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Losing weight should't be expensive or complicated. The ideal process would reduce our stress while driving results. Dr. Z weaves together his perspective on physical and mental health and the powerful way that fasting can connect these two spheres of our lives. Let's move toward total wellness and a holistic vision of health and healing. Learn more at SimpleFasting.com
Going to be diving in today on fasting wealth. A topic I'm going to introduce to you.
When I say, wealth, what do you think of it? If you're like me, you think great financial resources. Maybe you think about some wealthy, powerful person.
We'll try to expand our thinking today.
Wealth is simply a financial state,
to this concept, which I really love, which is that health is wealth. Health might be the most important type of wealth that there is
something that we
so take for granted, say the type of thing that you don't appreciate it until it's gone.
We have health. We have flourishing. We're feeling good. Everything is good. Just like it just melts into the background. Don't even realize it
until it's gone. And then we see its absence.
Health as well. Think if you have great wealth but not health. Not an optimal state at all. Someone. Maybe I was reading it in a book last year. It was saying, you know what? If,
someone comes, they are offering you, just as a silly hypothetical. Say you can have $1 billion, but you have to have, like, a miserable cold for the rest of your life.
So every day you're going to have a headache and stuffed up and, you know, you've be feeling terrible. And who would make that trade? Probably some people would, but definitely not me. I tell you, I don't want to feel miserable for the rest of my life. You know, achy joints and all the stuff I say. No, thank you.
I'll take my health. Every day
we've been discussing omnichannel health as a creative process about something that you build.
So there's a lot of financial parallels. People talk about building wealth
financially.
I say health as wealth. And let's build wealth, meaning building wealth. That's what we're going to be diving into. Did you take my challenge? Last week, Friday.
I said, trying to get outside, enjoy some nature where you're able to get out. I took my own, medicine, and I brought my camera
recorded,
a little, reflection for us.
walk down to the lake at 830. So it's almost like it's live. It's live. But it was Saturday.
I recorded these ducks, swimming around
and, spend some time myself reflecting on last week
and the reflection I was having,
in this space was especially on that, discussion we had about comparison.
how it's really not optimal to compare ourselves to others.
And sometimes we can trick ourselves into thinking that we will do it
and it'll be good. We find someone less fortunate than us, and we say, oh, aren't I happy that I am more fortunate? Or that I'm doing better? But then when we dug into the emotional space of it
and said, well, really, isn't that really not a very thoughtful space either?
And then, of course, most of the time we compare ourselves to someone who we say or we see is doing better, has more money, more success,
having more success on a weight loss path. If we're moving toward that, we say maybe we are on a path. Maybe we're moving in a direction. We start comparing ourselves. Either were puffing up the ego, or we're making ourselves, feel miserable,
so I don't want to do it.
And so as I was sitting here watching the docs, watching the sun coming out, it's reminding me comparison of a book I read a few years ago.
This book, did you ever read it? The Psychology of Money by Morgan ourself.
I really enjoyed this book. I don't know when I read it. When was this published? A few years ago.
But I thought it was very thoughtful, and it was dialing me in on a specific section I wanted to share with you.
Too. And then it really got me thinking. Okay, health is wealth. You can't even goes there in the book.
And but especially comparison. So I'm going to share this little section with you to.
Frame our thinking
of chapter nine. This is from chapter nine titled wealth is What You Don't See. And so he's speaking of financial wealth. But hey, this is a really helpful thing for us to dial in to already, wealth is what you don't see. As we head toward fasting wealth, we're going to really think of that.
Morgan writes,
money has many ironies, and here's an important one wealth is what you don't see. He's he distinguishes here between riches and wealth, riches. And this is what we're thinking to as we're heading toward our mindset,
fasting space, getting a handle on consumption
riches is like the consumption that you see. The fancy cars, the big houses, the expensive meals, the designer clothes.
Right? This is like a riches in its consumption. It's actually using wealth. Wealth is what you don't see. Wealth is the quiet part. The cars that aren't bought and the vacation homes that aren't purchases, the boat that you know, everything that money could be turned into. It isn't a consumption that's avoided. That wealth.
He describes this time, right? He was working as a valet, okay, when he was younger, but the author, mid-twenties in LA.
