Written by Christopher Kelly
Sept. 18, 2014
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Chris: Hello. Welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive podcast. I'm joined today by author, blogger, and podcast host Evan Brand. Evan is currently studying to become a nutritional therapy practitioner through the Nutritional Therapy Association. You can find him over at notjustPaleo.com.
Hi, Evan. Thanks for joining me today.
Evan: Hey. Thank you, Chris. I'm happy to be with you.
Chris: I think we might win an award here for having the most diversity in podcasting accents. What do you think?
Evan: I'd say so. I've had some pretty strong accents on my show, but it's definitely fun.
Chris: I'm wondering whether 50% of all of our listeners are not going to be able to hear like one of us.
Evan: Right.
Chris: Your story is not unlike my own. I think it's really interesting. Tell me what was going on for you. What were your main complaints?
Evan: Yes. I would say, well, we'd have to go back to 2009, I guess. That was kind of the big complaints. I was just a pretty depressed college kid, working my way through college, working a third shift job to pay for school. I was frustrated, I couldn't gain weight. I was in the gym eating what I thought were the right foods, exercising what I thought was the right way, and yet, I could not put on weight. I mean it was so frustrating. That was just one of the many side effects. And then I also had gut issues too and ended up going to the mainstream medical doctor to figure out what's going on, and then they basically said, "Oh, you have irritable bowel syndrome.
Chris: That's what I told you. You just told me what I told you.
Evan: Right. So then they say, "Well, here are three prescriptions you can take. You can take this muscle relaxer; you can take this antispasmodic, and this something else." I decided to take zero out of those three and start to work on changing and figuring out what is actually causing these issues. I didn't want a Band-Aid.
Chris: How did you know to do that? That I think is an interesting question in itself because some people, it doesn't even occur to them to even ask what could be the root cause underlying this condition. They would just take the prescription and really think anything more of it. I mean the doctor is such an authority figure you might not even question them. So how did you even know to think about that?
Evan: Right. You're actually the first guy to ever ask me, first person to ever to ask me that question. So that's awesome for you to pull that out.
To be honest, unfortunately, I've just had a general distrust of the mainstream, whether it's the mainstream news, whether it's the mainstream media in any forms, and that also applies to the mainstream medical industry. I've seen how my uncle got treated. He got in a car wreck when he was 22. He is now in his 40s. If he would have the proper care and the proper advice, he may have not been paralyzed. But now, he is paralyzed from the waist down due to just garbage medical care.
I mean some of it is inevitable because of nerve damage and all that. But long story short, just looking at him growing up and seeing what happened to him, it just made me not trust doctors. I'm sad to say that really. I know there are plenty of good doctors out there and I have friends that are doctors. But I realized that we're ultimately in charge of our own health and we have to start with our thoughts and then what we put in our mouth to actually create our basis of health, our baseline. So hopefully that answered your question.
Chris: Yes, it does, yeah. It's good that something good came off that.
I actually went in the other way, really having the utmost respect and trust for doctors. When I was about 17 I was in a motorcycle accident and I tore a carotid artery out of my neck which is a life-threatening injury. I was very lucky to survive it. The doctors did an incredible job on me. They basically took a vein out of my leg and grafted it into my neck to repair the damage. I suffered no ill effects from it whatsoever. Like two weeks I was out of the hospital as if nothing had ever happened. It was incredible.
So when I went to this sort of IBS type zone, it's kind of a very nonspecific condition in a way. I went into thinking "Oh, well, the doctor must be right. This is what I should do." It was only wife who is a food scientist who is like, "Yes, this is not right." When the doctor is not interested in what you're eating and you've got digestive symptoms, something is up with this.
Evan: Right. Yes. I went to the vet the other day. I had to take my wife's dog in there to get some -- I don't know what she was getting done. I can't remember now. But anyway, the first thing when you go in they ask what kind of food is she eating and what's her poop look like. I'm like "Damn. You want to be my doctor?"
Chris: That must be a good vet.
Evan: Right. It's like "Man, you can start taking care of me too if you want."
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Chris: So what else was going on at the time? One thing that I've noticed with all the people that I talk to now is there's always this period of increased stress that leads to a breaking point, a tipping point. And I think for me that was trying to be the fastest bike racer that I could. I've never really had good digestion and I was bit of a mess my whole life. But it was only once I added that additional stress that I really came apart.
So tell me what else was going on at that time in your life that you noticed that this is something you can no longer put up with?
Evan: Oh, man, I would say it was just a combination of growing up. When you're going from age 18, 19, 20, 21, that's a tough time anyway, just facing the world and starting to lose some of your naïve conceptions about the world and realizing that grownups are just grownup kids. That realization hit me pretty hard, and I think just the general outlook like, man, I really have to figure this thing out myself. There's not going to be people to pay my bills here forever. I really need to figure out life. I think just the general stress of that kind of triggered some of it.
And I've definitely had to be mindful of adding in stress reduction protocols. It will ruin your life. Stress and fear and stress-induced fear and that whole cyclical nature, it's sick. It's making us all sick. I think we really need to question how much our fear-based society is benefiting from it all.
Chris: Yes, absolutely. I've talked about this before, but there is an author, if you're listening to this for the first time, go and read Robert Sapolsky's book, "Why Zebras Don't get Ulcers," that catalogs all this stuff.
