a big impact, then, um, we’re, we’re, we’re getting somewhere and, and it doesn’t have to be huge changes. Just a series of small changes often has the biggest impact. And that’s, I guess the thought that I want to leave people with you don’t have to do these heroic, dramatic interventions, just start small, start with one area of your life, whether it’s starting a meditation practice or getting an hour more of sleep or removing, you know, industrial seed oils and flour and sugar from your diet, just make one small change. You start to feel the benefits of that. And then you make another small change and then you start to feel the benefits of that. And then, you know, within a year or two’s time, you’d be in a totally different place.
Guy: Yeah.
Guy: I love it. Give me, give him the power back to the person. Cause a lot of it’s preventable, you know, being able to take action. That’s a great, great way to end the podcast, Chris. Mate um, if they want to get your book, your new book on conventional medicine, um, or check out more of Chris Kresser, where’s the best place to send them for that?
Chris: Um, Amazon, um, has my book everywhere and, uh, the electronic version will be a little easier to get in Australia or a little faster, at least cause I, I self published this one. So we don’t have as broad of an international distribution network that we, then we typically have, um, unconventional medicine, book.com. You can download the first three chapters for free to just check it out and see if it’s something you’d be interested in. And then, uh, ChrisKresser.com is my main website and then KresserInstitute.com for anyone who’s interested in training and the new approach that we’ve been talking about today.
Guy: Beautiful, beautiful, Chris. I just want to acknowledge everything you do, mate. And you know, you’re making a huge impact on the world and the work you put out there. You’ve certainly inspired me over the years. And um, thank you for coming on today. I have no doubt. Everyone got a lot out of that.
Chris: Well, thank you Guy. And good luck with your new endeavor.
Guy: Yeah. Thanks Chris. Appreciate it mate. Cheers.