26: Brad Kearns: The Cheat Code For Health and Fitness As You Age

00:06 - Michael Kummer (Host)

You're listening to the Primal Shift podcast. I'm your host, Michael Kummer, and my goal is to help you achieve optimal health by bridging the gap between ancestral living and the demands of modern society. Get ready to unlock the transformative power of nature as the ultimate biohack, revolutionizing your health and reconnecting you with your Primal Self. Hey, welcome back. In today's episode of the Primal Shift podcast, I'm joined by Brett Kearns, who is a New York Times bestselling author, a former two-time US national champion and number three world-ranked professional triathlete. He is currently also an elite master's track and field high jumper and his podcast is a top ten ranked Apple podcast in the fitness category anti-cover-style fitness, peak performance, personal growth and longevity, combined with Brett's carefully-style and lively sense of humor. So try me today and welcome Brett Kearns. All right, Brett, welcome to the show. 

01:17

It's been a while since we last talked. We've been exchanging emails, obviously before, but I'm glad to have you on and talk about a couple of the things that you have discovered just with your own experiments in terms of, you know, the importance of diet, of fasting, of exercise and how you might want to change those things as you age. Right, it's not the same working out when you're 23 versus when you're. You know our age. I don't even know how old are you 58, man, come on. 

01:47 - Brad Kearns (Guest)

Yeah, I'm in the high-risk category. 

01:51 - Michael Kummer (Host)

Yeah, yeah. So you know, obviously I have changed my access as a regimen significantly. I mean, I am only turning 42 and I've noticed significant improvements despite working out much less. But of course, you know, access is only one of the parts of the puzzle. There are other stressors that we can and should expose ourselves to be at cold plunging, and all your fans are cold plunging, fasting and some of the other things. So maybe let's hear what has changed for you, what have you found, what have you discovered by making those changes, and what is your plan for the next couple of years in terms of staying young, as young and as fit and as healthy as you can? 

02:31 - Brad Kearns (Guest)

Yeah, thank you so much, mike, and I'm so excited to be part of the primal shift. Congratulations for getting out there and getting this podcast going, and it's been great to connect with you in recent years and learn about your amazing athletic background. And now, you know, as you're trying to raise a family and build the homestead and stay fit, you know we have shifting and evolving goals, which I think is super important. I was a professional triathlete back in my youth for nine years, and I was extreme endurance athlete, dedicating my entire life and every day to hours and hours of training, and of course, that's no longer a goal of mine. It's no longer sensible to do any of that crazy stuff that I did when I was pursuing, you know, the most narrow form of athletic competency. So as I've, you know, gotten older, my goals have shifted to things that are aligned with health, vitality and longevity, which extreme endurance training most certainly is not. And so now my recent fascination has been to become an explosive power, sprint, jumping, high performing athlete in the in the master's track and field, which is, of course, completely different than what I was pursuing back when I was professional triathlete. And, of course, my my genetics are aligned for endurance performance, not for jumping over the high jump bar or contesting the hundred or 200 meters like you did at the at the highest level when you were a youth. 

03:56

So it's really fun to have evolving, changing goals, things that you can pursue that you know you may or may not be excellent at right out of the gate, but it's so rewarding for me to keep pursuing peak performance with passion throughout life is kind of my motto, and, especially as we age, we want these athletic goals to be aligned with overall health and well being. 

04:18

So people who are playing in the NFL right now, maybe they'll be on your show next week and they'll talk about their regimen of doing this and that, but they're, you know, putting their health at high risk instead of, you know, having this beautiful synergy of all the the most important goals in life. And so, to answer your question, we really need to step back, especially the most driven, goal oriented, high performing people, and understand that there's a big picture of our stress tolerance in daily life and we have to factor all the stressors on one side of this balance scale and then all the ways that we rest, rejuvenate, recover on the other side, and I think a lot of us can get carried away with indulging in these things in the name of health and peak performance, but they're indeed stressors and you have to constantly strive for that stress, rest, balance. 

05:07 - Michael Kummer (Host)

Yeah, no, that that's absolutely true, and I think it's one of the most underappreciated. 

