From Drug Smuggler to Healer: How Nick Brewer Created Primal Moves

0:00Dr. Mark Hyman:Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show. Went from crackdown on cocaine to cracked open in your consciousness. I smashed myself to pieces. I'd gotten into drug trafficking. I found myself in South America. I wound up with 10 years in prison in Argentina for smuggling cocaine. And I had a broken body and a broken mind. You had this life as a smuggler. It's finished. And I sat there and I asked, I said, what am I going to do? And I heard this voice that came through and it said that I was going to be a facilitator of movement into people's lives. So it was through a damaged body that I developed Primal Moves.

0:31Dr. Mark Hyman:Nick Brewer is the founder of Primal Moves. Fusing movement, breath work, and trauma-informed awareness. He turned a prison sentence into a blueprint for freedom. Reconnecting people to their bodies. And out of pain. People say, what's the meaning of life? What's the purpose of life? To me, it's getting free. There's a lot of fear around actually wanting to be well because people are actually quite happy living in pain. They think it's a place where they can reside. It's comfortable. So many people don't live in their body. they are disconnected from their body.

1:03Dr. Mark Hyman:Nick, welcome to the podcast. So great to have you on today. Thanks, Mark. Thanks for hosting me. I'm a big fan of yours. Oh, ditto. I mean, here we are in Ibiza, in your house, or Ibiza, as they say in Spain. This morning, I just came from one of your classes called Primal Moves, which we're going to talk about, which is a powerful way of rehabilitating the body, of gaining strength, of healing injury. And I've known you for years. I've come to your class for years, but I don't think the world really knows about you very much. And I don't think the world knows about this practice that you developed that is quite powerful.

1:36Dr. Mark Hyman:And for me, it looks deceptively easy, but it's actually quite hard. And I want to sort of start off by kind of talking about something that just happened to me, which is I'm rehabilitating for my own back surgery. And I've shared a little bit about that. And I really was taken down. And I've been doing better and better. And it's been about six months. And I've gained a lot of strength. And I was weight training by myself because I was traveling. And I was lifting these weights in a way that kind of tweaked my back a little bit. And I was really hurting. And I was a little nervous about, did I do something wrong?

2:11Dr. Mark Hyman:Did I screw it up? I was uncomfortable. But I decided I'm going to go to the class and just do what I can do. And I just did one class. and I was huffing and puffing and sweating. And by using these sort of very weird movements that are like animal movements, crawling on the floor, crawling backwards, going on your side, stomach, stretching, it's like this kind of wild practice. In one class, my pain was gone. And I was like, holy shit. It's powerful stuff. Yeah, that's very rewarding to hear. I want to sort of start out by talking a little about your background because it's so interesting. And you're not your typical yoga teacher who, you know, like our fitness trainer who kind of just went through the traditional route.

2:51Dr. Mark Hyman:You had a kind of a crazy story. You went from basically cracked out on cocaine to cracked open in your consciousness through an incredible story that we can't really tell the whole thing because it takes hours. And we were in Africa together and you told me the story. It took hours to tell the story. It blew my mind. But essentially, you know, I want you to sort of start about how you first injured yourself and then how you became like a drug smuggler and then how that led you being in prison and then what you learned in prison. So kind of take us through that story and what happened to you and how you came out the other side as a whole human being.

3:28Yeah, I mean, that's a big backdrop. So, you know, first and foremost, movement is medicine. It's a healer for the body. It's a healer for the mind. And when I was growing up in my teenage years, I was a pro skier. I had an idyllic life. I lived in the Alps. I was on the international circuit and I broke my back in two places. You fractured your vertebrae? Yeah, I fractured L3 and L4. So compression fractures and completely herniated all the lumbar spine. That was the first injury. Five years later, I broke T7 and T9 in a motocross accident. So, you know, in my teenage years, in my early twenties, I smashed myself to pieces.

