E026: How To Hack Your Metabolism For Optimum Health with Dr. William Li

When you actually have extra blood vessels, and there's a little microscopic cancer around, guess what those cancer cells can hijack, like a terrorist, the blood vessels to bring blood to feed the cancer cells. And now they can start to explode in size because now they're getting nutrition. The bottom line is that you want to actually be in adjust, right? So if you have too many blood vessels, those extra blood vessels, your organs already offer those extra blood cells so can feed diseases and they can bleed. Let me tell you like the first part of my book, I open up with a discovery about human metabolism that absolutely blew my mind. So the old textbooks about human metabolism are being ripped up and thrown out, and the new ones are actually being written right now. And here's what we discovered about human metabolism.

Legend Welcome. I'm Scott Radford. This is the performance hackers podcast. And on today's session, we speak to Dr. William Lee, who is a world renowned and world leading physician, scientist, speaker, and the author of get this over 100 scientific publications. That's like four years worth of landings in my terms, and two best selling books, Eat to Beat disease, which is fascinating. And we'll definitely cover on today's episode, and the brand new book that's just been released. Eat to Beat your diet. Now, Dr. Lee's groundbreaking work in how we can use food as medicine has impacted more than 70 diseases, including cancer, diabetes, blindness, heart disease and obesity. And his TED Talk, can we eat to staff cancer, get this has garnered more than 11 million views, absolute baller, but how can we optimise our health and our performance and our longevity through the food that we consume? While last is going to be one of the things that we cover on today's show? This one's going to be great. I can't wait. So let's go.

Dr. Lee, welcome to the podcast. And thank you so much for being here today. Thank you. It's great to be on. Oh, would you be able to start by giving us a bit of an insight into your academic background to date? First and foremost? Sure. Well, I am actually a physician, an MD I'm trained in internal medicine, and which means I take care of men and women young and old, healthy and sick. And my my orientation has always been to keep people as healthy as possible academically. I did my my clinical training at Massachusetts General Hospital, which is a Harvard teaching hospital. I did my undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and I was a undergrad, I did my undergraduate studies at Harvard as a biochemistry major. But what my science background is really only tells you part of my story. And that said, I actually am a research scientist, I'm what's known as a vascular biologist. So I studied vascular vascular system blood vessels. So I study the circulation. Super important because the your blood vessels system, are really the highways and byways that, that we bring anything air we breathe, nutrients that we take every single cell in our body. So I saw, I'm a researcher, and I eventually take that to my, to my work. And then I, you know, I also run a nonprofit organisation that's been really involved with innovation. It's called the angiogenesis foundation. It's a nonprofit I helped to found almost 30 years ago, and we had this vision, that if we could look at common denominators of health and disease, that we could actually have much more powerful and scalable impact by hitting things that are common rather than treat every disease as its own little as a big project and, you know, spend looking at all those efforts that people spend fighting cancer and heart disease and diabetes and Alzheimer's, we thought, could you pull the bow back and send a single arrow through all of these conditions by hitting their common denominators, and so we've actually been quite successful. We've developed 43 FDA approved new treatments for cancer, diabetes, and diabetic complications, and also vision loss. So I kind of bring this, this the multitasking, multifaceted background with me and all that came together actually, when I started becoming an author and starting to write books, so I wrote a book called Eat up disease and now I've got a new book coming out called eat up your diet. Absolutely. And I love both of your books and your new book, Eat to Beat your diet. We've I've just finished reading that and it was such a tour de force in I think how you can apply high performance principles across not just food but how we can actually live a more high performing life holistically across the board as well. So I can't wait to get into that. What were your main influences then? So that inspired you in the direction and the focus of the role? Food and bridging that medicine, health gap. You know, I write about this in the introduction in different parts of my new book Eat to be your diet.

I grew up with an Asian background, my, my parents are Chinese.

I lived I grew up in a, in a city in Pennsylvania. In the US, that's actually very multicultural, multi ethnic, there were, you know, over 20 different ethnicities that lived very close together. So I remember as a child celebrating the traditional food cultures, from Slovakia, from Italy, from Greece, from Spain, from Portugal, from all around the world, everybody came together to celebrate food. And so I always associated diet, traditional diets with culture, and pride, and my own interest in in delicious tastes of food, fresh food, and, and then I grew up in a household where my mother was actually in the arts, she was a she was a pianist, and my father was a medical researcher. He was a biomedical researcher. And so I grew up sort of right brain, left brain, you know, you know, sometimes they did battle, but more often than not, they actually worked together where I was very into scientific problem solving, I thought science was so cool to break open new frontiers, and discover new things like that was something that really continues, I mean, it turned me on was a kid, I'm really every day, I wake up sort of excited by what science is going to yield. Next that can make help us live better, more high performing lives, as you say. But the other thing is that science doesn't solve every problem. And so for me, whenever I sort of see that brick wall, that we're not really sure how data can solve, I immediately switch gears and go into my creative mode to say, Well, okay, so if the brick walls in front of us the apparent brick wall, or the glass ceiling, how do we drive around that so that we don't actually have to run into the brick wall, what's the solution and outside of the box solution, literally to be able to get around. And that's really, these were some of my early influences. I think I did a gap year and after college before I went to medical school to become a doctor, and I lived in the Mediterranean. I lived in Italy, I lived in Greece. And I was very interested in studying the connections between food, culture and health. And by the way, this was long before the idea the Mediterranean diet became popular. I was sort of walking the walk before anybody else was talking to talk was there one early breakthrough that you had or insight that you had from that experience that sort of hooked you in from a scientific point of view? You know, what's interesting is, of course, we now know about the Blue Zones, those five and probably more areas of the world where people have unusual longevity, and unusual quality of life, right those like in Costa Rica, and Japan, and in Greece, and Italy. And in Santa Barbara, United States. Those are the classic blue zones. And as I said, there's probably many more that haven't yet been discovered, so to speak. For me, I noticed quite early when I left my home country, the US and I started to explore villages in a Mediterranean villages in Greece, I actually even spent some time hiking mountain climbing, and I'm doing research at a monastery in northeastern Greece, a place called Mount Athos. And these are, these are places where people lived mediaeval lifestyles, like the traditions you can actually see from today, you can turn around and look behind you, you can see exactly the heritage from our oldest came from. I'm a little bit of a history geek. And so I love the idea that our present is informed by our past. And that means that our future is also guided by the influences from what came before us. So I really believe that's super important. So one of the things that I think I noticed from those early days is if you take the best of the past, and you can see this in traditions, you know, these traditions stuck around for a long time. So the ideas that we talk about every day about food and health, eat locally, it sustainably eat seasonally cook with fresh ingredients, use healthy fats, nuts and legumes. I mean, these were the things that I noticed when I lived in the Mediterranean right away and people were, you know, the people that live in cultures eating this way. They embrace this lifestyle. They, they didn't eat to live, they lived to eat, and it was very much part of who they were their identity. And then when I actually spent time in Asia, I also saw the same thing. And again, Mediterranean Mediterranean culture. food culture is one of the healthiest as we know from research. Asian food culture is also one of the healthiest they all follow very similar principles. And that really developed my own way of actually approaching food which I call my new book, The Mediterranean way, which is I navigate my world reflecting on my own background, my own experiences and thinking about like if I had to pick and choose healthy food on any given day, how what Where does my compass point towards? It's really choosing foods and ingredients and methods of preparation or recipes, menu items, what have you coming from one of those two cultures? So that's why I call it Mediterranean eating. I love that answer. And I guess the best way to break this down because there is just such a vast amount of foods out there and options, and every single food feeds into a different one of your systems. I think the best way to break it down is probably to reference from your first book Eat to Beat disease and the five health defences that allow the body to defend itself from disease, would it be possible to just cover those five health defences and then we can maybe break down a couple of those and what foods can go into boosting those? A introduce the body's hardwired five health defence systems, in my first book, Eat to Beat disease? Because I wanted to answer a question, which I did that I always wondered when I was in medical school. So I was in medical school. And for those of you who have not gone to medical school, I can tell you the experience is about getting thick textbooks, put in front of you to memorise and digest every single week and then being tested on them. So a lot of the time is spent in your four years of education, memorising disease, memorising