#259 – What being ‘postdiabetic,’ rather than prediabetic, means and how to get there | Eric Edmeades & Ben Grynol

Before someone develops type 2 diabetes, they go through a prediabetic stage. But if someone is reversing their diabetes and is trending toward better glucose levels or even optimal levels, they are postdiabetic. Eric Edmeades and Ben Grynol discuss Edmeades’s new book “Postdiabetic,” his company Wildfit, and how the program helps people reverse type 2 diabetes, change their relationship with food, and overhaul their health.

Helpful links

Eric Edmeades: https://ericedmeades.com/books/the-evolution-gap/

Postdiabetic: https://postdiabetes.com

Wildfit: https://getwildfit.com

Eric Edmeades on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ericedmeades/

Eric Edmeades on Twitter/X: https://x.com/EricEdmeades

7:15 — The makings of the obesity epidemic

The United States started creating ultra-processed and fast foods, which have driven obesity rates.

I’ve really come to recognize that it wasn’t that America was unhealthy. It’s that America is first with a lot of things. So America was first with fast food and processed food. Basically, I would say the whole thing started roughly in Anaheim, California, with drive throughs and that kind of thing.

14:06 — Switching between fuel sources

The body chooses which fuel to burn based on what we’ve consumed and what we’re doing.

Then also there’s another big component of food that I don’t think gets enough consideration. And that is the meaning that your body takes from the food. What I mean by that is your body’s epigenetic response to what you’re eating. And this is a big thing that I think is at the very crux of the metabolic imbalance that exists around the world at the moment today is that there’s a lack of understanding about why we are able to burn different types of fuel. And why it is that we’re not very good at switching between them in our current lifestyle. We are able to burn sugar, we are able to burn fat, and we are able to burn protein. We have these three fuel sources. And so when we consume food, we are looking for those fuel sources to process, to burn, to run our systems with. And I think one of the big difficulties we’ve run into is that our body chooses what which of those fuels to burn based upon what we’re eating.

21:18 — The high cost and consequences of type 2 diabetes

Diabetes is a leading cause of illness and death.

On top of that, we’ve introduced tragic seed oils, vegetable oils, processed foods, glyphosate and a bunch of other insult on top of the existing injury. And then on top of that, we’re living longer because our general environments are safer. So all of this stuff’s getting amplified to the point that diabetes—just to put it in economic terms—diabetes will cost America about $400 billion this year. The defense budget is only $800 billion. So we’re talking about something that is economically devastating. It’s going to cost every single person in every single country around the world a sizable amount of money, chunk of their budget. But that is only reflective, of course, of the personal suffering that it’s causing. Because again, we’re talking about a largely avoidable disease and a largely reversible disease that is the number one risk factor for cancer, heart disease, leg amputation, loss of eyesight, and [taking] lifelong medication.

25:30 — Eric Edmeades explains the health experiment that changed his life

After years of illness, Edmeades gave up ultra-processed foods and overhauled his health, resulting in dramatic symptom improvement. He was astonished that doctors had never recommended nutrition strategies.

I undertook an experiment where I basically said goodbye to processed food and some other things. And I stepped up my intake of good-quality things. And it was miraculous. I mean, it was really miraculous. Thirty days later, I was down 35 pounds. I could breathe through my own sinuses for the first time in a decade. I had no throat infections of any kind. For the first time, my tonsils weren’t the size of golf balls in my throat. I wasn’t in pain. I was sleeping. This was a life upgrade beyond anything I can tell you. And immediately what that created for me is, How is it possible that for the last several years I’ve been visiting doctors and not one of them asked me about food, not one of them asked me what I ate, or did I consider eating more of this or less of that, not one of them. Every single solution they had was pharmaceutical, every single thing was breathe this in, take this pill, let me inject that into you, every single one of them.

28:38 — Doctors aren’t taught much about nutrition in medical school

Although good nutrition can help prevent and reverse many conditions, nutrition is not a medical school priority.

I said to the doctor, “How long did you go to medical school?” I saw his thing on the wall and he said, “Six years.” And I said, “That’s amazing. Well done. How much of that time did you spend studying food?” I was genuinely curious. I didn’t know the answer. I’ve now asked that question of doctors in over 30 countries around the world in my work, but I didn’t know the answer when I asked him. I fully expected that he would have an answer for me, an answer different than the one he gave me, which was “none,” like literally none, like not even an afternoon or a four-hour class on food in six years to become a medical doctor.

34:42 — Why doctors may be more likely to prescribe medicine than preventions

Physicians may be worried about liability when it comes to prescribing lifestyle interventions over a medical therapy, such as a medication.

There’s a malpractice consideration that if the doctor does something different than they’ve been advised by the pharmaceutical company or by their medical education, then they expose themselves. So, for example, let’s say a doctor has the opportunity to prescribe to you lifestyle modification or a pill. Prescribing the pill is a zero-malpractice situation for them, because ultimately if there is a liability problem, it falls to the pharmaceutical company because they’re the ones who made the pill. Whereas if you prescribe them to not take the pill, particularly if they’ve asked for it after they’ve seen it advertised in media and you prescribe them not to do that and to try a lifestyle thing, you’ve now opened yourself up to malpractice. So there’s a safety in doing what is accepted as the expedient way of dealing with it.

36:05 — Wildfit helps people change their relationship with food and reverse type 2 diabetes

Type 2 diabetes is largely preventable and reversible with lifestyle changes.

Now we’ve had over a hundred thousand clients in a hundred countries around the world. It’s been incredible.  But as a result of that, we started getting really interesting feedback from people. And of course we saw stories of weight loss and the normal things you might expect, but the one that really, really started to surprise us in about the third year or so as we started getting people writing to us and going, “I’ve just visited my doctor and my doctor tells me that I am now prediabetic.” They were previously type 2 diabetic, and their doctor was surprised by that because the way diabetes is discussed in medical circles is that it is a chronic, irreversible life’s long—you know that that’s the deal. You’ve got it now and you’ll medicate it for the rest of your life. And yet so many of our clients were finding themselves in the prediabetic or actually in the fully reversed range. And so in the years that we’ve been going through that, of course, we would then contact those doctors and work with them. Many of those doctors have kind of joined forces with us. So they now guide their clients to go through our protocol so that they can reverse the condition.

41:54 — Why Edmeades titled his book “Postdiabetic”

If someone reverses type 2 diabetes and has glucose levels of someone in the prediabetes range, they are at a different place than when they were originally prediabetic and trending in the direction of type 2.

I’ve been doing obviously quite a few interviews over the last several weeks relative to the book and such. And the other day I was on one—I think it was yesterday morning—and the person said that it was a genius marketing move to call it “Postdiabetic.” And I said, “You see, but the joke of it is, it wasn’t a marketing move at all. it’s a very important statement.” What I mean by that is that the way the statement came up was that many of our clients were coming to us and saying, “Look, I was a type 2 diabetic. Now my doctor tells me that I’m prediabetic,” and that irritated me because “pre” means before or like on the way to; it means that you’re headed in a certain direction, and I think language is important.

50:47 — The culpability of the food industry and the government

Society tends to blame the individual for obesity and type 2 diabetes, but ultra-processed food manufacturers and the government’s lack of good policy surrounding nutrition are at fault.

If somebody is massively overweight or even a little bit overweight or they’re type 2 diabetic, it’s not their fault. We have a disastrous food industry, a disastrous regulation, legislation, and lobbying that did this to everybody.

