Ep #19: Unlock Your Body's Potential with Ari Whitten

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This week I have something special for all of you. I interviewed Ari Whitten; somebody who I greatly admire. It’s a long one, but this podcast is packed full of information on topics you may have never even considered would help you on your fitness journey.

As a nutritionist and an energy expert, Ari is my kind of guy. He’s clued up on the science of everything he preaches and leaves no stone unturned in researching the best methods for his clients.

Tune in for incredibly in-depth insights into light-therapy and the effect that light has on our physical condition. Ari talks at length about how to maintain and leverage our biological clock. Some of this stuff may sound a little out there, but what Ari is about to teach you has changed my life and will change yours too.

If you like what you heard today, please go to iTunes and leave a review.  The more reviews we receive, the more women will learn about the podcast and learn from these lessons. If you know someone who is struggling with food, send them a link to the podcast and maybe they can find something here they haven’t heard before!

Listen to the Full Episode:

What You'll Learn from this Episode:

  • Why you should approach information and research carefully regarding fitness.
  • How to review information yourself to decide what is best for you.
  • Why light is crucial for maintaining a healthy lifestyle.
  • How it’s possible to know more than your physician when it comes to nutrition.
  • Why an ounce of prevention really is worth a pound of cure.
  • Ari’s thoughts on the most important component of your lifestyle to consider when getting healthier.

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

Pat Beaupre Becker: [00:00:38] I want to welcome Ari Whitten, the creator of The Energy Blueprint, where you can go and learn all about how to overcome your fatigue and maximize your energy levels. And I love the mission on the website, which says, a million people. He wants to reach a million people to overcome fatigue in the next five years. And with the way life is going at the speed of light, I think he's probably going to have that million well before five years.

00:01:13 Ari is also a bestselling author, nutritionist and a renowned fatigue expert. The amazing thing about Ari is that he constantly has interviews with these incredibly leading cutting edge scientists to give us practical information on how we can actually be healthy. And I think it's really ... The part I love about you is that you're a real science geek, but you're like have street smarts. I love that about you, because I'm like a street-smart kind of girl.

00:01:44 And the generosity of the information that you provide is amazing. I have a coach that's phenomenal like you, but your generosity and your continuous giving is why you're going to be so successful at reaching those million people, so I really appreciate that.

Ari Whitten: 00:02:03 Thank you, Pat. I appreciate the kind words.

Pat: 00:02:05 You're welcome. I want to also say that I signed up for The Energy Blueprint because I really thought it would help my clients. And I also as at that time I was very reliant on coffee for energy, and Ari taught me all about coffee and how it's good, but in certain ways you have to drink it. But I was always interested in more energy, and so I thought I didn't have you or offering it to people who had chronic fatigue, and I didn't have any of that, and I didn't necessarily want to or a field expert that I could communicate that to my clients.

00:02:39 But I joined anyway and I found that it's just been ... really, I've learned so much information that I didn't know. I work with weight; weight loss, and most of my clientele are women over the age of 60. And so, for me, nutrition, and mind, and thinking and how you believe things about yourself are very crucial to getting in shape. Exercise, which I know is new and that's one thing since, you have changed my life in terms, I actually go to the gym like three to four times a week now when before it was just a dream. That has been another big thing.

Ari Whitten: 00:03:17 Wonderful.

Pat: 00:03:21 Learning about circadian rhythm and sleep, especially its impact on weight loss is totally new to me. Learning about NEAT was my favorite thing in the world. You could just move in your life. You don't actually have to go to the gym, well, that's what I thought. I go to the gym anyway. I learned about hormesis, good stress, so important because so much of what I teach my clients are about stress of being willing to do hard things like being uncomfortable with your emotions in order to be successful.

00:03:52 And this is perfect to hormesis and good stress. So that was a really beautiful ... I use it a lot in terms of teaching about that now. I loved learning about the endocannabinoid system. I'm a hippie, like from the 60s. So knowing that we had something that we could impact by using the CBD oil and other things that I've also done. And the mitochondria, I can't wait to see. They're going to be a movie, a horror movie, and the all little mitochondria are going to be futures, it's so funny looking.

00:04:25 But I love understanding cell danger response triggers that you taught in Energy Blueprint. And then the light about light and healing, I bought the P300, which Aria is going to talk to you all about these things that I'm just want to talk to him about how I have been personally impacted. I've been using the P300 now and I swear, my skin has gotten amazing in really a short period of time. So that's been amazing.

00:04:52 And then there's the toxic load, a lot of the stuff you taught, and a lot of people are teaching about the toxic load. So I think the way ... Translating science goes from information to actionable items, is really where you are brilliant at, and has been very useful for me and for my clients. So I want to talk a little bit about that. And as I was going to say, and I love your daily redhead Facebook Lives, they're like my favorites.

00:05:21 You just gets up in the morning, which I could never do because I had to do the makeup and I have to do they have the hair, but Ari just gets up in the morning and turns on the video. Someday, I might be like that, but I'm not sure that I will. I want to, not talk about all of these things, obviously. And I have questions I want to ask you, but first I really wanted to just have you introduce yourself to my audience.

00:05:43 Tell us a little bit about you. How you first got on this journey. Who are your parents? Give us a little bit of information.

Ari Whitten: 00:05:52 Actually as I was listening to you ask that, I had certain ideas in mind of what I was talking about, and then you asked, "Who are your parents?" And that's actually something I don't normally talk about, but my parents, it's an interesting thing As it influenced me. My parents were actually some of ... they were into natural health and eating healthy from a natural perspective and shunning drugs and going an alternative route long before it was ever popular.

Ari Whitten: 00:06:23 In fact, when it was very, very fringe and really very few people were doing it. And part of that was actually influenced by the previous generation. My grandma, she got cancer back in the '90s, '80s, maybe 70s, and went to the Gersen clinic. I don't know if you're familiar with that.

Pat: 00:06:46 I heard about them.

Ari Whitten: 00:06:48 Natural health clinic, they put up green juices and coffee enemas.

Pat: 00:06:51 The coffee enema, right.

Ari Whitten: 00:06:54 Stuff like that. And I think also, actually not vegan, maybe they also had like raw liver and stuff like that. But anyway, she was given six weeks to live, I think she had liver cancer and went to Gersen. Everybody told her she was crazy. Her doctors, her husband, all of her friends, everybody in her family. Everybody thought she was totally nuts. And she lived actually for six more years. She cured her cancer and lived for six more years after that.

Ari Whitten: 00:07:26 She didn't die from cancer, she actually died from a brown recluse spider bite.

Pat: 00:07:30 Oh my God. That is painful.

Ari Whitten: 00:07:33 But she was healthy otherwise at that time. Six weeks to live and she lived for six years after that.

Pat: 00:07:39 That's impressive.

Ari Whitten: 00:07:41 So I think that event, her making the decision, "I'm going to go this alternative path, explore natural health," probably has made its way down the generations to me. Now, my parents, the only thing I'll mention here is that my parents were business owners, very, very hard working and started to actually suffer some, especially my dad, to suffer some complications of stress-related business stuff. Just the constant stress and not being able to sleep well, started to manifest as gut issues and he started to have diarrhea and abdominal pains and all kinds of stuff like that.

Ari Whitten: 00:08:28 He not a particularly healthy or health conscious guy that time. And then, my parents sought out what was basically one of the first preventive medicine physicians in the country. Like right when that specialty was starting to exist, and actually very close to where I live now in San Diego in a place called Del Mar, and it was a physician named Dr. Barnett Meltzer.

Ari Whitten: 00:08:58 And he's actually still in practice over there the same office some 30, 40 years later. But basically, put him on a vegetarian diet, told him to start jogging, told him to start meditating. And my dad actually did all of those things and it worked. And this was actually, I was maybe two or three years old this time. My mom was making homemade almond milk. And not everything was perfect, like they were shunning butter in favor of margarine, for example.

