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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
When I say the great work of our lives, the great work of your life. What comes to your mind could be a bunch of different things, a whole different canvas, realms that that could encompass. When I did a little reflection on this personally, the top thing that came to me was raising our children. I got two boys watching them growing up, thinking of the energy that were pouring into them.
I was walking through the park with my dog yesterday as a just a couple blocks from our house. I ran into a couple moms there with little toddlers just learning to walk. Child hanging onto mom's finger as they're trying to get toward the slide. My older son going to be 16 soon and you know, we were having a a just a chat about how the time passes.
So I was reflecting on that. What an experience. That's a great work, a multi-decade project. Okay. Other people going to approach that question, the great work of our life. And it's going to be focused on, you know, job, career, vocation, this sort of thing. And there's another place where it's like we pour ourself into it, whatever we're doing the work of our life.
Maybe for some people, a hobby, something that you feel completely called to that is separate from something we're doing to make money. Something that really fills you with joy and inspiration. Passion. Whether it's the night project, the weekend project. You say, hey, this is what really is bringing meaning. The thing that I was thinking and that I want to dive our discussion into, today, is the health Project.
Thinking of health as something we build and create. Spend a lot of time talking about health as an artistic expression. And the more I talk about it, the more I love it. And so I'm going to dive in a little bit in that direction. Health is something that we are or that we can be, that we be or that we do is an experience that we have.
We experience health. Health is something that can be a creative process that we can at least allow into being. I really resonate with that idea. Health is inside us and we need to create the conditions and environment to allow it to flow for. I think that's especially true of our metabolic health. I think we can see experiences where that's not the case.
We were in a car accident. Some external thing came, damaged us. Okay. Health was inside. There's a damaged out. Now, this health has come into the body through a no fault of our own. Now, health and healing is going to come from the body. We can provide the context, the experience, shape the inputs. It's just like planting a garden.
We plant the seed, we give the water, but we don't make the seed grow. Seed is alive. Seed grows into the plant. We provide the conditions. A farmer is an artist. A gardener is an artist. Maybe easier to see in the in someone who is has a flower garden. Is a flower the most artistic plant? But anybody who is creating conditions to allow life and health to flourish, that's a creative process, creating an environment.
We're trying to create an environment of health in the body from whatever circumstance we have. We can't make the health, but we can create the experience and the environment that allows health to develop to the greatest extent possible. So let's look at health. And as a project you say I have a garden project. I'm going to try to create conditions in my backyard where there was no garden.
And now there is going to be a beautiful garden, and maybe it produces flowers or food or is producing something of value. How valuable is health? Health is something we take for granted until it's gone. Then it becomes the most important thing. What value is money if you don't have health to be able to enjoy it, for example.
So one of the great works I say we might have many great works in our life, things of great value that we are aspiring toward and moving toward. My proposition to you today is that our health should be one of those projects, one of the great works of our life should be our health. What I'm describing as the artistic expression in our life, our creative process of creating the healthiest, strongest, most resilient version of ourself that we can possibly be.
You have to create that. That isn't really the type of thing that just happens if you just go through the motions of culture. We perhaps do not live in the healthiest culture that has ever been. A lot of dis health in society in large measure. Our bodies are a reflection of the society. If we do what society does, we go where society is going.
We become what society produces. So we've been unpacking that psychologically, the impact of priming effects and conditioning on our mind that form our habits and patterns, that shape our emotions, that determine what we perceive as normal. So then we're in this very complex emotional space where we perceive a lot of things that are normal, a lot of things as normal, that when we really open our mind and we look, we say, in fact, this is not normal in the sense of normal being something that is beneficial and healthy, like good soil that allows seeds to flourish without needing much help.
You think of good soil that retains moisture so you don't have to water it all the time. It's like trying to grow something in sand that that just dries out right away, or growing in just hard clay where the root can't get it. No, we want a healthy soil that's kind of like the culture. It's like, what is the quality of the soil that we're trying to grow?
This garden in this garden of health that we're creating and stewarding. Think about the work of a gardener or a farmer trying to build the soil. We can think about our modern farming practices and and what that is doing to soil and how really when you talk about it, shouldn't we be building up the soil more and more nutrients and nutrients to feed the plant in a cycle?
Nature is a cycle we gotta look at to that cycle in our body. Look to food, that cycle. But that metaphor creating the good soil that makes things easier. Think how much easier it is to grow a healthy plant in soil that is fertile, that is full of life. The incredible complexity of the microbes and fungi and all this stuff that is building a healthy soil, communicating with the roots, helping to exchange nutrients in this cooperative way.