56:47 — Diets are not the answer

Weight management is not about how many calories you consume and burn; it’s not that simple.

Consider that the average person will go on two diets a year through their adult lifetime. According to a big study, the average person will go on two diets a year, and they will stick to each of those diets for somewhere between six and seven days. So they’re spending roughly 12 to 14 days a year on a diet, and their self-esteem is being damaged and eroded every single time they do that. Their friends even tease them. They’re like, “Oh, you’re on another diet, right? It’s like, Oh, another diet. You’re just going to fail.” And a major part of the reason that people fail diets is that the diet industry is built on some really terrible myths, like calories-in-calories out. That’s the Enron accounting of the diet industry.

1:00:00 — Fat as a nutrient is not the enemy

Fat is a macronutrient, meaning our bodies need it.

Not only is fat not necessarily a bad thing, it’s bloody vital. One of the most dangerous concepts that was foisted on the American people then the world was the whole low-fat myth. It’s one of the most dangerous things that’s ever been done to us, where you now have people that are afraid of one of the most important substances they could be eating. It’s terrifying.

Eric Edmeades (00:00:06):

I’ve been doing obviously quite a few interviews over the last several weeks. The other day I was on one, I think it was yesterday morning, and the person said that it was a genius marketing move to call it Postdiabetic. And I said to see, but the joke of it is it wasn’t a marketing move at all. The way the statement came up was that many of our clients were coming to us and saying, “Look, I was a type 2 diabetic. Now, my doctor tells me that I’m pre-diabetic.” And that irritated me because pre means before or on the way to. It means that you’re headed in a certain direction. And I think language is important. I think specificity is important. And so, to take somebody who has improved their relationship with sugar, improved their relationship with their own metabolism, and now call them pre-diabetic is wrong language, first of all. But secondly, it also creates the possibility for terrible medical advice.

Ben Grynol (00:00:58):

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.

(00:01:28):

We all have our own stories when it comes to metabolic health, when it comes to health and wellness in general, lifestyle changes that we might make, maybe some moments, some sticking in our minds of events where we were informed or we had an insight, a revelation about our own health and changes that we can make.

(00:01:49):

Well, for Eric Edmeades, author, entrepreneur, world traveler, he came across an event with Tony Robbins in the early ’90s. And at that event, Tony was talking about food, food as this foundation for our own health and wellness. And it seems absurd to even say that, but 30 years ago that was very much the case. People didn’t have the same insight about health and wellness and the foundation of metabolic health that they do now. Well, fast-forward to today, Eric is an author and he recently released a book called Postdiabetic.

(00:02:24):

In the book, he talks about a nine-week course, a nine-week plan that he has made accessible to people through multimedia so that they can start to understand some of the lifestyle changes they can make around health, wellness, diet, sleep, nutrition, everything related to improving their own health and taking their health into their own hands.

(00:02:44):

The reason he uses this word post-diabetic is we often talk about people being pre-diabetic or in the diabetic range when they have metabolic dysfunction. Well, what happens when they’re in that range and they start to improve their insulin resistance, they start to improve levels like their average glucose, levels like their fasting insulin.

(00:03:11):

So, you’ve got a very interesting background of foray into metabolic health and a foray into this whole world of health and wellness. So, I thought it’d be good to dig into your backstory of being an entrepreneur, a world traveler, thought leader, and your story before we get into Postdiabetic, and the book you recently released. Your story sounds very similar to many people, where you think you’ve got to grasp on health and wellness and you’re generally aware of your lifestyle habits and behaviors. And then, one day there’s sort of this wake up call that you go, “Wow, I saw some data or I saw something that made me realize,” whether it’s a visit to a doctor, whether it’s using something like a continuous glucose monitor, blood tests, something that makes you wake up and go, “My mental model of what I thought of myself being in good health is completely disconnected from the objective data that shows me that maybe I should take different considerations in my hand.”

(00:04:11):

So, why don’t we start with your backstory, just your journey along as an entrepreneur, world traveler, a thought leader, and then getting into health and wellness, because it’s a very interesting story.

Eric Edmeades (00:04:22):

Sounds good. I’ll follow your lead.

Ben Grynol (00:04:24):

So, you are Canadian, South African born and Canadian raised by the sounds of it.

Eric Edmeades (00:04:30):

That’s about right.

Ben Grynol (00:04:30):

So, why don’t we start there?

Eric Edmeades (00:04:33):

As you say, I was born in South Africa, and being born in South Africa in the early ’70s obviously was an interesting time to be there, and my parents took the opportunity to get out. And so, my dad went to go study at McGill and then went to go teach at Dal in Halifax. So, over that period of time, we kind of went back and forth a bit. And by the time I was eight years old, I became properly immigrated and became a Canadian citizen, and grew up there and lived in Canada until I was 25. And then, at 25 I made the decision to head out into the world and I left Canada and I haven’t lived there since. I’ve got the Canadian accent, I understand the blue line and some general Canadian trivia, but I actually feel largely more South African than I do Canadian.

Ben Grynol (00:05:18):

Very interesting. And blue line for any listeners, we’re referring to hockey of course, that being the playoffs right now, May 2024, when we are recording. But granted that you’ve lived in three distinct countries. Well, you’ve lived in more. You have been raised in three distinct countries. We’ll say that South Africa, Canada, U.S., where you were raised, spent meaningful time. What are some of the differences that you’ve noticed, not just culturally, in the mindset, but even with things like nutrition and the outlook on health and wellness? Because I think between Canada and the U.S., we often talk, because it’s North America, like it is somewhat similar, but I think there are some distinct differences just even in when we talk about laws and regulation as it pertains to food. It is different, but again, metabolic health is a global epidemic and what we see in different countries based on diet, based on cultural values differs greatly. So, if you’ve seen that you’ve got ties to these countries still, have you sort of noticed some of these cultural differences with the outlook on it?

Eric Edmeades (00:06:22):

Yeah, there’s definitely very big differences. There was a, let’s say a certain Canadian and European snobbishness, I should say, snobbiness, about the state of health in America, largely in the ’70s, ’80s, even I would say stretching into the early ’90s. And that’s because you could see at that stage, you could walk through the average American city and see obesity taking place, you could see it happening. And at that stage in Canada, we really didn’t see so much of that. I mean, I can remember very distinctly that in my 12 years of initial schooling in Canada, I remember there being three overweight children, and I still know their names. It was a rarity. And you could already begin to see that taking place in the United States.

(00:07:09):

But I’ve really come to recognize is that it wasn’t that America was unhealthy, it’s that America is first with a lot of things. So, America was first with fast food and processed food. Basically, I would say the whole thing started roughly in Anaheim, California, with drive-throughs and that kind of thing. And so, the obesity epidemic, if we were going to… We could call it the Anaheim flu, it kind of started in that part of the world, and it started to spread out. And then, it got to Canada, and in 1996 or so, I moved to the United Kingdom and I was living in England. I lived there for 10 years.

(00:07:44):

And in the 10 years that I lived there, I watched the population grow. And of course, I’m not talking about the net number of people, I’m talking about the people themselves. I watched obesity happen in the country. And so, while there are differences and there still are differences, one thing that’s happening is that the destruction of metabolic health around the planet is happening everywhere. It’s just happening at different stages.