drugs, figuring out how to prescribe them. And, you know, I, I became very, very fluent in the language of disease. But one of the things that I asked my professor is, okay, now rather than just I'm getting to understand the diseases, more about what is what is health? And the answer I got from my professors, and medical school was very unsatisfactory to me, my professors would say, Well, you know, health is just the absence of disease, if you're not sick, you're healthy. And I thought that there was something very unsatisfying about something about I loved you to me. Well, the listen, I'm a scientist. So scientists challenge the things that are right in front of the world around us, right? So my mind automatically from my research train just gravitates to well, what can we what do we not know? What is health? Well, health is much more as I've discovered than the absence of disease. And my research led me to the answer. In addition to the absence of disease, which is the outcome, what we, what we how we live, the reality is our health is the result of our body's own hardwired systems of defence, health defences, that are working on our behalf and these health defences in our body were formed when we were still in our moms will, okay. And and when they were born, they begin firing on all cylinders. Kind of like a like an army, like a military defending our health from our first breath to the very last breath. And these are the five systems simply put, actually have to do with your circulation, angiogenesis, and Joe If blood blood vessel Genesis, how they grow. That's an area of research of my specialty. Second, stem cells, how we regenerate is our second health defence system, we actually regenerate slowly, we renew ourselves throughout our lives from the inside out. Brand new research teaching us how that actually happens, our brain even regenerates throughout our life. Number three, our gut microbiome is another health defence system, most people have heard of gut health. This is what it's all about healthy 39 trillion bacteria, mostly in the lower part of that last part of our gut, that are working on our, on our behalf to lower inflammation, help our immunity, help us heal faster, and text message our brain so we can really social hormones and control our mood. For self defence systems, our DNA, our DNA is much more than a genetic code. It actually protects us from harms in the environment, whether it's sunshine, radon from the earth, sunshine, from the sky, ultraviolet rays from the sky, off gassing, from our furniture and carpets, gasoline fumes, at the filling station, or putting petrol into our cars, all kinds of things, our DNA fixes errors that actually occur. Think of it as our bodies spellcheck. When there's an error caused by a chemical insult or a radiation insult. It automatically auto corrects it. So you don't have an error. If you didn't do that, you'd have to be forming cancers all the time. And then the fifth health defence literally is our immune system. And after what we've gone through in the last several years, everyone knows is keenly aware of how important our immune system is. But here's the thing our immune system not only protects us from bacteria and viruses in the air around us, that actually are bacteria. I mean, our immune system protects us from invaders, not just from the outside of our body, but from inside our body to and those invaders are cancer cells. And so our immune system conducts surveillance. Okay, like police driving in a cruise car and a cruiser patrolling safe neighbourhoods look For troublemakers, and when they find little microscopic cancers before they become a problem, our immune system eliminates them. And that's a very, very powerful defence system. So angiogenesis, stem cells, microbiome DNA, and immunity are very powerful health, health defences. And now, what I write about my new book II to be your diet is that they're all connected tethered to our metabolism. And so not only do you want to actually protect your health by warding off disease, but if you want to raise your health performance, what you want to do is to turn those elements those defences to your advantage by improving and optimising your metabolism. And that's how we get ourselves from wherever our starting point is, whoever wherever you are, to that next level of health that elevates your performance. Amazing, I love the answer. And I think that most people would probably just think that the immune system was your only defence against certain things, and bacterias and diseases that we get. So to have five different systems working together to sort of keep us alive and healthy. It's quite reassuring. We'll definitely get on to metabolism in just a quick second. But I'd love to break down the first one that you mentioned, and you alluded to the fact is one of the most important and almost the root causes for multiple diseases and illnesses that we have. And that's angiogenesis, can you give us a bit more of an insight and a bit more of a deep dive into what angiogenesis is, and why it's so important for for our health? Sure, well look, when your mom's egg met your dad's sperm, and you were a ball of cells, after a few weeks, those cells started to form tissues and organs, the first tissue that got laid down in your mom's womb is our circulation, because every organ ultimately is going to need blood flow. So angiogenesis starts us off, we have a circulation develops, ultimately, we develop, as you know, as adults, 60,000 miles worth of blood vessels that are the highways and byways for oxygen that we breathe, and the nutrients that we eat that in our blood vessels deliver all those important elements of survival to every cell in every organ or body. So when our blood vessels are healthy, we're healthy, and when our blood vessels are sick, we actually start our organs start to fail, we start to get sick as well. That's why it's such an important health defence, it functions to make sure we always have the right amount of blood flow. Now the tricky thing about angiogenesis, an important part of it is that it functions I call it in a Goldilocks zone. So if you remember, Goldilocks, and the Three Bears, right, the old fairy tale, right, so the three bears break into the house, and they're looking for porridge, and it can't be too hot, or it can't be too cold, the bed can't be too hard or too soft, and a chair, and so on and so forth. Well, that's how angiogenesis and all of these health offences are, you don't want it to be too much or too little. You want it to be just right. And it's not a single number, or single level. That's the gist, right? There's a bandwidth, there's actually a zone, it's kind of like, you know, when you swim in the ocean, even in a tropical area, you know, the stuff in the surface is that you're going to be warmer than the stuff at the bottom. So but there's this perfect area right in the middle. And so the bottom line is that you want to actually be in the just right zone. If you have too many blood vessels, those extra blood vessels, your organs already all fed those extra blood vessel can feed diseases and they can bleed. When they bleed extra blood vessels and they they're more blood vessels growing that and should be and they bleed in your eye, you go blind, okay? And that's a bad thing. When you actually have extra blood vessels and there's a little microscopic cancer around, guess what those cancer cells can hijack, like a terrorist, the blood vessels to bring blood to feed the cancer cells. And now they can start to explode in size because now they're getting nutrition. In fact, I was part of a lab research that showed that when you don't have blood vessels touching a microscopic cancer, that's defence angiogenesis defence, it won't grow. But the moment that a single blood vessels begin to feed a cancer, little microscopic cancer, that tumour will grow 16,000 times in size in two weeks. And those same blood vessels that feed the cancer allow cancer cells to escape and spread throughout your body. So you can kind of see how powerful it is that our defence actually prevents cancers from being fed so called starving the cancer and there are foods that can actually do this foods like green tea foods like strawberries, foods like apples, foods that are squinting can also do that. If you live in the Mediterranean country and you have cuttlefish ate, you know, the black pasta or the the black rice. Lots and lots of foods have now been discovered by the research community and I'm one of the kind of the leaders in this area to examine how the foods we eat, activate our health defences, including angiogenesis, so that we can help to help our body get the right number of blood vessels when we need them, and also help to prune away mo down extra blood vessels when they are dangerous and we don't want them to feed cancer. Okay, so my two questions to that. The first one would be, are there any foods that we actually need to get rid of that propagate this dangerous amount of blood vessels, as opposed to just the foods that we need to introduce and to Are there any signs and symptoms that we can search for on ourselves before it gets too late and we develop cancer that will allow us to almost understand the need for circulation before it's too late? Right. Okay. So first, you know, what are the things that actually are dangerous for sparking the blood vessels and help that cancers hijack blood, the angiogenesis system, it's called tumour angiogenesis, how do you get rid of tumour angiogenesis? Well, I mentioned some of the foods that can actually do it, but what are the foods that actually trigger that? Well, one of the big triggers for tumour angiogenesis the hijacker in the cockpit, okay, that you don't want to have happen is inflammation. Inflammation is like unlocking the door to the cockpit and letting the terrorists rush in. And inflammation is so easy to trigger in our body. We know that eating a lot of ultra processed foods, foods in a box that contain artificial colouring, artificial flavouring artificial preservatives, actually, that's those are highly pro inflammatory. Very, very dangerous, actually. We also know that excess added sugar, I'm not talking about fruits and vegetables and the fructose natural fructose, and these nutrient dense foods that have so many good things that a normal healthy body should be able to instantly metabolise the natural sugars, I'm talking about the seven to nine teaspoons of sugar that's put into a can of soda, that when you overwhelm your body's ability to metabolise the sugar, it actually compromises your angiogenesis system, and it makes your blood vessels more susceptible to actually opening that cockpit door so the tumours can actually grab those blood vessels. Another thing is that condemn be damaging is too much alcohol. Excessive alcohol, we know actually is linked to increased rates of cancer. And not only is alcohol, excessive alcohol, a toxin to the liver and a brain in the heart, and so on so forth, but actually can trigger