Yeah, just yesterday I stumbled across a paper that was quite recent. I think it was from February of this year. And it was the gold standard. It was a blinded double crossover trial with the washout periods where they looked at some middle-aged women and kind of tried to get a feel of their stress level. They, I think, answered a questionnaire and they cataloged all the different stresses they've been under the day before. And then they looked at a whole bunch of biomarkers, so insulin sensitivity, glucose tolerance, and inflammation maybe -- I forget all the biomarkers.
But what they showed was that stress actually reduced your ability to oxidize fat as fuel, and they calculated a weight gain of 11 pounds per year just by being under this increased period of stress. And this is a double blinded crossover trial, so this is like the gold standard as far as science is concerned. So no doubt it will definitely -- this is just one of the ways as well that stress will make you come undone.
Evan: Right, yeah. To add on top of that, you mentioned research studies. PubMed now is full of things talking about how basically most of your B vitamins are going to get depleted under times of stress. So it's not necessarily that the stress itself is what's making you sick, but stress is going to destroy your healthy gut flora. So then your B vitamins, those get thrown off. You're dumping magnesium. Your kidneys dump magnesium almost as if you're burning jet fuel along with your B vitamins.
And so then you start getting vitamin and mineral deficiency, so then you're exhausted due to these deficiencies, and then you get more problems because you don't have that. And then you start getting muscle cramps, and your exercise because you're depleting magnesium because you're stressed, and then you end up seven chapters down the road. And you really see how all these are linked.
I hate to talk about stress, so on the surface level, I really wanted to mention a couple of those deeper things of what's actually happening biologically because a lot of people mention stress and that doesn't mean something that's perceived in your head. It can be an external stressor that you aren't even aware of such as air pollution. So that's just something to mention.
Chris: Yes, absolutely. When you had all these problems going on, what was your diet like at that time?
Evan: It was very close to Paleo except I wasn't eating enough fat, and I was still eating gluten. So now occasionally I'll do some gluten-free brown rice noodles or some type of rice noodles if I'm going to do any type of more carbohydrate-fueled meal, I guess you would call it. But I wasn't eating bread, mostly just a lot of meats, green beans, peas, butter. I wasn't eating broccoli or any other, kale and spinach and stuff like that, so mostly just kind of the generic green foods that you eat as a kid and you just sort of grow up on. And then slowly, I just started adding in more fat, and once I pulled out the gluten, the stomach issues really started to get better.
Chris: So what prompted you? I know that can be a real leap of faith. Certainly it was for me. As an endurance athlete, while weight is so critical to performance, the idea of eating more butter was really quite horrifying to me at one stage.
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So what was it that made you make that leap of faith to add some more fat into your diet?
Evan: I found Mark's Daily Apple.
Chris: Yes, that's a great resource, fantastic.
Evan: Yes. I was talking to my friend at work at the time and he said, "Hey, have you ever heard this website Mark's Daily Apple?" I said, "No, I haven't." He showed me. This may have been 2009, I guess. He pulled it up and I started reading on there about just adding in I don't even know if it was coconut oil or butter or what it was, but I had this idea just to start adding in more fats. My workout started getting better. I felt less catabolic. I was recovering faster. I was "Man, there's something here."
Honestly, it's almost hard to remember after that what happened. Everything is almost a blur at this point. I know where I'm at now. It's hard to see the road looking back.
Chris: Mark Sisson is so good to the point that I find him almost slight annoying. He is completely perfect in every respect. It's not only is he incredibly knowledgeable, right? So he's technical too. He's a degree in biology. I think he's formally been in the UCI. It's the governing body of cycling [0:11:14] [Indiscernible]. So he really knows his stuff.
And then on top of that, he appears to be a wonderful writer and he is still ripped to his 60s, right? He still got this incredible six-pack. There's no fault in him and it's ridiculous to the point of being annoying.
Yes, it's a wonderful resource if anyone who is listening has not been over there. And see Mark's Daily Apple. There are so many great articles there. It was actually one of the resources that prompted me to head towards a more ketogenic approach. He has written quite a lot about high-fat, low-carb performance for athletes. It's definitely a fantastic resource.
So what happened then when you pulled out the gluten and added more fat? Was it like an overnight success story or did it take more time or other things?
Evan: I would say there was definitely a transition period. I mean my skin started changing, like my face and my nails started changing. I started feeling less irritable. Of course, everybody has their days, but working third shirt is not healthy regardless. You're not going to be optimal. I don't care how perfect you eat and manage your stress. I was still working third shift, so I was still not following evolution or pleasing my DNA in that sense.
Chris: There's always something like that, isn't it? You can never be perfect, I think. There's always some non-negotiable part of everybody's life.
Evan: Right. The thing is with that, you have to do the best you can. I've talked to Dr. Alan Christianson who would be a good guest for you show. He had some either friends or clients. I mentioned it on my show. He talked about how they had been living such a great life, these people, and then as soon as they get to age 59 or whatever it was they wanted to retire and go get their cabin off grid in the woods, the guy has a heart attack. It just makes you realize your mindset and all of these things that you carry throughout your life. That's what really matters.
You could still do the diet right, you could still do environment right, you could still do sleep right. But if your mind is a racing monkey all the time it's going to impair your results.