(00:08:07):

So, I’m right now in Estonia and we keep an apartment here. My partner’s from Estonia, here. And what I can tell you is there’s very little obesity here comparative to the United States, even comparative to England. But I’ve also been coming here now for about 10 years. And guess what? It’s starting to come here as well. If you go to a restaurant here, the average American or Canadian will go to a restaurant here and order a main course and they’ll be like, “Is this just a starter?” Because guess what? The portions here are more rational and normal and most of this stuff is still coming from natural production. But fast food is here, processed food is here, and it’s beginning to happen.

(00:08:42):

So, I think that gives us a really interesting opportunity to watch the pace of devastation of health in each country as those values arrive on the shores of each country.

Ben Grynol (00:08:54):

Yeah, it’s interesting where we yearn for expedition in the world, that being the expedition of information, of processing, of anything. We want things faster, more efficient, which makes sense in some regards. And when we bring that into the world of health and wellness, that’s where we started to see a significant… It’s that paired with the outlook on treating as opposed to preventing. So, this idea of we treat things once it’s an issue. We don’t focus on root cause medicine, we don’t focus on prevention as the first step, which is very much what your book talks about. There are things you can do before you’re actually ill. And if you want to think about longevity, this is the outlook on it.

(00:09:36):

But I think this mental model of not being able to disconnect where the breaking points in expedition are, where it’s like it’s great to have… Objectively, it’s great to have faster information processing, let’s just say email versus we need to send letters, objectively a better way of communicating. But expedition when it comes to food, to your point of the Anaheim flu and thinking how we have started to expedite food, we’ve started to make portion sizes larger. Our mental model of what is expected, what is rational is so skewed. So, people still will consume three… They’ll think like, “We consume three meals a day because that’s what you do,” regardless of portion size, regardless of, not the caloric intake, but the macro makeup of that meal. And I think that’s where we’re starting to get a lot of this creep, where slowly it compounds over time. Our biometric markers get out very quickly. And so, we want to make sure that we’re mitigating that and controlling that at the foundation, which is this idea of food is medicine.

Eric Edmeades (00:10:43):

So, I’ll give you a little pushback on that. I actually don’t like that expression. And in our community, we actually sort of disavow that. The challenge with that idea, that food is medicine, is that medicine is something you take when you’re sick, medicine is something you take to treat a disease. And food is only medicine in the sense that if you are drowning, then I guess in that moment, oxygen is medicine. If you are massively dehydrated, then I suppose in that moment water is medicine, but it really isn’t. It’s just a fundamental need of your body. And so, when we start to look at food, we recognize it really isn’t. I mean, look, there are foods clearly that have medicinal properties. I’m not disputing that. But if we treat food like medicine, then the natural extension of that is that, “Well, now that I’m sick, I should eat that medicine,” rather than the preventative medicine argument or the satisfying of the body’s physical needs. And in that sense, food isn’t medicine, it’s necessary. Medicine is only necessary when you’re sick, food is necessary.

Casey Means (00:11:56):

This is Dr. Casey Means, co-founder of Levels. If you’ve heard me talk on other podcasts before, you know that I believe that tracking your glucose and optimizing your metabolic health is really the ultimate life hack. We know that cravings, mood instability, and energy levels, and weight are all tied to our blood sugar levels. And of course, all the downstream chronic diseases that are related to blood sugar are things that we can really greatly improve our chances of avoiding if we keep our blood sugar in a healthy and stable level throughout our lifetime.

(00:12:30):

So, I’ve been using CGM now on and off for the past four years since we started Levels, and I have learned so much about my diet and my health. I’ve learned the simple swaps that keep my blood sugar stable, like flax crackers instead of wheat-based crackers. I’ve learned which fruits work best for my blood sugar. I do really well with pears and apples and oranges and berries, but grapes seem to spike my blood sugar off the chart. I’m also a notorious night owl and I’ve really learned with using Levels if I get to bed at a reasonable hour and get good quality sleep, my blood sugar levels are so much better, and that has been so motivating for me on my health journey. It’s also been helpful for me in terms of keeping my weight at a stable level much more effortlessly than it has been in the past. So, you can sign up for Levels at levels.link/podcast.

(00:13:22):

Now, let’s get back to this episode.

Ben Grynol (00:13:32):

Knowing that our bodies are getting what we need from macro nutrient perspective, knowing that we’re getting what we need at the cellular level, I think is where this idea comes from, to have the heuristic to say exactly what you’re saying in the book, where let’s break things down to what actually fuels your body, what is going to give you the energy that you need so that you can focus on feeling better. And I think that the visceral feelings of the physical part of it is the first step, where people can…

(00:14:01):

And you talk a lot about that, like, “Do you feel differently, yes or no?” You start off by saying, “Don’t just change everything tomorrow.” You don’t shut off a light switch and say, “I’ve completely changed overnight what I’m eating.” It’s that you slowly start to remove, you slowly start to change. You eliminate things like sugar, you change your perspective on carbohydrate intake, you change the macro makeup of each of the meals you’re eating, and that will give you this different perspective on, “Hey, I physically feel better. I’m sleeping more. I’m exercising regularly. I’m doing all the things that make my body feel different.”

(00:14:39):

When you can associate those visceral feelings with the actual fuel that you’re getting, it’s such a different outlook on… You almost think in retrospect, you’re like, “Why wasn’t I doing this before?” And I think a lot of it is just not knowing, because we’ve come to expect, especially in North America, we’ve come to expect that this is just what you do. You grab the Starbucks in the morning and you grab that egg sandwich if you eat eggs, and it’s generally healthy, and it’s actually not. The ingredients in processed food are not going to be the fuel that you need on a regular basis to make you perform at your best.

Eric Edmeades (00:15:18):

I think one useful consideration about this is like what is the definition of food. So, what is food? And arguably, you would say it’s an organic substance that we consume in order to extract building blocks and energy. We’re there to extract, say vitamins, minerals, amino acids that we’re going to use in the construction of tissue, in the construction of our bodies, in the construction of our immune systems, antibodies and what have you. And then equally, we’re eating food in order to consume calories that we are then going to use to power the system.

(00:15:53):

But there are two other components of food, and that is there’s non-nutritive benefit of food. So for example, fiber, having a cleansing action on the digestive system, which is arguably necessary or not. But then also, there’s another big component to food that I don’t think gets enough consideration, and that is the meaning that your body takes from the food. What I mean by that is your body’s epigenetic response to what you’re eating. And this is a big thing that I think is at the very crux of the metabolic imbalance that exists around the world at the moment today is that there’s a lack of understanding about why we are able to burn different types of fuel and why it is that we are not very good at switching between them in our current lifestyle.

(00:16:40):

We are able to burn sugar, we are able to burn fat, and we are able to burn protein. We have these three fuel sources. And so, when we consume food, we are looking for those fuel sources to process, to burn, to run our systems with. And I think one of the big difficulties we’ve run into is that our body chooses which of those fuels to burn based upon what we’re eating.

(00:17:03):

And so, if somebody, for example, eats carbohydrate, a carbohydrate food, then the body at that point goes, “Oh, okay, I know what that is, I know what to do with that, and I know what it means. And what it means is that we are in the season of autumn and that winter is coming. So, from that meaning I’m going to make some epigenetic upgrades. I’m going to switch some things. I’m going to boost my cravings for additional carbohydrate foods now that I’ve eaten this one because, hell, if it’s fall, I’d better eat more. And then, I’m going to slow the metabolism down a little because we better become more energy efficient so that we can store some of this energy to make sure that we make it through the winter.”