You want to build something like that so that life can flourish. We're seeing that this is what nature is doing to build health is what we want to be doing to mirror that in our body, giving our body every good thing that it needs to create the maximum amount of health and vitality that we can experience. The creative process got to make decisions to do it.
You gotta think about it to say, how am I going to do that? It's very it's complex. It's across domains. Like we say, well, we need healthy food to be able to support this structure that we're building or that we're allowing to build itself in the miracle that is the body. When we start to see, okay, this is the Health project, a great work of my life to build a strong body that is resistant to maladies of all kinds.
That is going to give me the best chance to experience health and longevity and functionality, so that I can do every other great work in my life that is possible. The foundational, great work of health is like the infrastructure that supports our ability to do every other great work. We think when you think of a great work, think of an artist spent their entire life, training and skill to be able to paint something and they produce a masterwork, some incredible piece of inspiration.
Got to have longevity to be able to do that. Maybe someone caught lightning in a bottle in their 20s. You know, they produced some incredible thing. Awesome. But a lot of the masterworks, you know, people spend a lifetime of of doing that. We want to create that foundation for ourselves so that every other good thing in our life can flourish.
Health at the very foundation of that. So our health projects something we really can build, projects of all kinds. They have raw materials, the process of building or creating, you know, think of, to use our analogy of a painting, trying to paint the beautiful picture on the canvas that is our life and our expression of health. Kind of have the brush got to have the paints, gotta have the canvas and can say, what are the raw
materials of health that we're dealing with healthy food, and then balancing that out with a fasting space?
That's the core of what I'm trying to help people see moving our bodies in healthy ways that it can be strong, functional dialing in, maybe most importantly of all, and a mindset of peace and contentment helps to get that parasympathetic outflow. Balancing the stress, everything that is coming at us in our day. Balancing that out through effective practices.
Bringing it all back into balance. This is the balance that we want between the physical and the mental. Where our mind body we're. One thing, but we split it out to think about it. Mind and body bring our physical being into balance as we bring the mental experience into balance. All the same thing. They're merged together in this beautiful fashion means as we improve our physical health, that flows in to better mindset as we strengthen our mindset and resolve that flows out as health in the body.
And each of these things spin around in this beautiful dance, beautiful cycle. So to get us heading in that mindset today, I want to share a inspiring little passage with you out of this book that I have been sharing with you the creative act, a way of being. If you're new to the idea, you're just catching up with us.
Think of yourself as an artist. You may have not picked up a brush since preschool on some watercolor thing, but you are creator of your health experience, one of the great works of your life, even if you are not healthy now, if you are coming in, you say, I'm not healthy. I have not had a health expression. Listen, the past is behind us.
We did the session earlier, looking toward the light with turning toward the sun. Shadows far behind us. Today is a fresh start and we are going to take a really out of the box, I think fun and exciting opportunity, you know, turn the page, paint a new canvas, take the raw materials of your experience, whatever you're at right now and realize you are not defined by your past.
You can create a different experience. And that experience can be the experience of renewed health, strength, and vitality, especially with that fasting brush. If you're trying to lose weight, opening a space for flourishing, living life as an artist is a practice. That's how this passage starts. I love the concept of a practice. Practice takes the pressure off. Okay, we're not some NFL kicker who's trying to walk out on the field in the Super Bowl, and millions of people are watching and and everybody is there's no pressure as a practice.
Nobody's watching. You know, nobody really cares other than than you and me. We're just here working on a practice, figuring out our way of being in the world. How do we be in this world? So as you're either engaging in the practice or you're not, are we living in the world in a way where we say we are trying to create something good and beautiful with our time and resources, and why are we not doing that?
Are we intentionally? We did this session the other day about our intentions. Are we intentionally moving toward a space of allowing greater health to flourish in our body, or do we not have that mindset kind of one over the other? Either we do or we don't. I say let's do. Let's dive in. Let's do that. It makes no sense to say you're not good at it.
It's like saying, I'm not good at being a monk. Like either you're living as a monk or you're not. You're at the the place or you're not. We tend to think of the artist's work as the output, the paintings, the music, the stuff, the artifacts. The real work of the artist is a way of being in the world.
And this is what I really want to move us toward, a way of being in the world, that the way of being. You can see that the decisions that we're making in a day, what and how we're eating and when, what and how we're moving through the day, and what strategies we are using to effectively cope with the stress and difficulty of life.