inflammatory pathways that can actually set up for tumour angiogenesis as well. So for all these reasons, you know, like the same things that we know are not so good for us Ultra processed foods, sugar sweetened beverages, including sodas, even artificial sodas, by the way, those diet sodas, that artificial sweeteners know what they do. They actually they're non nutritive, so they don't, they don't add calories to your body. But unfortunately, they actually poison our gut microbiome. So the sugar we don't absorb, and they trickle down to the end of our gut, and they poisoned our healthy gut bacteria. Now, unfortunately, for you are gut bacteria. If you're drinking diet sodas, our gut bacteria actually lowers inflammation. So when you poison that, that gut bacteria, guess what levels of inflammation in your body start going up, up, up, up, up. And again, remember, at least little microscopic cancers, you don't want an inflammatory environment out there. We've heard a lot about you know why you should get rid of you know, insulin, have an anti inflammatory diet don't low inflammation. Now, medical research is diving deep, and we're discovering exactly why that's important. In your second book that's just being released now Eat to Beat your diet. You talk about the relationship between circulation and body fat as well, and how important body fat is in this whole calculation. Can you talk to us a little bit? I mean, I read the first chapter, I think it was in chapter one that just sort of blew me away about body fat that I just had no idea about, would you be able to share a little bit around that? Sure, we'll look at body fat is very much an important part of how we live and thrive. And yet, that's not how we think about body fat. We think about body fat in generally, as something that's negative. You know, the word fat, the picture of fat, like, what do you think of when you think of fat, you think of, you know, what you see in the mirror out of the corner of your eye, when you step out of a shower in the morning, and you see a lump or a bump that you don't believe should be there, right? You think of body fat when you step on the scale, and the number that comes up is not the number that you had hoped for. And then you sort of curse yourself, I got to work out I got to eat better, I got to do better. Like you know it's a it goes you to actually have better performance, which in some sense is actually a very positive thing. But the idea of body fat becomes very negative. And then if you go to the grocery store, you walk by a market and you see a butcher and you see that rind of white thick lard around meat like it's a very negative feeling right? So fat we tend to be repulsed by that even that word is Republic. You know, many people actually find it to be a difficult word. It evokes so many nuggets. feelings. But a lot of people don't realise that body fat is an actual organ in our body. It's very, very important. It's an organ like your pancreas, your heart, your liver, your spleen, your kidneys. And this is actually a relatively new discovery than our body fat is one of our organs. Now, let me just take you back before, you know you looked in the mirror and saw, you know, the muffin that people don't I'm trying to get rid of, or, you know, a little bit of extra arm flap or you know, a little fat under your, under your chin. And because, look, that's how we tend to associate body fat. But I'll tell you, body fat started after the blood vessels were formed in the womb, I told you lays down so that you can older or your organs can begin to build flow, the second tissue that forms our nerves, because every organ needs instructions coming from your nerves to know what to do. And the third tissue that forms our little fat globules, little cells that wrap themselves around your blood vessels like bubble wrap, like packing. Now, why do you have fat even when you're forming from the very beginning? Because then Oregon? And what does that what role does that play with plays a bunch of, of natural, healthy, very important roles, most of mostly for your metabolism supports our metabolism. So number one, most people don't realise that fat cells on adipose cells are actually fuel tanks, just like in your car. So you still drive a car that uses petrol. You know, you're driving along, and your gas gauge starts to go towards empty, what do you do you pull over to the filling station, and you put more petrol and you're into gas tank, you fill it right up, okay? Same deal for us is that when we when our energy starts to run low, okay, our fuel for our bodies engine, our energy comes from food. So when we're our fuel runs low, we don't go to a petrol station, we pull over to the dinner table, or to the refrigerator, or to the restaurant so we can fill up. So our food is our energy and our bodies hardwired. So that what's that energy in our body, we're going to use some of the fuel to run the engine on a on a daily basis on an ongoing basis. But anything extra gets stored into these little fat cells, fuel cells, the fuel tanks, and that's basically what body fat does. That's one thing it does. Second thing it does, it forms a cushion. All right, it's not just insulation, like lard, blubber on a whale. Okay. That's how we also think about fat. But actually, fat is an actual cushion. So it's like packing peanuts. If you're if you're FedExing, some wine glasses to to across the country. Look, you want it to be protected. And so we've got some fat in our body so that if we were to trip on a rug and fall on the ground, our organs don't shatter or split open. Okay, so it has a very protective function. And then even more surprising is our organs actually are fat as an organ releases hormones. One of the most important hormone is for our metabolism is called a Depoe. Niken. adipose tissue is our fat, a Depoe. nektan actually is that is an aura. It's a hormone. It's in our bloodstream. It's in all of our blood streams. In fact, if you were to compare all the hormones in our body, oestrogen, testosterone, insulin, everything else, whatever, all the hormones, you can think of. Cortisol, cortisol, a dip and acting is 1000 times higher than any other hormone in the body, and it's made by fat, our organ, what is it? What is this hormone to this is a, you know, important scientific discovery, a Depoe nektan is critical to allow your insulin, your body's energy absorbing hormone, made by the pancreas, to absorb the energy into ourselves into the instance, we can use the food to fuel that we eat. So we always need to have high levels of this disconnected, made by our fat, we don't have enough body fat, you're different nicotine levels drop, it's hard for you to actually fuel up so people who actually, you know are starving on a desert island, they have a hard time even when they start eating again, building up their energy until their body fat actually comes back. People have too much body fat outside of that Goldilocks zone. All right, way too much body fat. This is the problem with body fats, there's excess. Now the disconnecting the entire machinery to make a disconnect in your organ starts to malfunction. Now you're not making enough adiponectin and you can't absorb that energy either. And so our fat is actually all generates these hormones to allow us to use our fuel our metabolism effectively and finally, which is really cool. Very surprising to some people is we've got different kinds of fat. One kind of body fat is called brown fat. And you cannot see it in the mirror because it's actually not close to the skin. But but it's called brown fat and it's not lumpy, bumpy, jiggly. It's actually wafer thin, it's thin as paper and it actually is plastered close to the bone around your neck, under your breasts. Bone a little under your arms behind your shoulder blades and a little bit your belly. And that kind of brown fat can be triggered by cold temperature or certain kinds of food. And when it's triggered that Brown had fires up, like a nuclear engine, it fires up your metabolism, and it burns fuel. And so there's certain foods that can actually trigger your burn fat, your brown fat, good fat to burn down the fuel from your excess bad fat. So fat can good fat can fight bad fat. And eating foods can actually turn that on. So there's all these surprises about body fat we don't think about we shouldn't think we should fear of fat, we should respect it. But what we want to do is to make sure we tame it, we don't want to make it go away. So how can we optimise the way our body uses this food for fuel that, okay? Quite simply, number one is not to put too much fuel in the tank. Right. So when going back to the car analogy, when your tank is low in when you're driving your car, you pull over to the filling station and you put petrol into your gas tank gasoline in your gas tank, and you fill up what happens when the tank is full. There's a click and the nozzle stops putting fuel in your tank. All right. Now, one way our bodies are not wired that way. So there's no click, we can actually keep on putting more fuel into our body more fuel, more energy. And unlike in so what happens for a car to filling station is that if you didn't have that, click that gas tank fills up and you kept on filled putting in gas, it'll run out to the tank down the sides of the car around the tires and pool around your feet. And guess what? You're standing in a dangerous, flammable pool that could endanger your life. Right? Okay, and then you gotta wait for the air to evaporate the gas before things are safe again. All right. Now in your body. If we actually we don't have a clicker, we can easily overstuff, put too much fuel in our body. And remember, I told you fat cells, okay, are actually fuel tanks. So our body naturally still begins stuffing the fuel into the fuel tank normally, that's going to do that normally. So sounds like me last night to be honest. Well, then what happens is that all that extra fuel from last night, your body keeps on stuffing it and so the small cells that get bigger because you're filling it with fuel, like a water balloon, it's bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Now you're stretching these fat cells to their absolute limits. Guess what, there's still more extra fuel that needs to be put away. So your body generates more fuel tank, more fat cells. And then those get filled up bigger and bigger and bigger. And now you can kind of see how when we overeat when we have too many, too much food too much fuel we call the fuel calories. Okay? Then what happens is that our fuel tanks get bigger and bigger. The good news how because us how do we control them. This is what science teaches us. Our body wants to burn extra fuel, but it can't do it all the time. It can only do it when our insulin levels are low. And that's how we're hardwired. So when we eat food during the day, when we put some food in our body, it's a signal to our bodies is how we're hardwired. Oh, you know what, we got some fuel in our body. Let's bring it into the cells, fellas. And