With 15 years of professional experience in health and fitness, Michael Stanwyck probably finds maintaining a healthy lifestyle easy. Yet he admits he still struggles just like everyone else who gets tempted to eat a small piece of cookie or skip a workout for the day.
He also recalls how they struggled during the early days of creating a program for the CrossFit community. As self-improvement junkies, they combined what works in the self-improvement world and apply it to their community. That was the start of the Whole Life Challenge. It has helped participants not just with weight loss, but with their lifestyle and relationships.
In this episode, he explains the challenges of creating a program, how they came up with the Whole Life Challenge, and he even shares transformation stories that made a mark, an affirmation of the community they have built that continues to lift each other.
(For a limited time, the Whole Life Challenge offers a $10 discount for listeners of Stay Off My Operating Table. When you sign up, use discount code ifixhearts.)
Quick Guide
01:51 Introduction
09:55 The immediate feedback loop helps
11:27 How the Whole Life Challenge delivered results
24:09 Everyone struggles, the whole process takes time
28:19 The seven daily habits of the Whole Life Challenge
35:22 Its more than just weight loss
46:24 How to participate in the Whole Life Challenge
53:49 Closing and contact information
Get to know our guest
Michael Stanwyck has been involved with health and fitness since he was 18 years old. He is the co-founder of the Whole Life Challenge.
“ All of this stuff is, it's not just diet and exercise. It's being very intentional about listening to your body, what it needs, what your mental health is, your mental health is going to contribute your physical health. Your physical health is going to contribute your mental health.” - Michael Stanwyck
Connect with him
Twitter: https://twitter.com/wholelife
Website: https://www.wholelifechallenge.com/
Episode snippets
10:26 - 11:02 - Immediate and short-term consequences
13:59 - 14:56 - You are doing something you want to be doing
17:30 - 18:18 - Take incremental steps towards your goal
20:35 - 21:20 - Trading a point for a cookie bite
24:29 - 24:56 - Even someone who
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
With 15 years of professional experience in health and fitness, Michael Stanwyck probably finds maintaining a healthy lifestyle easy. Yet he admits he still struggles just like everyone else who gets tempted to eat a small piece of cookie or skip a workout for the day.
He also recalls how they struggled during the early days of creating a program for the CrossFit community. As self-improvement junkies, they combined what works in the self-improvement world and apply it to their community. That was the start of the Whole Life Challenge. It has helped participants not just with weight loss, but with their lifestyle and relationships.
In this episode, he explains the challenges of creating a program, how they came up with the Whole Life Challenge, and he even shares transformation stories that made a mark, an affirmation of the community they have built that continues to lift each other.
(For a limited time, the Whole Life Challenge offers a $10 discount for listeners of Stay Off My Operating Table. When you sign up, use discount code ifixhearts.)
Quick Guide
01:51 Introduction
09:55 The immediate feedback loop helps
11:27 How the Whole Life Challenge delivered results
24:09 Everyone struggles, the whole process takes time
28:19 The seven daily habits of the Whole Life Challenge
35:22 Its more than just weight loss
46:24 How to participate in the Whole Life Challenge
53:49 Closing and contact information
Get to know our guest
Michael Stanwyck has been involved with health and fitness since he was 18 years old. He is the co-founder of the Whole Life Challenge.
“ All of this stuff is, it's not just diet and exercise. It's being very intentional about listening to your body, what it needs, what your mental health is, your mental health is going to contribute your physical health. Your physical health is going to contribute your mental health.” - Michael Stanwyck
Connect with him
Twitter: https://twitter.com/wholelife
Website: https://www.wholelifechallenge.com/
Episode snippets
10:26 - 11:02 - Immediate and short-term consequences
13:59 - 14:56 - You are doing something you want to be doing
17:30 - 18:18 - Take incremental steps towards your goal
20:35 - 21:20 - Trading a point for a cookie bite
24:29 - 24:56 - Even someone who
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
Announcer 00:10
He was a morbidly obese surgeon destined for an operating table and an early death. Now he's a rebel MD who is fabulously fit and fighting to make America healthy again. This is Stay Off My Operating Table with Dr. Philip Ovadia.
Jack Heald 00:36
We're live. Hey everybody, it's the Stay Off My Operating Table podcast with Dr. Philip Ovadia. I'm the talking hairdo, Jack Heald. And we are joined today by a guy I have actually been in the same physical space with. And I can't say that about, I don't know that I've ever been physically in the same place with any of our previous guests, Phil. So Stanwyck and I went and did, with a bunch of other guys, went and did things that would get us in trouble.
Michael Stanwyck 01:10
I think you should probably qualify just to make sure we don't get into trouble.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 01:17
Everyone involved in that activity was fully clothed.
Jack Heald 01:23
We were all clothed. Yeah, we did the advanced handgun training workshop together with a bunch of other guys. Was it two days? Or was it three days?
Michael Stanwyck 01:35
Well, we did, well, I've done a two-day and a four-day. I don't know which, I don't know if you are both...
Jack Heald 01:40
It must have been the two-day that we did together. So anyway. But that has nothing to do with why we're here. Hey, Phil.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 01:46
How are you doing, Jack?
Jack Heald 01:47
Why we got this long-haired hippie on our show?
Dr. Philip Ovadia 01:51
You're talking about Michael, right, not yourself with that question, right? So, yeah, this should be a great episode, because the three of us actually kind of know each other in real life. But Michael has some great messaging and is doing some great work around the same shared goals as I which is getting people healthier. And I've been fortunate to know Michael for a couple of years now. And he’s, as I said, he's involved in the health and fitness space, has a little bit of a different spin on it, a unique perspective on it. And I think that would be something great to introduce to our audience. So, with that, I'm going to introduce Michael Stanwyck to our audience, and let him tell them a little bit about himself.
Michael Stanwyck 02:48
Hi, guys. Geez, if I had known it was going to be like this, I would have prepared a speech. So, my name is... Well, I didn’t know I was just gonna have to introduce myself. My name is Michael Stanwyck.
