Eric Edmeades on How to Gain Control of Our Food Habits | EP 526

24:57And the idea is that as we started to change our environment, we started changing the environment faster than our genetics could keep up with. And that opened the gap. And I would suggest to you that almost all the pain and suffering, emotional, physical, even social that we're suffering exists in that gap or is at least amplified by that gap. And so studying our evolutionary biology and studying our ancestral history and studying contemporary modern, contemporary hunter gatherers, and even studying chimpanzees and bonobos, all of those things can give us some fascinating insights into the human condition and help us discover solutions to many of the problems that we're dealing with today.

25:32So I want to explore, I know you can't at this point talk too much about this book because it's not out yet, but I do want to talk about something that I've heard you discuss in the past. And that's something that you describe as the perfect human diet. And how do modern diets deviate from what our bodies are actually designed to consume if we were to have that perfect human diet? Okay, I think we need to start with the word diet. Diet in every context in science, in nature, diet means way of life for that particular species. It's only us and our pets that can go on a diet, which is this newly adopted version of the word, which means something akin to a temporary alteration to my normal lifestyle in order to achieve a particular health goal on a particular day.

26:24When we talk about the idea of the perfect human diet, we go back to the same thing that I mentioned earlier. And that is that if we want to learn about an exotic animal and we want to understand its diet, the best way to do that is to observe it in its natural environment when it's following its natural instincts. So then the question is, well, how do you veer from that? Well, a really good example would be elephants. In the 1800s, they were capturing elephants and taking them for zoos and circuses and all that kind of stuff. And effective that was that those elephants rather than living 70 years like they would normally live in nature were now living only seven eight nine ten years and um and of course an examination of that demonstrated the cause what was going on and that was that they'd been so shockingly removed from their natural environment that they were nutritionally under stress they were mentally under stress they they weren't getting the movement that they needed in every way they they were not living according to their design.

27:22And of course, that resulted in them dying 60 years earlier, they really needed to do. Now that's a harsh change, right? It was like, you take an elephant from the wild, and you put it in nature. Clearly, there's no adaptation that's going to help it with that. So then we look at our situation, and it's not quite as harsh. Although we have examples of that harshness in our history. When Banting was traveling around Canada on behalf of the Hudson's Bay Company in the early days of Canada, he was traveling around northern Canada and and investigating what was going on with the original Canadian people, the original settlers, the first before Europeans arrived.

27:56And he on the way on the at the end of that tour, he was on a train and he was talking to a guy just casually about what he observed out there. And he said what he observed is, first of all, unfair transactions, buying huge tracts of land when they didn't even understand the concept of land ownership for a bag of beads and flour. But he said even more devastating than that is that they were not able to handle European foods they were being given. And it was causing widespread disease all over the place. And boy, did he get in trouble for saying this to this guy because it turned out the guy was a reporter.

28:29And so the guy reported his words and Banting was under an NDA from both the government and the Hudson's Bay Company. So he wasn't allowed to say that stuff. And they asked him to apparently they asked him to issue a retraction. And he says, look, I know I wasn't supposed to say it, but I'm not now going to suggest that I was lying. It's another example of too harsh a change. But then let's talk about the gradual change, which is in some ways even more dangerous. And that is, imagine you and I are in the bush 50 ,000 years ago, actually probably 20 ,000 years ago. And we return to one of our koi camps, a place that we go to on a regular basis.

29:03And we suddenly notice, hold on a second now, wait a second. those bushes that we like the berries from they're growing in camp now how did they get here how did that happen wait isn't that where we usually sit on the rock and throw the seeds behind us and spit them out and what have you you don't suppose you don't suppose we did that you don't suppose we did that is that did we do that and all of a sudden agriculture is born and the minute agriculture is born there's a bunch of decisions to make shall we grow these yummy sweet things or these sour bitter things that we only ever eat because we're starving?

29:37Well, we're going to grow more of the sweet things. And then as we learn more about that, we learn that we can crossbreed things and we can improve their sugar intake. And gradually, gradually we veer away from our diet. And I don't just mean food. I mean, how much we have to walk, the air that we're breathing, the quality of the water that we're breathing, the amount of water, the timing of the food that we eat, both in terms of the daily timing, say in the concept of say, an intermittent fasting conversation or the seasonal timing relative to metabolic reset. All of that stuff starts to get messed with, but really slowly, 20, 30 ,000 years ago, 15 ,000 years ago, you start to see some dental caries and bone disease showing up in the fossil record that wasn't there before.

