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Welcome to The Health & Wellness Practitioners Podcast! Dr. Danielle and other guest experts talk about everything from getting your practice started, developing your clinical skills, growing your practice YOUR way, and dealing with the real stuff life burnout and work/life balance. Whether you’ve been practicing for decades or just started your journey, you’ll find something here for you!
Dr Danielle:
Welcome to the Health and Wellness Practitioners podcast. I am your host, Dr. Danielle Angela. In this show, I and my guest experts will talk about everything from getting your practice started to developing your clinical skills, growing your practice your way, and of course, dealing with the real stuff like burnout and work-life balance. Whether you've been practicing for decades or just started your journey, you'll find something here for you. So, take a deep breath and enjoy the show.
Dr Danielle:
I am bringing you a new guest to the podcast today. His name is Zack Schreier, and we are going to talk about taking your own health struggles and using them for the greater good, helping other people with what you've learned through the process of, of healing yourself, which for a lot of you is how you got into the modality that you practiced in the first place. Right. So, before we go any further, we're gonna dive into the rapid fire questions. And question number one, Zack, is when there are so many career paths available in the health and wellness industry, why did you choose the path that you're on now?
Zack Schreier:
Yeah. that's a great question. Let me see if I can rapid fire as requested. I, I think the reason is I, I like creating stuff and I, you know, especially like, like physical products and, and goods. And so, you know, entrepreneurship just made sense for me for that reason.
Dr Danielle:
Awesome. Okay. Talk to me a little bit about what excites you or fills you up.
Zack Schreier:
Yeah. okay. Let's see. I, I'm really, I really like like intellectual projects and creative projects, and I guess making progress on those really fills me up.
Dr Danielle:
Mm-Hmm. Yeah, of course. That's what makes you a good entrepreneur, . All right, question three. What do you like the least about running a business?
Zack Schreier:
It's pretty incessant. And so the, you know, I really haven't taken much time off like where I don't feel like an obligation to make progress on, on the business really ever. Like, not, not in years can I think of like a, a three day stretch when I wasn't kind of focused on making progress.
Dr Danielle:
Yeah, I hear that. And a lot of people in our audience struggle with that too. Listen, I'm not exempt from it. I'm always, and forever asking people, telling people, advising people to take time off from their practice proactively, like they're not sick and having to cancel their appointments. They are planning ahead to take time off to rest and recover, especially for the chiropractors and other hands-on practitioners because they have such a physical demand on their body to do the work that they do. But I also struggle myself to think like, proactively and to take that time off. And when I do schedule the time off, to actually have it truly be completely time off, it, it, like I always am like, whoa, I keep sneak this meeting in there cuz I have nothing else going on that week. And then it kind of starts to fill in . So yeah, it can be very insidious. All right. Question four. What book do you think everyone should read?
Zack Schreier:
Gosh, there's, there's a handful l let me name this sort of category of books actually that I've, I just gotten into last year, which is these like biographies of 20th century scientists. So specifically I, I loved this book aboutJohn von Neumann called The Man From the Future by an author called Ananyo Bhattacharya . That was so, so good. You know, I I'm quite inspired by these books because you know, the 20th century was a a time in history when, you know, humanity was tapping into the kind of open-ended like a ability of science and tech to just fundamentally change the way our lives go and, and you know, what we can do. And so, and, and I love these thinkers in the way that they basically handled and, and search these domains and came back with these brilliant insights. So Von Neumann and then also Richard Feynman and I just read Oppenheimer. And then also there's an Einstein book by Walter Isaacson who does a lot of these biographies and all those books, I, I just like felt were so uplifting, so I'd recommend those.
Dr Danielle:
Yeah. Cool. Thank you for sharing that. That's definitely a unique genre of books, and not one that has been mentioned on the podcast before. Cool. Okay. Last question is, on a scale of zero to 10, how crunchy are you?
Zack Schreier:
I'm like a five. I'd say
SHARK TANK
Dr Danielle:
Well, I guess we'll find out more about that as we start our conversation and learn more about who you are and what you do. So as I've let everyone know in the title of the video, the livestream and the Facebook group, you were contested on Shark Tank in 2021. So give us a story of how that happened. How did you find yourself on Shark Tank?