So back to my story, I guess talking about what changed, my mindset started to change. I just started to realize that I'm an organic creature, so I need to actually nourish myself. At the time, I was just so focused on gaining weight. I was just eating a ton of food. I was probably way overeating protein at this point. Of course, we all know overeating protein is not necessarily a good thing or necessary.
Chris: It's really common too. My wife is a food scientist and she has been reviewing lots of diaries and it's ubiquitous, overeating protein. I'm not sure where it comes from. Probably it's maybe the whey protein industry marketing or something telling athletes that they need to be loading up on protein. You can see it's simple enough to measure with a glucometer what happens to that excess protein. I think it's a really common problem.
Evan: Right. Yes. I mean hopefully we're starting to breach the bodybuilding community because that was kind of who I was part of at the time. I did end up putting on a good amount of weight. So senior year of high school I was 120-122 pounds, and within maybe three years I guess, I was up to 165.
Chris: Wow. That's an incredible difference. How much of that was muscle, do you know? I mean it must have been obvious from the appearance.
Evan: I have some pictures and I maintained I would say somewhere around 12%, 13% body fat the whole time.
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So I would say mostly muscle. I got some good pictures on my website. So I need to put up a before picture. I don't think I have skinny picture on there. But anyway, hopefully we can get into the bodybuilding community though and start to remind people that we need to kind of stray away from this mass protein consumption to more fat consumption because somehow, like you mentioned, the whey protein industry. That's got to be a huge thing that's tricking guys into thinking they just need to be shoving down protein, protein, protein.
But you never hear any mention of fat in the gym. You don't ever hear any guys in the locker room talking about fat. They're talking about protein shakes. Oh, how many grams are in that scoop? It's like you're missing the point, dudes.
Chris: Well, that's fantastic. So where are you at now in terms of like all the main complaints that you set to fix?
Evan: I'm much better. I would say this is probably one of the better times. So I still have occurrences. I just got married at this point. It has been a little bit over a month so the stress leading up to that was pretty crazy and I definitely had some IBS type issues going on before then, but that was a good stress of course but a good stress can still affect your gut and your body is still going to react like it's getting attacked basically. So I had some flare-ups and definitely some digestion issues going on.
Chris: Yeah, absolutely. I still find the same as well, and I'm not sure that everyone realizes that digestion is a long-term building project and when you're under stress it makes sense to put it off until tomorrow. But of course if there are too many days, if you're planning a wedding for six months, then obviously you cannot put digestion on hold for every day.
But I see the same thing. I did a cyclocross race, the first cyclocross race of the year on Sunday, and definitely my digestion falls apart a little bit after that and it's the stress response of racing that's doing that. No question.
Evan: Right. Yeah. That kind of set me off a little bit a couple of months ago, but I'm pretty much on track right now. I still occasionally will throw in some digestive enzymes if I'm eating in a situation where it's going to be really loud like really loud restaurants. I mean those can even be IBS triggers for people because of the excess noise. We're not really designed to eat in really noisy or fast-paced places. I don't recommend and I don't personally sit near televisions and stare at televisions while I'm eating at the restaurants, in the bars, where those are located because it's distracting your mind and your gut from digestion.
Chris: Yeah, I know. Isn't that the worst? I don't know. It has been a long time since I lived in UK, and I might find if I went back there now and spend some time in bars which I'm unlikely to do that the TVs are there now. So it's something you notice when you first come to this country like what the heck. There's even a TV in the bathroom. I mean it's like it's crazy where I notice people are just staring like zombies at the screen. I can't bear it.
And sometimes you have a really nice restaurant that they have obviously spent a lot of money on the interior design, and then I think they've just blown it by putting TVs everywhere.
Evan: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I'm the same way, man. If I go into a nice restaurant and then I see one TV and then they are always positioned perfectly in the corner of your eye, your peripheral vision, so even if you're not looking it's there. I'm like oh, my God, get it out of my eyes. But I don't have any scientific proof. I guarantee it's out there somewhere.
But here is the thing about science real quick and a little tangential thing. There is a quote and I don't know who it's by, but it's basically the idea that if we're so scared to go on a limb and say something or give our N=1 personal experience about something, if we're too scared to rely on that for recommendation, then we're not what's on the cutting edge of science. So the cutting edge is actually the edge above what science is actually proving.
So I guarantee I have talked about things and you're going to talk about things on your show that are in front of scientific discovery that are still true. So what my discovery is I would guess that you have impaired digestive enzyme production and bile secretion at a restaurant when you're in a loud, noisy area with music and/or TV.
Chris: Yeah. I would say yeah. I completely agree with that, absolutely.
Evan: It was a doctor who said that. I feel bad for not having the name, but I have been reading a lot of books. It may have been in the book called "Staying Healthy with Nutrition" which is almost a bible in itself, but I believe it was in that book and it really struck me because so many people are skeptical or they feel like they have to have a science article, and it makes you so much more professional if you have a study that says this.
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It's like, no doubt more sleep is going to make you feel better, more sleep is going to help you burn more fat, more sleep is going to help you recover and process memory and memory formation. It's like these are primal things that are built into the human. Yes, of course, artificial light is going to suppress your melatonin levels at night time. We've never had artificial light besides fire and the moonlight, so, of course. But then when the science comes out, it makes us feel better.