(00:17:44):

And so, that conversation about the fact that our body in a sense determines a meaning based the food that we’re eating is vital and misunderstood. Mother nature used to control the supply. And so, our bodies learned to respond to the seasonal supply of mother nature. And now, Nabisco, Coca-Cola and Post and Unilever and whoever out there is manufacturing food, they’ve taken the job of mother nature and now our bodies are confused as to what season they’re supposed to be in.

Ben Grynol (00:18:12):

Yeah. That’s exactly. And as the body gets confused, where it’s going, “I’m…” As I move through seasons, my body’s used to burning certain fuel sources based on what is available in the environment around us. So, let’s just use fruit. It is winter and you are in, this is tens of thousands of years ago, it’s winter, fruit, raspberry bushes are not prevalent and around us, and so, we’re not grabbing those and consuming them. So, we’re going into a fat burning state.

(00:18:44):

But now, because everything is available and it’s ready, we’re consuming more of it. And that’s not even the issue, is if we’re consuming whole foods, let’s just use raspberries, we’re still getting a high amount of fiber associated with it and we’re not stripping it away, but when we’ve reduced it down to… We’re basically injecting ourself with high fructose corn syrup or cane sugar, we’re just injecting ourselves and consuming it so quickly. Rick Johnson talks a lot about this as it pertains to uric acid, where people will slam back a, let’s say a glass of orange juice or something that is giving them the surge of sugar. We’ll just say sugar. They’re giving themselves a fructose or a glucose surge so quickly, and our body doesn’t even have a chance to metabolize it. And this is highly correlated with higher rates of colon cancer, because it’s going straight through us.

(00:19:37):

So, our body is not used to this and we don’t know how to handle that. And that’s when we start to get in this… If we think about biomarkers as being a symphony, some are correlated, others are inversely correlated, and we see this dance and our bodies going like, “What is going on?” And we’re trying to get back to a point of homeostasis. And really, what our bodies, to your point, biologically, what we want from an epigenetic level is to get back to the point of just saying, “Where’s the raspberry bush when it is in season? And let my body do what it needs to do when it is in a different season.”

(00:20:11):

And so, it such a hard thing because our bodies, it takes so long to evolve and adapt, but we’re fueling ourselves incorrectly faster than our bodies can adapt to anything, nor should we be adapting to this new state of consuming sources of fuel, if you want to call caloric intake being fuel. But it is so short in the time horizon of the world that it’s only in the past, we’ll say 70 to 100 years, where we’ve started to really change. And even if we shorten that window, where it’s like the past 25 to 30 years, the Pepperidge Goldfish, orange SunnyD, all of these things where it was like we started to really push Lunchables, we started to really push a lot of this highly processed food on society.

(00:20:58):

And that’s where we’ve seen these drastic changes in overall obesity rates in metabolic health, especially with where it’s unfortunate is the rate of diabetes, the rate of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease in children is increasing at an increasing rate. And it’s very sad to see, because this is the future that we are building and we are acknowledging that it’s okay right now, unless we do something about it.

Eric Edmeades (00:21:23):

Understanding the timeframe is really important. Of course, you’re right. In the last 70 years we’ve seen devastating changes to food production, what have you, but to really understand the problem is to understand how long it’s been going on for and then to understand that it’s been going on for such a long time that we’re now just in the steep edge of the curve, we’re just in the steep edge of the exponential results. Even the Romans knew about diabetes. They knew about it and they didn’t have processed food, and they knew about it, and they knew enough about it that in order to determine who had it, they would have a bunch of soldiers stand in a line and have them pee on the sand. And then if the ants went to your urine, they would know that you were dealing with sugar sickness. They would know that you were not metabolizing sugar properly.

(00:22:04):

And so, even at that stage, agriculture had already interrupted our epigenetic expression. Agriculture had already started to cause these problems. They are now becoming significantly worse because we’ve dramatically increased the uptake of various forms of sugar. And on top of that, we’ve introduced tragic seed oils, vegetable oils, processed foods, glyphosate, and a bunch of other insults on top of the existing injury. And then, on top of that, we’re living longer because our general environments are safer.

(00:22:34):

So, all of this stuff’s getting amplified to the point that, just to put it in economic terms, diabetes will cost America about $400 billion this year. The defense budget is only $800 billion. We’re talking about something that is economically devastating. It’s going to cost every single person in every single country around the world a sizable chunk of their budget. But that is only reflective, of course, of the personal suffering that’s causing. Because again, we’re talking about a largely avoidable disease and a largely reversible disease that is the number one risk factor for cancer, heart disease, leg amputation, loss of eyesight, and lifelong medication. So, it’s a big conversation. I’m glad there’s people like you out there that are up for having it.

Ben Grynol (00:23:19):

The difficult part too is extrapolating it too, because you can model anything in the world, you can quantify it any way you want, but trying to extrapolate it from a productivity standpoint too, from a mental health perspective, to all the aspects that poor metabolic health touches, where you say what would happen not just from a disease standpoint, saying we’re spending $400 billion annually on diabetes care currently in the U.S., saying what’s happening from a productivity standpoint, where somebody’s feeling a little sluggish or maybe they’ve got brain fog, they’re not able to work in as efficient a way as they could. How much more could we produce if it was from an effective efficiency standpoint, what would that look like? What does it look like when we start to flip the lens on mental health? We know that poor metabolic health is directly correlated with mental health in many cases, and we’re seeing that from a biomarker perspective too.

(00:24:18):

Chris Palmer recently wrote the book Brain Energy, and he talks a lot about that, and I think it’s still such a new field for people to adapt because adapting to it is hard when we’re just starting to surface this conversation of what is metabolic health. People have heard of a metabolism, people have generally heard of blood sugar, but connecting it all and knowing that it’s more than just a single marker, it’s more than just a single thing that we have to manage, it is generally our overall health and wellness, it is hard, but it’s hard to quantify and say what is happening because we’re not taking our health into our own hands.

(00:24:54):

And so, would love to hear more about your journey into health and wellness, where in the ’90s, it sounds like that became a point where you started to take health into your own hands. I think that was around the time when you had connected with Tony Robbins. So, why don’t we dig into that, because it’s pretty interesting.

Eric Edmeades (00:25:11):

Yeah, I was like a lot of other people, you wouldn’t have regarded me as, say particularly unhealthy, but I was suffering. I always had sinus infections and throat infections, and I often had digestive problems, I had horrible cystic acne, and that was just my life. Of course, I’d been to go visit doctors and specialists and I was taking these pills and those injections and inhaling this stuff, and they even recommended surgery for me to handle the whole thing.

(00:25:40):

And you’re right, weirdly, I found myself at a Tony Robbins seminar, and on the last day of the seminar, Tony started talking about food. And I’d never really heard anybody speak about food like that. I’d never read a diet book at that stage in my life. I hadn’t really thought about it, other than what they told us in school about the four food groups and Kellogg’s and what have you. And so, all of a sudden I’m seeing this different perspective, and that really got me interested. And I started doing some reading and just being curious.

(00:26:07):

And I then undertook an experiment, where I just basically said goodbye to processed food and some other things, and I stepped up my intake of good quality things, and it was miraculous. I mean, it was miraculous. 30 days later, I was down 35 pounds. I could breathe through my own sinuses for the first time in a decade. I had no throat infections of any kind. For the first time, my tonsils weren’t the size of golf balls in my throat. I wasn’t in pain, I was sleeping. This was a life upgrade beyond anything I can tell you.

