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Again, that's longangle.com. Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. I'm Chris Hutchins, and I am excited to have you here for a conversation with Liz Moody. Liz is a longtime writer, editor, and healthy recipe developer. She's the author of two cookbooks, Healthier Together and Glow Pops.

She was formerly the food director for MindBodyGreen, and she's had her work featured in Vogue, Women's Health, and many more places. And last, but certainly not least, she's the host of the hit wellness podcast, Healthier Together, which features intimate interviews with some of the biggest names in the wellness world, as well as a few non-wellness guests like yours truly.

In fact, the episode I did on her show just went live today as well. And in case you aren't watching on YouTube, we recorded both those episodes live from the All The Hacks studio, aka my basement. This conversation is going to be chocked full of all kinds of health and wellness hacks, but if you hear that and think it might be too healthy for you, then you should definitely stick around because I happen to know we both share a fondness for a certain unhealthy cereal, and that while Liz certainly believes in the power of food to heal and nourish your body, she also knows that a good pasta carbonara has a place on the table because sometimes it can just heal your soul.

We're here to talk spices, cold showers, circadian walks, meditation, vitamins, taping your mouth at night, hacks to make frozen veggies taste great, and a lot more. That is a lot to cover, so let's jump in. Liz, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me in your house. This feels very like intimate and fun.

I know I have done almost all virtual recordings online and then two this week in person. It feels like the new normal. Oh, I'm so happy with it. So I'm going to start by letting you know that I too love Fruity Pebbles. That is not where I thought you would start.

Is it your cereal of choice? I wouldn't go as far as cereal of choice, but it's definitely in like the top two or three. I only say not of choice because like it's not a healthy cereal. It's not a natural cereal. I thought the colors were like, they always say eat the rainbow.

Is that not? No, that's Skittles. Also not natural. But people are not going to listen to any of my health advice from this moment. Well, actually, I think the opposite, because so often I feel like you're talking to people who have an opinion about health and ways to eat healthier and live healthier and be healthier.

And you get all of this feedback that is like you can't do anything fun. And so I wanted to start with that because when I was reading part of your cookbook and I was just reading some of the content you wrote, I listened to some of your podcasts. There is a lot of advice on how you can live and happier, healthier life.

Yes. But I also heard that you love Fruity Pebbles, which makes me feel like you're a normal person and you're not someone who's just like figured out how to never eat anything unhealthy, which I just is not an option in my world. I like cinnamon rolls. I like donuts.

I like Fruity Pebbles. Do I want to eat them in moderation? Do I want to use hacks to make it better? Yes, but I want to at least set the ground with talking about food first, that you are not this rare person that just doesn't like sweet food and that's how you're healthy.

No, I absolutely love sweet food. So I always say that wellness is a tool, not an end unto itself. So the second that wellness makes your life worse, it's no longer wellness. And I think a lot of people are like, Oh, I'm like living this really healthy life, but they're miserable all of the time with all of the things that they're doing to be quote unquote healthy and healthy includes how we feel in our body.

But also how we feel in our brain. So if you're like, I can't go out to dinner with my friends, cause what am I going to eat? I can't ever eat these like foods that really make me smile and bring me joy. That's not wellness. Wellness is actually getting in the way of you living your best life.

So I always like people to zoom out and have that perspective with wellness and with any of the health tools that I provide my audience with. I'm like, sometimes I'll say, Oh, here's my night Tim routine. And people be like, well, what if I am out late drinking with my friends or I'm at a work party and I can't do it.

And I'm like, then don't do it. If you can't do it, don't do it. It's also all designed to help us get optimal sleep. So if you're super tired and you're just going to fall asleep anyways, good, fall asleep. That's amazing. On top of that, I think there are also a lot of things that you can do to make the things that feel a little bit more fun, a little bit more indulgent, not feel as negative on your body.

So let's take sugar. For example, when I was writing my cookbook, I drove my editor crazy with this. Cause I was like, for everything, I wanted to have like my very specific perspective and why I was making the assertion that thing was healthy. And for dessert, I was like, what is quote unquote unhealthy about dessert?

And the main thing is, is that it spikes your blood sugar. So you're having a lot of sugar, your blood sugar goes up and then it'll crash down. You'll feel lethargic. We've all had that sort of like tired, sometimes you get like a little shaky. You just don't feel good when your blood sugar rises and then crashes.

So that's the problem. What can we do to solve that? There's a few things we can do. One, you can change the format of the dessert itself. So I do that by adding fat fiber protein to my desserts. I'll put in something like Greek yogurt or almond butter or almond flour and just make it a more stable blood sugar experience from the get go.

But then there's also other fun things you can do too. So I had a woman who calls herself the glucose goddess on my podcast. She is amazing. She's a biochemist who kind of hacks glucose in her body. She wears a continuous glucose monitor and she, her whole thing is studying the different effects that things have on your glucose.

So she has a few different like little tricks that she recommends that I really like. One is if you want to eat a sweet thing like fruity pebbles. We all love our fruity pebbles. And I honestly think fruity pebbles like got me through the pandemic. I'm like, not sure I was in New York for the early parts of it.

And I am like, if I didn't have my fruity pebbles, would I be okay right now mentally? And I don't think so. But if you want something like your fruity pebbles, don't have it as a snack, have it as an actual dessert, which means after you've consumed some other type of form of food.

So after you've had a main course with your protein, with your fat, your fiber, all of that. So if you're craving a cookie in the middle of the day, if you're craving your fruity pebbles, be like, that's not off limits to me. I'm still going to have it, but I'm going to move it to after a meal.

That's a really great hack that'll just elongate your blood sugar curve and make sure that your glucose doesn't spike and crash again, eliminating all of those quote unquote negative effects in your body of eating a lot of sugar. Another one that I really like is her green starter hack, which is just eat something green before you eat anything else.

So if you eat something with a lot of fiber, it creates almost like a little stopper in your intestines and it just slows the absorption of everything else in your body. So literally you can do this for anything that you eat. Just eat a little green salad before some vegetables.

If you're out at a restaurant before you go for the bread, which is a lot of carbs, a lot of stuff that would spike your blood sugar, have a little vegetable side first, have a little salad first. You can do that with literally anything. And that brings me to my last point, which is that I think if we think of wellness as deprivation based, it's not going to stick again.

