#199 – Wisdom is taking your own advice: Regaining metabolic flexibility | Commune’s Jeff Krasno & Sonja Manning

Jeff Krasno, CEO and founder of Commune, experienced chronic fatigue and brain fog earlier this year and discovered he had prediabetes. He used Levels to learn more about his blood glucose and metabolic health and now enjoys metabolic flexibility. Sonja Manning chatted with Jeff about his health journey, his dietary changes, intermittent fasting, and his other learnings from the metabolic health world that he applied to his own wellbeing.

Commune is an online course platform featuring world-renowned teachers in personal development, yoga, meditation, health, ecological regeneration, and social activism. Jeff Krasno is also the founder of Wanderlust; part of Oprah’s SuperSoul 100; and host of the Commune Podcast, which ranks in the top 1% of podcasts; amongst many other accolades.

Helpful links

Jeff Krasno’s website: http://www.jeffkrasno.com

Connect with Jeff Krasno on Instagram: https://instagram.com/jeffkrasno

Connect with Jeff Krasno on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeffkrasno

Commune’s website: https://onecommune.com

Connect with Commune on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/onecommune/

Connect with Commune on Twitter: https://twitter.com/onecommune

Find Commune on YouTube: https://youtube.com/onecommune

Article – Commusings: Great Fullness by Jeff Krasno: https://onecommune.com/blog/commusings-great-fullness-jeff-krasno

Article – Commusings: The Physical and Spiritual Dimensions of Fasting by Jeff Krasno: https://onecommune.com/blog/commusings-the-physical-and-spiritual-dimensions-of-fasting-jeff-krasno

04:30 – Wisdom is taking your own advice

Even though Jeff Krasno was eating healthy and exercising regularly, he wasn’t experiencing optimal health. Soon he realized that the extra weight he carried around was more than age—he learned he developed pre-diabetes.

They say wisdom is taking your own advice. Well, uh, it took me a long time to get around to that . Um, but uh, you know, yeah, I, I always felt as though I was eating a healthy diet. I was getting regular exercise. Um, but I was. , as you say, not experiencing optimal health. I had chronic fatigue, brain fog. I got covid pretty severely early on. And, and that kind of set off this trophic cascade where over about a year and a half I was, uh, getting, um, sick on a recurring basis. Clearly my immune system had been degraded and I really had to take, you know, a, a harder look at my own health. Uh, I just turned 52, so you know, that’s just orbits around the sun and that’s chronological chronological age. And, uh, you know, I began to get more focused on health span or bio age, if you will. And, uh, and, and it started very much as a product. It was like how I was feeling. And then it became a more kind of intellectual process. So, . Um, you know, and, uh, I’ll also say I was carrying a around, not like a tremendous amount of excess weight, but, you know, typical kind of apple shape, uh, visceral fat kind of around the middle of my body. Uh, certainly could, you know, wear it respectfully, , but, uh, but, you know, but, but there it was, and I was always, uh, you know, throughout my entire life, um, you know, I was a chubby kid and I’ve always had, you know, my, uh, internal, uh, battles with, with weight. And so, um, so yeah, you know, I, I became really interested in, um, in blood sugar and I got a cgm, I got a Levels, um, and I got the Levels app. And lo and behold, I was pre-diabetic, I was running fasting glucose levels of 115 to 120 milligrams per deciliter. Um, and postprandial spikes were like off the charts, like, you know, 200, 200 plus on a consistent basis. And I was also noticing some other places where I was spiking. Um, Related to sauna usage, that could be a whole nother discussion . But, um, but I wa you know, it was a real eyeopener for me and I said, okay, well, you know, w what’s going on here?

07:05 – Learning the dietary patterns that work best

Jeff Krasno started to eat the foods that helped him feel the best, including low-carb, high-fiber, and plant-focused keto. Weight loss was a byproduct of his dietary changes, never the main focus.

So, you know, it was much easier than to adopt protocols once I actually understood some of the mechanism and some of the data. So, um, and, and I guess I would just say that the, the weight loss was just really. Byproduct of the whole process. So I don’t want people to get like, too caught up on the weight loss part of it. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. I went from like 1 95 to about 1 45 where I am now, and like fluctuate a little bit around that. Um, and that’s, that’s feels really good for me. Uh, you know, I’m light on my feet, I’m an athlete and I’ve seen just incredible, uh, you know, performance improvement and my stamina and mm-hmm all, all sorts of the elements of my life, you know, from focus and ability to, uh, to subsume like new information, et cetera. But, you know, really what I started to do was not that complicated. I started to map spike, Blood sugar spikes to consumption of food. And I started to, you know, make a list mentally and sometimes on a piece of paper of like, oh, whoa, I can’t eat that. Or that really spikes me. Or that eating that, you know, I don’t know, starch or potatoes or white rice without catering it properly with, uh, fiber or fats on the front end had, you know, a much more dramatic spike effect or something. I basically just started to learn all of the different, um, Uh, physical patterns kind of in my body. And then, uh, and then it really adopt a protocol, which was pretty much low glycemic, high fiber. I mean, I kind of think of it as keto, so it’s plant focused, um, plant focused keto.

14:30 – Adapting intermittent fasting to become more insulin sensitive

With a lot of insulin resistance through stress, poor diet, overwork, and poor sleep, Jeff Krasno knew he had to reconfigure his cells to be more welcome to nutrients through diet and an 16:8 intermittent fasting protocol.

So, you know, your, your audience is obviously gonna know. a lot about blood glucose already, but for me, what I realized is that over decades I had built up insulin resistance and I had done that through stress, through probably drinking a little bit too much from time to time, um, through diet and through overwork, and just not sleeping particularly well all the time, even though I try to adopt, you know, good sleep hygiene. Um, but what my challenge was to undo my insulin resistance and become more insulin sensitive, essentially reconfigure my cells such that they were more welcoming to macronutrients, whether that would be glucose or whether that would be ketones or free fatty acids for the production of energy. So, In order to do that, what I needed to do was to down-regulate the production of insulin from I pancreas. So, okay, well what’s the way to do that? Well adopt a low glycemic diet and achieve low glycemic states. So I talked a little bit about diet already. The other protocol was for me, a 16 eight intermittent fasting protocol in which I consolidated my eating window into eight hours. Generally between around 11:00 AM and 7:00 PM And no, I’m not neurotic or fundamentalist about it.

But, um, but generally the 16 a protocol, um, was work really well for me. That that is where the most data exists. Um, that I could find mostly out of Satcha Panda’s lab, um, in San Diego. Um, that’s produced a lot of good data around intermittent fasting protocols, particularly in the 16 eight protocol.

18:41 – Burning stored fat through cold exposure

With his intermittent fasting protocol, Jeff Krasno also uses cold exposure via cold showers in order to jumpstart his mitochondria to create energy and heat in the body in order to burn stored fat.