4:08In the process of that, you know, I'd hit the self-destruct switch. I'd gotten into drug trafficking. I found myself in South America. I wound up with 10 years in prison in Argentina for smuggling cocaine. Yeah. And I had a broken body and a broken mind. And it was the template that I had. I haven't had anybody on my podcast who's been in prison for 10 years. Yeah. Actually, of those 10 years I spent in prison, I spent four years in isolation. Wow. Which is another story. That was a deep, deep, deep dive into my, into myself, into practice, which is actually where lot of the kind of benefits and a lot of the rewards i get today for movement and meditative practices came from and that's kind of how and why i developed primal moves i came out of prison in 210 with a broken body you know my spine looked like it had scoliosis i had total lumbar herniation

4:55Dr. Mark Hyman:i had degeneration of the discs when you went into prison yeah so when i came out i was in a lot of pain and i spent years practicing um with a chiropractor the kind of modern medicine were like look let's just open up your spine let's put a big bolt in there let's stitch the entire lumbar spine together and bolt it together and I was like no way like there's no way we're going down that route just yet so I started that's major surgery that's what I just had by the way yeah I mean you know I think yours was uh undeniable you had to have it I had that but I was still in that position of you know I was 40 years of age yeah and I was like I don't want to have a rod in my back so I down the route of yoga, pilates, elementary gymnastics training and I tapped into lots of different modalities of movement and you know I just came out of prison as well where I developed a deep deep yoga practice.

5:44In prison? In prison and that was what started the whole kind of journey into rehabilitation like physical and mental. My body was not in a good place when I was 40. I was in a lot of pain. I had joint pain, my spine hurt. You know more often than not I'd be two or three weeks lying down in my bed in the fetal position where the the discs are just completely bulging I had no spinal stability I had no joint stability so I basically went about re-stabilizing my joints through quadrupedal body weight movement quadrupedal body weight movement

6:16Dr. Mark Hyman:yes so my body weight legs moving on all fours yeah in a non-linear fashion yeah so it'd be forwards, backwards, sideways, diagonally, moving in multiple planes of direction, multiple joint action, but with my body weight, not creating any levers in the body, which would then create stress in the lumbar spine, which is what you've done. You've picked up a weight in an awkward fashion and that lever, you know, the weak part of the lever is the hinge and that's what's happened. You've just tweaked it. So what I was looking at doing was re-stabilizing my body. So So it was through a damaged body that I developed primal moves.

6:54And the story that I'm hearing from you today is a story that I've heard hundreds and hundreds of times. People come to class and they've got stiff bodies, jammed up bodies, herniations in their lower back, destabilized joints, hypermobility, stiffness, and just basically like degenerating bodies. They come to class once, twice, three times. They get hooked and they're going away happy humans. And they're going away pain-free. And then they take on, and really then they start to embody the practice. Because not only do they get their physical youth back, but they actually start to grow with that.

7:27They really start to enjoy their body again, and start doing things in their 40s and 50s that they thought they'd never, ever be able to do again.

7:32Dr. Mark Hyman:You said earlier you were in solitary confinement for four years. I mean, that would drive most people insane. I mean, you'll end up climbing the walls. Yeah, and there are practices, like the darker treats that Tibetans do, where they go for months or longer in darkness. And vipassanas. Yeah, but you didn't choose this. It chose me. It chose you. And four years is a hell of a long time. Yeah, it's a long time. It's a long time. And you were in a little cell? Yep, I was in a cell. It was probably two meters by three meters. Had a tiny little window at the top and gray concrete walls. And you had to figure out how to move in that space?

8:10So I had some books on yoga that I managed to get sent in. So they let you have books in solitary? So I could have books. And I was in there like 22 hours a day. So I did a lot of siddhi practice, did a lot of reflection, a lot of mind work. I started to study the works of Ramana Maharishi, which is about observing the mind and the ego, which I actually didn't even know we had one until I got into isolation. So this was really quite effective. You didn't know you had a mind and an ego? I had no idea that we had a mind and an ego prior to going into prison.

8:36Dr. Mark Hyman:You were just going through life. I was just completely numbed out and desensitized going through life like a bullet, like a steam train, completely on a self-destruct mission. So actually it was a really beautiful process of actually going into that space of, you know, I was a very grateful convict. Albeit, you know, South American prisons are slightly rough. And Argentina was not a pleasant place to be in prison. It wasn't like when Martha Stewart went to prison. No, no, no, it was nothing like that. The opportunity that I had to go into that isolated period for four years of my life was really quite profound.