30:20Something's headed in the wrong direction. And then that accelerates and accelerates. And we get to the point where at the start of the 1900s, cancer and heart disease and diabetes aren't in the top 10 killers of the people in America. And by now, they basically occupy the top three positions of the top four positions, like it's everything has changed. And so the answer about the perfect human diet is to recognize that every species on earth has an evolved diet. And what that means is evolved nutritional dependencies and evolved capacity for extraction. And the more you veer away from that, the more likely you are to suffer with disease and consequence.

30:57And the closer you adhere to that evolved diet, the more likely it is that you remain healthy and heal and recover when you're not. I think that is the perfect lead-in to where I wanted to go next, which is the emotional and behavioral aspects of why we eat. And I've heard you talk before about that there are six primary reasons why people eat. And understanding these reasons gives you greater control over your eating habits. Can you walk us through some of these reasons and explain why recognizing them could help listeners make more conscious, intentional choices about their food choices? It's a tough topic to do quickly.

31:40It's a masterclass by itself, and it's a huge understanding of food psychology. And if people can grasp these things, they help a great deal. We call them the six hungers. And the general idea is that there are six primary hungers that drive all of your eating decisions. And it's not typical that any one of them motivates a particular eating decision heavily on its own, but collectively they gang up on you. And out of the six hungers, only one of them actually relates to nutrition. And we would call that nutritional hunger. And nutritional hunger is a very important thing to understand because first of all, how does it happen?

32:16Well, it happens when you're malnourished and the vast majority of people in the developed world today are overeating stimulants and garbage and sugar and what have you overeating calories, and then under eating nutrients. So they're literally overeating and starving to death at the same time, which means that their nutritional hunger is almost always activated. They're almost always nutritionally hungry. In fact, they often only stop eating because their stomach is so full that they're hurting, right? They want to keep eating. So they're that nutritional hunger is a very important piece. And of course, the best way to neutralize nutritional hunger is to eat really well, to focus on getting the good stuff in, and then you neutralize that hunger.

32:53The other trouble with nutritional hunger is that it's nonspecific. It's not like it says, oh, go get this because you need that. It basically says, eat what's available around you because we didn't have choice before. Mother nature controlled the availability of food. So you couldn't, if you were, for example, not in fruit season, there was no point in having a craving for food. It just wasn't there. So instead, your body goes, hungry, go eat something. Maybe it might direct you in the direction of a macro, like fat, salt, sweet, and what have you. But generally speaking, nutritional hunger is this general desire for food and the only genuine hunger.

33:27The other five are really fascinating. Thirst. Now, people often what do you mean thirst is a hunger? Well, I mean, I guess you could say thirst is a hunger for water, but that's not what I mean. What I mean is that for the vast majority of history, humans didn't have water bottles. We didn't have running water. Like the water that we got was largely delivered to us from the food that we ate, the fruits, the vegetables, the root vegetables, and even the meat that we ate was so fresh that it was heavy in water content. So we ate a lot of our water. Sure, we drank it when we could, but we didn't have the mechanism for carrying it around.

34:02So we got a lot of our, in fact, as an example of this, there's an antelope, at least one that I know of in Africa that never drinks. It doesn't go near the water. That's a great evolved response. You know why? Because there's freaking crocodiles in the water and the lions like to hunt there. So they evolve the ability to avoid going to the water. Where do they get their water from? They get their water from the plants they eat. So we also have a capacity to do that. The challenge today creates this problem. A lot of the food that we eat today is not water rich. So when you eat it, not only does it not replenish your hydration, but it actually utilizes some of the water you already had in you.

34:38So now somebody's dehydrated a little bit, they send up a craving, and that is go eat something, we need water. Then they go eat a bag of hostess potato chips, which has arguably a negative quantity of water in it, because it uses water out of your body, you eat that, and then you want more. Why do you want more? Because you need water. So you eat more, now you want more. Why do you want that? Because you need, and the cycle is repeated. So that's a very powerful hunger, it drives a huge amount of our eating decisions. And one of the best ways to neutralize that is to prehydrate. If you are drinking to address your thirst, it's too late.