Zack Schreier:
Sure. Yeah. I guess in order to set the stage for that whole journey probably starts in sixth grade for me. So I was, I was diagnosed with Type one diabetes as a young kid. And basically for the audience you know, type one is basically requires you to be dependent on insulin. So there's no, there's no way to just, you know, manage it with lifestyle alone. Your pancreas basically doesn't produce any insulin pretty shortly after diagnosis. And so you have to, you know, perform that function that your body was previously performing, which is to, for, for every carb that you take into your body that turns into blood glucose and you need to calibrate or basically regulate that blood glucose by by, you know, injecting the right amount insulin to take that glucose and shuttle into the cells.
Zack Schreier:
So yeah, basically that, that was sort of a health you know, journey or that sort of health problem that was thrusted on me pretty young. And so it was all about like learning what I needed to learn to like always be doing this balancing act in the best way possible. And you know, one thing about that is that you learn pretty quickly that high glycemic carbs are kind of the enemy. Like you don't wanna have carbs that just like rapidly spike your sugar. And the reason is actually that the, the the the action of the insulin and the bloodstream takes a couple hours actually for the insulin of to be basically fully used up and to bring sugar back down. But rapidly absorb carbs like soda, for example, take like 15 minutes, and then you've got this massive sugar spike that's quite immediate.
Zack Schreier:
And so I, the best thing to do is to be able to offset the the glucose being deposited in the bloodstream with insulin. And to have that glucose be deposit slowly, which means fiber, protein, fat, and not just straight carb. So anyways, low carb stacks were really quite a beneficial thing for me to have because of that. And even actually no carb foods in general, like eggs, for example. And so I was making a lot of eggs and I realized that there was like crispy bits of omelet that would coat the pan French like chips even though, you know, they didn't have any carbs. Yeah. And so I was like, maybe I can make some, some low carb chips out of, out of these these eggs. And so that ended up being the, the idea for my first business and kind of click out with that maybe when I was in middle school. And then right as I was going to college, decided to revisit that idea. And actually just two years later, it was a full-fledged business. We were producing in a commercial kitchen space and distributing the product to retailers and online, and then we applied to Shark Tank and they accepted us. So yeah,
PRODUCT BASED VS SERVICE BASED BUSINESSES
Dr Danielle:
I, I think that the process of creating a a physical product is way different than, well, clearly it is way different than what most of the people in our audience aren't doing, which is a service-based business. Right. And yet they want to, or like, they kind of, they dream about having some kind of product that they can sell because it doesn't, at least in their minds, require more effort from them to sell more, to increase revenue. Whereas like a massage therapist, as you can imagine, they can only make as much money as they can seek clients. The, the number of appointments on their schedule is the limitation. Right. So I'm curious what you would say about that from your perspective in regard to getting a product-based business off the ground that was solely your own invention. Is it as time freedom-based as people would like to believe that it is,
Zack Schreier:
Right? Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. You know, I, I I used to so my parents are in services also that, you know, they sell physical goods, but it's, it's a, a kind of so it's a floor covering business. And so you know, it's, it's, it's more similar to kind of this like constrained by time and by staff kind of business than a CPG company where, you know, in CPG you can scale that thing up from, from zero to, to, you know, a hundred million annually. And of course that does require a team of people, but you're not really quite as restricted. Like, you know, the machines that are making this stuff can, can churn out just thousands and thousands of packages, and then you can ship those across the country easily and distribute them everywhere. So there, there is this opportunity for scale.
Zack Schreier:
And that, that was part of what was attracted me about, about physical goods and you know, distribution like this. And recently I've been sort of almost like like, not that I ever had experience in the, in the space, but almost like a kind of like twinge of nostalgia for something simpler and something, something like more, more grounded more sort of fundamental like, like services. And so yeah, may, maybe I'd say some, some of the mystique of, of like, entrepreneurship has gone away as I've realized just how difficult it is. And, and so I think, but at the same time, I think you're totally right that if you're restricted by your own labor, then you're gonna find yourself putting in more and more hours and then reaching the ceiling of what you can, what you can do with that, with that time in terms of revenue generation.