It feels like it's making our life worse. So with every single part of health, I like to think about what I can add to my life instead of what I can take away. So instead of being like, I'm not going to eat any sugar and that's going to make me feel so much better, you think about, I'm going to add a vegetable to every single meal and I'm not going to take anything away.

And I think if we start to think about what can we add to our lives, we start to feel nourished, we start to feel taken care of, and we start to feel like these things are making our life better instead of being dogmatic and taking away from our experience on this planet.

So is that as simple as I want to order pizza tonight, but I'm just going to like whip up some broccoli and eat that alongside? A hundred percent. Yeah. So my husband and I eat frozen pizza like quite often for dinner and we'll just make a little salad that we'll eat.

So we'll get like one of those containers of pre-washed greens. We'll put some olive oil. I like to like microplane a little bit of garlic, a little bit of a lemon zest, and then squeeze the lemon juice and some salt. And we'll eat that first. So the thing is you eat the green thing first, or we keep frozen broccoli on hand.

I love roasting frozen vegetables. Have you ever tried that? No, but I know from looking you up, it's like you said roasting frozen vegetables. And I was like, gosh, most people you talk to that have written a cookbook are like, the only vegetable you should eat is like fresh from the farmer's market.

No, no, no. I mean, I love the farmer's market. It's like very much my happy place. And I think it's a wonderful way to get excited about food. It feels like a very visceral experience. You can walk around and like sample things and it feels beautiful. And I think anything that gets you excited about healthy eating is wonderful, but frozen vegetables and frozen fruits are phenomenal.

They often contain more nutrients than their fresh counterparts because they're flash frozen at peak ripeness. So if you pick broccoli, every bit of its journey from being picked to the grocery store, it's going to go in a truck. It might cross the country. It might cross several countries to get to you.

And then it's going to sit on the grocery store shelf for often quite a while before we're actually purchasing it. And every little bit of that way, it's losing its nutrients. So things like vitamin C especially are really quick to be lost in that journey. Whereas if you are getting something flash frozen, it's preserving a lot more of those nutrients.

So I think we should eat fresh vegetables and fresh fruits as much as we possibly can, but I also think that frozen fruits and veggies can be a really beautiful part of the journey. And my frozen veggie roasting hack is like one of my absolute favorites. So the thing that you do is you put your frozen veggies, like frozen broccoli, let's say out on some parchment paper, and then you put it in the oven at like 425 or something like that, but with nothing on it.

I learned this when I was trying all these different ways to roast chickpeas and make them super, super crispy for my cookbook. And people were like, Oh, do it with oil at this point, or you should start with fresh chickpeas or whatever. And the thing I found that worked the best is you roast them completely dry, no oil, because the oil traps in the moisture.

So you want all of that moisture to evaporate, and then you add the oil and then you cook them normally. So with the broccoli, you want to like literally not touch it, like dump the bag on the parchment paper, spread it out, put it in the oven, and then roast it until all of that moisture's evaporated, it's already starting to brown a little bit, and then you toss it with the oil, toss it with some salt, toss it with whatever seasonings you want, cook it for five more minutes, and you've got like beautiful frozen roasted broccoli.

Are there other vegetables it works with? Definitely anything cruciferous. So like cauliflower, it works pretty well with Brussels sprouts. You're not going to get quite the same effect as you would with like a fresh Brussels sprout, definitely like squash and things like that, that are chopped and pre-prepared. Awesome.

You mentioned adding veggies and you mentioned how to do it if they're frozen. Like, are there other good tips for how to take what you do now and make it better? Oh yeah. And there's like a zillion. So if we're in the, if we're in the realm of like still frozen veggies, which I'm really into, one of my favorite hacks is to keep a bag of cauliflower rice in your freezer, and you can buy this at any grocery store, just like pre-prepared cauliflower rice.

It's just going to be riced cauliflower. And then you can use that as a sub for ground beef in pretty much any recipe. Like I do half ground beef and then half the cauliflower rice. So like a bolognese, you can brown the ground beef and then add the cauliflower rice in, and you won't know that it's there, but you've just added this like significant portion of vegetables to your dish.

I also think that cauliflower rice is amazing for thickening soups. If you're making a soup and it doesn't have as much body, it doesn't have as much heft. You can take half the soup and then blend it with some sauteed cauliflower rice and then pour that back in. And you'll have this really thick and beautiful and rich soup.

So I think that keeping some frozen cauliflower rice on hand at all times is a really wonderful hack. I also love to sub it. Like I'll put it in for half of my white rice in a dish. So I'll cook up some white rice, delicious, lots of salt. That's the secret to making white rice taste really good.

But then I'll saute up some cauliflower rice and I'll just mix them together. I'm not a person who can do cauliflower rice on its own and pretend that it's rice because it's not, and it doesn't taste good. And I need my food to taste good. And that is like my number one rule of food is that it needs to taste good.

But mixed in with normal rice, it actually adds like a really nice nutty note. And I think enhances the dish and adds veggies instead of detracting from it in any way. I'm going to ask what else? Cause frozen cauliflower rice, frozen broccoli, both good hacks. Yeah. So I would say a few things.

One, use your spices way, way, way more. Spices. I always call them the original superfood. So people are always trying to like go get these like fancy superfood powders and add them to their lives and enhance their health journey that way. And that's great. If that's what you want to do, wonderful.

But spices have so many potent therapeutic properties and they make everything you eat tastes really delicious. If there's spices listed in a recipe, I almost always pretty much double them. Like obviously do it to taste, but people way under season their food and it makes it healthier and it makes it tastier.

So big fan of that. Also a big fan of starting every single morning with a green smoothie, which I would be remiss not to mention. I'm sort of like known for my green smoothies, both in my personal life, when I push them on people at all times. I have a video on my Instagram where I was testing out different green smoothies until I won over my little sister who hated green smoothies.

And I did, I got her with a pina colada one, which I was very proud of and she liked it and she drinks green smoothies every single morning now, which I'm be very proud of, but also in my public life, I have a green smoothie society on Patreon at patreon.com/lizmoody, which just has all of these green smoothie recipes.