Michael Stanwyck 03:01
That's probably a bad idea. Michael Stanwyck. I have been involved in health and fitness now for about, I mean, as a profession for about 15 years. As a lifestyle, since I was probably around 18 years old. And now I'm 50. So, you can do the math on that. But I got involved in CrossFit in the early days, back in 2006. And that was kind of the wild west of the new age, I think of health and fitness. And that was really the beginning of turning, I think, the health and fitness world upside down. Up until then, bodybuilding was sort of the reigning model for how you got healthy in the gym. Low-fat dieting was the model for how you ate. And CrossFit came along as this little bit of an experimental laboratory of fitness. And through that, I got introduced to a whole bunch of different concepts, different kinds of dieting. We were probably among the first people to really adopt paleo, and then really get into keto. The CrossFit world. And then carnivore when that sort of started to emerge. But one of the things through all of this, and through my running of a CrossFit gym, I joined what was the officially the 11th CrossFit gym in the country. And we struggled with getting our clients to eat well. It was not hard; it was not hard to get them to work out. That was the fun part. People love to show up at the gym, they love to throw things around. They love to be doing something different from what everybody else was doing. But when it came to eating well, it was kind of hard to do something different from what everybody else was doing. And so, over the years we tried different models of coaching, different models of programs. And just by chance, CrossFit decided to put on a little bit of a seminar on nutrition and we traveled down, we were invited down because we were an early affiliate, and we checked it out as a two-day seminar. It was terrible. And me and my business partner, my boss at the time, Andy Petranek, we're lying in our hostel, we're staying in a youth hostel in San Diego. We're like this is a terrible seminar, but this is a really important thing to tackle. And so, we decided we were going to come up with our own thing like this was not going to be the answer, and none of our clients were going to ever do this. It was super boring. It was super intellectual and there was nothing actionable about it. So, we decided we were going to come up with this seminar this like 12-week seminar, and we're going to do it in person with people or we're going to really teach them what was going on in their body. And we were going to do blood testing. I mean, this was back in like 2010. Getting blood testing back in 2010 really took a lot of wheeling and dealing. I worked with a chiropractor who could write the script and a blood testing lab kind of cobbled it all together. We did a bunch of blood testing, we did a bunch of seminars, we did some one-on-one coaching. And after 12 weeks, it was a total flop. And that's not to say that people didn't see changes, they did. They saw huge, the people who stuck with it. So, a huge change in their diet, there's a huge change in their blood measurements, their A1C came down, all the things they wanted to see, but people just couldn't stick with it. I probably started with about 12 to 15 people in my gym, and I probably ended up with four and the four who stayed were like my good friends. And so, we realized it wasn't a model that was going to work. And I had and both Andy and I, my partner, Andy Petranek are pretty big self-improvement junkies, and always have been. And we became aware of all the things that worked in the self-improvement world, things like scoreboards are really big, things like community were really big. Community is really big in CrossFit. And so, we decided we're going to just mash all this stuff together and try something. And instead of telling people what they should do, we just said, this is what you'll lose points for, we created the Whole Life Challenge. And the Whole Life Challenge was this really simple model, you were going to take eight weeks, and every day you were going to be a viewer. You’re going to start with a batch of points and you couldn't lose them. And you could lose them based on the foods you ate, you can lose them based on what you didn't do. If you didn't exercise, if you didn't stretch, at the time fish oil was all the rage, fish oil was the was the fourth habit at the time. And it was a revolution in our gym, it completely changed the way people behaved. Because it kind of rather than just having the spotlight on them when they were in the gym, they had the spotlight on them when they were at home. Right, because everybody every day when they logged their score could see how well they sort of did the reps at their meals and how well they paid attention to what was important. And there were people who refused to lose points until I lost points and I wasn't going to lose a point. And so, after...
Jack Heald
That's really interesting.
Michael Stanwyck
Yeah, I had clients who were like, when are you going to lose a point so I can lose a point, please? And after eight weeks, I mean, we had people who achieved results they had never thought possible. I mean, people who lost 30 inches off their body total. We were measuring hips and waist and thighs and arms. We had people who
Jack Heald
In eight weeks?
Michael Stanwyck
In eight weeks, we had people who had to buy entirely new wardrobes. We had people bringing in their clothes that no longer fit, and we were hanging them from the ceiling of the gym. And at the end of the challenge, we just donated them all to charity. And what ended up happening was rather than being this kind of nanny position of being like you should do this, you should do that. Let me read your food diary, let me point out to you what you already know you did wrong. I just said, I don't care. I don't care what you do, it is totally up to you. You're a grown ass adult, you can do whatever you want to do. But in this game, these are the things that are going to cost you points. And if you know Cross Fitters points are very important. And so, it really changed the way they addressed things every time they made a choice. It wasn't like, oh, I'm just gonna have to talk to Michael about this in a week. And he's going to he's going to absolve me and he's going to give me penance. And I'm going to be fine for the next week. It was like no, if I do this, I have to tell everybody I did it. Everybody's gonna know. The other bonus to this was like it helped people
Jack Heald
You have this peer pressure thing happening.
Michael Stanwyck
You have this community, that peer pressure, but also it gave people a sense of these things have consequences. And mostly with your diet, might take five years, it might take 10 years, it might take 20 years before you see the real consequences. But this gives you a consequence today. Right and so people started to behave totally different.
Jack Heald
How nice.
Michael Stanwyck
Yeah. And so, we kind of, we thought Yeah, that was a cool thing. Let's do it again next year. Okay, bye...
Jack Heald 09:55
It’s more than feedback. It's immediate consequences.
Michael Stanwyck 10:00
So right, it's immediate, it's immediate consequence.
Jack Heald 10:02
You know what, Michael, I realized I'm not telling you anything you don't know, because you have children. But that's effective parenting is there are immediate consequences for behavior. I tell young parents, your job as a parent is to design consequences. That's almost job one.
Michael Stanwyck 10:26
Well, I think as consequences go, they say most people in this country don't read above a third-grade level, I think many people don't understand the concept of consequences of a third-grade level, right? It has to be immediate, it has to be right now, like with my four-year-old, consequences have to happen immediately. And they have to be short term. Like, if I take a toy away, he has to get it back tonight or tomorrow, otherwise, he forgets it existed. Right? So, this feedback loop has to be very short. Yeah, like three weeks from now, he’ll look at me and be like, why is my truck on top of the refrigerator? And he doesn't remember the whole the whole incident. But if you make that feedback loop super short, people start to change their behavior very, very rapidly.
Jack Heald 11:03
We could we literally could stop right now. Yeah, you have just heard everything you need to hear about how to make effective and fairly quick changes in your life.
Michael Stanwyck 11:19
Well, yeah, so we both...
Jack Heald 11:20
I don't want to drive you off the rails, but I don't know that I've ever heard it said more succinctly. It's just...
