Journey to Well
We are not created to do this healing journey or life alone. In fact, it was Bessle Van Der Kolk who expertly shared “healing happens in the presence of an empathic witness”. That is the heart of this podcast & my business : to witness. You can expect a plethora of conversations on nervous system regulation, breathwork, human design & astrology, cycle alignment, energy & spirituality work and so much more. We are all on a journey back home to ourselves, rediscovering our innate power within & I am thrilled to take this journey to well with you. be well xx
Journey to Well
Unleashing the Power of Authentic Living for Health & Wellbeing | Justin Nault
What if your health story was a journey to self-love & transformation? Today, I'm joined by Justin Nault, a nutritional therapist and former musician, to share his inspiring story of overcoming body dysmorphia and embracing authenticity. From growing up in the 90s under the influence of iconic action heroes to navigating the pressures of the music industry, Justin reveals how using food as medicine helped him develop a healthier relationship with his body. His unique perspective provides valuable insights into the power of embracing one's true self for lasting personal transformation.
We explore the intriguing parallels between dietary choices and addiction, dismantling the flawed foundations of conventional health advice. Discover how simplifying complex concepts like human design and cycle alignment can make them accessible to everyone, while emphasizing the critical role of self-love in breaking unhealthy eating habits. This episode challenges societal norms and encourages aligning lifestyles with true aspirations, offering practical strategies for transforming habits and reframing health perspectives.
Take charge of your health journey with the transformative power of self-love and authentic self-expression. From practical food swaps to the benefits of understanding your unique human design, we share personal experiences and client success stories that illustrate how a balanced lifestyle can be both rewarding and empowering.
Connect with Justin on Instagram @ justinnaultofficial
Let's connect on social media! You can find me @ _journeytowell
Be sure to reach out and say hello 🤍
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https://journeytowell.net
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be well, my friend
xx Hannah
Okay, welcome back to the podcast journey to well, I am super excited to have Justin Nault. I didn't ask you how to say your last name, is that right?
Speaker 2:Nailed it.
Speaker 1:Hey, there we go. We have Justin on the podcast. Today we're doing a little bit of a different conversation. We're talking about nutrition and food as medicine and energy, and I don't think that I have talked to this topic on my podcast, although I certainly talk about it a lot on my social media channels and my community, my coaching clients, I mean. Everything is so connected. So, justin, super excited to have you on. I start every podcast letting my guests introduce themselves and share what they would like to share about themselves. So who is Justin?
Speaker 2:Oh man, that's a great question For me. The most honest way for me to answer that is that I am Justin. You know it's like, honestly, my entire journey and the thing that I try to teach more than anything else in my content we can talk about nutrition, we can talk about all the things is my life's work has been becoming more authentically me. It's the single most important thing I've ever done. It's taken me 38 years to get to this version of self.
Speaker 2:That is the one that I'm the most happy with the one that I'm the most happy with, the one that I love the most, the one that experiences the most joy and depth of intimacy and connection with others. But it wasn't always that way, you know. So with my coaching, I really think of myself I'm technically a nutritional therapist, right, but I think of myself as an architect of freedom is helping people design the life that they want to live, not the life that they were told that they should.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. It's true. I think that's a lot of that's what we have in common. A lot of what we have in common is um, I think that's actually I think I have it pulled up right now, cause I was just sending someone a blurb about myself. I'm starting to teach in another studio and part of my little blurb, or bio, is just talking about like, we spend so much time being told who we should be, being told how we should eat, being told how we should work out, being told what we should do for work and what's successful and what the meaning of success even is, and we don't spend a lot of time actually digging into who am I, who do I want to be, what's important to me, what are my core values?
Speaker 1:So I like that that was the shortest intro but maybe the most profound, so I love it. Before I forget, I know I told you, but I love to interweave human design, which is a huge tool of unearthing our authenticity and who we really are. So Justin is, excuse me, a 1-3 sacral generator, so I like to kind of give the top three. We're going to talk a little bit about human design at the end, maybe I'll interweave it, but I really want to get into the conversation of nutrition. So I like to hear a little bit of backstory. What got you here? What brought you into learning about nutrition? Learning about food as medicine, using food for energy and eating whole foods all of those good things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean, I couldn't function as a generator without energy. But you know, the whole story is, I think a lot of influencers today like the term influencer, whatever it means are mostly just sharing their own story, right, there are like entertainment influencers that are like dancing or whatever, and then there are those of us that are actually sharing a transformation story that is our own, that's impacted us. And now for me, right, I've gotten to see the ripple effects of me sharing what worked for me and that, having worked for thousands of people. Now, you know, but for me, I think it was similar to a lot of people's journey is that I grew up in the nineties, so, uh, the politically incorrect term was I was a fat kid, it's what they call me you know, and I got kind of teased by my brother and his friends and stuff.
Speaker 2:But it was also and I was born in 86. So my childhood was really like the glory days of action films like Arnold Schwarzenegger, sylvester Stallone, jean-claude Van Damme, and I was obsessed man. I was like I'm just gonna be the shredded hero I will save everyone. But I was. I was a chubby kid, you know. So I just developed tremendous body dysmorphia at a very and it followed me, no problem. It followed me through, you know, high school, which was very challenging, but then I was a performer. I played my first, you know, really large local talent show. I was playing piano and singing when I was 16 and the town went crazy. I ended up on the news. I became a professional musician at age 17, getting paid to play, and then that led me to go into Berkeley College of Music in Boston and I got a degree in songwriting. And then I went down to Nashville and I had a 15 year music career and I played 300 shows a year, right? So if you just picture like a teenager with body dysmorphia now literally living under the spotlight, you know. So it followed me into my 20s in a really in a bad way and for me it was just always fitness. I was like I will outwork this body of mine. That's the most common thing that I see today is people really look at their body as an enemy. It's like, why won't this body do what I want to do? I want to cooperate. Why doesn't it look the way I want it to look? I'm doing all the hard work and I'm constantly punishing myself and no pain, no gain, and I just can't get the six pack right. It's like you're never working with your body, you're working directly against it, like it's an enemy. So in Boston I was bodybuilding in the morning before class and then I'd leave class and then I was training boxing and then when I got to Nashville, it was twice a day CrossFit and I started powerlifting and then I got certified in kettlebells and I became a purple belt in jujitsu and it was just like, no matter what, it was always through the fitness angle, just like punishing my body during the day and then basically working graveyard shift, like I'm getting on stage at 9 PM and going to bed at 6 AM, right. So it's like my circadian rhythm was trash, Like everything was just it was working directly against my health and I'm also punishing myself during the day. So it's like the catastrophic like impact that was having on my energy levels and my mental health and all these things. And that was when I ended up, you know, hiring my first talk therapist in my late twenties.