A scene where material appearance takes precedence over everything but oxygen. Okay, so he's parking all these nice cars.
He says you see a Ferrari driving around. You might intuitively assume that the owner of the car is rich. Even if you're not paying much attention. But as I got to know more and more people, I realize this wasn't always the case.
Many were mediocre successes who spent a huge percentage of their paycheck on a car.
Remember, a fellow will call Roger about my age. I had no idea what he did, but he drove a Porsche, which was enough for most people to draw assumptions. And then one day, Roger arrived in an old Honda, and the same the next week.
And then the next. What happened here? Porsche asked. It was repossessed after defaulting on his car loan, he said without a morsel of shame. He responded like he was telling the next play in the game.
Every assumption you might have made about him was wrong. LA is full of such people.
This is what I was saying last week about the comparison. That's what I was thinking as I was sitting here by the water. I was like, oh, this is like that story that he told in The Psychology of Money. You have no idea someone else has experience. We make we tell all these stories that we create about other people and their experience.
We have no idea what we're comparing ourselves to.
He goes on, someone driving a $100,000 car might be wealthy, but the only data point you have about their wealth is that they have a $100,000 less than they did before they bought the car, or $100,000 in more debt. And that's all, you know,
we tend to judge wealth by what we see, because that's the information that we have in front of us.
And a number from our psychology book, we've been, working through what we see is all there is like our, our intuitive emotional system. It just takes what it can see
and it weaves a story.
We can't see people's
bank accounts or brokerage statements, so we rely on outward appearance to gauge a financial success. Cars, houses, Instagram photos.
Modern capitalism makes helping people fake it until they make it into a cherished industry.
But the truth is that wealth is what you don't see.
Wealth is the nice cars not purchased, the diamonds not bought. The watch is not worn.
Wealth is financial assets that you haven't yet converted into the stuff that you see.
And that's not how we think about wealth, because you can't contextualize what you can't see.
And then we're going to take it another level. And here we're talking only about money. But then we've already established, okay, wealth is much bigger money not of much use if we don't have health. So as we're heading here in this Thanksgiving week, right when we're
having gratitude and thankfulness.
Are so many things we want to think, what are the things that are truly valuable? Are family and relationships and health
He discusses a famous singer who went bankrupt over overspending and sued their financial advisor, and the advice he responded, was it really necessary? Necessary to tell them that if you spend money on things that you end up with things and not money?
You can laugh. But the answer is yes. People do need to be told this
when most people say
they want to be a millionaire. What they actually mean is, I'd like to spend $1 million. And that's literally the opposite
of accumulating wealth.
Investor
Bill man once wrote,
there's no faster way to feel rich than to spend lots of money on nice things. But the way to be rich is to spend money you have and not to spend money you don't. It's really that simple.
It's excellent advice, but it may not go far enough.
The only way to be wealthy is to not spend money that you do have.
It's not just the only way. It's the very definition of wealth.
Not spend money you don't have. We're going to turn this in, okay? Fasting wealth.
The consumption rate is avoided. We want to create health. We want to give space to allow health to flourish in the body.
A consumption avoided is how we build fasting wealth.
We should. Yes, I can attack through the seasons. We should be careful to define the difference between wealthy and rich. It's more than semantics. Not knowing the difference is a source of countless poor money decisions.
Rich as a current income, someone driving $100,000 cars. Almost certainly rich because even if they purchase the car with debt, you need a certain level of income to afford the monthly payment.
Same with those who live in big homes. Not hard, smart, rich people. They often go out of their way to make themselves known, but wealth is hidden. It is income not spent.
Wealth is an option not yet taken.
Its value lies
in offering options and flexibility and growth to one day purchase something that you couldn't. Now this is this is also what I connect in with me.
Here's listener. My go is diet and exercise offer a useful analogy? Losing weight is notoriously hard, even among those putting in the work of vigorous exercise.
In his book The Body, Bill Bryson explains,
one study in America found that people overestimate the number of calories they burned in a workout by a factor of four, and they also consumed, on average, about twice as many calories as they had just burned off.
And the fact is, you can quickly undo a lot of exercise by eating a lot of food, and most of us do, he says. Exercise is like being rich. You think I did the work and now I
should eat a big meal as a reward?
Wealth is turning down the treat meal and actually burning that calories is hard.
