Unwavering Resolve: Making Aligned Decisions When Life Falls Apart

In this Office Hours episode, Michael Caulo explores how to make aligned decisions under stress, drawing on real-world experience and behavioral science. From sitting for his national board certification exam during chaos to navigating unexpected family emergencies, Michael explains how stress impacts the brain, why identity-based habits matter, and how alignment outperforms certainty for long-term health, fitness, and life performance.

💭 Thanks for listening to The Lifestyle of Fitness Podcast with Coach Mike Caulo - NBC-HWC health coach, retired pro Muay Thai fighter, father of 4, and founder of the LOF 100-Day Comback System, 

Transcript

So if you're waiting for life to calm down, to make a big decision, this is for you. Because most decisions don't show up when things are calm. Let's be honest. They show up when plans fall apart. I'm going to tell you two different stories here. First one starts today. over four years ago. I was sitting for my national board certification exam. This is after six months of prep, studying, and getting everything ready. Obviously I was nervous, anxious, and everywhere in between. I specifically showed up an hour early to make sure I was fully prepared, had enough time, all of that. Now, ironically, and thankfully I did do this, they didn't have the right code for me that I printed out to take my exam. When you sit to take the exam, you have to have a code. And the code that I had was not the correct one for whatever reason that they gave me. So there was a dilemma right now, needless to say, fast forward two hours, we're still trying to figure out this issue. So being able to address it, I decided, What would I do if I knew the outcome was exactly what I wanted? Because I was debating once again, should I stay for this exam? Should I reschedule it? They did offer me, hey, because of the chaos, because of everything, you can technically start the exam two hours late and we will allow you to have the normal allotted time or you can reschedule it. Because I was so stressed out, I was considering, hey, I'll reschedule this. I don't know if I'm in the right state of mind. Long-windedly, I asked myself this key question. I learned it to ask myself in my first World Kickboxing Association title fight. Because everything went wrong in that particular fight week. And the question was, what would I do if I knew the outcome was exactly what I wanted? So I took the exam. Fast forward, I passed. And even now, fast forward five years, I'm able to actually host health retreats. I'm able to give workshops, do health education. And now we're even taking health insurance because of this. Now I'm gonna share a second story, this one's more recent. Also, hello, I see you on YouTube, saying hey in the chat. If you guys are watching this live, feel free to say hey in the chat as well. And if you are watching the replay, feel free to say hey as well, drop questions and let me know if you're watching the replay. So the second story goes, this literally just happened last week on Friday. Our dog Misha had a freak accident and broke her leg. And I'm not talking about like a minor fracture. This was a compound fracture. If you're not familiar with that terminology, what that means is she literally snapped her leg to the point where the bone was sticking out. Blood was everywhere. It was a pretty actually rough scene. And on top of all this, the kids had stayed home for health reasons from school that day. So we really had to have a chaotic scene to manage. And knowing that, I asked myself this simple question. This helps me calm down and regulate in all moments of stress and high decision making. What would I do if I knew everything was gonna work out? I took a moment, I breathed, I said, all right, obviously we're gonna have to get all the kids in the car. I mean, I had an entire day worth of calls. I had an entire plan. I had a live stream. This actual live stream was supposed to be scheduled on Friday that I had to move. If you guys were following and made sure to pay attention to that, you noticed that I had to move it and I couldn't show up for it. And the reason I bring all this up is it goes back to the mindset. I wanted to share this story because this was a real life situation. And the reason I bring this up and the debate here was because my reservation was, oh, I have calls. I don't want to reschedule these things. But I was like, if I knew everything was going to work out, Misha is going to be okay. Clients are going to be okay. Still going to be able to do a live stream. What would I do? I take Misha to the hospital. We would take care of it. Fast forward to today. Misha is actually going into surgery. Unfortunately, she has to do surgery. It's also extremely costly. There's a financial component to it that's stressful. But again, the question we keep coming back to is what would I do knowing that's all going to work out and the outcome is going to be fine. Misha is going to be healthy. We're going to be able to figure out the money. All of those things come together. Of course, we would do the surgery. So that's what we did. So I want to start with those two things to help understand where we're coming from and what we're going into today. And I'm sure you can relate whether it's because you're sitting for an exam, whether you have a dog or not, you have kids or not, you can relate to making decisions in stressful moments. And I'm going to be going over throughout this live stream and talking points, some clear data that backs, not only what our intuitive nature is indicating, but what actually has an impact here. But I'll pause really quick. I'm also going to just check the chat. Thank you. I appreciate that. I am engaged. Carrie's the best. I have great kids with her and our stepkids, but appreciate the kind words. So the first data point I wanna share with you guys, I wanna talk about this and explore not only again, dealing with chaos, whether it's in exams or whether it's in life, kids, whatever it is, is how do we approach this? There's gonna be some systematic approaches I learned from my fight career that carry over into my personal life that you can gain benefit from. Whether you want to be a entrepreneur, whether you want to be a world champion, whether you want to just be the best person you can be, these things will serve you. So number one, why stress distorts decisions. This is going back to the neuroscience. So in general, stress hijacks our clarity and it's going to make it harder to make rational decisions. Acute stress reduces activity in the prefrontal cortex. So that's a part of our brain that's responsible for planning, reasoning, and impulse control. Fun fact, if you have ADHD, or any type of neurodiversity, you may have challenges in your prefrontal cortex as well, or as far as it being activated in a level at which helps with this. There's ways we can actually activate the prefrontal cortex or get more intense blood flow. I shouldn't even say intense, but more activation as far as the neurons signaling and blood flow to that area. Stress also will shift control to the amygdala. This is our stress response system, increasing fear-based reactions. This is where fear is going to come into play. We're going to drive it from there. So again, stress doesn't make you