Michael Stanwyck 11:27
And that's why we built, so we built this platform, right? When we first did it, we didn't really have much of a platform. Our clients, we have clients who are programmers, like, yeah, we can do a scoreboard and a point system. And I linked it to a blog. And we linked it to a forum. So, we had an effective website. We did it again the next year. And we're like, hey it will be cool. Let people invite their friends and their family, not just gym members, right? And so, people brought their husbands, their wives, their cousins, their whatever. And we had them and they came to us and they said my brother who lives in Poughkeepsie, we were in Los Angeles, he who we've never met, who we’ve never talked to, I've never seen, I've never known, he got the results that he's been looking for 10 years by doing this. And so, we were like, this is interesting. Maybe we should try and like, make this bigger than the gym. And so, we built yet another website. And a year later, we launched it, and we allowed a select group of CrossFit gyms to register. And it was just immediate. 150 gyms, 8000 people they all wanted. So, they'd heard about it, they heard the results. They all wanted something like this. And from then on Andy and I were like, Okay, we should reconsider what we're doing with our lives. Right? Not that running across the gym was bad or unsatisfactory. But we were immediately having an effect on thousands of people that will again, we’d never meet, we'd never know. And we were sort of outsourcing it. We were replicating ourselves among their coaches. We were giving them the language to say to their people, we were letting, we were facilitating this kind of experience all over the country, and really actually all over the world. Because at this point, except for Antarctica, the Whole Life Challenge has been done on every continent. And maybe it's been done in Antarctica, I don't know.
Jack Heald 13:06
So, if you're listening to this, and you live in Antarctica, and have done the Whole Life Challenge, please contact Michael.
Michael Stanwyck 13:14
I would love to say all continents.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 13:17
If you want to plant a flag, you can just go there for eight weeks and do the challenge from there. Yeah.
Michael Stanwyck 13:22
I have a friend who actually just vacationed in Antarctica, which is really strange. I never even knew you could do that. But she just went to spend a couple of weeks in Antarctica. But yeah, so from there, we just kept rolling. We did it once a year. And then we did it twice a year. And then we did it three times a year. And then we had to, and then we shortened it, because eight weeks turned out to be a really long time. Everybody lost steam around six weeks. So, we're like, okay, how do we have more people succeed at this, let's just make it six weeks as people are getting the results. It's diminishing returns, I want people to feel successful. I want them to finish. We shorten it to six weeks. And now we do it four times a year. So, it's six weeks on six weeks off. And we have had people who since we started have done the challenge 25, 30 times. They just keep coming back and doing it every six weeks. Like it's a tune up. Like it's a practice. Like it's, because if you think about it, you're not doing something you don't want to be doing. You're doing something you want to be doing. I want to be paying attention to the food that I put in my mouth. I want to make sure I'm accountable for working out, for stretching, for getting a good night's sleep. I mean, we were among I think the first people I was aware of, to incorporate to say, all of it matters. Your sleep matters. Your well-being matters, meditation matters, practice matters, rest matters. All of this stuff is, it's not just diet and exercise. It's being very intentional about listening to your body, what it needs, what your mental health is, your mental health is going to contribute your physical health. Your physical health is going to contribute your mental health and to incorporate all of this into the game and we really made it a game. We built a website that rewards you, it gives you badges, it gives you, you can have streaks when you play, you can win bonuses. And that I think was the really interesting thing, we started to give people bonuses. We’re like, if you are consistent in the nutrition category, give you a bonus and you can use it. If you want to go out on the weekend and have a glass of wine, go to somebody's birthday party and celebrate with them. It's not going to cost you because you have in a sense, you have maintained that kind of at least 80-20 approach, 85-15 things, and you can use it and it doesn't cost you credits. Yeah, it doesn't cost you. It's not counted against you, because we're very realistic about what people's long-term kind of view of their life is gonna be. I'm not going to be 100%, I mean, there are going people who are going to be 100% carnivore forever. They're few and far between. Some people want to, they want to do it, they want 80-20, they want to be 90-10, something like that. And they want to have a sense of when I am actually living in what people call moderation, right? Cuz everyone says moderation, what they usually mean is I get to drink whenever I want. Right? And what moderation really comes down to is like having a sense of where your edges are. And knowing what that middle path is, knowing what throws you off. And that's what the Whole Life Challenge is all about. It’s about paying close attention for six weeks, to what does you good, what improves your life, what you can sustain. Because most people, the funny thing was, when we started, we had very close contact with our clients who were doing the challenge. And there were people who insisted on being perfect, right? They did a hot CrossFit workout seven days a week, right? No, no, no, that's not the point. The point is, you're active seven days a week, right. So, you can take a day off, but just make sure you get outside and take a walk or ride your bike to the beach or something like that. You don’t have to be, you don't have to turn it up to 11 seven days a week, you want to pay attention to what your body needs. But you also want to understand that your body needs to move. And so, you get to design, this is what exercise is for me today. And if I do that, check. This is what sleep, when we introduced sleep, we finally said how do we do sleep because not everybody can get eight hours of sleep at night. Right? If they're night shift people, if they only get six hours, we just said okay, what would be an improvement for you? Six and a half, 6 hours and 20? You commit to that improvement, and you do that check, you're done. Right. So, this is really a program of taking incremental steps towards an end goal. If you did the Whole Life Challenge for a year, and took incremental steps every time you did it, you would end up somewhere sort of unrecognizable to you. But something that you would ultimately be able to sustain. It would be your life. It wouldn't be the sort of what do you do on day 76 of 75 hard, right, you have burned yourself out after two and a half months, and you can't do it all and you don't know which parts to do and which parts not to do and what is okay. It's just a mess. So, we're all about that incremental movement towards an ultimate goal. And for some people, it takes a year, some people it takes two years, but all along the path you're becoming a different person.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 18:19
So, let's kind of tie that back, I want to go back to sort of the Genesis story here. You have a bunch of people doing CrossFit, and anyone who has ever walked into a CrossFit gym know that it's not something you do by accident, and it's really pushing the limits of what most people would consider like a normal activity to do. There are some crazy things that go on in CrossFit gyms, and yet, you had a bunch of these people doing these crazy activities, doing extreme levels of activity, and they weren't successful in other parts of their life, they weren't eating well, essentially, or they weren't paying attention to their diet. What was going on there? Was it that they kind of figured that I'm doing these crazy activities, so I can pretty much eat whatever I want?