Pat: 00:09:35 Everybody was.

Ari Whitten: 00:09:37 Not everything was perfect, but the point is that I grew up in a very health conscious family where we had awareness of nutrition and being healthy and doing exercise and avoiding stress, meditating, and stuff like that from the time I was a baby, basically. I think that influenced my path. And then as far as me to make a very long story short, I got into health and fitness more obsessively when I was about 14 years old, for typical young teenage boy reasons.

Pat: 00:10:15 I've seen pictures of that body in those photographs on your website.

Ari Whitten: 00:10:19 Thank you.

Pat: 00:10:20 You achieved the high points.

Ari Whitten: 00:10:22 I build muscles, get abs to get girls and that sort of thing. So my interests were more fitness oriented at that time. Through a series of events, I went on to actually become a personal trainer, to get my first degree in kinesiology and personal trainer, nutritionist for many years. And then in my mid 20s I got mononucleosis, Barr virus, and was very, very hit. Was really just hit super hard by that for months with severe chronic fatigue.

Ari Whitten: 00:11:02 And that was the first thing that put fatigue and energy on my radar and shifted my focus away from this fitness, body composition, fat loss, muscle building world to health and energy specifically, because I realized in my own personal life, if you don't have energy, life sucks.

Pat: 00:11:23 You can't do anything.

Ari Whitten: 00:11:25 Nothing else matters if you don't have energy. You not only can't do any of the things that you want to do for your own selfish reasons, but you can be of service to anyone else. You can't take care of your kids, you can't take care of your family, your dog. People are taking care of you. And that was not a position I wanted to be in myself. It also made me empathize with everyone else suffering from chronic fatigue and me say, "I want to help people who are in that same situation." The next layer of the story is basically me trying to figure out stuff, like delve into the science on energy enhancement, on causes of fatigue, and just realizing that it's a mess of like all these conflicting ideas, and most of them don't even have any evidence to support them. But no real coherent understanding of what are the causes of fatigue or how to overcome fatigue. It just didn't exist. For example, you can look online about fat loss, there's obviously lots of crap information, but there's also a pretty significant body of evidence where they're comparing different diets, comparing different types of exercise and mindful eating and stressed interventions.

Ari Whitten: 00:12:51 All sorts of evidence that exist there. That sort of evidence doesn't really exist in the energy and fatigue space, just because it hasn't really been explored. There are some bits and pieces here and there, but what I wanted to do was build out a comprehensive science of our understanding of fatigue and how to overcome that. So that's what I've been dedicating my life to for the last four years now.

Pat: 00:13:19 Yeah. Amazing amount of ... When I was reviewing The Energy Blueprint and all the information, it's pretty fascinating the way done. The other thing I think is fascinating about you and the peers that you are interviewing is that I used to work at the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and we were funding stem cell research. That was part of our work. And I remember how scientists were so awkward, they could not communicate to the public. And so you had academics talking to academics, and the public was just like not really getting the information, and the papers were not really communicating.

Pat: 00:13:55 And now you are a leader in this group of people who are willing to take ... I was just reading Genius Food, and he does a really good job. Sure, I got it from you. Every book I have lately has been somehow related to one of your podcasts. The idea that we can take science and make it more useful, because if you think about how what I have read about the science of how we got into this mess with food, it was because the science was just two people making this decision and then the government making a policy. We didn't have the information to make our own decision. And I think for me, especially with the women that I'm working with over 60, we are from a different generation, aging in a different way, and part of that is, we want to know information, we're not going to just trust the doctor. Which like my dad, and people a little bit older than me, they just want to trust the doctor. Now, it's like, "Well, no. There are some good things about that and bad things about that." Because as you say, there's a lot of pseudo-science ...

Pat: 00:14:59 Is that how you say it? Pseudo?

Ari Whitten: 00:14:59 Pseudo.

Pat: 00:14:59 Pseudo-science. Yeah. And so it's a little bit ... everybody's an expert, nobody knows what they're talking about. I try and be very careful about the line of expert that I represent, knowing what I know just from books and from my own experience.

Ari Whitten: 00:15:17 Well, on that point, to digress for a minute on that point. The whole MD conventional medicine thing is interesting, because I know lots of older people especially who look at their doctor as the expert. "This doctor, he is or she is the health expert and I trust whatever their opinion is." Most people have no clue, and most of those people who trust their doctors, they have no clue that their MD physician has never taken a single course on nutrition or a single course on exercise, or a single course on any of the other lifestyle factors that are the major causes of chronic diseases.

Ari Whitten: 00:16:05 This is the epitome of absurdities in the world, is that we have people who are looked at as health authorities, and people go and ask them questions on nutrition or healthy lifestyle habits and those people have received no education whatsoever on those subjects, virtually nothing. Of course, some of them are highly educated on those subjects, those people who have gone-

Pat: 00:16:35 Gone out of their way ...

Ari Whitten: 00:16:37 To educate themselves through their own reading and their own pursuit of various outside of conventional medicine trainings. But again, most people just have no clue how ignorant those people are. And in fact it's worse than that because many of those physicians have actually been taught in their curriculum that, "Oh, diet, is insignificant. Exercise is insignificant, or lifestyle is insignificant." Or they just have a very surface level understanding in, "Oh, go on a diet and less calories than start an exercise program, or get some sleep."

Ari Whitten: 00:17:19 they don't really understand hardly anything in this realm. Again, what most people don't realize is that they can actually know more about those subjects than their doctor does in literally a month of intensive reading. Again, that's to generalize across most MDs. There are of course exceptions of MDs who are highly educated and highly intelligent and extremely knowledgeable. But I'd say 99 plus percent of them are totally clueless when it comes to nutrition and lifestyle.

Pat: 00:18:00 Yeah, which is so crazy because, I mean, all the research is there to say, "It's time to wake up." This is crazy. The proof is there. That's why I appreciate all these scientists who are communicating that. And I think that is a difference ... It's also the opportunity of the internet, we have this opportunity to communicate in ways we never had before, so it's great to see you and your colleagues take advantage of it. It's also a benefit-

Ari Whitten: 00:18:27 Yeah. I'll just add one more thing on this point, which is, the flip side of it ... of course I just feel compelled to issue this warning is, the flip side is there's lots of crap information online as well. There's lots of pseudo-science on the subject, especially in the realm of nutrition. As a consumer, you do have to be careful with your sources of information. It is possible to know much more about science than your physician does, about nutrition and lifestyle habits. It's also possible to read pseudoscientific nonsense from diet gurus who are writing stuff that's seemingly scientific, but is actually garbage information.

Ari Whitten: 00:19:14 It's also possible to become very confused if you're ... if you don't have good sources of information.

Pat: 00:19:20 Well, that's actually a lot of what I want to talk about, because I think that is important. And I know you might want to talk about cherry picking and how, because every day on the news, there was just one the other day, pasta can help you lose weight, because they did one research study where they gave somebody pasta, but then of course they kept saying, "But only once or twice a week and don't eat it a lot." But that's not what the headline says. The headline says, "Pasta will help you lose weight."

Pat: 00:19:47 So if you could just do a little, just a short thing on cherry picking and how ... I know for you, I think what I've learned from you is the metadata is the way to go. So maybe you could say a little bit about that.

Ari Whitten: 00:19:58 Yeah, sure. There's actually two problems here that you're alluding to. One is the media who routinely misrepresent the studies that they are actually talking about and create very misleading headlines. That's one issue that's not even necessarily cherry picking, it's just that they're trying to report on particular study, and trying to create a sexy headline to get their article read and shared, but in the process, the sexy headline and the way they write it actually misrepresents the actual study and what it's actually saying.