05:12

Recovery is one of the most underappreciated aspects of improving your performance, and I think the main problem, at least as far as I'm concerned, is, you know, there's always this there's the mental aspect and there's the physical aspect. You know you don't want to be lazy, you know, and I grew up and I started training with the mindset that if you don't throw up after the workout, you're not, you're weak. You know and, funny enough, this attitude has really helped me a lot to push through discomfort. Unfortunately, I did not learn at the same time that, while it might be necessary to push the envelope at certain times, that doing it all the time, every time, is counterproductive, right, and so really disconnecting. I think, at the end of the day, your ego on, you know, doesn't really matter how strong and you know how resilient you think you are. There is a time and a place for pushing it and there is a time and a day for not doing it and just taking it easy and finding that balance without feeling your your sandbagging or you're overdoing it. 

06:15

I think that's for for driven people. That's really the challenge and that's been a challenge for me for a long time. 

06:21 - Brad Kearns (Guest)

Yeah, I remember in these words from the great endurance coach, dr Phil Maffetone, many time bestselling author and one of the pioneers of aerobic based endurance training. And he said look, the brain does not need to be trained how to suffer. I can come over to your house right now, put a gun to your head and Michael's going to run his first marathon later today and you'll do it. Even if you've never trained and you don't think you're in shape and you don't have your weekly mileage, we can go to the well and deliver amazing feats of athletic performance anytime that the brain can do it. It doesn't have to suffer a little bit every single day to be conditioned for the big day when we have our competitive goal, and so that that's an insight that we all need to park away for a while when we think we're being lazy. 

07:10

And I had to learn the hard way. Competing on the professional circuit, I had great achievements and at my best I was national champion. I was number three ranked in the world, everything was going well. And then I got my butt kicked so many times and I'd have to get on an airplane and fly across the world with my little journal and my notes and wonder why did I get 17th? When I thought I was going to win the important race in Australia? And after you know 14 hours of problem solving and seeing what happened, a lot of times I had this unregulated competitive intensity that got the better of me, whereby I left my best performances in the workouts rather than saving them for the day of competition. So even someone who's not competing at a high level or has a goal race, everybody can understand that there are times when it's fun to push your body, try to achieve a personal breakthrough in the gym, whether it's at your CrossFit class or with your personal trainer, or on the weekend when you're going to hike the highest peak in your county. All those things are wonderful ways to experience personal growth. But then the rest of the time we have to take care of ourselves. We have to very carefully nurture that competitive intensity and balance all the other forms of stress in our life. 

08:24

So when it comes to workouts and how my approach has evolved from perhaps in my youth now I do I have the goal of not crushing any more workouts, because when you use these terminology and you go post on Instagram that you crushed another workout and you were so sore the next morning. We've been socialized to believe that this is an effective, disciplined, motivated fitness enthusiast and the truth is, when you crush yourself in a workout, you have a very high risk of delayed recovery or breakdown, burnout, illness, other things that can set you aside, especially when you're immersing back into your hectic, high stress lifestyle where you're producing stress hormones and you're getting inflammatory things that are happening just like you did in the workout. So, if I can kind of fly under the radar, especially as I age and perform a consistent pattern of workouts that at times are challenging, but I always leave a little in the tank. That's when I can improve without the interruption from these horrible setbacks that are so frustrating. And I'm here giving advice on a podcast. 

09:29

But I have to also admit I should have showed up today on the video with a big L on my forehead because I'm recovering from a foot surgery that's taken me almost a year to recover from and it happened from being too aggressive with my progression of sprint workouts and I feel like what was I thinking? What was I doing? Well, I was having a lot of fun. I'm very competitive. It feels great to go out there and beat your times from the previous week. But guess what? You are always at that risk of tipping over the balance point and then sustaining an injury where it takes a lot of recovery time and a regression of your fitness accordingly, from pushing too hard. 