But in reality, there's so much common sense built in to this way of this lifestyle that you and I are all about, that we don't have to wait on the science to prove what we're figuring out. I mean look at my great grandparents who did not have electricity, they did not have the modern diseases of civilization that we're facing in epidemic proportions today.
Chris: Yeah, absolutely. I agree with you completely. I put my life in the hands of a chiropractor and he ran some tests on me. And when I tried to look for some studies that were proving as facts, some of the interventions that he was trying to make, I didn't really find too much stuff. But I went with it anyway and the results were fantastic.
And I realized now that he wasn't going on something that he'd seen on PubMed. He was just going on 22 years of previous experience and knowing what works, and I think that's valuable too. And again, the science sort of fills in what we already know later on, and that's exactly what's happening now. He is doing a study that's funded by the Mayo Clinic where is going to show that this method works. But you're right, the science is not always everything.
Evan: If chiropractors didn't have letters next to their name and a degree, and that they actually had to go through some of the stuff that doctors have to go through, people would probably look at chiropractors as some sort of like new age hippie body worker or something like that.
Chris: Yeah.
Evan: I mean they have magical powers almost in my experience. But yet, they have the credentials that people don't question their ability to help you. And I think society is kind of transitioning that way to where just because someone doesn't have a certain letter or credential next to their name, that discredits their ability to help people. I think that's really starting to shift.
Chris: Yeah, absolutely. And the opposite is true too that you sometimes see -- certainly I've had my fair share of experience with people who have a medical doctorate or something and they've been utterly, utterly useless in helping me. In some cases, they've been worse than that in that they've actually sent me down the road that could lead to harm, which seems like, for me, worse than saying, "I don't know."
Evan: Yeah, yeah. Speaking of that, that triggered my thought. I guess maybe about three or four months ago, I had mostly some upper stomach, upper GI area pain. It just felt kind of weird. I didn't know if it was a torn muscle or whatever because I've been doing some pretty intense exercise lately. It just felt kind of off. And I thought, oh, I'll go back to this lady. She was pretty good last time. I'll just go see what she says.
She says, "Oh, it's IBS related. I guarantee you have too much stomach acid. I'm going to recommend you some type of prescription acid blocker," which if anybody in your audience is not familiar with the idea already, the majority of people across the developed world have extremely low stomach acid, and that's what causing all of this acid reflux and undigested food, because there's not enough acid actually breakdown everything. And so she wanted me to basically do the opposite of what I needed, which is take more stomach acids. So after adding in a couple more days, I'd taken some time off my digestive enzymes that happen to have some betaine hydrochloric acid in them. Two days of adding those back in right before my meals and the pain was gone.
So that's just another idea. I mean if I would have taken or even took her advice for an over the counter acid blocker, I would have made my situation much worse.
Chris: It's crazy, isn't it? You would think that in that situation she should have just said, "I don't know, I don't know what to do, so don't do anything."
Evan: Right.
Chris: That makes more sense to me.
So I wanted to talk to you about your new guide that's up on the website, which I thought was really interesting. Sleep is a subject that fascinates me. Back when I was at my worst, I didn't sleep at all. I used to go to bed for six hours, but I didn't really sleep. Sometimes I would just sit on the couch all night. It was crazy. It was really bad.
And I went through -- I changed my diet, and I did some lab work, and I fixed a bunch of things. But the truth is I don't know exactly why it is that I sleep so well today. So even though we've got a ten-month baby and we all share a bed, obviously that's not particularly conducive to great sleep, but generally I really do.
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I mean we get woken up a couple of times in the night, Julie a little bit more than me admittedly. But for the most part my sleep is better than I can ever, ever remember it, and I don't really understand all the mechanisms like I say. So what's your experience being like with sleep and what prompted you to write this book?
Evan: Yeah. Well, definitely it started with third shift. That's what I was working. So I would have to -- I was doing some crazy stuff at the time, crazy meaning I was using a light box which is very beneficial for seasonal depression which I definitely experienced living in a high northern latitude to where you wouldn't see the sun free from -- I mean the sun would be up as in it's bright outside but you're not going to see the sun directly for four months out of the year because it's hidden behind gray skies, and that really, really got to me. I used to live in Las Vegas and I have plenty of sunshine there, but Kentucky, it's definitely different there. The Ohio Valley, the way the river is, the water vapor just comes in and gives you tons of clouds.
So I was using that for seasonal depression in the winter, and then I got to the point to where I needed energy to start work at midnight. So I would have to sit in front of this light box at 11:30 p.m. which is putting out 10,000 lux. So a minimum of ten times brighter than your average fluorescent bulb in your office cubicle, and I was sitting in front of that to boost up my hormones basically and to get myself through the night. And I would come home 5:00 or 6:00 a.m., try to lay down. And looking at the sunrise and trying to go to bed, it's one of the most bizarre and uncomfortable things I've ever had to do.
And I was tired all the time. I mean my wife who was my girlfriend at the time, she really have to wait until 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. for me to get up and halfway muster up enough energy to get up and go to class and try to eat some food and hit the gym. So that was part of me not gaining weight also.
But that's really what inspired me to write the book because there are millions of people and several, several people that are listening right now that are having sleep issues to where, like you said, even if you're six hours "sleep" you're probably not cycling through all the stages so you're not going to hit REM. So some of your short-term to long-term memory conversions, those aren't going to happen. You're not going to dream, which is a sign of detoxing, so you're not going to be detoxing. You are becoming more toxic by poor sleep.