let's store anything extra and some fat. All right, when the insulin is up, your body says don't burn fuel. All right, so the fuel burning mechanism is largely shut off. When you're not eating. Like when you're sleeping. insulin levels go down. And when insulin levels are down, your body goes Okay, time to burn fuel. So when we're sleeping, we're not eating. Some people call that fasting, right? And that's when our fuel burning has actually occurred. And so why are you burning body fat, excess body fat excess fuel, when we're actually sleeping. And what happens when we wake up in the morning? Well, we're not fasting anymore, because we're going to start eating. And we break our fast by eating wreck fast breakfast, right? And that's what breakfast is. So we're breaking are fast. Now the insulin levels go back up. And now we're actually just loading more fuel. So basically, people who party all night, don't sleep very much, okay. And then load fuel all day long. What's going to happen they're going to start getting their fat cells or fuels going to be stored up. All right, it's not a it's not a there's no value judgement. It's how the body actually works. Now, if you actually get eight hours of sleep, for example, and you're not eating for those eight hours, most people don't eat what they're sleeping. You're burning fuel. You're burning. Whatever you had last night, extra fuel, maybe a little bit from the night before or even over the holidays. You're just burning it down, down, down, down, down. And so this is where this whole concept of intermittent fasting to optimise your performance comes in. Because if you give your body extra time to perform its duty to burn down that extra fat when insulin is low. So best what a good really good way to do this is let's say you eat dinner, depending on where you live, or an early dinner in Europe might be at seven o'clock. Then you finish at eight o'clock. I know some people some people eat two or three hour dinners, but I'm just talking about like the average average time of dinner, you meet at seven, you stop at eight. When you put your dishes away, let's say you don't eat any thing else after that, no snacking, no desserts, no notching and picking up food throughout the night, no midnight snack. So you stop being eight and you go to bed at 11. Now you've got three hours of not eating, donate, okay, you've given your body three hours to take advantage of lower insulin. And then you got eight hours of sleeping. All right, now you've got 11 hours going for you have energy burning, fuel burning. And let's see you got up in the morning. Let's say you get up at seven, for example, I'm just using some general examples. So you give it seven. And rather than roll out of bed, and do what your mommy told you to do, when you were a kid, hurry up and eat some breakfast, because you got to catch the school bus to go to school. Right. That's how we're all conditioned. But let's say that you take your time, Get up, take a shower, get dressed, check your email, or read something, go for a walk, do something to relax a little bit before you get your day started. Even for an hour, so you get up at seven, but you don't eat anything until eight o'clock and you have a light breakfast. Now you've gained an extra hours. So they've got three hours from the night before. After dinner, you're not eating anything else, and you've got an extra hour, four hours, plus eight hours now you've had 12 hours, half the day of fuel burning. And so although people talk about intermittent fasting is 16 and 816 hours of not eating, and eight hours of eating. In practice, it's a lot easier to just think about what I just told you 12 hours of not eating is very, very practical to do. And that's a great start to allow your body's hardwired metabolism to do its thing to burn down that extra energy. add on to that we can deliberately choose foods and I write more than about more than 150 of them in my new book Eat to Beat your diet. Those foods, when you put them in your body actually override your milk, they'll burn energy, when you eat certain foods, they can do the they can hit the override switch, and they can help your body say even though you're not supposed to be burning fuel, let's go burn some fat anyway. All right. So that's how you get some extra, extra leverage out of diet and lifestyle. I want to take a few seconds to talk 2040 the sponsors of this podcast because to me, they're the epitome of what high performance is for young leaders and decision makers looking to make a mark. So 2040 is a membership community that doesn't just help you accelerate professionally. But it's also helped me grow and develop personally to bowl intensive purposes. This is an opportunity community. And it brings together the next generation of exceptional young talent and connects those rising decision makers to help them unlock their fullest potential through the power of their peers and creating the opportunity for each other. Now, when I joined 2014, I went from feeling alone in my entrepreneurial journey and missing the energy and the ideas and a collaboration of others to having an endless new source of high quality connections. Super long list of the world's highest performers to interview which has been epic. And even this partnership that has allowed us to scale the show, all of its really come from the opportunities presented at 2040. Also, the private events are absolutely legendary. Imagine being able to meet like minded people at really intimate events hosted by global industry leaders, or even just rocking up to a Friday afternoon, we work session for a free bear. It's all available at 2040. So if you're on that journey as an entrepreneur or a decision maker in your industry, and you want to be immersed by people like yourself, other rising talent doing the same, going through the same journey and the same struggles with all the opportunities that that provides, go and check out 20 code on forty.org.uk. All the links will be in the show notes. And I bet it will be the best decision you make this year. It certainly was for me back to the show. So two questions that come from that piece. The first one is what is the best thing to take to hit our stomachs first thing in the morning or as our first meal are breaking fast? Is there something that optimises that process even more, like you said, those foods that continue to burn the fat stores. And number two is around habit building, because in my head, I kind of thought that if you fasted the same time, every single day, your body would just get used to when it's expects food. And so it wouldn't tap into those fat resources. And it would almost be like, Well, I'm getting fed in three hours because I always get fed in three hours. And so your body would adapt and not be effective. Is that true? Well, it is true. We our body is actually incredibly resilient. And so when we change our patterns of eating, we just get used to eating different ways. And I'll tell you how I know this for a fact. As a doctor, when I was in training, we had to get up. When medical school we actually had to do different rotations. So some of them would start at a gentlemanly hour of eight o'clock, you know to work but and we would do that for three months at a time and our bodies would get used to three months and then you know and then Oh, but then surgery, we did our surgical rotations, we had to get up at four, because we had to be in the operating room by five o'clock. All right, like in the hospital, scrubbed, and ready, you know, to participate in the operation. All of a sudden, like we were missing our breakfast, right? I didn't feel like eating when I was five in the morning. But when you do this for a month at a time, you start to adapt, adapt your body. And so yeah, I couldn't eat something, I realised I could eat a little bit something but then, or eat something later when I got a break. Same deal, like, you know, when you get really busy into a shift work, and you're like, oh, man, I don't have time for lunch today. First couple of days, you know, like, you get really, really hungry. But then after a while, you kind of just adapt to it. So yes, our body can adapt to habits. And one of the things I write about, I need to be your diet. But the final third of this book is really a practical guide of how to actually create those patterns, where you just mindfully you know, when he talks about mindful eating to optimise your diet, it really is about optimising your life. So just think about what time do you get up? What time do you normally eat breakfast? What time do you normally eat lunch? Do you snack? What time do you eat dinner? And what time? Should Are you done done with food. And if you can document this, and I say, you know, it's really helpful to do a food diary to diary your food. Try it for a week, even three days, so that you then can review the pages and see just exactly how you go about your life. So many of us just on autopilot. That habit, as you say, once you realise your own habits, then if that's the first step to being able to say, Well, I'm wondering if I can optimise how I allow my body to perform on my behalf? Is there a way we can optimise this? And answer's yes. And so then I actually suggest, well, you know what, one thing that'd be nice to do is let's just create some eating windows. Think about it, like, you know, like a window in your house. What time are you going to open the window, you open the eating window. So you're like, Okay, let's go eat. And then at the end of the day, what time are you going to close the eating window, so then you're not going to eat anymore. And I think that you know, then you can do like anything else on your date book or your your iCal or whatever you use electronically or Google Cal, you know, you can then sort of just set your windows and so you can develop your own better habits that's part of optimising your self awareness of how you naturally live, how you have been living is actually the first step in taking that next step. Yeah, high performance doesn't have to be restrictive, does it? It can actually be quite expensive if you can sort of understand what works for you, and how you net your natural cadence of the day and then sort of start to fit things in and around that. Yeah, no, Scott, I'm so glad you mentioned that. Because my philosophy has always been when it comes to diet and health, you should really love your food to love your health. And I think you can, you know, you can line those up, because so many people and this is something that bothered me, that led me really to write the books that I have written. So many people have actually learned to fear food, and you know, associate food with something that they shouldn't be doing. And then this idea that diets are deprivation, all about elimination. You know, the human nature abhors deprivation, what happens when somebody tells you, you can't do something? Look, you then your brain automatically goes, well, maybe I will just do a little bit. How about that? Or you