Michael Stanwyck 19:17
That’s probably part of it. I mean, the reality is, they're just, they're still people, right? They're still human beings. And I think as human beings, that's probably something to the effect of, I am doing all of this really hard work five, six days a week. So that means I could afford to all this other stuff. But there was no kind of, let's say intentionality about it. Right now, you can't go out every weekend and have 12 drinks, right? No amount of CrossFit is going to balance out all that because that alcohol is not just calories. I mean, it's a nuclear bomb to your system. So, I think there was a lot of, I've earned this. This is why I do this. But I think most of it is just consistency. Right. And this is something that I did discover when I was working with people on their food journals. I remember one time I was working with this woman, and she would bring me her food journal, and we'd go through it and, and by and large, she was on track, right. And her meals were good, what she was making for herself was the right thing, but then she'd be like get a bite of a cookie. Oh, I made cookies for my kids after school. And I had some, and then it'd be like a handful of m&ms, oh, I was at the whatever, this office, and I just grabbed this. And there were so many little areas where I was like you might as well just have a dessert a day, right? Because when you add all this stuff up, all of this stuff that you're writing off as just a bite, just a nibble, just a little bit here and there actually adds up to quite a bit. And the problem is, you're not aware of it. Right? Because it's so small, you're not aware that it's actually adding up to anything. And most of the time when people don't keep food journals, they even forget that they did those things. Yeah. So, the consistency element was what really got introduced, like people started to reach for something. And then they would, is this worth a point? And that sort of became that actually became a little bit mantra. Would I give up a point for this? Would I trade a point for this? And that's something, that is like a sort of a heuristic or a little model that people use for themselves after the challenge was over. They would, would I trade a point for this? Would this be worth it?
Jack Heald
Would this be worth a point?
Michael Stanwyck
Right? Or is it just sort of, is it just an impulse? Because nobody's as consistent as they think they are. Nobody's as aware as they think they are. Nobody has the willpower that they think they do. And a lot of people are really capable of bullshitting themselves, quite honestly. Right. Like, even if they're very regimented, and they cook all of their meals on Sunday, and they box them up for themselves. And they kind of eat through that all week long. They still can go out and do things that they just don't even allow themselves to remember that they did, right? Because they justified it at the time. They said I do all this. So, I'm going to do that. And when somebody asked them if they ever eat crap, eat like crap, or you should if, they just say no. They just because in their mind, they do well enough where they don't have to pay attention to the times they don't eat, they eat shitty food. And I want to be really clear. I'm perfectly okay with shitty food. Right? Like, I'm a bit of a I'm a bit of a desert junkie. But a practice like this, and I've been doing this now for over 10 years, has made me much more conscientious about it. I mean, I've been known to eat all of the dessert at a wedding. And when I say all the dessert, I mean everybody else's. I was at a wedding one year and they were serving churros as the dessert. And everyone had an old show and they went to the dance and they made a bunch of churros and they put them on cups all over the room. And I was like nobody's here and I ate all the churros in the room. And everybody came back and they were like, where are the churros? And I was like, I told my wife, I was like I ate all churros. And I wouldn't do that today, the practice has actually led me to really sit.
Jack Heald 23:18
And the narrator says Michael was never invited to a wedding again.
Michael Stanwyck 23:22
One of the examples I give, so I work with a couple of people in spawn small group setting out of the Whole Life Challenge. And one of the stories I like to tell them is and because I think this is so important, this is everyday shit. Every day, every time you go to the supermarket, you walk through that checkout line, and what's right there is just as candy. Right, it's the last thing you see. And nice to walk through and one of my favorite things in the row is a Snickers bar, I'd walk through and I'd be like, yeah, Snickers bar, come on, buy, eat it. And then a little later, I was like, I think about it and I go, okay, what's the week been like? Can I have a Snickers bar? Yeah, it's been pretty good. Okay, Snickers bar. And I buy it and I eat it. And I got to the point where I'd look at the Snickers bar. And I don't need it. I don't need it. And I just, I can't remember the last time I bought a Snickers bar.
Jack Heald 24:09
I gotta tell you, this is so helpful to have somebody who's basically been fit his whole life. Based on your story, maybe you're lying, I don't know. But to have somebody who's basically been fit his whole life talk about this progression.
Michael Stanwyck 24:29
It's just it's a struggle for everybody like I said, we're all human beings. Another individual I was working with, I write a weekly email and I and I wrote something about one of the struggles I have with being consistent with workouts especially when it gets colder outside and we were speaking at one of his, we're talking one of his one on one sessions, and he said that email, because I don't know if you're channeling me, but like, he spoke to me. I said, bro, I wasn't channeling you. I'm exactly like you. Yeah, I just have more practice. This is just something that I've been doing for longer than you. And again, as I walked by that Snickers bar, I see it, I know how much I like it, but it just doesn't have any power over me anymore, I can walk away. And there's no regret, I don't think about ah, I should have had, I just have this one. It just, it's over. It's over. And so, I think the Whole Life Challenge is really built around this idea that you can't just have all of this tomorrow. Many people have spent 20 or 30 years building the crappy lifestyle that they have today, they're not going to undo it in six weeks, they may make a significant dent in it in a year. But if you try and undo it in six weeks, if you try and change everything about your life in six weeks, it's going to be so far from your baseline, it's going to be really hard, if not impossible, for you to maintain for a long period of time. I think it's really important for people to understand that this is a process and it takes time. And I'm not, yes, I have been a healthy and fit person since I was a teenager. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that's when I started working out. That's when I started paying attention to my nutrition and I have now for 30 years. But that means I have 30 years of practice. That means I have 30 years of experimenting, knowing what works for me knowing what doesn't work for me. It doesn't mean that you should look at me and go, well, look at you, you've always been fit. So, it's not hard for you.
Jack Heald 26:31
There we go. The “it's not hard for you” excuse. I love that.
Michael Stanwyck 26:41
But it is. I struggle with the same kind of breakdowns around not wanting to go to the gym, wanting to just eat a shitty meal. I cooked dinner for my family every night. And sometimes I'm like you know what, I just wish I could just throw a pot of spaghetti on and pour on a jar of Ragu because making a good meal. I mean, it doesn't have to take forever, but I'm in the kitchen for 30, 45 minutes or an hour to put a good meal on the table. I sometimes I just want to go get pizza and a burger.
Jack Heald 27:12
Just call Papa John's.
Michael Stanwyck 27:14
And you know what, I'm not gonna lie, sometimes I do. But it's so infrequent. Like maybe we order pizza three times a year. And the thing I'm most proud of is that that's how my kids are growing up. They don't grow up with the idea that pizza is a meal. If I give my kids anything besides meat and vegetables and maybe rice, potatoes, fruit, they just, they go, I mean, my son has gotten to the point he says, this is crap food.
Jack Heald 27:45
How old is the use for?
Michael Stanwyck
He’s four.