It requires self-control,
but it creates a gap between what you could do and what you choose to do that accrues to you over time.
This is where I was starting to dial in on this concept of fasting. Well, if you think, how do you build wealth? We understand that you spend less.
Than you are bringing in and you save a portion
tracking by losing weight. He brings in. Okay, there does have to be a calorie deficit
fasting. I will tell you that.
Easiest and most gentle and I use that word carefully. Easiest. I didn't say easy. The easiest way for most people to actually eat less is to fast.
People struggle to diet. To always eat less than you want is a psychological burden. And we discussed we have limited
mental capital,
to open up a fasting space, though, a space where you can flow through without
burden. That's the goal. Doesn't mean it's easy to do that, but it's a practice that you can train.
Charlie Munger, great late, great investor, always invert, he said. Always invert so we can think.
Of
the energy in the body that we are wanting to burn down like a bank account, we can think about
We have accumulated more energy. Energy is a type of wealth. Energy is wealth.
Munger would say, I think invert
So instead of saying, well, we're just drawing down that account, is what I'm saying, let's invert it and actually build up our fasting wealth.
Then it starts to line up with the concept, like we're saying. But how do you build wealth while creating a gap? The consumption that is avoided, that's fasting wealth.
And we can create this mirror in the logic of building financial wealth through saving and living within our means. Fasting so much in alignment with that, about bringing consumption into a sustainable and balanced pattern, consuming less, bringing things into balance is creating this gap that we can save. And as we're trying to build health, the foundation of wealth.
That's like
what I would say is like a real health savings account. You know, where we're actually saving health.
By bringing our consumption into a pattern that works with what the body's trying to do.
The problem for many of us is that it is easy to find rich role models. It's harder to find wealthy ones because by definition, their success is more hidden. There are, of course, wealthy people who also spend a lot of money and stuff. But even in these cases, what we see is just their riches, not their wealth. We see the cars they choose to buy.
We don't see their savings or investment portfolios. We see the homes they bought, not the ones they could have bought if they had stretched themselves.
The danger is that I think most people deep down want to be wealthy. They want freedom and flexibility, which is what financial assets not yet spent can give you, just what health can give you, right?
Freedom and literally flexibility
that is health.
But it's so ingrained in us that to have money is to spend money.
But to have food available is to consume. Food is to have a pleasurable experience.
That we don't get to see the restraint that it takes to actually be wealthy.
This is why I really love the idea of building a fasting community of people. As as more and more people come in and we can share stories, what does it actually look like to walk the path to, to bring a situation into balance, to be healthy, to see health flourish?
As we see more and more people do it, start to normalize it. Because we've said in this culture, it's not normal that people are walking this path. It's normal that people are in a consumption culture.
That's why people are not healthy in a large measure. And so we're seeing we're trying to build health.
Store up that health. Build a real health savings account. How do you build a health savings account? Not just the money
the actual health.
How do you build that up? Avoid the consumption. Just like you want to build the bank account, lower the consumption level. Don't even have to earn more. You're opening up more money that can be saved,
Trying to lose weight, trying to give space for health to flourish. Open up the space means bring down the consumption in a space to create that fasting wealth gap. Store that health experience. It's not a physical currency. It's not like a dollar bill that you can transact, but it's still a closed here account.
The real magic in finance compounding, right? You want something that compounds our health decisions compound ultimately because there is no middleman. You know, there's there's no broker taking it 2% or two and 20 or anything
that health accrues to us across our life. You want to make the biggest investment, make it in our health.
People are good at learning by imitation, but the hidden nature of wealth makes it hard to intimate,
imitate others, and learn their ways.
After he died, Ronald Reid became in many people's financial role model. He told this story earlier in the book. The gentleman who is a janitor who worked, I think, minimum wage his whole life, but he lived very meager land savings, ended up dying with millions of dollars.
But he was able to leave to his family. Crazy story.
Imagine how hard it would be to learn to write if you couldn't read the works of the great authors.
Who would be your inspiration?
Difficult to learn
from what you can't see.
The world is filled with people who look modest but are actually wealthy, and people who look rich, but who live on the razor's edge of insolvency. Keep here. Keep this in mind when judging others success and setting your own goals.
