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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
we're saying we're going to be healthy today.
Just going to try to sink into this moment
right here and right now.
Yesterday, as I was preparing for this show,
I was, you know, taking some space just to think about
what do I want to share?
The thought that kept coming to me in the stillness
is just what a precious gift it is, a day of our life.
We can take it for granted.
That's what I was trying to do yesterday.
What I'm really going to try to do today.
Don't take it for granted.
You know, it's easy to blow past a day like yesterday.
I was thinking like.
Like what is tomorrow? It's just a it's just a random day.
And then I was like, we have to slow down
and we have to not take these random,
mundane days for granted.
We have an incredible opportunity
both to be healthy, to use every bit of our being.
This is where I want to center ourselves today, fully
pull us into the present,
not looking forward in anything and not stuck in the past.
But really to be here and to say,
what does the perfect expression of this day look like?
Taking my very best energy, my very best
thinking, taking the best of everything
that this one human body can muster
and say, I'm just going to give it my best shot today.
And that doesn't have to be some,
you know, extreme athletic thing.
Maybe it doesn't even look like very much from the outside.
This is what a fasting space is to me.
Say let fasting do the work.
If we are moving toward weight loss and wellness, we're trying
to do something powerful in the body.
You know, we can use lots of metaphors, like
climbing the mountain and doing something inspiring.
Okay, but just as inspiring as to to say,
okay if we sat in a space.
You know, this is what fasting is showing us.
Is a mirror as an option, as a potential
that just to simply sit in a space
and choose joy.
You know.
Oh man.
Like, I think there's a lot of days where,
you know, I might say, oh, this day there's just nothing here.
Kind of like blah. Okay.
And from the outside, someone looking in, okay, look,
this person just having a day,
but now this person is sitting there
and we're choosing joy and.
I love that.
Thank you for sharing that.
Sit in a space, fasting space.
The meals that aren't consumed.
Okay. Say from a certain standpoint that's doing nothing.
From a certain standpoint, it's like doing everything right.
Because isn't that a challenge?
Isn't it a challenge to say, okay, if we're in a mundane,
we're going to look at I'm going to share
a little passage from this book,
dear artist, a love letter we've been dialing in.
How do we get into the heart?
How do we move forward in a direction that is so thoughtful?
This passage
had the phrase the miracle of the mundane
I'm going to share with you.
And that was speaking to me.
Okay.
Mundane was feeling like kind of the mood I was in yesterday.
But then miracle of the mundane, I'm like, oh man.
Like, how do we find the miracle here?
The fact that there can be joy present in nothing in space,
that there doesn't have to be an event.
You know, this is what happens,
I think, when we are turning inward, looking to the heart,
connecting with our deeper self,
that even in the midst of the mundane
and nothing special, that we can actually find joy
and such positivity.
On our health journey.
Health journeys for many people are a slog.
They're like, oh my gosh, I got to get to the gym.
I got to buy the special things.
I got to do the things
and the way that I want people moving forward, the way
I am trying my very best for my personal self
to move forward,
just move forward and joy, move forward and positivity
that the choosing the healthiest foods
is actually how I feel my best and like, don't
we want to feel our best?
And man have I been noticing it.
Like if I really dial in on the diet
like it helps everything,
especially the mood, like the energy, you know,
and then the fasting space to, you know,
bringing that in and just feeling the openness
and the body feeling it
as a gift to the body saying, hey, we are being healthy today.
Maybe I would even prefer in the mind, eat something,
I'm okay, but I'm giving this gift
and then you feel it in the body.
I can feel, you know, the GI tract just says, hey, thanks.
Like, oh, we're going to use this space.
All these things flow together.
Where, wherever that heart is, the emotional heart
that it can feel lighter.
Listen to these words.
This is the inspiration for the day.
Whatever day we are in, here we are.
Whatever's happening,
if it's a good, if it's bad, if it's neutral,
just listen to these words from Jaya John.
Learn to fill your heart each day
with the wildflowers of wonder and awe.