10:06 - Michael Kummer (Host)

Yeah, now I can certainly relate to this. I remember I think it was two years ago at a biohacking conference I had those ARX machines where you had like oh boy, bench press or whatever. I was obviously not warmed up. I was working at the conference when I was like you know what, let's see how much weight I can push and resist and I tweaked something and it's fortunately all healed up by now, also thanks to red light therapy and all the things that I did to try to recover. But it was 100% avoidable. It was just my ego trying to beat whoever had the best score on that bench on that particular day. No good reason whatsoever, just pain and like how stupid. You're old enough to know better that this is not something you should be doing, especially if it doesn't fulfill any particular purpose other than feeding the ego. And so yeah. 

10:58 - Brad Kearns (Guest)

And speaking of that, we marvel at the amazing performances of the world's greatest athletes. I just returned from the great track meet in Eugene the Diamond League finals where I saw the greatest performers in every event. It was one of the greatest track meets of all time and you see what level these people are performing at. But behind the scenes, and what we really don't understand, when we try to extrapolate the example of the elite athletes training and put it into play and be tough and disciplined and motivated, is they are almost always performing well within their capabilities. So Jakob Bengebritzen, the greatest middle distance runner in the world, who's shattering records and on his way to be one of the greatest of all time, if not the greatest this young guy from Norway he is not puking at the side of the track ever at the end of his workout, like young Michael was in Austria trying to make their world junior team. And when you realize that these guys are comparatively to the average person, when he goes out for a comfortable jog at six minute per mile pace and you see him running past you on the sidewalk, there goes the greatest runner in the world. Wow, isn't he amazing. Look how fast he's going that six minute mile per mace jog. Per mile is equivalent to you doing a brisk walk in terms of the heart rate capacity, the percentage of your maximum heart rate that you're working at and the aerobic stimulation that's occurring. Most of us need to slow down from whatever that medium jog or that brisk jog down to a brisk walk to get the appropriate training stimulation to progress aerobically. And the same with when we go into the CrossFit environment or another high intensity competitive environment. When you look at what Matthew Fraser and the other great champions are doing, they're going to 80% of their capacity, 73% of their capacity. 

12:48

There's an article in the New York Times about Jacob Ingebrigtsen that he never exceeds 87% of his performance capacity at workouts. And I'm getting out my calculator going okay. Well, if I can run a 60 second quarter here in the Old Man's Division at my very best, that means that I'm training at 68 pace and that's seemingly ridiculously slow. Because when I go out there and train I want to feel like I'm working hard. I want my muscles to feel a little bit of burn and walk off that track thinking, okay, I crushed it today and that means I'm going to get better and it's a fantasy and it's a ruse, and it's time to expose that and unwind this, especially for people who don't have those genetic gifts that the greatest athletes do, who can train really hard and recover the next day anyway, but they still don't. So when we're training harder literally comparatively equivalent to an elite athlete we have huge problems with our approach and that's why we see a lot of attrition and breakdown. 

13:47 - Michael Kummer (Host)

Yeah, no, absolutely. And you know, funny enough, it's been a couple of months now that I used to work out. I used to do CrossFit six times a week and now I only work out twice a week and my performance has significantly improved. Post-muscle length, my cardiovascular performance, my cardiovascular respiratory fitness, everything is up, you know, and when I go workout I might still be completely out of breath, but it's not like I don't feel like I'm throwing up anymore. I actually can walk around after most workouts and still have crushed it, comparatively speaking. But I have not crushed myself in the process. 

14:24

And a lot of people have asked me how is that possible? You know I work out more than you do and your physique is better and you perform better. How is that possible? I'm like, well, maybe it's because I'm working out less and I'm spending more time recovering or trying to recover. And, as I said, it's a hugely underappreciated part of improving fitness. And the other thing really is that, if you are a professional athlete, there is a point, I think, in your fitness journey where longevity and health span and physical. Did you see that Happy? 

15:01 - Brad Kearns (Guest)

birthday. Yeah, if you're watching on video. 

15:03 - Michael Kummer (Host)

we got balloons going, yeah and moving the iPhone to record, and now Apple is picking up on those gestures. To add. I don't know how to do this, but there is a point in time where your physical performance and your longevity and health don't track at the same pace anymore, meaning that you can be physically fitter to accomplish something that you would otherwise not, but it doesn't mean you're any healthier than someone who is not able to perform at the same level, and that's also one thing that many people don't understand. The fittest are not necessarily the healthiest, right, or the strongest might not be the healthiest. 