Ari Whitten: 00:20:38 So that's one issue, that's one problem. But the much bigger problem is cherry picking. And for people that are unfamiliar with this term, basically it's like this; whenever we're talking about any particular subject, let's just take weight loss for an example, and comparing let's say vegan diets versus Atkins diets. And there's still on that particular subject, there's a body of evidence. And what that means is there's a whole bunch of studies that have been conducted by different researchers all over the world that have done experiments that are relevant to this low carb versus higher carb question.

Ari Whitten: 00:21:26 Now, if I am a vegan who ... A lot of the vegan diet gurus really are kind of very anti the low carb movement. Well, they might cherry pick, they might selectively quote and cite the specific studies that they like that support their particular views. This is often like studies that showed a low carber has maybe lost weight but they also increased their LDL and their blood level lipid profile was suggestive of higher risk of cardiovascular disease, or something to that effect.

Ari Whitten: 00:22:07 They're going to selectively cite the studies that support their views, and their preconceived notions, and leave out all of the evidence that conflicts with that. Similarly, low carb advocates do the same. They cite only the studies that showed that there was an advantage to low carb diet, and they leave out all that other evidence that doesn't fit nicely within their preconceived notions that shows that low carb is actually no better than other diets, than the Mediterranean diet or the Ornish diet or whatever, in the long term.

Ari Whitten: 00:22:42 So that cherry picking, of people selectively citing only the evidence that supports their agenda and their biases is a huge problem, and it perpetuates a massive amount of confusion in the general public, they are constantly reading one cherry-picked view or another, and then they're like, "Well, everything's conflicting. I don't understand. This person says this, this person says that, I don't know who to believe."

Ari Whitten: 00:23:10 Or they just maybe don't even get exposed to multiple perspectives, they only get exposed to one perspective, and they are convinced that's the truth, the whole truth, everybody else is an idiot who doesn't know what they're talking about. It's perpetuating a lot of confusion, and almost all of the information perpetuated by most diet gurus, most health gurus is cherry picked. Unfortunately, most people have more of an allegiance to their particular biases and their agendas than to the actual evidence, to what the evidence says.

Ari Whitten: 00:23:49 For me, my allegiance is to the evidence. If there is evidence that comes out that says something I said previously was wrong, then you can expect me to post and send an email out to all of my audience saying, "Hey, I was wrong about this thing. Here's the newest study that says Dot, dot, dot, dot, dot." Most people are not willing to do that. And so they leave that stuff out, they ignore it, they hope no one else sees it, and then they just say the stuff that supports their views.

Ari Whitten: 00:24:23 In this context, scientific literacy is very important. And scientific literacy is basically the ability to read and understand science. Now, it's one thing to be able to read a particular study or like an article and understand a particular piece of research, and that's good, that's obviously important and necessary, but real scientific literacy has to be able to evaluate an entire body of evidence and to be able to look at the individual studies and look at all of them, and then form a picture of, "Well, this one says this, this one says the opposite. This one says both of those things are wrong and that neither of those things is correct."

Ari Whitten: 00:25:11 And then you form a picture of what is the all of the different studies, what do they say. And sometimes, they're all pointing in one direction consistently, sometimes they're all pointing in the other direction. Sometimes there's contradictory data, so you say, "Oh, there's no significant effect of whatever this thing is." Now, everybody who's listening is like, "Well, I don't have time ... I don't have hundreds of hours to go explore all the individual studies." Well, fortunately, there's something called the hierarchy of evidence.

Ari Whitten: 00:25:41 And the hierarchy of evidence, and you feel free to do a Google image search.

Pat: 00:25:45 I actually have done this already.

Ari Whitten: 00:25:48 You can get a picture of what I'm talking about, where basically there's different levels of evidence in as far as how they are viewed within the scientific community, in terms of their weight and their importance within the overall body of evidence. So a particular individual study that is not well-designed, that is maybe what's called an observational study, it maybe has lots of confounding variables, and maybe didn't have many participants. That's a very low level of evidence.

Ari Whitten: 00:26:17 And you have better-controlled studies, animal studies, better-controlled studies, test tube studies; very low levels of evidence. And then better, better, better controlled human Studies with big sizes, long-term, controlling for all potential confounding variables. Those are good studies. Strong evidence. And then at the top, you have what are called systematic literature reviews and meta-analyses, which are basically where researchers go out and they do a literature review.

Ari Whitten: 00:26:53 You don't have to do all of it. They look at all of the evidence, they make sure that the studies adhered to particular standards of how they were conducted, that they were conducted well so they don't include of core studies, and then they lump it all together, and then they do a big statistical analysis and say, "Based on our review of the evidence and our statistical analysis, the weight of the overall body of evidence says that things are pointing in this direction, or that they're pointing in this direction, or that there is no effective plan."

Ari Whitten: 00:27:29 That's the peak of the hierarchy of evidence, that's the strongest evidence. Is actual researchers went out and reviewed the entire body of evidence, and they found this. Again, just to wrap this idea up, unfortunately, what a lot of diet gurus are doing is they're not looking at those systematic literature reviews and their views are not aligned with the overall body of evidence. What they're doing instead is they're selecting, this one over here. This you over here. "I like this one and this one and this one. Those support my views, but I'm going to leave out those 20 others that don't support my views and make sure that none of my audience sees any of those."

Pat: 00:28:14 Well, this actually is a perfect segue to my next question. I wanted to talk about ... So my clients again, they want to lose weight and mostly they are women who have struggled with food and diets, yo-yo dieting all their lives. And so we see how overwhelming it can be to make these decisions on what to read, what to believe in and even in terms of all of the things that you teach. I want to ask you, if someone's not necessarily having symptoms of fatigue, but they know that they have had a lifetime of bad eating, so they know they need to clean up their act. How do you decide ...

Pat: 00:28:56 For me, it's like, "Let's change your food." That's important. The most important thing is to eat 100% whole food, look at the quantities, what are you eating? And then there's the timing. But when you talk about light and the circadian rhythm and all of these additional things, the mitochondria, like if you were going to say you have all these areas where are you going to... you need to pay attention to your life.

Pat: 00:29:25 Like even for me, I haven't gotten to that toxic load yet. I haven't done anything about that, and now I'm considering it from your last podcast of doing a liver detox. Where do you recommend, almost like what's the best bang for your buck? If you're going to pick five areas of clean up, and maybe it depends on your symptoms, but what would you generally recommend?

Pat: 00:29:48 Diet and exercise is pretty much what everyone recommends, and I would certainly recommend that.

Ari Whitten: 00:29:53 Yeah. Context is important here. Are we talking about someone who wants to overcome chronic fatigue? Are we talking about someone who wants to lose weight?

Pat: 00:30:02 They want to lose weight and they want to become healthy in their 60s. So they may be experience some symptoms of not having a lot of energy, but I'm not talking about chronic fatigue so much.

Ari Whitten: 00:30:15 I would say one of the big ones is circadian rhythm. Circadian rhythm is basically our 24-hour biological clock. It's a literal clock that is built into our brains. It's in a place called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, and basically, its job is ... its many, many jobs are to control all kinds of hormones and neurotransmitters that affect energy, that affect metabolism, that affect calorie burning, that affect appetite and hunger hormones. All kinds of different things, almost everything is affected by circadian rhythm.

Ari Whitten: 00:31:02 Now, if this sounds like a strange idea, like this clock built into our brains, like What the hell is this guy talking about. Let's just consider for a moment that every night when it gets dark outside, a few hours after the sun goes down, you all of the sudden get tired and sleepy. And then for some weird reason, you spend the next eight hours in your bed in darkness sleeping, in a totally different state of consciousness.