But prior to breaking my fast, so maybe 10, 10 30 every morning, I would take a cold shower. Now, sometimes I would take a sauna on the front end of that to raise body temperature, just to make it a little easier for me. I don’t love, I don’t love cold water, but oftentimes not. And I would just take a 62nd cold shower, uh, and then not dry off right away. Just let myself shiver. Um, uh, you know, naked, sorry for that image, and. And, uh, and so what was happening there? So of course I was engaging a particular protocol that would lower my body temperature. So most of life really is just about creating energy to be warm. There’s a tremendous amount of focus in the human body just about regulating body temperature. Um, so if you’re gonna purposefully lower your body temperature through cold water therapy, your cells are going to need to produce to go into thermo neogenesis, essentially raise your body temperature back up into that goldilock zone, right around 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. And so what’s going on there? Well, your mitochondria then go into overdrive and they say We’re cold, or the body’s cold. We need to essentially create energy, create heat in the body. And so then it goes to burn energy. But what does it have to burn? Well, it doesn’t really have any glucose around because A, you have adopted low glycemic diet, but B, you’re in a fasted state. So what does it have to burn stored fat? And this is really where I almost could physically see the fat coming off in the mirror would be like af during this process of, of, um, of hydrotherapy before I break the fast. And it was those three protocols conjoined that really kind of set me off kind of on my way to, uh, a more optimal health, incredible keto diet, intermittent fasting and cold exposure.

24:05 – Philosophy behind fasting in order to gain control

Many religions, particularly Buddhism, talk about fasting in order to assuage anything that you grasp for that’s outside of yourself. With fasting, it can help take you off the hedonic treadmill and remove need and craving so you can be more in control of your desires.

And that is the hedonic treadmill. That is the, um, the, uh, the chakra, if you will, of craving this endless cycle, um, that so many of us are on. And I’m certainly not, not, um, um, you know, I’m not out of that that cycle myself, but I think being able to witness and observe craving that would well up inside me related to food. was, um, you know, served as a bit of an inflection point for my overall, um, relationship with need or craving. And, um, because certainly I have a biological imperative, I have a biological need for food to create energy. Yes, that is true, but when is that the case versus a psychological desire for pleasure with food and really being able to feel that sense of ghrelin, , that sense of hunger, um, arise within me. And then witness where was. Witness its providence, basically. Was it coming from a biological need or was it coming from some sort of psychological need for comfort or pleasure? And the more I could actually, uh, train myself to witness that feeling, the more I could delineate between the two and say, okay, actually now I really need to go get like a handful of walnuts or something. Cuz you know, I need, I’m feeling low, I need some energy. Mm-hmm. , oh, but actually now this is just mindlessness, you know, this is just me, you know, out of habit, reaching for something in the cupboard, et cetera. And, um, and over time I really got to actually, um, look forward almost to that feeling of craving to be able to witness it, to name it, and just to say no. You know, I don’t, I, I don’t have to fall prey. To every desire

28:35 – A wandering mind is an unhappy mind

Jeff notes that the best correlations for self-reported wellbeing or happiness is correlated to aligning your thoughts with your actions, being intentional, and being mindful with the current moment.

there’s a lot of clinical data that shows that the, that one. Best correlations for self-reported wellbeing or self-reported happiness, um, is correlated with aligning your thoughts with your actions, essentially yaking your intention and what you’re thinking about what’s going on in your head with what you’re actually doing. Mm-hmm. . So there is real clinical research to, to point to the fact that a wandering mind is a very unhappy mind.

if there is a, um, gap or a separation between your intention and your thoughts and your actions, it has been proven to show that that creates a quite, uh, a lot of frustration and, uh, dissatisfaction. So one of the, um, great targets of meditation is to essentially align. Yourself in the present moment with what you are actually doing. And there’s a couple different ways, uh, of doing that. I mean, one is, you know, focused concentration, um, Dianna in Sanskrit, or Chan in Chinese, or Zen in Japanese. So people may be familiar with those traditions. Um, where you find a, uh, what’s known as a drishti. Now that tends to mean like a gaze point and you focus your complete concentration on that gaze point. But that drishti could also be your breath. It also could be a mantra. It could also be some mala beads that you’re, um, you know, um, threading through your fingers. It’s essentially finding one pointedness of mind.

44:06 – Rediscovering metabolic flexibility

Through the protocols, dietary changes, and lifestyle changes that Jeff Krasno made, he was able to develop more flexibility than before, which allowed him to enjoy himself during a recent trip to France and eat things that wouldn’t normally fit into his diet plan.

I’m currently in the experience of metabolic flexibility, um, which is essentially, A, a certain, um, capacity to switch relatively seamlessly between burning fat and burning carbohydrates or glucose for energy. Um, so having achieved that metabolic flexibility, which is really also representative of like an upgrade of mitochondrial function really. And, you know, we didn’t talk about fasting and mitochondria, but there is an incredible relationship between intermittent fasting and miy, which is essentially autophagy for mitochondria. The breaking down of dysfunctional mitochondria, but also mito, uh, mitochondrial biogenesis, the creation of new mitochondria, um, which of course everyone knows as, as the energy, power plants in your cells.

And, um, and so the wonderful thing about getting metabolically flexible is that you can, if you get to that place, then you can actually, I would say just be more liberal and cheat a little bit around the edges and just be okay because your body has upgraded its functionality

49:31 – Achieving the optimal rest and digest state through breathwork

Oftentimes, we’re eating in a highly distractable state, putting us in our sympathetic nervous system, where all of your energy moves away from digestion and metabolism. Breathwork can help get you back into parasympathetic rest and digest state.

But really, a, a more precise axio there would be you are, you are what your body can absorb. Hmm. And if you are consuming food while you’re driving or while you’re staring at your phone, or while you’re watching a thriller or a horror movie, or you know, in any form of distracted state where you might be in your sympathetic nervous system or you know, you might be getting triggered in some way, well, what’s happening there? You know, just physiologically, well, all of your energy is being diverted from your gut and from your immune system to your extremities, to your muscles, your heart rate and your respiratory rate are going up. Your pupils are dilating, sometimes depending and. Essentially all of the energy allocation is moving away from digestion and metabolism. So what you really wanna do before you’re e, before you eat and consume food, is you wanna move yourself out of that sympathetic nervous system out of that cortisol infused amygdala, hijacked state of being into your parasympathetic rest and digest state. And you can do that, you know, through breath work

54:44 – The one theme that arises again and again: Coincidence of opposites

After interviewing 400 people for his podcast and writing every week for 3 years, and sitting amongst the world’s most brilliant people, Jeff Krasno notes a theme that comes up again and again.