9:09And, you know, I got into the yoga practice, but it was static. So that was fine. It kept me moving. I was basically practicing all day. But when I got...

9:18Dr. Mark Hyman:You mean yoga postures? Yeah, it was static. It was mat-based. So when I got out of prison and I had a studio to move in, I thought, wow, let's try moving this across the floor. So I was doing my sun salutations and the static poses. You know, instead of just staying on the mat, I actually moved across the floor. And then it was through the healing that started to come around my body. And then I started to practice with clients. and through that the practice built a small community in London and it was from this community and observing bodies that then I really started to systemize an entire method around it.

9:53Dr. Mark Hyman:And then you kind of found that yourself out of prison but your body was still not great and then through these embodied practices that we know you've called primal moves you've been able to sort of repair all that so all the broken back all the disc herniations all the pain because you're like in your mid-50s now you're one of the strongest guys i've ever met and you can do like a one-armed handstand and crazy shit exactly and it is my absolute joy and you feel like that sort of that time in prison helped you sort of get grounded and present in yourself so you could kind of start to listen to what was happening because yeah you didn't have a lot of distractions pre-prison i was totally distracted i was numbed down and i was desensitized going into prison and going into isolation and going back into that space of stillness and started to embody myself meaning i was able to actually feel and stop thinking you know so instead of asking myself what i was thinking i was asking myself what am i feeling yeah and that was a completely different outlook that was a completely different lens to look at my life through so you know how am i feeling in the morning how am i sleeping what do i feel like how's my cognition how's my memory how's my evacuation do I have energy am I recovered am I feeling depressed so I was actually able to start feeling myself again and then I worked out that through embodying these practices which was a lot of breath work and a lot of movement you know I was able to remove that that kind of depressed feeling that came down into me you know anything that became stagnant any stuck energies I moved them through with practice it was through moving my body that I was able to free myself completely So not only did you kind of move your way out of physical pain, you were able to move your way out of emotional and mental pain.

11:39Absolutely. Because all the traumas that I had, you know, from 15 years of smuggling and breaking my body and being on that self-destructive path, I was actually able to go in there and start healing that in prison through these practices. You know, I realized I was so stuck. I was so stuck in my head. I was so rigid. There was so much control. There was so much manipulation going on up there. There was a lot of darkness that was going on in my life at the time and I had no idea Yeah, it was just your life. That was basically what it was and then as I started to work through my body I started to work through the fascial system.

12:14I started to work through the mind You know, I also I broke down, you know, I had mental breakdowns as well. I think three or four years into prison I'd been in isolation for about two years and it brought me to my knees You know, I had a complete emotional mental break. What did that look like? what did that look like that looked like a baby crying on the floor sobbing for about two weeks completely broken and shaking it was kind of letting go of your old self my old self with my i was having a total ego death i didn't even know it yeah it completely crushed me it brought me to my knees i lay there crying and sobbing for about two weeks and where i was there was no humanity there was no one coming around to check up on you and say hey how you doing you want a hug do you need something you need any help the prison guards weren't doing that the prison guards in south america didn't even come and check they just came and checked for

13:03Dr. Mark Hyman:dead bodies they just want give you your food in the thing they gave you a head count that was it they didn't feed you they didn't feed you no well how'd you get your food you had to get your food in so they just went someone from the outside had to bring your food in for you and you'd have it in boxes and bags and you had to try and make it and cook it somehow really so there was no food i mean the malnutrition in the prisons was people dying of malnutrition it was terrible it was horrific it's like third world that's a powerful story because you know most of us are pretty locked into our psychological framework our emotions are pretty sort of fixed in the way we relate to the world to our experience to relationships to work to family to ourselves and and those rigid patterns like keep us from being free and always the constructs that we create in our head which actually i realized post-prison that you know freedom is actually a state of mind because i've met so many people that are actually in prison because they're just bound by their thoughts yeah they're so rigid they've built so many constructs that actually they've stopped themselves from being free anymore and i didn't actually realize that until i got out of prison that's true you can be a billionaire and be still in the prison of your mind exactly so i was euphorically year five in prison i was euphorically happy that's incredible euphorically happy you went from like breaking completely down yeah from having complete ego deaths total mental emotional breakdowns again it was it was movement and meditation breath work of a daily practice that got me out of that um but i went into states of absolute euphoric happiness which i haven't actually achieved since being in prison because now i'm actually you know i'm back in the world and i've got distraction again yeah yeah you know i have a house i have to pay rent i have a business i need to pay salaries yeah you know i have a lover right so i have desires so i actually went into some really interesting states of being when I was in there.