I think it's a really beautiful thing. You can integrate into your day. It tastes like a milkshake. It takes less than five minutes to make. And if you do it in the morning, for instance, you will have had more vegetables before like 9am than most people eat in an entire day, which just makes you feel really good about yourself.

So I'm a big fan of the all in greens. What's in these green smoothies? Okay. So the formula is greens and you can do like spinach. You can do mixed greens. You can do something like arugula, but you need to balance it with, I would say something that's a little peppery that leans into those notes.

But I'd say for a starter, spinach or mixed greens is a really nice base. And then on top of that, you're going to do a banana. I would say we'll make it taste really good. You're not going to taste the banana, but if you're just going for a delicious flavor, put the banana in there.

I have some recipes without if you're banana free, but good starter. And then you want some sort of fat. So that can be an avocado. That can be Greek yogurt. That can be a nut or a seed. I think like pistachio is a really fun thing to include in a smoothie.

That can be chia seeds. That can be flax seeds. That can be hemp seeds. That can be a nut butter, but some sort of nut or some sort of fat to get the nutrient absorption from the vegetables that you're putting in. So something like greens has a lot of fat soluble vitamins in them.

And you want to make sure that you're actually absorbing all of those vitamins from those greens. So some sort of fat, and that's also going to help you stay full through lunch, which is what we want. That said, if your green smoothie does not make you full, please eat some food.

That's very important to me. This is not meant to be a diet thing. This is again, not meant to be restrictive in any way, shape, or form. If you're hungry, listen to your body, eat. A lot of people will do a green smoothie with like scrambled egg on the side or something like that.

I switch it up. Some days a green smoothie is enough. Some days I like to have a more robust breakfast. So I go either way. So we've got our greens, our banana, our fat, and then you want to add some protein. So if you're using some nuts or seeds, they're going to have a certain amount of protein.

You can also add in something like a protein powder. You can add in collagen. Again, that protein is going to elongate your blood sugar curve and it's going to keep you full longer. So that's really important. I like to add some frozen berries, usually like blueberries or blackberries or strawberries.

And then I like to put in like my fun flavor elements. So this can be spices. I love cinnamon in smoothies. I love cardamom in smoothies. I love cayenne is like a little bit of spice in a smoothie. I love cacao, which just makes it taste like chocolate, which is the dream and everything.

I also love zest. So using like some lemon zest or some orange zest, it has so many therapeutic properties, the skin of the citrus, but it also tastes really strongly of that thing. So if you put like orange juice in your smoothie, putting orange zest in the smoothie will taste even more orangey essentially, which is really nice.

And then a little pinch of sea salt, which is just gonna bring out all of those flavors. You always want a little bit of salt in anything that you cook. Even if it's a sweet thing, we put salt in our cookies. It brings out those flavors. And it also adds some minerals if you're using a sea salt or a mineral salt or something like that.

And then I just add water. I think that blending your smoothies with a nut milk is a huge waste of money. Like, what are we looking for? Save your nut milk for your fruity pebbles and use water in your smoothies, blend it up and drink it. And then they also keep for, I'd say 24 hours solidly in a tightly sealed container in the fridge.

So if you want to make a smoothie for two days, which I love doing a little gift from past you, highly recommend that as well. I love it. I want to go back to your previous comment on spices and ask, do you replace your spices regularly? I always wonder if this spice rack that I assume we probably bought 15 years ago or something is, have they expired?

Do they go bad? They don't go bad per se. Like you're not probably going to get food poisoning or something like that from your spices, but they will lose their potency in terms of both flavor and therapeutic benefits. If you want to know if your spice is still giving you all those therapeutic benefits, you can literally just taste it.

And if it doesn't taste robust and of that thing, then you've probably lost a fair amount of the therapeutic benefits. So there's a few things you can do to prevent that. You want to keep your spices somewhere as cold and dark and dry as possible. So in a cabinet, not right next to your stove, not lined up on your wall where the sun is coming in every single day, just as cold and dark and dry as possible, and that will make them last longer and then seal them as well as possible and then use them more.

It's a little bit tricky because I feel like by having them put away, you're maybe not as inspired to use them. So take inventory regularly, put them in your dishes so that they're not dying before you get the chance to use them. And how long would you say the average spice lasts?

I'd say like a year. So would you do like a turnover of your whole spice drawer? I don't because I use them all. I would say most of the spices in our spice drawer that we don't use a lot of are like five plus years old. So maybe before you leave, since we're in person, give me a little spice inventory.

Well, and I would also say that I don't think you need maybe as many spices as you think. So sometimes people go and they try to do like this fully stocked spice rack, but then they realize they're really just using the same five or six spices on a regular basis and maybe lean into those spices.

And if a recipe has like 45 spices, be like, do I really need all of these? Can I experiment with getting most of the way there with what I have? I also think that spice blends are super underutilized. So instead of buying all of the spices in something, have one or two go-to spice blends that you're always using.

If you want to like roast vegetables and have it taste really good. If you're doing a stir fry and you want to have it taste really good. You have your spice blends that you can go through with that. And that way you can use it up much more quickly.

I love it. Now I'm getting hungry and we don't have dinner plans at this house tonight. So I'm curious. Pick a recipe from your cookbook that I and anyone listening can make for a meal tonight that you think will just make everyone happy. Ooh. OK. That I can also link to so people can try it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm trying to think. Yeah. So this isn't up yet, but it will be up by the time that this goes up. It's a taco salad. I like salad, but the salad has to take like really, really, really good if I'm going to eat salad. And so I'm a big fan of like hearty salads and exciting salads and things like that.

And I had a taco salad out at a restaurant in the Bay Area and I was deeply disappointed by it. And I was like, this could be so much better. So this is just a very quick and easy taco salad. The taco meat is plant based, not because I am plant based, but because I thought it actually tasted better that way.

So I call it accidentally plant based. It's a mix of pecans and frozen cauliflower rice. So you can pull out your frozen cauliflower rice and make that with that. And then it's just quickly seasoned. And then everything else you're just like chopping up and you're making a really quick jalapeno dressing, which I love and pouring it over the top.

It's going to be really nourishing. It's going to be really delicious and it's going to make you feel really, really good after you eat it. All right. We will link to that in the show notes. Yes. I noticed looking at the cookbook, gluten free, dairy free and plant centered.