After interviewing 400 people for the podcast at writing 2000 words a week for three years, um, making 125 courses sitting around the table hiking, taking saunas, cold baths with dozens upon dozens upon dozens of the world’s most brilliant people and authors and, um, teachers and thought leaders and sages and mystics of all sorts. Um, you know, I’ve been so lucky because I can just be a sponge and absorb and, um, and grow my own breadth of knowledge. If I can synthesize that into wisdom, great. But from, you know, the brilliance of other people, and then synthesize that into something that is my own. And so through all of these hundreds and hundreds of conversations, you know, what I began to notice, what I began to notice were certain patterns or I would say kind of a consilience across all of these different people that I’ve talked to. And as you say, I mean, they could be microbiologists or virologists, they could be spiritual leaders or monks or whatever, all across the map. But I, I think what one of the themes that has come up over and over and over again is that all phenomena that arise as a product of consciousness arise as a coincidence of opposites.

Jeff Krasno (00:00:06):

Certainly, I have a biological imperative. I have a biological need for food to create energy, but when is that the case versus a psychological desire for pleasure with food and really being able to feel that sense of ghrelin, that sense of hunger arise within me, and then witness its providence, basically? Was it coming from a biological need or was it coming from some psychological need for comfort or pleasure? The more I could actually train myself to witness that feeling, the more I could delineate between the two and say, “Okay. Actually, now, I really need to go get a handful of walnuts or something because I’m feeling low, I need some energy.”

Ben Grynol (00:01:04):

I’m Ben Grynol, part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health, and along the way, we have conversations with thought leaders about research backed-information so you can take your health into your own hands. This is A Whole New Level.

Sonja Manning (00:01:34):

I’m Sonja Manning, Chief of Staff at Levels, and I could not be more thrilled to welcome Jeff Krasno to A Whole New Level. Jeff has been immersed in the wellness industry for his entire career. He founded and is the chairman of Wanderlust, now a global wellness platform with 65 events in 20 countries, founded Commune Media, an online learning platform that many of us at Levels love and use regularly. He’s the host of the Commune podcast where he’s interviewed a wide variety of guests, including Deepak Chopra, Wim Hof, Mark Hyman, and many more just incredible human beings.

(00:02:11):

Jeff is an author and a contributor to Huffington Post and Fast Company, and part of Oprah Winfrey’s Super Soul 100, a group of top thinkers, authors, and spiritual luminaries. In addition to all of these accomplishments, what I find most impressive is Jeff creates community around mindful living and invites everyone in his orbit to join him. In short, Jeff empowers. As someone immensely knowledgeable and immersed in wellness, Jeff has always assumed he was healthy, eating well, exercising, meditating, prioritizing sleep. However, last year, he was experiencing chronic fatigue and brain fog and discovered he was pre-diabetic.

(00:02:55):

He used Levels to learn more about his blood glucose and metabolic health, and not only lost 45 pounds, but now experiences the joys of metabolic flexibility. Jeff has empowered and inspired me countless times, and I’m so excited that today we’re going to dive into how he applied his learnings to improve his own wellbeing. I have no doubt you’ll feel empowered by the end of this conversation. So let’s jump in.

(00:03:31):

So let’s start with your health journey. We are in this era of agency where we have the ability to change our destiny and change our health outcomes, and your story is one of just that. So what happened to your metabolic health and your health journey?

Jeff Krasno (00:03:50):

As you pointed out in the preamble, I was one of those people that blamed genetics for poor metabolism. I think that’s a common trope where people just say, “Well, I just have poor metabolism, and that’s the way I was born, and here I am carrying extra weight, but also not feeling great and suffering from all of the knock-on impacts of what I learned was insulin resistance,” et cetera.

(00:04:22):

As you say, I’ve been immersed in the wellness industry for a long time. Now, that doesn’t always ensure that you are also well because they say wisdom is taking your own advice. Well, it took me a long time to get around to that, but yeah, I always felt as though I was eating a healthy diet. I was getting regular exercise, but I was, as you say, not experiencing optimal health. I had chronic fatigue, brain fog. I got COVID pretty severely early on, and that set off this trophic cascade where over about a year and a half I was getting sick on a recurring basis.

(00:05:07):

Clearly, my immune system had been degraded, and I really had to take a harder look at my own health. I just turned 52, so that just orbits around the sun and that’s chronological age, and I began to get more focused on health span or bio age, if you will. It started very much as a product. It was how I was feeling, and then it became a more intellectual process.

(00:05:39):

I’ll also say I was carrying not a tremendous amount of excess weight, but typical apple shape visceral fat around the middle of my body. Certainly could wear it respectfully, but there it was. Throughout my entire life, I was a chubby kid and I’ve always had my internal battles with weight.

(00:06:13):

So I became really interested in blood sugar, and I got a CGM. I got at Levels and I got the Levels app. Lo and behold, I was pre-diabetic. I was running fasting glucose levels of 115 to 120 milligrams per deciliter. Postprandial spikes were off the charts, 200, 200 plus on a consistent basis. Then I was also noticing some other places where I was spiking related to sauna usage. That could be a whole another discussion, but it was a real eyeopener for me, and I said, “Okay. Well, what’s going on here?”

(00:07:02):

As I got more insight into the dashboard of my personal vehicle here, I was able to adopt a number of protocols based around the observation of data in my own body, and that’s really the exciting thing about what you call the era of agency or the age of agency is this democratization of access to information about your own body. You don’t just have to rely on your once a year visit to your PCP if you even make it, et cetera. So yeah, I’m happy to talk about the protocols that I adopted coming out of this moment of physiological satori and how it really changed my health around, if that’s appropriate to talk about.

Sonja Manning (00:07:58):

Yeah. Amazing. Your story is not uncommon. 93% of Americans now are metabolically unhealthy in at least one or two biomarkers. So appreciate you sharing your story. I think starting with how did it feel to see those numbers and to begin to have this insight into your own body, and then what were some of the protocols or experiments that you ran to now achieve your Prius-like state, as you sometimes say?

Jeff Krasno (00:08:32):

Yeah, right. Well, yeah. I mean, initially, it was a head scratcher, to be honest. I was confused because like I said, I was armed with plenty of information in terms of nutrition, but to see data in my own body, it was much easier than to adopt protocols once I actually understood some of the mechanism and some of the data. I guess I would just say that the weight loss was just really a byproduct of the whole process. So I don’t want people to get too caught up on the weight loss part of it. I went from 195 to about 145 where I am now and fluctuate a little bit around that, and that feels really good for me. I’m light on my feet, I’m an athlete, and I’ve seen just incredible performance improvement and my stamina and all sorts of the elements of my life from focus and ability to subsume new information, et cetera.