Speaker 2:But really the catalyst for the nutrition stuff was I had found the paleo diet and felt amazing, like very quickly I started dropping body fat and I was like whoa, this is like a cheat code, like there's something to this nutrition thing. And at right around that same time my niece was born terminally disabled. So she was having over 300 seizures a day and she went straight into the pediatric ICU. They gave her less than three years to live, they hooked her up to all these different machines and stuff and eventually they had to install what's called a G tube. If a child can't eat or drink, they put a G tube in their stomach and feed them through a tube. So that was when I was introduced to the ketogenic diet. In in a medical situation, the ketogenic diet is used to suppress symptoms in infants, children, toddlers there's a whole foundation called the Charlie foundation that specializes in this.
Speaker 2:Um Savannah did not turn out to be epileptic, but across the board they're like, if you're having seizures and we can't diagnose this, we're going to put you on a keto diet.
Speaker 2:So, there's a baby formula called KetoCal that is, Gerber makes this baby formula and they're owned by Nestle and all the beautiful government corruption that goes into that. Our tax dollars subsidize it to give it to these little babies. And I had already become a nutrition, a nutritional therapist at that point and I had a client of one and it was me. I was just like I'm going to learn the depths of this for myself, you know, and um, I knew just enough to annoy the doctors, Right. And I asked the doctor. I said look at these ingredients. It's, it's high fat, low carb, it's technically keto, but it's. The fat is all hydrogenated vegetable oils.
Speaker 2:And then it's artificial flavors and sweeteners, synthetic versions of vitamins that the body can't use well or even blocks receptors in some cases. So I brought up the attention of like a world renowned neurologist and he looks at me and he goes huh, I never thought to check that and that was it. That's literally like how we got here, cause I was so angry, like it. Just the level of rage. I can't even listen to my, my original podcasts, like the first hundred podcasts. I where I am. Just like everyone needs to know the truth. You know, and I started studying, you know, human metabolism, biochemistry and biology. I started just ordering textbooks to my house, like training myself on textbooks, and then I created a baby formula for Savannah in my kitchen using alio friendly superfoods, food dehydrators and processors, and I eventually worked with a food and beverage consulting company and released my first product online. I basically turned that baby formula into a protein powder that I started selling to CrossFitters.
Speaker 2:And I just started going on Facebook live and sharing what I was learning about, like the horrors of mainstream medicine and the truth about food versus poison and the corruption between big food and big pharma and all these things like mainstream medicine being the third leading cause of death in America Right, and that's how we got here. You know, I started really doing the thing online about eight years ago and now I'm here with you, with you know 650,000 followers and thousands of transformation stories that I'm unbelievably grateful for.
Speaker 1:Wow, I love that. Now I'm going to have to go back and listen to your first 100 podcasts.
Speaker 2:Oh man, be prepared. It's like a power lifting, just like alpha. I will take down the whole system. It was crazy A lot of personal development between then and now.
Speaker 1:Man. I mean, of course, when you have something that hits so close to home, of course there's gonna be so much anger. I think also whenever we finally realize something like it might be common knowledge to other people, but stuff that we don't know or we're not educated on, I think, unfortunately, a lot of people don't understand a lot of these things that you're taught not understand. I'm sorry, don't know a lot of these things that you're talking about, but whenever we learn something that we figure out that we've been taught the exact opposite our whole lives, of course there's so much anger and there's so much frustration, and behind that, of course, is a lot of sadness, and there's always. There's always a lot of sadness in nutrition.
Speaker 1:For me, part of my story is I grew up my mom has her undergraduate degree in nutrition, her master's degree in counseling, and so I grew up. My mom has her undergraduate degree in nutrition, her master's degree in counseling, and so I grew up knowing how to read a nutrition label and you know miles more than I do, but I know enough. You know, like I know enough of if it says nonfat there's, you know what else is in it, like there's something that's making it nonfat. They probably don't want to be eating. Or if it says you know, no sugar, diet coke is better than regular coke, like all of these things. And I didn't realize how much I knew because I grew up that way. And then I go off to college and I see how the average american eats college in the south too, mind you. So you know we love the sweet tea, we love the like fried chicken, all of that, and I love it. Um, but seeing how these people, the average American, is eating and and seeing how you know people do go for the nonfat things because it says no fat in in the label, um, I'm seeing the manipulation. I mean so much, so much sadness there. So it's so interesting.
Speaker 1:So I'm curious. One of my biggest what's the word? One of the things that's most important to me on this platform, on my platform, is making these really big topics like human design, like cycle alignment, really easily digestible and very easy to bite off and chew. For the person that doesn't know anything, because you've spent how long did you say 20 years, 15, 10 years, however long studying this and all the textbooks and all the books and podcasts and education, and to someone that is listening to this. It's like I need to eat healthier. I know that, but is so overwhelmed because they don't even know where to start. Where do we start?