15:39

If you look at bodybuilders, you know they are incredibly fit and strong for the most part and look incredible. But are they the healthiest? I would argue, not only because of what they inject to get there, you know, but just because of the amount of stress they put on their you know not only the muscles, but also their bones and everything, and joints and ligaments. They're not the healthiest, and so there is a clear distinction that you have to make. If you want to be the fittest in the world, chances are by going there, you might not end up being the healthiest, you know, and at some point you might have to mitigate some of the damage that you've done by trying to get there. 

16:17 - Brad Kearns (Guest)

Yeah, well said. And it's also okay to want to live a exciting, rich, meaningful life and pursue meaningful goals and push your body and maybe make a few of those sacrifices that you acknowledge that you're going to get some dings and some injuries and some setbacks because you're so competitive. And of course, this is me talking and telling you about my injuries and my recoveries and I'm not going to, tomorrow, wake up and say, oh, I just want to enjoy my hobbies, like bird watching and riding my bicycle two miles an hour to the farmer's market and buying some healthy foods and coming back and living forever. So I'm always looking at that balance and that confluence that you describe between peak performance and supporting health and longevity. And the great research is out now People like Peter and Tia are pushing these points really well that maintaining functional muscle strength throughout life is the single best longevity protector that we have and, according to Dr Tia, nothing else even comes close. So we know that fitness is going to take you a long way and it's going to be a fun, energizing, exciting life to boot. It's not just about meditating for two hours on a cushion every morning and two hours every afternoon and that's the secret to longevity, because I don't think I would sign up for that. So it's nice to know that being healthy, energetic and athletic will work. 

17:41

But yeah, I think we're kind of exposing this hype and this fitness programming in pursuit of profit, where people are being pushed too hard, especially well meaning, devoted novice participants when they show up at the gym and they sign up for a one hour class and their heart rate is well over the aerobic limit for the entire hour and they're starting to break down and get fatigued at the end and then they're asked to perform complex activity that has high risk of injury. All that stuff we need to get rid of quickly and also realize that fitness does not have to be this elaborate, complex or deal where instead you can get up from your work desk and stand up, even in your cubicle if you have no space, and perform a set of 20 deep squats, and that is a fantastic fitness stimulation, even if it only takes one minute. So this concept of micro workouts that I like to promote. I think it's the greatest breakthrough in the fitness industry in decades, because now you can purchase some cheap equipment, like the mini band is maybe the best example. You know, the small rubber band that goes around your ankles and you can get a fantastic, virtually a full body stimulation just from stretching these bands. 

18:54

And when I travel I have this little mini band that can fold up and go in my pocket and I'm doing some great work on the back and the posture and the deltoids and all the lower body things, the donkey kicks and the monster walks and it doesn't have to be complex and it certainly doesn't have to be time consuming and when you can perform these micro workouts that only last a short time, what happens is you are flying under that radar for the risk level that comes with a one hour long crushing exercise session and instead, bit by bit and drop by drop over a long period of time, you are dramatically elevating your fitness level and you're just climbing up the staircase with no, with no down steps, to the point where you can actually become fit or even super fit just from dabbling around at your house. 

19:42

And then, of course, you can layer on. If you enjoy master's track and field or you want to participate in the local triathlon or, you know, go around and put up some numbers at the gym. Of course you can layer on proper formal workouts like you described. You go there twice a week and I'm sure your workouts are quite impressive and quite challenging, but the rest of the time you're not sitting on your butt typing on the screen. You're carrying everything around the farm and doing these little dabbling and tidbits that give you that healthy, active, energetic lifestyle. 

20:14 - Michael Kummer (Host)

Yeah, no, that's absolutely true, and I always have to chuck it when I see, you know, someone like you know, taking the elevator down to the car from the office and then driving to the gym. I'm like, take the stairs, you know, and you can save the time. You know, going to the gym and there are so many things. Or just parking far away when you do grocery shopping, just park at the farthest spot away and carry your bags, you know, don't use the cart, just carry them. You get a great farmers' carry work. I mean, those are the things we do at CrossFit, but they are meant to help you do those things in real, outside of the gym, right, when you have to do them or when you have the opportunity. Or, you know, bringing feedbacks, you know, from the basement, you know, to the animals and all those kind of things. 