(00:09:46):

Really, what I started to do is not that complicated. I started to map spikes, blood sugar spikes to consumption of food, and I started to make a list mentally and sometimes on a piece of paper of like, “Oh, whoa, I can’t eat that,” or, “That really spikes me,” or, “That eating, I don’t know, starch or potatoes or white rice without cadencing it properly with fiber or fats on the front end had a much more dramatic spike effect,” or something. I basically just started to learn all of the different physical patterns in my body, and then it really adopt a protocol, which was pretty much low glycemic, high fiber. I mean, I think of it as ketotarian, so it’s plant-focused keto.

(00:10:46):

So there’s really three protocols that were my primary ones that really made the biggest impact. So one was the adoption of this ketotarian diet, essentially low glycemic, so keeping blood sugar down, high fiber, really feeding the gut, so lots of salads, veggies, brassica, sprouts. I started sprouting a ton at home. So alfalfa sprouts, broccoli sprouts, mixed bean, legume sprouts, tons of olives, tons of olive oil, tons of avocados, nuts, particularly walnuts and pistachios and some Brazil nuts.

(00:11:27):

We ferment quite a bit here, so certainly sauerkraut. I generally break my fast and we’ll talk about fasting because that’s the second protocol, but with a coconut probiotic yogurt. So that is important. Then really starting to add a lot of herbs and herbal adaptogens to my body or to my diet. Really simple. Just have a bunch around and always go to the farmer’s market and starting to get parsley and cilantro and stuff and sprinkling that into virtually everything.

(00:12:02):

Then in terms of quote, unquote, “primary protein sources”, though, you can get all of your essential amino acids from a plant-based diet, but for me, occasionally eating super high quality loin cut fish, salmon and tuna. So loin cut, basically, they’re not that big, so they don’t have the same proclivity to develop a lot of heavy metal concentration, but super high quality fat omega-3s, et cetera, and very, very good quality protein, and then maybe eggs a couple of times a week. So that was really the “diet”, quote, unquote.

(00:12:47):

Now, it’s not a diet at all. I don’t really even think about it too much. It’s just a lifestyle. It’s just what I go to. It’s what is in my fridge. I really have largely eliminated the consumption of refined sugars and refined grains and ultra processed foods. I’ll put a little asterisk by that because I just went to France for two and a half weeks, and when you get to be metabolically flexible, you have a lot more freedom to actually eat some of those things when the situation calls for it. So we can get to that at the right time, but the second protocol-

Sonja Manning (00:13:27):

First of all, I’m coming over to your house after this to break my fast. Just listening to all of those incredible whole foods filled with so many good things for our bodies, I’m coming over after this to break my fast.

Jeff Krasno (00:13:41):

Cool. Well, yeah. So right around 10:30 or 11:00 every day, I will generally have a probiotic, couple scoops of this very high quality probiotic coconut yogurt, which I love with some walnuts, goji berries, maybe a couple blueberries and some sea salt, and not very much, and that’s just an amazing way to break your fast for a whole bunch of different reasons. That leads elegantly into the fasting conversation, which is completely conjoined with the understanding of blood glucose.

(00:14:27):

So your audience is obviously going to know a lot about blood glucose already, but for me, what I realized is that over decades, I had built up insulin resistance, and I had done that through stress, through probably drinking a little bit too much from time to time, through diet, and through overwork, and just not sleeping particularly well all the time, even though I try to adopt good sleep hygiene, but what my challenge was to undo my insulin resistance and become more insulin sensitive, essentially reconfigure my cells such that they were more welcoming to macronutrients, whether that would be glucose or whether that would be ketones or free fatty acids for the production of energy.

(00:15:25):

So in order to do that, what I needed to do was to down regulate the production of insulin from my pancreas. So okay, well, what’s the way to do that? Well, adopt a low-glycemic diet and achieve low-glycemic states. So I talked a little bit about diet already. The other protocol was for me, a 16:8 intermittent fasting protocol in which I consolidated my eating window into eight hours, generally between around 11:00 AM and 7:00 PM, and no, I’m not neurotic or fundamentalist about it. You’ve seen me after 7:00 eat probably on more than one occasion, but generally tried to use those goalposts to demarcate my feeding window.

(00:16:19):

Of course, the result of that is in some ways the same result as the ketotarian diet that I just talked about, which is essentially after 16 hours of not consuming food, your blood glucose levels are going to go way down, but your body still needs to produce energy, but in a low glycemic state, your pancreas is not going to produce insulin, it’s going to produce glucagon, which is the counterpart peptide hormone, which triggers all of these processes, so the release of glycogen, self-stored glucose, but also a little bit of gluconeogenesis, but also really triggers what’s known as lipolysis. It’s this process of breaking down fat adipocytes into free fatty acids and glycerine, I think, but the real point is that you start to burn fat for energy.

(00:17:19):

So for me, the 16:8 protocol was tricky, was a little hard at first, but then it became almost second nature. Now, I don’t think about it. Although I will say in the winter, my appetite is I have more morning appetite than I do in the summer. That’s a whole other conversation we can have about light and hormones and other things like that, but generally, the 16:8 protocol worked really well for me. That is where the most data exists that I could find mostly out of Satchi Panda’s lab in San Diego. That’s produced a lot of good data around intermittent fasting protocols, particularly the 16:8 protocol. So that was two.

(00:18:06):

Of course, I was watching my CGM or my levels out throughout this whole process, and I saw my fasting glucose go from 120 inching down over time till 80, in the range of 80 and lower than that during sleeping hours, generally. Then it naturally rises with the rise of cortisol in the morning, et cetera, and it also just evened out. It became waves instead of mountain ranges.

Sonja Manning (00:18:41):

Incredible.

Jeff Krasno (00:18:41):

So then the last protocol I will say that is also completely intertwined with the ketotarian low-glycemic diet and the 16:8 intermittent fasting protocol was I started to adopt a cold water therapy or hydrotherapy right before I would break my fast. So late morning, and this is, of course, a luxury that I generally work at home. So I have a lot of freedom with my schedule to do some of these things around my own convenient time, which I admit is a luxury, but prior to breaking my fast, so maybe 10:00, 10:30 every morning, I would take a cold shower. Now, sometimes I would take a sauna on the front end of that to raise body temperature just to make it a little easier for me. I don’t love cold water, but oftentimes not, and I would just take a 60-second cold shower and then not dry off right away, just let myself shiver naked. Sorry for that image.

(00:19:57):

So what was happening there? So of course, I was engaging in a particular protocol that would lower my body temperature. So most of life, really, is just about creating energy to be warm. There’s a tremendous amount of focus in the human body just about regulating body temperature. So if you’re going to purposefully lower your body temperature through cold water therapy, your cells are going to need to produce to go into thermoneogenesis, essentially raise your body temperature back up into that Goldilocks zone, right around 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

(00:20:36):

So what’s going on there? Well, your mitochondria then go into overdrive and they say, “We’re cold or the body’s cold. We need to essentially create energy, create heat in the body,” and so then it goes to burn energy, but what does it have to burn? Well, it doesn’t really have any glucose around because, A, you’ve adopted a low-glycemic diet, but, B, you’re in a fasted state. So what does it have to burn? Stored fat. This is really where I almost could physically see the fat coming off in the mirror would be during this process of hydrotherapy before I break the fast. It was those three protocols conjoined that really set me off on my way to a more optimal health.