35:12I'll be more brief with the next four because frankly, I could get very carried away. But the next one is, let's say empty stomach hunger. The idea that your stomach being hungry has anything to do, or sorry, the idea that your stomach being empty has anything to do with you being hungry. It doesn't. Your stomach being empty is actually a very important thing to do from time, to let it repair, to let it cleanse, to let it flush out, and to generally have more energy for healing and what have you. So that's why you see this big trend around intermittent fasting and fasting, because it actually is important to have empty stomach time.

35:44Most people have a Pavlovian link up between nutritional hunger and their stomach being empty. And they're like, oh, my stomach's empty. My stomach is growling. Yeah, it's cleansing. Leave it alone. So getting used to the feeling of an empty stomach is one of the biggest life upgrades that people can get. And that can be done with various forms of fasting, low blood sugar hunger. It's not a form of hunger, but it feels like one. I, for the first time recently wore a constant glucose monitor, and I found that to be a fascinating exercise. I even experiment a little outside of my normal regime so I could see what the impact that was.

36:16And I'll tell you, it's not the spike that you're trying to avoid. It's the crash after the spike. And most people are living with sugar spikes and crashes on a regular basis. and then they experience these low blood sugar moments. And during those low blood sugar moments, there are problems, emotional problems. That's when you snap at people. That's when you're angry. That's when you're grumpy. That's when you're fungry. But the other problem is that it causes cravings. It causes you to have emergency cravings. And that's a problem because if you suddenly feel this emergency feeling, you're pretty much willing to eat anything.

36:48And next thing you're scarfing down a chocolate bar in the car on the way to pick up the kids, not ideal. And then the next one is variety. And the thing with variety is that we crave variety. And largely, I think this was a protection against eating any one thing for too long, because plants in particular have defense mechanisms that are bad for us. So eating kale. I mean, if you talk to Dave Asprey, kale is killing the planet. What I would argue is that while the current form of kale may well be doing that, that every plant is trying to defend itself. And our ancestors never were really hurt too much by those defenses because they evolved responses to them, except that they ate the plant seasonally.

37:28So they would eat the plant for as long as they could to get the benefit from it, but not longer so as that the toxins or anti-nutrients or anti-digestion mechanisms were impacted. So they had also a craving for variety. We've been eating this plant for a long time. Don't you think we should try to find something else? Only today, we want variety on a daily... No, we don't want variety on a daily basis. We want variety on our plate. I don't like you can have your friends going, Oh, should we get sushi? Oh, I had sushi on Tuesday. I don't think I could do it again. I mean, our need for variety has driven insanity when there was a reason for it, but of course it's maldeployed.

38:05And then lastly, and I told you this would take a minute. The sixth hunger in this case would be emotion, emotional hunger. And this is where people have been conditioned a variety of different ways. Some were unconscious parenting mistakes. Others were deeply manipulative advertising campaigns by unscrupulous food companies. But we have been sold the idea that this food can solve this emotional problem. And that is incredibly dangerous to us. Now, the real challenge is that, as I said, not any one of these hungers is a problem unto itself, but it's when they get combined. So you imagine somebody who's nutritionally hungry, which is most people in America or Europe for that matter.

38:46They're nutritionally hungry. And then let's say they have a blood sugar crash. And at the same point in time, they have a negative emotional response to what's going on in their life at that point. Those three hungriers are going to end up with a bowl of ice cream, a bar of chocolate, or a glass of wine, or a pizza, or whatever it is. And so neutralizing those hungers is one of the most valuable things you can do in facilitating long-term dietary change for people. I'm glad you ended on emotional eating because following our conversation, I also had Dr. Judd Brewer, who you probably know on the show, and we explored his book, The Hunger Habit.

39:21And when I think about these six different reasons that you give for why we eat, all of them in some way or another tie into our behaviors, the habits that we become accustomed to. Can you explore that a little bit more of what our habits have to do with why we eat and how we go about eating? Sure, John, this is a little playful, but I basically want to suggest to you that all humans have this little app that's running. We run apps, we run different apps, and we've got this one app, and the app basically says, if I am alive today, then whatever I did yesterday was good, because for the majority of human history, survival was not a given.