20:50

Every time I pick up a bag, I'm like you know, this is functional fitness. You know, this is the stuff that I'd like to be able to do when I'm a hundred, you know, and without falling apart, and by doing them every day now, you know, you can save a lot of time, money in the process and avoid the risk of injury. 

21:06 - Brad Kearns (Guest)

really, yeah, it all adds up. But I think we need to make that shift in our mentality to realize that and you heard this during the quarantine so much that, oh, I got out of shape and put on 20 pounds because my gym was closed. And you're like whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa wait a second, do you have a staircase in your house? Yeah, what about it? And so I like to pick up these favorite examples where, when it's time for me to ascend a staircase, I sprint every single time. Anywhere I am, I'll sprint up the stairs and work on my footwork and my you know my sprint performance, my sprint technique. 

21:39

Now, if you're not highly physically adapted to just bust out a sprint up a staircase, you can ascend quickly and then descend and then ascend more quickly the second time and maybe a three time rep going up a single flight of stairs over a year's time. If we get back on the podcast a year from now and you have some mailbag people going yeah, I heard Brad talk about going rushing up the stairs or doing three sets of stairs instead of one when you're going up one flight. Here I am a year later and you can report back that this stuff really does work. So we're obligated to look for opportunities to be fit and active, because we have so much comfort and convenience these days that we can easily sail through periods of time where we're not active enough. And I think there's great experts out there. Katie Bowman is one of my favorite author of many bestselling books, like Nutritious Movement is her name for movement, and she cites a lot of respected research that just being more active and moving more throughout the day is a higher priority for your health and longevity than adhering to a devoted fitness regimen. 

22:47

It's great to adhere to a devoted fitness regimen and it's sure better seeing you at CrossFit Workout rather than seeing you at the movies or at the library. 

22:55

However, if you are engaged in a lot of patterns of prolonged stillness, it's gonna compromise many of those benefits that you get from your fitness routine anyway. I'm gonna blame the running community for a moment, because you see so many people that they put up their number. Yeah, I run 30 to 45 miles a week. I'm getting up to 50 training for next year's event, and so a very, very impressive running total of putting in 40 miles a week of running. But guess how long that takes? It probably takes, you know, five hours or six hours total in the week, and then there's 168 hours in a week's time, and a lot of those runners are taking a hall pass to sit around and not do much else besides putting in their eight miles at six in the morning. And so it's called the active couch potato syndrome. It's actually a medically, a scientifically validated condition where people who adhere to a devoted fitness regimen still have risk factors in their blood and disease risk because of all the sedentary patterns that they do outside of their workout. 

24:00 - Michael Kummer (Host)

Yes, no, absolutely true, and that's also one of the reasons why people work out to compensate for not moving right. Right, you know dangerous propositions, it's just sad. You know, I feel better on days where I don't work out but I'm active throughout the day Going around. You know walking the dog twice a day. You know carrying feedbacks, whatever. I haven't done any formal workout but I've moved more. You know, and again, that's, from a longevity health perspective, significantly better than working out 45 minutes per day, even if you do it every day and you sit the rest of the seven hours you know of the workday. Now, besides, you know working out. Well, what else do you do to kind of influence the stress levels positively and negatively throughout the day? 

24:41 - Brad Kearns (Guest)

Yeah. So I want to direct the majority of my stress capacity to my peak performance, athletic training, and especially at age 58, I don't have this massive capacity for workout or athletic stress as I maybe did when I was younger and training five, six hours a day. So I want to have, in general, a lower stress lifestyle, try to keep working on my mindset and my work habits in my career so that I'm not, you know, burning the fumes and working late at night and getting super emotional and upset when things don't go my way. So when I look at my life, the stuff that's gonna be tough and challenging and require recovery is gonna be athletic performance sessions. Now that also means that I have dialed back other forms of stress they call them hormetic stressors that are done in the name of health and even fitness, but can still count on that side of the stress-rest balance scale. So I've been a big proponent of therapeutic cold exposure. But since I started back in 2017, so I've been doing this for six years now I've actually significantly toned down the duration of my sessions because I want them to be less stressful so a lower hormetic stimulation than in the day when I was trying to adapt and show that I could go from four minutes to five minutes and then from five minutes up to six minutes. So at one point I was doing 38 degree temperature in my old chest freezer before I got the beautiful cold plunge. I could go for six minutes and live to tell about it and I thought, hey, this is really working. I'm getting cold, adapted, I'm getting all these health benefits. 