14:49Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah, and it's a sort of a gift in disguise, right? Totally. I mean, I had that now as a reference point to go back to. So I've been there. I've understood that blissful state of nothingness. You know, when you absolutely own nothing, have nothing. Yeah. And you can be blissfully happy. So I have experienced that. Well, I'm curious about what happened in the process of the breakdown, because you describe it almost as a physical experience you know laying on the floor sobbing and going through the somatic expression and discharge of all the emotion you know talk therapy really doesn't do that no and for me you know i i went through a lot of things in my life i've had many illnesses many marriages probably about five years ago i found myself fairly you know sort of stuck in the prison of my own beliefs and mind and i knew i knew intellectually what the issues were from my childhood and my mother who was a child of deaf parents and how that affected her and how that affected her parenting me and then it's a long story but I really did not know how to get rid of it and through a series of processes and things I was able to kind of have this somatic experience where I just like literally broke down on the floor crying and crying for days like a week yeah so you've had that breakdown and I and I and it was the weirdest thing I had the same experience after you i literally after it was all free from that i i emerged and i felt euphoric like high like i just taken some like drugs but like happy drugs i hear you and it was it was pretty remarkable and i just went around in this state for quite a while it's why i think being in your body is so important and why the work you do is so important because if we just stay in our heads we'll never get there and you were you were forced into it unwillingly exactly and i had no to talk to yeah so i couldn't do talk therapy yeah so the only way that i knew was somatic work to release myself of pain mental emotional and physical all i could do was move and sometimes i woke up in pain you know my my hips were hurting my shoulders but my pain my head was in pain you know so i had no one actually there to talk to i had no one to intellectualize or compartmentalize it with but i understood okay these were the traumas but the only way i could actually release myself from that was from basic breath work and movement and it was actually the movement the somatic work i was doing in the prison and just constantly working with my somatic nervous system that started to ease out it was agitating all this stuck energy yeah it was agitating these traumas to move out of the somatic system yeah out of the fascial system and it was freeing me up you know don't get me wrong some days i had to stand there in my in my room for maybe an hour having an internal fight with myself because there was one part of me that wanted to lay down and just be depressed and there was another part of it was like no you got to do your practice because it's pain you're feeling will move through your body yeah

17:50I would literally stand there and have a stand-up fight with myself for an hour yeah I would not move until I did my practice and you fight feeling that came through me as I started to move my body even raising my hands above my head and touching the floor and synchronizing that with some breathing, the lightness came and it moved through me and I went through this like a year, two years of this internal fight of to practice or not to practice. You know, that's why now for me, I think one of the reasons that Primal Moves has become I'm so successful is because of 15 years I've shown up every single day to practice yeah and when you don't feel like it right everyone comes down and they see me kind of leading through example and inspiration like hey this guy's down they're looking at a great concrete floor two three hours a day and he's euphorically happy I'll try that I went through a different experience