Dr Danielle:
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it leaves you basically with two choices. You can continue to add more appointments, you can increase your fees for services, you could do both, and you could, in some cases, reduce your appointment time. Cause it doesn't really work for massage therapists. You know, I, I like used this as a specific example. Massage therapy as an industry, there's an expectation that you get a certain amount of time from your massage therapist and chiropractic, acupuncture it, that's not the case. We can do things to help reduce our appointment times, but ultimately there's still only so many people we can squeeze onto our calendar when you know, even when our appointments are as short as we can get them to be while still providing quality care too. So let's talk a bit about what your, how can I say? Like, your company portfolio looks like now you have the company that you started initially that created the egg white chips, if we can call 'em that. And then where have you gone since then? What else have you done?
Zack Schreier:
Yeah, sure. Actually, one, one thing I'll say on the last point as well is I, I think a, as you're thinking about bringing a business into the world, especially with products it's really important to note that there's gonna be a lot of fixed costs and ultimately, at the end of the day, you need to be able to pass through that, that territory of getting that thing off the ground and all those fixed costs. And you need to see some light at the end of the tunnel, where essentially at some scale, the variable costs are gonna be low enough that you're gonna end up being able to turn a profit that that covers all of your your fixed costs. And so it's almost like, you know, I, I recently I think recent podcast, I can compare this to sort of what life does in the universe.
Zack Schreier:
And you have to go from zero to one as you're starting a company where one is basically something that can continuously procure resources, it needs to sustain itself, and zero is where you're at right now, where, you know, you don't, that thing doesn't exist yet. And so you need to basically figure out, you know, it's essentially a creature that could exist but doesn't, and it's up to you to kind of like do the like rapid consolidated evolutionary process to bring that thing into the world and make it a successful or viable entity. And so, you know, the most important thing at the end of the day, really the only thing is that there's a way for revenue to exceed cost. Like otherwise, it's just doesn't work. So in C B G consumer package goods, you really have to focus quite a bit on margin and recognize all the different places where you're gonna end up sacrificing margin.
Zack Schreier:
So you've got, you know, you've got the list price the consumer sees, so let's call it a hundred dollars for something or a dollar and then whoever's distributing that is gonna take their cut. So it's, if it's a Whole Foods that you're selling into, now you're actually Whole Foods is actually paying 50 bucks for that a hundred dollars item, and then there's gonna be some distributor that brings it to them, and they're gonna take their cut. So now you're gonna sell it to the distributor for 40 bucks. And then you've got your costs as part of that. And then you also need to reserve some room for marketing and, and acquisition costs. So now all of a sudden you need, like, your cost needs to be like 20% of what the, what the end user pays for it to be viable.
Zack Schreier:
And so it's, you know, it's a, that's a difficult thing especially as you're competing against established players who have already optimized along all these lines. I think basically you have to be, either you have to find something that is totally undersaturated, or you can step in and solve some need that's unmet or you have to be ready to lose a lot of money. So you have to fundraise, you have to bootstrap yourself. And so I, I wouldn't necessarily recommend that people get into this space unless they're really willing to, you know, I think hear a lot of advice from a lot of people that have been in the space and say all the reasons not to do it. And if you can overcome all those things, then then maybe you've got a shot, but it's tough. So Yeah.
Dr Danielle:
Yeah. No, but thank you for sharing that because we need to hear the real life behind the scenes stuff, not just what, you know, looks great on social media or like what the end result is that can be coveted. It's like we don't know all of the work that went on behind the scenes to get to that that achievement or that accomplishment. I was kind of also having like a mind expansion moment as you were talking about going from zero to one and relating that to quantum physics. I don't know how familiar you are with quantum physics, but basically like what we focus on, what we put our attention on consistently, we can sort of pull out of the quantum field and manifest into reality. Right. And that's really what entrepreneurship is. Like. You, you're putting all of your focus on something to create something that didn't exist before. So you've done that once with your first company, and how did you know that it was time to move into something else from there?