Jack Heald
Oh, I love it. Use for
Michael Stanwyck 27:49
He’s four. I mean, he knows the things that his friends bring to school for lunch is crap food, is not real food. And that to me is the most exciting result of all of this, it's like the concept of my kids have that food that real food is real food.
Jack Heald 28:07
Ah I say this a lot, Phil. But God, this is my favorite. This is my favorite interview.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 28:19
Your favorite one this week? Yeah, I know, they just keep getting better and better. And I think all these ideas feed into each other. And let's talk a little bit more about because you mentioned some of the areas that that are scored, let's say or tracked in the challenge, your activity, and your food and your sleep. But what are some of the other areas that you looked at that’s another unique thing about the challenge.
Michael Stanwyck 28:51
So, it's called, we call it the seven daily habits. And as far as I'm concerned, aside from esoteric stuff that people like to get into, it really covers every bucket, right? So, we have nutrition, exercise, mobility, sleep, hydration, well-being and reflection. And so, when we talk about nutrition, we don't have a hard prescription, we have three recommended kind of levels for nutrition. We call one performance, basically paleo. One is lifestyle, which is just a little bit more, I don't want to call it Mediterranean because not specifically Mediterranean but it has a lot of the elements that people might recognize from Mediterranean, people can have grains and they can have cheese and they can have milk and stuff like that. And then we have what's called kickstart, and that's just like, don't eat seed oils. Don't eat sugar, don't eat processed food, stop drinking alcohol or beer, and don't eat fried food. Like it's very basic. It's trying to help people who are who are nowhere close to being able to adapt something like a paleo lifestyle, but if you have a diet that you want to be held accountable for, that's what you can use. Right? This is about facilitating something for you, we provide these levels for people who just don't know where to start, and they don't have a model for themselves. But if you have your own, you bring it. This is about accountability. And then exercise, you are required to exercise for at least 10 minutes a day. Now, the genesis of that was we wanted you to exercise every day. And if you didn't exercise, we wanted you to at least do some active recovery for at least 10 minutes a day. Right. So that meant doing a little bit of yoga, riding your bike, going for a walk or something like that. Most people by and large, don't just say, okay, exercise, 10 minutes, I'm good to go. But what it allows for is for people to make space even when they don't have it, right. So, if today is super busy, and I know I'm not going to get to the gym, I don't write it off, because if I just stand up at my desk, and for 10 minutes, I do some squats, push-ups, I do whatever or if I go out for a walk for 10 minutes, I can say I made the space in my life for exercise today and I get to maintain the consistency. And I get to keep that as a sort of an awareness in my life. And then you have mobility, which is you probably know at this point is more than just stretching, it's the health of your joints, it’s strength through range of motion, but a practice of mobility 10 minutes every day. Sleep, which is a kind of like I said it's kind of a choose your own adventure, how much sleep do you want to get? How much sleep would be an improvement over what you're getting now? Give yourself something to stretch for but make it something that you can probably get every night of the challenge, right, like as most people's, most people have a have a practice around sleep, which involves, like BS-ing around bedtime. Right like a little bit of scrolling, a little bit of this, watching one episode too many on TV, most people struggle is not that they're shift workers or that they have kids or something like that. So, if you can make an extra 20 minutes work for bedtime, do that because I want you to be successful every night. Then we have a hydration requirement. And hydration is tough, because we all know like the whole eight glasses a day of water is kind of a BS sort of model for hydration. But we do want to give people the practice of paying attention to when they're thirsty. So, we just say take your body weight, take a third of that, right. So, I'm 180 at 60, 60 ounces is my minimum requirement. It's not that much water, it's not going to be too much water for people that you know where they're going to be up all-night pissing, but unless you forget about it and drink it right before bed. But it is going to give people the idea that maybe you should just have water instead of soda. Maybe you should have a glass of water with your meal, or something like that. And so that's hydration. And then well-being practices. Well-being practices is kind of a spectrum, we have well-being... So, if again, if somebody has a practice for their personal well-being whether it's journaling, or meditation or something like that, bring that to the challenge that can be what you're held, I want to do that make sure I do that every day. So, you can be held accountable for that every day, if you don't, we introduce a new wellbeing practice every week. And if you like it, the first one, you can keep it the whole challenge. If you don't, if you want to just experience all six, you can do a new one every week. And they range everything from sort of like the inner work, which might be meditation or journaling. There are things, there are practices that encourage you to connect with the members of your community. There are practices that are just about cleaning up your environment, whether it's your mental environment, your physical environment. We have definitely had practices around electronics and social media. So, you might have a week of disconnecting from social media, but you might just have a week of like, what we call, what we actually will start the new year's challenge with it's just the digital sundown, right, like two hours, three hours before bed, you're off your phone. You don't turn it on until 730 in the morning. So, we're not saying you can't be on social media. We're not saying we hate social media; we're not saying we think your phone is all evil. But we want to give you the ability to draw boundary lines. And so, we introduce these practices to you every week, and allow people to experiment with these different practices' week by week. And then the final practice is reflection, because we want to give people and the reflection actually came from one of our participants. After the second challenge we did where we let people bring their friends in, I was talking to the friend of a friend. We didn't have reflection yet. And he said I just love that each day, I get to sit down and reflect on how well my day went. And I was like that's a really good point. And it's not just I reflect by checking off boxes. It's like I actually get to have a conversation with myself about how well it went for me. Like did I do everything I wanted to do? Did I kind of cut corners a little bit? And so, we added the habit of reflection, which is just a moment. It's like 25 characters minimum. And you just get to say something about how your day went. Did you do what you said you were gonna do? Did you want to do more? What's your plan for tomorrow? Celebrate your successes, anything that you want to do, but we make constant reflection, a part of like, just tying the day. Closing the day off. You did the habits. You said something about it, you put it to bed, you start fresh tomorrow. Those are the seven daily habits in the Whole Life Challenge.
Jack Heald 35:22
Tell us some of your favorite success stories. I mean, losing 30 inches in eight weeks is pretty astonishing.