necessarily weak. It temporarily shuts down the part of our brain that makes it clear to think. Knowing that, we want to pause and allow our system to have a moment to reset. so that we can then make informed decisions and strategies that go along with that. The first thing I always invite for people, whether it's with my ADHD clients or myself or for others is again, this pause, breathe and assess technique. That's where I was able to on Friday or in those past moments, be able to say, what am I going to do here? I was able to pause, take a deep breath and ask myself the question, what would I do if I knew the outcome was going to work out? That's a key component. Also, thank you for the new sub. Appreciate the comments, all that good stuff. And again, if you guys are enjoying this, please feel free to comment, subscribe, follow, all that good stuff. continuously dive in. So that's the first data point. As well as with all of this information, I'm gonna be posting it in our blog that you can see the citations with all of this, because I'm not just making this stuff up, you can clearly track the data here as well. So that's number one, stress is gonna hijack our clarity. So what can we do? Create some distance from the initial stress response to when we make our decision. We're gonna pause, we're gonna breathe, we're gonna assess in a clear fashion as best we can. If you cannot make a clear decision, if you cannot calm yourself down, Create some time between when you have to make that decision. So even going back to that example I was talking about where I had to take my board credential, not only did I show up early so that I had some time, but I was also able to deal with the stress of it. And I considered before I told them yes or no, I was like, let me think about it for a minute. I sat with myself, collected myself, and then I made a decision based on how I felt after gaining some clarity, not in the stress response. So let's go to the next kind of data point interesting aspect here. So alignment over certainty from a decision basis or a decision framework. And what that means is being able to use alignment with your identity over what feels motivating or a hundred percent certain. So in general, I've talked about this in the past. If we can create an identity that is helpful in how we approach strategies, routines, and habits. whether that's from, again, an identity-based behavior change that we want to lead to longer adherence over a traditional outcome-oriented goal, as well as going against motivation-based goals. So people who act in alignment with their identity show higher consistency during stress. I'll give you another example. When decisions align with who we believe we are, we will survive the chaos that ultimately ensues, going back to... Friday. I'll use the example with Misha. My word for this year is devotion. I get to be a devoted father. I get to be a devoted man to my own self. I get to be a devoted partner. I get to be a devoted coach and a devoted business owner. So, and considering being a father, Misha is one of my children to a degree. She's a part of our family. So I am devoted to her. So while the temptation, especially I'm going to be super transparent with you guys, getting a six thousand dollar bill for not only her medicine, antibiotics, but ultimately surgery, the fear comes in that should we even do this? Can we just let her heal naturally without that? Or do we just let her kind of figure it out or whatever comes into play? Not allowing that, that doesn't align with my identity because I've maybe lost some motivation to have some fear around, oh, that's a huge financial implication and cost. But does that align with who I am? I'm a devoted person. That doesn't align with feeling devoted. So it wasn't even like a real kind of consideration to be honest with you. I knew in my mind, I was like, you know what? Even if this costs ten thousand dollars, this is what we're doing. We are going to show up for our family and put the resources behind it and I will figure out the rest. Same thing with Carrie. We have the agreed upon mindset there. So being able to know that, again, going back to the identity, I had a devoted identity to my family and I was able to leverage that. So when, again, the decision aligned with who I believe I am, it survived the chaos of Misha breaking her leg, the financial implications of it, the stress that goes along with that. It survived all of that. So I want to pause here. Again, I will check the chat to see if there's any questions. Also appreciate everyone jumping into the comments, even if I can't understand exactly what you're saying. See if I can throw that out there. App? You can. We do have an app. Fun fact, I don't know if that's actually what you're looking for, but you can feel free to follow along on our app as well, which is... Right here behind me, we've got our QR code. You've got access to all of our fun stuff. Wherever you're watching this, in our profile, in my profile, you'll have a link to all of our great resources, website, app, fitness, all that good stuff. So let's dive into our next kind of data point along the way, our next piece of the conversation, which is... Really the question that grounds action. Being able to have a question that grounds us. So again, I go back to that pause, breathe, and assess. The opportunity in that assess will be rooted in this question, which is going to be, what would I do if I knew this would work out? That gets to be the North Star, our guiding principle in this component. What's up, John? What's going on, Euro? all about the eye contact no matter who it is um what about you so being able to know that we have this guiding principle as far as a question becomes impactful allows us to take a moment and steer the ship with that question so what would i do if i knew it was going to work out i would obviously take care of our family And knowing that let's kind of look at some of the data what's behind that. Okay. So cognitive reframing will improve performance. So cognitive reappraisal or reframing stress will improve task performance and emotional regulation as well as people who reframe stress as a challenge and or opportunity, not a threat perform better under pressure. So the way I like to look at it is maybe a challenge. Sure. But I really like to look at it as an opportunity. This is a great, a great video out there by jocko willings that's basically just like good right no matter what comes up good um yeah i hate that yeah yeah you gotta you gotta throw in a little bit of fun you can't take it too personally you know what i'm saying appreciate the file throw the love back at you you know what i'm saying um so being able to look at Where's the opportunity here? The reframe as it were. So to me, that's what I literally asked myself all day. I'll be honest with you guys. I did not have a clear answer Friday while I was going through all this stuff. And on top of all of this, Misha breaking her leg, girls having to stay home from school because they're not feeling well. So we have a house full of kids. We got all four daughters, one house. i have a day full of calls i have to reschedule all my calls reschedule my live stream sponsored stuff all of that carrie also wasn't planning on having all of this going on we were supposed to go food shopping a storm came