ENTERING THE SUPPLEMENTING SPACE
Zack Schreier:
Yeah, actually, you know, I, so the same year that I so I I took a year off of college to work on the the egg chips. They're the, at white chips, I should say. And then I went back to school actually and continued to be a board member. And my, my co-founder actually continued on full-time as our CEO for for five years. And basically that same year that I started that company, I also started to exploring the supplement space. And the, the reason really, really was that you know, during my first two years of college, I had dabbled a little bit with some mind altering substances of different sorts and recognized the benefits and, you know, enjoyed some of the performance benefits actually of using something like Diphenyl, for example. But I wanted to figure out whether I could basically have a, a daily stack of, of supplements and other habits that would allow me to access those elevated performance states without some of the drawbacks that are usually associated with like, you know, say Adderall, for example.
Zack Schreier:
So I started exploring that space and you know, I brought in a hundred different ingredients and kind of mixed powders in, in my, in my room at home. And, you know, ended up taking that back to school and, and continued to work on kind of making my own supplement stacks. And then realized that actually we, we created a product. So we, we created a capsule product called Flow and another capsule product called Chill. And you know, we, we started selling to, you know, college kids and created the small business outta that, but it was kind of an uphill battle to, to sell like capsules. You know, it's like, who, who were we to create those sorts of products and that, that kind of thing. So realized that in order to drive adoption, in order to make reduce the barriers to people trying this stuff, we thought it would be easier if the format was more food-like, so if we could say, Hey, you know, have this bar, or have this gummy or whatever and you know, it's, it's got, it's gonna benefit your focus or it's gonna help you with overall health, that, that seemed to be more compelling and easier to sort of spread proposition than like capsules.
Zack Schreier:
And then we, then we had another sort of insight, which was that coffee's already the neutropication of choice for most consumers. So like, 70% of Americans have coffee every day for daily energy. So we're like, okay, we're creating energy products. Why don't we infuse a coffee creamer with these ingredients that we wanna use for daily focus and energy. And so that, that's the, that's the product that we ended up launching in 2021. We created like a beta version of that and launched it on Amazon. And then two years later we we, or actually, so just this march, so literally just a month ago we, we relaunched that product a new and improved version in terms of the flavor and texture. So the first version was like, really effective and people loved the way it felt. And then the second version we made sure it was absolutely delicious. And like the very best thing you could add your coffee both on the, the flavor side and on the effect side
Dr Danielle:
. That's pretty amazing. And I can only again, imagine the process that you've had to go through to get actually, I guess, both products, right? Like the egg white chips and also the what, like, what can you say, how, what's the category that this is, that it's like a
Zack Schreier:
Product, like add the coffee, we say like add, it's an ad coffee product. I think the, the, there's a, a concept called standard of identity in, in food that the FDA actually enforces. I think we are technically not a coffee creamer for that reason because Okay. That, that we probably could say non-dairy coffee creamer if we wanted to. But add a coffee's probably the more general category. Okay. And, and that's sort of like, you could think of like collagen, creamers and that sort of thing as kind of analogous products where you're getting some functional benefit by adding something to your coffee. And in this case, we've, we've chosen to align that functional benefit with the reason you were having the coffee in the first place, which was focus and energy.
WORKING WITH THE FDA
Dr Danielle:
Yeah. So you mentioned the F D A, that's where I was kind of going with this. Like, I can only imagine what that process is like to do whatever it is you need to do. I don't even know where you would start to get approval from the F D A to package something like this and be able to sell it on a platform like Amazon and not just like, out of your basement. So what that, what process was like.
Zack Schreier:
Yeah, sure. So I guess the, the thing to note here is that, you know, people, people say stuff like, you know, supplements are totally unregulated and that kind of thing. You hear that. Yeah. And that's, I guess that's, that's true sort of like, you know, potentially if you wanted to, you could make something in sell outta your basement, that sort of thing. But if you really want to get to scale in the supplement space, you need to work with manufacturers that, that have good manufacturing practices. So you, you go and find somebody credited that the FDA has basically automated and approved potentially you look for other certifications like NSF. And so that's what we're doing in, in our case, so we're working with a manufacturer that is a Turkey manufacturer. So we tell them, you know, this is what we want in the product, here's the specs.