40:05I mean, it was hard out there. I mean, it was hard 200 years ago, never mind 20 ,000 years ago. I I mean, I have done embedded stays with Hazzabi people. And I can tell you at the end of a week, I'm like, I cannot imagine living a year like this. It's a very hard lifestyle and you're facing survival issues on a regular basis. So if you woke up one day, then the app goes, wow, we made it. Yes. Whatever we did yesterday is a good thing. And that app is the app that stimulates the creation of habits. So I think maybe you've probably seen Atomic Habits, great book, fascinating. And you have a lot of people talking about habits.

40:44And there's this big debate. Does it take seven days or 21 days or 65 days to create a habit and all this kind of stuff, right? I would say to you that the premise of the question is flawed in the first place. It is not about the number of days. Yes, it looks like it is. And everybody believes that it is. but I would put to you that it's a combination of emotional intensity and repetition. So if you have 65 days of doing something, but you have no emotional response to it, sorry, it's not going to become a habit. I just don't think so. But if you do something one time with enough emotional intensity, it will become a habit.

41:19A good example is rookie sports guy playing in the World Series baseball. Bases are loaded. They're two runs down. It's the bottom of the ninth. Everything's all positioned. And the kid slams a grand slam, wins the game. The crowd goes wild. The people are celebrating. Everything's amazing. He's producing incredible celebratory chemicals in his body. Everything's amazing. And his body activates the app. Holy shit, this day was amazing. Not only did I survive, but look at all this attention. It's amazing. What did I do for the last 24 hours to create this magic? And so whatever he ate that day is going to become his game day food.

41:56And when he suddenly realizes that when he was tying his shoes, he banged his head on the locker, it hurt. He didn't get any blood, but it hurt. Guarantee you that kid's banging his head on the locker before every game for the rest of his life. It's not about the number of days for repetition. It's about the level of emotional intensity. And so when you understand that about habit creation, now we take a look at a kid who just slipped and fell down. Now, John, I know you've seen it. Kid falls down, looks up. No parent looking, kid gets up and keeps playing. If it wasn't too bad, right? But if the dad's looking, the kid's got one response.

42:34If mom was looking, the kid's got another response, right? Like it's a moment, right? And what's going to happen in that moment? There's pain, I fell, there's surprise. And I suddenly see the most nurturing person around and I start to cry. And that person wants to end my pain. And they come along and give me a cookie. and in that moment just like the kid with the baseball game i have learned that cookie is a combination an unbelievable combination it is a combination of anesthetic and a communication of love and so that's why at 45 years old i'm scarfing down a cookie when i feel bad well i love that explanation and it leads me into so many people realize that health is important And I love something that Rory Vaden has told me, for those who know Rory, is that people don't pay for knowledge.

43:29They pay for the application of knowledge. And there's so much knowledge out there about you need to improve your health. Yet I find that it's so difficult for people to translate what they know and what they hear into lasting behavior change. Yeah. For someone who's listening today, what's the first step that you recommend that they can take to truly get their body and mind back on track? It's a tough question because it has a lot to do with their starting point and how much pain they're in and what their primary motivations are and so on. But I'll start with this. the diet, the fad diet industry, the weight loss industry, the biohack industry, the longevity sciences industry, this whole influencer field that we're in at the moment, unfortunately is influenced by algorithm.

44:23And so what that means is that we know that controversy and that kind of stuff feeds the algorithm. And so therefore we have to do stuff like that. And so one of the things that we see a lot is fear-based campaigning, avoid these seven dangerous foods. Like I could do a series of videos that would first of all, frighten people about eating meat. Then I could do another video that would frighten people about not eating meat. And then I could do a video that would frighten people about eating kale. And then I could do a video that would frighten people about drinking too much water. And then I could do a video about, about frightening people about the sun, as if that's not already been done to them.

44:55I could frighten you about just about everything. And then you're like, what's left? What the hell do I do? But the challenge is that because we are very easily motivated by fear, it's a great way to get people's attention. And so most diets and life hack programs of some kind are predicated upon making you feel fearful and telling you to give up stuff. And often they're telling you to give up stuff that's deep in your heart and you have a deep connection with. And they're trying to do that at the same time while you're probably somewhat malnourished if you're an average person living in the developed world.

45:27So this is one of the many reasons that diets simply fail. And I will be really clear about when I say that diets do fail. People don't fail. Diets fail people. Diets are badly constructed psychologically and mostly nutritionally, and they fail people constantly. And it's awful because the industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. And the reason that it's a multi-billion dollar industry is because it doesn't work. If it worked, you wouldn't need billions and billions of books about it. So I want to suggest that we break with some of those trends. And if it has to be down to one thing to focus on.