Sonja Manning (00:21:30):

Incredible. Ketotarian diet, intermittent fasting, and cold exposure, three phenomenal protocols. I would love to jump back to intermittent fasting for a moment because I think this is a technique that many members, many Levels members, many people of our audience try to do or have adopt or enjoy, but you have a very unique philosophical view of intermittent fasting in one of your Commusings you say you had a craving not to crave, and the cessation of craving is a stepping stone to nirvana and to liberation.

(00:22:11):

When I read that, it’s like, wow, that really resonates with me, is myself and many people crave sugar. You’re addicted to sugar. So how does this sort of philosophical perspective of craving not to crave, how did that come into play in your intermittent fasting, in your metabolic health journey?

Jeff Krasno (00:22:34):

Yeah. Well, there is obviously a lot of physiological mechanisms at play with fasting, and then there’s a whole number of psychological or what you might even categorize as spiritual components to fasting. So clearly, this has been baked into religion’s Christ’s 40 days in the desert was an exercise in fasting and living aesthetically. I believe Muhammad actually received the Quran from St. Gabriel in a fasted state, though that might be apocryphal, but I’ll go with it for now, but particularly Buddhism talks a lot about fasting and baked into Siddartha’s primary thesis is that we suffer because we crave, and that we are always looking for external agents to assuage internal discontents or perceived deficiencies.

(00:23:40):

So that could be sugar, that could be alcohol, that could be cigarettes, that could be gambling, that could be sex or pornography, that could be the approval of others, essentially anything that you’re looking for outside of yourself to bolster your own sense of satisfaction or self-esteem or self-acceptance.

(00:24:05):

Then of course, the way out of suffering is to blow out like nirvana. Literally, the translation of it is to blow out. So it’s literally to let go, to stop craving, to stop clinging, to stop forcing and to stop pursuing what I refer to as the hedonic treadmill, which tells you that, “If only and only if I can achieve this thing or buy that fancy car or house or get this girlfriend or boyfriend, well then and only then I’ll be happy.”

(00:24:48):

So there always is a gap there between who we are and where we are and our happiness, which looms out there on the horizon somewhere. The moment that we cut the ribbon off that box, when we get it or achieve it, our eyes then refocus on some other new glittering object on the horizon, and that is the hedonic treadmill. That is the chakra, if you will, of craving, this endless cycle that so many of us are on.

(00:25:26):

I’m certainly not out of that cycle myself, but I think being able to witness and observe craving that would well up inside me related to food served as a bit of an inflection point for my overall relationship with need or craving because, certainly, I have a biological imperative, I have a biological need for food to create energy. Yes, that is true, but when is that the case versus a psychological desire for pleasure with food and really being able to feel that sense of ghrelin, that sense of hunger arise within me, and then witness its providence, basically? Was it coming from a biological need or was it coming from some psychological need for comfort or pleasure?

(00:26:42):

The more I could actually train myself to witness that feeling, the more I could delineate between the two and say, “Okay. Actually, now, I really need to go get a handful of walnuts or something because I’m feeling low, I need some energy.” Oh, but actually now, this is just mindlessness. This is just me out of habit reaching for something in the cupboard, et cetera. Over time, I really got to actually look forward almost to that feeling of craving to be able to witness it, to name it, and just to say, “No, I don’t have to fall prey to every desire.”

(00:27:31):

It’s a training that can have its origin around food, but that has very wide application because if I can manage my cravings as it pertains to food, well, can I manage my cravings as it pertains to my phone or Instagram or whatever or any other transgression or peccadillo that I may have, and there are many. So I really look at fasting as much as a spiritual experience as much as it is a physiological experience.

Sonja Manning (00:28:07):

Incredible. That is a phenomenal example of agency right there. What were some of the tools or techniques, whether it’s meditation or gratitude practice you used as you were in the process of training your mind to observe what was happening both in your mind and in your body? How do you recommend people cultivate that sense that you have cultivated?

Jeff Krasno (00:28:35):

Yeah. There’s a couple just specific techniques that relate to meditation techniques, and I’ll say one of the … Before I tell you what they are, I will say that there’s a lot of clinical data that shows that one of the best correlations for self-reported wellbeing or self-reported happiness is correlated with aligning your thoughts with your actions, essentially yoking your intention and what you’re thinking about, what’s going on in your head with what you’re actually doing. So there is real clinical research to point to the fact that a wandering mind is a very unhappy mind.

(00:29:25):

Of course, we have every opportunity in the attention economy to be distracted because every single marketer, friend, family member, spammer, whatever, is vying for your conscious attention at every possible moment. So it’s very, very easy to become distracted, essentially cleave what you’re thinking about with actually what you’re doing. Even if you’re thinking about something fantastic, if there is a gap or a separation between your intention and your thoughts and your actions, it has been proven to show that that creates quite a lot of frustration and dissatisfaction.

(00:30:15):

So one of the great targets of meditation is to essentially align yourself in the present moment with what you are actually doing, and there’s a couple different ways of doing that. I mean, one is focused concentration, dhyana in Sanskrit or chan in Chinese or zen in Japanese. So people may be familiar with those traditions, where you find what’s known as a drishti. Now, that tends to mean like a gaze point and you focus your complete concentration on that gaze point, but that drishti could also be your breath. It also could be a mantra. It could also be some mala beads that you’re threading through your fingers.

(00:31:13):

It’s essentially finding one pointedness of mind such that you are absolutely concentrated and focused on the thing that you’re doing and know that thoughts, of course, will come in and out of consciousness and feelings of discomfort and all that stuff. That’s actually a good thing. That is actually an opportunity to always come back to your drishti or your mantra.

(00:31:48):

It has been shown that happiness is really very much linked or concomitant with people’s ability not just to hold their focus, but to actually leave and then come back, and what is that duration period of actually coming back to focus? People who meditate a lot train themselves to be able to always come back, always come back, always come back. That is a big indicator for a happiness, as I said.

(00:32:19):

Now, the other one is I described it to some degree as part of the direct experience of observing craving, but essentially, it is the practice of observing phenomena arising and subsiding in consciousness moment to moment without fixating on it or identifying with it. So you can start with sound because sound, you generally don’t associate like a valence or too much salience with it. It’s morally neutral. You’re not judging the car going by. I mean, you might if it doesn’t have a proper muffler or something or the bird tweeting or the HVAC system or your refrigerator humming. Essentially, you just become extremely, extremely quiet and just observe sound as phenomena appearing and disappearing in consciousness moment to moment.