Of course, some of your brown fat that is a good fat is going to be converted over to white visceral fat that's going to be in your organs and things like that. Your cortisol cycle is on a cycle with melatonin, so you can have what's called an inverse melatonin cycle to where melatonin is high when it's supposed to be low or cortisol is high when it's supposed to be low, or cortisol is low when it's supposed to be high and then you can't get yourself out of bed. So I really just wanted to help people understand this and figure out what you can do and then how diet plays into it.
So, for example, if you don't have some of the raw materials to make your neurotransmitters to produce your hormones, so neurotransmitters are just your brain chemicals that you can derive and you can create from food, so you always hear about people getting sleepy at Thanksgiving eating the turkey because of the L-tryptophan in there, the amino acid. Well, tryptophan is in other meats too. It is in turkey but it's in other meats. So you know when you have tryptophan and assuming that you have vitamin B6 in there in your diet somewhere, you're going to be able to make the conversion over to serotonin, and then eventually your excess serotonin with another conversion molecule gets added in, and then eventually boom, you make melatonin.
So long story short this is why vegetarians and vegans struggle with poor sleep because they are not getting the amino acids necessary to produce sleep hormones. So I really wanted to understand this better for myself, and so it was a learning process for me writing it. But also when it comes out onto paper, it really helps people. And then I narrated the audio book for it too just because some people, if they are listening now, they obviously enjoy audio. So that may be a good way to listen.
Chris: Yeah, that's interesting. It's funny you should mention that pathway actually, but it's actually on the organic acids test that we do. The organic acids test is a urine test, and so it can tell you how well that conversion is happening.
And tying back to what you said earlier about stress as well can affect that pathway too. So when your body is under stress, like it thinks it's being chased by a tiger, then there's an alternative. There's like a fork in the road in that pathway.
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Some of the amino acid tryptophan will head down towards [0:30:09] [Indiscernible] eventually ends up with inflammatory cytokines. So you can have someone that has low serotonin and low melatonin. The reason is just that they're on distress, so they might experience that as kind of mild depression.
Evan: Right. Rather than me just explain this and inform people, now that they have the knowledge, that's not really doing too much. It's good to have knowledge. That way people can talk about it at the dinner table now.
But I want to add some takeaway. Mainly, you really have to start just reducing your input. So whether it's saying no to something, you had to reschedule and then push your show back for me because of my issue which was awesome. So that could be a small stressor in itself.
But just make sure that you're not overscheduling yourself. Make sure you're not agreeing to things just because you feel pressured and that sort of thing and giving time for yourself. Even if you're at home and taking what you think is stress-free time or chill-out time, if you have the TV on and then the laptop in your lap and the cell phone in your hand all at the same time while feeding the baby or whatever that, to me, is still adding stress in. So just take a conscious effort to reduce those inputs.
Also, if you can start journaling or saying some prayer either with dinner or before you go to bed, adding some gratitude "You know, I'm really grateful today that I was able to get up and not have any gut issues today. My digestion is feeling good. I'm feeling really good. I'm thinking positive."
Your thoughts really do create the way your body functions. I mean a thought can change everything. A thought can change the way your cells function. It's incredible. So I just want to add a few key points in there to make sure people have something to actually take action on.
Chris: Absolutely. I've seen it in the emWave device. Have you ever tried one of those? That's kind of how it works. It's a biofeedback device. You can just put your finger on a little box and you can actually control -- like the outside, the lights change color. I'm not sure if everybody is the same. It's certainly in the instructions, but I can only enter into coherence like make the lights change color when you think happy thoughts. It's interesting. It's a real phenomenon. It's not just old wives' tales that you should think happy thoughts.
Evan: Right. Yes. That's funny you say that. I've actually been testing out a heart rate monitor. It's the Polar H7 heart rate monitor. I've been using a couple of different apps that do HRV, heart rate variability.
For people, if they're not familiar, it's the spacing between your heartbeats that's correlated to -- they're almost saying that it's correlated to better overall cardiac health and longer lifespan and things like that. If your heart is able to shift gears basically quickly and smoothly, that's a good sign from what I know. This app also has coherence.
Chris: All right. What is that?
Evan: The one that has the coherence on it is called My HRV Beta. It's a really pretty looking little screen when you get the heart rate monitor hooked up and you see your heart rate, and then it measures your coherence. I felt just kind of a little bit off in the middle of a day like I haven't been focused on my posture of breathing. So I put in on and sure enough I was in medium-low coherence. So I took a few minutes to really focus on my breathing and start thinking positive thoughts, and I easily shifted right back in to very high coherence. I try to do that about two or three time a days, and I really do feel the lasting benefit from it.
Also, if people don't want to buy something like that or they don't want to buy the emWave, when I was hanging out with one of my chiropractor friends, he had a psychologist friend and I mentioned the emWave to him, and he said, "Don't spend $200." He goes, "Just sit here and interlock your hands together and press your thumbs, both of your thumbs, press them against each other and focus on your heart." Then he said, "Close your eyes and I want you to focus on someone you really love and you really care about, something that just makes you feel wonderful or someone that makes you feel great. Okay. You have that person there. Okay. Keep focusing on that person. Keep focusing on that person, focusing in on your heart and how that person makes your heart feel. And boom! Okay. Now you're in a more coherence state." That's powerful.