An artist sees the miracle in the mundane.
Grow your own medicine, distill its juices and essence,
drink from it and share the drink.
All souls in this place are thirsty and need infusion.
Experience
a thing and absolutely dissolve to its presence and aura.
Creativity is its bakery.
If you want to feed your soul and others, bake more bread.
Breathe as though you are the sky
and every breeze is your exhale.
Your breathing is a vital art
that also feeds all your other art.
It is a renewable energy system that you don't have to pay for.
If you don't invest in it, surely you will have to pay.
You are nature.
Spend time in yourself
and if you say you can't write poetry, you are poetry.
Write yourself.
For all the terms. You say you are not an artist.
Have you doubted yourself
and taken the risk to express your soul anyway?
Behold, you are an artist.
I hope you, I hope you like that.
That sat so well with me yesterday while I was thinking of that
and this miracle of the mundane, I thought I'd just read it,
you know, straight through as a reading.
And then I'll just share some thoughts about this
that were speaking to me.
Fill your heart each day.
This this is it's just a mirror.
I've been stepping through this.
You know, we've done a couple of these
and it just felt meaningful
as we've been thinking about
how do we connect to our heart and how do we use this resource
of, of this very deep, emotional place
to help us flow powerfully in a direction of health?
And it just felt like such a joy to me yesterday
that the next page
I turned to started with learn to fill your heart
as we've been thinking about this.
Like, are these coincidences?
You know, maybe you know,
but it didn't feel like it yesterday to me.
An artist sees the miracle and the mundane.
I was thinking about this yesterday like.
I was.
I was sitting at my table planning something out,
thinking, oh, how will tomorrow go? And.
My kids are just hanging out here.
And I just, I was like, I'm going to do this later, you know?
Then I just went and sat
and I just practiced some more presence
in this space, had a chat with my kids,
and we didn't even say much.
But I was like, this is, you know, just one of these moments
that seems like nothing.
But then it's, you know, everything.
So looking out, can you
can we find a moment like that in our day?
I'm going to be looking for it,
you know, where we can just be fully
present in the space and realize the miracle in it.
And maybe that can be something
if we want to bring it right into our health space,
maybe we can sit in a moment where we say, okay, here's
where I was going to have a snack.
And here I'm sitting in a space and I'm dialing in like that
passage said the wildflowers of wonder.
Like I'm sitting in this space, getting into the mind,
envisioning the beauty and flowing through a space
where in the past I would have had some trouble.
And then today we're saying, hey, we're moving through it
in a beautiful and gentle fashion.
Like that phrase we said the other day,
nurturing our way to health and never punishing our way there.
Grow their own medicine.
You know, this phrase lit up to me.
I think about medicine. I'm a doctor.
I think a lot about what medicine is.
I gave a talk. Well, it wasn't a talk.
We hosted a documentary screening for this documentary
that is now on Amazon called The Cholesterol Code.
It's like five bucks to rent it.
Go check it out and tell me what you think.
Very, very interesting this guy is.
I'll do a whole a whole show on it.
We should do we think a lot about what medicine is here.
We're in a context where medicine is nothing.
This is my thing is fasting medicine.
I think about this a lot from a certain standpoint.
You say it could be because it's a practice you can do.
You say is walking medicine.
You know, like walking can bring health and healing
to the body, but it's like, you know, it's just walking.
You know, it's like fasting is nothing.
So on a certain level it is a certain level it isn't.
But I often define medicine.
You know, many people define medicine
as a pill or medicine is like a surgery.
It's a thing that is like these classic things in medicine.
To me, medicine has always been
anything that can help a human being to flourish.
And. Here we're talking about growing our own medicine
as the artist is seeing the miracle in the mundane.
So like to me, he's just describing taking this process of
our life and making something beautiful out of it in this day.
This is what I want to inspire.
Distill its juices in essence, drink from it
and share the drinks.
You loved that one to like.
If we have an option today here I'm feeling like
this is what this show is.