Is that because you are gluten free and dairy free, or is that because you feel like that's a healthier way to live? Or how did you make that call? So for a few reasons, if I'm going to be completely honest, it's because the powers that be at publishing houses like marketing terms.

And so those are easy marketing terms that help people identify. It's and I get it. You know, if you're looking at a cookbook cover on Amazon, you need to be able to tell so quickly whether that's something that you're going to want in your life. So identifying terms like that are really, really important.

Also, I'm trying to make my food as accessible to as many people as possible. And there definitely are people out there with celiac disease, with allergies and things like that. So the book says plant centered. What's the take on plants? I would say plant forward. One hundred percent. I am trying to smush in vegetables whenever possible.

I'm the biggest fan of them. I've interviewed probably thousands of doctors at this point in my life. And it's so interesting because they disagree about so many things about what constitutes a healthy diet. But the one thing they all agree on is that like more vegetables is better. 80% or so of your diet should just be like focusing on putting vegetables in.

So I'm like, let's stop arguing over that last little bit about whether like meat or no meat or grains or no grains. If we all just got the vegetable part right, we would all feel so much better. We're arguing about that tiny tweaky bit when we don't have the foundation laid.

And I think that happens with a lot of wellness stuff. We're trying to like hyper optimize instead of laying the foundation that would actually make the difference. So I would say plant forward. One hundred percent. Vegetables are the foundation. I'm going to smush them in anywhere. But I don't follow any food rules with my diet.

And I think unless you have a specific health reason, something like celiac disease or an allergy or something like that, I would not encourage anybody to follow any restrictive rules either. Perfect. And for all those vegetables, do you feel like vegetables, fruits, anything, do they all need to be organic or what's your stance on organic food?

So, look, I think that we all do the best that we can within the circumstances that we have. The reasons to buy organic are a few. Like, obviously, there's pesticides and things that you maybe don't want in your body. And then I think you can follow easily something like the Clean 15 and the Dirty Dozen, which you can easily look up online.

And that's basically a list of produce that is going to be more likely to be sprayed with pesticides or things that you'd put in your body. You can also follow easy rules like bananas, avocados, things that you're not eating the skin. You probably don't need to spend your money on organic.

But then there's also issues with a lot of organic farming practices where they're using heavy metals and other things that you maybe don't want in your body as well. So I think that it's complicated and it's nuanced. And the best way to get around it is by knowing your farmer as much as possible.

And obviously, that's a very privileged thing to do. But I do think if you can go to a farmer's market and ask how they're farming, what they're using when they're growing, that's the absolute best practice. And then beyond that, I would say in general, roughly, if you can afford to buy organic, do it for things that you are eating the skin of.

Like when I was talking about the zesting, if you can get that organic, great. That's really nice. And if you can't, then don't sweat it. There is never a circumstance in which it's worse for you to be eating the produce. If you're like, I can't afford organic produce, should I be buying produce?

Yes, 100 percent. It's still the best thing you should be putting into your body. Do you feel similarly about meats? I think meats are a little bit trickier for me. I would say that I lean towards grass fed pasture raised ethical practices. I'm also a borderline meat eater, as is for ethical reasons and environmental reasons.

So if I'm going to eat meat, I really want it to have been raised in as ethical a way as possible, I think, because we're talking about a living creature. It's a little bit different than when we're talking about a carrot. Well, you haven't mentioned anything about supplements, vitamins, that kind of stuff.

Do those have a role in like a healthy lifestyle? I think they absolutely can and do. But I think it depends what your goals are. I hate when you open somebody's supplement cabinet and they have so many of them and you're like, well, what are these for? And they're like, I don't know.

It's part of being healthy. And I think you should be able to point to every single supplement that you are taking and say, this is the need that it's filling. This is the problem that it's solving. So for me, for instance, I don't eat seafood at all. I take fish oil.

I know that having omega threes in my diet is really good for my brain. It's really good for my overall health. So that is why I take my fish oil supplement. I think that if you're willy nilly attacking it and taking too many, you're probably not having the positive effects that you want.

You're probably wasting a lot of money. And it should be a lot more of a thoughtful practice than people are using it for. Is that the same with like a daily vitamin? We were talking about this off air a little bit. I take athletic greens. I love athletic greens.

I think that something like a daily vitamin, particularly if it's a vitamin like athletic greens that sourced in a whole food form, it's a really nice nutritional insurance. So a lot of us would like to eat a lot better than we are eating, or we don't have time to make these robust veggie rich meals.

And also, there is some truth to the fact that produce doesn't necessarily have the same nutrient profile that it would have at one point. The soil has been really depleted through farming practices, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that it's a nice practice to have a little bit of insurance.

But again, it's a nice to have. And if all you can afford is really good produce, like do that. Your number one thing I want you spending money on is really good produce. Like if you can fill your diet with vegetables, you will feel better than almost any other practice that you can add in.

And then everything else, it's bonuses. It's a little bit of a cherry on top. So stack your Sunday again, lay those foundations. And then if you want to add the cherry on top of that, all the better. And when you say really good produce, do you mean fresh? I mean, what's the really good?

So I mean, like a diverse, beautiful array of produce, something that gets lost in the produce conversation often and in the healthy eating conversation is how much diversity is important to our health. So I've interviewed a number of gut health experts, and people are always like looking for these little gut health hacks.

And it really comes down to eat as many types of plants as you possibly can on as regular of a basis as you can. So if you're regularly eating broccoli, maybe try Brussels sprouts, maybe try cauliflower. If you're making your smoothie with spinach all the time, maybe swap in some mixed greens.

If you have pretty much any dish, add some fresh herbs on top. That's a type of produce, and it's going to make it taste better. It's going to make it look more visually appealing. So just as large of a variety as possible, as much diversity as possible, it's going to feed your gut microbiome.

You're going to be really happy. It sounds great. One of our favorite things to do, and I can put a link in the show notes, but you don't need it, is to literally go to the farmer's market and just buy all the vegetables and make a crazy big stir fry with just all vegetables.

I love that. There's probably 10 or 12 vegetables in it at any given time. And it's really good. Yeah. And again, it's like about finding the ways to make the vegetables taste really good, because if you're sitting there and you're like stabbing a sad piece of broccoli, you're not going to enjoy the process of eating.