18:43Dr. Mark Hyman:recently where I kind of went through this portal where I almost died and I had an infection in my back it led to an abscess and I had to have major surgery and I was in bed for six weeks I couldn't walk. I lost 20 pounds, which I'm already pretty skinny. I came out of that and I was really unable to move. I couldn't tie my shoes. I couldn't get up off the toilet by myself. I couldn't do the most basic life things that you think getting dressed. You take for granted. Yeah. I mean, and I recently saw my surgeon and he said, most people at your stage are on a walker or maybe never get off a walker and I did I did what you did no matter how bad I felt or how depressed I was or how broken I was I literally got up into the gym every day and worked with physical therapists and a trainer and started moving I'm not 100 % back yet but I'm uh out of pain amazing I'm moving I'm doing your class no I mean I've seen the MRS scans of your spine it's incredible yeah i've got all the hardware in there uh like a hardware store in there and and uh you know i'm there with a bunch of 30 year olds in the class and i'm 65 yeah that's amazing that's inspiring and it's just like your body has that capacity and what i really find interesting and i wonder if you have any insight on this is as i look around the world and and especially in america so many people don't live in their body they are disconnected from their body and you can see their bodies become overweight or they they are hunched over or they're you can see they don't move fluidly and and it's interesting that people are kind of locked in this state of physical contraction yeah and don't really even know it or aware of it and they don't realize that there's a way to the other side of that and actually getting free because i i think you know more and more because we're so connected to our devices we're so yeah um not having to move our bodies we're we're just sort of out of this traditional way of living that we've done for hundreds of thousands of years which i think the question for you is seeing what's happening in the world around this sort of disconnection from our bodies how do we start to inch forward because it feels like a big hurdle for a lot of people who who aren't in their bodies who aren't exercising regularly who aren't moving regularly to actually go from that to doing something yeah it's a big push i mean this is mental you have to like you have no it has to be a mindset you need to shift the perception of your mindset and make movement a lifestyle it has to become part of your life you know i say to a lot of people here that you know have full-time jobs and they work that you need to actually book this session in and make it part of your life it needs to be embodied as a daily practice and they see the benefits from that and trying to create that shift of people where they actually think yeah you know what just going to give myself one hour a day to go to class or to get on the mat or to go to the gym and do something even go for a walk or a swim but something just move your body because this is a hunter-gatherer body yeah it needs to move it was designed and created to move and the more you move it the better it feels yeah and it will degenerate the body if you sit in a chair all day the body will just slowly degenerate right quicker than you think that's true i mean it doesn't discriminate the more you move it the better it's going to feel i mean i was in bed for six weeks and i i i never felt so debilitated yeah powerless yeah powerless but also just like my body lost all of its function and i i couldn't go to the bathroom by myself i couldn't do the most simple life i think because if you had that template that framework of being healthy because well i could get i could remember what it was like but i was like what it felt like so you had muscle memory to be like hey i want to go back to feeling like this i don't want to feel like I am now.

22:28Dr. Mark Hyman:I mean, I was a yoga teacher in my 20s and we did seven hours of yoga a day for like a month and you get pretty flexible. But even as kids growing up now, it's not in the school curriculum. There's no sport. There's not a daily session of sport where they're encouraging children to move and be fit and be conscious and try and be embodied and do mindful practices. They're sat down in a chair and they're given a book. And that's true. And I think because we're so disconnected from our bodies, I think it also prevents us from being able to access a very powerful liberating force, which is using the body and the somatic practices, as you call them, to start to free up a lot of the stuck emotions and the beliefs and the fears.

23:10Dr. Mark Hyman:And yes, sometimes, you know, talk therapy helps or coaching helps or those things can be helpful or psychedelic medicine. But I think, you know, movement is medicine. You said that right at the beginning is powerful and you know a lot of people are into longevity and they want to take this vitamin or this drug or do this special thing or take a hyperbaric chamber or whatever that's fine it's like you don't actually move for me it's bypassing they're trying to hack their way to health by by bypassing doing the hard work yeah which is actually to go into a class i mean one of the beautiful things about primal is a very community driven brand so we have like a big group of people that move together and that's really beautiful and really inspiring you know we sometimes have 80 people come into class i know it's pretty crowded this morning and but there's something very beautiful because of you know you get this i could really find it i could really find a place on the on the hanging bar because there's like so many people there but you know just moving together as a group it brings about exponential growth yeah you know it brings a flow state around it's inspiring you release oxytocins you release serotonin and dopamine you get that happy drug feeling of just moving in a group yeah you know when you're doing a class which biomechanically works not only do you feel emotionally good but you feel bloody physically good as well yeah you know and that's what primal essentially is yeah it's sort of like healing almost invisibly when you do it and you don't have to think about it you just it's like and it's and you know i think whether it's yoga whether it's primal moves or whether it's you know other forms of exercise if people can get in their bodies it's really the key to feeling good to healing if i don't exercise for a few days i start to feel cranky it's physical longevity you know people talk a lot about physical longevity these days you know just move and so do are you familiar with the science around around how this all works in terms of the somatic healing of primal or primal or just in general i've started i've looked into it quite deeply so can you tell us sort of about the science behind this because I think is you know people may not really be aware of what the the sort of underlying principles are of why this works and how it works I've written a manual on this I wrote a hundred page manual on why primal moves works and where can people find that you have to do one of my teacher trainings to get that that's like my blueprint so it's a big topic it's a big conversation about what it does but it's actually starting to it starts to rebuild muscle mass, it starts to re-stabilise your joints, it starts to increase cognitive and behavioural patterns physically and mentally.