Speaker 2:I love this question. I fundamentally believe like if you can't explain something in a way that clicks for a third grader, then you don't fully understand the thing you're talking about Right, and it's I I did.
Speaker 2:There was 10 years of intense rabbit holing how to read scientific studies, like so I wouldn't just read an abstract, like I needed to learn how studies were conducted, and all these things. Over time it became where I've landed now. The reason why my my content is so simple is because I think the entire industry is built on a foundation of error. The randomized control trial, built on a foundation of error. It literally can't prove causation, the way that it's designed, and we hold it up as the holy grail of the scientific community, right. So I had to go deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper to be able to realize oh, if it's built on a foundation of error, then the results of that system are going to be catastrophically bad.
Speaker 2:If we take a look at the last 70 years of human health, right, 90% of the population has at least one marker of clinical metabolic dysfunction. The average person in their 50s is on 12 prescription medications. 75% of the population is either overweight or obese. 45% of children are obese. Mainstream medicine is the third leading cause of death in America. We spent tens of trillions of dollars on a war on cancer and survival rates are exactly the same, we have made no progress, right? So when you really start to look at the thing, you're like oh okay, what I have to do to get healthy is the exact opposite of what the entire mainstream is telling me to do. And it turns out that's true in nutrition, it's true in fitness, it's true in romantic relationships, it's true in parenting, it's true in making money, it's true in everything. So the last 10 years of my life were a journey of undoing all of society's programming on my own human psyche. Right? It's like I was raised in a public school system. I have to raise my hand to go to the bathroom and if someone tells me no, I now need to suppress suppress my body's intuition survival mechanism to use the restroom Cause someone else told me I'm not allowed, right? So this is where we get into the illusion of authority.
Speaker 2:Now, I just gave you this really complex, convoluted answer. To bring it back to simplicity, which is the people that don't understand because they haven't been exposed to this stuff. They've just taught the food pyramid when they were growing up. The simple litmus test is food versus poison. I teach everyone food versus poison, because if you only eat food and you don't consume poison all of the complicated stuff goes out the window. You do not have to count calories, you don't need to punish yourself in the gym for hours per day. You don't need to take medications. You don't need to take supplements. I own two supplement companies and I'm telling you you don't need to take supplements if you get this stuff right.
Speaker 1:I was going to ask you about that.
Speaker 2:Exactly Like if you're not getting it right. I make supplements that can help you start to get it right.
Speaker 2:But, supplements are only meant to supplement the perfect things you're already doing in your lifestyle, right? So I always say this like if I say if I could take you know children and ask them this question, any adult will pass this test. If I say there are two foods, one has to be called food and the other has to be called poison, you have to pick one Food. Number one is steak. Option number two is strawberry pop tarts. Tell me which one is food and tell me which one is poison. They can't both be food and they can't both be poison. You have to choose. Nobody fails that test. 100% of people will say the pop tarts are poison and the steak is food. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's it, You're done. I have nothing else to teach you Right? So 99% of my coaching is trying to figure out why people won't do it. Why they won't get rid of the pop tarts, why they won't get rid of the wonder bread, why they won't get rid of the Doritos and the Diet Coke, why they won't stop pulling into the drive-thru on the way home from work, right? So, ironically, I became a nutritional therapist as a title, because I was studying epigenetics. Turns out, most of my work is life coaching and therapy.
Speaker 2:Trying to help people understand why they choose things that they know are terrible for themselves, and trying to help them understand that they've built a life for themselves that is completely out of alignment with the person that they actually want to be in the world. So using food like a dissociative drug. It's the same way that somebody who has been deeply traumatized or comes from a horrible place with poverty and violence, they may choose to use something like meth or heroin because why, why not? Why do they care? Right Now it seems extreme to jump to that like meth versus food, but that's literally what we're dealing with here is like people are finding a way to dissociate from their lives with food, and the mainstream has given them this idea that if they just restrict calories, they'll be healthy. What they're doing is stripping away energy from their body, and we see it all the time I did an Instagram reel on this the other day where, like people wake up and the first two, three meals of the day it's like I'm going to have a hard boiled egg for breakfast or I'm going to skip breakfast, or at lunch I'm going to have like a light salad and a diet Coke, and it's like this constant starvation, starvation, starvation.
Speaker 2:Then 10 PM rolls around and they're trying to figure out why they just ate a full pint of Ben and Jerry's and they blame themselves. Oh, I'm realizing. They have starved themselves for an entire day. They need calories and food to survive. They're never going to overpower the lizard brain inside of them that says we have a very calorically dense and energy dense food in front of us. That is this Ben and Jerry's.
Speaker 2:I'm going to send a signal to your brain I'm going to overpower you and you're going to eat the whole thing. Right? You blame yourself instead of blaming the terrible information that you've been given about diet and nutrition. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:Absolutely there's so much like there's so much. But I love that you just brought up that point and I love that you brought up that it's like a neurological thing because we do, we have so much shame and guilt and we can I mean, like you said, we can go down all of the rabbit holes right, like relationship guilt and shame and parenting guilt and shame. But just talking about nutrition and bringing up the point of it's, it's kind of the the your brain, it's your brain. So how do we go about and change that? I would love to talk about breakfast specifically. Are you a like breakfast supporter? Start your day off. That's where my brain's going. But how do we go about starting to change that so we don't find ourselves coming to the end of the day having that pint of Ben and Jerry's?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm gonna go simple and then a little more complex, because I think it's important for people to understand what's happening at the level of your neurology and why this is happening so you can stop blaming yourself for it.