this past weekend it was actually a legit storm we got like eight inches of snow um it was like it's three degrees earlier today all of that to put together it was chaotic and i had to be out of my storage unit because we just ordered a new shed so i had to get all my stuff out of my storage unit which is still kind of like sitting throughout the house and being able to Figure it out, right? So it slowed things down and was allowing me to reframe it like, all right, cool. What's the opportunity here? Right, Rob? Rob knows. That's right. Wake up North Carolina, New York City, live with Mike. Dude, Rob, you're missing out on the story. So I'm going to give you a TLDR version for those of you that are just tuning in. For example, my friend, Robert, you kind of got lost along the path. Our dog Misha broke her leg on Friday. Compound fracture, bones sticking out, blood is everywhere. Kids, thankfully they like, kids are in a place where like, they're not crying or screaming or scared as much as they're like, hey, is Misha going to be okay? Am I like, what do we do? Is she okay? Like we didn't know her leg. I mean, I knew her leg was broken. They didn't know. They just see she's bleeding. She's crying. Misha the dog, I mean, chaos. Plus winter weather, all that fun stuff. I had to be out of the storage unit. Absolute chaos. knowing that let's fast forward, being able to look as like, all right, the opportunity here, what I came back to was the opportunity to basically live my word for the year. Am I going to be full of BS or am I going to actually legit live it? Am I going to feel devoted to my family, to my dog, to how we live? I'm going to be devoted. It's an opportunity to say, okay, cool. The other opportunity. And I'm going to be, this is super transparent. I actually had like ask chat GPT and talk to my therapist about this to seem like my crazy. Um, I was like, all right, cool. You know what? Misha's already hurt. It's going to cost us like six grand. How do I turn this into an opportunity? How can I create a content series out of this? How can I share vulnerably with you guys about this and actually see, Hey, can we make some of that money back? Like, I'm going to be real with you. We're going to look, reach out to some sponsors on Amazon, some other sponsors in our network saying, Hey, who wants to throw down some money in a content series around how we're going to be rehabbing our dog? Exactly. What can we do with this? So I'm also like, we have our workshop coming up in Joshua Tree. Wednesday, we're getting into town. Thursday, which is the fifth, all the way to the ninth, which is Super Bowl Sunday. We're gonna be hosting workshops and retreats in Joshua Tree, whether you wanna come in person or you wanna go remote. You'll be able to access it. So I was like, all right, the opportunity is I'm going to share a real story with you guys. We're going to, I'm going to just, while I'm talking about this, push the retreat. We're going to have more people hopefully show up because of that. I'll be vulnerable with you guys. So if you also want to catch the remote pass, we lowered the pass from a couple hundred dollars to now it's thirty dollars to have a full pass for the entire week. Remote. You can tune in every single workshop every single day for thirty bucks. You can't go wrong. You can see it on our Eventbrite. I'll put it up in our link tree. We have it on our profile. You guys can tune in all days. You'll have the recordings of it as well. If you happen to be in the Joshua Tree area or in California, you want to come out, you can actually buy passes for a day pass. We have three spots left for the in-person. And the point is the opportunity here was to just communicate. And honestly, for me, I was like, cool, I'm going to make some content out of this. I'm going to be real. I also recorded a video this weekend. Rob, you'll probably laugh at this. I was like, I do Zurcher squats and Zurcher variations, which is a fancy way of saying you put the weight at your elbow, right? So when I'm holding the bar, holding my bands, I put it at the elbow to work on our technique with it. So I made a content B roll recording of me doing that. And then I'm going to, you'll see some posts and some videos coming up in the weeks ahead of this is why you do Zurcher squats and Zurcher variations, not only for combats, for athletics, for performance, for aesthetics, but for functional reasons. When you want to pick up your kids, when you want to pick up your dogs in different types of scenarios, you want to pick up your partner. Being able to do Zurcher variations are awesome from a functional standpoint, but Highly recommend them. And trying to put, honestly, a funny spin on this piece of content. You'll see me literally picking up Misha with her broken leg and me having to carry her about. Isn't that a two-person workout? Touche, Rob. Touche. But that's where you get to use the bands, Rob. Perfect question. Rob's setting me up. That's where we got our LOF bands. You buy your band set, boom. You don't need another person to carry. You don't need another element. You got your bands right here. And that's why we have our training system, which you can get anywhere you're watching this. And when you get those bands, again, there's another opportunity to... Get your training program on. And that's right. Who kicks you in the stomach? Rob does. That's why I got a good friend. I'll tell you guys a quick side story later. If you guys want to wait till the end, I'm going to tell you a quick story, but you got to hang in for the whole live stream and us breaking through the actual like serious stuff. And I'll tell you funny stories. So to recap it, cognitive reframing. Okay, so the three things we've covered so far as far as data and some actually four things now, we're gonna be getting onto the fourth one here in a minute. One, stress hijacks our clarity. It reduces activity in the prefrontal cortex. That's the part of our brain that's responsible for rational decision-making, planning, reasoning, impulse control. If you have ADHD, That part's already challenged, so we want to be mindful of that. So when you're more stressed, it just weakens that part of our brain. Stress will shift things over to the amygdala, stress response system, which is fear-based. It's reactionary-based. It's where you're going to make some irrational decisions. Rob, I'm looking at you. You're also looking at me. And again, the next piece is being able to have alignment over certainty, meaning we have an identity that we attach ourselves to over just feeling motivated. You're not always going to feel motivated, but if you have an identity on how you want to show up, it will lead you through these chaotic events. For example, I'm devoted during these stressful times. I'm like, cool, what's the devoted move here? Devoted move is obviously taking care of my family, taking care of my dog. After that, being able to have a question that grounds us. So being able to have that cognitive reframe improves performance. So ours is, hey, what would I do if I knew it was gonna work out? For example, Rob, what would you do if you knew it was gonna work out? Everyone in the comments, if you wanna throw, what would you do if you knew it was gonna work out for you today? Or what risk would you take? What opportunity would you explore? I wanna