And also, there's some really interesting studies that show that the mood that you're in when you're consuming food literally impacts your digestion, impacts your nutrient absorption. So making food tasty actually technically makes it better for you, too. I like it. Being a parent can be scary, whether it's watching your toddler jump on your new couch naked during potty training or the indescribable pain of stepping on tiny plastic dinosaurs in your bare feet, both of which happened to me recently.

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It's like about being healthier with people. What have you got? I know there are a bunch of things you do in your routine. Let's talk about some. So a hack that I'm loving right now is to set the bar way lower. So I think a lot of people think about something like working out or meditation, and they're like, I don't know, I'm so busy already.

Like, I know these things are good for me, but how do I actually fit them into my life? And I think that if instead of sitting down and being like, well, I have to do 20 minutes of meditation to make it effective, you're like, I'm going to do five minutes of meditation.

I'm going to do 10 minutes of meditation. First of all, it makes it so much more achievable and attainable. And if something is achievable and attainable, you're so much more likely to keep going at it. You're not going to try to do it for a week, fail and give up.

But then also, most of the time when you sit down and try to meditate for 10 minutes, you're going to love it. It's going to feel really good. And you might even want to keep going or maybe you'll do 10 minutes for a week. And then the next week, you'll do 11 minutes.

The next week you'll do 12 minutes. And actually, I had a woman on my podcast who studies focus and she studies meditation and its effects on your brain. And 12 minutes is literally the minimum viable dose to have incredibly potent neurological effects. So if you're one of those people who feels scattered all the time, you like go to answer an email and then you find yourself on Instagram and you don't even know how your phone got into your hand.

Doing just 12 minutes of mindfulness practice every single day will massively help that type of thing. It'll help you focus your attention. It'll help you use your attention in the way that you want to use your attention. So that's so much less than most of us think. And by the way, that's not even every single day she does that.

I think four to five days a week was the study. So 12 minutes, four to five days a week. Same thing with working out. I had a doctor on my podcast for a Ask the Doctor burnout edition. So we talked all about what are the causes of burnout in our bodies, in our brains, and how can we address them?

We were talking about the minimum viable dose of working out. And it's anything that gives you a state of change. So anything that makes it so that you sweat, so that your heart rate goes up. That is, quote unquote, enough. And I think that bar is so much lower than get in your car, driving to the gym, doing an hour class and yelling at yourself if you're not doing all of those things.

So one of my favorite hacks is anything that you want to do in your life. Make it easier. Make it less of a time commitment and make it fun. That's another really good hack, is that anything that you want to do, if you can make it enjoyable, which sounds so silly, you're like, of course, like if you make something enjoyable, it will be easier to do.

But I think there's this pervasive attitude with wellness that unless you're beating yourself up, it's not really wellness, that there's an element of suffering involved. And that's not true at all. So, for instance, I had Katie Melkman on my podcast and she studies how we can essentially make the choices that we want to make and actually stick to them, how we can make those changes.

And one of her favorite things that she recommends is taking something that you really love. So if you really love like a TV show or a specific podcast, like all the hacks are healthier together. Save the podcast for some time that you doing something that's a little bit hard for you to motivate yourself to do.

So for me, that's working out. I hate working out. If I could just lay on the couch like a potato for the rest of my life, I would absolutely do it. But I know that I feel so much better after I work out. So I say my favorite podcast, I only listen to them when I work out.

And then I get excited to work out because I'm like, oh, my gosh, I get to listen to my favorite podcast. You can put on music that you love while doing your taxes. You can have a little treat like a food that you eat or a favorite wine or something like that, or a friend that you call when you go for walks.

There's all these ways to sort of pair the thing that you really, really love with the thing that you have a harder time motivating yourself to do. And it makes it fun and it creates that association in your brain so that you start to love the thing that you thought you didn't love in the first place.

Does that mean that you wouldn't listen to your favorite podcast? It does, yeah. Unless you're working out. She recommends saving the things that like you really love that really motivate you for when you're doing the hard things. I like that. And I know meditation, because I've heard you talk about it was something that you tried for a while and it just didn't stick.

And I know I have. And many people have been like, yeah, I downloaded Headspace and I did that. And then it didn't work. And you found a way to make it work. Can you talk a little bit about that journey? So my meditation journey has been really interesting. I started meditating during what I like to call my mental breakdown period.

I was living in London with my now husband and I became completely agoraphobic. I started having panic attacks whenever I left the house. And that's the beginning of my wellness journey in general. I was like laying prone in bed and emailing sources about how I could essentially stop having panic attacks at every single second.

And a lot of them recommended meditation, which really surprised me because I was reaching out to people more in the hard science arena. They also recommended foods and supplements. And that's how I began to cobble together my personal wellness journey. So I tried meditating with Headspace and it did help a little bit.

I will say that Andy Puddingcombe has like a very soothing voice. It's a nice, nice British tones in there. And I was in England and that was probably the only British person that I was like regularly having interactions with was Andy Puddingcombe in my ears. So I do think that it helped a little bit.

And then later for a story, I did Vedic meditation training, which is much like transcendental meditation training. And that worked for me, but not for the reasons that you might think. So TM is a mantra based meditation. So you're you get a secret mantra. You like go you pay money and then you go to this five day workshop.

They whisper to you your secret mantra. I don't know where it comes from. They like tell you your mantra. And I think the idea is that like if you went to five different teachers, they like tell you the same mantra based on I don't know. I literally don't know what is based on like your height or your vibe or your energy or like your name, but you get your mantra.

You're not supposed to tell it to anybody. So I don't know my husband's mantra and he doesn't know my mantra, but he knows my Gmail password. And then you repeat that mantra to yourself in your head over and over and over when you meditate. So one of the reasons that I think it works is because it focuses your attention instead of being like, don't think about anything, which makes you think about everything.

You have a thing to think about. You just think about your mantra over and over. So I think you could use literally any mantra and it would have that effect. So hum is a really great starter mantra. You can just sit there and repeat. So hum to yourself in your head.