45:59This would be the one thing to focus on. Don't focus on removing everything you love. Focus on eating the stuff that your body needs. Start there. You want to eat ice cream, do that, but eat the good stuff first. You want to have a chocolate bar, go for it. I mean, I would say choose better quality chocolate if you can, if that's okay with you. But first of all, make sure you're getting your core needs met. We know categorically without debate, without cognitive dissonance without any question that humans have spent the last 300 ,000 years as sapiens and arguably another five or six million years as pre-sapiens.

46:33We know that our diet is largely comprised and really made up of seasonally available meats, fish, poultry, eggs, seasonally available fruits, vegetables, and root vegetables, and seasonally available nuts and seeds. So I would suggest that if you were to build your focus on getting enough of those natural things in, that would be the best starting place. I think that's great advice. And I think everything that you do with your WildFit program, and maybe you can introduce that for the listeners so they know what it is, behavioral change is at the core of the success. And what I find is most of these diets rely on willpower and fail long-term.

47:18How have you been able to integrate behavioral psychology to ensure that people make lasting changes? I would say there's a few different points to touch on there. First of all, let's talk a little bit about willpower. Willpower is a largely misunderstood thing. It's a bit like a muscle. And what happens is that it's a muscle that's designed for short-term tension. So you and I, for example, could go to the Maldives and go free diving. And in order to go free diving, we would need to use willpower to hold our breath, we would use will to not breathe while we're under the water. But if you were underwater, and you got stuck under there, then eventually your willpower would give out and you would try to breathe even though you were underwater, right?

48:02So willpower is this short term thing that can only hold on for so long, even when it should keep holding on it won't. And I would suggest is exactly what most people experience on a willpower based diet, they hold their breath, They stick with it as long as they can, and then any number of things interrupt them and get in their way. In fact, I read about a big study wherein it said adults go on an average of two diets a year through their lifetime and stick to each one for only seven days. There's your willpower window for food for most people. Some are better, some are worse, but there's the average.

48:33So that's the first thing to look at. The second thing to look at is to look at the structure of the programs they're on. And generally speaking, if I were a teenage alien from another planet here to evaluate the diet industry, I would have to deduce, I mean, looking at the output, I would have to deduce that the entire diet industry positions itself about helping people lose weight. And meanwhile, seems to be constructed with the specific intent of damaging people's self esteem and destroying their relationship with their body. Oh, you should restrict all your favorite foods immediately. You should go on deep calorie restriction to lose weight.

49:06You should exercise your ass off, even though you're overweight and you're going to damage your knees doing so. I mean, it's lie after myth after lie after myth. And so that's the first, that's the next step is to really evaluate those things and part with them. Let them go, let go of the diet mentality. And then we get into the things that we do with our clients. And we really do a deep dive into their food psychology, understanding how they created their beliefs about food, their habits about food and so on. And I could do, again, we could do a whole masterclass on that discussion, but I'll give you one really tangible example.

49:41If you eat something very calorie rich, your body will reward you for that. It'll taste good. It'll feel good. You'll produce feel good neurotransmitters. Like it'll reward you for that. And that reward is designed to act as an indexing feature. Memories are created by emotional response. So that emotional response is like an indexing feature of, oh, this was a good decision I made. Well done. And what led up to this decision? Let's repeat that behavior. And that's a deep human mechanism. Now, take somebody who's had, say, a crappy day at work, and then they get in the car and they have some road rage.

50:21And then suddenly they feel inspired to stop off at Krispy Kreme, Dunkin' Donuts, Tim Hortons, or any number of other diabetes peddling organizations. and they get there and they're suddenly eating a donut to help them feel better. They eat the donut, they get the coffee, the caffeine and the sugar and all the stimulant and their body goes, oh, well done. Cause the body doesn't know about bad stuff. It doesn't understand that's brand new to humans. The body goes well done. And then it says, whatever did we do to leave to this magic reward? Oh, road rage. That's what we did. And so pretty soon your body begins to learn that if it wants those big payoff, cheap garbage calories, all it has to do is trigger you to have a road rage incident or to have a bad day at work.