know. Let me know in the comments. Let me know in the chat. Let me know if you're watching the replay or a chopped up version of this that's repurposed for short form. What would you do if you knew you couldn't lose? For me, it was taking that title fight. And I won, I won my first world title. Being able to go to Thailand. That was another risk. I was scared of that too. Going to Thailand, living there when we were supposed to go for our, originally my ex-wife, we were supposed to go for a honeymoon. We ended up staying there instead of two weeks. We stayed there for six months. Being able to fight a Thai in a Thai stadium and win, being able to take those risks, being able to have my company and go through time after time after time, taking the board certification exam, being able to just take care of the, impact of the business after the hurricane, being able to take care of our dog, take these risks and knowing things will work out. That helps from a reframing and a performance standpoint so I can show up. So again, reframing stress doesn't mean it removes it altogether, but it restores access to clarity, restores that prefrontal cortex, goes back to the rational decision-making. Next point we're going to get into is small wins maintain momentum. So we want to make micro actions to preserve our identity, get those daily buy-ins. So if I'm a devoted man, what does that look like on a daily basis? Do I show up to pray? Do I journal? Do I use my planner? Do I give my kids a hug? I'm just using some examples for me, but whatever your identity is, what are the things that align with that? And then do that as much as you can on a daily basis. Even if it's two to five minutes, lock in those daily motivational pieces and wins. So again, these small wins maintain momentum. Completing small, achievable, actionable steps increases dopamine signaling and reinforces self-efficacy and motivation. Momentum matters more than the intensity during the actual disruption. So being able to regenerate momentum. I was just talking about this with a client earlier. I could easily say, all right, this Misha thing is going to derail me. I'm not going to do live streams. And then I could just not do live streams the rest of the year, not make any more content. I could stop using my planner. I could stop doing my workouts. I literally worked out every single day. There are certain things that I continue to do. I'm devoted. I get to stay devoted to my action was the things that I can control. That's the whole point of this. So being able to keep that in mind, it allows us to say it doesn't remove, again, all of the challenges. It allows us to show up, though. And again, five minutes keeps the identity alive. Five minutes will keep your identity going. It doesn't have to be five hours or fifty minutes. Five minutes, two to five minutes will keep the identity alive for what you're working towards. So for me, it's five minutes in the morning doing my abide app, doing my initial meditation and prayer. Then it's five minutes of journaling at the end of the day. And then being able to fill that in. Even for me, I do five minutes worth of just like stretching and pushups and a pull up. I do ten pushups, one pull up, and five minutes of stretching every single day, no matter what's going on. Even if it's a rest day, it's just basic things on how I like to show up. Another variation of that is even in those five minutes, I will do two minutes of shadow boxing. I will do two minutes... of some type of jujitsu drilling. And it doesn't take me more than thirty seconds to do ten push-ups, a pull-up, and I do some basic stretches while I'm going through all that. So maybe it's like seven minutes, if I'm being honest. Or if I really need five minutes, I'll do one-minute jujitsu drills, one-minute shadowboxing, Muay Thai. I'll do one minute of my bodyweight movements, and then I'll do like one to two minutes of some stretching. So the point is, it doesn't take more than five minutes to keep the identity alive. I'll pause there again. I always like to pause, see like questions that come in. I'll check the comments. It doesn't look like we have any going on there. We'll keep it rolling and moving forward. And then again, at the end of all this, I'm going to touch on a couple of products related to this, as well as some funny stories that'll come into play as well. All right. We're getting towards the end though. We got a couple more here. So next is going to be a kicker is resilience is built in the disruption. So if you want to be a resilient, disciplined person, it's not built when things go perfect. I'm gonna say that again. Resilience is built in the pattern disruption in your life disruption. So being able to develop psychological flexibility will predict wellbeing too. This is an interesting one and we'll go back to, I'll reference the data on this, what this means. So that means psychological flexibility is strongly linked to lower stress levels, having better health behaviors and quality of life and higher resilience during uncertainty. So that's a fancy way of saying when ish hits the fan, when life kicks you in the face, that is an opportunity to get stronger. That is an opportunity as much as it doesn't feel like that in the moment, to get a little bit more resilient. And there's a cool part of the brain, the anterior mid cingulate cortex, that is related to our resiliency, our willpower, our discipline. And many other popular neuroscientists have talked about this. Amanda Huberman. to Dr. Rhonda Patrick and everyone in between. I'm just kind of regurgitating some information from them and others. But the point is these areas of our brain, we can develop that ultimately are connected to a better quality of life. So if you want to wonder why, Hey, why do I keep failing? Why do I keep, I'm unable to keep up a workout plan. I'm unable to keep up with a nutrition planner. I keep messing this up. There's a multitude of factors, but honestly, what's probably happened is you're making it too complicated and you're not tying it to an identity. And by doing that, tying it to identity and doing a simple two to five minute buy-in, you will exponentially increase your actual results long-term. And being able to know that it's going to work out. If you knew, if I said, hey, if you follow this plan for the next year, you will be guaranteed life's transforming health or you're guaranteed a million dollars. You're guaranteed whatever crazy thing is. The likelihood of you showing up to do it is way higher because you know there's a guarantee at the end. There's an identity piece to it. All of a sudden you're going to create along the way as well, which is a really powerful one. So with that being said, we'll start to bring it home here and being able to tie it all together. So why does even our coaching and why does the retreat exist? So I talked about even before, where's the opportunity here? When I saw with Misha getting hurt and even the cost from all of that, um, we're going to get into that as well. Why the retreat ties all this together with our workshops and with a connection with all these pieces. But before we do, I just want to tie some resilience isn't toughness by the It's flexibility under pressure. It's being able to be adaptable under these high pressure moments. And it's not perfect. It's not always going