know, maybe I'll break the rule. And I think that what we want to do is empower people to say, look, you know, you can throttle up your own health, it's all up to you. And the steps to take are really not about deprivation, they're about enhancement. How do you enhance yourself. And this is really where self awareness comes into play. And I actually write a whole chapter I need to be your diet as well. That's actually drawn from a unlikely source, who is the super martial artist, Bruce Lee, who actually talked about how do you actually enhance your own personal performance? He was one of the I mean, he was the OG of self felt self efficacy when it comes to performance. And so you know, I sort of stripped some of the ideas that he took and applied it to actually diet. So you can actually be, you can figure out how to navigate. Well, funnily enough, my plan is at the end of this podcast to finish on Bruce Lee. So hold that thought. But just going back to that question that I asked beforehand, so if for me in order to change my habits, I mean, at the morning when I wake up, I'm saying my wife over there, and she's spooning coconut oil into her face. I'm sort of thinking about needing to get 30 grammes of protein first thing in the morning because I feel like my metabolism burns quite a lot. Is there anything in particular that we should be looking at hitting our stomachs? First thing? Yeah, well, look, every individual is going to be slightly different. Okay. So I think that you ask a very valid, you know, a totally fair question. What's the optimal first kind of foods you want to put in your diet and, and again, like the temptation is for me to give you a answer that then a listener will then feel like oh, well, I guess that's the pattern that I need to follow, I want to tell you first say it's going to be very individual. So you need to kind of listen to your body. But I will tell you my approach to do this and how I do it. And I have a, you know, I've actually measured my metabolism in the day and in the evening. So I know actually, I'm my natural patterns are actually quite quite healthy, and an optimal. So one of the things I always tell people is, there's, we want to stay hydrated. So the first instinct you should have is to hydrate your body. When it comes to hydrate, hydration in the morning, you definitely don't want to be reaching for sodas, forget about that, that's not healthy for you. And, and even juices, you know, like I grew up growing up, I grew up drinking orange juice, because my mom always poured me a glass of orange juice, we were supposed to drink orange juice in the morning than in America. Well, you know, actually, there's a lot of sugar in that. And a little bit of orange juice is good. But you know, a tall glass of orange juice is like eight fruits, eight oranges squeezed in, that's a lot of oranges, a lot of extra sugar. I could have a single orange and get the same micronutrients and macros out of there and the dietary fibre as well. So I always talk about, think about three things you want to consider putting in your body first in the morning. And I think people will will smile at this coffee, tea or water. All right. Coffee, because it's got chlorogenic acid is also good way of a good white man pick me up actually activates your body's health defences. It's anti inflammatory tea, so many benefits from the poly phenol is the catechins that are in tea. And water, by the way, is actually metabolism activating. So if you want to burn some extra calories, and get some energy, it turns out that when you drink cool water, it turns out there's temperature sensors in your stomach, a temperature reader. And when it's really cold, your body does not like your core temperature to be cold. So when cold water hits your stomach, it reads that temperature gauge. And it basically says, Hey fellas, let's fire up we need a little we need a little warming of the water, it fires up your brown fat. And so your metabolism actually goes up. And it actually makes you feel a little bit more full because you've got stuff in your stomach, and so you're less likely to overeat. So I sort of say, start your day thinking about the liquid you want to actually put in. Alright, and then I like to eat lightly for breakfast for me. And what I do is I like to take either a fruit or a vegetable, whether it's an avocado with great dietary fibre, and good vitamins and micronutrients. And there's something in avocado code of OB is actually a little natural chemical that can activate my metabolism gives me a little extra energy in the morning, or I have some fruit, berries are a great way to start your day, because you can actually pick the number of berries you want to eat. Sometimes I'll add some tree nuts, some walnuts or pecans. To that granola is a great way to kind of combine all that stuff together, I'd like to eat lightly and get some fruit into my system as well. You know, I don't really talk about carbs or eggs or, you know, that kind of thing. Because, you know, I like to get those core pieces into my body first, then I will add to it. So if I want to add some protein, I might have some eggs, as well. So, again, I'm not a vegan, I'm not a vegetarian, I'm a health Attarian, you know, like I and I also enjoy food. So I would just kind of navigate along the way. And by the way I have to adapt to wherever I am. If I'm travelling, I might be at the airport, I've got to actually figure out how I'm going to adapt to what's around me and make good choices. If I'm at home, I've got different things in my refrigerator. If I'm on vacation, I've got a different set of circumstances. And this is where adaptiveness is so important. We've talked quite a lot actually about metabolism. But it would be quite good to round off a little bit about what it actually is. And I know that you've covered before a couple of misconceptions about metabolism that I'd love you to share with the with the listeners. Yeah. Okay. So let me tell you like the first part of my book, I open up with a discovery about human metabolism that absolutely blew my mind. And I think people reading about it will also be quite surprised because it's a discovery that's only two years old. So it's so new, it's smoking hot discovery. It's not even in the medical textbooks yet. So the old textbooks about human metabolism are being ripped up and thrown out. And the new ones are actually being written right now. And here's what we discovered about human metabolism. First, the assumption was that, you know, you're either born with a slower or a faster metabolism. How many of us has heard, I've heard the saying, Oh, my sister was so lucky. She was born with a fast metabolism. That's why she's skinny is a stick and can eat anything and doesn't get fat. And oh, me. I was born with a slow metabolism. And that's why I've struggled with my weight my whole life. Like that's a comment that I've heard over and over and over again and Frank, frankly, I actually even believe that myself when I was being trained as a doctor that that mantra was sort of everywhere, right. And it turns out that that's not true. Another thing that people think about is like, like when you're a teenager, and you watch, you know, teens and adolescents in a household, they go from, you know, just eating three meals a day to suddenly eating to dinners. They're eating everything in sight. They're bouncing off the wall, because they have so much energy. And then they're growing up like a beanstalk. Right? And so parents always assume, well, their metabolism must be going on. Not so absolutely not true. And then, of course, the classic thinking about metabolism when you're an adult, your 40s or 50s, or 60, your metabolism is slowing down. And that's why you're getting to be pear shaped. And that's why you're actually gaining weight. And it's a big problem when you hit menopause, or my pregnancy weight, like it's just part of the whole who I am. And I'm hardwired this way, there's nothing I can do about it. So people believe that their, their their metabolism is their fate. And again, there's within two years, there's been a brand new set of discoveries that blow that all out the window. So let me just tell you basically what it is the study that was done just two years ago, it's an international study that involves 90 Researchers from 20 countries. And they studied 6000 people, these 6000 people were, span the entire human life's lifespan from two days old to 90 years old. And what they did is they actually studied their metabolism in the exact same way, they gave him a little drink of water, h2o, that's this chemical formulation of water, hydrogen, they put a little tweak on it. So you can measure the hydrogen, the oxygen and put a little tweak on it. So you can measure the oxygen. And when you drank, when they all drank these waters, they can measure the metabolism of the hydrogen and oxygen in their breath, in their blood, and also in their urine. So imagine 6000 People from two days old or 90 years old, measured in exactly the same way that the equation was solved, and out came human metabolism. What do you think the results showed? Well, not surprisingly, when they did it just like that, everybody's been telling them all over the map. It's a gigantic confusing set of data, no one knows the same, right? Like, just like you would expect, right? However, we now live in, you know, the modern age was super computing, with computational analysis with artificial intelligence. And what they did. That was really and this was really the the turnkey part of this. This is the breakthrough, they applied an algorithm that allowed them to subtract out from the results, the effect on the metabolism of excess body fat, based on the size of the person. So based on the size of the little infant, the two day old base and the smaller size of the elderly person based on the size of the 40 or 50 year old, they were able to remove from the data, the results all the excess. The result, the implications, the excess fat when they did that, your Rika human metabolism across the lifetime turned out to be only in four stages. And those four stages are zero to one years old, metabolism is going sky high, like a rocket up, up, up up up to 50% higher than your when an adult when you're one years old, your metabolism is 50% higher than than you it's going to be when you're an adult. Alright, that's first stage six second stage from one year old to 20 years old, right through adolescence, right through the Beanstalk, the spring sprouting right through the two dinners and bouncing off the walls. The metabolism going from one year old to 20 Oh is going down, down, down, down, down down down to adult levels. So through adolescence, our metabolisms going down, make surprise, fit stage three, from age 20, to age 60. Guess what, our metabolism is rock steady, it doesn't actually move, it's hardwired to stay exactly the same from 20 years old to six years old. And what that means is that 60 is the new 20 If you allow your metabolism to do what it's hardwired