Zack Schreier:
You know, here's, here's everything we formulated, here's the suppliers we wanna work with. And they say, okay, that's great. You know, we'll put this through all of our processes. We'll do all of the batch testing as the stuff coming in, you know, test for microbial activities, test for heavy metals, all that stuff, test on the way out. So it is a pretty stringent process because we're working with accredited manufacturer. And in terms of the relationship with the FDA, they submit the label that we use to the F fda. There is no like, formal approval process, but that said, you do have to stay within certain bounds when you're working with these ingredients that are, that are recognized as safe and approved for use by the FDA. So, like, you know, if, if we wanted to, you know, use supplements in the wrong way, we could effectively make a poison, you know, that that is something that you can do.
Zack Schreier:
But the FDA, as you submit that label to the fda they'll say, oh, no, you can't, you can't do that. Like, that's not in our balance of what is acceptable to be used in dietary supplement. Actually, the manufacturer in the first place wouldn't let you do that is my, is my guess. So but yeah, I mean, it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be using some of the ingredients, misusing some of the ingredients by using them in the wrong doses, in the wrong combinations that could be harmful. But that's that's definitely prohibited by the processes that we, we've got in place.
MANAGING PERSONAL HEALTH STRUGGLES WHILE BUILDING A BUSINESS
Dr Danielle:
Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for sharing a bit more about that. So knowing that you were diagnosed with type one diabetes when I think you said you were in sixth grade at that time, so you've been living a, a large portion of your life with a condition that is as far as we know, incurable and then also started two companies in adulthood. Can you speak a bit about what you have done or what you've found to be helpful for you in maintaining your own health, despite the stress of dealing with the fda, for example?
EQUILIBRIUM SYSTEMS AND NON-EQUILIBRIUM SYSTEMS
Zack Schreier:
Yeah, sure. Yeah. you know, I think there's you know, unfortunately when it comes to health, there are actually, let, let me say a little more about sort of how I view like like the human circumstance in a sense. So we're, we're what you'd call a non-equilibrium or a far from equilibrium system. So this is sort of back to the physics talk. Basically there, there's kind of two categories of things in the universe. And this might, this might sound simple, but this is actually this is you know, Einstein said had this idea of like, as simple as possible and no simpler. And that's, I think what we're shooting for as we create theories that are supposed to explain what's going on, we want to make sure that we're not ignoring crucial complexity, but that we're actually handling that complexity in as few terms as possible.
Zack Schreier:
Otherwise it's unwieldy. So, you know, the so anyways, yeah, there, there's a framework I think that is actually applicable and helps to basically categorize the different kind of physical dynamics that different things in the universe are exhibiting. And that is basically systems that are at equilibrium at and systems that are at exhibiting a non-equilibrium steady state. So basically, an equilibrium system is something that's settled to its lowest energy state. So like, you know, if you think of like you know, l l I'll leave a, an ice cube out, it will melt, and then there's gonna be a puddle of water, right? And then that will evaporate, and then it will be in sub cloud, you know, and so th this system has basically the entropy of that system has increased where it was in a, in an ordered configuration of like being in ice cube where energy had to go in to create that order.
Zack Schreier:
And then over time basically that thing becomes more disordered, the entropy in the system goes up, and then you see it basically settle into its lowest energy state. Now with a human, so notably, like everything in the room around me is like the same temperature, right? Because everything I'm getting a call here from my business partner, ignore that. So so yeah, basically every, everything everything settles into a low, low energy state and equi, equilibriate, equi, whatever, whatever. So you know, the, the things, things but but notably, like, I'm here in this room and I'm 98 degrees right now, right? And so I've evidently not had my heat dissipate. I've not settled into my lowest energy consideration. And so I'm still preserving this relatively low entropy state that, that makes me up. And so the, these are the two categories of things in physics, basically, you've got equilibrium systems and non-equilibrium systems.