Speaker 2:Right, it's like the idea of breakfast being the most important meal of the day was marketing, right, but it was only marketing post the 1950s and the advent of hyperpalatable, ultra processed foods like mapo and cereal and this kind of stuff right, because prior, in the 1930s and 20s and I can tell you amazing statistics about that time when humans were eating more than 4 000 calories a day and it was all like red meat, whole milk, homemade bread, all these things right. So the idea of breakfast being important is very true, but it's not very true, like if, if the if the option is like I'm either going to skip breakfast or I'm going to eat a whole wheat, whole wheat bagel and a and a bowl of special K cereal with milk, right. Like if that's your breakfast option, skip it. But I have a rule within all my programs is 30, 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up. So you get an approved foods list. For me it's over 110 foods you can choose from. But if something's not on that list, you don't eat it, period. We don't do cheat days, we don't do cheat meals, none of that right. Within 30 minutes of waking up, you're consuming 30 grams of protein. And I coach people how can you do it? How can you make it more convenient? Blah, blah, blah. Because protein is the let's get to work right.
Speaker 2:So the protein is incredibly important and the reason for this when you talked about, like at the level of your brain, the hypothalamus, is what controls whether or not you're hungry. It's called your satiety hormones, right, like whether you're feeling hungry or whether you're feeling satiated. So in the past there's a flavor on your tongue called umami. There are taste buds that recognize the umami flavor, this kind of salty, savory, kind of sweet flavor, right? Historically, the only place we would have found that in nature is animal blood. So the moment that taste bud is activated, it's sending a signal to your body that we are about to receive protein and the body gets to work. Before you've even swallowed your first bite of food. It's creating the perfect amount of stomach acid and bile that's going to break down protein and then amino acids are going to enter your bloodstream and your body knows what to do just from what it's tasting on your tongue.
Speaker 2:Wow and your body knows what to do just from what it's tasting on your tongue. Fast forward to today and we have food engineers who are salaried scientists, who design food to taste like umami. This is like a bag of potato chips, like kind of a sweet, salty, savory flavor. So the brain is getting a signal that you're eating protein. The next thing you know you've consumed 500 calories of potato chips and there's no protein in the system, no protein. Body goes yeah. So your body says something is wrong, we're not getting enough protein and sends a signal to eat more. So this is why you can. You can look up. 10 minutes have passed and you've eaten a full bag of lay's potato chips and you're like what just happened? Right, whereas if I said, go eat a pound of boneless, skinless chicken breast and tell me how easy that is for you to do, it's going to be near impossible.
Speaker 2:But the potato chips are a cinch because they are designed by engineers to be as hyper palatable and addictive as possible. So people are blaming themselves when they're actually consuming foods that are designed to hijack their brain to make them eat. It's astonishing. It's very powerful stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, wild. So here's my next question then. Okay, I imagine and I've had these conversations with clients, with friends, I imagine people listening they're like I can't eat Lay's potato chips. Like if I talk to Justin, he's going to tell me I can't eat Ben and Jerry's and you already said no cheat days. Like how do we do that? Used to consuming fast food, you're used to having a croissant in the morning for breakfast or what did he say?
Speaker 2:Special K? How do we go from that to whole foods? So step one is self-love, right, it's one of the more I would say. Some people call it controversial opinions. I have, but the obesity epidemic is really a self-love epidemic.
Speaker 2:Wow. It's very difficult for you to consistently choose to poison yourself every day and to look in a mirror and hate your own body and still continue to make the same choices every day. It's very difficult to do that. If you deeply love yourself, you will want what's best for yourself and you will choose what's best for yourself. So every program that I have starts with self-love. I'm going to ask you to stand in a mirror, look yourself in the eyes and say I love you out loud 10 times.
Speaker 2:And I don't care if you're faking it in the beginning, you're going to do it every day If you don't do it every day. I'm going to hold you accountable, Right.
Speaker 1:Can we pause? Can I say something?
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 1:I don't typically share like a lot of it. Keep going with the steps. But I have to say something about this. I don't typically share like so much of my vulnerability. But uh, I was just. You know, we go down rabbit holes, whatever. Everyone has bad days. Let's just say that.
Speaker 1:So I was just talking to one of my friends and I was like I feel like I am so rigid on what I eat, like I I went to my sister's house for dinner and she had peppermint gluten-free Oreos and I'm gluten-free mostly. So she's like, do you want some Oreos? I was like fuck, yeah, of course. Like love, I used to eat Oreos. I haven't had Oreos in years. And so I was reflecting on that and I was like I think that I'm just so rigid, like I don't really have. I allow myself to eat ice cream. That's like my favorite food, but otherwise, like I don't really eat a lot of junk food. I don't keep junk food in the house for my consumption because I don't like it. And I'm like being so hard on myself. I'm like I'm so rigid and my friend goes she's like how I see it is that you love yourself so much that you won't feed your body that junk. You don't want to feed your body that junk and you appreciate your body and you're taking care of your body.
Speaker 1:And I was like, of course I cried. So I'm like, of course that's where it's rooted in and that's where it stems from and that's what I have said in the past. You're saying like, you're speaking my mind like literal words that I've said in the past of I love myself so much that I'm not going to do this. And it's not about restriction, it's actually about I love myself and I feel better. Like once you do this, you do feel better.
Speaker 1:And then you kind of get to the point where you're like why am I going to go get blackout drunk? Why am I going to eat a pint of Ben and Jerry's when I literally feel like dying the next day? What's the point? So, anyway, I had to share that because I that's just like a realistic, because I do think people get a little like oh yeah, I love myself, though, like I, I do love myself and I appreciate myself, and and I look in the mirror and I tell myself, you know, and like, we kind of just like, brush it off, but we all struggle with self-love. We all do from time to time and to different degrees, and you can still come back and like hopefully you have friends, like like my beautiful friend, to like check you and remind you of how much you love yourself and remind you of the things that you do, so continue. I love that you and remind you of how much you love yourself and remind you of the things that you do, so continue I love that you shared.
Speaker 2:It's important that you share that right because, like, the most powerful things we have are the stories of our own transformation and what works for us, you know so so many people are going to feel seen in what you just said and it's like self-love is not like.