(00:33:27):

You didn’t put it there. It just came and it went and you waved at it and said, “Goodbye. Nice knowing you.” That practice is transferrable to emotions and feelings, that emotions and feelings in this sense are like the phenomenon of sound. They appear and they disappear within your field of awareness. They are completely transitory. You didn’t put them there. They just welled up somewhere from under the crust of consciousness and they again disappeared.

(00:34:09):

So don’t fixate on them. Don’t identify with them. You can’t be jealous. You can’t be jealous. You can feel a wave of jealousy. You can feel a wave of envy or any emotion, but these, again, are transitory phenomena and they’re just coming and going. So these are two pretty simple basic kinds of practices that help to align your thoughts with your actions and really truly bring you into the present moment because you can’t really be grateful without presence because gratitude is reliant on a certain thankfulness for the miracle of God’s gifts, but if you are stuck in the projecting your needs out into the future, back into that kind of hedonic treadmill situation, then you are always out there. You’re always in tomorrow land, but the sad reality is tomorrow never comes. It’s always a projection.

(00:35:30):

So much of the time we’re focused on the traumas of our past and projecting them into the future as anticipated memories, anticipated negative memories oftentimes. So we’re creating memories in the future that are completely phantoms of our own projection, completely phantoms. This is the cause of a tremendous amount of anxiety and suffering. Then we become anxious about the anxiety, and then we become anxious about the anxiousness that we feel about the anxiety, but the witness of the anxiety is fine.

(00:36:18):

The witness is just watching it, and that’s really, yeah, I think to the degree that meditation has to have a goal, and I don’t always like to give it a goal because mostly, it’s really just about grooving with the present and the benefits become self-evident as part of the practice, but to the degree, there is a goal. One of them can be the relief of a lot of anxiety by moving ourselves into the reality of the ever now and out of the imagination of the future and the tyranny of the past.

Sonja Manning (00:37:02):

Beautiful, beautiful. Thank you. One of the things I hear you have clearly cultivated through your meditation practice is just this deep sense of gratitude for food, for the natural world. You talk about gratitude for things as simple as green beans, how beautiful a long string green bean is. How does that sense of gratitude impact how you view food? When you’re going into your fridge, when you’re making a meal, how does that sense of gratitude carry through to your relationship with food?

Jeff Krasno (00:37:44):

Yeah, sure. I mean, this will be a slightly spiritual answer to that question, but, Sonja, I would advise everyone to give up on trying to answer the question why we are here. I mean, it’s a noble pursuit, but just go to Barnes and Nobles and you’ll see 20,000 books in religion and 20,000 books in new age, and it’s an open question. It hasn’t been determined.

(00:38:17):

For me, a lot of the answers to why we are here begin to become clear when you examine how we are here. The metaphysical is so often patterned in the physical as nature’s cosmic foundational intelligence. So when we examine a green bean or an apple or a pear or any luscious fruit or crispy vegetable, to actually understand how that particular life form came to be, well, I mean, the only appropriate response to that would be a sense of wonder and awe and gratitude.

(00:39:13):

There’s a lot in the news right now about fusion, right? So we’ve been working on this, humanity’s been on this project for decades. Of course, the primary fusion reaction that exists in the universe happens billions and trillions of times per second in the sun. This is the source of everything that animates all life, including human existence, but the process of two hydrogen nuclei fusing to create a helium atom, and as part of that, the release of electromagnetic radiation has a quanta and this photon hurdles through interstellar space into our atmosphere and happens to find a chloroplast in the leaf of a string bean plant or an apple tree. That chloroplast actually has its origin as a bacteria two billion years ago that merged with an archaea that became eventually a mitochondria in human life and that became a chloroplast in plant life.

(00:40:28):

The reaction of that photon on that leaf triggers this process of photosynthesis in which water and carbon dioxide essentially then metabolized into chemical energy out of solar energy. In combination with the genomics of that particular plant, whether that’s an apple tree, for example, creates this juicy fruit that hangs very conveniently right about shoulder height for us to pick. Then you move into this process of human metabolism and human digestion, which is really the unlocking of the sun’s energy inside of your body, such that you are animated and that your intentions and your emotions can express themselves through your motor neurons or through neurotransmitters that get built through the production of energy that then are animated to make you feel a particular way.

(00:41:40):

When you begin to dissect all of these processes and know that all of these systems are also just produced from self-assembled atoms that were part of a massive star explosion billions of years ago, I mean, the only appropriate response is gratitude. I mean, how is this improbable, unlikely miracle possible?

(00:42:12):

So this is for people that are curious. You can keep studying these patterns of existence and it can invoke really just a lot of wonder and a lot of awe and a lot of gratitude. So when you then sit down at the dinner table to eat your string beans or whatever, and know that you are in this co-evolved relationship that leverages billions of years of cosmic intelligence into that moment such that this energy is then being transferred from the sun to the plant to you and then back out as carbon dioxide and water and all of the energy that then you produce, it’s amazing.

Sonja Manning (00:43:15):

I’m never going to look at a green bean the same way again. I love that description so much. That’s truly beautiful. Thank you, Jeff. I’m going to transition us from green beans back to French croissants. So another thing we can have a sense of awe and wonder around, but you mentioned earlier in the episode a recent trip to France and the metabolic flexibility that you experienced when you’re maybe eating things outside of what you would have at home. I think with the holidays approaching, many of us are shifting our routines. So I would love to hear a little bit more around what that metabolic flexibility looks like and feels like for you when you’re outside of your normal routine.

Jeff Krasno (00:44:06):

Yeah. So for me, it’s a little easier right now because my metabolic vehicle here is pretty tuned up after a year of protocols. So I have … Okay. Let me rephrase because I don’t like I have because it’s not a product, it’s a process, but I’m currently in the experience of metabolic flexibility, which is essentially a certain capacity to switch relatively seamlessly between burning fat and burning carbohydrates or glucose for energy. So having achieved that metabolic flexibility, which is really also representative of an upgrade of mitochondrial function, really, and we didn’t talk about fasting and mitochondria, but there is an incredible relationship between intermittent fasting and mitophagy, which is essentially autophagy for mitochondria. They’re breaking down a dysfunctional mitochondria, but also mitochondrial biogenesis, the creation of new mitochondria, which, of course, everyone knows as the energy power plants in your cells. They also do a whole lot more than just produce energy, but that’s for the purposes of this conversation. So let’s focus there.

(00:45:31):

So it’s fair to say that my mitochondria are functioning at an efficient clip at this juncture. So then when I go to visit my firstborn, who has tortured me by resting herself in the city of lights but also given me ample excuse to visit her more than she would want to be visited at this juncture. So I was just there for two and a half weeks and parked in a funky little Airbnb with basically no kitchen, and then you’re in Paris. So we’re walking to the Musée d’Orsay and then Picasso Museum in the Louvre, and then we’re going out to jazz at night. We’re doing all of these different things. We’re out in the world. I don’t really have a kitchen, so that means despite the fact that the French have all these great markets and all this kind of stuff, I was eating out pretty much every single meal for two and a half weeks.