Zack Schreier:
And in order to be a non-equilibrium system, you have to have some strategy or some bundle of strategies for maintaining this differentiation from the environment over time. So you have to figure out how you can be an ice cube that stays frozen, even at room temperature, or in this case the opposite. You have to figure out how you can keep your heat despite this this pressure to dissipate. And so basically what this means in the, in the, in the case of humans, is we've got all these things that we have to do in order to maintain this distance from equilibrium in order to basically stay alive. So we're talking nutrition, we're talking sleep, we're talking exercise, hydration, all these different things. And unfortunately, our non-conformance study state is made of all these things, not just one of them. So you can't, you can't ignore any of these elements.
Zack Schreier:
You really have to optimize along all of them in order to occupy the, the highest energy states that you can. And I think there, you know, I, I'm mixing metaphors a little bit, but there is a k a kind of a through line from the from this idea of like maintaining far from equilibrium and maintaining performance. So if you wanna be as robust as possible, as the kind of like continuous loop that you are as a human being, you wanna be able to push tho your energy states up to the highest level and sustain them. Now, I could take Adderall today and I would be like, at a higher level than would be sustainable, right? But of course that thing's gonna come crashing back in. You know, I'm, I'm not gonna be able to maintain that, that excessively high sort of energy state.
Zack Schreier:
So what I wanna do is find a, a sort of suite of things that are repeatable that I can use to, to support my, my highest sustainable performance. So you just gotta basically figure out your limit of energy expenditure and figure out what you can do to support that. And, you know, not go too much further, but also don't settle for being too, like, don't settle for being too sort of reduced and crashed burnt out. You know, if you find yourself in a position like that, you have to figure out how to basically you know, recover, how to bounce back how to find some sort of upward spiral back to like your full capacity basically. Sorry, that's a long answer, but that, that's my thoughts on it. No,
Dr Danielle:
That's awesome. I loved the analogy about the ice cube and I can hear the sports performance gurus and the audience that are like wanting to hear more, and they've got all of these ideas and and like rabbit holes that they want to go down with this conversation in regard to human performance overall. And, you know, how do, how do we keep ourselves from getting to the point where like we do crash or just, you know, the day-to-day of raising kids and having gone through really stressful college degree programs and then board exams and now having a very busy practice and the stress of filing your tax return this week or whatever, you know, whatever is going on. People that get into sometimes their thirties, but oftentimes their forties and fifties, they're like, I cannot sustain this anymore. I quit.
Dr Danielle:
Like, I just give up. I can't keep going. So there's a lot that we could say about all, all of that, right? But I think your perspective on that is, is really unique. So thank you for sharing what you did. So, okay. So having, having said that can you kind of like crystallize, like what does it look like in your own life right now to run two companies and to sustain your own health and, and to make sure that you aren't finding yourself in that position in the future where your energy level is not what it used to be,
Zack Schreier:
Right? Yeah. I think for me it's, it definitely starts with sleep, and I think that's probably across board. you know, if I'm not, if I'm not sleeping well then, you know, I just can't expect myself to have, you know, the output that I, I know I'm capable of. I, and I think I more sensitive that than most people my age might be. I, I just like, feel pretty acutely less capable, like immediately if I get less than seven hours. Like now that, you know, that said occasionally, especially if there's a lot going on that's like actually inviting instead of just stressful, then I can, I can get by on six. Like you know, I was recently at a, a trade show and I love being at those, those shows. Like it's, the energy is just so high and like, I was not sleeping, you know, my full seven hours or eight but I, but I felt good for a few days, right?
Zack Schreier:
But now, you know, back at home and kind of just like on the hook for doing all the things I'm supposed to do each day, if I'm not coming into the day rested, I'm just like not able to get it up to do everything that I, I need to do. So that's one piece. I think, you know, good nutrition is another crucial aspect for me. Like if I don't, if I don't eat well, then I notice it also similar to sleep and then staying active, of course I think all also one frameworks for, for like, for handling the to-do list are really important for me. So may maybe unlike many of the listeners of the, of the show who like have a ver like just incessant obligations on the schedule each day seeing patients and they just have to show up and do that well.
