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Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
Hello, good morning everyone. Welcome back to the podcast straight in today and it's a good one. So before I mention on the podcast a study that had a group of people drink two milkshakes. Okay? One milkshake was called the unhealthy milkshake, 500 calories, you know, 80 grams of sugar, all salts.
Speaker 1:Right? And the other milkshake was the same milkshake, 500 calories, but they called it a healthy nutrient shake, those are 100 calories. And they wanted to know on both visits did these people have the same reaction internally to both shakes. So one shake they were told this is healthy, one shake they were told it was unhealthy. The only difference is the perception.
Speaker 1:So what the study found, when they consumed unhealthy milkshakes, they had worsened function internally. So basically the same shake, one they thought was healthy, they didn't have the same worsened reaction internally with some blood markers. Both of them are the same, but they just thought one was healthy, didn't have the adverse reaction. They thought the other one was healthy, did have the adverse reaction. So perception is powerful.
Speaker 1:You know, perception is everything. Perception is reality. Basically, what you think is true is true. You know I mean? We gotta be careful what we think is true.
Speaker 1:You know, you're gonna let people on TikTok infiltrate your brain every day. You're gonna let people on Facebook. You're gonna let any person in your work go, eat my false part for you. I've read this and that. Shut up.
Speaker 1:Go away. Don't wanna hear about you. You know? And we let these kind of toxic y messages get into our brain, infiltrate us. Now Epictetus, one of the famous stoic teachers, had a brilliant, lesson of a nurse.
Speaker 1:He said he said to you, young Roman man, he said, listen, buddy. You wouldn't let anyone come up to you and steal some cons of you, would you? He said, no way. And you defend yourself. You defend those cons.
Speaker 1:You would never let someone disturb the wealth you have on your pocket. No way. I wouldn't let someone do Ahmed. You go, well, why you let someone so easily disturb the number one gem you own, which is your mind? I said, well, know what you mean.
Speaker 1:He's like, well, you're happy to defend your coins, happy to do that, but someone comes along and says pops a message in your brain, all hell breaks loose inside. It disturbs your peace. It causes an emotional outbreak. They are puppet masters of your brain. Okay.
Speaker 1:He's like, well, it's true. Yeah. Let anyone come walk by and disturb you, disturb your mind. But you wouldn't let someone come and steal £5 off you. You wouldn't let someone come and, you know, take a jumper off you.
Speaker 1:You'd probably look after your you'd probably make sure your laces are done. You'd probably look at make sure your shoes are clean. You'd probably make sure your shirts are looking fine, your hair is looking good. You probably put more effort into those, and I'm talking you as in you, me, everyone, than the, defense of our mind, the peace. Having a peaceful mind, having a neutral peaceful mind gives you clarity on decisions and viewpoints.
Speaker 1:Right? That's the key thing here. Because once you get emotionally turbulent, you don't see you don't see properly. You are all over the shop. Think about when you're angry.
Speaker 1:You don't see anything. Think about when you're emotional in terms of sad and, you know, even happy. You know, all these emotions cause us to change from a neutral state and change behavior. So be careful out there. Don't just let anyone walk by and take something from your brain and and and disturb it.
Speaker 1:You've worked too hard to let someone you won't give a crap about in five, ten, or even tomorrow ruin your ruin your peace today. One of the Stoic books by Ryan Holiday, one of the titles is called Stillness is the Key, and there's a big truth in that. Being able to be still through our weight loss journey or through our health and fitness journey, being able to not react like animals but respond intelligently. There's a famous quote by Viktor Frankl and he says, Between stimulus and response is pretty much the golden zone. Okay?
Speaker 1:That's where you that's where your power lies. So the stimulus is someone's saying something bad to you. Someone's saying you don't look good today. What are eating that far? Shouldn't you be dieting?
Speaker 1:Shouldn't you not be eating that Oreo ice cream sandwich? Mate, get out. You know nothing. Go away. Or I'd say, yeah, mate.
Speaker 1:Gonna have a thousand of these today. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm gonna die tomorrow, I think. If I if I think I eat 10 of these, I might die.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Make sure you tell the police what I did. Just shut them down. You gotta do that because it between the stimulus, those people coming in and annoying you, there's a time period, a time interval where you can respond, and that's where you take a deep breath and you decide how you respond. And if you just react straight away, you're gonna be you're gonna be flustered, and it's gonna cause you to think about it all day.
Speaker 1:How many times have you thought about someone that's annoyed you in the morning all day, texting everyone, I can't believe this happened. This person said this to me, and you texted someone to kind of listen. You're going on and on about it all day. We get it. Someone annoyed you six hours ago, and you're still there to stress you out now.
Speaker 1:And on the topic of that, let me tell you why that's not a good thing. So there is an amazing book on stress. If you and if you wanna read or listen to it, it's called Why Zebras Don't Get Elseas by Robert Sapolsky. Okay? And he talks about stress in his book.
Speaker 1:I'll try and give you some quotes to try and help you understand the things he says in his book. He doesn't break it down very well, but we have to be careful. We don't wanna be turning the stress response on. Okay? So he says here, stress can make us sick, and a critical shift in medicine has been to recognize that many of the damaging diseases of slow accumulation can either be caused or made or far worsened by stress.
Speaker 1:Okay? For animals like zebras, the most upsetting thing in life are acute physical crisis. You are that zebra. A lion has just leapt out and ripped your stomach open. You've managed to get away, and now you have to spend the next hour invading the lion as it continues to stalk you.