51:03So when you use food as an aesthetic for, say, a negative emotional state, what you're doing is teaching your body that the path to that food is through that emotional state. So the body goes, well, I'm feeling like an ice cream. I know how to do that. Bring on depression. And the next thing you know, you're having an ice cream. On the other hand, if you refuse to do that and you only reward success, you only reward your best possible days, you only reward the completion of big projects, you only reward you showing up in the best possible way, that's the day that you have the ice cream. I would argue against ice cream as a regular food anyway, but if you're going to have it as a reward mechanism and then your body goes, wow, the path to ice cream is by finishing the book I've been writing.

51:49or completing that big project at work, or wow, my kids pushed my buttons today and I rocked it. I didn't raise my voice. I was loving. I was compassionate. I understood that I'm the parent in a situation. Now I can have ice cream. And so you get to employ a really powerful principle in the WildFit community in that, geez, I think it's just basically a human principle, but that is any behavior that you reward is very likely to be repeated. So do you want to reward your road rage? Do you want to reward your sadness and depression? Do you want to reward those feelings of loneliness? I don't think so.

52:19Well, I love how you just explored behavioral triggers. And really what you were just saying is that those triggers around food are tied to social situations, stress, our environment, things that are going on. And we keep tending to reward ourselves oftentimes for things that we're not holding ourselves accountable for. Yeah. Which leads me to how much does accountability play in creating the lasting change that we want? Well, proper accountability plays every role. It's unbelievably important, but the wrong kind of accountability is a problem. And let me explain what I mean. The diet industry has been just destroying people's psychology and self-esteem for many decades at this point.

53:05And the idea there is that, oh, you gave in. Oh, you slipped up. Oh, you cheated. Right? Like, If you look at that whole diet mentality thing, then the idea is to trigger a sense of shame in people. Now I want to be really clear. I think shame is one of the best emotions ever because it's a huge behavior modifier. It can work really well. But it only works really well when you handle it really well and when somebody else didn't give it to you. What I mean is that your own internal shame has the ability to really help you improve and become a better human being. But when a company is making you feel shameful about failing at their product, that's something else.

53:39That's something else that's going on. So when we talk about accountability, if the accountability is functional, that is to say, I'm taking responsibility, then that is going to be a big component of the transformation. But if the accountability is, I feel shameful, which is another form of accountability, then shame, unfortunately, is a negative emotion that also acts as a food trigger and a self-esteem destruction. So the next thing you know, that form of accountability can be a problem. And I would say that a lot of the eating disorders that we see are an over-application of accountability.

54:09When you see somebody walking into a toilet, sticking their fingers down their throat and vomiting up their meal, that's accountability, but not the right kind. And one more question about your program. WildFit boasts 80 % to 90 % success rates, which is unheard of in the diet industry or in the health industry as a whole. Why do you think your approach is so different and has such higher levels of sustained behavioral change in your participants? I would say there's a few components. And the first one is consumption of the program. That's a very important thing. If you buy a diet book or a diet program or a health program and you don't read it or you don't watch it or you don't consume it, it's probably not going to work.

54:55We can start there. And when I first decided to do this, I was approached by many people that were saying, hey, you should do a book about this. And I was like, I don't know. I don't think a book is the right venue. Like, I want to use multimedia. I want to be able to convey more emotion. And I want to do it digitally. And so I created it as a digital program. But before I did that, I did a bunch of research into digital education programs. And what I found out was shocking. And that is that the average industry completion rate of digital programs is something like six or 7%, which is really shocking since most of these programs are like five or six modules long and you can watch them in a day.

55:26It's like, why are people not completing them? In fact, one story that just broke my heart, but really opened my eyes was that there were these internet marketers talking about this 10 DVD back in the days of DVDs, but 10 DVD, how to make a million dollars or whatever it was program they had. And after years of selling it and making millions of dollars selling it, they got a note at the help desk and it was like, oh, my 10th DVD was blank. And they're like, oh, no problem. We'll just send you another one. So they grabbed a 10th DVD, stuck it in the player to make sure it was good, just because you want to check.

55:54And it was blank. That's weird. What a coincidence. Well, further investigation led them to find out that they had never printed the 10th DVD. And that made them laugh their asses off because it meant for years and years, people have been buying this program and never getting to the 10th DVD. That would not make me laugh. That would make me feel like an object failure. If I created a program and you don't watch the 10th DVD, I have let you down. And so I constructed a mechanism of developing transformative education programs called behavioral change dynamics. And there's a number of principles and filters and mechanisms for how you deliver content to people so that it's sticky.