And I think it'll have a really positive effect. You can also just sit there and watch your breath or you could listen to Andy. And that's great. But the other reason that I think that it was so effective was because it was really expensive. And I think that making an investment in something in that way is so motivating in a way that we don't talk about.

So instead of being like, well, I don't feel like meditating today, I was like, oh, I spent five hundred dollars on this stupid course. You better meditate to make it worth the money that you spent on the course. So I do think that to the extent that you have the privilege to make a financial investment in something, it works for something like booking a workout class in advance.

Or there's even sites where you can like bet against your ability to do something. So if you want to quit smoking or you want to work out every day or something like that, I do think if you can tie your finances in with it a little bit, it is weirdly motivating.

So I've been a pretty regular meditator. Again, my bar is low. I don't think I need to be perfect. I don't need to do it every single day and I don't break myself ever. But I do think that putting the cost investment on the line was a really big motivating factor for it finally sticking.

That's awesome. Yeah. I know a handful of people that swear by their mantra. And every time I'm like, I don't understand it. What is the mantra? No one will ever share. I should look into it. Where does the mantra come from? I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. I have no idea.

You should try it. Do you meditate? I have spent time with it. Hotel might have like a breath meditation class. We'll go do it. It's not I'm not afraid of it. But I just have not ever found a way to make it stick. But it's something that it's like on that long list of things that I want to bring back into life, but has been on the list for years.

I also find it helpful to literally look up all of the health benefits of it, because the second that you are aware of all of the massive benefits you can get in your life by doing something like meditating, it just becomes so much more motivated on the focus episode of the podcast.

We talked about whether you could just do activities mindfully, like mindfully wash your dishes or mindfully go for a walk. And that does have a certain amount of benefits, but not nearly the same benefits as that concentrated dose of mindfulness of 12 minutes a day, which you talked about.

Interestingly, it's partially like training ourselves to sit in discomfort and training ourselves to not like the experience in a way. I like that, like forcing yourself to be uncomfortable. A few other things that I know you at least regularly do. Yeah. Cold showers. Cold showers. I know we talked about this on my when I interviewed you.

You don't do them. Well, it's funny. Sometimes I want a cold shower. It's not about if you want a cold shower. So I don't have a practice of forcing myself to take a cold shower. But sometimes I'm like, I just kind of enjoy a cold shower right now. My wife thinks I'm crazy.

When you're in like Colombia or like just in normal life. Like some days I'm like, I'm running hot today and I'll take a shower and I'll just like it's not the coldest it gets, but it's by no means warm. Right. But I think what you do is not that it is not that.

And I would actually say that wanting to do it. Almost takes away from the reason that we do it. And when I explain why, you'll understand. So first of all, I want to preface, I do not do the whole shower cold, like I am shampoo weed and washing my body in a nice, warm, toasty shower like you might think.

And then at the very end, I breathe in really deeply and I turn the thing to as cold as it gets. And the idea is you want to be as cold as you can comfortably be without feeling like you're in any sort of danger in any way. So I go as cold as possible.

And I do a minute is my goal. Always, again, kind of having those lower goalposts. But sometimes I'll go a minute and a half up to two minutes. I think aiming for 12 to 15 minutes a week is ideal. Not a day. I mean, I mean, when I heard 12 to 15 minutes, I was like, wow, I got 12 minutes of meditation today, 12 minutes of cold, 12 to 15 minutes a week, which is not that much.

And again, you're kind of like habit stacking. You're in the shower already. I like it because it's this tiny, tiny, tiny thing that you can do that will have a big effect on your health. So you're like, what is the effect on your health? First of all, if you're vain, a cold shower is going to make your skin glow.

It's going to make your hair really shiny. So if you want to look really pretty, which I can tell by your face, you're like, this is appealing to me. Of course, if that is the goal, it's going to help with that. So the same reason you see people do like their ice rollers for inflammation and like face puffiness, the cold shower is going to have that effect.

But basically on your entire body. Wonderful. The reason I do it, though, is to help balance my dopamine levels. So do you know, Dr. Anna Lemke? I do not. She is a wonderful Stanford professor who basically her entire practice is devoted to studying dopamine. And dopamine is the neurochemical of motivation.

I think people confuse it with serotonin a lot. And I certainly did before I interviewed her. It's not the chemical of happiness. It's about motivation. It's about our desire and drive to do things. And so a lot of the technology that we use, drugs and alcohol, these things that are like so easy to motivate yourself to do, it's because they encourage your dopamine receptors to essentially pump out dopamine.

But when you do that, your dopamine can essentially get out of balance, which has a number of pretty negative effects on you. It makes it harder for you to be motivated to do the things that you want to do in your life. And it can also make it harder for you to find pleasure in the simple things like going for a walk or watching the sunset or just these like little moments.

It's why I think sometimes you'll see like a group of friends out at dinner together. And instead of wanting to talk to each other, they're all like wanting to be on their phones. And you're doing the fun thing like you're out with your friends. But that dopamine imbalance is causing you to want to reach for your technology, even in those moments.

So if we can do things that feel a little bit uncomfortable, we can bring our dopamine back into balance, which will make it easier for us to motivate ourselves to do hard things in the other facets of our lives and easier for us to experience pleasure in those like smaller moments that aren't causing these huge dopamine bursts.

So hard things include things like cold showers. So if you can just add in this little moment of being uncomfortable, of pushing yourself to do something that's a little bit difficult for you, it has all of these longer outsized positive effects. By the way, it doesn't need to just be a cold shower.

She mentioned in the episode walking to get groceries in the rain. The big takeaway for me was that discomfort isn't something that we're trying to eliminate from our lives. Discomfort actually has this really positive and balancing effect. So if you find yourself as the type of person who's always reaching for your phone, who has a hard time getting motivated, who isn't sure like where they can find those little moments of pleasure in their life, I think looking and leaning into those moments of discomfort can feel really satisfying.

There are also a lot of health benefits of cold water as a therapy. So you didn't even mention like all that world. But I know that Cold Plunges and Wim Hof, who some people listening know, other people can Google, has done a ton of stuff with the health benefits of cold water therapy.

And I think a lot of that comes down to inflammation. I think if we can sort of manage our inflammation levels at a base state, it has these cascading positive effects on our bodies. But for me, as a person who finds it very hard to do hard things, I like the idea that I can do this one little hard thing and I'll make all the other hard things feel so much easier.