Ari Whitten: 00:31:33 And then the next morning when it gets light out, you all of the sudden, for no voluntary choice of your own, you wake up and you start to feel more energetic and then you start to get out of bed and then you do all these things throughout the whole rest of the day where you're in a different state of consciousness, waking consciousness, and you do everything you need to do during the day. And then guess what? On a particular time the next day, you feel sleepy again and then it's time to go to sleep, and your whole consciousness shifts.

Ari Whitten: 00:32:02 So the circadian rhythm is the 24-hour clock in your brain that is regulating all of the neurotransmitters and hormones that are responsible for this very common everyday observation that we all do: We go to sleep, we wake up, we have more energy. Sometimes we're in a waking consciousness, sometimes we're in a sleeping consciousness, other times ... It's your 24-hour clock that regulates that. But it's not just going to sleep and waking up that it's doing, its regulating dozens of hormones and neurotransmitters that are affecting all kinds of things.

Ari Whitten: 00:32:36 Obviously, in the context of energy, it's having a huge impact on neurotransmitters and hormones that affect energy levels, but in the context of fat loss specifically, it's doing two things of note; one is that it will increase calorie intake when you have a disrupted circadian rhythm. Your appetite will go up, your hunger will go up, your cravings will go up.

Ari Whitten: 00:33:01 Specifically, they found that cravings for sugary and fatty processed foods go up. Now, in the context of weight loss, success is all about adherence, long-term adherence to consistently doing the right things when it comes to lifestyle habits nutrition choices. Well, if you have a disrupted circadian rhythm, it's going to impact not consciously, but on a hormonal and neurotransmitter level, is going to impact your ability to actually follow through with that particular nutrition plan that you are on.

Ari Whitten: 00:33:38 What ends up happening as a result of disrupted circadian rhythm is people end up eating more, people end up deviating from their nutrition plan more and over time, enough significant deviations of eating more and not sticking to their nutrition plan, results in fat gain or stalling of fat loss. And they will, "Well, I'm trying to stick to the plan and I'm doing my best," but they can't and it's because on a neurotransmitter and hormonal level, their body is not cooperating. So that's one side, that's the calories inside of the equation.

Ari Whitten: 00:34:12 On the other side, disrupted circadian rhythm is also impacting the calories outside of the equation, it's decreasing energy levels, it's decreasing metabolic rate, it's decreasing the neurotransmitters and hormones that regulate one's desire, then this is part of energy levels, but one's desire to actually get up out of the chair and move your body and do what you mentioned earlier, doing NEAT, Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis, which is just gentle movement throughout the day.

Ari Whitten: 00:34:45 It also decreases your motivation to get up and go to the gym and do a workout. It also decreases your desire to actually perform in the gym and work hard. So it's doing all of these things that are suddenly decreasing the calories outside of the equation. So it's shifting this calories in and calories out equation towards calories in and away from calories out, which is basically, subtly sabotaging your whole fat loss efforts. Now, here's the key thing to understand. Our modern world is perfectly built to disrupt our circadian rhythm, to disrupt this clock in our brain, through no fault of our own, through no decisions of our own.

Ari Whitten: 00:35:32 This isn't about your willpower to do stuff that you already knew you shouldn't be doing, like you shouldn't have McDonald's, you shouldn't have pizza and ice cream and so on. Everybody already knows they shouldn't do that, so it's framed as mostly a matter of willpower in that context, is only partial truth to that, but in this context, we are all growing up in a world and in an environment, that is totally out of harmony with our biological design in terms of our circadian rhythm.

Ari Whitten: 00:36:05 Now, what do I mean by this? The circadian clock in our brain is wired by a few things, but in particular, by light. It is light that primarily controls your circadian rhythm. And it's actually primarily blue light, so light in the visible blue spectrum. For example, if you look up at a blue sky, that's blue light. Also part of the sun, even though the sun has more of an orangey, yellowy sort of look to it, and it's because it's a very broad spectrum of light, but a big part of the light that is emitting is blue.

Ari Whitten: 00:36:44 Blue light goes into our eyeballs, feeds back through the neurons into our brain, into the suprachiasmatic nucleus and back to circadian clock in our brain and tells your brain, "It's daytime, it's the time to be awake, alert, active, energetic." And then after the sun goes down-

Pat: 00:37:04 We turn on the lights.

Ari Whitten: 00:37:06 Well, in a natural context, the way it's designed to work is, after the sun goes down, it becomes dark out, and the only sources of light available at that point are the moon, the stars, which are very dim sources of light and firelight. Historically, it was fire, we'd sit around the fire for a few hours after the sun went down. And firelight is interesting because it has almost no blue light. It's mostly orange and yellow and red, and then also has invisible in the near infrared and far infrared spectrum, but basically, it's a light source with very little blue light if not almost no blue light at all.

Ari Whitten: 00:37:56 So we can sit around a fire and be just fine, it's basically the equivalent of darkness. And so that is how our circad ... That's the environment that our circadian rhythm is designed to get. Now, there's one more aspect of that, which is ancestrally, humans lived outdoors. So let's just imagine like Native Americans in a teepee and what did they ... It's not like they hang out in their teepee all day, on their computers and iPhone. As soon as it's light out, they get up, they get out of their teepee and they go do whatever they have to do.

Ari Whitten: 00:38:32 They gather food or hunt or field or get water, whatever it is, care for children, but they're outside from the first moments of the day after they wake up, they go outside, they're in bright light. Now, again, the sun goes down, it gets dark, firelight, moonlight, starlight. Mostly dim, no sources of blue light. No basically, no sources of blue light. Now, what does the modern world do? Well, most of us wake up, we are in our houses, we don't go outside, we get almost no natural light whatsoever.

Ari Whitten: 00:39:17 We're in very dim indoor light, outdoor light is in contrast at least 100 or a thousand times brighter than the light we're typically in indoors, and then we're indoors almost all day. Many modern humans I'm shocked, when I ask people this question, but many people tell me they spend almost no time at all on a daily basis outdoors. They're indoors almost all the time apart from like, walking out of a building to the parking lot, to get into their car, just like a few moments of outdoor time each day.

Ari Whitten: 00:39:55 And then after the sun goes down, well, you turn on all the bright lights in your house and you stare at computer screens, and phones, and iPads, and TVs, and all of these sources of artificial light, which include lots of blue light. So the signaling to our brain, to our circadian clock has changed, and is basically now chronically disrupting our 24 hour clock in our brain. The way that you want to think about this is, it's designed to work as kind of a peak and valley. So you want a big peak of energy awake alertness, wakefulness and so on, lots of light, and then you want a valley. You want darkness, you want to send a strong signal to your body, "It's the time to rest, regenerate and sleep."

Ari Whitten: 00:40:49 Well, what most people are doing in the modern world is, they don't have enough light and they have too much light in the evening. So they're chronically blunting the peak and the valley, and you've probably heard of seasonal affective disorder, fatigue, depression. Those are the kinds of things that result from disrupted circadian rhythm, but it also shifts your physiology, your hormones towards that gain as well. This is a big factor that's impacting body composition and fat loss tremendously, and it's mostly outside of people's awareness.

Ari Whitten: 00:41:29 What's actually going on, they have this big thing influencing their hormones and they have no idea.

Pat: 00:41:34 So are they studying like the effects of cancer? Obviously, we have an increase in lots of diseases that we can ... I can think about food in terms of the kinds of food we're eating, but this must be a big part of it as well then, because it's huge.

Ari Whitten: 00:41:49 It is. And the main way that it's studied, you have to be able to study like particular groups, is how it generally works. They typically will study like night shift workers, for example, and then you can look at disease rates, you can take people who are all females, all of a particular age range, all of a particular body composition, all married and control for all those variables, the only difference is one group works day shifts, one group works night shifts and they can look at rates of cancer and diabetes and heart disease and obesity and so on.