Speaker 2:It's like six-pack abs, right, like. People come to me I want six-pack abs and I'm like okay, when you achieve six-pack abs, what happens next? What's the rest of your life? Look like, do you just go back to doing the daily actions you were taking when you didn't have six-pack abs and you just erase the six-pack like, or do you continue? Like what? What does what changes in your life? What comes next? Right?
Speaker 2:So this is the thing with self-love is people will walk around. Oh, yeah, I, yeah, I love myself, right, it's like no, because these people are making commitments. It's like we're in January. We're right around the time where 85 percent of people's New Year's resolutions fail.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like if you're a parent and you tell your child hey, soccer practice ends at 3 o'clock, by 3.05,. I'm going to pull up in the car and you'll be sitting on the curb and you're going to hop in the car. I'll be there, kiddo, and I'll take you home. We'll have dinner and then you just don't show up, you just leave the kid there all night, right? No, you wouldn't do that. You'd be a total fucking right barring. You got in a car accident and called a family member and they went and picked up the kid. You would go out of your way to make sure that that little kid is the commitment is kept to that kid and he's picked up from soccer practice and driven home in a safe way. Right, yeah. But you'll tell yourself like, oh, I'm gonna eat clean for the next 30 days and a weekend.
Speaker 2:You break that commitment to yourself yeah we are all little children in grownup bodies. That's it. Not a single one of us is a grownup, all right.
Speaker 2:And this is where we go back in time, like your, your ego, your shadow, the way you feel about yourself. Again, you have to raise your hand to go to the bathroom. This is all programming from childhood that carries us into adulthood, right? So I understand when people are like, oh, what do you mean? I can't eat Lay's potato chips? Right, I'm like, yeah, where. Like, oh, what do you mean? I can't eat Lay's potato chips? Right, I'm like, yeah, where are you at?
Speaker 2:You're coming to me and you're saying I hate my body, I hate the way I feel, I'm insecure. It's ruining my romantic relationship, I have no libido, I'm snappy with my kids, everything is just like doom and gloom. And I'm like, yeah, we're probably going to give up the Lay's. You tell me that you want change, but you don't actually want to change any of your actions. Then the change is never going to happen. So we start with self-love first, but step two, the light at the end of the tunnel here is I am yet to find a junk food that I have not been able to replace with a version of that food that has no poison in it. So again, we're talking about food versus poison.
Speaker 2:So my foods list has 110 single ingredient. Whole foods to choose from? Yeah, but then I give the example of, like a chocolate sea salt RX bar or a Boulder Canyon potato chips. Right, the ingredients in Boulder Canyon potato chips are potatoes, avocado oil, sea salt. All three of those single ingredients are on my foods list, which makes that packaged food an approved food. If you go to Lay's potato chips, it's going to be canola oil. That is not an approved food. Don't eat that seed oil. So just swap for Boulder Canyon potato chips, right? If you usually eat Snickers bars, I'm going to direct you to Unreal Candy, which is a version of a Snickers bar that doesn't have artificial food colorings and dyes and seed oils in it. If you like tortilla chips, we're going to switch you to Siete brand tortilla chips, right? Like? There are all these different things that we can do. But then again people slip immediately into victimhood and they say, well, the Unreal candy is three times more expensive than the Snickers bar.
Speaker 2:And I say okay. So now you're saying that the difference in $4 or price or whatever is worth more than your health. And then we go down the rabbit hole of the average 40 year old woman with one chronic health condition is going to spend $300,000 more out of pocket on medical care than someone who doesn't have that chronic condition. So if you want to pretend that the Snickers bar is less expensive, than the one without poison in it.
Speaker 2:Again, like I teach philosophy, I don't teach nutrition. Right, I'm asking people to adopt a philosophy that I have created, that I've come up with over 20 years of doing this, and it's simple, right. The same way, all of my programs are guaranteed right. Do this for 90 days. If your life doesn't get better, come tell me about it. I have no fear. I guarantee you, if you do it, your life is going to get better. Right, but it does require change, and it's just focused in a different direction, right Like change. And it's just focused in a different direction, right Like the beginning of my career with Clovis, my first company. I was still playing 300 shows a year as a musician. So the difference is am I going to pull into Chick-fil-A or am I going to pull into the Kroger or the HEB or the Aldi?
Speaker 1:that's right.
Speaker 2:Next door and get myself like a chocolate, sea salt RX bar and an organic banana and a coconut water for my travel snack? Or am I going to get fried chicken and Chick-fil-A Like why one is poison and one is food? Why would I do that to myself? It's the same amount of time. It takes me five minutes to walk into the grocery store.
Speaker 1:You see what I'm saying so.
Speaker 2:It's just like where your focus goes. It's not any more difficult.
Speaker 1:It's just different. I think that we make it. What I'm thinking of is like, how cool is it that we live in a time where we can go get that RX bar, where we can go get that banana at a grocery store that is? I mean, I've never seen, you know, a grocery store that's like less accessible than a fast food joint. I, of course, I mean, of course there's going to be like ones that's a little bit closer, but yeah, what is it worth to you? And I think that we do use that excuse a lot, that it's more time consuming. That's what I've always heard.
Speaker 1:Because my brain, when you're like you can't have Lay's potato chips, I'm like, oh, just make your own potato chips, buy the potato, slice it up, fry potato chips. Like, buy the potato, slice it up, fry it in your avocado or olive oil or whatever you want to fry it in. And you're like, oh, just go get these, like Boulder. I'm like what a world we live in. Like you don't have to go make your own Snickers bar, which I also have done. Like, made my own little peanut butter cups and I mean they're amazing, I love them. But you also do spend an hour in the kitchen, you know, and with potato chips, gosh you would make, you'd make quite the mess, but you can do it. But what a world we live in where we can make those easy switches and it's not super time consuming and, yeah, sure, it's an investment. That was another thing. Like my mom, that's a core value of mine is food is an investment, and I'm investing in my body, like that's what's been drained into my brain. So I will go to Whole Foods, I will go to the grocery store, easily spend however much I need to spend, because I will buy, you know, the Whole Foods, whatever the organic which I'm, the whatever, um, the organic which I'm sure we could have a whole conversation about. But I buy, I buy the whole foods, um, and it's not like I'm.