to look simple. It's not always going to feel great, but it is effective and you will be able to utilize it when the time comes. So let's tie it all together, put a nice little bow on it as it were. So why does the retreat exist? Why does the lifestyle retreat that we put together? Why does it exist? The retreat exists because these decisions are hard to make alone, especially when life is loud. Yeah, I'm gonna say that again. The retreat exists because these decisions are hard to make alone, especially when life is loud. So ultimately you don't need to have necessarily more clarity by itself to move forward. You need to have alignment and the courage to take action from it. And maybe that starts with, again, coming to our retreat. When I say coming to it, you can get a remote pass right now. It's thirty dollars for a five day pass. Originally was going to be five hundred dollars. And that would even be justified with the amount of workshops. We do two workshops a day every single day. We have guests from all over coming. And when I say guests, I mean guest hosts coming from all over as long as guests to this. And again, the in-person, I'll be super honest, you guys can go to our website. It's three thousand dollars for the in-person. So you can get basically a lot of the educational value for that for thirty dollars. You can come remotely, sign up, tune in. We'll also be doing some promotional live stream so you guys can kind of catch the in-betweens. But if you want the full unfiltered workshops themselves, you can tune in for that. We still, again, have three passes for the in-person. Honestly, it's too late for you guys to book to stay overnight, but you can come for the day. We have day passes for a couple hundred dollars. You can come check it out. You'll get in food with us. You'll be able to connect, come to the workshops. Again, can't recommend it enough. Whether you can make it for multiple days, one day, or even one workshop, we will have options on our Eventbrite. It's wherever you're watching this in the profile. We have a link for it. You can check that out. So I want to pause here. That's kind of bringing it all home, putting a nice little like bow tie on it. I'm going to see if we have any questions and then I'm going to pause and kind of transition here into some kind of product breakdown. One of the things I like to do is when I have time at the end of live streams, especially, and even if you're watching the replay, I'm going to keep this in there as well. Some products that I've gotten in that sometimes are random, sometimes are tied into this, but I want to kind of like wrap it up. with some products when I have the time because that's part of the fun as well. So I'm going to just, again, see, it doesn't look like we have any like additional questions or comments specifically on that. I'm just going to go back through. It looks like what people are saying. Hey, yeah, I appreciate the new subscribers. I appreciate the kind words from what everyone's saying. It looks like fun. Yeah, I appreciate that. I also appreciated some of the funny comments between my buddy Rob jumping in. as well as being able to have some people jumping in on TikTok, having the funny humor. I always appreciate that. So now what we're going to do is, again, pull out. Let me actually, I'm going to put the Eventbrite in the comments here. So I'm going to put it in the comments so you guys can kind of have access to it. Boom. I'll put this below for everyone watching live. You can get our remote pass. And if you're watching on Amazon though, I'm not going to link to it. You can just check out our other platforms, but make sure even if you're watching on Amazon, subscribe, follow, ask questions. We're going to get into some of the comments here and you'll be able to just, again, see everything from wherever you like catch our stuff. You can reach out. You can always just send a message if you're not sure how to sign up for it and I will take care of you. So with that being said, let's dive into some of the product breakdowns. I'm actually wearing a couple of things, but more specifically, I have some supplements coming I wanted to talk about. I want to share with you a system that I utilize to see if it's actually a product I'm going to use and some of the approaches I like to take to see if it's something that I want to actually put into my body. But I wanted to give a special shout out actually to one of the actual guest host that's going to be coming on the retreat that was here for our last episode, Michelle Colton. She's a health coach as well, integrative health coach and nutrition coach. She has Homicide by Hygiene. It's actually in the Amazon shop as well. Let me actually put it in there. I'm going to bounce out for a second, Amazon, to see if it's in there. I'm going to put it up. It may not be in the carousel. Let me double check here. because I do have it under my books, my favorite picks for books. I thought I added it. It looks like it may not be in here. Yeah, I still got to add this. I'll add that in for my next one, but you can see it on my profile. I'm going to make a video about this. It's really cool. It's got great insight from just what we talked about. I haven't read it yet, but thanks, Michelle. You're an ally in health. And she breaks down, again, our skin being an organ, what ingredients we want to look for. So one that stuck out to me was phenol, ethyl, oxy. I wrote it down, actually, because I was not going to remember. But the point being, being able to have – Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Totally had it over here. I wrote it in my notebook. We'll get back to it. Phenyl ethyl oxalate, I think was the ingredients. I'm probably butchering it. Point being is I highly recommend checking her out because she puts some great stuff in here. It sounds like to have strategies on what you're going to put onto your skin. Like I got some raw shea butter that I ordered and she sent me a little extra clearly handsome face and neck cream for day and night. I'm going to use later after I get done with everything. But I'm going to pause. I'm going to go into a couple of different strategies when it comes to supplementation that I want to talk to you guys about. So I have companies send me supplements all the time. And one of the biggest questions I hear people ask me, clients ask me, and I want to share with you guys, we're going to talk about this a little bit at the workshop, is how do you pick your supplements? How do you pick whether it's legit, whether we should take it, what's effective? There's a couple of things I like to look for. One, no matter what the brand is, we have, there's kind of three products I'm going to go through right now. First is Uh, cheery, very steady B-twelve energy. So I personally actually do take B-twelve. I like taking B-six, B-twelve. Um, so this has also has D-three. That's actually a really clutch one. Um, it's got enough units that we want to look for. Got folate as well. Nice. We got B-six, B-twelve, folate, and biotin. So we got B-three, B-six, B-twelve, B-nine. Nice, nice, nice. We got some added, like just some extracts. Here's the one thing I will say when they say proprietary blend, they don't have to tell you how much of each ingredient. So I'm always weary with proprietary blends because they could say three