Chris: Yes. I'm sure that's one of the coherence techniques. Is it the Quick Coherence technique? I think you can go to heartmath.org and see some of these techniques, these videos. It's quite interesting.
[0:35:05]
I haven't done one of those for a long time. But yeah, they're great. That's an awesome technique.
Evan: Yeah, it's good for people that when they hear something they are like, "Oh, man, I got to go buy another tool to tell me how healthy or not healthy I am?" It's like some stuff is free. Our ancestors didn't think about how to be calm. They were just calm.
Chris: Yes, absolutely. So going back to the guide, how would I know that I need it? So how do you quantify sleep? Is it something that you're using some sort of app or something for that or will I just know without any of that kind of gadgetry that I could use your guide?
Evan: I mean you could definitely do some tech toys and figure out your sleep quality. I know there is that thing called Beddit, and there is a bunch of other bed sleep tracking type things. But to be honest with you, I mean you're going to know. You're going to feel it. You're going to have that pressure behind your eyes all the time. You're never going to get energy or you're going to be dependent on the coffee. If you skip the coffee you're not going to make it through your day. You're going to have brain fog. You're going to have excess weight, and I can almost assume that if you have excess weight that you potentially have either (A) some insulin issues or (B) some sleep issues that are creating insulin issues because your hormones that regulate appetite are also disrupted.
Leptin and ghrelin, those are your two hormones that are the satiety and the hunger hormones. Those are thrown off. So if you're someone who is overeating or you just can't seem to satisfy your appetite, a lot of that has to do with sleep deprivation and if anybody is, or not anybody, of course everybody have had a time to where they have stayed up all night or they stayed up too late or went out partying and the next day, if you're not hung over and you have an appetite, you're just super hungry and you feel depleted. It almost feels like your biceps are shrinking by the second. You're in a very catabolic state. Well, that's because your hormones ghrelin are going to be way elevated due to not enough sleep.
So there are some signs there, but honestly, most people will know if they are dependent on some sort of stimulant and a lot of people in our community are using different stimulants in the forms of herbs and vitamins and things like that and those could also be covering up some underlying fatigue issues. But ultimately, I feel like people are going to know whether they need it or not.
And also it's marketed. I call it REM Rehab to fix it. But in reality I cover other things about how proper sitting technique or trying to go squat when you use the bathroom and try to interact with your kids in that way and sit in a primal squatting position and things like that. So it's mostly a health book and an overall lifestyle book, but it's described and I guess marketed more for sleep specifically just because I go so deep into the food mood connection and things like that.
Chris: I think it's a good barometer of the health in general, isn't it? It's another one of those things. There's lots of things that give you a clue as to how well you are doing. And when you're sleeping great, I think that speak volumes to how well you're doing. So yeah, give us a little bit more insight then into what's in the content. Is it all just stuff that I have to conceive? Is there any specific instructions or things that I can do and get involved with right away?
Evan: Yeah, absolutely. So in some of the guide, I tell a little bit of story about a couple of clients to where a girl named Cynthia, in the introduction, basically she is in her teaching career, and between the weight gain and her depression, she is feeling rundown. The stress of her job, her performance as a teacher is suffering. All she could think about is summer break, her time off, the beach vacation and all that.
And basically we say these thoughts that she is having and feeling, they are not a requisite for being a human, right? So the consequences that she is experiencing in this little scenario are consequences of behavior. So then we talk about the different stages of sleep. I want to lay the groundwork so you understand it.
And then we go into depressed metabolic function and talk about, like I said, how the hormones are going to be off. Insulin is going to be altered which you can literally, if you're operating in a sleep deficit for a long time, you're basically leading yourself up to type 2 diabetes, and I know that's a mind-blowing concept but chronic sleep deprivation, what it does to the hormones, it's very similar when you look at a graph to type 2 diabetics.
Chris: This we do know is fact. We've talked about stuff that we can prove with science and stuff that we can't, but this is definitely -- I can show you a PubMed paper that proves this is fact. Even a single night of sleep deprivation will lead to the types of problems that you just described.
[0:40:06]
Evan: Right. So you asked if there's any actionable thing. In Chapter 3, it's called Slumber Slip-Ups, and it's basically we talk about this guide Dave who he's got this busy life and he eats his bagel before he goes to work with his orange juice, and he's really stressed and just doesn't feel good, and then he watches football until 11:30, and then turns off the TV and does it all over again. So then that kind of leads us into the diet.
And then we talk about swimming in stress. We talk about artificial light at night, the blue light spectrum. Of course, when you look at a sunset and you see a red and orange and pink sky, it's beautiful and mesmerizing. That's not actually the sky turning orange and pink and all these pretty colors. It's actually just the removal of the blue spectrum of light. And when you remove blue, what's left are those colors of the light spectrum from the sun. So that's a kind of a cool scientific way to look at a sunset.
And that trigger, that removal of blue is actually what starts to trigger the release of melatonin. So you start releasing melatonin about 12 hours after your light exposure. So if you're getting up and turning on the light at 7:00 a.m., you're going to start releasing small amounts of melatonin around 7:00 p.m. So you can just feel it kicking in. You kind of feel this rhythm like the night just has this different feel to it, and that's somewhat attributed to cortisol going down and somewhat attributed to melatonin coming up.