Don't compare yourself to others. That was our message from the other day.
So many good insights. From this. Maybe do more. Just, on that book I really enjoyed thinking about, that book this weekend. In this parallel, many analogies and parallels that we can draw
between financial health. I think people say.
Lasting wealth, say fasting health.
Something in
fasting wealth. Fasting health, fasting wealth, you know, a kind of interchangeable. These concepts.
How do we bring these concepts into a place that really helps us see what is going on?
Maybe it's that one just thinking, okay, of energy in the body.
Like I had said, the bank account
can be a way. You can see it as like a physical bank account. We can see it. We can weigh it like weighing our gold coins. Like we can actually see the weight, say, well, you can think of that like a currency, energy as a currency. Maybe it's helpful to just look at it that way and say, oh, opening up a fasting space.
It's like we've saved this savings account.
Time to make a withdrawal. I do like that as an analogy and then invert it.
saving up health health savings account.
Think of like a fasting token.
Like, oh, if I open up this fasting space, maybe you could do it. Create fasting tokens and see. Oh, here I'm building it up. Something tangible to hang on to, you know, like, a little, stone. Right? Something you can see because they say wealth is what you don't see,
And so, so many times health and health decisions
are invisible. Like, you don't see them. Like if especially if we in an old timey economy and we actually got some, you know, silver coin for our days wages, if we get a hold it, we see, oh, I did this work and this came to me.
So many things in health we don't see though, like the snack we didn't eat is just not there.
Like the fasting space. It's nothing like we're seeing the other day. How do you hold on to nothing? It's. It's the absence of the things makes it difficult to hang on to. But if every time you opened up a fasting space, you got like a a little token,
maybe you want to do that in your week. Every time I successfully make it through this space, I get myself a little gold coin.
Doesn't have to be a real gold coin,
can be some monopoly money, you know. But if you could see it stacking up to hey, look, look at this. I've stacked like seven of these things together this week. And how did it go? When you say start after Thanksgiving week,
we said we got this whole week. This week is like a celebration.
Fasting really to me is for like the boring week
is for like when the family's not around. You have to have a very interesting family to to get together for a holiday and, you know, declare a fast and say, hey, let's all lose weight together or whatever.
But think about this week. This is what I will, say for us this week as we're thinking about Thanksgiving, as we're thinking about the true, valuable things in life.
Where does health rank on that, priority list for you?
How can we think about accumulating health to ourselves? Is that a higher priority than, any sort of financial situation?
But.
I would say I think so.
Top priority for me. Top priority for me to do it myself. I want to be healthy. You know, I think about, you know, the longevity. I want to stay active, being able to do as many things as long as possible. To me, a fasting, one of the things that helps you do that, along with every other good practice, put only the healthiest food into the body.
Move the body in healthy ways, exercise it, practice it, and all these things moving together,
opening up a fasting space, clearing out the insulin level. You can't see that. You know you can't see it. But that is, creating a value in the body, building up value in the body, lowering the insulin level is hormones that are doing what they do behind the scenes.
Allowing access to that bank account. Right. And fasting is like, what's the Pin number, you know, to get into the account, I want to log in. I want to make a withdrawal.
What are the processes that help you do that? So often we're eating and then exercising. And then it's like we're creating this layer in between or we can't really get to the bank account, right.
We want to clear out the energy,
drop the hormonal environments like putting the pin in the cash machine. We want to make a withdrawal of that energy right.
Open up some fasting space and then train yourself. This would be the bonus. Like I said, nobody has to do it.
Start training your body to handle some exercise in a fasting space.
Now there's no food there. We've burned through all that body's like, okay, what is next? Well, look at this. Okay? We've stored this energy reserve for us.
Time to make a withdrawal. That's how we access the energy bank account in the body. Make a withdrawal is like the the energy retirement plan. You know, we've gone through our capital accumulation phase, and now we say, okay, now we got to maintain figure out, you know, what is the withdrawal rate.
From the IRA or whatever it is. Right.
If we want to get into that space where we're accessing
that energy storage plan,
I was tell people, you got to walk before you can run in a fasting space, you're going to try to exercise. You got to sit before you can even walk. Don't try to do too much too fast.
You
got to be able to sit in a fasting space and just let the body run.