These are the way, this is the way that we are in the world. Can you feel that there is a way of being in the world that is different than we have considered? It is different than the culturally conceived opinions about how we should be. Culture has opinions of how we should be, that we should be primarily a consumer, and that we should buy the things that are sold, and we should eat the things that people want us to eat at the times that they want.
And so then we step back and we say, oh, is there a different way of being in the world where we can look at this culture in this situation and say, you know what, I don't think this course is taking me exactly where I want to go. And we have our analogy. I've been using of the sailboat. Sailboat is blowing across the lake.
The wind is taking it is this wind of the culture is blowing in a certain direction. We got a rudder and we say we're going to push on that a little bit, and we're going to allow this culture, the wind that is blowing, this environment and situation. We have kind of push back a bit on that and help to move this boat just in a bit of a different direction.
Want to get somewhere else. You see, on a long journey, a tiny change in the direction can have a big result. Like you walk 20 miles in this direction, but we're just a couple degrees. We turn this way, you know, by the time 20 miles gone by, I'm going to be in a different town. I'm going to be on the other side of the lake.
If it's if it's a big lake and the path that we're on, a path of health. This is a lifetime path, a lifetime path of health. If you're if you're trying to lose weight, I always try to help people pull back. Look at the big picture. Sometimes I do an exercise with people. People come in to consult. People want to lose a lot of weight.
I say, let's just focus on losing the first pound and lose that first pound. Can you do it in a way that is not stressful? That does not feel overwhelming in any way. So break things down into small step. Not stressful, not overwhelming. That's why we're focusing one day at a time. We win today. We don't have to win the next 360 days.
We can stress ourselves out like that. It's enough to do the work of this day. This is all we can do in the moment. I think it was Will Smith I was seeing has a quote, something about great work. It's like building a wall and you can only put one brick at a time. I think I heard him say something like that.
You got to lay that brick of this day in the very best way that you can. And as you do that day after day, you build the structure. But if you are, you know, you're laying the bricks, not intentionally or thoughtfully. B hard to build a structure on top of that. So this is what we want to do to build that structure of health that we are creating and bringing into the world.
What's a more helpful perspective? I want to lose weight. I want to get healthier. I'm going to dive into an Excel sheet and and track the calories and macros of everything that I eat on a daily basis. Have you done that? Has it been helpful? I've. It can be helpful. I'm not saying there's never any value in it, but in the grand scheme of things I've worked with, I'm sure thousands of people who have worked that process and not found it successful.
And I've also worked with a large number of people who have found success with that for some period of time, and then did not find it ultimately sustainable. If it works for anyone, great, don't stop doing it. Okay, but we were talking in the session the other day about reducing our life into a numbers game, and that that can be a dehumanizing process.
What is resonating more with you right now, carrying on with this numbers game, reducing the great work of our life of health into a series of equations that we need to follow, or to ask yourself, what is a different way of being in this world? This is a totally different game than people are playing. People saying, what is the macro composition?
How much fat, how much protein? What are the carbs? Are you doing one? I mean, we could list off the entire realm of the diets the keto, the paleo, the dash, the vegetarianism and veganism and Mediterranean and and just I mean, we could go on and on, okay, of all these things like, what's the next book? You know, I'm going to try the this in that this is the game that everybody is playing is like we want to create a different experience than that.
We want to get to a level that is much deeper. How do I want to be in the world? People say, how do I lose weight? And in the short term you say, well, everybody knows you know, everybody will give an answer. If you if you ask men to eat less and exercise, and of course you do, with the caveat that eating lasts all the time, without ever any break can create some very difficult metabolic adaptations in the body, and is something that I would say everybody knows, which I don't really agree with.
Everybody who eats less in any fashion and fewer calories in the short term will lose weight. And there's lots of medical studies show basically every diet works in the short term. Not many people. This is the shocking paradox of our modern nutrition and diet landscape is every diet works, basically in the short term, yet very few people having any long term success.
It's the minority. And so there is a great deficit in our understanding of this and a great deficit in our ability to translate that experience into long term, sustainable abilities of people to be healthy and experience health and vitality and maintain their weight at a healthy level in the current framework. So if we say we have this entire current framework that really isn't serving people very well, do you want to dive back into that process, reducing things to numbers, or have we have we really run that game?
This is how I feel. Have we really run that game enough times to say, I think it's time to turn a different page in the page it out and trying to help us turn right now is to ask a deeper and more profound question, how do I want to be in the world? To me, this is getting us in the sailboat.