25:42It's non-linear, it starts to break down rigidity in the mind. The fascial networks, it starts to move the fluids around in the fascial system. The motion creates the lotion, the body starts to move, it starts to become lean and supple, becomes healthy the muscles are working properly you start to get bone density muscle density again you know you're working with neuronal and non-neuronal intelligence you know the cells are working to release stem cell creating stem cell because of this micro trauma yeah in the body every time you're moving across the floor all the joints are creating what we call micro micro trauma which then gives stem cell a job to actually start healing you again you know if you don't do anything stem cell doesn't work doesn't need to goes to sleep the more you work your body the more stem cell has a job so it starts to heal the body starts to rejuvenate the muscles the bones the skin the connective tissue you know along with that if you're also eating consciously as well that that for me is hacking that's biohacking breathing eating moving i think the

26:44Dr. Mark Hyman:um the hurdle for a lot of people is just getting started right so how how would you sort of advise people who want to get just show up to class show up to class well not every town has primal moves yet yeah so we well we've got a digital space so you can find it online where do you where do you find it online so www.primalmoves.com so we've got a plug and play uh really cheap subscription model and on there you've got probably like 150 sessions and it's mat based so all you need is a mat and a small space you don't need to go to a gym you don't need equipment you can literally roll out your mat open up your your tablet and you get visual you don't need a big like floor space to do it so i can i guide the sessions actually i built it in covid because when the studios started to shut in covid everyone reached out to me it's like hey how can we practice yeah so then i built this very simple plug and play digital space where people could just literally turn on the system and they could work through their bodies we have like full flow classes or you can work on stabilizing your spine opening your hips strengthening your shoulders amazing so there's a lot of content on there that's definitely my future yeah and obviously now what we're trying to do um you know because there's so many people that have come into this community of primal that when they're going home to their cities throughout the states and europe they're actually wanting to open studios so now we have a whole training program and the idea is over the next few years we're going to be opening you know like mothership destination studios in in the bigger cities that's great and if you don't live in one of those cities you can do it online and i think exactly i think i'm going to start doing that i miss it like when i'm not here i'm like oh yeah i mean the session's like half an hour there's 10, 20, 30 minute sessions.

28:18That's all you need. Just a little bit every single day. You just got to tap into the body every day. And also it gets you out of your head. You know, for me, there's nothing more pleasurable than living in my body. It's the most pleasurable place I can ever be.

28:31Dr. Mark Hyman:Well, I think most people don't live in their body. They don't pay attention to the signals that their body says. They don't eat when they're hungry and not eat when they're not hungry. They don't sleep when they're tired. They push themselves. People are in all sorts of strange disconnect from their physical body. They're upregulated. They're anxious. They're living on sugar. Their sleep patterns aren't good. And you're very disciplined about your practices, right? Really, yeah. It's a daily thing for me. It's non-negotiable. Tell us about your food patterns and your habits, because it's different than most people.