(00:26:40):

And immediately, what that created for me is, “How is it possible that for the last several years I’ve been visiting doctors and not one of them asked me about food?” Not one of them asked me what I ate or did I consider eating more or this or less or that. Not one of them. Every single solution they had was pharmaceutical. Every single thing was, “Breathe this in, take this pill. Let me inject that into you,” every single one of them.

(00:27:04):

Now, listen, I may now sound like an anti-establishment nut bar who hates all medicine, absolutely not. I wouldn’t be alive without them. I was working at a gas station in Halifax, Nova Scotia when a guy lit me on fire. And if it wasn’t for trauma surgeons and pharmaceutical companies, I’d be dead. They had to take skin off my legs to rebuild my arm. That’s not something I can do. I’m grateful. I had an emergency appendectomy deep in the wilderness in Africa in a field hospital that barely had walls. But guess what? There was a surgeon there. There was anesthetic and there were antibiotics. I’m not saying those things don’t have a place, but I’m saying is we’ve become so reliant upon them that they have become the first port of call, “Oh, you’re in pain, take this.”

(00:27:46):

And all of a sudden I didn’t need those things anymore. And no kidding, I sat with one of my doctors who was trying to convince me that I should still have the surgery he ordered even though I was no longer in pain. And he said, “Listen, that happens a lot. People get nervous about the surgery and then the symptoms, sometimes they come and they go, and then they don’t want to have the surgery, but then the symptoms come back, and then they want the surgery, but then they have to wait,” because of course, that’s how universal healthcare works in the country I was in at the time. And so, I had to convince him. I had to convince him, “No, it’s not that I don’t want the surgery, it’s that I don’t need it.”

(00:28:19):

And you know what was striking? Bear this in mind, I changed so much physically in that month that my mother didn’t recognize me. Literally, I arrived at the airport and she looked right past me and didn’t see me. That’s how much I had physically changed. So, consider I walk into my doctor’s office and none of the nurses, none of the doctors that know me, that saw the change in me, that when they weighed me noticed I was 30 pounds, 35 pounds lighter, that my blood pressure was different, all of the markers were different, and not one of them asked me what I had done. Not one of them said, “Oh, wow, you’ve turned some things around,” not one of them.

(00:28:58):

Instead, all they tried to do, like an unethical used car salesman in the back lot of whatever city I was in, trying to save the deal. “Oh, you don’t want to cancel now.” “Yeah, I do. I really do.” And then, I’m no kidding, I was impertinent enough that I said to the doctor, I said, “How long did you go to medical school for?” I saw his thing on the wall, and he said, “Six years.” And I said, “That’s amazing. Well done. How much of that time did you spend studying food?” I was genuinely curious. I didn’t know the answer. I’ve now asked that question of doctors in over 30 countries around the world in my work, but I didn’t know the answer when I asked him. I fully expected that he would have an answer for me, an answer different than the one he gave me, which was none, literally none. Not even an afternoon four hour class on food in six years to become a medical doctor.

(00:29:48):

And my immediate reaction to that was, would I take my car to a mechanic that skipped all the classes on oil and brake fluid and shit? No, I would not. And that’s really what started the journey for me, is I immediately followed up and had that same conversation with other doctors. My uncle was an orthopedic surgeon. He had spent probably close to 12 years in medical school. And when I asked him the question, it was amazing, because I said like, “Hey, 12 years in medical school, how much of that time was spent on nutrition?: No kidding. He cocked his head to one side like a dog does when it’s going, “Huh.” It wasn’t that he thought my question wasn’t appropriate, it’s that he was puzzled that he’d never thought of that before, that he’d never considered that in 12 years of studying health, of course, he wasn’t studying health, he was studying disease. That’s a distinction. It surprised him.

(00:30:34):

And that feeling, that recognition that the doctors around us… It’s not their fault by the way. This might sound like an anti-doc, it’s not their fault. It’s their education. They all signed up to do the best they could. They signed up to go to school and learn what they could, to do the best they could to help us be healthy. But then, they were indoctrinated into a system that’s profit driven and pharmaceutical driven, and now we’re the victims of that. And so, at that point, I basically said, “All right, I’m going to have to figure this out for myself.” And that’s what started the journey.

Ben Grynol (00:31:03):

That is the hardest thing, is the advocacy, especially when we’re our own advocates and it’s easy to be influenced by family, by friends, specifically, maybe by a doctor that we trust. So, you’ve got a doctor that is-

Eric Edmeades (00:31:16):

Sure, they’ve got a lab coat and a stethoscope and they’re very authoritarian about it. It’s tough to stand up to them.

Ben Grynol (00:31:22):

Yeah. Even when, let’s just say you’ve got a doctor that is very accommodating and very understanding, they might warrant what you’re saying or they will listen, but they’ve still got the perspective. It’s funny that you bring up the story, I had a very similar experience recently, I guess it was May of ’23, we’re in ’24 now. May of ’23 went to one medical, unrelated, ended up having pneumonia. Neither here nor there. So, back to your point, sometimes you do medicine and medicine is good, but I got antibiotics and that was fine, but I had blood pressure that was alarming. It was 146 over maybe 96. It was something like that. And the doctor said, “Do you smoke? Do you drink? Do you do all these things?” And I said, “Are you sure?” And I said, “This is unheard of. I’m normally one teens over mid-seventies.”

(00:32:16):

So, started to monitor my blood pressure. I was trying to pinpoint what was causing this. Eventually, went back to one medical because two of my friends who are in their early forties had heart attacks one day after another. One of them unfortunately passed away. And so, I said, “I’m concerned about this. Let’s do something about it. What should we do?” And he said, “Go on blood pressure meds tomorrow.” And he was pushing it very hard, and I almost did it, and it was so far against my belief system. And even my wife was saying, “Yeah, you should probably do it,” and she’s very much into health and wellness as well. But it was the influence, it was the, “You’ve tried everything.”

(00:32:57):

And so, I took a very extreme approach and I said, “I’m going to go on a full elimination diet and I’m going to start.” I went vegan for a couple months, eliminated coffee, alcohol. And again, I don’t drink a ton as it is. I don’t consume sugar generally. Already doing a lot of the things, exercising regularly, sleeping enough. My uric acid was a little bit high, where that could have been causing the higher blood pressure, but it wasn’t at a rate where it would make sense for it to be as high as it was.

(00:33:31):

And so, did this, got my blood pressure back to a good baseline, which is like one teens over mid-seventies. And so, my doctor was like… He thought it was insane. He literally was like, “What are you doing?” And he said, “I’ll give you a month, but if you don’t resolve this, I don’t want to be responsible for any outcomes.” And so, did this. And what it ended up being, for whatever reason, I’m now quite caffeine sensitive. We know caffeine spikes blood pressure as it is and it can spike blood sugar too because the cortisol, but it was one of those things where pinpointing that allowed me to have the lens and go, “I understand the fuel for my body.”

(00:34:14):

And that’s the thing of the advocacy, to your point, of if you are not the advocate for yourself and you’re not willing to make some of these very difficult changes to understand what fuels our individual bodies, you can run into the trap of you get on the hedonic treadmill of just taking one pill after another, after another because the prescription is fast, efficient, mitigate now, don’t solve for long-term outcome, just solve for the immediate need. And when that comes from a healthcare perspective, it can be detrimental when we get on that path.

Eric Edmeades (00:34:48):

Not only that, but there’s a malpractice consideration that if the doctor does something different than they’ve been advised by the pharmaceutical company or by their medical education, then they expose themselves.