Michael Stanwyck 35:31
I have a story that happened very early on, we had a supporter very early on to the challenge. He was a local guy. And he had been a personal training client of Andy's again, my ex-boss, my business partner. And he's kind of a big old muckety muck. Now, he had a small company back then, but he's gone on to work for Beats by Dre and Apple. And now he were I think he works for Louis Vuitton, Nihlus in Paris. But he was a big fitness guy, but he loved the model of the Whole Life Challenge. And he invited his daughter at that time, I can't remember she was in high school or college, she might have been college since she was away, to do it with him. And I guess they had had some, have some trouble connecting since she moved away, or since she'd become an adult. And they did the Whole Life Challenge together. And it completely changed the way they connected. And he contacted us afterwards, he says, like I got my daughter, I have my daughter now in a way that I never did before. Because we got to do something together that was so important, and so positive, where we got to support each other, and we got to change our lives for the better together. And now our relationship is entirely different. And then he got his father to do it. And after that challenge, he was like, guys, you guys added five years to my dad's life. Right. And so, through the course of inviting his family members to do the challenge with him, he got an entirely new family. Right, he had a new relationship with his daughter, he had his father for more time than he ever thought he was going to happen. And this is what I think the most important thing about the community aspect of the Whole Life Challenge really is, is how often do people say I'm going to go on a diet, I'm going to change my life, and yet the people around them are not. Right. And so, they all go out together. And this person is trying to like, they're trying to order something healthy on the menu, and everyone's kind of given them a hard time be like, come on, bro, just have this, just have that. This allows you to like to create community around this. And so not only do you, like recruit people who want to have the same kind of success you do, and therefore you're in the same boat. And you're finding ways to socialize in new ways during the challenge. But when it's over, right, you're not just like walking back into this group of people who haven't changed. You're walking along further along with a group of people who have changed just like you. We had a group of young guys, 4 friends, just dudes, right? Like 20-something dudes, drinkers, pizza eaters, everything, right. And they did the challenge together. And they started to reshape what they did socially. On Friday nights, they no longer got pizza together, they did something else, because pizza wasn't compliant on the challenge that started to open up their eyes to new possibilities for young men in their lives. And when they were done, the four of them had like collectively lost like 140 pounds or something like that. We made a joke that it was as though they had lost a team member over the course of the challenge. Because that was like the size of one of them.
Jack Heald
We lost an entire person.
Michael Stanwyck
We lost an entire person. So, like my favorite stories have to do with not just that people lost weight. It's that like how they did it and how they learned to address this kind of, this important issue in their life changed the way they live their life. There was a woman who wrote me an email, I remember this is the first time I think I was really affected. And I couldn't have said why at the end the moment. She wrote me an email and she said, I get up. This is so Jordan Peterson. I get up every day and I make my bed now. And what that said to me was I don't wake up hating my life anymore. I wake up with positive energy. I wake up like what I'm going to do today is going to make a difference. I wake up and I change, I act in my environment at the moment I opened my eyes. And so those I mean, of course, I love hearing stories from people like I started this this challenge on five medications. And now I'm on one. And you know my favorite stories are like, my doctor says, I don't know what you're doing, but keep doing it. Now, like do you want to know? Do you want to know what they're doing? Like as I tell you, like, it's so often just like, I don't know what it is. Don't tell me. I don't have time for it. But you keep doing it. So, I do like just the new lease on life that people experience when they go through these kinds of transformations.
Jack Heald 40:09
Phil, can I can I put you on the spot a little bit? As someone who dealt with all of the challenges, not just physical, but mental, social, psychological involved in being obese, and has put that behind you, I'd love to hear you reflect on the areas that aren't physical, how your life has changed, as a result of getting that under control? In light of what Michael, just all of this that he just described.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 40:51
Right, and this is I think maybe those end up being the more important part of this journey and whether doing it through the challenge, or just the way that I talk to my patients and my clients these days, is it really, if that part of it doesn't take hold, the rest of it isn't going to matter because you're not going to stick to the diet, you're not going to continue the exercise. You're not going to keep optimizing your sleep or any of that, if you don't have the mindset right. And this is why it's when I look at the sort of the areas of the challenge, and I look at the principles of metabolic health that I lay out in the book, and we see how those all overlap, and the concept that I talked about of thinking of your health as a system, not as a goal, and this is exactly it. You're developing that system for health, it's really not about the six weeks that you're doing the challenge, it's about what is that setting you up for the rest of your life. And for me personally, it's exactly that. I realize that I never identified as a healthy person. It wasn't important to me to be a healthy person when I was unhealthy. I was a heart surgeon, and I was helping other people and this and that, but I wasn't identifying myself as a healthy person. And now I do. It is part of my identity. And that's why seven years later on my journey, I'm still here, and I'm still doing the things and like I said, maybe whether it's the diet you want to talk about, the activity, the stress management, the sleep, all of these areas, they all start with you identifying that as an important part of your life. And what Michael said about the lady who said, I get up every morning, and I make my bed, why is that important? Does making your bed make you healthier? No, of course not, it doesn't. But what that means to yourself, that you're paying attention to your life to the point that you make sure you make your bed every morning is very much relates to your health.
Michael Stanwyck 43:25
And the fact that she knew it, right, because that's what she told me, right? That's the one thing that she told me was I make my bed every day. So, like, she obviously was aware that that was a very important, like, benchmark. Like it was a bellwether of like something, something important is happening in my life. I'm taking care of myself in ways that I wasn't before. And I think while you and I, we have the same goal - metabolic health, right? And it's always, it's interesting, because you have an approach to it. That's, I think, as a doctor, it's very appropriate, right? The blood measurements are very important. And the markers of metabolic health are very important. And we actually for a period of time, we had all of that in our system, right? You could track all of these blood measurements, you could track your weight, you can track... Right now, we do give people the ability to track some measurements, your weight, or your body fat percentage, or some girth measurements and a workout. But we added all these tears of analysis that you could do with all the blood testing. And the reality is, it was overwhelming for people to do on their own. Most people didn't do it. And I think what we realize is just we have a different role to play. And it's not that those numbers aren't important, but what you'll hear people talk about when it comes to their experience with the challenge is it's in the area like you said, with mindset, but it has so much to do with I have more compassion for myself now. Right? Because developing compassion for yourself means like, I know that I'm going to stumble sometimes I know that I'm going to let myself down. I know that I'm not going to meet my expectations, but I also know that I'm a human being, and I deserve to have compassion for myself. And so, when people can learn that, they can take this journey and not worry so much about what happens if next month doesn't turn out the way that we wanted it to turn out? I just I have compassion for myself. And that I remember a woman I saw on Twitter once and she had this just fantastic transformation, right? Like she went from very overweight to this, just this really healthy, vibrant, bright woman. And she had made this comment about who knew that self-loathing could lead to self-love and she talked about how she how she bullied herself into her current state and like, and so I came back, I just wanted to challenge her, I said, look, here's the thing, you didn't loath yourself. You just weren't willing to admit that you loved yourself. But you did. Because you wouldn't have been able to do this for somebody you didn't love. You just wouldn't have been able to do it if you didn't think you deserved it.
Jack Heald
That’s so powerful.