56:31So I can tell you, like the first metric in helping people transform is getting them to actually engage. So the first metric we were really working on, we achieved an 85 to 90 % completion rate for people who started the program to completing it. And that wasn't measured by us. That was measured by our publisher. That was told to us as an external number. That was pretty cool. So then the next part of it is the transformative technique or the transformative structure of the program. And the program is an incredible balance of really solid nutritional principles informed by evolution neurology and really powerful step-by-step incremental psychological shifts that people make so that they won't have to rely on willpower or that they will learn how to use willpower in very short bursts to achieve what they want over the long term because they've change their identity.

57:20And that's really the big deal is that people come out of the end of it. And they're like, I am a different person. And I'll put it in one simple term. If you want to eat ice cream, you're going to eat it. You're gonna, I maybe not a lot, maybe a lot, you can use willpower from time to time, but you're gonna if you want it, you're going to eat it. What if we could get you to not want it, or we could reduce your wants sufficiently that it really truly was an annual event rather than a weekly one. Well, I think that's a great way to think about the whole thing. And personally, I had my challenges with wanting to eat ice cream because it's probably my favorite dessert, but you're right.

57:59When you get in that mindset that you don't crave it, you don't need it. And it becomes something that you put to the side, you'd consume a lot less of it for sure. John, at the risk of coaching without permission, well, let me put it in a, I can offer you. Yeah, absolutely. Here's my little prescription for you. Continue to eat ice cream, but do what I said earlier. From now on, for say three months, only eat ice cream on exceptionally amazing days. Only eat ice cream when you have shown up in business the way you want, as a father the way you want, when your emotions are tuned in. It's those days where you go, wow, I was amazing today.

58:39Only eat ice cream on those days and never eat ice cream on a bad day, on a day that didn't go well. So you start there. And then what I think you'll find is that on some of those truly amazing days, you won't even want it. And that's interesting in and of itself. So that's step one. And then step two would be, you know what, don't even worry about step two. One day I'll get you, you come and do the whole WildFit program. I'll take you through steps three and 93. But start with that step one. I'll bet you, you change your whole relationship with ice cream just by making that one change. I think that's a great leave behind for anyone who's here is it's got to start with that first step and then go from there before you're going to be able to perfect any of the other ones.

59:20I was going to ask you one final question, Eric. You've spoken on stages around the world and you've influenced countless people with your work. You've transformed so many people's lives. What is it that's a challenge that still persists that's keeping you up at night and making you to have so much passion with the work that you continue to do? motivation or the thing that gives me the biggest emotional feedback professionally is when I facilitate a breakthrough moment or I facilitate long-term transformation for somebody I really I appreciate that literally not a day goes by I can not a day goes by that somebody doesn't write to me and and tell me about the incredible transfer transformation they've been through I was going to try and find you one here just came in this morning like every day somebody sends me before after pictures of their life.

1:00:08They tell me about the babies they were told they would never have. And now they've had them, their diabetes is reversed. Like I really enjoy doing that. And the reason is that I was in so much pain and I know about the quality of life upgrade I experienced. And so I have a, let's call it an overactive empathetic response when I see people suffering in similar ways to what I was suffering. So yes, I've been very privileged to share my message with millions of people around the world. And I'm very privileged to get these messages from people and so on. But when you ask the question of what is still out there that drives me, I mean, the fact is that solving this problem for one person just highlights there's another 10 that have the problem.

1:00:47Most people have some kind of low-grade eating disorder of some kind. And we're dealing with the fact that the majority of people in America have metabolic health problems and that the healthcare system is groaning under the weight of it. One-third of people going to go to heart disease, one third of people going to cancer, diabetes coming up the scale super quickly. And diabetes is going to cost, this is crazy. Diabetes is going to cost the American economy$400 billion this year. That's half the defense budget. It's insane. And so for me, I am just driven by that. I'm driven by the fact that as long as humans are suffering and in pain, we are not going to have the energy or resources to turn our attention on some of the big issues that we really need to talk about.