I love it. To get very specific, you turn on the cold water. Yeah. Are you then like showering, splashing all over, getting it everywhere? Are you just like standing there frozen? So first I do my face because again, I'm trying for my glowing skin effects. So I am vain.

And so I first put my face on her. That's horrible. It's excruciating. But I do that probably for like 20 to 30 seconds. Then I do my front and then I turn around and I do my back. I do try to kind of do right on the back of my neck because that encourages brown fat in your body, which has a whole host of positive effects.

Look up brown fat if you would like to. And then I just try to withstand it as long as I possibly can until I turn it off and get out. And again, I give myself full permission to stop at 60 seconds every single time. I think that keeping it as quick as possible in the 60 seconds goes by really fast, you know.

I like it. I will. Will you try it? I will try. You commit to try it for this is another wellness thing. I think that we often are like, oh, I like did the wellness thing. Where's my great effect? But you're not using it long enough and not using it consistently enough to get those benefits.

So add in your vegetables. Do it for a month. Do your workout for a month or two before you start sitting around and being like, why isn't it working? Meditate for a month or two. So how long are you going to commit to doing your cold showers for? Hmm.

It's funny because we have a hot tub and I was like, maybe I should just turn the water and just let it get cold and then just do like the full submersion because funny enough, you know that you can buy a I know that we in a conversation in a past episode, I talked about the DIY versus like the fancy, expensive one.

I'm down to experiment. So this I do think, though, you're immediately trying to complicate it. And I feel like do the plunge thing later. Yeah. Transform your hot tub later. But for right now, literally with doing nothing, you could take a cold shower at the end of your shower today.

So I'm like, set your bar a little lower. I'll try it for April. OK. All of April. And then will you like announce on Twitter or something how it went for you? I'll just talk about it. I'll bring it up. Bring on the podcast. Yeah. Or do it. Yeah.

Stay tuned for Chris's cold shower journey. I'm going to do cold showers for a month. Let's everybody should join you to anybody listening. Who hasn't a cold shower? Join Chris on his cold shower journey. Yeah, let's do it. But by the time you hear this, maybe you'll make it.

May. Yeah. OK, it's funny that Liz was talking about athletic greens because I'm also a huge fan and I'm excited to be partnering with them for this episode. I started taking it because I wanted to see what all the hype was about. And I've kept it in my daily routine for over a month now.

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Again, that's all thehacks.com/athleticgreens to take ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. It seems like with every business, you get to a certain size and the cracks start to emerge. Things that you used to do in a day are taking a week and you have too many manual processes and there's no one source of truth.

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That's all the hacks dot com slash NetSuite to get your own KPI checklist. All the hacks dot com slash NetSuite. N-E-T-S-U-I-T-E. I just want to thank you quick for listening to and supporting the show. Your support is what keeps this show going to get all of the URLs, codes, deals and discounts from our partners.

You can go to all the hacks dot com slash deals. So please consider supporting those who support us. What about circadian walks? Sounds much more pleasurable than a cold shower. I love my circ walk. So the circadian walk is the idea. I don't know if you've heard of a hot girl walk, but that's just like I have not heard of a hot girl walk.

It's literally just walking. And I think there's a lot of different ways that people are trying to make something as simple and wonderful as walking like trendy and circadian walks essentially bring a little bit of science into the age old practice of walking, which is a really beautiful and wonderful practice.

Speaking of the focus episode, she said one of the best ways if you want to like regain focus for a meeting or something like that is just go for like a 10 minute walk, something where you can look a long ways in the distance, where you're not thinking about anything directed.

And if you have like a big meeting or a speech or presentation, it'll help massively with reinvigorating that focus. But a circadian walk, you get the benefits of ambulation of walking, but also you're going to help control your circadian rhythm. So this is a 10 minute walk outside before 10 a.m.

to help set your circadian rhythm for your day. What is your circadian rhythm? Do you know your circadian rhythm is? I probably am not going to explain it like you would, but the kind of general. Yeah, just let you explain. So your circadian rhythm, I think a lot of people think about it in the context of sleep.

So it does impact your sleep hugely. And I would say if you go for a circadian walk again, 10 minutes outside before 10 a.m. for, I'd say, a week or two, you'll probably start to notice some really positive effects in your sleep. But your circadian rhythm also impacts so much more than that.

Pretty much every single part of your body is running on its own little clock, like your digestion is running on its own little circadian rhythm, your hormones. So when you set your circadian rhythm, when you encourage your circadian rhythm to function optimally, you're actually having all of these downstream effects of it outside of just your sleep being better.

You do not have to walk. You can just stand there and look at the sun. I do think there's like minor benefits to moving your body. It helps wake you up if you're going to just stand there. Why not? But sometimes I will if I'm feeling very lazy. But then I'd say the second circadian walk is the walk that's right as the sun is going down.

So the number one time if you can do it is in the morning. Closer to when you wake up is better. But I would say 10 a.m. sort of the cutoff to get the benefits. And then if you can also do it as the sun is going down, as you're getting those sort of like pinky, orangey, yellow tones of sunset.

Again, that will help kind of encourage your circadian rhythm to function at its optimal level, which is going to help your sleep. It's going to help your mood. It's going to help your hormones. It's going to help your digestion the whole the whole nine yards. I love it. What other things in your routine are you doing?

We got cold showers. We got circadian walks. Yeah. OK, so here's a weird one. Do you know what hydroxyapatite is? No, I just assume the answer to all of these obscure questions. The answer is just so hydroxyapatite is it's a fluoride alternative in toothpaste. So I do these like ask the doctor episodes where I do deep dives with functional medicine practitioners.

And I had a dentist on and I hear all the time people are like, oh, I don't want to listen to the dentist episode because that sounds really boring. But the more that we find out about our mouths, the more that we're finding out that it really impacts our entire health of our body.

Like so much so that when I had the doctor on the Ask the Doctor immune health edition, I said, what's one thing we can do that will support our immune system? She was like, take care of your mouth because it's impacting your immune system. It's impacting your cardiovascular health.

It's impacting your brain health, like literally your mouth. Microbiome is where all of these things are starting. And fluoride, we're finding out more and more has these really negative impacts on our overall health. So you want all the benefits. It's good for teeth. Nobody's disputing that. Everybody's like fluoride.