(00:35:00):

So, for example, let’s say a doctor has the opportunity to prescribe to you lifestyle modification or a pill. If prescribing to you the pill is a zero malpractice situation for them, because ultimately if there is a liability problem, it falls to the pharmaceutical company, because they are the ones who’ve made the pill. Whereas if you prescribe them to not take the pill, particularly if they’ve asked for it after they’ve seen it advertised in media, and you prescribe them not to do that and to try a lifestyle thing, you’ve now opened yourself up to malpractice. So, there’s a safety in doing what is accepted as the expedient way of dealing with it.

(00:35:34):

What we’ve found with diabetes, it’s funny, the reason that we wrote this book was that when I created my company, WILDFIT, we really created it just around helping people improve their relationship with food. What I saw was people struggling to maintain diets, to go on a diet and stick with it for any longer than a few days or a few weeks. And so, I developed a methodology that you might now call food psychology to help people to permanently change their relationship with food.

(00:35:59):

And it worked. It worked really, really well. It was a hobby business and we put no effort into it, no marketing into it. And within a couple of years we were serving five, 6,000 clients a year. Now, we’ve had over 100,000 clients in 100 countries around the world. It’s been incredible. But as a result of that, we started getting really interesting feedback from people. And of course, we saw stories of weight loss and the normal things you might expect.

(00:36:22):

But the one that really started to surprise us in about the third year or so is we started getting people writing to us and going, “I’ve just visited my doctor and my doctor tells me that I am now pre-diabetic,” where they were previously type 2 diabetic. And their doctor was surprised by that because the way diabetes is discussed in medical circles is that it is a chronic, irreversible, lifelong… That’s the deal. You’ve got it now and you’ll medicate it for the rest of your life. And yet so many of our clients were finding themselves in the pre-diabetic, or actually in the fully reversed range.

(00:36:55):

And so, in the years that we’ve been going through that, of course we would then contact those doctors and work with them. Many of those doctors have joined forces with us today. They now guide their clients to go through our protocols so that they can reverse the condition. But what we found is that doctors can be divided up in a sense into three categories. There are the doctors that are trapped in the old education paradigm, and that is that they regard type 2 diabetes as not that serious a disease and chronic. In other words, “Oh, well, you’ve got it. Here’s your medication. Next customer, please.” It’s a straightforward thing.

(00:37:26):

Then you have another category of doctors, and that is a category of doctors that kind of know that if you were to improve your lifestyle, that conditions could change. And these are the kind of doctors that are talking about managing your diabetes rather than medicating it. “No, we’re going to manage it. You’re probably still going to have to take some medication, but we might be able to manage it.”

(00:37:47):

And then, there’s another type of doctor, and that’s the type of doctor who fully understands that this is a reversible condition in majority cases and that the client can do something about it. But the vast majority of them have given up. And the reason that they’ve given up is that, and this is on the consumer now, is that you’re sitting down with a patient and you go, “Listen, we’ve done your numbers. Your A1C is here, you’re in diabetic range, so we’re going to have to do something about that. Now, you have two choices at this point. One, is I can put you on this diet. Or the second one is you can start taking this medication, and you probably should still try to clean up your lifestyle a little bit.”

(00:38:22):

Well, the average consumer at this point is frankly lazy and wants the shortcut. They’re like, “Well, I better just start taking the medication.” And even the occasional consumer that says, “Okay, I’m going to do it.” They don’t do what you did. They half-assed it, or they stick with it stringently for a week, and then they start making exceptions, and those exceptions become the rule. And then, they go visit the doctor for the next round of tests and guess what? It’s even worse.

(00:38:46):

And so, there’s a sliver of doctors, and I follow some of them on Twitter, and some of them are friends of mine, that are aware that it’s reversible and that are actively campaigning and pushing, but of course what they are facing is that the industry is coming down on them for it. The industry is attacking them for taking that position. And it’s affecting things like, well, if you take that position, you’re not going to get the funding for this research you want it to do, or you’re not going to be able to lecture at the conference at this particular facility, or you’re going to be slowly carved away because we don’t want that narrative to interfere with what’s going on. And they’re brave and they’re fighting the battle anyway. And they are, in my opinion, at the front line of the single biggest health problem that faces civilization today.

Ben Grynol (00:39:33):

Yeah. That is very much the idiom around the tallest poppy, where you grow too tall in the field, chopped right off, because you have to get down to the same baseline that everyone else is at. You can’t stand out. And I think it’s very difficult when we’re in the early conversations around this. Some people still view it as extreme. We hear members, and I’m sure you’ve heard many clients talk about it as well, where they try to get something like a continuous glucose monitor and they request it from their primary caregiver and they will say, “No, you don’t need it. Maybe the labs are a little bit out. But no, absolutely not.” And, “This is my body. I want to have some insight into what’s happening in real time.” It’s wild that it is such a difficult conversation.

(00:40:26):

It’s great that the industry is moving in the direction, with even Dexcom is coming out with a device this summer, the Stelo, which is going to be commercially available over the counter in the U.S., which is great. In Canada, glucose monitors are available over the counter, which provides different access. But still, even from a country to country basis, we see some countries will have over the counter access and others will still have prescription devices. It would be like prescribing in one country, saying like, “No, you can’t access a blood pressure cuff or a scale. You can’t access something that gives you some quantitative data about your own body,” for some arbitrary reason.

(00:41:10):

So, there’s still a lot from the policy standpoint to move in this direction, where people can take health into their own hands. But it’s an ongoing conversation. It’s something where we just need continuous thought leadership, continuous people from the inside, that being people who work in the healthcare field to say, “Here’s the message we’re trying to push forward.”

(00:41:25):

I love the way you frame this idea of being post-diabetic, because we don’t talk about… We talk about people being pre-diabetic or diabetic, but the way you frame the book, being post-diabetic, this is something that you can change. It is a very interesting way of framing it, and I think it’s just shifting our mindset around it.

Eric Edmeades (00:41:44):

I’ve been doing obviously quite a few interviews over the last several weeks relative to the book and such. And the other day I was on one, I think it was yesterday morning, and the person said that it was a genius marketing move to call it Postdiabetic. And I said, “You see, but the joke of it is that it wasn’t a marketing move at all. It’s a very important statement.” And what I mean by that is that the way the statement came up was that many of our clients were coming to us and saying, “Look, I was a type 2 diabetic. Now, my doctor tells me that I’m pre-diabetic,” and that irritated me because pre means before or on the way to. It means that you’re headed in a certain direction. And I think language is important. I think specificity is important. And so, to take somebody who has improved their relationship with sugar, improved their relationship with their own metabolism, and now call them pre-diabetic is wrong language, first of all.

(00:42:34):

But secondly, it also creates the possibility for terrible medical advice. And I would put it this way, imagine there are two patients going to see their doctors and they basically have identical metrics. A1C is identical, everything else is about the same. They’re fairly identical as patients go. But one of them is on their way to type 2 diabetes and the other one was last month type 2 diabetic, but is headed the other direction. They’ve met at a common intersection. They happen to have similar metrics at that point in time, but I would argue that the person trending away from type 2 diabetes requires different medical advice. They require different medical treatment in that moment. And so, to classify them as pre-diabetic would be to open up the book to what they tell you to prescribe to a pre-diabetic and put them back on that same track. That person is not pre-diabetic. They are post-diabetic, and they are trending in the other direction.