Ari Whitten: 00:42:27 And yes, they find many, many differences in disease outcomes between day shift workers and night shift workers. The other group that you can look to is what are called night owl chronotypes, and these are people who are ... people have probably heard of night owls versus morning people or early birds. You can look at people who are more early birds versus more night owls, people who tend to stay up later and wake up later, and you can look at diabetes, and obesity, and cancer and so on.

Ari Whitten: 00:43:01 And pretty much the vast majority of studies find significantly increased rates of many, many diseases associated with being a night owl or associated with night shift work. So yes, we definitely know that disrupted circadian rhythm does impact apart from body composition and fat loss, and apart from energy, it does impact many diseases as well.

Pat: 00:43:28 Wow. It's fascinating because I know that I have ... And you teach a lot about this in the Energy Blueprint and you have a whole protocols, and I have to say, I don't really do very many of them. I do a little bit, but it's almost like hard for my brain to wrap around how important it is. It's like, it'll come, it's coming, but it's fascinating because it's very new to hear this. It makes sense, it's very logical and obviously, the studies, but it is one of those things. So that would be ...

Pat: 00:44:02 And I do teach about stress and I do talk about it, but I guess really, when I do it myself, then I feel much better about being able to teach it, because I could see how hard it is to make that behavioral change. So I have to do the work myself, but I do recommend it, but I have to say, I have to get better at doing it. So that's very informative, because I think you're right, I don't think a lot of people know about it. All right. So we talk about lights and now you have these other forms of light. You've got the saunas, so there's lots of different things about light that you use in your practice. Is it all based on ... That's not based on circadian rhythm, that's more about the healing properties of light, correct?

Ari Whitten: 00:44:48 Yeah. Good question. Light is a big part of the work that I do. And the way I break it down is that there are five bioactive forms of light. That in itself is an interesting concept because most people do not think of light in this context, as being bioactive, as doing things to your cells in your body. We normally think of light as, "Light is just, I flip a switch and turn a light on in a room so I can see stuff and light is what allows me to see, it's the opposite of darkness." That's how we think of light, but light is so, so much more than that and most people just have no idea.

Ari Whitten: 00:45:28 Five bio-active forms of light; one is blue light, which we just covered and that is acting through the eyes on the brain called the circadian rhythm. And by the way, none of this is controversial, I'm not telling you any wacky like crazy idea. There's huge bodies of evidence on all of this, it's just that most people again, don't think of light in these terms and most people are unaware of this research. Blue light is one, UV light is another, and this is another one that people have some familiarity with.

Ari Whitten: 00:46:05 Most people are familiar with the idea that UV light helps them synthesize vitamin D. Yeah, UV light is bioactive, UV light specifically UVB, is hitting your skin and is causing chemical reactions there that lead to the synthesis of vitamin D sulfate, which is a critical compound that regulates the expression of over 2,000 of your genes. That's one thing, then there's also another compound called cholesterol sulfate, which some researchers think might be almost as important as vitamin D and most people don't even talk about it or most people I've no idea about its existence.

Ari Whitten: 00:46:48 Cholesterol sulfate is another compound that we synthesize in our skin from UVB exposure. Then UVA also has different sets of effects, it affects our eyes, it affects the dilation of blood vessels. There's also indication that these UV frequencies may help do things to our immune system and fight off infections and things like that, and can actually irradiate your blood through the capillaries in your skin and so on. So that's another, that's the second one. So blue light, UV light.

Ari Whitten: 00:47:24 The third one is far infrared. And this is invisible, we can't see it with the naked eye, you can see it with certain kinds of like night vision cameras and so on, but you can actually feel it. So when you're out in the sun and you feel the warmth of the rays of the sun, that's primarily far infrared energy that's hitting you, far infrared radiation from the sun. That word radiation, scares people, but the sun's rays are light radiation, electromagnetic radiation. Basically, the way that breaks down, if people want to do a Google image search of the electromagnetic spectrum, you can see that X-rays to radio waves, and then part of that spectrum is the visible light spectrum, so violet, and blue, green, yellow, orange, red.

Ari Whitten: 00:48:24 And then as you get out of red then it transitions into near infrared and then far infrared, and those are both invisible to the human eye. Some other species can conceive things in those spectrum like bees for example, you might have seen like nature documentaries, where they sometimes will show what a bee sees when it looks at a flower versus what a human sees. And a bee sees all kinds of different colors that a human eye doesn't see. So visible spectrum then near infrared, far infrared. Far infrared is heat primarily, and that does a number of things in our body. There's some research from a guy named Gerald Pollack, that indicates that it may have all kinds of effects on boosting energy production in our cells. It does things to the viscosity of water in our cells and may affect the ability of the cells to function well, on a general broad level. And then it also does things that are maybe more approachable with the current scientific paradigms, like increased blood circulation, promotes sweating and detoxification and so on, like far infrared saunas.

Ari Whitten: 00:49:44 And then, the last two kinds of bioactive light are; red light and near-infrared light. And red and near infrared, the reason I lump them together is because they basically act through the same pathways, the same physiological pathways and cellular mechanisms. There's actually over 5,000 studies on this subject alone, if somebody is interested in going on PubMed, you can look up low-level laser therapy. Low-level laser therapy uses red or near-infrared wavelengths. And there's also, they do it not just with lasers, but with LEDs.

Ari Whitten: 00:50:23 There's a lot more research on LEDs now, but basically, wavelengths of light in the red and near- infrared spectrum are bioactive. They do things to human cells and in this particular case, they're doing very, very profound things to human cells. There's a few different pathways that are going on, but I'll just name a couple of them. One is that it's acting directly on the mitochondria in your cells, which are our cellular energy generators. And those light photons from red in your infrared light, hit your mitochondria and they hit a specific part of them called cytochrome c oxidase, which is what's called the photo acceptor.

Ari Whitten: 00:51:12 Basically, what that means is it accepts a photon, it kind of takes a light photon in and then does something, trigger some reaction from the energy of that photon. In this case, what it's doing is, basically the mitochondria is taking that energy in from light and using it to help manufacture ATP, which is cellular energy. So think about this for a second, our cells, human cells, can use light to turn into energy. Pretty cool, because we used to think like only plants could do that.

Ari Whitten: 00:51:53 There are only plants take in light, they have chlorophyll, which is by the way, a photo acceptor and takes in light and then uses that light through various chemical reactions to synthesize energy and carbohydrate and facilitate plant growth and so on, and do that cellular respiration processes of taking in carbon dioxide and producing oxygen and so on. Humans can do it too in a somewhat analogous process, we're taking in some light energy and that can be used to facilitate the production of cellular energy in ourselves.

Ari Whitten: 00:52:33 Now, that light doesn't penetrate all the way through our body, though if you take a flashlight and you put it on your finger, which many kids do, they take it and they shine it and they see that, "Oh my gosh, I can see the light going through my fingernails." Well, if you notice, the color of that light that actually penetrates through your fingernail is mostly red. And that's because red actually penetrates more deeply through human tissue than any other red and near-infrared than any other part of the spectrum.

Ari Whitten: 00:53:09 It penetrates, the deepest it would go is maybe about an inch deep. Most of it is staying more at the surface, the first few millimeters of skin and then a portion of that if you're using a high power light especially, a portion of it will get significantly deeper. So it's not getting all the way down through inches of muscle, all the way into your bone or something like that, but some of these lights are indeed strong enough to get light through the human skull into the brain for example.

Ari Whitten: 00:53:44 Basically, this latest facilitating energy production ... Another thing that it's doing is, it's acting through hormesis actually, and this is another principle we can describe more deeply maybe later if we want to get into that. But basically, what it's doing is creating a very small burst of free radicals of reactive oxygen species and as a result, it triggers your internal cellular antioxidant and anti inflammatory defense mechanisms. So by doing that, it's like exercise. Exercise works in the same way.