Great for teeth. We love it. Maybe not so much for our overall health. So if we want the benefits of fluoride for our teeth without having the negative elements of fluoride for our health, hydroxyapatite is a fluoride alternative. It's been used in Japan for 30 years now. It's very safe.

It's literally as effective or more effective than fluoride. And tons of studies. You can find it in a toothpaste called Risewell, a toothpaste called Boca. There's actually a normal toothpaste that you can buy online and you're getting all of the mouth benefits while protecting your mouth microbiome and protecting the more downstream effects of fluoride in your body.

So hydroxyapatite toothpaste, I'd say in a larger way, making little swaps to the things that you use every single day. So that's another people are like, Oh, do I have to like wear organic clothes and do all this stuff? And I'm like, make over your bed. You're going to spend 12 hours.

Well, you're going to spend eight hours a day in your bed. And if you can make your bed this little wellness haven, then you can skip a lot of the other stuff. So if you can get a mattress that's not off gassing, if you can get I have organic sheets, I have a hypoallergenic pillow, things like that.

I have a silk pillowcase so that my hair and my skin looks really good. I tape my mouth at night to sleep. I think there's all of these things that you can do while you're sleeping to essentially enhance your wellness that you're not like having to think about during the day.

So that was a lot of things. What is taping your mouth? Taping your mouth is the idea that essentially when you're breathing through your nose, you're getting a lot more health benefits for your body than when you're breathing through your mouth. And I feel very strongly about this. I actually had a reconstructive rhinoplasty in October.

I went surfing one time in my whole life and I broke my nose. I hit myself in the face with the surfboard in Brazil, and I got it fixed after that and after they fixed it, I couldn't breathe through my nose. And the effects of not being able to breathe through your nose are so well researched and so much worse than what we think.

For instance, my really severe anxiety started pretty closely with the time that I stopped being able to breathe through my nose. And I'm not saying it's just that, because obviously there's so many factors in one's life that you have to consider with something like anxiety. But I also don't think that it's completely separate or completely unrelated.

So we want to breathe through our nose as much as possible. It decreases stress. It takes your body out of this like fight or flight mode. It helps you think better. It helps eliminate that foggy brain situation. It's just generally so good for us. But many of us have trained ourselves to breathe through our mouths all the time.

If you have a nose that can have air go through it, which I do now because I had a piece of my rib taken and they built out my nose. So it's like bigger and has passageways that are wide enough for air now. So you have a nose that can have air go through it.

A nice practice to do is to gently tape your mouth and then it forces you to breathe through your nose. So it's not a physical issue. It's more of a habitual issue that you're trying to correct. And if you're worried about it, if you're about suffocating, there's mouth tapes that you can get online that very much allow you to breathe through your mouth.

They just encourage you to breathe through your nose to experience all those positive effects. And you do this every night? I do it most nights. Yeah. Wow. It also helps with snoring. Again, if we're going from a vanity perspective, a lot of people have like weaker chins. You'll start to see a difference in that if you start breathing through your nose, because it literally reshapes your jaw.

In essence, it'll help with your teeth health, because when you're breathing through your mouth overnight, your mouth is drying out and you want to keep all that saliva in there because that's the thing that's essentially protecting your enamel. It'll help with your teeth health, which will, again, have all those downstream positive effects because of your oral microbiome taking care of that.

Your breath won't smell as bad in the morning. Not you. I don't mean to point to you. Wow. I'm sitting here. I'm like, we're only five feet away and it's afternoon. But wow. OK, so so much of what we do nowadays, especially I think about me and work and living at home during the pandemic.

Everything's online. Everything's virtual. When you came here today, you gave me a physical product, which I thought was so cool. And it immediately made me jealous because I was like, gosh, I have a podcast. I've always listeners. I don't have a physical product. I wish I could have something to give people yet.

So I need to get inspired there. If anyone has ideas, let me know. But can you talk about the deck of cards you gave me? Yeah. So it's the healthier together deck. I'm allergic to boring conversation. I am also extroverted, introvert and introverted extrovert. So I want to be around people and I want to have the conversations.

But sometimes I think there's a lot of pressure into taking it to those deep levels. You kind of stay in the like, well, how are you? What's going on in your life? What are the world events when actually we really want to talk about like those foundational things, like the things that make us the people that we are.

So I wanted to create a deck that basically gives you an excuse to have all the types of conversations that we want to be having that maybe are harder to bring into our everyday lives. I actually think it's a huge reason why people love podcasts is because I just met you, but we're getting to have these sort of like deeper, more introspective conversations simply because there's a mic in front of us.

So what I like to say about the deck is it lets you get a lot of the benefits of doing something like a podcast. It lets us bring the questions of something like a podcast into your kitchen table. So I recommend having one in your car. I made it really pretty so you can like leave it out on your coffee table, leave it out in your kitchen table, and then you can just pull out a card anytime with a friend, with your partner, with like your mom and dad on a Zoom date.

Instead of you're just like, OK, we like talked about Aunt Sally last week. That's so great. I'm glad your golf game is good. You can pull out a card and really get to know people as people. And people will surprise you. My husband surprises me with his answers all of the time, and it makes me feel closer to him and more connected to him and love him so much more.

I love it. Funny enough, when we had our au pair first arrive, the au pair agency sent us a deck of cards with questions. Oh, my God, to try to get to know each other and your family. Oh, my God, that's so fun. The weird thing was that we're good.

Some of them were good. The strangest thing was some of them are labeled. This is an au pair only question, and this is a host family only question. And you would think they would be things like, what is it like growing up in America? But some of them were strange, whereas like the host family no au pair question is what does happiness mean?

And it's like, why is this a specific question? Why couldn't we all discuss it? Yeah, that's so interesting. But I really like that. But we've tapped it out. It's not as big of a deck as this. So I'm excited for this. The card I pulled out somewhat randomly that I'll share as an example of a conversation starter is, have you been anywhere in the world where you've thought the people here really got it right in terms of living a happy or healthier life?

If so, where was it? Yeah, so that's one of the questions that actually came directly out of my podcast. So I like to ask people that at the end of episodes,