ingredients in here and it says, okay, proprietary blend, but it doesn't tell you how much of each individual ingredient there is. They'll just tell you the total. One thing I do look for that this has is, or that I'm looking for to see if it does have, is it third-party tested or is it NSF? Which is another kind of like stamp of approval saying, hey, it says what it has and it actually has those ingredients. Or if it's in a certified lab or manufacturer that cleans their equipment, that uses the actual ingredients that they say they do. Because a lot of times you can get cross-contamination. A lot of these brands will ultimately mix things in bigger manufacturers that are cross-contaminating ingredients. The reason you may want to consider this for an athlete, you may have to pass a drug test. And if it's creatine, for example, but it also has something else that's a contaminated performance enhancer, you could flag a drug test. I've seen this happen to UFC fighters and other athletes before. There's something we learned in college when I was going to Stony Brook university, they sat us down and from the athletics world, or even like wrestling and the club and all that stuff. Hey, you want to look for NSF. That means it's certified safe for sport. You're not going to fail a drug test. Also being able to see if it's again, third-party tested and verified. So with that being said, that's what you like to look for. The ingredients themselves look good, but it doesn't really matter what it says. Can it say anything on it? You want to see, is this third party verified? Now, I don't see that stamp on here. So while I'm going to take these to experiment with them, because I like to just experiment with a variety of different things, I don't see that stamp on it. Now, what we can also do, here's a backup system. If I don't see the stamp on it, what I like to go to is a third-party website that's a nonprofit. The one I like is quackwatch.org. There's a variety of ones. That's just one I literally have known about for decades. I learned it from going to Stony Brook University. That's one that they recommended the athletes to use. And what we do is we search the actual brand and product. And what we're looking for is, does it come up flagged like there was a lawsuit? So here we go. Look, this is perfect. I just typed in Cheery, the brand. And we're going to look up some things that came up. It said it found eight results. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean this exact brand is flagged. It's looking for keywords. And what we're looking for is, does this brand come up in any lawsuits? Does it come up in any conflicts or any issues? So the first thing comes up, dubious promotions of Herbalife Nightworks. So this is talking about Herbalife, so this is a different brand altogether. But I'm just going to make sure that the formula in it isn't associated to this at all. which has been marketed since three. All right. So let's read this. The article tells why I believe that night works is being promoted with improper claims and conduct has been highly questionable ingredients and claims that have been marketed since two thousand three is maybe unrealistic. So that's an important one. But you're just talking about more general ingredients. So about vitamin C, talking about vitamin E, folic acid, lemon balm extracts, ALA, alpha-lopic acid. It's talking about some basic ingredients. That doesn't mean they don't work, but they might be making claims or connected to claims that are too over-exaggerated. I'm going to go through another one just to see if, again, this particular brand doesn't look like this actual brand comes up in any lawsuits. It's more of maybe the potential ingredients. I wonder why CHIRI came up, though. It's probably connected to a name. And let's see the base manufacturer. The other thing we can look at is the actual brand itself beyond just the label. So McCoball. active i'm going to type that in let's see if anything comes up nothing comes up so the brand itself seems to be like no lawsuits no issues and then we can even look up the manufacturing so it says manufacture exclusively for cheery a division of purity products we're going to type in purity products too to see if cheery didn't come up purity products if that comes up that'll be another one there we go okay so look we got a hundred and eighty results so it's mostly because it's using the word products but we're gonna just scour through and i'm gonna specifically look for most recent search and we're looking to see if there's anything specifically for this brand lawsuit by misinformation promoters yeah so it's literally just literally just because it has the word products in it but we're going to look up purity See if anything pops up on that. So now it's going to look up for, it's not the actual brand. It seems it's more about making claims of purity. So that's an example of when we type in cheery, that nothing comes up related to the brand. It's just other types of products related to maybe over-exaggerated claims. So the one thing I would say from this, since a couple of things came up, not related to their brand or the product, but the ingredients is the claims they may be making might be a little over-exaggerated. Like for example, they're claiming like melts away, uh it's kind of cut off here so terrific berry b-twelve energy melt so actually just melts on your tongue that's it's just a dissolvable thing so they're actually making out ranges it's basically for energy which is a true statement the thing i would just be mindful of is you know that a lot of the claims these companies are making are over exaggerated that's the key thing i would invite that's the biggest take home from all of this um and let's just see if there's any questions that come up on that Doesn't look like we have a question. That's just, again, Curie B-Twelve. Again, something I'm going to be taking. I don't see any certified safe for sport dynamics on it. I'm actually going to pull it up on Amazon to see if I open up their listing. What if anything does come up? Because that's the other kind of backup nature I like to it. Because it'll also say on the listing, if it does have legit third-party testing, they will always boast that. That's something they know is a helpful marketing tool as well as just something you want to know. So let's just look on their brand. It'll have the ingredients. we go melts fast nervous system health see it's making a lot of these like general claims nothing crazy but it's just like okay how legit is this as far as efficacy so we know b-twelve is an effective supplement in general but is it going to be like So they're saying like nervous system health. Yes, it will impact your brain. We know B-to-O is impactful for cognition. Brain health. Yep, that's true. Energy and vitality. These are actually true things. These are all like legit statements. Nothing too crazy. They're not making over-exaggerated statements or claims, but they don't have, again, a stamped certified safe for sport or anything like that. So what I would say, if you're considering it and you're an athlete, probably don't go with this. It may or may not be safe. It doesn't even have third-party verification or testing. But if you're just any other person and you want to try it out, Again, it's a cost effective, decent