to do. And then from 60 years old, to 94th phase, your metabolism does slow down a little bit about 17% By the time you're 90. That means when you're 90 years old, your metabolism is only 17% lower than when was when you were 20 All right, so alright, that's how our bodies hardwired it is a big surprise once we realise that that's why the textbooks being rewritten. Now, here's the key thing. They removed the effect of excess fat when they started to put the excess fat back in and guess what they found? excess fat squashes your metabolism derails it suppresses it. So it's not that a slow metabolism from birth causes you to gain weight and gain body fat. It's the other way around. excess body fat that we accumulate through diet and patterns and behaviours that we accumulate throughout our lives usually unknowingly actually slows down our metabolism. That puts the power of unleashing Our inner metabolism to improve our performance in our own hands. That is one of the big breakthroughs of this book A to be your diet. Wow, that is kind of just blown my mind. So actually, I'm not going to hit 40. And then my metabolisms just gonna hit a wall, I'm gonna have to stop eating everything, it's 100% My choice, if I can suppress the body fat, then the metabolism will stay exactly where it was. That's right. And you know, diet is part of it. Physical activity is also part of it, getting good quality sleep as part of it, dealing with getting management of stress as part of it. And, you know, one of the things I write about my book, you know, that are helpful tips. In addition to diet, like my book is mostly about how do we find delicious foods, you know, that that harken back to, you know, the traditions of the Mediterranean and Asia, you know, kind of old world cooking and delicious things. And of course, you don't want to overload your fuel tanks, don't eat too much, don't eat too late, don't eat too early, you know, all kinds of things. practical wisdom, okay. But one of the other things I talk about is the importance of, of physical activity, you can work out if you want, but you don't have to work out all the time, you know, physics, any kind of physical movement actually will actually start to keep your metabolism your, your, the, the engine running, Okay, to start burning some metabolism, something that I thought was really, really interesting, as part of the research I did on here. You know, there's been a study done in the UK that people who even fidgety increases your metabolism, you know, fidgeting is sort of like that, people's knees go up and down, up and down, up and down. Because knowing what people who tap the table, right, and so you probably don't want to do this in front of people, they might like other people, they might not like that. But I can tell you, even fidgeting is part of our well actually burn, but that will increase your metabolism, it helps to burn excess body fat. And so that just shows you how fine tuned our body is to be able to respond to things in terms of a stress management, you know, what, actually, if you carry around a lot of extra anger, and this is something that was that I write about, you know, like, look at, there's a lot of people who just stuffed their anger for various things, you know, it's like, it's like, we're, we live complex lives, things piss us off, we've had things happen to us. And we all carry, carry the anger around someplace. But one of the reasons to actually try to really blow off that anger and find a good channel for it to become more balanced emotionally. This is a connection of emotional health as well to optimise your metabolic performances that people who hold on to anger actually increased stress hormones in our body, that raise inflammation that not only help your, you increase your risk for developing cancer, we talked about that earlier, also derails your metabolism, which then allows your body fat to accumulate even more. And so again, these are some like kind of mind blowing correlations of things that we kind of might have already assumed. That make common sense. Now, if you really want to talk about optimising performance, what I write about are the specifics the science behind this, it's not just a what to do, but the why, and then the how to actually do it. Wow, I absolutely love that. And I think just from the coaching that I do with people, a lot of the time they're carrying a real emotion of frustration, maybe it's a lack of agency that they have in their life, or they weren't where they wanted to be, or maybe they just don't have clarity of where they actually want to be. But there's that underlying sense that your expectation of life or what's happening is not meeting what you want. And therefore you carry this frustration around with you. And that sort of seems to sort of fuel everybody that's walking round, sort of angry, upset, frustrated, I'm just wondering, are there any foods then related to that that can help? Or is it literally a mindset shift that needs to go on? To complicated answer to a very good question, which is, are there foods that we can eat that actually help us be calmer? Maybe more even keeled? Because every little bit can actually count. And, you know, that's our nutritional psychiatry is a whole field in and of itself. But I'll give you sort of my general take on it. First of all, our gut health, our gut microbiome, that healthy bacteria in our gut is really important for making us feel calmer and happier and more level set. And so one thing we want to do is to eat foods that are prebiotic foods like dietary fibre, like plant based foods we eat foods with a lot of fibre that have plants are not only the brassica, broccoli, bok choy, you know, those kinds of foods, but but also avocado and kiwi they have a lot of dietary fibre. Even citrus has a lot of dietary fibre. Average pair medium sized pairs about six grammes of dietary fibre. You're about 20% of the way there of your daily intake just by having a pair in the morning. It's some fruit that I sometimes have when you feed your gut. bacteria and make them happy. Your gut bacteria performs well. Bacteria perform help you perform, they actually affect your brain that you release more serotonin and dopamine and oxytocin, which then actually lowers your stress and makes you feel happier. So taking care of gut health is a really important way of mental health. Then there's some actually, beverages like tea. Most people think of tea and coffee like it's got caffeine is going to wire me up. Okay, for some people, they are quite sensitive to tea. But actually green tea lowers your blood pressure and can actually lower stress levels. If you're sensitive to caffeine, you want to try a water based caffeine decaffeinated tea, meaning water based paint of the caffeine is removed with water processed, not solvents. So that's just making looking at the label to see how it's been decaffeinated. But chamomile, actually chemical AltY herbal teas also can be relaxing, will normal tea do the job normal tea while so. So what is normal tea right? So if you're British, you might actually think of normal tea being black tea, right, which is, which is great, that's black tea improves your metabolism. And if you have it, if you really want the poly phenols and black tea, you don't want to add milk to it because milk actually reduces the number of polyphenols that your body can actually absorb. But yes, black tea Breakfast tea can actually work. Turns out that green tea also works. And the green tea if you want to go to a really high test, green tea go for matcha tea, it's a ceremonial taste the powder you get in a sushi bar for tea, that actually really powers up your metabolism. And remarkably, recent research shows that there's the polyphenols in Matcha Tea is so powerful, it actually kills the stem cells that form breast cancer as well, which is a quite an amazing discovery to me. So again, we were talking about kind of calming foods, I would say gut health, and some teas, including herbal teas. You know your grandmother was actually right. Herbal teas actually can be actually helped you get a good night's sleep. There's one one more topic I'd love to discuss before we mentioned briefly, and that is how we can create strong sustainable energy. Because there was a time in my life where I almost used the caffeine and sugars to sort of fuel workouts. Certainly when I was flying around the world quite a lot. I'm still training for rowing, I was almost on the edge of needing these boosts in order to get through a training session. Are there good foods that can almost give us a sustainable level of energy throughout the day as opposed to those crushes that I get with sugars? Yeah, so I mean, look, you what you've described is a an exceptional need. When you're, when you're a high performing athlete, you do need to actually put yourself in the zone and get your body to be fine tuned for that performance, whether it's preparing for the performance or the actual performance itself, the competition, right? Same thing as a musician, you know, if you're just playing piano, for, for for the joy of playing the piano, because you like the sound of a piano when it relaxes you that's different than actually preparing for a concerto performance, you know, in Carnegie Hall, right, it's a different order of magnitude. And the kind of practice you need, the preparation is vastly different. So what I tried to do is to say, you know, if you're a performer, if you're a performer, you need to actually get into zone and there'll be very specific things you need to do while getting ready performance. But if you're if you're in your average ordinary life, and you would just like to have more energy, overall sustainable energy, so you don't have to have wild swings, ups and downs and crashes. Okay. I mean, I can tell you, I had to go through exactly what you talked about when I was in medical school and residency training for No, as I was training as a young doctor, you know, we'd be up all night, we needed caffeine to kind of get us going wake up in the morning, after being up for 36 hours, just to be able to get to work the next day, we needed to get a shot, you know, sugar, caffeine, those were all the things that we kind of did to prime our body just to be able to get through that intense period. That's not normal, but regular energy, look, here's the thing. You want to to not feel sluggish, you want your inner metabolism, that hardwired stuff that I talked about those four phases to really sore, you want that inner metabolism to rise as high as it can to do what it wants to do. So I do think that fighting body excess body fat is one way to actually do that. And as it turns out that to fight excess body fat, you're going to be eating foods, mostly plant based, high fibre, high poly phenol nutrient dense foods, not too much, you're not going to over over indulge, okay, there's no gluttony involved. And you're going to avoid excess saturated fats and fried foods, things that kind of stun your energy levels. And you're