Maybe right now, whatever you call this program,
we get to just share a little bit of these ideas,
at least in this day, says all souls in
this place are thirsty and need infusion.
Do you feel that way?
I mean, I do like I need a refreshing thought, you know?
And here it is.
Find the beauty and joy in this moment.
Creativity is a bakery.
You want to feed your soul and others bake more bread.
It's like, just like, let's try to dial into this space.
I love this thinking.
You know that video I put out, Weight Loss
Artist that we can take everything that is difficult,
that everything that has been a condemnation and a struggle,
that has made weight loss
seem like a punishment and that has been cycles.
And we can turn this around,
take it out of this left brain sort of space
where we are stuck in numbers and spreadsheets and scales,
and we can get over another right
brain of creativity,
and we can lean into things like openness and joy.
And that when we see
baking more bread,
see that lit up for me in general, I'm a pretty low carb guy.
I say, you want to lose weight,
we're not going to bake a lot of bread.
This is the metaphorical bread.
If you see, creativity is the bakery
like you think of the session we did on the weight
loss dream, you know,
and when we were diving into some of the deep psychology
of how the mind works, it actually when we're sleeping,
it's just a creativity space,
and the brain is using all of its resources
to try to put together the unlock.
Like, how do we move as being forward in the healthiest way?
And I suggested a practice of dream journaling
to try to capture some of these really creative ideas,
but then bringing that idea into this space.
We're sitting in our average day,
but we say, you know, a journey of a thousand miles.
If we say, oh, that can feel overwhelming.
If a weight loss journey really is a thousand miles,
which, you know, if if every step is a day and you say,
is that what two, 2 to 3 years, you know,
like that's pretty practical for a long term major.
You know, change in our metabolic state,
you know, so each day
it's like is like each is like a critical link in the chain.
And so we we don't get overwhelmed by the future,
bring everything into this moment.
Say baking more bread
is like bringing that creativity right into this day.
How do we bring the meaning and the joy into this day?
Because ultimately we got to stack up the days, right?
I tell people we want to make our template day right.
We want to be healthy in this day.
And as we're finding the ability to do that to every day
1% better, like atomic habits,
bringing in that energy to the day,
how do I just turn the dial a little bit,
have a bit of a win here today,
find so much joy and presence in that.
Then as we start stacking that process, being healthy today.
But every day we say being healthy today.
Being healthy today.
It's like cranking out a lot of loaves of bread
out of the bakery.
Breathe as though you are the sky.
I love that one.
Just love it.
I've done.
Haven't we done a few sessions lately
where we've been diving in on the breath
and how beautiful the breath is.
How easy to overlook.
Just like the beauty in the fasting space
that it's like you don't even see it.
Like people ask, do you fast. People say, no, they don't do it.
But everybody fasting overnight
and we don't appreciate, oh, look what happened overnight.
Like the we didn't eat and 12 hours went by
and the body was fine.
The body has this energy okay.
This same process can power through our life.
And then we see the breath as the same thing.
Like, breath is just happening. It doesn't stop.
We it can just dissolve into the background.
But then we can bring our intention to it and we see, oh,
there is a powerful tool
here to center our body and mind,
to help us release stress out of the body,
to cope with it in an effective way
that isn't messing up our hormonal structure,
so that even in the face of all the difficulty
that we can face,
that we can flow through it in a space
that is looking toward joy,
maybe in the midst of our most difficult moments,
maybe we can't find joy in every space,
but we can at least find some measure of peace
through the storm.
Breathing is a vital art that also feeds all your other art.
See, to me this is speaking so much truth.
Breath is at the foundation of what we are trying to do and.
Get down into that core space.
There's another thing that can be sound very mundane, right?
Miracle in the mundane, though, that a breath contains
vital art that can inspire everything else in our life.
A renewable energy system you don't have to pay for.
Do you ever feel that way?
Like you're in the middle of a struggle,
you're trying to move forward.
You feel like I don't have the strength or energy, but
do you take a breath and you can find the strength to do it?
Maybe you have a moment like that today, right?