Speaker 1:I'm so thankful that that is my perspective and you don't have to be born into a family like that. You can make that your perspective, you can choose. You know even just a little mantra Like I, I am woo, woo and I am crunchy. So I would say like thank you, thank you for whatever, thank you God, thank you universe, thank you Whoever you want to thank, thank you my bank account for being able to afford this money and bless it before you go spend that money and it will come back to you either in good health or or or money. Uh, it always does. It always comes back to you when we're buying things, when we're investing in things with that intention. It will always the abundance mindset right. It'll always come back to you. That's what you're trying to see in the world yeah, it's the difference between.
Speaker 2:I try to help shift people out of the.
Speaker 2:There's a concept called learn helplessness, um throughout like scientific research literature throughout the last hundred years or whatever right and learn helplessness is the way that animals will just stop trying right. It's like if you have a little baby elephant in the circus. It's a little baby and they tie its leg up and they put a post in the ground and it's like pulling at the post. It's trying to get away. It can't get away. It can't get away. For years it can't get away from this thing. It then grows into a three ton elephant and they put the same little stake in the ground with the rope around its arm and it doesn't even try to escape. That giant animal could pop that thing out of the out of the ground, destroy the entire circus and run away and nobody could do anything about it. Doesn't even try.
Speaker 1:Haven't there been studies where it's generationally too? It's like that offspring they do it with the offspring, and the offspring who never like learned that it couldn't get away, still won't try to get away.
Speaker 2:Yes, they've done studies on that with rodents. They've done it with monkeys, they've done it with all sorts of animals. Right, it's like, yes, they will learn generation to generation. It's the same way too. Like people love to say that, like diabetes, obesity runs in my family. No, it doesn't. Habits run in your family. The way you were taught to eat monkey, see, monkey, do. You did what mom did. You did what dad did. Right, like a family dinner to you might look the way that it looked when you were a kid, and now you're feeding that to your kids. Right, it's just. It's monkey, see, monkey, do. It's this, it's the generational stuff.
Speaker 2:So I'm trying to shift people out of learned helplessness and to get into the actual woo-woo or what is legit, just quantum mechanics. You are the creator of your own reality, period. So this whole thing oh, what do you mean? I can't have laser. Well, it's too expensive. If every single way that I tell you you can transform your life for the better is immediately met with an objection in your mind, you are living in victimhood. You're living in learned helplessness Because if I can do it, you can do it. Right?
Speaker 2:When I left the music industry, I walked away from 95% of my income. I left a whole identity. I have a program now called the Identity Upgrade. Because I did this, 95% of my income evaporated overnight. It was broker than I'd been since I was 18 years old. I left an entire industry and an identity behind Right and I started over here I am, if you, if I can do it, you can do it. There's a blueprint to do it Right and that's like. People come into my programs and I present them with a blueprint. I spent all of my coaching time trying to figure out why they won't follow the blueprint.
Speaker 2:They will continue to choose learned helplessness and choose victimhood right. It's astonishing.
Speaker 1:It's not an easy thing to change and I acknowledge that it's not, especially if you are raised. We actually talk about this in human design. It's conditioning. Actually I'm going to be talking about this, uh, next month is looking at your open centers in human design and looking at where the conditioning came in, where I mean we can just talk about this, not in human design terms of yeah, like how, how I was raised. When we're raised with this money mindset that there's never enough because our parents never had enough money, we adopt that and that's exactly what you're talking about. But it doesn't have to be your reality. I think is what I'm hearing you say.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and this is huge, right, because I love the example of New Year's resolutions. Like the reason why New Year's resolutions fail, right, like if somebody has not done any physical activity for the last year, they've eating. They don't know how many calories they're eating. They're eating junk food and fast food and whatever. And then january 1st comes and they say I'm gonna go to the gym five days a week, I'm gonna eat 1200 calories, I'm gonna eat super clean, right? This is an example of very low self-worth and very low self-love. Reason being you are setting yourself up for failure on purpose so you can fulfill a bunch of false beliefs. The first false belief that you always fail, no matter what. No diet ever works for you. I've tried everything and nothing works for me. I've tried everything. No, you haven't. You've tried the same thing with a thousand different names. It's all restriction. We're going to teach you how to stop restricting and feed yourself enough food to be a healthy person right.
Speaker 2:But the second part of that is that getting healthy sucks. People believe getting healthy sucks our whole life. We've heard no pain, no gain, right, it's a caloric restriction, calorie deficit, you need to exercise more, right. All these things. It's like constant self-punishment, constant restriction, constant sacrifice. We have a story from the mainstream directly that we've all been taught since we were little kids Getting healthy sucks. You don't get to eat your favorite foods, you got to go to the gym. The whole process sucks, right. And I try to flip that on its head and help people see, like if you are part of a program that is telling you it's going to make you healthy and it's making you miserable and it's painful, fire that person and get someone who knows what they're doing, because getting healthy should only feel good, period. It's like you said, once you adopt this right. I've had people that'll follow my foods list for 30 days and then they're like yeah, I'm going to see.