going to really try to kind of find that equilibrium where your engine is in high performance, you know, when you're driving a car, right? There's a Speed RPMs and revolutions per minute in which your engine is running optimally. And even if you're driving a race car, there's still a kind of a level. But if you want, you need to get on the track, and you're doing a high performance race, you know, the Formula One, that's a different story. And so I'm talking about regularly, I think eating moderate amounts of food mostly plant based within an eating window that allows your body to burn excess fat, so your inner metabolism can rise. So that's actually to your own advantage, and then powering yourself up by staying hydrated, staying well rested. Eating foods that give you enough your motor is running. Your your onboard motor is running at a at the pace that makes you feel good. So it's going to be very individual. That's something that you can kind of get in touch with to optimise your own performance. There's no formula for this, other than to start paring away the things that you know, can damage your metabolism. And you mentioned keeping a food journal as one technique for doing that. Are there any other sort of clear cut easier ways for us to start to understand our own bodies? And what foods work for us? And what foods don't like? Are there any apps or blood tests that we can do? Or what would you recommend? Yeah, well, so I mean, I think there's, this is the exciting part of modern technology. I think that, you know, we're going to have more wearables that actually give us examples of heart rate and heart rate variability, respiration cycles, quality of sleep, how often we're deep, good, high quality REM sleep, how much nighttime disturbances, we're actually having an uneven measuring erectile erectile function. And nighttime is a reflection of our physiology. So there's all kinds of little body hacks through apps that we can actually get that actually give us a sense of how well how optimal our body's doing. I've recently been trying a device called the lumen. It's a breathalyser for your metabolism, which I think is really really cool. Right, that's it, you know, the the troopers watch you pull you over to the road? So we get these as well. You know, you should check it out. It's called lumen. It's actually made by an Israeli company. And I've been See I've been as a researcher, being involved with developing medical technology. I was I was thought, Is there something we could do with our breath? You know, like, besides get pulled over and you know, arrested for, I think too much alcohol? Well, turns out, yeah, actually, our metabolism captured in our breath. And so there's a device that's now out, just out now. I'm just playing with it now. So I'm not endorsing it. I don't get paid by the company right now. Just it's I'm just curious about it. And it's really interesting, because it actually measures whether you're mostly fat burning or carb burning, and you can measure it over the course of the day. And so that's really cool. Blood tests. Absolutely. You can actually measure inflammatory markers you can measure lipid markers, you can measure haemoglobin Awan see like how much your sugar is over spiking over the course of time. And so you know, there isn't a a recipe book of these five things are going to be important for you to hack your health. We can define define those, but I think it's what's nice is that they're starting to be more and more choices. For us to be able to put together a programme that's tailored to our own life and our own needs to be able to adapt to our lives, help us adapt to our lives and be able to look, you know, really get a handle on how we're actually doing, besides kind of hand waving it and saying, Yeah, I wish I did a little bit better now we can actually start to get to some numbers. I love that. I remember a few years back, I actually teamed up with a company and I strapped myself up to Heart Rate Variability monitors for a big long haul flight. And we monitored from a couple of days before to flying over to LA to the recovery in LA, flying back and in the recovery back in the UK. And the amount of data and understanding I learned from that experience was kind of life changing. So what did you What did you find in the flight? What happened on the flight? You know what the funny thing the first funny thing was that after five days of landing back into the UK after a trip to LA, my body still hadn't recovered fully. So they still said you're still in recovery mode, you're you're still out of work after five days. So bearing in mind, we normally have two or three days off before we go flying again. So for a lot of long haul pilots, the chances are you'll never be in a settled state of recovery, which is quite scary. And the second thing that I learned was I had more of a stress induction from sending emails two days before I went on the flight than I did from taking off out of Heathrow with big storms and 300 passengers on board and you know a lot of defects on the aircraft and it's a really stressful manic departure. And I had a biggest stress response from sending emails beforehand for a company that I was sending out that I did fly out of Heathrow. And so it's quite interesting to understand that what stresses you out? What induces that fear response in you is very, very different and very subjective and different people. It's not necessarily that going through a stressful event actually has that impact physically on your body, I guess. Wow. So I mean, hence this idea of individualism, individualism, we're all different. Our circumstances are different. And we need to understand ourselves well enough to be able to actually adapt ourselves to manage our situation as we move forward in life. Last thing I wanted to quickly talk about was Bruce Lee, and bring him back up, because I know in your new book, you have a really cool passage about Bruce Lee and the impact that you had on you. Can you give us a little bit about those five principles and maybe a little bit about how you implement them in your own life? Yeah, well, so you know, you know, I encourage people to get my book and read about this, but most people will recognise the name Bruce Lee, he was a martial artist that lived in the he died, actually in 1973, at the age of, I think, 32 years old. But this one dude, actually, who was born in America grew up in Hong Kong, brought martial arts broadly to the world by taking his very unique fighting style that was quite unlike anything everyone anyone had seen before, to the cinema, and anything that you would see in a movie today, in which there are, you know, depiction of people fighting or combat, and even mixed martial arts, the actual professional level, fighting tournaments that they had to hold, all stemmed back from some of the original changes that Bruce Lee or awareness of that Bruce Lee actually brought to the world. And he was a skinny, scrawny guy, who actually learned how to fight to defend himself and on the streets of Hong Kong. But when he came to America, one of the things he really wanted to do is to teach other people the discipline of fighting, and what in the style of kung fu called Wing Chun that he knew, actually, he felt was quite limited, when the more he studied it, he realised that, you know, Wing Chun against boxing and Judo against karate, you know, like, you know, everybody had their own stiff ways of dealing with it. Not good, not good enough. And so he was all about high performance. And he and he wasn't afraid to break the norms, the normative patterns that everyone told him, You must do this, you must train this way, you must block a punch this way, you must do a kick this way. He, he said, let's throw all the rule books, let's put through all the rules at the other window. And let's just use let's borrow from whatever's around us whatever we need at that moment in time in our circumstance, that suited to our own body. And so he developed a whole philosophy, he studied philosophy when he went to college, built around a new approach to the body. So even though people call it the fighting art, I adapted my book to talk about, you know, how do you actually train your body, train your mind how to actually modify and it starts with number one, understand yourself. Diary journal, self reflection, self awareness, mindfulness, this is something that actually is so important for being able to perform get to that next level for yourself in any situation, you don't understand where you're starting from, what are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? What can you do better on number one, number two, is really to actually learn as much as you can absorb from everything. All right. And if you've been taught one way to do something, and you want to try something else, don't throw away everything that you've learned, take the best of what you've learned, and discard everything else that's not useful for you carry the best with you as you go along your life journey. That's actually something that's very important for navigating life's path with dietary health and exercise and in combat, you know, if you ever get into a physical altercation, you know, like, those are all things that you carry with you discard what's useless, keep what's useful, and carry on with your life. The third thing is really adaptation. We've been talking about that a little bit. Look, Bruce Lee felt that you know, however you train, you got to be trained to be adaptive and agile. And you got you have to train yourself awareness, situational awareness, so that you're not only training in your dojo and your gym and only one way, shape or form. But you have to be kind of loose and aware around you so that you can adapt what you trained in the gym, to the streets, so to speak. Now, obviously, I'm not encouraging people to kind of train for street fighting, but the fact of the matter is that when it comes to fighting for your health, which is what we should be doing, we are always in different situations. You're invited to a friend's home, what are they feeding, you're travelling in an airport, what are we eating, you're throwing a dinner party, you're going to a buffet, you're in an aeroplane you're at you're either you're in a casino like all of these are different situations where you need to be able to take what you know what you've trained, the best of what you know, and adapt it immediately to that situation so that you can stay out of danger and really optimise your performance. So you know exactly based on who you are, how to make those right decisions, that's very Bruce Lee. And you know, he called his own style, a style of no styles, he called a Jeet Kune Do, which was the way of the intercepting fist. And, you know, it's very martial concepts that, you know, that's who he was in the 70s. That was very cutting edge. Today, I would just say, you know, you get to adapt your life, and your eating habits to the way that you actually want to. And those are some of the basic