Ari Whitten: 00:54:24 Exercise creates a small burst of free radicals that stimulates your cells to build up their internal antioxidant, anti-inflammatory defense systems and makes them stronger. While red and near-infrared light can operate through the same mechanisms. And they positively affect basically the resilience of the cell and the mitochondria the ability to respond to stressors and handle stressors as well as they positively affect genes that regulate inflammation, so they can suppress chronic inflammation for example. Now, this technology is used in clinics all over the world to accelerate wound healing, healing from injuries, to enhance brain function. There are trials on Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Ari Whitten: 00:55:14 There's trials on depression, enhancing muscular performance, enhancing fat loss, an anti-aging skin benefits. As you mentioned, that's definitely a big one. All kinds of different things, I actually have a book that I just finished writing that's going to come up.

Pat: 00:55:30 Yeah. I've been waiting for this book.

Ari Whitten: 00:55:33 Yeah. I have 5,000 studies on that. Those are the five bioactive forms of light. And basically, the message is, light is a drug, light is bioactive, light is affecting your cells and most people have what's called mal-illumination, which is the equivalent of malnutrition. So if you think of light as important as nutrition is, and then you consider what kinds of light most people are getting, what are the types of light are they getting, all the different types of light they need. What's the dose of those things? Are they getting things in the right dose?

Ari Whitten: 00:56:12 You realize very quickly that most people if you look at their light intake, as in the context of diet, most people are on a light diet that is equivalent to eating nothing but McDonald's French fries, chicken nuggets and doughnuts and ice cream.

Pat: 00:56:30 Wow. that's fascinating. It's fascinating. Well, that's pretty cool. What we mostly know at least, about the sun and light it's like, it's dangerous, you'll get skin cancer. That's the biggest thing, I know even my daughter when she studied nutrition and she was like, "You need to go out in the sun to create your melatonin and then take up a few sunglasses and don't put on sunscreen and then you read an article that says, if there's one thing I can teach my daughter, but she always wear sunscreen." What is the balance of that in terms of getting my thing in the sun and then worrying about like for me, I've had skin damage from the sun?

Ari Whitten: 00:57:14 It's a good question and I don't have a perfect answer for you, one that's going to satisfy everyone watching, because there isn't a perfect answer and I'll give you ... Just to put this in a proper context, exercise is good. Well, is it possible to over exercise?

Pat: 00:57:34 Absolutely.

Ari Whitten: 00:57:35 We know that for example, this is a phenomenon in college, a female athletes for example, very common. If they do too much exercise, they become infertile, they get amenorrhea, they lose their period and they have various other symptoms that are associated with that, negative symptoms. So exercise is this beautiful, wonderfully healthy effect, that we need to be healthy, but, if you do too much of it, then you can get some problems. One more thing just for reference, water. Water's pretty healthy. Well, if I consume a gallon of water, let's say two gallons of water in the next 10 minutes, I will put myself into a coma and cause irreparable brain damage. Water.

Ari Whitten: 00:58:25 Is it possible to also do too much sun and get certain negative effects from too much sun? Yeah, absolutely. Sunburn, potentially increased rates 58:35

Pat: 00:58:34 It's like putting baby oil on your face then getting a reflector. That's what we did, baby oil with a reflector.

Ari Whitten: 00:58:44 Is it possible to do too much sun and get problems? Yes. Potentially sun damage, potentially wrinkles, potentially skin cancer. Yes. Those things are possible. However, and this is a very, very big and important however. If you actually look at the overall body of evidence, going back to what I talked previously about not cherry picking, not being myopic, and how you look the evidence, but looking at the full body of evidence, what you find is that, increased sun exposure is linked with reduced rates of dozens of types of cancer as well as dozens of types of other diseases.

Ari Whitten: 00:59:27 In other words, let me put this in context. You can get potentially increased rates of skin cancer from doing lots of sun, but at the same time, you also reduce your rates of dozens and dozens of other diseases. So that's like to put this in other terms, "I want you to do exercise. Now, if you do too much you can get hypothalamic amenorrhea and lose your period and become infertile, or you can also reduce your risk of dozens and dozens of different diseases. That's the context to understand sun exposure and-

Pat: 01:00:05 I think that's a perfect explanation.

Ari Whitten: 01:00:08 Thank you. And the one other aspect that I'll add to this is, even with the skin cancer thing, most people would be shocked to learn that skin cancer is actually way more common in indoor workers than it is in outdoor workers.

Pat: 01:00:24 Really?

Ari Whitten: 01:00:24 Yes. What seems to be really problematic is not sun exposure per se, but infrequent, irregular sun exposure and too high doses. To make this very easily understandable, someone who is a desk job worker, who's indoors all the time, who goes on a vacation to Hawaii and gets fried because they're laying through all the day. Lots of frequent events like that, can potentially cause skin cancer. But, I actually would not worry, this is me personally based on my evaluation of the evidence, I would not worry about somebody who's getting lots of sun exposure on a daily basis, very frequently, very consistently, not getting sunburnt at all because they've built up a tent with melanin and their skin has adapted to that UVA exposure and they're getting sun on a regular basis.

Ari Whitten: 01:01:26 That's the situation you want to be in. That's what I do myself based on my evaluation of hundreds of studies on this subject, and what I think is the way to get all of the benefits with basically no risk whatsoever.

Pat: 01:01:43 It's fascinating when you think how, and so when I was a kid we just went in the sun, sunburns and healing, it was terrible disgusting summer. You'd be like you couldn't walk. Then we learned, "Now, no sun." That was like, slather up, every day, make sure you have no sun. And then as I said, when my daughter was like, maybe eight years ago, she was like, "No. You shouldn't do that. You need to have a little sun. I'm not putting any sunscreen on." And it was shocking to me.

Pat: 01:02:11 I understand that this is again, this is a slow adaption. Now, I know, it's like we have these reactions to what we have taken in to be true and now we have to change what we believe to be true, which is based on science. I appreciate that because I still was not really clear on that part of it, so I really appreciate that.

Ari Whitten: 01:02:31 There's one other aspect that I'll mention here which is, diet actually plays into the sun exposure thing, because many compounds in the diet determine your skin's ability to adapt to UVA exposure. For example, polyphenols and things like blueberries and pomegranates, the phytochemicals in things like cacao, Sulforaphane and cruciferous vegetables, especially in broccoli, turmeric, Astaxanthin, which is an important compound found in seafood, the pink pigment. All of those have been shown to basically act as internal sunscreens.

Ari Whitten: 01:03:21 When you consume lots of those in your diet, you'll notice you can go out in the sun and the level of sun exposure that used to burn you, doesn't burn you anymore, it's then your skin just gets tan and adapted to the sun instead of burning. Now, what's going on at a cellular level ... That's the observation kind of the macro level, but what's actually going on at the cellular level is, whether your skin cells have the resiliency to adapt to this very intense UV light exposure which is potentially DNA damaging, it's a stressor.

Pat: 01:03:53 Hormesis?

Ari Whitten: 01:03:55 Exactly. And whether your cells have the ability to adapt to that and respond and be able to essentially eliminate the pathological aspect of that stressor, through creating melanin and creating this barrier to absorb that energy or whether it just results in DNA damage and then causes sunburn and potentially contributes to increased rates of cancer and so on. I mentioned that kind of like irregular sun exposure is problematic. I will also add one layer also which is irregular sun exposure in somebody who's eating a poor diet that is deficient in all of these polyphenols, all of these phytochemicals that are internal sunscreens, that allow our cells to adapt properly to the sun. That situation is the real problem with skin cancer.

Pat: 01:04:51 That's fascinating. I did not know that at all. And I eat every single thing that you've mentioned. I have to say. I have such a good diet, I'm so thrilled. I wanted to do one little thing and I don't even know if I really want to bring this up, but I know that I've been following a lot of the longevity, and especially was the longevity diet. There is a lot of contradiction because he says, "No. If you're over 65, you should have three meals. You don't need to do intermittent fasting."