(00:46:35):

So the wonderful thing about getting metabolically flexible is that you can, if you get to that place, then you can actually I would say just be more liberal and cheat a little bit around the edges and just be okay because your body has upgraded its functionality, but I will also say that there were things that I did there to keep myself on some form of protocol. It was pretty easy for me to maintain my fasting protocol there. Largely, and I would say that this could be applied not just to travel but to holiday season, is I would just basically eat one big meal a day. We would go out for, when I was in France anyways, we would go out for these fantastic dinners and we’d all hang out around the table and we’d be there for hours and all that kind of stuff.

(00:47:32):

During the day, I was, to be honest, pretty espresso fueled, but drinking a ton of water, staying super, super hydrated. I had all my supplement regime and all that kind of stuff, but really trying to concentrate those big heavy meals just one per day, and then always walking and getting some form of exercise postprandial, so after eating, which is a amazing way to control glucose spikes.

(00:48:04):

So one of the cool convenient things about holiday season is sometimes you’re cooking all day in the kitchen, but you can maybe just eat one big meal around 4:00 or 5:00 in the evening, at least for Christmas or New Years. That’s how we do it. That’s how we do it for Thanksgiving as well. You’re just hanging out around the table forever, but that’s really all you’re really eating for that day.

(00:48:37):

So there’s certain ways to manage it and also have fun and don’t be too crazy and neurotic and fundamentalist about it. Just know that this is a particular time of year where people get to commune around the table and be with friends and be with family, and just make the absolute most of it.

(00:49:04):

I guess the one other thing I would say is that I’ve really tried to develop some kind of mindful practice before eating, and part of that is gratitude, reflecting on the wondrous journey of the string bean, but we have a ritual in our house that’s called Rose, Bud, Thorn that before and as we start eating-

Sonja Manning (00:49:30):

I love Rose, Bud, Thorn. You’re speaking my language, Jeff.

Jeff Krasno (00:49:31):

Okay. See, not very many people know about Rose, Bud, Thorn, but I’m slowly spreading the gospel around it. So much of the time in modern culture, the way that we’re eating is extremely rushed. So it’s often said, “You are what you eat,” but really, a more precise axiom there would be you are what your body can absorb. If you are consuming food while you’re driving or while you’re staring at your phone or while you’re watching a thriller or a horror movie or in any form of distracted state where you might be in your sympathetic nervous system or you might be getting triggered in some way, well, what’s happening there just physiologically? Well, all of your energy is being diverted from your gut and from your immune system to your extremities, to your muscles, your heart rate, and your respiratory rate are going up, your pupils are dilating, sometimes depending.

(00:50:34):

Essentially, all of the energy allocation is moving away from digestion and metabolism. So what you really want to do before you eat and consume food is you want to move yourself out of that sympathetic nervous system, out of that cortisol-infused amygdala-hijacked state of being into your parasympathetic rest and digest state. You can do that through breathwork, through prayer, through a gratitude practice or if you want, we have Rose, Bud, Thorn, which is the ritual that we engage in around the table, where I have three daughters and two of them are here, but Phoebe will be back this weekend, and we go around the table and we share our rose, which is the best part of our day, our thorn, which is clearly the thorniest part of the day, and then our bud, something that might represent some potential for the future, although don’t get too caught up on the future.

(00:51:44):

It’s just a wonderful way to engage in conversation for me to learn about what’s up in my kids’ life, for them to pretend to care about what’s up in my life. It really just brings us down into this grounding place. There’s a beautiful emotional side to that, but there’s also some physiological impacts there, which is then you are in a better place to digest and absorb as much possible nutrients from your food by pulling yourself back into that grounded place. So there’s a lot of different things inside of there that I would recommend that people do specifically around this season, but also in general.

Sonja Manning (00:52:32):

I love it. Rose, bud, thorn is one of my favorites. I’m notorious for having my friends and family play, and I’ve actually recently added an addendum. So you can see what you think of this. It’s Rose, Bud, Thorn, Chow. So the chow is either something you’re really looking forward to eating if you’re doing it before dinner like, “I’m so excited for these mashed sweet potatoes that we’re going to have,” or if it’s at the end of a weekend, it’s like, “What was the most incredible thing that we enjoyed?” That ends up being one of the most fun parts of the game. So if you’re open to adding an addendum, it’s Rose, Bud, Thorn, Chow.

Jeff Krasno (00:53:10):

All right. I’ll introduce it and I’ll report back and see how much traction I get.

Sonja Manning (00:53:15):

Let me know.

Jeff Krasno (00:53:16):

Oftentimes, we digress and we don’t really make it through all of the requisite categories, but that’s part of the fun, and then part of the processes that you discover something new about a friend or a loved one that you might not otherwise have known about it. It’s very sweet practice.

Sonja Manning (00:53:37):

Totally. The best part about the game is that if it lasts three to four hours and you realize you still haven’t answered all of the Rose, Bud, Thorn questions. I love it.

Jeff Krasno (00:53:47):

Yeah. We do this at Commune Topanga quite a bit, and we have some really pretty interesting people that are coming through there on the regular. So pretty recently, we got to do Rose, Bud, Thorn with Gabor Maté. It was really funny just to see everybody has a rose, bud, and a thorn. Doesn’t matter who you are, doesn’t matter if you’re an internationally renowned author or celebrity. Everybody has a rose, bud, thorn.

Sonja Manning (00:54:16):

That’s great point. That leads me to another question. You have spent your life spreading education and amplifying thoughts of incredible doctors and authors and thought leaders through your work with Commune especially. Have there been any learnings from those conversations around wellbeing and behavior change that have really changed the trajectory of your personal health journey?

Jeff Krasno (00:54:44):

Yes. I think it’s really after interviewing 400 people for the podcast, writing 2,000 words a week for three years, making 125 courses, sitting around the table, hiking, taking saunas, cold baths with dozens upon dozens upon dozens of the world’s most brilliant people and authors and teachers and thought leaders and sages and mystics of all sorts, I’ve been so lucky because I can just be a sponge and absorb and grow my own breadth of knowledge. If I could synthesize that into wisdom, great, but from the brilliance of other people, and then synthesize that into something that is my own.

(00:55:41):

So through all of these hundreds and hundreds of conversations, what I began to notice, what I began to notice were certain patterns or I would say a consilience across all of these different people that I’ve talked to. As you say, I mean, they could be microbiologists or virologists, they could be spiritual leaders or monks or whatever all across the map, but I think one of the themes that has come up over and over and over again is that all phenomena that arise as a product of consciousness arise as a coincidence of opposites.