Zack Schreier:
Yeah. You know, I, I don't have all that many things each day where I have to be a certain place at a certain time, do a certain thing. So it's much more about like, sort of organizing my day such that I get the things done that I need to get done. And so actually, but for me, I can be quite easily overwhelmed by just how long that list is of things I'm supposed to do over the next month. And so it helps actually, if I ignore almost everything that I have to do and just put a few things front and center that I actually feasibly can't do today. So whatever, whatever I can't do today, I shouldn't be looking at, I shouldn't be attending to. And so now I use this framework of opportunities and obligations where, you know, I've got, I've got just a few opportunities that I've listed where when I, when I've got surplus time, which I hope to carve out most days those are the things that I'm supposed to be leaning into and working more seriously on.
Zack Schreier:
And then the obligations are the things that run it, that are just running all the time that like, yeah, whenever they come in, I need to handle them. And so I'm trying to keep those list as short as possible and then keep another list of like future obligations and opportunities to pull up as the list gets thinner up top. So that, that helps me cuz I, I just, it's totally easy to get overwhelmed by everything going on and you know, you, you, you can't do more than you're capable of, of doing. I mean, you can for a day, but then you, you'll you're, you'll burn out more quickly. And so it's, it's good to figure out what that highest level of output is that you can reasonably sustain and expect yourself to do that and know more.
Dr Danielle:
Yeah. And entrepreneurship is like, a marathon it's not a sprint. Some of us approach it like a sprint in the beginning, like, we're just gonna run as fast and as hard as we can to get to some arbitrary benchmark, which usually hasn't been identified, and then find like, oh, I actually can't run anymore cuz now I've gotten injured. Or like, I'm just completely depleted. I'm out of energy. I can't keep going. But if we think of it as a marathon instead, then we know that we have to pace ourselves and we've gotta get out the gate at like, yes, a reasonable pace. But that has to be a sustainable pace for the long term, for the long haul because there's really not a finish line. I mean, the, and it doesn't matter what kind of business you have, whether it's product-based, service-based, a hybrid something online or in-person, it's there, there's no finish line. You, you get to one level of them, you realize like, oh, and now we can grow to this next level if we do this .
Zack Schreier:
Totally. Yes. I'm actually, I'm glad you brought this up. You it's, I'm, I'm a frameworks person. Like I, I, I've really like sort of this idea of like as simple as possible, no simpler. I've tried to do that for a number of different questions and areas of life. And I, I'm a, I'm a distance runner and actually in high school and college specifically, and so I worked pretty hard to, to strip that area bare and figure out what the sort of it's kind of general theory of training would look like and how to, how to implement that. And I think this there, there's a real analogy here to the rest of life. So, you know, basically the way I see it is there's a, you've got a capacity curve, and that capacity curve basically represents what's possible for you to do.
Zack Schreier:
And you can, you can have a flat capacity curve where you've got like a sort of like this is on one axis, you've got duration and the other, you've got speed and you, you can only maintain a certain duration for or I'm sorry, a certain speed for a certain duration. So maybe you can run a, a five minute mile and you can run a, a 11 minute, two mile and you can run a a three hour marathon. You know, those are all different points of the capacitor curve. But you know, let's say, let's say you were gonna run a second race that same day with, with like a, a little bit of a time in between to recuperate. Now you've, you've added a time dimension to this where your capacity. But, but what's crucial about this is that you can't it's not the same curve at a second at a second time because there's this recovery or this this this sort of expenditures that would actually compromise future parts of the curve.
Zack Schreier:
Now, let's say, let's say you do some training and you recover, and then you're better than you were now all of a sudden the curve at a future time is actually higher than it was in the past. So the really important thing is to add this talk time dimension to the capacity curve, understand the way in which what you do right now will impact the future a capacity that, that you've got to work with. I think as we're planning a training schedule or as we're creating a life structure for ourselves, the really crucial thing is to make sure that we're trending upwards on the capacity curve. Meaning we have to, we have to do things that we can recover from in reasonable amounts of time. You know, if we do a sprint and it drains us, then, you know, we might have done more in that day, then we otherwise do it in a normal day. But we might have lost a few days of, of energy. Now it's always, it's possible to sprint for weeks or months in a row and then find yourself burnt out for a few months as well. And so it's good to think about, I think it's important to modulate some, you know, sometimes days are gonna be hard, sometimes you're gonna take recovery. But you know, macroscopically you want to have a reasonable load and, and not more than you can handle for, for weeks or months in row.