And when you're looking at your iPhone and you flip it over, hopefully you're not sleeping with it next to your head for other reasons that we can talk about on another show, but when you're exposing yourself to this light, you're suppressing literally almost all of your melatonin. They have a science paper where they put a quarter-sized light behind a man's kneecap, and that was enough to suppress his melatonin for about 40 minutes.
Chris: Wow!
Evan: So that's why if it takes you 30, 45, maybe an hour to go to sleep, that's why. The melatonin eventually is going to slow drip into your system again, but it's going to take at least 30 minutes or so.
And then we talk about some other actionable things, monitoring your caffeine intake because just because you drink a coffee at 6:00 a.m. and you think that doesn't affect you, well, caffeine interrupts your GABA production. So GABA is your calming neurotransmitter. GABA is like the breaks on a semi-truck. So if you're constantly pushing yourself with Bulletproof coffee and some of these butter coffees and things that people are so fanatical about, you're depleting your GABA.
So that's basically what you're creating in terms of an analogy. You're creating a semi-truck with bicycle brakes. That's the modern human. And hopefully that paints a picture for why we're experiencing what we are.
Chris: Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's great.
Evan: Also things like birth control, that can double the time that it takes to metabolize caffeine. So your 6:00 a.m. coffee, but you're taking a birth control pill which I won't get into the issue with that this episode, that can still be causing you sleep issues at night. If you're a smoker which I doubt we have many cigarette smokers here, but they metabolize caffeine 50% faster, so that's why you see a lot of people drinking a cup of Joe with the cigarette, because the caffeine, it metabolizes so quickly, they just need another cup.
So pregnant women, they have a much longer half-life, much closer to 11 or even more hours depending on the woman to get the caffeine out of the system. Medications, basically, there are many pharmaceuticals. I don't have the full list but there are definitely pharmaceuticals that interact with your absorption or excretion of caffeine. So caffeine is huge, it really is, it's one of the bestselling drugs in the world, so I had to go deep into that.
Chris: Do you recommend no caffeine at all then?
Evan: To be honest with you, I am against caffeine for most people that I talk with more than for them. Most people I talk with, I've started picking up on doing some consulting for people again, and when I listen to the modern lifestyle, it's almost ubiquitous that people are overstressed, overrun, and they're going around like a chicken with their head cut off. To me, that's because they have the crutch of caffeine that's allowing them to do that. I understand there are some beneficial qualities to it, but long story short, to your question, most people have too much caffeine in their life.
[0:45:00]
Chris: Yeah. I mean it's just a coincidence perhaps, but it's one of the variables that I changed. I used to be a big caffeine consumer, and now I don't drink any caffeine at all. So it's definitely one of the things. I always wondered, it's such a grey area people ask me all the time, and the truth is I don't really know whether they should be drinking coffee or not. I just don't know them well enough to know whether that's a bad decision.
We ran this four-point saliva test that measured cortisol, and I know that caffeine does a pretty good job of stimulating the adrenal glands in some people into producing more cortisol. I see that all the time on a result where and they get this huge spike of cortisol at the middle of the day which is not in keeping with the other results for the day, and that's usually the reason as the person has not read the instructions and drank some coffee.
Evan: Right. I was helping out a woman who was 45 years old, and she was having extreme anxiety to the point to where getting in the car and heading on to the road was almost paralyzing her, and I started digging in and I go through this sort of questionnaire with each client that I help and I found out that she was popping at least; well, not popping; when I say popping, I mean drinking or consuming close to 350 milligrams of caffeine before she even got on the road in the morning because she was drinking two, two and a half cups of coffee, 16 ounces.
So I think people forget that a coffee mug is supposed to be eight ounces, but now we have these huge thermoses and there's like 24 ounce mega gulp coffees. Depending on the blend, you're talking 100 milligrams of coffee at a minimum usually for a cup. It's insane.
Chris: Yeah, absolutely. It's funny, in the UK it's mostly tea drinking, but when you look back even half a generation, you see little tiny tea cups that are almost like you would give it to a doll, like that sort of size and that was a cup of tea. Although they're drinking tea, the British are drinking all day long, it was from tiny little tea cups. But, of course, the mug was invented, and it's like an order of magnitude bigger. And then of course Starbucks reinvented all of those rules with their enormous ludicrous size, like a liter of coffee or something.
Evan: I know, isn't it? It's amazing how we've witnessed, if you look back at history, we have witnessed the change of society and its dependence on drugs. Coffee was a very valuable commodity and it still is, and it's amazing to think how advanced our civilization is. Yet, we're still so ancient in the fact that we depend on raw materials to be extracted from the planet or the forest or whatever to get us through. It's already happening in South America due to this… It's almost like a rust that's happening to the coffee crop. They're expecting almost like a 50% loss of the coffee crop in the world, but it's amazing to think if something like that were to just get cut off and what society would actually do at that point.
Chris: Let's just invent something else, a synthetic one.
Evan: Right, Right. No joke, Yeah. But to jump back on if you want to for a couple, I have seven guidelines, for eating and for sleep that I'd like to read that may be helpful. This is in the chapter called Eating for Sleep. And so I won't read the fine print below them, but number one, eat two to three hormone-stabilizing meals per day, so we're talking mostly fat and protein here. Avoid snacking which is a controversial topic that we probably don't have time to get into today.