(00:43:28):

And even when they continue to reverse it all the way to normalized, say normalized blood sugar, I would argue that in that moment they are still post-diabetic. And what I mean by that is that if you once were a type 2 diabetic and you’ve reversed it, you still have a predisposition for it. You’ve demonstrated that. And that means that if you go back to your old ways, it’s going to come back. And so, that title of post-diabetic is, I think, quite important. It’s important to the medical advice they receive and it’s important to their sense of identity, so that they can take seriously their lifestyle decisions and stay on track.

Ben Grynol (00:44:04):

As our bodies change with insulin resistance, it is, and it’s something we’re still learning about, we’ll call them easily accessible tests for people to measure. We hear about it all the time, where people get glucose spikes, and we don’t know what the insulin response is as far as how much insulin their pancreas is secreting, unless you’re measuring it through proper in lab testing. Two people could look the exact same and they might have the exact same A1C in general. On paper, they look like they’re generally in about the same level of health. But you’d see one, a person might have an extreme insulin response to a glucose spike, their insulin goes up to 30, let’s say from three, and another person might go up to 10. Your body is doing that because your pancreas has been stressed for so long throughout your life that it is now working extremely hard to mitigate the glucose spike that has happened in your body. And so, you get that.

(00:45:09):

What does insulin do? You’ve got more insulin in the blood. Insulin becomes a growth factor and it’s causing all of these other downstream implications with inflammation and other increases in different biomarkers. And so, it’s very much a challenge, but you’re right, that you see this crossover point between two groups and you need to… The outlook on getting to a better state of health requires different steps and different advice.

(00:45:35):

Why don’t we get into, you’ve got a nine-week program in the book that you outlay that makes it accessible. If we assume that education and content is the first avenue to making changes, granted people can get blood tests, they can wear glucose monitors, they can do certain things. The easiest thing is to say, “Hey, I understand there are meaningful changes that I can make,” and I can read a paragraph, a page. I can read something to make that change not a week from now, not a month from now, not tomorrow. But once you consume that information, you are in control of making those changes based on your own willingness. And so, I think the way that you break it down into very simple steps is a good way of looking at it, because we always say the metabolic health curve is long and steep. You don’t learn about it overnight. It takes years and years and it’s ongoing and it’s steep because it’s quite complex. And so, bringing it down to a foundational level is something that makes it more accessible to people around the world.

(00:46:37):

So, why don’t we get into the prescription, if you want to call it that, the prescription that you have for people to say, “Start here.”

Eric Edmeades (00:46:44):

The way the book is designed is to really help people to understand what diabetes is, how it happens, what it means, what the implications of it are, and why it’s being mismanaged in the population. When they understand all of that stuff, they’re very much empowered. A key principle of this is that all of my work is basically informed by evolutionary biology. Earlier this year, I released another book called The Evolution Gap, and the theory put forward in that book is that our very slow pace of genetic evolution is in conflict with our incredible and accelerating capacity for innovation. So, the more we change the environment around us, the more out of sync we feel, which is why we have more addiction and psychiatric problems and suicide today than we’ve ever had in history, despite life being demonstrably better today than it’s ever been.

(00:47:28):

Type 2 is one of those examples. It’s a disease that is the result of that gap. We evolved a metabolic system for a certain environment, and then we left that environment. It’s fairly much that simple. The way we describe it is that humans evolved to, first of all, survive incredibly difficult environmental realities, including seasonal fluctuation, but then we also, evolution being ever efficient, if nothing, we also evolved the ability to utilize the seasonal fluctuation to our benefits. So, first to survive the seasons and then to utilize them.

(00:48:01):

So, to make that tangible, to survive the season, we had to develop a metabolism that would allow us to eat carbohydrates, stimulate our appetite to eat more carbohydrates, slow our metabolisms down so that we could store those carbohydrates as fat and prepare ourselves to get through the coming winter, which of course for our ancestors was a long period of drought and caloric deficit. And so, that’s the survival phase of it.

(00:48:27):

But then the utilization phase is even more genius because now you move into winter. And sure, you might move into ketosis and burn some fat for a few days, but once you’ve passed over about 48 hours of really serious caloric restriction, the body goes, “I’m not even burning fat anymore because I might need this fat. This could be a long winter, so I’m going to burn something else. What else can I burn?” And the body starts looking for protein to burn. And where the average gym trainer gets very concerned about, “Well, you’ll metabolize your muscle away.” The body’s a whole lot smarter than that. What it does is it looks around your body and it looks for old, sick and diseased proteins. Proteins just being basically complex molecules built out of amino acids, and when they are no longer in use or they’re broken or diseased, they’re just floating around. And now the body goes, “Now that it’s winter, I can burn those.” What an efficient evolution.

(00:49:20):

Now, the point of all this is once you begin to understand that we evolve this metabolism to run through those cycles, then that brings us to the next conclusion, and that is that what would happen to any animal if it got stuck in a given season. Bears fatten up for the winter, just like us. They fatten up for the winter, chipmunks, squirrels, they do it. They do it pretty much the same way we do it.

(00:49:43):

But what do you think would happen if you took a bear and put it in a forest that was only ever autumn, that never went into winter? Well, it would fatten up so much that it needed three seats on the airplane. And it wouldn’t be its fault, and it isn’t somebody’s fault today. If somebody’s massively overweight or even a little bit overweight or they’re type 2 diabetic, it’s not their fault. We have a disastrous food industry, a disastrous regulation, legislation, and lobbying that did this to everybody. But the fact remains the same, that if you take us and take us out of the season that we’re supposed to be in, it’s going to be a problem. Then compound that with processed foods, seed oils and what have you.

(00:50:18):

So, the nine-week structure that we’ve created is modeled on our core WILDFIT program, which is to say that our programs are designed to stimulate behavior change, not to impose a bunch of restrictive rules. Our core brand frequency is to provide people with freedom. It’s to provide people with the freedom to eat what they want, when they want, whenever they want, but also the freedom to not eat what they wish they wouldn’t eat without feeling like they’re missing out. That’s a very key thing, because every diet does the exact opposite. The diet says, “You can’t eat what you want to eat, when you want to eat it, or as much as you want to eat it. And by the way, you definitely have to eat the stuff you don’t want…” I mean, it’s psychologically completely backwards, which is why they fail.

(00:50:58):

What we’ve done is created this week by week structure that’s based on something called behavioral change dynamics, that allow people to learn and integrate in incremental steps so that they never have to go on a diet again. That’s the most common feedback we get from people. Like, “I’m done. I will never go on a diet again. I have permanently changed my understanding of and relationship with food. I’m good.” And that’s what that nine-week program is about.

(00:51:20):

And interestingly, I resisted a book. I didn’t want to do a book, because I don’t believe that words on paper are the most transformative medium. And so, years ago when WILDFIT first started taking off, I was approached a number of times by people wanting me to do a book, and I’m like, “Nope, we’re doing it multimedia.” And so, our programs are done as multimedia distribution. People would watch videos, they would get materials, they would work with a coach, and they’d be guided through the program. And we have industry best completion numbers. Like our 90-day video coaching program has an 85% completion rate. It’s outstanding.

(00:51:58):

So, I really didn’t want to put it in the book, but then I got approached by the exact publisher I want to work with, and they asked me if I had some books on the go, and I go, “Okay, I could do this one because of the circumstances that are out there,” but it meant putting this into a nine-week format in a book, on written paper. So, now I sound like I’m talking people out of the book. No, my compromise with the publisher was there’s a QR code inside the book. You buy the book, it’s whatever, 20, 30 bucks, but there’s a QR code in there that’ll give you our $300 mixed multimedia program, so you can go through it properly with the multimedia experience, with the emotional engagement and so on. And so, that’s how the whole thing came about.