Michael Stanwyck
And so, I think the sooner people, like get in touch with that, that love for themselves, the compassion for themselves, that they're worth doing the work for. They have an entirely new outlook, and they're willing to have patience and they're willing to take the time that it takes.
Jack Heald 46:24
We are well past the point in this conversation where people want to know, what do I do next? I'm not saying we got to stop talking. But there are people listening right now what go, Okay, what do I do? How do I What's the next step? So, give us that.
Michael Stanwyck 46:45
So, like I said, we do a challenge four times a year, we do have one for the New Year's, the magic thing about is doesn't start until January 21. Right, we don't start January 1st because people just aren't ready yet. Plus, we like three weeks into the New Years, because then people start to go, oh, I think I need a little help with this. Right? I think I need a little help backup on this resolution that I made. WholeLifeChallenge.com If you go to Whole Life Challenge.com, you can sign up to play with us in our new year's challenge. It's six weeks. But if you sign up now, you can actually explore the platform, you can start with the accountability today, if you want it to, right. You can access, we have, the challenge is live between platform between... I'm sorry, the platform is live between challenges. So, we do have annual subscribers, right, in between challenges, they're free to continue to use the platform, hold themselves accountable for the habits that they want to be accountable for during the challenge, alright, because we call the challenge of the Whole Life Challenge. So, it is six weeks of addressing your whole life. Between the challenge, you might say, look, I've kind of got sleep down, I don't really need to drive that one home every day. But I still do struggle with my nutrition and this wellbeing practice, I'm gonna hold myself accountable for that year-round, and they can continue coming in. We've just actually launched a new part of the platform called groups. So, we used to have what we call teams. You started the challenge, you came in with your team, you did it with a challenge. When the challenge is over, that team just disappeared. And if you wanted to do it again, you came back and you've really brought those people back together again. What we realized how impractical that was for people who were doing the challenge over and over again and for people who were in there between challenges. And so, we expanded it to groups. So, people can have this more social experience between challenges, the groups will exist when the challenge isn't going on. If you form one of your family and friends, it will be here when you come back in the spring, in the summer, in the fall. But the platform is really there for you year-round now.
Jack Heald 48:48
I’m sharing, for those of you who are listening, you're not seeing this, but I just did a quick share of the homepage of the Whole Life Challenge. Cool. You answered a question that came to mind. I've got this group of guys I get together with every week. And I would love to have, I mean there's sometimes there's 10. Sometimes there's 12. Sometimes there's 16 of us, but I would love to have the thing that we could all do for six straight weeks together. And I'm gonna pitch it to him.
Michael Stanwyck 49:27
Yeah, and you get your own little, you start your own little private group, nobody else is in it. Right. You can be in there, you get your own private communication feed, you'll see what your buddies are saying in their reflections. Right? So, they make the reflection and it posts in the communication feeds. You know how the challenge is going for them. And if you do the challenge, and you don't have anybody who wants to do it with you, there are always groups of people who are like this group is for everyone, right? Like and there's groups that are like 50 and over, that's what this group is about. We have a couple of people who have been leading groups in the challenge, I mean for years, so they're very experienced and helping people who have never done it before get the support that they need if they're there alone. So, you can get in there and find those public groups and get the support that you want from just a really fantastic group of people who are up to the same thing you are, even if you just can't either get people to do it with you, or if you're just not quite ready to invite people to do it yet. Because that can be a very challenging thing for someone is to say, I'm going to ask somebody to do this with me. What often happens is they do it. Everything changes, and somebody says to them, what the hell did you do? And they say, I did this thing called the Whole Life Challenge. They say, can I, do it? They say, do it with me next time. And then that's sort of how, your success is on sort of a natural invitation. So, if you don't know how to make that invitation now, do it by yourself. There's plenty of people in the platform who are willing to support you and give you everything that you need. We provide tons of resources, I do videos every day of the challenge to set context for people, we have meal plans, we have exercise plans if you need them, we have tons of articles, I mean, so we really, really give you everything that you might need to change how you approach these things to change how you see them to set your mindset differently.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 51:22
What have you noticed, I guess, are the predictors of success longer term beyond the six weeks? What do you find people do or don't do during the six weeks that then really predicts how they're going to do long term?
Michael Stanwyck 51:39
So, there's two things that I think really lead to success. One is dealing with other people, right, like doing this by yourself does not have the same impact as doing this with other people. And I think a lot of people think, oh, yeah, it's just the things, I'm just going to do the things for six weeks, but it's that engagement with other people, especially if they are people, you care about, right. Like I said, you can do it in the platform with people who will support you. But if you are doing this challenge with people who you care about, and you're close to, right. Your family, your coworkers, people like that, it will change the environment when the challenge is over. And it will just, it just allows the continuation of the practice. I'm not saying it's going to be perfect when the challenge is over. But we do corporate wellness, and we've seen offices completely changed their break room, right, the junk goes and what the office now provides their employees is healthier food. So, doing it with a group of people who's sort of in your immediate environment, and matters to you, that is the number one predictor of success. I would say the other predictor of success is to not try and make this about being perfect. Right? Like and what I, I try and tell people, you don't have to be perfect to be perfect, right. And what I mean is, I want you to get a perfect score every day. Right? Like, I want you to be able to check off those things every day. But I also want you to be willing to sort of be flexible everyday so that if you know an hour-long CrossFit workout is not in the cards for you today, you do something that's appropriate for you today, like if you're exhausted, if you didn't sleep, I don't want you to go to the, I'd rather you sleep than go to the gym. So, if you're going to forego the gym today for sleep, I want you to find 10 minutes after dinner to go for a walk. Right. So, I want you to get that perfect score and realize you do not have to be perfect to be perfect. And so, the trick really is in the, I've had people do the challenge 3, 4, 5 times before that finally clicked. Right? The challenge would exhaust them. And I'm like, Guys, this is not the point. The point is not to exhaust yourself during the challenge. The point is you come out better than when you started. And it would take them finally, four or five challenges they go, I gotta do this differently. I said you think? And so, taking the habits seriously, and seriously enough so that you learn to be flexible inside of them, I think is really what is going to make you the most successful because what you want ultimately out of this is to build those habits. Did I pay attention to my body today? Did I eat the things today that are going to do more harm than good? Am I setting myself up to get a good night's sleep? Do I have a practice that helps me relieve stress? And some days it might just be like I close my eyes for two minutes at my desk and I breathe, right? It doesn't have to be a 20-minute meditation if that's not in the cards, right? So, you don't have to be perfect to be perfect.