Speaker 1:Okay. That's it for them. They get away and they go back to back to base. As humans, we live long enough and and we're smart enough to generate all sorts of stressful events purely in our heads. That's where most of the stress comes.
Speaker 1:A very good quote by a French philosopher called Montaigne here is that he says, I've had so many terrible things happen to me, none of which happened. Happened. Or something like, I've had loads of terrible things happen in my life, none of which actually happened. You know? It's true.
Speaker 1:So stress is basically anything that knocks from the outside world and knocks you out of your balance, knocks you out of stillness, and it takes a stress response to get you back to balance. Okay? A stressor can be an anticipation as well. So an anticipation, you're gonna go out for pizza tonight and you're stressing about it. Don't.
Speaker 1:Eat the pizza when it comes. Know, zebras and lions don't they might see trouble the next minute, but they don't think about tomorrow and the week after, and that's why they live in now, and that's why their stress is acute and it's here and it's gone when it's gone. Right? So that's why the animals don't have this long chronic stress that we do. Right?
Speaker 1:And I think we can literally turn on the stress response from our mind alone, even if it's not a physical thing. The mind doesn't really tell the difference. That's the crazy thing about stress. So, like, when people are playing chess against each other, the grandmasters, they are in incredibly stressful states internally, but they're not even doing anything. They're just moving a piece of wood on on a on a on a board.
Speaker 1:Right? So so the stress response can be turned on, it can be harmful if you do it all the time throughout the day. It's like in the healing area, it's like the body saying, let's go, it's an emergency, get all the energy to the muscles, stop digestion, let's go, it's a very expensive process. When you then have to recoup that energy after the stressful event happens, are far hungrier, you want to eat all the foods. So that's why hunger goes up.
Speaker 1:You're trying to recoup the lost energy. You're constantly mobilizing your body into all out war, basically. So you're fatiguing. There's risks of things going up. Menstrual cycles become irregular or stop entirely in some females when the stress response stress is on all the time, male's testosterone levels go down, sexual behavior, sexual desire goes down.
Speaker 1:So when you think about what the stress response all the time can do, it's not great, increases your risk of diseases. It doesn't cause a disease in itself, it just makes the environment possible for it to do so. You just you just think you're in fight, fight, fight, fight mode all the time. Okay? You're not in this relaxation mode.
Speaker 1:And you think now, think to your body, have a look, scan your body, how tense are you right now? Think, Look. Have a scan. Look. Your tensed arms, tensed shoulders, tensed legs.
Speaker 1:Everything's a bit tense, isn't it? You don't really realize it until you think, oh, Let me just relax a bit. Life is a bit stressful. You know, we're in this stress state ready to pounce quite often, and it's important that we recognize this and we try and do things about it. You know, going for walks, slowing down, getting rid of this, like, rushing around all the time, responding, not reacting, taking time to process what people are saying and be like, yeah, don't agree, but I'm gonna leave the situation.
Speaker 1:I don't wanna get involved. Understanding emotional turbulence, stressful events is gonna make our life harder to live healthier, happier lives, and we're just gonna be consumed by it. Know? Sometimes that means going off social media. Sometimes that means unfollowing people on social media.
Speaker 1:Sometimes that means, you know, kicking some people out of your life as well. So it's important that you see how this perception, which isn't in fact a real thing, it's just in the mind, can cause real world problems for you. And this isn't a scaremonger, again, it's just a fact. Okay? So when it comes to food, don't say that's a bad food.
Speaker 1:Simply saying that's a bad food neither can cause the internal response that you don't want. But saying food's not good or bad, food is food. Food is energy. Food is macronutrient. Fine.
Speaker 1:Happy days. Okay? There's no that's a neutral view of food. I will eat it. I will track it.
Speaker 1:And some days I have more energy. Sometimes some days I eat more energy than I need. Sometimes I don't. Okay. No problem.
Speaker 1:That's just all I'm saying. I'm not saying anything more. I'm not gonna make a mountain over a molehill, as you say. So, yeah, have a read of that book if you get a time. It's a long one.
Speaker 1:It's it's one you might wanna listen to an audiobook on a on a walk or something like that. So, yeah, it's an interesting one. It's an interesting one. He talks to you as well, and I'll get more details about it. He talks about, like, when you're in a really stressful response, your body conserves more water, decreases blood flow to the kidney, so you might find that you might be holding onto more water retention when you're more stressed as well.
Speaker 1:Again, it's not about weight loss, it's about fat loss, but it's a psychological thing. Your weight might be higher because you're more stressed, because you're holding on to more water. So there's so many gems from it. I'm gonna post them in the groups in Facebook over the next few weeks just as ones that might be helpful. But again, perception is reality.
Speaker 1:You decide what the perception is. Okay? Don't let someone else decide. Be neutral. Be still.
Speaker 1:Be peaceful. Eliminate hurry. Eliminate worry. And live one day at a time. That really is the golden ticket to live in I think.
Speaker 1:If I do say so myself, you're to live from today until tonight. Yes, you can use time to plan future things, which is important, but be sure to be present. You can do it until bedtime tonight. You can track your calories easily. You can hit your protein target today.
Speaker 1:You can get more steps in today, there's no doubt. You have to do a workout. It'd be beneficial if you do. It's something to look forward to in the future for people who aren't doing workouts right now, but, you know, get your steps in, and be as peaceful as you can because these are huge factors in your health, guys. And when you go to sleep tonight, you're gonna sleep well, and that's another boost.
Speaker 1:Good sleep. And that's it. The fundamentals over time will change your life. Have a good day. Speak to you all tomorrow.