1:01:28Hey, look, I think we can all agree. There are some environmental concerns that we have right now. We can get into the climate debate over there, but why even do that? Let's talk about the mass rate of extinctions, the Armageddon of insects, the air pollution. I mean, these are all tangible things. We know that they're happening. But for the average person's health is in such disarray that they don't even care about those other things. Or if they care, they don't have the mental energy to approach them. So it strikes me that to facilitate the transformation, let's say socially, psychologically, in the population around the world that we need to have, we need people to be in the best possible condition they can be in.

1:02:11And so solving this health problem for them is, to me, the only way we even solve the problems in the environment. thank you for sharing that and you're absolutely right about that and there are so many people that need to be helped so i'm glad that you're so passionate about this and want to change so many people's lives eric if people wanted to understand more about you where's the best place for them to go to learn about your programs your writing and the work that you're doing sure for wildfit go to getwildfit.com in fact i think we have a two-week trial there where people can go and do that super easily.

1:02:47Low touch just gives them a sample of what's going on. And I think that they'll find that pretty mind blowing. And generally you can find me at eric.ee, www.eric.ee. And I'm active on Instagram. I manage my own Instagram account and I very often reply to people directly when they've got questions and stuff like that. And I'm happy to support people. My main areas to that, where I really love supporting people is in helping them find their passion from an entrepreneurial perspective, helping them become really effective at communicating. And first of all, and of highest priority is helping them really come to grips with mastering their own health and quality of life and expanding their health span.

1:03:25And if I can help people, I will. Well, Eric, thank you so much for coming back on the program. It's always such an incredible honor to have you on PassionStruck. Thank you again. Thanks for having me. Good to see you. Wow. What a transformative conversation with Eric Edmeades. His insights into aligning our habits with our biology and understanding the truer impact of our daily choices offer a practical framework for creating lasting health change. One of the biggest takeaways from today's episode is that true health transformation begins with small intentional actions. Whether you're setting healthier routines, rethinking your diet or building a better mindset, Eric's approach reminds us that each of us has the power to steer our lives towards a healthier, more intentional future.

1:04:05As you reflect on this episode, consider one specific change that you can make today, something that aligns with the healthier, more vibrant life you envision. Remember, those small, consistent actions can lead to incredible transformations over time. If today's episode resonated with you, please take a moment to leave a five-star rating and review. It helps us bring you these impactful conversations every week. And if you know someone who could benefit from Eric's message, share this episode with them. Together, we can inspire change and growth. For those interested in bringing these ideas to a broader audience, I'm also available for speaking engagements, helping organizations and teams drive intentional change and growth.

1:04:42Visit johnrmiles.com speaking to learn more about how we can work together. And as always, you can find links to everything we discussed today in the show notes at passionstruck.com, including Eric's book, Post Diabetic, and other resources to support your journey. If you're looking to rewatch or share today's conversation, head over to our YouTube channels, John R. Miles and Passion Struck Clips. And don't forget to check out our sponsors and deals at passionstruck.com slash deals to support those who support the show. Be sure to follow me on social media for more insights, behind the scenes content, and updates.

1:05:14Just search for John R. Miles on your favorite platforms. Next up on Passion Struck, I'll be joined by Jason Silver, a multi-time founder, startup advisor, and the author of Your Grass to Screener. Use what you have, get what you want at work and in life. Jason shares powerful strategies to find purpose and fulfillment in the work you're already doing, showing you how to grow your career without waiting for the perfect opportunity. Trust me, it's a conversation that's packed with actionable insights that you won't want to miss. The way I tend to think about that is what I have control over are the decisions that I make.

1:05:46And if I'm clear with my intention, I might not get the outcome that I want, but I'm going to be trying to accomplish it in a way that I'm proud of. And I think the challenge happens when, hey, it's five years later and I look back and I say, oh, I have nothing that I wanted. It's terrible when you look back and you say, geez, I didn't do the things I wanted to do. And now I'm in a position where I don't have the things that I want. That's different than looking back and saying, you know what, I'm proud of the way I tried to accomplish these things. And it didn't work out in exactly the way that I wanted it to.

1:06:17Let's figure out how to do whatever it is we're going to do with the situation that we're in right now. Thank you, as always, for your time and attention. Remember, the fee for the show is simple. If you found value in today's episode, share it with someone who could benefit. it. And as always, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. Until next time, live life passion-struck.