option. The other thing I like to look for is the cost per count. So like this is ninety cents per count. So it's ninety cents per tablet and each tablet you can look at the levels and then you can always cross compare it to like, OK, does this make sense from a financial return? Honestly, it's not a bad option. Nothing huge jumps out of me, especially when I look it up. But like, I'll be honest, this wouldn't be my number one pick. I would actually pick I have a couple other ones, especially sublingual. You drop it on the dropper, but this could be an option. Now let's go to. Our next one, which is our pasteurized Echomancia munsenilifila, which is basically a bacteria. It's probiotic. It's from ExpandAge. It's a probiotic strain. So what we're going to do though, is we're going to look for it again, not only under CrackWatch, but I'm going to pull up the product itself and we're going to look for, is it third-party tested? Is it NSF? Looking for some of those key variables. Now, what I will also say from a probiotic, it has some other interesting ingredients like berberine, cinnamon, and some fiber components to help basically promote and support the gut health that you want. So elevate your health, gut health signs back to probiotic innovation. Again, they can make all these claims, clean formula. You could say all those things, show me the testing. So what they have is they actually do have it. They have GMO-free certified, gluten-free certified, full ingredient disclosure, third-party tested, GMP certified. That means it's in the manufacturer. It's been tested that they have the ingredients, no artificial colors. So this is actually a really good quality as far as what it says is in it is in it. And the place that they're actually manufacturing it is tested to support the ingredients. So the main benefits to this, let's talk about what are the main benefits? Because I'm actually looking at, I love AI. So like on Amazon, I can show us, hey, what are the questions like this? So what are the main benefits here? The main benefits of this is your gut health. Why should you care about your gut health? When you have a balanced gut health and microbiome, you are going to less than likely not crave as much of the sugary items and other foods that are going to be impacting your weight. It can also impact inflammation, how you feel, and overall immune system function. The other benefit that this has is it has cinnamon and berberine, which can be connected to some... responses related to your overall fat management now you don't need to refrigerate this because that's another question i see here yes it's also vegan friendly because you can see it's got a vegan stamp of approval on it and here's what i will say from a comparison standpoint this is a really cost effective option for a three month supply Twenty two cents per count. Twenty bucks. Really solid. Now you can also do I've worked with companies like Zenwise that have a probiotic rich, which I also like, but they're going to be a little bit more costly. But this is a pretty cost effective option. It's not a brand I've heard of. So the last thing I want to do is I'm again going to pull up Quackwatch and just pull up expand age of the brand itself and see if anything by expand age life sciences comes up. So let's see. Boom, OK, complementing alternative medicine. OK, applying to science based summary. Let's check. So something did come up and we're looking for, so it doesn't actually have their brand. It's just because I, what I spelled, this is a really simple strategy I do. I type in the brand, go on quackwatch.org and I look at, does anything come up that's actually listing this particular brand? Sometimes articles will come up, but it's because we're using certain keywords like age that it pulls up a bunch of articles, but you can specify. and it you can read it usually will say in the title like flagged by the fda like this says consumer health uh digest issue twenty three to two it doesn't talk about the actual brand itself but let's use one that we know like for example um i'll pull up one right now so i know like that one doesn't have it see walmart It's Walmart brand had one for a couple of flagged issues. So you'll see that come up as well. So you can kind of just go to these third party websites to look to see if there's any issues. If you don't want to do that, that's what I'm here for. This is what I would actually give a thumbs up on and cost effective as well. So now let's go into our next piece, which I'm going to pull up the other by the same brand. This is the different kind of strain. It has some different alignment of intention and purposes, which this one, it seems like they're kind of leaning towards or kind of putting it more towards a overall health. And let's just kind of pull up some of the claims here, because honestly, I've not heard of. urolithin A, to be honest with you. It could be just a probiotic strain. So let's look up this. And if I haven't heard of something, that doesn't mean I know everything, but there's some pretty basic common things that you're going to routinely hear about. And if it's something outside of that, I'm always kind of sussed to see like, hey, is this just like you're repurposing something new? So they're gearing it towards, again, what seems like healthy aging, mitochondrial health, gut health. So the biggest thing is another potential gut health ingredient. It looks like They're using, again, a microbiome kind of probiotic strain in here that finds a strain of particular bacteria that I just hadn't specifically heard of. And let's look at some of the questions that come up. What are the main ingredients? Yeah, it looks like so for the main ingredients, you have urolithin A, which is going to be kind of piggybacking on a probiotic, which is the Acomencia municifilio. That's a probiotic strain. You can tell just from the amount of units and what it is. Then you see it just has some different extracts, strawberry fruit, pomegranate, kiwi fruit. Like, yeah, it's great to have those fruit things. That's just kind of help feeding from my understanding, the actual microbiome and bacteria for it to take root in place. This is lab tested. It's certified in a manufacturing place. It says exactly what it has in it. This is something you can take on a daily basis and it's meant to help with your digestion and just overall what seems to be cellular health and mitochondria function and renewal process. So there's a gut. The biggest reason I would take this is the gut health component. Um, so again, either one of these can be used from a gut health perspective. They're both by the same brand. I think they're helpful. Also, again, another cost effective option. If you're like, Hey, I also want to have some other benefits, maybe with mitochondrial health, like energy, that's a fancy saying energy, um, being able to help with your cells, replenishing all those things. These are more like bolder claims that I don't see as much maybe backing on. Um, I'm less familiar with. And nowadays with technology, again, you go to quackwatch.org, you plug it in and see if anything pops up. You can even just, again, come to me. I got you. But I would say for expand age, the brand itself doesn't have any flags. They're third party tested. They're verified that they're what they're putting in it is in it. So