Speaker 2:I know Justin talks about cheat days, whatever. Like I'm going to my friend's house. I'm going to like I'm going to see. I know Justin talks about cheat days, whatever. Like I'm going to my friend's house. I'm going to like I'm going to drink a couple of beers and have some Domino's pizza. Right, they text me the next day. Dude, I feel like I am dying. I can't get out of bed. My head is throbbing. Like I've been in the bathroom all morning, like what is going on yesterday, and I'm like throwing up blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, yeah, because your entire life you have been poisoning yourself every single day. And this is the first 30 days in your whole life where we removed all the poison and helped your body recover. And then you went and picked up the poison and tried it again and your body was like oh hell, no, we're not going back to this, you know, and that's really like all. All chronic disease is like all. Chronic disease is metabolic at its core.
Speaker 2:And it's all the direct result of your body not having a long enough period of time with zero poison on its face. That's the truth about health and wellness.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's super interesting when you shift your diet, your body also stops craving it, and I think that we don't realize that and we don't talk about it enough. I mean, you did a beautiful job touching on how addictive these foods are and so, of course, if you have it, you're going to. Maybe you'll have more Lay's chips in that one sitting. But I remember, like when I really took a lot of time, a lot of mindfulness, to like cut sugar out of refined sugar out of my diet, and then I'm like, huh, I haven't had ice cream or whatever the Oreos in months and I don't actually want them, like I don't, I think you do need to give yourself. I don't. I think you do need to give yourself. I don't think you, I know you need to give yourself time to maybe it's that 30 days. I'm sure you would have a better timeline, but you need to give yourself that time for your body to let it go out of your entire system. And then, uh, yeah, maybe give it. Give yourself that time to like try it again, see how you feel, but you will feel shitty, it will be terrible, and then you get to that point of and I really believe, aside in addition to that self-love. I really do believe that change comes from.
Speaker 1:What is that quote? Like you change when being uncomfortable surpasses living in that comfortable state. And when you get so uncomfortable, whether you hate yourself, like you realize that it really is a self-love issue, whether you're just like I'm like way too fucking fat and like I am just uncomfortable all the time, whether it's pain, whether it's hatred, whether it's a diagnosis, whether it's, you know, a change in your life. Like you get pregnant or you get married or somebody dies and you really have that wake up call. That's when we change. Typically, it doesn't have to be that way. That's a big part of my philosophy is like we don't have to wait. But honestly, that kind of is the root of what I've experienced in my life is when, when that uncomfortability surpasses us, wanting to stay in our comfort zone, that's when we'll, that's when we'll start, that's when we're like, or when we say you know, I've tried everything else, might as well, just try what Justin is spewing out, might as well, like who cares.
Speaker 2:No, you're spot on it. The way that I describe it's just another way to say it, but I tell every client you choose your rock bottom. Rock bottom is completely subjective, right. There are some people we hear the horror stories, right, and if I'm in Austin and I drive by a tent city or see some like situation like that, it's like there are some people where their rock bottom is their entire family no longer speaks to them. They lost all their money and they live under a bridge and they put needles in their arm.
Speaker 2:For some people that is their rock bottom. For some people, with food, their rock bottom is their 600 pounds and the doctor's like if you don't get this sleeve surgery, you're going to die, and that's the first time that they take it seriously. Or they get a stage two cancer diagnosis. Wait, what just happened? You know what I'm saying. Like it's, it's. You choose your rock bottom and if you're listening to this right now and this is resonating with you or some of it felt like a gut punch or like your nerve endings are tingling or whatever it's like, now's the time. Don't sleep on that there. You don't need to go further downhill before you make the decision that you're going to create a new reality for yourself. It's up to you.
Speaker 1:I love that, I love that. So we're going to wrap up. I want to give a really helpful tool, a human design tool. But before I we talk, human design. Last question if you were standing on a stage and you had one minute, two minutes, to share the most important thing, the most important message to you, what would it be?
Speaker 2:it would have to be radical, authentic self-expression more than anything else. Right, that is actually the most common thing that I see in people who are dealing with really serious chronic health conditions or like significant, like clinical obesity. I start to poke around their life and they are just self-betraying, self-betraying, self-betraying. They're saying yes when they want to say no, mommy. Martyrdom is another one. Everyone else's needs come before me because that makes me a good mother. Where, like, actually, that leads to you know, being beaten down and resentful of the people that you love the most. Right, it's like we need to figure out a way to speak our truth into the world.
Speaker 2:Like your authentic version of you, there's a consciousness experience. Authentic version of you, there's a consciousness experience. I view reality like a mirror. Right, this is a mirror. This is Justin talking to Justin through a mirror named Hannah. Right, but it is through you and your very special, unique, authentic magic. You are one of a kind. There is no one else like you. The things that I can learn about myself through your unique mirror can only happen if you are being authentically you, if you're being a make-believe version of self, because you think this is what a good mom looks like, or you think this is what a good podcaster looks like, or you think this is what a good coach looks like and it's not actually authentic to you. You're just like regurgitating what you think you should be doing. You're robbing me of the experience that is you of the experience that is you.
Speaker 1:That's deep. I love that. I needed to let that settle in for a second. I love it. And we spend so much time right, we spend so much time. How do I grow my podcast? This is what you have to do to be successful. I'm like I'm just going to do me. I just want to do what I want to do?
Speaker 2:That's it.
Speaker 1:Okay, so we're gonna. We're gonna end with human design. I always pick one piece of my podcast guests chart and I talk about it, which you know a little bit about human design. We talked about this already. I don't know, did you ever dive into your digestion type?
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:Okay, so we have what's called a digestion type, and in human design it's not just how you digest food.
Speaker 1:Think of it as how I digest the world, how I process information, how I take in information most easily, how I'm able to like, process and assimilate that into my body. It also relates to food and we have six digestion types. Don't quote me, might be eight, I'm pretty sure it's six. Yours is called open taste. So open taste is and the digestion type comes from. If you're familiar with human design, it comes from like these arrows that are near your crown and your Ajna center in human design, and so it's either pointing left or right. Your digestion arrow is pointing left, so structure is pretty helpful with your digestion type. So like eating around the same time of day with open taste. Actually, it's one of the older digestive systems in the world, so you do really well and it's so cool.