26:23

And then I wrote books about keto with Mark Sisson and you know the low carb lifestyle and all these things that have become boilerplate for ancestral health. But I now contend that if someone is healthy, active, energetic, athletic, has good blood markers and has stable or approve of their body composition, I am rethinking the need to engage in carb restriction or fasting of any kind, because it comes on that category of a stressor. So when you wake up in the morning and you don't eat any food until lunchtime and you contend that you're a focused and energetic at work and you feel great and you're productive, these are in part due to the activation of fight or flight mechanisms that happen when you don't eat food and it's okay, and if you're giving your stomach a break because you're healing from a leaky gut conditions or you used to eat a crappy breakfast, and now you don't eat any breakfast. These are all health boosting practices, but in the past year and a half I've been experimenting with, instead of my typical fasting or consuming minimal calories in the morning hours, I now go out of my way to get up, I do my early morning exercise routine and then I consume a huge bowl of fresh fruit and a huge high protein smoothie, putting the organ supplements in there, putting all the other stuff that I might be taking and trying out creatine, whey protein, and that is for a fully fueled, maximum cellular energy status day, especially in service of performing and recovering from what I consider to be a pretty devoted fitness regimen. 

28:01

And so this is where we come to kind of a fork in the road, I'm going to say. If you're someone who has concerns on your blood work, who's been frustrated by carrying some excess body fat and you want to get it off, there are any number of strategies that you can implement to escape from this unfettered access to indulgent foods that we have today and instead try some time-restricted feeding, try some ketogenic journey, like we describe in our best-selling book, the Keto Reset Diet. We talk about a six-week block of keto adaptation and then a transitioning to a long-term pattern where you're not obsessively cutting your carbs down to 50 grams a day in the name of long-term health. It's simply too stressful for most people, and so I personally am going for performance and recovery. And performance and recovery that's my new motto perform, recover, perform, recover and so what that means is I am going and deliberately looking for nutritious, easy to digest sources of food carbs, protein and fat and I'm doing that as a deliberate strategy to perform and recover better. 

29:07 - Michael Kummer (Host)

Yeah, absolutely. And I think we are on a very similar path where I used to have actually on my whiteboard here in the office I had like a little table of all the things that I wanted to do sauna, bathing, red light, poke-lunching, then the re-hit bike that I used, the carol bike that I really like cross-legged, all those kind of things, to make sure I get all of those ticked off on certain days. And then I realized, well, first of all, it's not only a mental stressor to kind of keep tabs on doing all of those things, to going out of my way to include all of those things, but it's a physical stressor at the end of the day as well. And now I'm going more like okay, how do I feel? Do I feel really good? I go do certain things. I work out twice a week and I usually feel good because I only work out twice a week. And after I work out I jump into my cold plunge and it feels great. I don't stay in there longer for maybe three minutes, sometimes three and a half, typically the length of whatever song I pick and that determines how long I stay in and that's it. 

30:06

Everything else is just going by the flow, especially with fasting. We still, I guess, get our intermittent fasting in terms of we usually get at least our 14 hours, but that's just by the fact that when I start feeling hungry, and whatever that happens, we eat, regardless of how long I've had. And if I had a late meal and I've only had a 12 hour fast, I don't care. You know, if it's been longer or if I'm on the road and I don't feel like eating, I don't want to eat, I don't have time to eat. You know I fast, but it's very much now based on on how I feel and how I think my body can handle. 

30:36

You know those stressors and and that's been again a game changer and I've noticed it in in physical performance as well as in mental performance and just overall. You know how I feel. I mean my wife is the same we feel better by not being as strict with certain things. I mean, we have a certain framework, of course. You know we, we, we stay within. We're not going to go out and eat like McDonald's in our drink a Coke. 