Pat: 01:05:25 And then there's all this little bits about the best. And I think for me, as I believe with my clients, it's what work. You have to pick what works, what you're going to be able to stick with. But sometimes people like to experiment, they want to try something new. What are your thoughts on intermittent fasting for an older population say?

Ari Whitten: 01:05:51 I don't totally agree with Dr. Valter Longo on this point. I think there is legitimacy and truth in what he's expressing, but I think it's a little bit more nuanced than this. The reason that he generally advises against it is, one of the problems that occurs as people get into older ages is they lose muscle mass and they become more frail and they just lose body mass. And the loss of body mass is then linked with potentially higher risk of like breaking bones and falling and just becoming more frail.

Ari Whitten: 01:06:28 Statistically, when you actually do the mathematical statistical analysis of how body weight is linked with particular health outcomes and longevity, you find that frail people and very skinny people without much body mass, actually have higher rates of a lot of these health problems. Again, just maintaining body mass and especially muscle is important as you get older. Having said that, my preferred way of doing that is not to just tell people to eat more, it's to tell people to be physically active, do weight training, do strength training and particular, maintain your muscle mass through activity.

Ari Whitten: 01:07:18 And then I'm fine with people of really any age, maybe not kids, but people of any age doing some intermittent fasting. And I view this as, human biology is actually wired for occasional periods without food or with very little food. And in my view, this is just simulating the environment that our biology evolved in for millions of years. I don't think it's a problem to occasionally do a little bit of fasting here and there regardless of whether you're 34 like me, or you're 85.

Pat: 01:08:00 Okay. Good. Good to know and I do agree that, with exercises, where are you're going to keep your muscle anyway? Because even if you eat that extra meal, it doesn't mean your muscles are going to stay in shape.

Ari Whitten: 01:08:12 Exactly. And I also don't completely agree with him on his recommendations, for example, for protein intake for younger people, for people of my age. If I took in his amount of protein that he recommends for someone of my age, I would lose 40 pounds of muscle in the next three months, just by making that change and doing what he says in that way. I think it needs to be a little bit more nuanced for the individual, and according to body size, muscle mass and physical activity levels.

Ari Whitten: 01:08:49 I generally agree with most of what he says and I think he's great and I really love his work, so I'll be clear about that, but I think specifically his recommendations around protein and meal, kind of the issue that you brought up meal frequency, could be more nuanced.

Pat: 01:09:08 Yeah. I think that one thing that ... I actually already told my husband is if I get diagnosed with anything severe, I'm going on a fast for a week. I'm going up to this place, I'm going to have medical fast, because everything I have read says that fasting actually is that hormesis, can prepare your body for healing in a way whatever. Whether it's cancer, whether it's, you know.

Ari Whitten: 01:09:31 And I would actually go one step further and say, "Do it before you get it [crosstalk 01:09:38]." Because the reality is with most diseases is that-

Pat: 01:09:43 They started way long-

Ari Whitten: 01:09:45 If they've progressed enough, it's mostly a losing battle. Now, some cases, you can reverse some things for example, diabetes is pretty easy to reverse. But at a certain point, in a disease process, especially with something like cancer, it's very, very hard to reverse it. So it's much, much better to actually do stuff preventively and prevent it from happening in the first place. You know the old cliché saying, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," it's really, really true. It's much better to be on the offensive and actively doing stuff to promote good health before you get diagnosed with anything, than to then go, "Oh, I just was diagnosed with something, now I'm ready to take my health seriously."

Ari Whitten: 01:10:31 Which is what most people do, and unfortunately, it's too late at that point, or you can still make some progress, but it's mostly a losing battle in a lot of cases.

Pat: 01:10:42 Okay. Well, I take that to heart, I'll have to plan that into my vacation a week away, which sounds like a fun to me actually. I'm excited about the idea of it, but I'm a little nuts. If you were going to ... I know it's just getting, we've been for a while here. What would you want to say to my audience, like the most important thing? I think that the most important thing and you talked about it at the end of your last podcast is, "Be well, enjoy your life. Don't be freaked out about ... " If partly looking at that toxic stuff, it's like, "Oh my God, there's so many things." It's like you could freak yourself out. And then you're not living well.

Pat: 01:11:23 For me, that's like the most important thing. But I also believe in all of the things you're teaching. What would you want to say to my audience? These are women who are health conscious, who are smart and savvy, but they want to be in shape, but they don't really want to do too much.

Ari Whitten: 01:11:42 I would say, I'm going to go big picture here. I'm a big health geek myself, and I love other health geeks who just want to delve into all the science and experiment with this thing and experiment that thing and try this new thing and learn about this new aspect of health and just be immersed in this world of health and all of these different strategies you can use. But it's possible to be in that place, in what I see as a pathological way. And it's also possible to be in that space in a really great way.

Ari Whitten: 01:12:21 And what I mean by that specifically is, it's possible to be in a place of, "Oh man, I'm sick and I'm going to try this and I'm going to try that, I'm going to spend money on this stuff and, man, I hope this stuff finally is the thing that works for me, and doesn't fail like all the others did, and I'm going to listen to this person and go on this person's diet, and try this new exercise program. Man, gosh, I hope something works for me and does something."

Ari Whitten: 01:12:50 And it's possible to just be in a place where you're unhappy with your life and you're trying all this stuff, but in a way to fix yourself and just you're looking at every new supplement and every new diet, as the thing that's finally going to fix you. And it's also possible to be in a place where you're just, you're content and you're experimenting, you're playing, you're learning and playing and experimenting and enjoying the process.

Ari Whitten: 01:13:27 "I wonder what this thing will do if I start practicing that? And I wonder if this can give me some benefit by doing this." So, even like let's say I tell you, to start wearing blue blocker glasses at night, to eliminate blue light. A person can look at that or do that and be like. "Oh men, I have to wear this stupid blue blocker glasses every night that make me look stupid. My husband thinks they're lame and my kids think they're lame and they think I'm like an idiot for wearing these things and that they couldn't possibly be doing anything. Who's the stupid person that talked into wearing these stupid things in the first place."

Ari Whitten: 01:14:11 All this and can just look at this whole thing as, "I'm being forced to do this thing to improve my health by someone else outside of me, because this is another thing that I have to do to be healthy." Whatever. And it's also possible to just be like, "Oh I wonder ... " To embrace it and to play and experiment with it and see, just be excited about this whole process of playing and experimenting with new health strategies and fat loss strategies, in a way that you're excited to go, "Hey, I wonder if I try that, if I can get some positive effects from doing that."

Ari Whitten: 01:14:52 And that's really the right attitude that you want to take into this whole process. The truth is that health is complex and there's a lot you'll have to learn to do it well, to live a long time, to prevent disease, to be optimally energetic, to be extremely lean and have good body composition. We live in a world, in an environment that is not conducive to our health and to good body composition and to good energy levels and to good sleep.

Ari Whitten: 01:15:23 And all of these things ... And to low stress and being happy, and so on. So, the reality is that it takes a lot of knowledge and it takes a lot of skills. To then implement the things that you need to do, to be healthy, to be happy, to have good relationships, to not be stressed and depressed all the time, to be lean, to be energetic and so on. It takes knowledge, it takes skills. What I'm saying is, take the right attitude of play and experimentation into that process, rather than looking at the whole thing like, " So and so gurus are now forcing me to do this diet and I'm just going to suffer through this miserable thing." That would be my big picture tip.

Pat: 01:16:10 Good. And as [inaudible 01:16:11]would say, "What else do you have to do with your time?"

Ari Whitten: 01:16:15 Exactly.

Pat: 01:16:16 This is learning about health, being healthy, trying these things out. This is living. That's what it's for.