That would be a miracle just in this day
if you hit a stressful point,
if you find a difficulty, if you say, okay, I'm
going to use my renewable energy system, okay.
The breath is here.
It is supporting me.
I've got a quote.
Maybe I can find it in here.
Oh, I can, I should leave this up.
I can't put it on screen.
Viktor Frankl between stimulus and response, there is a space.
And in that space is our power to choose our response.
And in our response lies our growth and our freedom.
That's the space stimulus response.
And that everything right where we aren't just reacting,
we're responding so good.
And does the breath when we are keyed into it.
Is that what helps us do that? Quote.
Just open up enough space between stimulus
and response that we can instead of reacting.
And isn't that where we can start flowing through things?
I love that we can take an artistic book like this
that is just meant for artists and we can like,
take it and dial it right into our life
in this process of health.
This is why I believe it is.
Health is an artistic expression.
We are creating it through our decisions.
If you don't invest in it, you surely will have to pay.
That's the breath. This is our health, right?
And don't we know it?
If we aren't dialing in on these fundamental processes,
don't we feel worse?
Isn't that having to pay for it?
You eat some nasty thing, something unhealthy as they
didn't want it and then don't you pay for it?
That's what I'm thinking.
You are nature, they say, bringing us in here.
Do you believe that?
Do you feel that way?
You know, I think so many times we can feel like strangers.
We can feel like, what are we even doing here?
Isn't this like the eternal question of mankind is like,
what is the meaning of life?
You know, nobody knows.
So can we feel like we were put here?
But like, I think part of the answer to this question.
Not that I have the full answer.
It's like we are part of this.
Like we aren't separate from it.
We came out of the earth.
We are going back into it.
You know, you say, unfortunately, but that's how it is.
This is the cycle.
And in this moment, well, we are here.
We are still part of it.
We are like, we literally are the Earth.
Like, this is the earth here and we are part of it.
It's like when he says, you are nature.
These are the thoughts that come to me and to me.
This gives us great encouragement in any struggle
we're going through, whether it's a struggle toward better
health, it's a struggle toward
anything relationships or work or whatever it is
that we can realize we're not alone here.
We're very much a part of this,
and there is strength and power here that can see us through
difficult things,
including change, like so much of a health path.
Right?
We have to change.
And it's almost a process of continual change, right?
1% better is like a tiny change every day.
And so here this is showing us like we our nature.
Nature is change, right?
The seasons are showing us the cycle.
The earth is always changing and we are part of it.
And we can change and grow.
And to me, this is a great encouragement and inspiration.
Tells us spend time in yourself.
You are nature. Spend time in yourself.
We think about spending some time in nature,
something I encourage everybody to do as much as possible.
Okay, I was seeing a study
I think I was telling the other day in Japan
where they prescribed people
with type two diabetes for forest therapy.
Everybody in the intervention group have to spend some time out
in nature every week, a couple hours
and their blood sugar got better.
It's like like, this is such a cool experiment.
Spend some time in yourself, though, because we are nature.
This is the meditation space and.
This is such a huge base layer.
Just like the breath spending some time in ourself.
This is the connecting to the heart.
This is what we've been trying to do.
And these things that we listen to the heart.
That's what we were doing in the last couple sessions.
And then what does it say?
And let that fill our meditation.
Listening to the heart.
The heart wants to speak.
Do you feel that way or have you thought of that?
Do you think it's true?
Does your heart want to speak?
And could you give it a platform?
You know, it's like we're always taking the mic, you know,
and the mind is just hitting it.
But what if you could get the mind to stop for a bit
and let the heart speak?
If you say you can't write poetry, you are poetry.
What a beautiful.
What a beautiful line that is. You know, this is.
This is taking away judgment.
If anyone out there is struggling in a space,
feeling judgment of any kind,
if if judgments that we put on ourselves
are the limiting belief.
Okay. Do you have limiting beliefs?
Here would be a space in that meditation. Open up.
What are they?
I mean, we all we all have limiting beliefs.
Are you on a health journey?