THE NUTRITIONAL SIDE OF FEELING GOOD
Dr Danielle:
Yeah, yeah. And the goals for running, but also for running a business too. Yeah. Cool. For sure. Okay, so Zack I think I've asked you all the questions that I wanted to ask you today. Is there anything else that you want to contribute to this conversation before we wrap it up?
Zack Schreier:
Yeah. Let's see. Well, lots of different things come to mind. Let me see. Yeah. Well, okay, actually one, one thing that's been interesting to me recently is, is the sort of is the nutritional side of feeling good and, and raising our capacity and trying to basically get a framework in place for understanding that as well. And, and the way, the way I think it may make sense to handle this area is to look at a few different categories of, of nutrients. So things that you absolutely need. So like the essentials things that play a helpful but non-essential role in optimizing metabolism. And then things that are specifically designed to set state. So like help to get your, get your mindset right. And I, I, I'm finding these tools to be also quite helpful for just maintaining a relatively higher performance baseline on a daily basis.
Zack Schreier:
And I, I, I think it like part of you know, part of burnout potentially is just the, the demand that you've placed on your time exceeding the supply that you're capable of of sustaining. And you can, you can, you can act on either side of that. So you, you can try and sometimes alleviate the demand and take some rest and then recuperate. You can also try and bolster the supply side by having more of the right nutrition. So I think some things for people to focus on probably protein consumption, just keep that like in mind. Probably not not being too calorie restricted all the time I think it's quite easy for people to like, get in that mindset of like, you know, always, always under eating. And I, I think, you know, as a health intervention under reading is sometimes a good thing, but you probably wanna modulate that and make sure you're often having enough calories and definitely having the, having the right kinds of nutrients you know, whether you're under or overeating or eating, you know the right amount.
Zack Schreier:
So that's protein, that's your minerals, that's vitamins of course. And then on the metabolic side, you know, loving certain adaptogens like ---- and ----, --- things like that. And then those, that overlaps as well with, with setting state. So they're like, you know, using, using caffeine the right way, so not, not excessive doses and using it around performance occasions in particular, and then neutropics as well. So this is stuff we're exploring at Live Stacks with starting with this coffee creamer, but I guess it's I just wanted to put my finger on that as a different place people can look to enhance and support performance.
Dr Danielle:
Yeah. Awesome. Thank you for bringing that up. And I think if I understand it correctly, there is a place that our listeners can go to get a special giveaway from Life Stacks, is that right?
Zack Schreier:
Yeah, that's right. We're doing a try before you buy it offer on the website, and so you can go to lifestacks.com and basically add it to your card. You just pay shipping and if you like it, you keep it in pay, but otherwise you can just you know, no, no, no questions asked. We'll just, you know, ha thanks for trying. No problem.
Dr Danielle:
Awesome. Okay, well, we'll be sure to include the link to the creamer in the show notes so that people who are coffee drinkers maybe even non coffee drinkers, I don't know how else you would consume it, but they can go check out the product that you have created. Zack, thank you so much for hanging out with me today. It's been really, really fun to talk with you. It's been a very insightful and unique conversation and I know that our listeners are gonna be really excited to hear from you.
Zack Schreier:
Yeah, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.
Dr Danielle:
Hey, thanks so much for joining me for today's episode. If you love this podcast, then be sure to join our free community, the Health and Wellness Practitioners Group over on Facebook where you can continue the discussion and get to know other people in the community as well. We're a group of chiropractors, natural paths, acupuncturists, midwives, doulas, massage therapists, mental health therapists, counselors, nutritionist, and a list goes on. So come join us, get to know other people, build some personal and professional relationships. You can find the group by heading to drdanielleangela.com/community and request to join the group. I will see you inside from there.