Speaker 1:And I was reading this because we had this conversation when we were chatting about having you on the podcast and what we were talking about eating seasonally and the importance of eating seasonally and that's actually part of your digestion type is eating like the same foods until you feel like I'm kind of done with that. So like you might be someone that does really well, you know, having the same, maybe the same type of protein for breakfast, or definitely eating breakfast around the same time every morning, but eating like the same thing, and then maybe you change it up when you feel done and then you eat that. Like you eat eggs for a week and then you eat I don't know shrimp for a week. I don't know. I'm thinking of like when I would break my fast.
Speaker 1:Or you have a protein shake each morning, and so part of the open taste is one of the things that we say is like we talk a lot about variety in the nutrition world, like variety is so important and with you it's like shifting that perspective just a little bit of more. Like maybe variety seasonally rather than variety each day, or maybe variety monthly versus variety each week, or something like that. Um, and another cool thing it says another cool thing about open taste is like you can really recognize and this is where I'm like you just decide, like you'll know, open taste. People will know like okay, I'm kind of done with that food, like I did it, and now I'm like now I just don't feel like it's serving me anymore. Um, so this is also we can talk about that in terms of like life as well and just having that like pretty structured. I actually didn't look at all of your arrows.
Speaker 2:Let me see I mean on so far yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh good, yeah, Like pretty structured, sorry, go ahead. What were you going to?
Speaker 2:say I strive like I want you to continue, but like I, I thrive in structure. For sure I do way better with structure. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah and so, like this is this is where another place that we can start, like, when you're on this health journey, when you feel really inspired by this podcast, you start following Justin and you dive into all of his things. Also. I would just add also pull up your human design chart. Look at it. It's the top left arrow in your chart is either gonna be facing left or right. That doesn't mean if it's left you're open taste, because there's three uh digestion types on for the left arrow, three for the right, um, but, like, definitely the structure would be the same for you, um, but just pull it up and pull up your digestion type and see how it hits for you, because every and this is where, like, we get back into the authenticity, where you and I we're going to have slightly different, um, slightly different flavors of how we approach food. I'm also a left-facing arrow, so I'm also very structured Um, but my digestion type is direct light, so I need to eat when it's light out. I eat dinner at like 5 pm in the winter because I need to eat when it's still at least a little bit light out and I best take in information in the light. So, like when I'm searching for a house, a new house to move into. I'm like it needs to have a lot of direct light, not fluorescent lighting, not like all that shit, and that's how I best take in information. So look up your digestion type, see how you assimilate most easily, and that's another way that we're using. We're working with our body, we're working with our design rather than, like you said, I mean all the diets and all the like.
Speaker 1:Some, some people, right-facing arrows actually do better eating when they're hungry. So maybe they would do better not eating. Checking in, checking in with themselves, because I do agree, eat like at least within the first hour of you waking, but check in with yourself. Are you hungry? Do you want a big breakfast? Do you want a small breakfast? Do you want to just eat, you know, like a protein shake that has those 30 grams of protein or 20? Mine has 24. I mean, we're close enough, but do you want to have that big breakfast or do you want to have a smaller one and play around with that? And then, do you want to eat lunch at noon or do you want to wait until you feel hungry? And of course, we, we're still eating whole foods, but anyway. So that's the little tip about human design, but let me hear how that like settled with you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean one. It's spot on for me and like the accuracy of how I live my life for sure, because I've eaten this way in 20 different countries. Like literally. It's like it's not hard to not deviate, but the chaos of travel and stuff is like very hard on me over time and I crave getting back to my home and my routines and my structures and everything. The other thing that I'll add is like really what all my programs are doing are trying to make your body generate the most energy possible. So you have this idea of like energy balance. But if you look at people who are like significantly overweight, they don't have high energy symptoms.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They have low energy symptoms, right, their hair is falling out, they're cold all the time, they have no libido, their teeth are sensitive, they're moody, they're depressed, whatever right, we need to create more energy in their body. So the one piece I want to speak to you said of like in the beginning if someone is dealing with significant metabolic dysfunction, we cannot trust their hunger cues.
Speaker 1:Oh good point.
Speaker 2:I have people wake up first thing in the morning before they even get out of bed, before they've even like rolled over, and we have a thermometer next to their bed and they put it under their tongue and they take their core body temperature. Yeah, some clients come to me, me, their core body temperature, waking, is like 94 degrees. This is like a walking corpse, yeah, and they're like, well, I just I don't eat a lot because I'm not hungry.
Speaker 2:I'm like because your body is in full-blown energy conservation starvation mode for too long and it's like you're catabolizing you're you're basically cannibalizing your own tissue yeah it's called catabolism so I try to help them. See is like the first week may feel like a chore of getting that 30 grams of protein in. And then day eight, they're like Justin, I'm starving. Oh my God, I've been starving all day, Like what is going on? I need so much food and we're checking their body temperature and now they're 95 degrees 95 and a half degrees Right, and we're actually bringing their metabolism back to life.
Speaker 2:No-transcript, so I just wanted to add that a little bit.
Speaker 1:Thank you. No, thank you, because a lot of mine is with the assumption that we have that mind-body connection. We have that balance already, so thank you for bringing that up. I appreciate that. So where can people find you? Where do you hang out the most if they want to continue learning from you and soaking up all this beautiful information?
Speaker 2:Sure, the most is Instagram. My handle is at Justin Alt Official everywhere, but I always tell people like the easiest way to learn more or get in touch, just go to Justin Alt Official on Instagram and send me a message it will be me that responds and tell me that you want the foods list or you want daily mirror work or whatever, and I'll send you anything you want for free and then I'll just ask you some questions and if I can help, we'll dive in.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on. This was such a fun conversation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you, it's been a pleasure.