30:59 - Brad Kearns (Guest)

Right. 

31:00 - Michael Kummer (Host)

Then our, our animal based kind of dietary framework. You know, we play it by ear, so to say and it's been working significantly better. It's less, again, less stress in terms of keeping tabs on things oh, when can I eat? Or you know whatever. You know, we eat when we're hungry. We don't eat when we are not. You know, for the most time. 

31:16 - Brad Kearns (Guest)

Yeah, I appreciate how you made that McDonald's comment in there, even though you lost a potential sponsor for the show, because we're kind of. You know, we're in this fine line here where there are a lot of people who are really locked in and devoted to healthy living, ancestral living, and they have all these high aspirations and goals, like you mentioned, written on your board, all the stuff you want to do. And then we have a lot of people in the peanut gallery who are saying things like hey, look, it's all about everything in moderation, right. And I say no, it's not about everything in moderation, because our health status in general in society is a disaster, where the fattest, sickest population in the history of humanity here in the United States I'm embarrassed to be an American, at least you immigrated here and you can reference some, some good old times in the homeland where you went to the you know the dairy farm and got the raw milk and the fresh eggs and, oh my goodness, we have major, major problems here. So this requires an extreme devotion to healthy living and eliminating the adverse influences, such as the processed food, that are the centerpiece of our diet. So I want to push back on anything where we're talking about. 

32:23

Yeah, you know, I have cheat weekends and I go and eat whatever I want and then I go back to keto during the week. These are slippery slopes that are, you know, ill advised in my opinion. And so once you have these strict parameters in place and you have these guiding principles to live by and you write beautiful blog articles about these topics, about, you know, emphasizing an animal based diet and getting your kids into that at a young age rather than stuffing them with, you know, foods that will disturb their appetite and satiety mechanisms, now we're sayingly along and we can relax and enjoy what comes to us, and that even includes occasional indulgences. But, like when I indulge, I am going for the most well chosen, lovingly prepared, delicious treats. I had a homemade flan last night, the Mexican dessert, and you know that's something that I'm going to go for every time. But I'm never, ever going to go buy a frozen package of flan from the grocery store, produced by multinational food corporation with a bunch of chemicals in it. 

33:23 - Michael Kummer (Host)

No, absolutely true, and you know it's funny that you know when you tell people you know how you cheat, like you know Kathy makes you know we have, you know, raw milk from a local farm here and hopefully soon our own milk once we own a new homestead. But for now, you know we buy raw milk and she makes you know raw milk, ice cream with maple syrup and honey that you know we were not asked. But our bees, you know, making a backyard, our cheat them. When you tell people, okay, you cheat with them, like you know, this doesn't sound like a cheat. I'm like well, it's really not, because you know raw milk and honey. You know there is not really any cheat associated with that. It's good. You know the tritious food. It just happens to taste absolutely delicious, you know, and you don't have to worry about having a second cup of that, you know. 

34:04 - Brad Kearns (Guest)

Incredible. Yeah, and I think the point when we're talking about diet for everyone is you got to clean up your act and eliminate these nutrient deficient processed foods. Then, if we want to talk about specific strategies like should I fast in the morning, should I fast in the evening, should I try keto, should I try a vegan, vegetarian, carnivore, whatever it is, these can all be essentially categorized as tools, strategies or even gimmicks to, for example, try to get rid of some excess body fat. But the success that an individual will experience when they simply clean up their diet and start to emphasize the wholesome, natural foods of the earth and prepare good meals, you're going to naturally calibrate your appetite satiety hormones, you're going to improve your metabolic function and most likely, we'll see steady results with the removal of excess body fat that got there most predominantly from consuming processed food, chemical laden foods. 

35:06

Dr Robert Lustig, bestselling, author of many great books, I interviewed him about his book Metabolical and this is one of the world's leading researchers and most respected authorities and he says if you simply eliminate processed foods from your diet, you can't get fat, you can't get diabetes, you can't get metabolic syndrome. And I'm like wait a second, back that up. Are you willing to stake your reputation on that statement? He goes absolutely so, if it's that simple. And then the rest of it, well, the chips will fall where they may. 