Okay, trying to hammer us into a thing. Imagine if this simple fasting thing was like, okay, you need, you know, clocks and apps and tracking yourself and numbers, numbers, numbers. And when you're eating, it has to be exactly these foods. And you have to go shopping to these specific places. Buy all this stuff, eat it at this time and buy this supplement and make sure you're balancing this and that.
I mean, the modern dieting landscape to me is kind of a nightmare move in a totally different direction. To me, most all of that thinking is unnecessary and even counterproductive to even what I'm doing right now. To talk about it is stressing me out. That's my first reaction. I got to take a deep breath. When I'm thinking about all that.
I think about the huge ocean of stress that I have experience from thousands of people trying to do that number. Their way to better health and weight loss. I want to tell people, let's just let's recognize, okay, numbers are real, numbers are things in some very, concrete material like existence which we are in. Okay. We we do have to eat less calories do have to go down.
I can hear nutritionists in the audience saying, well, what about my my trace elements? And we've got to get it. I mean, all this is true, okay? But putting that as the focus doesn't help us to sail through a space in a calm, gentle fashion where we're finding peace and contentment. In my experience, when we take the pressure off and we start asking the deeper questions about how do I want to be in the world?
And we think about our expression in that fashion, and we start getting into a flow with it where we
're not struggling with it. The decisions that we make, the things that we do help us to actually do, the things that we would be stressing out about and trying to trying to do. But you can just flow through it.
I think the world is such that if we're thoughtful and open and try to move toward health and try to make healthy food decisions and get natural, unprocessed foods that come from the earth in a natural way, you start to realize what a miracle it is there for all kinds of different things, full of nutrients and life giving things, and bring energy and everything we need that we don't really have to think about.
Are selenium intake. Okay, I've had I had a nutritionist once arguing with me about my fasting process with a patient that we were sharing is a respectful discussion, but they were really bent out of shape because they didn't think that the patient was getting enough. Selenium. Selenium is important, okay? It's helpful for thyroid function, all kinds of stuff.
I get that. I'm like, this patient has lost 80 pounds, okay. Like their their insulin resistance is going away. Like you got to look at the big big picture here. We can get so dialed in on the numbers of things need to like open up and breathe a little bit. So as I think about great work, I want to share with you, a piece of great work.
And that is going to frame some more of our discussion. I had the great fortune a few years ago of going to Spain in Madrid. If you're ever, able to go there, there is an incredible art museum. I believe it's called Reina Sofia, which houses a lot of incredible things, my favorite of which was Picasso's Guernica. It was really amazing to go see this piece of artwork is this is like 12ft high and 26, 25, 26ft long.
It's his style of, depicting the bombing of this Spanish town, Guernica by the Nazis in 1937. I seen pictures of it before to stand in front of it. You look up at it, you look it. It's so huge. He spent, like, six months painting it, like, 35 actual days of painting. But building it the structure for the canvas and mapping it out and designing it half a year to create this.
Incredible. I think I found it to be really inspiring and thought provoking to look at it. This is one of the times in my life where I said where I, I saw a great piece of artwork and it just really impacted me on a on a deeper level. Have you had an experience like that? Have you seen something in the world?
Maybe it's just something natural. Maybe it's a piece of artwork, a great work, a great something that spoke to you on a deeper level. The big theme that I have been exploring in our discussions, how do we get to a deeper level than we're currently operating on? We've identified we've discussed the things that everybody knows in our society about how to lose weight and get healthy and move toward health and promote health and healing.
And we have thousands of nutrition studies, for example, that say, oh, well, these are the things that you do and say, everybody knows I need to eat healthy food and eat less of it and exercise. Okay. But none of these things, you know, I give quotes rare. This is why the majority of adults in our society is struggling with weight, because this knowledge is not helping us.
So how do we get to a deeper level? If you were to ask somebody, let's say, hey, how does a human being get to a deeper level emotionally in any way? A deeper understanding of reality, of being human, isn't it? Art is an art. What does that art is the process of capturing the emotion, the struggle, the difficulty of the human experience and channeling it into something that resonates, that we can understand on a deep and emotional level, that helps to transform things that shares and communicates in a language that is deeper than words.
You stand and look at. Guernica has no words on it. You know, there's no signs. It's it. It is speaking in though, the the language of human experience. We're trying to talk about being differently in the world. I think it takes something like that to do it. It's at least the type of thing that we should really think about and consider.
And when you think about the way the world is, everything numbers, everything science, everything analytical. When the school budget gets cut, we we knock out the art and we knock out the music. And, you know, how is that serving us? Is that leaving us as a society of people who have a more open mind, a more creative experience, can see things from other people's perspectives, from multiple points of view who are able to say, like, actually, I don't know that this is the way the world really is.
