Transform Your DIET & LIFE by Eating THIS | Shawn Stevenson EP 552

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:11and you talk about in your book about how you know when you deal with family or friends you care about and you're eating meals together that you're specifically creating together or having some element or role in the creation process how much more powerful is doing that consistently over time versus eating isolated and eating ultra processed foods by yourself. Yeah. The last time I saw you, that's what we were doing, eating together. It was a celebration for you, for your birthday. Yeah. It was one of the most magical days, right? We'll always remember that experience. This was normal, this celebration around food, right?

0:49Having a luau, like this is kind of like maybe a commercial aspect of it now, but it's deeply rooted in sharing a food with your tribe, right? and celebrating life, celebrating our connection to food and to each other. And this is the mission right now. Now we're getting to how do we fix this? I talked about the larger culture scape that we're existing in. And culture is like an invisible hand that's guiding our behaviors. We think we have free will, but our culture is really deciding what we're aware of and the choices that we have. How do we change this culture? We start with our own family.

1:24We start controlling the controllables. I've been in this field for over 20 years. and thinking about all the time I've spent trying to target the bigger culture. It's very, very difficult. And what I found to be the most effective is changing the culture from within, starting with yourself, your family. That starts to bleed out to your community. People start to see things different. They see an example. I didn't see any examples when I lived in Ferguson, Missouri. I didn't see what health looked like. And so for people to see me and my family, knowing where I come from, it changes everything.

1:58Now, how does eating together with friends and family start to shift this culture? Well, according to the data, I'm going to share three powerful studies with you. It's creating a protection for our health that heretofore we didn't really understand. So eating together with friends and family, let me start with study number one. This is researchers from Harvard. They gathered all this data on family behaviors around eating. And they found that families that consistently eat together have a higher consumption of vital nutrients that prevent chronic diseases and lower intake of ultra processed foods.

2:32Really? Right. One of the things that really jumps out is the intention behind eating together as a family. Right. There's an intentional meal planning that's automatically going to take place. It's not going to be across the board all the time. But if you know I'm having family dinner tonight, you're thinking about it. it's a it's an unconscious subconscious thought process it's like okay we got a plan like what are we going to have right whereas today if we're not if we don't have this as a constant structure door dash is on tap right or just picking up something because we're not thinking we we make the food decision last minute and that's okay because we have access to that that's okay but when that becomes normalized we get more and more separate from each other and also this protective mechanism for our health.

3:15Now, this next one was cited in the Journal of Nutrition, Education, and Behavior. And they looked at family behavior around food and the outcomes for the children specifically. And they found that parents who eat breakfast with their children four times a week had dramatically lower intake of ultra-processed foods, higher intake of vital nutrients, at least five servings of fruits and vegetables each day, most days of the week. And by the way, They found that when the TV was rarely or never on for these families, they had an even further drop in their consumption of ultra-processed foods, the kids specifically, right, because of that marketing, that advertisement.

3:54Now, the most important part about the study is that this was looking at minority children who would generally be in the context of low-income conditions, families like mine. We didn't know that eating together could help to protect our health in some strange way. had we known, even if we were eating processed foods, just the behavior of eating together, it starts to create this protection. I'm going to share with you why. This leads to the next study. This was a collaboration of studies. This was actually published in Pediatrics and the Journal of the American Medical Association. What these researchers uncovered was that, and this is the most important takeaway from today, this is the one, do this one thing.

4:34They found that families who eat together, any meal, three times a week. Okay, so parents eating together with their children or parent eating together with their children just three times a week dramatically decreased overweight and obesity in the children and decreased eating disorders and just overall decreasing the risk of the onset of early mortality and chronic diseases. Wow. By eating together with your family three times a week. That's fascinating. All right. This is the major takeaway that I want people to take on and make that a mandate. Make it a mission to eat with your family, eat with friends three times a week, plan it, add it to your calendar.

5:15Because today we've got a lot of stuff going on. And a lot of times if you don't put on your schedule, it's not real. Like literally plan it out. This could be whatever flavor it looks like for you. This could be, you know, family dinner on Wednesday and Thursday and then brunch on Sunday. Right. Just whatever works for you. But there's something really special about this process, and we can unpack more of this why, but also the psychological aspect. And this was shown in data looking at adults and how eating together with their family dramatically decreased their stress levels. This was coming from a population of workers from IBM, and they found that as long as the workers were able to get home and have dinner with their family, it kept work morale high.

5:56But as soon as their work schedule and the demands start to dig into them spending time with their family, getting home in time for dinner, their work morale started to go down, their stress levels elevated. Now, why does this matter overall? This was a meta-analysis, and the researchers determined that upwards of 80 % of all physician visits today are for stress-related diseases. 80 %? Up to 80 % because of the stress-related component. Because stress isn't just something that's invisible.

6:33Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving The Daily Motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple podcast right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel on Apple podcast right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

7:23Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.