Ben Grynol (00:52:35):

Yeah, it’s great how you frame it too in the book, that people are no longer on a diet. A diet is a thing that you do for a point in time. Basically, your willingness to stick to it, your willpower to-

Eric Edmeades (00:52:46):

Hold on. There’s a very important distinction, and you’re right on track with, but I just want to offer you a tiny little distinction. Languages change, words change over time, they evolve, and some of that evolution is detrimental to meaning, and sometimes it makes things better.

(00:53:00):

But here’s the thing, if you and I are watching David Suzuki, you might remember David Suzuki doing nature programs on CBC or if we’re watching David Attenborough, if we’re watching the Big Cat Diaries, if we’re watching National Geographic, the guy comes on and he says, “Here we have Loxodonta africana, the African elephant. The African Elephant’s diet consists of eating 200 kilograms of seasonally available bark and fruits every single day and drinking about 70 liters of water. Over here, we have a cheetah hunting on the plains, and the cheetah’s diet consists of eating 2.5 kilograms of fresh meat every single day that it can. It will not eat animals that are already dead, lying on the grass.” The word diet in science means species specific way of life. It is only for humans and our pets that diet means temporary alteration to your eating pattern in order to fit into some outfit for a special occasion. It’s only for us. And what we also have in common with our pets is we are the sickest animals on Earth.

Ben Grynol (00:54:03):

It’s a great distinction because it’s the point in time that we think of when really the scientific meaning of it is nutrition, what is our nutritional intake. And in shifting that, where people cast a vote for themselves, they start to say, “This is who I am. This is the way that I consume food. This is my nutritional intake, and this is who I am.” As opposed to, “Okay, I’m going on a diet now,” because that feels difficult. It feels Sisyphean, it feels temporary, and it feels like something that you are using your willpower in every which way to stop if a person chooses to do this, to stop themselves from grabbing the Coca-Cola or the Snickers bar or the whatever it is.

(00:54:45):

And that can be difficult for some people, it can be easier for others, and there’s no right or wrong with it. It’s the mental model of saying, “What I consume from a nutritional standpoint is this. This is who I am because I want to feel viscerally physically better, I want to feel cognitively stronger, and I want to achieve longevity.” I don’t think anyone gets up in the morning and says, “You know what would be great is if I felt worse today.” No one does that. No one does that with their job. No one says-

Eric Edmeades (00:55:13):

What they do is they say that, “I want to feel better right now, with no consideration to the fact that my method of feeling better right now is going to make me feel worse.” And so, somebody who wakes up in the morning and says, “What would make me feel really great this morning is coffee and a donut.” Yeah, that will make you feel better in this moment, for a few moments, but it’s going to cause you to drag your ass an hour and a half later. And that’s a big part of the food psychology thing.

(00:55:44):

Consider that the average person will go on two diets a year through their adult lifetime, according to a big study. The average person will go on two diets a year and they will stick to each of those diets for somewhere between six and seven days. So, they’re spending roughly 12 to 14 days a year on a diet, and their self-esteem is being damaged and eroded every single time they do that because this is the one. I mean, their friends even tease them. They’re like, “Oh, you’re on another diet.” It’s like, “Oh, another diet you’re just going to fail.”

(00:56:10):

And a major part of the reason that people fail diets is that the diet industry is built on some just really terrible myths, like calories in, calories out. That’s the Enron accounting of the diet industry. It doesn’t work like that. Or that if you simply go to the gym or go for a run, you can outrun your calories. We know that not only is that not true, but it’s a myth that was bought and paid for by the soft drink industry to sell more calories.

(00:56:34):

So, the diet industry is based on incredibly flawed ideas, and then it’s based on incredibly flawed psychology. “Here are a bunch of rules. We want you to follow them stringently, and they involve the fact that you were probably already overstimulated on calories and malnourished and missing key nutrients, but what we’d like you to do is eat less than you did before, and so you were starving and now you’re really going to be starving. Plus, on top of that, you’re going to be emotionally starving because food has been the emotional crutch you’ve been using. We’re going to take that away from you as well. And then, when you cheat on your diet, we’re going to call you a cheater and we’re going to make you feel shame and guilt about the cheating you did.” And shame and guilt are incidentally perfectly good food triggers for carbohydrate foods, particularly the worst kind. And so, the cycle absolutely repeats.

(00:57:19):

One of our expressions, I think it’s in the book, but it’s a common expression of mine, is that people don’t fail diets, diets fail people.

Ben Grynol (00:57:26):

Yeah, it’s the demonization of, we saw it with big sugar and a lot of the propaganda that was put out around fat. My goodness, “Here are all the things that are causing heart disease, here are all the things that are causing metabolic dysfunction.” And this went on for decades and decades and it’s just starting to resurface. But the behavior is so similar to what we saw with big tobacco, where you would have doctors recommending, it’s mind-boggling to look back at a lot of these ads that would say, “My doctor recommends two packs of Camels a day or a week,” or whatever the propaganda was. And we would see this with sugar.

(00:58:05):

And so, people are highly influenced in the wrong direction, back to the whole beginning of the conversation around burning fuel sources, fat. And you talk about it in the book, fat is great when you consume the right fats, when you consume the right macronutrients to give you the fuel that your body needs when it is in a certain state of burning that as fuel. And it’s changing the perspective that fat is not necessarily a bad thing. Some fats are, but our body requires this as a fuel source when we consume the right ones.

Eric Edmeades (00:58:38):

Even sugar. I mean, sugar can be a good fuel source if it’s the good quality sugar and it’s eaten in some sort of cyclical pattern similar to our ancestral history. And not only is fat not, “Necessarily a bad thing,” it’s bloody vital. One of the most dangerous concepts that was foisted on first the American people in the world was the whole low fat myth. I mean, it’s one of the most dangerous things that’s ever been done to us, where you now have people that are afraid of one of the most important substances they could be eating. It’s terrifying.

Ben Grynol (00:59:10):

Glucose is literally the fuel of life. So, to your point with sugar, our brains take up a significant amount of the glucose that our body is consuming as fuel. We do need this as fuel. We need it from the right sources, that being back to the raspberry bush. It’s consuming the whole foods, consuming the right fuel. Not consuming, sugar is not consuming… Coca-Cola is not going to give you the same, and I don’t think this would be a statement that people would argue with, but it’s not going to give you the fuel that you need for your body to be well nourished.

(00:59:41):

So, it’s great though, having foundations like your book, having foundations like nine-week programs, having multimedia, having all of the conversation around what people can do and how they can make changes is exactly how we’re going to do it.

(00:59:52):

So, what’s the best place, where can people find you? Name of the book again, Postdiabetic. It just came out recently. Where’s the best place for people to find you in the courses?

Eric Edmeades (01:00:02):

Postdiabetic’s available Amazon, in Barnes & Noble bookstores around the world that you want to find it. If you are in a country where you can’t get access to it, you can go to postdiabetes.com and you can order from us directly. WILDFIT, people can find WILDFIT at getwildfit.com, and I highly recommend that for anybody who’s ever struggled to adhere to an eating program. We will definitely support you in making that change happen in as short as two weeks. Food psychology is incredibly complicated, but it’s really not that difficult to make the changes you want to make. And if anybody’s looking to contact me, they can go to www.eric.ee or just find me on Instagram. I manage my own account. I do the best I can to answer people who write.