Ari Whitten: 01:16:23 That's a great point, I'm going to steal that from her.

Pat: 01:16:24 Oh, she is great. I'm going to go see her soon. Two more things quickly. So, if I want to ... I know that I come to you for this information, like I really feel like I can go to ... I have vetted you, I have been with you for a while and I trust what you say, doesn't mean I'm going to do everything you say, obviously, but there's a place where I feel I can go for some scientific truth or some kind of way of not reading the headline.

Pat: 01:16:53 Now I read that headline, and I go, "Okay, now this is curious. This is one study, what does it mean?" Where would you recommend people who have a little bit of interest, how did they get their information?

Ari Whitten: 01:17:04 Yeah, that's a tough question. I'll give a few names of people who are trusted sources of information; Andrew Whale, is good. Rhonda Patrick, is a good source of information. David Katz, is wonderful, and he writes lots of articles in major publications on nutrition in particular. I highly recommend to all your readers to look up David Katz, and his last name is spelled K-A-T-Z and you can do like David Katz LinkedIn. He's written a lot of articles that are posted on LinkedIn and U.S. News and World Report ... one or the other, U.S. Health or something like that.

Ari Whitten: 01:18:05 Any article written by him it's great, he's got dozens of articles online. I highly recommend going through his stuff. Those are names that come to mind other than me, but obviously I have a bias in telling people to Google me. But keep in mind that's also my recommendation is always go straight to the scientific literature yourself. But most reality is most people don't have the time. It's more than a full time job [crosstalk 01:18:34]

Pat: 01:18:34 If you have a question and you want to search something, you can look for these ... I like having something to recommend. It's great.

Ari Whitten: 01:18:42 Yeah. So, that's a way to shortcut that process, your listeners don't have to go spend hundreds of hours exploring the scientific literature, trying to figure it out. Which is its own skill set as well to even understand all the scientific jargon. So, following those names will keep you updated with science in a way that's a bit shortcut.

Pat: 01:19:05 Okay. My final question. Well I want the final questions. What's your latest venture? But before that, what do you want for your son and future generations? Because it seems like there's a lot of damage that has been done to the earth, to the body, to the food source. What do you see as ... obviously what you want, but what do you see as maybe more doable. Where do you think it's going? There's a lot of people who feel like there's so much negative and then there is other people feel like there's equal positive in terms of the changes and the studies and awakening of what we're doing to the earth and to ourselves.

Ari Whitten: 01:19:42 Yeah. I wish I could say that I'm optimistic about societal trends or government trends or on a big picture population level, that there's some grand awakening of what we're doing to our environment, how we're polluting our land and our oceans and the kinds of unethical things that go on, inhumane factory farming practices. I wish that I could say that ... Yes, I think we're all awakening to these realities and that we're going to do something about it and fix these problems. But, I don't necessarily, that doesn't mean I'm a pessimist. I would just say I'm indifferent, to it maybe not indifferent. That's not quite the right word.

Ari Whitten: 01:20:31 I would obviously prefer that these things happen. But I'm not betting either way, I'll put it that way. And my position is basically like, "Hey, I hope these things will happen, but I'm not banking on it. I don't care to really invest a lot of time in thinking about whether they will or will not happen." My intuition tells me there is a good possibility they may not happen or may not happen for a long time. Maybe even when it's too late and so my position is basically that the individual, it's up to them to increase their knowledge and their understanding of things and to address their own lifestyle and their own micro environment of their home and their immediate environment.

Ari Whitten: 01:21:25 And create the right environment for themselves and the right lifestyle habits for themselves to deal with, that situation regardless of what the population at large is doing. So, for my son what I'm going to do, is teach him ... I'm going to teach him obviously the importance of eating well, the importance of exercising, the importance of meditation, the importance of all these kinds of lifestyle habits. But, we also spend time in my vegetable garden every day and he sees us growing food and harvesting food from our own vegetable garden. We spend time at the beach, every day immersing ourselves in nature, and we spend time in the sun every day, naked sunbathing as a family together.

Ari Whitten: 01:22:20 So, these are the kinds of lessons that I'm not necessarily consciously teaching and explaining to him in an intellectual way, but he's learning in an experiential way and when he's old enough, then he'll understand. I'll be able to teach him verbally about what all these things are and why they matter. And ultimately, it's like I said, it's up to the individual to take responsibility for their life, their health, their environment and control what they-

Pat: 01:22:53 And that's really all we have control over, right? We don't have control over anybody, but ourselves. So, that is an incredible teaching. And it's interesting because as you talk about your son, I see your grandmother, it's like really that experience of her taking care of her own individual, down to your parents, down to you and now to your son.

Ari Whitten: 01:23:13 Yeah, absolutely.

Pat: 01:23:15 So, basically I just want to say thank you, but also tell me about your latest venture. So, Energy Blueprint, this is something that my clientele can go and sign up for free, to get on the ... What is that about? What does that come with? Because I've already been, I'm already in it. It's been a long time.

Ari Whitten: 01:23:34 Yeah. So, there's a free four video training. I call it, double your energy free video master class. And they can sign up for that. I'll give you the link to it and they can sign up for that, get a four video training on how to start increasing your energy levels. And then I have full 60-day program which you're a member of. That's the full Energy Blueprint program and it's 60 days where I take people through six modules, first ones on detoxifying your environment. Then we go into circadian rhythm and sleep. Then we go into nutrition for energy enhancement and fixing the gut health.

Ari Whitten: 01:24:14 Then removing toxins from the body, detoxification, and then rewiring your brain for high energy levels to get it out of stress mode. And then finally, it's all about hormesis, which building up your mitochondria, your cellular energy generators and making your body high energy, rewiring it into high energy mode and making it resilient to stress. So, that's what the 60-days program is all about and we love for your listeners to join me.

Pat: 01:24:45 It's one of those programs that just keeps giving, it doesn't seem to ever ... You just continuously give. It's amazing, and the value is incredible. So, anybody interested, especially learning more details about the circadian rhythm and also the detoxification, there is lots of information there that as I said, I was revisiting it this morning I was like, "Oh boy, okay now it's time for me to deal with this one."

Pat: 01:25:10 And you do it at your own pace so you don't have to obviously ... it's always available which I think is also great. This really, and the thing about my program is, so I teach very similarly. I don't teach about the details of all this stuff, but I'm like. "Now I'm throwing in the light, I'm throwing in that other stuff." But for me it's learning how ... It's almost like what you ended with, what you recommend is mindset. How you think about your life hugely impacts your emotions and although you gave that book about motivation, which I just started reading, for my work, motivation comes from the way thinking in the way of feeling.

01:25:49 And so you can actually create motivation with an emotion. And I teach my clients how to do that, because a lot of times they want to lose weight. They want change, but they have these thoughts about this food, that it's just like, "I have to have it, it's so delicious, I can't live without it." The same thing that you talk about as well. So, I think it's a great combination of your program and my program. So, I highly recommend it to all my people.

Ari Whitten: Thank you, it’s been a pleasure, Pat. Thank you so much for having me.

Pat: Same here. Thank you very much and I’ll see you on Facebook.

Ari Whitten: Alright. Sounds good.

Pat Well I hope you enjoyed that and learned a couple new things. I know that I have been learning lots from Ari. I know that was a little bit extra-long podcast, so I want to thank you so much for listening and pass this information on to everyone you know because I know that before I heard about the importance of circadian rhythm and even having access to these light therapies, I just really knew nothing about them. So I want you to pass the information on to all of your friends and let people know about the podcast.

Join me next week when I’m going to talk about special events, weddings, funerals, different times when we feel challenged with what it is we’re going to eat and what it is we’re going to do. And I’ll be going to a wedding, so I’ll be sharing my experience about that too. Alright you guys, I’ll talk to you next week.

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