I don't see that this is working. So if we say, well, this is a process that maybe is not serving us so well, maybe we should think more deeply about it. And to do that, I want to read a second passage for you. So the first passage I read, kind of a primer, just getting us in the mindset of being an artist, creating our experience.
And then this is what I really wanted to share with you today. This passage is called submerge. Submerge the great Works. Broadening our practice of awareness is a choice we can make at any moment. And of course, we should do it. Let's do it. It is not a search, though. It is stoked by a curiosity or hunger, a hunger to see beautiful things here.
Beautiful sounds, feel deeper sensations to learn and be fascinated and surprised and a continual basis. That sounds exciting to me. This sounds like the type of journey that you know I want to be on, the type of journey that I want people to be on. So you're moving toward health. I want it to be like that fascinating, surprising, full of beauty and joy.
Absolutely. In service of this robust instinct, consider submerging yourself in the canon of great works. Read the finest literature. Watch the masterpieces of cinema. Get up close to the most influential paintings, visit architectural landmarks. There's no standard list. No one has the same measures of greatness, the canon continually changing across time and space. Nonetheless, exposure to great art provides an invitation.
It draws us forward and opens up doors of possibility. This what I'm telling you. Opening up doors of possibility open our mind to something different and greater and more open and full of joy and meaning. Something inspiring. Numbers on a spreadsheet. Not necessarily the most inspiring thing if you can get inspired by it. If you see the number going down, if a process is working for you, well, it can be inspiring.
And no offense to any mathematician or anyone else. If you make the choice of reading classic literature every day for a year rather than reading the news, by the end of that time, you will have a more honed sensitivity for recognizing greatness from the books than from the media. We were talking about this the other day, about news and about the purpose of it.
The conditioning from media. It's a consumption. This is the mirror that fasting is giving us. Media companies making huge amounts of money from advertising, and they want to keep us consuming more of it. They've created a cycle where they guilt trip everybody to make you think that you aren't a thoughtful or conscientious citizen if you don't keep consuming their product.
The news that you have to know, but you don't have to know it. Your friend is going to tell you the important things. Let other people filter that out. You can't escape. You can't live in this world without knowing the big, important things and just going to come to you if you even if you are in a cabin in the woods, you know someone's going to deliver the mail, they're going to tell you like, hey, did you hear we've talked about this priming effects.
We have a certain limited amount of mental bandwidth, a lot of influence trying to get in and fill that space in our mind to shape our experience. So we consume things in a certain way, fasting, showing us we don't need to do that. We can fast from food and bring health to the body. We can fast from media and bring health to the mind.
Open up greater space for love and joy and appreciation. Recognizing greatness. We're talking about the great works of our life, one of which can be our health expression. If we want to really have a great work of health, got to open up space for that, and then fill it with the most inspiring ideas. I love this idea. Take this idea.
Reading the classics, looking at incredible pieces of inspiring artwork. How much more inspiration would you get standing in front of Guernica and thinking deeply about the human condition that led to its creation, then scrolling on a social media app, the absolute morass of what is going on. This applies to every choice we make, not just with art, but with the friends we choose, the conversations we have, even the thoughts we reflect on.
All of these aspects affect our ability to distinguish good from very good, very good from great. They help us determine what is worthy of our time and attention. This is a specific a very, very good thing to focus on. What are the things that are worthy of our time and attention, our precious, limited attention? Where are we turning it?
What are we filling that space with? Because there's an endless amount of data available to us, and we have a limited bandwidth to conserve. We might consider carefully curating the quality of what we allow in. Exactly. This doesn't just apply if your goal is to make art of lasting significance, even if your goal is to make fast food will likely taste better.
If you experience the best fresh food available during the process, level up your taste. The objective is not to learn to mimic greatness, but to calibrate our internal meter for greatness so that we can better make the thousands of choices that might ultimately lead to our great work. I really, really love. Especially the way he ends that calibrate our internal meter for greatness so we can better make the thousands of choices that might ultimately lead to our own great work.
Our own great work. One of the things, the foundational things the creation of health and the flourishing of our life in that space, thousands of choices shape that experience. The creative act of health is a collection of thousands of choices that we make throughout our day and throughout our life that paint the canvas of health. I say, let's make the greatest work of health that we can create the strongest, healthiest, most resilient version of ourselves that we can.
We're stepping toward that day by day value. You all here. Nice to be with you. Wish you the very best, and I will see you back here soon.