(00:56:29):

So for sleep, there is wakefulness. For up, there is down. For beloved, there’s a lover. There’s sun, there’s moon, there’s the sunny side of the mountain, has to have the shady side of the mountain. The heads goes with tails. Everything goes with something else. Nature’s foundational intelligence brings polarities into a sensitive balance like a dissonant harmony or an asymmetrical order. I think about it in terms of love, for example, where love requires a lover and a beloved. Those roles might switch back and forth a bit, but the healthy relationship is like a teeter-totter, where neither people’s feet are touching the ground.

(00:57:31):

You can apply that same theory, if you will, to almost every phenomenon that exists or every relationship that exists within the natural world. So you have, I mean, your respiratory system and your cellular respiration essentially is an exchange of oxygen for carbon dioxide. You have glucagon and insulin, as we discussed earlier. You have growth pathways like mammalian target of rapamycin, and then you have repair and autophagy pathways like AMPK. You have neurotransmitters that are inhibitory like GABA and serotonin. You have neurotransmitters that are excitatory like dopamine and norepinephrine and adrenaline hormones like that too.

(00:58:21):

You have everywhere that you look. Electricity is essentially the repulsion and attraction of negatively and positively charged particles. I could go on essentially forever about homeostatic drive and sleep and wakefulness and cortisol and melatonin and antioxidants and free radicals. Everywhere that you look within human physiology, within the natural world, within plant life, what you have is the coincidence of opposites, and you have this intelligence that is foundational, that is attempting to bring those opposites into some form of coherence.

(00:59:07):

That is what it’s like to be alive is finding that eubiosis, that sense of sensitive balance or sensitive order, which is never a thing, it’s never a product, it’s always a process. Every interaction that you have as an organism with your environment is either adaptive, so it’s bringing things into greater balance or maladaptive, pushing things to their polarities.

(00:59:41):

So when you begin to approach life with that overarching philosophy, you get to see that healthy life, that thriving, flourishing life is clumpy, it’s bushy like clusters to the middle. You can see that in healthy physiological systems that have high concentrations of both oxygen and carbon dioxide or healthy balance between neurotransmitters or cortisol releasing at the right time of day and melatonin releasing at the right time of day or all the different balances, the right release of glucagon, the right release of insulin, all of these kinds of things, but you can also start to map it on social and cultural phenomenon.

(01:00:26):

It’s not healthy to have three men in the United States that own more collective wealth than the bottom 50% of the population combined, right? It’s not healthy to have a hundred billion cows, sheep, chicken, pigs, and people, and then have extinction of species on the other side. Same with biodiversity of plant life. It’s not healthy to have downtown main streets shuttered up and little jazz stations and local newspapers and local markets all going out of business and then have one big Walmart on the edge of town that only provides people with ultra processed foods and cheap goods.

(01:01:15):

I mean, you can go on and on and on. Essentially, healthy systems are ones that take polarities and balance them and move things to the middle, and unhealthy systems are flat and move things to the edges. So when you see the world and the universe becoming flatter and flatter, that is a sign that we’re headed towards some significant calamity. I don’t want to overdramatize it with the sixth grade extinction, though I could make a case for that for sure, but these are … So when I talk about pulling that particular thread through the needle, this is my own synthesis of having hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of conversations with different people talking about this phenomenon in their own field of expertise.

(01:02:15):

So whether that’s a neuroscientist talking about neurochemicals or neuromodulators in the brain or whether that’s a regenerative farmer talking about the balance, the healthy balance of microbial life in the soil, it’s all pointing to the same thing. Of course, the Chinese knew this thousands upon thousands of years ago because they developed the symbol that encapsulates this, which is the yin yang. It’s the balance between the light and the dark, and originally, the sunny side of the mountain and the shady side of the mountain, but of course, there’s a little bit of shade on the sunny side, and there’s a little bit of sun on the shady side. All of this is existing as ons and offs and crests and troughs, and those patterns are everywhere in the material world.

(01:03:07):

In hydraulics, you see waves of water. They go like this. They go up and down. They have an amplitude and a frequency. In electromagnetic waves, same thing. All of these crests and troughs, ups and downs, ons and offs can be tracked through virtually every natural phenomenon. To the degree that we want to live happy and flourishing lives, the best we can do is study the patterns of nature and try to align ourselves with them such that we’re applying the rudder within nature’s current, and that’s a process.

Sonja Manning (01:03:50):

What a gift, Jeff, to have you synthesize that learning those money learnings from 400 plus people truly touch wisdom that you’ve imparted. So thank you. Truly such a gift.

Jeff Krasno (01:04:07):

Well, you’re just squeezing the sponge. That’s it. Just by nature of what I do, I’m a plagiarist. I’m a synthesizer plagiarist. It’s just really just taking everybody else’s ideas and trying to find some common links to them.

Sonja Manning (01:04:31):

Oh, amazing. Well, to close us off, I’m going to ask three shorter questions and a rapid fire type of thing, but the first one is, what is your number one most metabolically healthy favorite food?

Jeff Krasno (01:04:55):

I have to go with avocados because I can eat avocados all day long. So I’m sticking with avocados.

Sonja Manning (01:05:04):

I love it. In one sentence or a phrase, what does health mean to you?

Jeff Krasno (01:05:12):

Well, health is a process of healing, of moving toward wholeness.

Sonja Manning (01:05:23):

What is one thing you are optimistic about with regards to solving our country’s metabolic health crisis?

Jeff Krasno (01:05:31):

Yeah. I think there’s two things. Really, the democratization of information and tools that give individuals more agency and empowerment over their own health, and that is a really exciting development. Obviously, you are playing a significant part of that, but there are many others as well. I think that human curiosity around people’s own physiology has only grown, and that might be one of the few silver linings in the open glove of COVID.

(01:06:06):

I think the other piece is that we seem to be taking regenerative farming and soil health more seriously as a culture. I think this has become a bipartisan issue. There’s not many of those because nutrient dense foods are completely and 100% reliant on nutrient dense soil. That message seems to be getting out there and seems to be resonating with more and more people, and I’m very hopeful about that.

Sonja Manning (01:06:41):

Well, I wish we could do a whole another hour on regenerative agriculture. Maybe that’ll have to be a future episode. Thank you so, so much, Jeff. Where can listeners find more from you and join your community?

Jeff Krasno (01:06:54):

Yeah. Oh, I just encourage everyone to go to the commune platform at onecommune.com. We have 120 courses up there with brilliant, brilliant people, thought leaders that will provide you with a lot of information about how to live healthier and happier life, and the protocols to adopt too. So we can really pair both mechanism and protocol on that platform. Then if you’re interested in listening to my podcast, it’s just called The Commune Podcast, and it’s on all the different pod catchers, and I’m exhorting both pathetically and poetically on Instagram from time to time at Jeff Krasno. So you can see me there.