Are you in a place?
Do you feel stuck?
Are you looking for the next step?
You say, okay, we've we've climbed up part of a mountain.
We're sitting at this base camp.
We are building up the energy,
doing the practices,
getting ready for the next leg of our ascent.
But the path is not completely clear yet.
You are poetry.
It tells you right yourself.
We are writing the next line.
Okay, the next line.
Maybe this is the big unlock.
There's no right answer.
Maybe like we have to write it ourselves.
If it is a creative process.
Nobody tells the artist, you know, or just create this.
You can't and artist can't go to an AI language
model and be like, you know, make make it for me.
You know, it's like the real artistic expression,
what does the heart say?
Heart going to lead us on the path.
Write our own story, I say.
For all the terms.
You say you're not an artist, colon.
Have you doubted yourself
and taken the risk to express your soul anyway?
Can you think back into your history?
Do you have a time when you've done that,
when you've had doubt,
and then you've taken the risk to express yourself?
Let yourself sink back into that space today.
Connect with that memory.
Connect with that part of yourself who is open.
Remember that that quote leaving the heart open, right?
To to be in a space like that, to be
in that key moment of difficulty and vulnerability
and to take a powerful step anyway.
Express yourself.
Put yourself out there, says, behold, you are an artist.
So I say that to you today.
Behold, you are an artist.
You are on a creative path.
You can be healthy.
Today I'm giving you a big
this is I'm not a big cheerleader, okay?
But I am trying. Okay?
I'm giving you a big, cheerful cheer for your day.
You can do it.
You can flow through this day
in the most healthy and positive way.
And no matter what happens, okay?
If it's the mindset that matters, okay?
You have the intention of doing your very best.
And I think a lot of times
people say, oh, I'm going to be healthy today.
I'm going to do and then something goes wrong, okay.
Something goes wrong.
Remember that wonderful session we did?
No rules for weight loss okay.
And we are trying to do everything we can
to stop judging ourselves in any fashion.
And so how everything goes, if we have a mindset
and we center ourselves at the beginning of the day, say,
I'm going to do my best and we bring all of our intention
to it, like no matter what happens,
say we made some choice that in retrospect,
we didn't like, okay, we can just learn from these things.
We can take all the pressure and judgment off
and then we can realize, look,
we are creating something here
and we can't see it in this moment.
But these processes that we go through, decisions
that are a struggle, we say, was it good or bad?
And we can judge it.
But today we say, hey, however it goes,
we aren't going to judge it,
say we did our best, and if it didn't flow in the way we want,
then we can be thoughtful and say try again tomorrow.
And you know, we center ourselves in the present moment,
a very powerful thing to do.
But also sometimes, like we zoom out
and we say we can take the pressure off
to say, journey of a thousand miles.
We got a couple other chances.
Okay. Hopefully. You know, hopefully.
And so that can be beautiful too, to take the
we don't have to solve every problem.
And perfection certainly is not required.
Oh see that just makes me take a deep breath.
Perfection not required.
I as I'm leaving our beautiful space here
today, I'm driving over to Milwaukee.
I am giving a talk at a nursing conference.
And you know, I've gotten, you know,
at least compared to the past,
I've gotten more comfortable talking on a camera
by myself down in my little basement room.
You know, getting up in front of a couple
hundred, like, actual live people.
Not that that you are not live people.
Okay, but you know what I mean.
Go ahead in a room and then, you know, running all the tech
and the slides and the mix and the stuff
and then communicating.
So this is the message I'm telling myself today
don't have to be perfect.
I'm just going to.
It's just going to be the same.
I'm talking about the same stuff,
you know, that I talk about here.
How do we get into a great mindset of health
and how do we help?
All of these beautiful thoughts flow through the body,
the mind, the spirit, so that we can be healthy today?
This is what I want.
It's the only time we can be healthy, right?
This is where we're actually doing
it Really wonderful to share these thoughts with you.
I hope you have a beautiful day
and I will look forward to connecting with you again tomorrow.
Have a great day everybody!