29:02So I'm a very simple eater. I'm 80 % carnivore. So my main meat is red meat. And I'm super particular about how I source it. So I actually go to the farm myself. I look at the cows. I need to understand that the cow is walking around eating grass under the sun and does not go in the barn and that the way that the animal is killed is very special as you know the whole food conversation is a big topic, is a big debate and getting well sourced foods is a really hard thing to do these days you know the soils are devitalised, they're demineralised the foods are genetically modified the animals are being injected with god knows what so sourcing your food is a for me it's a really important thing I believe that what we eat is what we are.

29:48What's going in the soils and what's going in these animals is who our body becomes. So my meat's grass-fed, grass-finished, and I eat a lot of it. I don't eat many vegetables. I don't eat greens. I eat fruit.

30:01Dr. Mark Hyman:But you're explaining to me why. Because people are like, well, greens are good or vegetables are good. So why do you like that? I started to feel inflamed. Because you were noticing what your body was feeling. So I was observing my gut. It didn't feel good. When I eat greens, my gut started to feel almost a bit achy. And I started to feel a little bit, I had like joint ache and a bit foggy in the head. So I'd go through long periods, say three to six months of doing processes of elimination of foods that I would eat and wouldn't eat. So I stopped eating grains completely. I eat very few carbs.

30:36Every now and then I might go out and have some pasta or some rice. but very seldomly, like once or twice a month. I don't eat many sugars, hardly any. I eat fruit and all the animals. And potatoes. Potatoes. My classic meal would be a fillet steak, barely cooked, with lashings of ghee. So I eat a lot of ghee. I eat a lot of fat and a lot of protein. So essentially I'm fueled by mitochondria, which is the cell's ability to produce energy as opposed to insulin. So my energy levels throughout the day are really well balanced. Neiman, yeah. I have two lattes and a pan of chocolate. So I keep it real.

31:13I have like my percentage of diet, which is what I call my junk diet.

31:17Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah, yeah. I keep it real. You know, I have a pan of chocolate. I have a coffee. Every now and then I might have an ice cream. You know, I like to keep it real. Yeah. But I know that 75, 80 % of what I eat is grass-fed animals, really well sourced. And for me, like, you know, to understand my markers, I wake up in the morning and I feel it. You know, how am I feeling? How am I sleeping? How's my recovery? How's my mind? Is it foggy? How's my gut? How's my evacuation? In my practice, my physical practice, how's my body recovering? How am I training? How's my energy levels? It's 955, and they're good.

31:50I just recently had my bloods done, and I had them checked, and they said, wow, your bloods are like that of a man 30 years ago, of a 30-year-old man. My testosterone is up at 1 ,000. My HDL, my LDL is really healthy. my hemoglobin is good my minerals my vitamins are really high and they say to me this is incredible you don't eat vegetables do you take supplements no so i don't take supplements i avoid supplements at all costs i've started to take creatine just to see how it feels yeah for like cognition and recovery but i don't supplement i literally just source really good foods yeah train and breathe and that for me is hacking i take a sauna four times a week and i get in the ice bath when i can but again it's more of a lifestyle as opposed to you know I try and avoid supplements and I try and convert people onto healthy foods, healthy living.

32:43Dr. Mark Hyman:Well you know it's interesting you know historically we never took supplements because we had a very nutrient-dense diet and if you look at hunter-gatherers diets and this has been well studied you know the the amount of vitamins minerals were extremely high compared to modern diets and they also had animals that were eating wild plants. Exactly. And those wild plants are full of not just vitamins and minerals, but also phytochemicals that are very healing. There's an amazing guy, did a podcast with him, a couple of podcasts, because one of the most incredible people I've ever met named Fred Probenza who wrote a book called Nourishment about what we can learn from animals about how to eat.

33:19Dr. Mark Hyman:And what he said was he studied rangeland ecology and the relationship between plants and animals and the soil and nature. He found that the animals would eat a few main calorie crops or plants, but then they would sample up to 100 or more different plants that had different properties, different minerals or different nutrients, and that the animals knew. I've been in the Amazon. I remember seeing this side of this river, which is clay, and the parrishers just came flying fox and were eating the minerals because they knew their bodies needed. From the soul, yeah. We're so disconnected. We think we need like Skittles, you know, like, oh, that looks good.