Jack Heald 54:39
I would love to do a follow up interview where we talk about Michael Stanwyck, the psychology, what happens inside your mind, inside your thoughts, inside your heart over your lifetime that’s brought you here because I hear a lot of, most of what we hear on this show. And this is not a criticism at all, because it's our show, I love it. But most of what we hear is knowledge, knowledge that people lack that people need. But what I'm hearing here is something far more valuable. I'm hearing wisdom. And I know wisdom comes at a great price, a much higher price than knowledge comes out. So, I commend you, man.
Michael Stanwyck 55:36
I appreciate that. I mean, like I said it's, it's been a long journey. I've had a sort of a bit of a storied background. My life, like I said, it's been a lot of personal development in different areas. I did a program on spiritual psychology; I've done a lot of just very strict personal development work. I have a degree in philosophy. I was a trained chef. I was an actor for a period of time. I was a provider to medical dispensaries of pain relief substitutes. I've learned I've just learned a lot.
Jack Heald 56:20
He grew weed, folks.
Michael Stanwyck 56:22
I did but legitimately like when I when I did it, we were providing for the sort of the burgeoning medical dispensary business that did not have what it needed to get people what they needed. So, I've done quite a bit, and I've seen a lot of myself. And I think what this really comes from is having dug deep into myself, because like I said, I don't read your mind, I'm just like you. And I have looked more deeply into myself. And I think many people look, look into themselves, and I and I'll share what I learned, and sort of then invite people to do the same thing in themselves.
Jack Heald 57:04
This will be a different show, but I want to have it, I want to do it. Phil?
Michael Stanwyck 57:11
I’m happy to go back.
Jack Heald 57:14
Dude, I'm so glad we did this.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 57:17
Yeah. Another great discussion. And again, great program, the Whole Life Challenge, and I certainly recommend everyone go check it out. And I think it gives us all a great framework for life improvement. One of the things, one of the other comments I'll make is that we think of the health as sort of somehow a separate part of our life. You're losing weight, or you're improving your heart health, or you're reversing your diabetes, whatever it might be from a health standpoint, and we sometimes fail to recognize that this is really overall life improvement. And I think that's what Michael has done so well with the Whole Life Challenge, because it really is about your whole life. And you're not isolating out these aspects of it, you really want to get your whole life.
Michael Stanwyck 58:20
Yeah, one of our mottos very early on was don't try and put the Whole Life Challenge into your life. Right? Like, don't try to put an extra thing into your life, put your life into the Whole Life Challenge, right? So, like, what you want to do is not try and fit another three hours into your day, what you want to do is change how you look at the opportunities you have in your day, right? You're going to eat anyway. How are you going to approach that differently? Put your life into health and fitness, don't try and put health and fitness into your life, not more things. Put your life into this new context. And you'll just, you'll see the opportunities. I mean, as trite as it seems, you'll take the stairs instead of the elevator, you'll walk instead of drive when you can, you'll skip the handful of m&ms at the dentist's office. You'll start to see a new like, it's like seeing through the matrix, right? You just start to see opportunities that were always there, but you are blind to them.
Jack Heald 59:22
Okay, so if people want to stalk you on social media, is that an option that's available to them?
Michael Stanwyck 59:28
I don't recommend it. I am not super active on social media. I would say that was one of my challenges because I don't have a very like a very strong you must do this message. So, I always struggle with social media but I am on I am @WholeLife on Twitter. And that's probably the best place to find me. My Instagram is just sort of a private friends and family thing and I haven't been on Facebook for years. So, if you want to hear what I have to say on the most regular basis possible @WholeLife on Twitter is where is where I talk most often.
Jack Heald 1:00:00
@WholeLife on Twitter. All right? Well, God, I just, this is my literally, these are always the highlight of my week, Phil. I just love that I get to do this. But I guess we're done, at least for now. Christmas is in two days, y'all are going to be listening to this about the time the Whole Life Challenge starts. I wonder if we ought to try to scoot this one up so that people have more time to what did you say? January 21st?
Michael Stanwyck 1:00:31
January 21st. And I would say if you want time that’s just right, like 10 days before January 21, because too early, people will just forget about it. Too soon, too close to it, and they'll go, I'll do the next one. I don't have time. So, you give them 10 days, 10 to 14 days, and they go, oh I can do that and I can get ready, I can ask my this and my that.
Jack Heald 1:00:50
So, I'm gonna make a note and Phil, with your permission, we're gonna change the publication date of this particular episode to try to hit around to the January 11th mark. And if somebody looks at this and says, hey, Episode X came before Episode, well, however, this would be wrong. That's why. All right.
Michael Stanwyck 1:01:13
Well, I really appreciate you guys inviting me on the show. This has been really fun. I'm grateful that you gave me the opportunity to share all this with your audience.
Jack Heald 1:01:20
Is it cold in Texas?
Michael Stanwyck 1:01:23
This week? Yeah, we're gonna get down to 15 degrees. I know it's snowing in Dallas today. We're a little too far south for snow. But uh, but it is getting cold.
Jack Heald 1:01:33
I can remember, I used to live in Central Texas. And I remember this time 1980, I want to say it was probably 82. I was living in a mobile home. An old mobile home and we had one of those blue northerners come through that was I think it got down to eight degrees overnight. I know it was 82 because my then-wife was pregnant with our first child. And she was, I could see my breath inside our home. And she's walking around in this flimsy little nightgown, because she's six months pregnant and can't get cool.
Michael Stanwyck 1:02:13
Can’t get cold enough. Yeah, we had snow two years ago, but not since.
Jack Heald 1:02:17
All right, that I went way off track there. Hey, I want to invite everybody to click that subscribe button. If you're listening on any of the podcast platforms. If you're on YouTube, hey, do that as well. And go to Dr. Ovadia’s site, ifixhearts.com. He's got a metabolic health quiz there that you can take. You don't have to tell anybody. Take it. Get yourself a baseline and it'll help you know what you need, where you most need to get started. And contact Dr. Ovadia if you want some high-class professional help and then go to the WholeLifeChallenge.com And I would recommend you stalk Michael on Twitter too, but that's just because I'm like that. All right. I think we're done. We'll talk to you next time.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 1:03:06
Totally agree conversation. Yeah.
Jack Heald 1:03:15
America is fat and sick and tired. 88% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy and at risk of a sudden heart attack. Are you one of them? Go to ifixhearts.co and take Dr. Ovadia's metabolic health quiz. Learn specific steps you can take to reclaim your health reduce your risk of heart attack and stay off Dr. Ovadia's operating table.
Jack Heald 1:03:43
This has been a production of 38 atoms