principles to navigate. You know, everything in moderation, even moderation, live your life to the fullest, you know, it's really important that if you want to live long, you want to also live well. And so I think this is something that we always, I encourage people to think about when they want to perform optimally, you know, you can put the pedal to the metal to really rock for any particular task you need to do. But honestly, if you want to live long and prosper, you know, you really want to be able to actually take good care of your body over time, it's like maintaining your car, over time feeding your engine, putting the right oil, putting the right fuel in your car, all those things, when it comes car analogies are really relevant to actually how we take care of our body when it comes to food and our metabolism. That's very different than you know, how do you get into your formula one car and do you know, a bunch of laps under time? You know, you're going to be burning out your tires there, but it's going to be amazing ride, I think there is, you know, more value in taking care of our bodies for the long haul, especially given how important long term health is. I think that's a great way to finish actually, Dr. Lee. Before we do go, though, we do have a closing tradition, which has a few quickfire questions. The first one is one piece of advice that you would tell your younger self before starting out. I would say to my younger self, be even braver earlier, I've had to actually take lots of chances against expectations that the system that I was in the rules that were there, I should eventually learn how to learn the rules so that I can make better rules to perform even better. And I would say that, you know, even though I started pretty early in life, I would tell my younger self to not be so fearful of the authorities, you know, the authoritarian systems even earlier and be more individual be even more individual earlier, we talk a lot about courage actually on high performance. And certainly it's one of the things that I think differentiates a lot of people that have achieved your level of excellence in your field. Is there anything in particular that you did, that you can sort of articulate for us that was how you operate under courage? How you can be braver, you know, I'll tell a story that I've I haven't really shared publicly before. But this is actually a very authentic story for me. I can't remember my age, but I was in grade school. And we were we played indoor hockey, you know, the American Hockey sport. There was no ice, it was a gym. And we all had hockey sticks. And I wasn't very good at it, because I had never trained in hockey and some of my friends, my classmates had actually, they were practising their parents had taken them to hockey leagues, and they were actually very, very good. And when I had a chance to play in the very beginning, I, I was terrible. Like, I couldn't even manoeuvre the stick very well, I was, I was tripping over my own feet. But you know, I wasn't performing very well. And I saw that people recognised I knew I wasn't playing well, but other people also recognised wasn't playing well. And I felt that I had disappointed myself, I disappointed my classmates, I was kind of jeered at and criticised people made fun of me. And you know, what, that was a moment where, and this is the moment of real reveal about my personality when I was in grade school, you know, I could have actually just given up ashamed and, and just listen to listen to the, the voices in my head and what my classmates were saying I wasn't any good. But, you know, I actually took that as a challenge for me to get better lean into what I needed to do. And I literally, like that was if I was one moment of courage in my head, that when I was younger, like that, I can refer back to that I basically said, you know, screw it, I'm actually going to get really damn good at this. And I leaned into it, and I eventually became the captain of the team. From from zero. All right, and so that's one of the things that I remember I had to overcome the feelings of being suppressed around me and my own the voices in my head, in order to find that courage to be to break out and, and I have to say, probably mine that memory. From time to time, whenever I am in a current situation, I mean, even where I am now, like when you tried to do something new. There's always a little bit of hesitation, anxiety, maybe even a little fear, like, I'm going to be able to do this, you know, should I be even doing this? And you know, I I think that's where courage comes in. And I really encourage anybody who's listening to this. Everyone has a courageous voice inside their head, you might, there may be other voices that are joining them out, fine tune your ear to that voice of courage, that is going to be a very important part to how to actually find your inner health. Thank you so much for sharing that story. Dr. Lee, that was, that was very inspirational, actually. And, yeah, I've definitely I definitely feel like even the things that I'm starting outside of flying planes, which is my comfort zone, you know, I look at some of the big podcasts out there. And think like, I'm miles away from that, it's kind of almost embarrassing to start this small. But I've kind of just made a decision that actually, you need to be starting here. And I'm very, very happy doing all of this uncomfortable beginning phase, in order to get to that in a few years time and worst investing in it now. So I appreciate that one mantra or belief that has enabled your high performance life. I always talk about this as being my motto, but it's a little bit of my mantra. And it really is about enjoying your food, to enjoy your health, love your food, to love your health, I really believe that we should be aligning our big goals, which is health, with the things that actually we really, that give us pleasure. And if we can actually align those things rather than say what gives us pleasure deprives us of our longer goals. You know, that, to me is self destructive. I like to try to get them aligned. And so for me, love your health, love your food to love your health, actually, is something that really kind of gets me going. And it's up to you encourages me to actually encourage you to to really try to convince other people, you can do this too. Well, I'm convinced on that one, one ingredient or habit that has contributed to your success the most. I always drink green tea every single day. I heard you're quite a big coffee lover as well, aren't you? I also drink a lot of coffee. And so by the way, so maybe this is another secret, right? So some people say I drink tea, some people drink coffee. I actually drink coffee in the morning to pick me up and I just I lived in Italy for a while. And I think I was introduced to espresso in the morning. And I just have never given that up I it's just something that I enjoy doing. Now I know I'm getting chlorogenic acid into my body, which actually boost my metabolism and my health defences. And I drink tea at night because it actually calms me clears my mind. It's relaxing. So yeah. So of course I drink water throughout the day. So I call that the Holy Trinity. Coffee In The Morning green tea in the evening and water throughout. That's right. And finally, one last question, what is your go to food or drink that tears you up for a big day, like a high energy day? Do you have something that goes there that sort of fuels you get you through the day, or maybe even you'll get guilty pleasure? You know what I really tried to make sure my pleasures are not guilty, like I tried to align that really well. But I will tell you the thing that gets me that if I if I had had to have a high energy day, I have to confess I still love a really amazing cup of coffee. Just in the morning, even if it's one. It's just something I learned years ago, just makes me feel better. And I probably when I was in training as to be a doctor. It was a caffeine but now these days, I actually I kind of feel like the polyphenols and coffee. Really give me that energy. So I'm really happy when that happens. I'll definitely have the link to your books in the show notes. Each to beat your diet, I've absolutely loved reading it. And from my personal point of view, the accessibility that you give people the options that you give people, I think sometimes in high performance, people think it's very restrictive, you have to follow certain guidelines, and you're only allowed to eat certain foods, for instance, but your expansive view of like this holistic approach to sustainable performance, almost, it's something that you can actually bring joy and bring fun into as well, is absolutely revolutionary. So I think the book kind of opened my eyes to just how restrictive maybe I thought I was being and how restrictive I don't actually need to be. So I want to thank you about that as well. But I know you're very active with the latest science and you keep on producing the most up to date science and releasing it for us all to hear. So are there any other places that people can find you and follow the journey and get the latest information? Yeah, I encourage people to come to my website and sign up for my free newsletter where I put all the latest information on a ongoing streaming sort of way. It's completely free. Come to Dr. Dr. William li dot com, Dr. William lead.com. And you can also follow me on social my handle is at Dr. Dr. William Li Li. And you know, one of the things that I do I do master classes these are completely free that I've had, like 8000 people sign up for a master class from 40 countries. It's really fun. It gives me an opportunity in live fashion to actually talk to people and deliver the latest kind of groundbreaking information that I find jaw dropping. I want to share it with the world. Of course I curated so actually it's really cool And then for people who really want to do a deep dive, I actually teach an online course for four weeks. And I also do mini courses that people can sign up for. So please come to my website, Dr. Dr. William Li li.com. Love to actually see you guys on a masterclass and get my newsletter. I'm all about contributing to the community. That's part of my mission. Incredible. And I'll share those links in the show notes as well absolutely. Eat to Beat your diet out. I think it's going to be out today, the day of the release of this podcast. So highly recommended. One of the best books I've read in a long time. It's not just in expanding your idea of what you can eat and how that can contribute to your health and your performance, but also in how we can actually just fit philosophically live in a more fun and more high performing way. So thank you so much. I know the work that you do is so so powerful. And I know there's been a lot of people that have endorsed you that are far greater than me, but I wanted to say thank you so much again, Dr. Lee for being on the show, and I look forward to jumping on one of those webinars. Thanks for having me.