35:35

And are you going to have too many scoops of that homemade ice cream where you're going to get soft and flabby someday? It's not possible, because the food is so nutritious and satisfying. Same with the eggs that you make in the morning and the steak that you make at night. And, if you like, salads or bowls of food or whatever it is, you're going to naturally calibrate to an active, energetic lifestyle and good metabolism. So that's, it's kind of a relief to think that we don't have to constantly shuffle the deck and try another new, different strategy. It's mostly opening up the pantry and saying, hey, what's this still doing in your house? I thought you were a ketogenic crossfit queen and you're complaining about. You know you haven't had perfect results. Just clean up your act. That's my public service statement of the day. 

36:18 - Michael Kummer (Host)

Absolutely true and it also takes out, I think, a lot of the stress associated with making the right choices. We've noticed and that's in particular true, I think, with kids there's always that struggle where they come hey, can I have this? And like, no, you can't have that, I'm like why is? 

36:32

it at home if you can't have it, and so I'm just only having what you're supposed to eat, and by sticking to whole food sources. Again, I'm leaning more towards animal-based foods. But even if you include vegetables and fruits in particular, of course, whatever it might be within that spectrum, if you have whole foods at home that are ideally grown seasonally at local farms, so from the area, and you focus on that, there is no difficult decision-making Whatever there is in the pantry and the fridge, you take out and you whip up a meal, whatever that meal might look like, and when the kids come and say, hey, can I have this or that, can I have a banana, can I have? 

37:11

go have it, have at it. Whatever is at home you can have Takes all the friction out of the equation and makes life so much more pleasant and it feels much less restrictive, because there is, in fact, a variety of foods you can thrive on. I mean there might be some that are a little bit better, some that are maybe not as good, there might be genetic factors, metabolic factors, whatever individual sensitivities that you have to be with, but you'll figure those things out. You'll. Naturally, once you're in tune, you figure out what can you have, what can you not have, and sticking within those frameworks becomes second nature and very easy and convenient. 

37:48

We've been doing this for years now. Obviously, we always fine tune and figure stuff out, but it's not a struggle. It's not like all we own is restrictive animal based diet where we don't eat certain whatever. No, it's actually a great diet, very easy to follow and I feel great every morning. We all feel great every morning and I think it's what ultimately counts. If you feel great every morning, you're probably doing something right. If you don't, maybe it's time to reevaluate what you're doing. 

38:13 - Brad Kearns (Guest)

That's a good checkpoint man, first thing in the morning. I love it. And it does bring in the question of getting adequate sleep, rest and recovery, because I think when we are messing up a little bit in those areas, that is often directly associated with slip ups in the diet and turning toward that indulgent nutrient division food to get quick energy. Because if we rewind the clock you didn't get enough sleep and then you went out and pushed yourself too hard at that 6 am workout in the name of health and the name of fitness and some of these things unravel on our discipline and our decision making. Kind of unravels when we distribute our willpower throughout the day and then we run out when it's nighttime. 

38:53 - Michael Kummer (Host)

Right, absolutely All right. I think we are about to wrap it up, but before we do, how can people find you? What are some of the resources that people should know about, be it books, be it, obviously, the podcast as well. I was a guest on that podcast a couple of months ago, so what are some of the links and resources that I can include in the show notes? 

39:13 - Brad Kearns (Guest)

Oh, thank you. Yes, I would love for people to go and check out the Be Rad podcast and you can go straight over to the Michael Kummer episode and start there, because we had a great talk and it's super fun to connect with people. We answer all the emails that come through and we love to connect and be on this journey together. You can find everything at bradkernscom and, of course, search for the podcast and you'll find that You'll find me. It's really easy to find now and we're ready for action. So thanks for the opportunity. It was great to connect with you on your show. 

39:44 - Michael Kummer (Host)

Well, thanks for spending the time with me. I really appreciate it. Great information. I hope a lot of people will see this. And yeah, with that we're going to wrap it up and I hope I'll see and hear you all next time you.