Eat whole foods and avoid antifoods. Most people eat antifoods, but that could be anything as far as sugar, too much caffeine, gluten consumption, excess phytic acid, things like that.
When you eat plants, you want to prioritize them, vegetables first, berries next, and then all other fruits last due to the low insulin response you're going to get there. You want to stabilize your blood sugar. I feel like I have so much to say and I know we don't have much time, but maintaining a solid and steady blood sugar is one of the number one things. If I were to give a person one takeaway from all of this today, everything we're discussing is almost an imbalance of blood sugar.
If your blood sugar is out of whack, you're going to be experiencing bouts of fatigue, and then you're going to have energy, potentially anxiety at the top end of that energy and then back down into fatigue, depression, back up into a moderate okay feeling, back up into excess energy. I mean we literally operate on a rollercoaster in our society in our blood sugar and both our moods and everything. And if you can stabilize blood sugar by eating good-quality proteins, eating good-quality fats, reducing the amount of sugar, 90% of what we've talked about fixing today will be fixed. I promise you.
[0:50:00]
Chris: Yeah, that was definitely key piece to me especially with respect to the sleep. So I know that my insulin sensitivity is so poor that I couldn't really get through the night without eating. So I got to this really not fun place where I was having to eat breakfast at like 2:00 in the morning. It was ludicrous. And of course I made the worst possible choice which is this enormous bowl of oatmeal with honey and dry fruit and stuff in it, and I just continued on the rollercoaster for the rest of the day. It was awful.
But yeah, sorry, I don't mean to interrupt you. What's on the rest of the list? I'm intrigued.
Evan: Yeah, no problem. That's definitely good information for people. That midnight crash and that midnight wakeup for cravings, that's not normal. That's a sign that your blood sugar is not properly regulated, so just adding in some more protein. At that time actually protein is a little bit more beneficial than fat for some reason upon waking and as well as right before you go to sleep.
So the next one was just aim for 1 gram of protein per ounce of lean body mass. That's just the general thing. I'm sure some people benefit from a little less protein, a little more depending on how much you are lifting weights, things like that. The next one, don't drink sugar which is pretty self-explanatory but you go get…
Chris: And that would include smoothies and things like that then for you. You don't recommend like blending whole fruit or anything like that.
Evan: I'm okay with smoothies as long as you're using an unsweetened liquid. So whether you're just doing spring water or you're doing unsweetened almond milk with no carrageenan in it and you can do some berries. I recommend just blueberries. Honestly that's one of the best. They are just most of the berries are pretty safe. They haven't been hybridized for sweetness so they actually contain some nutrition still. Most modern fruit just has sugar and not much nutrition even if it is organic. It's just been hybridized because taste sells more than nutrition sells. You're not going to say oh, this Gala apple has this milligram or milligrams or magnesium and this one over here has 20. I'm going to get this. It doesn't work that way. So long story short…
Chris: Yeah, absolutely.
Evan: If someone is overweight I try to limit their fruit in general, but a smoothie here and there is okay as long as you're adding some coconut oil or some sort of fat to store, to basically give you a slow drip of that sugar into your bloodstream. But if you don't have a fat source in there, you're basically just dumping the sugar in there and your body has no barrier so to speak to fight against it. So that's my spiel on that.
And then number seven is to supplement with resistant starch which is beneficial for some people at certain times but I don't know. We could spend 20 minutes on that but that's number seven.
Chris: Okay. Interesting. Yeah. No, it's definitely something. The resistant starch, I will resist the temptation to dig too deep into that. I know at one time it was a disaster for me, and yeah, now I'm not sure.
Evan: I personally don't use it right now, but I have seen people have benefits. So it's something on there. It's not a one size fits all recommendation. I don't like to think those.
Chris: Oh, nothing is one size fits all, right? I've got lots of examples of people that do really well on quite high carbohydrate diet. So they are not really affected by the sugar in the same way that I was. Each person is unique and they need to do their own testing, I think.
Evan: Right.
Chris: I say well this has been fantastic. I really enjoyed this and learned quite a lot of new things. I'm really quite excited about it. So I definitely want to see your guide. I'm really intrigued by that now, and I'm sure I could learn something from that too. So the guide is linked from your website. That's right. It's notjustpaleo.com.
Evan: Yeah. If they go there, up in the top, under the Learn section, you will see books and programs and REM Rehab is right in there. So you can get just the eBook by itself. I recommend the program. I'm honestly not making as much money as people think on it, but I recommend the full program. That way you're getting the audio book so you can try to learn it in different method. And then with the audio book you will hear me talking with my friends, a naturopathic doctor. We talked about adaptogenic herbs and some of these a little bit more advanced topics and how you can actually start to modulate your cortisol with herbs and things like that to really kick start the healing process.
I love conversations, so those are actually getting some of the best reviews almost more than the eBook itself, but yeah. And the website, if people just want to look at the chapters, I have already talked about a couple of them. But at REM Rehab, it's just remrehab.com, I have all the chapters there laid out for you and talks about what's in each chapter. It's basically free information on that site, so you might as well check it out here.
Chris: Brilliant. I will. Thank you very much.
Evan: No problem. Well, thanks for having me. It's been awesome.
Chris: Yeah. Thank you, Evan.
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