I actually like the brand. I like the probiotics. There's something you can take on a daily basis. To me, when I recap, when I think about supplements in general, all three of these, I think about what can I take on a daily basis? I'm taking a multivitamin. I'm taking a vitamin D supplement or D three K two. I'm also going to be taking a creatine based supplement. I'm taking an omega three based supplement. So whether that's like fish oil, krill oil, or some vegan plant oriented version of that. I'm also going to be taking a protein oriented supplement on a daily basis. So whether it's like via drink, jaco milk right here or you have different brands like i like also the pure protein because it's got a little bit more fiber jaco milk i think it's got one yeah it's got one gram of fiber two grams of carbs hundred and eighty calories thirty grams protein it's solid and i like supporting um because i trust the brand the person that runs it owns it and all that stuff they're third-party tested grass and has in it when it says it's in it nsf so it's safe for sport um yeah all that good stuff ultimately being able to have a handful of things. And when you go beyond that, like unless all the other aspects of your life are dialed in, it's kind of not necessary for those things. But yeah, even a B-twill vitamin, that's something I think about for my ADHD peeps out there. It can be very helpful from a cognitive standpoint. I'm going to pause here, see if there's any questions that are coming in on that and that's related to it. And then lastly, what we will talk about, I do want to go back to this, this Barry one really quickly, because I realized I skipped over the questions that come in for it. So let's just address questions for our cheery B-twelve energy spend. Can it be taken on an empty stomach? You could, here's what I would say for almost any supplements. Ideally don't take it on an empty stomach. You want to take it with food ideally in the morning. So what I do is I fast until about noon. So what I do is I use the only reason I, or the thing is not considered fault. I use my protein shakes, so I'll drink it with my coffee and then I take my supplements together. But ideally you want to take it not on an empty stomach for the most part. It doesn't contain any common allergens. So for what I can see in the ingredients, Doesn't seem to be anything like on a common, typical allergic basis. Still look at it. But if you're talking about from a specific inflammation standpoint, again, I'm weary of things like this because they're not third-party tested or not verified what they're saying is in it. So you want to be mindful of that. But it seems to be a cost-effective option. Now it also doesn't have a vegan stamp of approval. So unless my experience is if it is vegan approved, they will have a stamp on it. So we're just gonna say it's not a vegan safe option. You might wanna be me of that. And then again, just to compare it, like there's some other B-twelve supplements I like that have a dropper version of it. You could take it, it's quick, it'll dissolve under your tongue. Why you might like it again, B-tol for energy, especially with the B-six added on as well from immune system standpoint and some of the other B-complexes. The other bonus I do like about this, it has vitamin D-three. The only thing about vitamin D-three is it's a fat soluble supplement, which means, or a vitamin I should say, which means you want to have it with fat. This doesn't have anything like that with fat in it. So you're going to want to take this, especially this with food that has a little bit of fat. So my protein shake, for example, the Jocko milk, this has four and a half grams of fat in it. So when I drink this with it, that's a perfect mix because if you don't have it, vitamin D, A, K, and E are all fat soluble vitamins. So if you don't take it with fat, body's not going to properly absorb it. That's just a quick thing I wanted to touch on that. And then lastly, it's kind of like a side out of kind of left field that they sent me, but I'm happy to talk about it because it's related to health is the fungal nail treatment. So this is something I, fortunately I don't have to deal with yet in my life with having like any kind of like fungal infections or things in my nails, but like being in the jujitsu and athletic space, this is like a real thing that people have to deal with, but also just in athletics or like, I know like without throwing fan, like my specific family, um, Some family members know how to deal with different like fungal things under your nails, stuff like that. So here's, I'll just look at some of the questions. How long does it take to see results? That's a great question. I haven't used it yet, but let's look at what they are claiming. when it comes to this kind of stuff i will have to make a follow-up to see so use the past consistently before bed for three to six months so it looks like this can take anywhere from like two to four weeks depending on what it is from like athlete's foot or ringworm to potentially three to six months here's what i'll say especially using this for like ringworm talk to your doctor like any of this stuff talk to your doctor because when it comes to ringworm for my like wrestlers athletes and stuff it's not something you want to mess with but if it's help i'm just looking at the ingredient You don't want to make acid. I don't have enough. It's an antifungal that can be quite effective possibly for a ringworm. So just talk to your doctor though. This isn't something I want to give like clear advice on. Can this be used on fingernails? A hundred percent fingernails. That's kind of what it's meant for being able to use on toe and fingernails for any kind of nail damage, but also being able to use it for like ringworm or any kind of like athlete's foot or skin infections. This can be impactful, but again, talk to your doctor, talk to a medical professional about this. And again, are the patches visible when wearing shoes? So depending on where you put it, you're not gonna be able to see it. They're not see-through either. They're like a brown kind of texture, but you're not really gonna notice it if you're wearing shoes. If you're wearing slides or like open-toed stuff, you're for sure gonna see it. Other than that, you're not really gonna notice it from the outside. You're probably gonna feel it. So again, for Cure, most athletes foot, jock itch, and ringworm. I might even keep this just literally for the ringworm. I haven't had ringworm in a long, long time, like years, but who knows? But with that being said, that's going to bring it home for the products. I literally got it just in time. I'm going to wrap it up from there. Hopefully that answers the questions. Hope you guys enjoyed this and I will see y'all. We're going to be heading to Joshua Tree, California. So if you're watching the replay, we might already be there. Check for your Eventbrite links if you want to join the pass remotely. If you don't watch it live, you will also be able to buy with thirty dollars a pass to get all the replays. So that's going to be available as well. With that being said, I'm going to get out of here, jump on my next coaching call. Catch you guys on the next one. Later, y'all. I'm going to bounce out of here, drop out of here, and we'll close this one up as well.