Most of the energy we're using in our body is actually just running the bodily processes, the heart beating, the breathing, the digesting and thinking, okay, that's most of the energy. And eat and doing exercise on top of that is pushing,
things
to the next,
level.
Got to be gentle with that.
great concept, withdrawing the stored energy for living life not just burning it. Yeah, I, I really love the concept. And like you said, not not wasting it. Like using it to empower you and push things forward. Living life.
Sometimes I even think that way.
You know, if I go to the gym or I'm, I'm exercising, I'm just like lifting weights. And I think to myself like, oh, like here. And lifting these weights to like help the body be strong. But I'm like, I think like I can be doing work with this. Like what? What how many boxes could I be moving? How much things could I be doing in here?
I'm I'm just doing this pointless activity, not pointless, mind you. Good for your body. You know, there's only so many things. But yes, taking that in and realizing all this energy is energy for life, our body. Like I said, I've tried to say so many times body is not broken. Body has not even really been damaged on a certain way of thinking.
Health can spring forth in a fasting space. I just want people to see this. The metabolism. Yes, people's metabolism can slow way down, but we can crank it back up again.
Blood sugar and insulin resistance can be happening in the body, but those things can go away again.
So many, good, things happening in a fasting space.
And you see, then we start to see the great value of it. And we say, well, as health, as wealth, what is a practice that helps health to flourish would be incredibly valuable. And so and then
what a paradox to say that that something is nothing.
This is wild to me. I just think it's wild.
Very very valuable process.
Think how overlooked it is in our society. This is totally a culture focused on consumption. And then Thanksgiving. This is the thing. This is something you really do. Our mindsets to Thanksgiving when we dial back into the original story, you know, people, settlers coming in had been starving to death. And then our, you know, in a scenario, people helping their own people sharing food, celebrating the fact that we have enough to survive.
Whoa. So, Tish taking some some space in this Thanksgiving, thinking about, like and really bringing intensity, I would say let's bring in an intensity into our gratitude for food and family and life and health and the fact that we aren't,
living in some really, brutal existence on the brink of starving,
wow, so much gratitude.
And then coming in and seeing
if health is really wealth and and food in a mix with a fasting space, all these things like this is what's truly valuable in life.
Spend time with our family, maybe have some discussions about things like this with our family if we can. Would be really great just to really bring in the gratitude, to all these things.
I hope it is a great week for you. Think. And, these thoughts will be doing more thinking about, things like this
diary this week.
Good food. Want you to enjoy it. Finds so much gratitude for it. Be looking forward to it. Enjoy it.
Thanksgiving.
Finding gratitude for the health that we have. Whatever situation we're in. Maybe you're in a situation and my health isn't so great. Okay, we're still here. We have an opportunity. We find gratitude for what we have. We use every tool we have at our disposal to invest in our health, to build up that health to the greatest extent possible,
use the good energy that is flowing.
energy for living fire ourselves up here, all the enthusiasm build the health practices that,
are accruing to us. Use that to to bring that energy out into the world,
in service to help others in, in any domain, especially also to help others to be healthy. Bring people along. Such a beautiful,
way to do it.
So I hope it's a great week. I will be back tomorrow. More thinking on these types of topics. We kind of hit a little bit of a harder, one today. Okay. Fasting wealth. And how do we dial in on that account? And then, we'll see where we go. I got a couple ideas, planned up for tomorrow, but especially then into the end of the week, we want to just be floating through a space
that's,
That's my vision for a holiday.
Anybody in any space bring any sort of intensity to any day that they want, but especially we. I love the quote. Preservation is progress we're going to get, especially in the Thursday. And we say, hey, I'm going to enjoy this space and anything, you know, anything that happens on any one day from a health perspective, as far as what you're eating, what you're doing is not a big deal.
Like we were saying last week. Okay. Is there it's not really a test. Don't look at a Thanksgiving as a test. It's just a celebration. This is. Have the beautiful day already. Pass the test.
We're on a path
that, you know, works,
and then we're going to preserve, get through a space and then enjoy it. Then we'll look back fondly upon it, remember how great it was, and then we would be right back on the path, stepping forward in health, finding joy on the journey.
Absolutely. The things we want to be doing. Have a great day everybody. See you back here tomorrow. So thanks so much for being here.