Summary:

Eric Edmeades, founder of WildFit and author of “Post Diabetic”, discusses his approach to health and nutrition on the Wellness Your Way podcast. Edmeades, who has a background in business and nutritional anthropology, explains that his company WildFit combines nutritional anthropology and behavioral change psychology to help people improve their health. He argues that the diet industry is fundamentally flawed and often does more harm than good. Edmeades also discusses the concept of “post diabetic”, a term he uses to describe people who have reversed their type 2 diabetes. He believes that by understanding the cause of diabetes and adopting a lifestyle that mimics the seasonal cycles of our ancestors, people can reverse their diabetes and improve their overall health.

Full Episode:

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Transcription:

Megan Lyons:

Thank you so much Eric Edmeads for coming on Wellness Year Way. I am so excited to have you here and talk about your new book.

Eric Edmeades:

I’m glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Megan Lyons:

Of course. Please start by telling our audience just a little bit about you.

Eric Edmeades:

Sure. I’m see, I’m sort of Canadian. I was really born in South Africa, but grew up in Canada and my background has really been that of business. My first business was in mobile computing and logistics management, and then I got involved in Hollywood film production and special effects and I transitioned from there to high fidelity medical simulation, mostly for military applications. But underneath all of that, I’ve had a longstanding hobby in the space of what we might now call nutritional anthropology. And so about, I don’t know, 12 or so years ago now, I got an invitation to go on a big speaking tour teaching business around the world, and I love doing that. And so I decided to really turn to that and got into basically teaching business. That was my thing. But my business clients were always asking for advice outside the realm of business, and that’s very normal entrepreneurship.

Eric Edmeades:

When you’re hanging out with other entrepreneurs, you’re asking like, Hey man, how do you manage your relationship when you’re running your business? How do you handle parenting? And one very common thing that came up was, well, how do you stay healthy? How do you stay fit and healthy? And so at that point, my longstanding interest and hobby in this space of nutritional anthropology combined with my business coaching business, and I founded the company WildFit and created the first WildFit program. And all of that led to us here today and the launch of the post diabetic book and so on.

Megan Lyons:

Amazing. Now, I think many members of the audience might have heard of WildFit or be familiar with WildFit, but in case they’re not, can you tell us what that platform is?

Eric Edmeades:

Absolutely. So we specialize in a combination of, again, nutritional anthropology, that is to say the historical study of nutrition and food from an evolutionary perspective and behavioral change psychology. And the reason for that is that I think we can all pretty much agree that the diet industry is fundamentally flawed and probably does more harm than it does good. And one of the reasons for that is one of my little jokes is that if you imagine a teenage alien coming down to earth to do a homework assignment and their teachers giving them this assignment, study the diet industry and determine what it’s for,

Eric Edmeades:

They would look at it and go, well, they say it’s for losing weight, but what it really seems to be for is destroying. And that’s basically how the diet industry works. And so when I started sharing health principles with my business clients, I noticed something and that was that I would see them, they had obvious many times, obvious need of diet revision, and I would give them all the advice and then they would stick with it for somewhere between hours and weeks. And then I would see them at the next workshop maybe a year later, and they would be, I mean, right where they were before, sometimes worse. And in the meantime it looked like I’d hurt them. And what I mean by that is that by giving them really good rules that really did work and then they didn’t follow them, it made it their fault.

Eric Edmeades:

They now had shame and they had guilt and that shame and guilt by the way are, well, those emotions are food triggers. So now it becomes this perpetuating cycle. And I didn’t want to be part of that cycle. And so I then did a deep dive into something that we call behavioral change dynamics. I had developed it for our business coaching business, but I decided to combine those same ideas about experience design and transformative content to nutritional content. And so I launched the very first WildFit program a little more than 10 years ago now, and I did it for eight clients to begin with. And I was blown away by the results they got. The average person will go on two diets a year for their entire adult life, and they’ll stick to each one for about seven days. And here we had eight people that had stuck to a three month process and all gotten really good results.

Eric Edmeades:

And so I was like, no, that’s interesting. But it’s also very anecdotal. It’s eight people. They were fans and clients, so I had to keep testing. I did another class of eight and another class of eight. And then some of our clients, the transformations they were experiencing were very obvious. It’s interesting if you teach business, the only way somebody goes is that really working is they look and go, oh look, they’re buying a new car. They live in a bigger house. But for all they could be doing that on credit. We don’t know that the results are real, but when you help somebody lose 40 pounds and you help somebody turn around their say diabetes or reverse all the inflammation that’s been puffing up their face and joints, their friends notice and they start asking. And that’s exactly what happened is that we started getting people writing to our help desk and saying, where is this health program?

Eric Edmeades:

My friend told me about, because we didn’t have a website, we weren’t trying to sell it, it was just an internal program for our business clients. And one thing led to another, we did put up a website, and it was quite interesting. One of our clients had done the program with his wife and they sent out an invitation to do a little conversation on a zoom call with a bunch of their clients. And where we had 150 clients the year before, we had 200 people sign up right then and there. So it was like suddenly a year’s worth of business in a moment. And then it happened again about three weeks after that or maybe a month after that, another 200 people. And then a few weeks after that, another person did it and 1100 people signed up. Wow. And so suddenly we were in this fast scaling business and the word of mouth was causing this snowballing growth.

Eric Edmeades:

And since then we’ve launched our own coaching certification, have 500 coaches around the world, and we’ve now had over a hundred thousand people go through the core program. I mean, I would say probably closer to a million people have gone through the overall masterclasses and so forth. But the core program, a hundred thousand people have gone through that in a hundred countries around the world. And then we stumbled upon a bunch of interesting data, and this is an important thing. A lot of times we don’t realize that a business is really about data. And we started collecting data and really watching it. And one of the data points that we saw is that many of our clients were coming back to us and telling us that they were no longer diabetic. Well, worse than that, many of them are coming back to us and saying, when I started your program, I was type two diabetic and now my doctor says pre-diabetic.

Eric Edmeades:

And that irritated me. It irritated me because pre means before and it has a subliminal command in it that you’re headed in that direction. In other words, we are on your way. It’s the prequel. And so we started instructing those clients that we would rather they use the expression post diabetic. And over time we refined that definition and now it’s been picked up and people are really using it. And the idea is this, that if you were a type two, if you were dealing with type two diabetes and you reversed it and you now are in the same rough range, say from an A1C perspective as a pre-diabetic, you might have almost the same metrics, maybe exactly the same metrics, but because you’re trending in the other direction, medical advice should be different. And so therefore there should be a separate medical classification for those people. And that’s where we proposed the idea of post diabetic. And of course that’s where my co-author is a medical doctor and previously an assistant professor of medicine at UCLA. He had diabetes before he did our program, and that’s what inspired him to want to come and do the book with me.

Megan Lyons:

It’s an absolute genius phrase, and I am somewhat embarrassed to consider that. I’ve never even thought of that word. I thought of it as a range in A1C like most health practitioners do. And I thought, okay, well that’s like the level below diabetic, but I’ve never considered that when you come back down you should be called something else because of course, like you say, we treat that differently. So it’s genius. Please go ahead.

Eric Edmeades:

There’s another level and that is that. Now let’s say that person comes out of the prediabetic range and goes to fully normalized condition. They are still post diabetic. And this is a very important consideration because they’ve been type two diabetic before they’ve demonstrated a proclivity. They’ve demonstrated that they might have epigenetic influence, they might have genetic influence, they might have lifestyle influence that makes it easier for them to develop diabetes in other people. And so let’s say for example, you had two friends, one became a type two and then reversed it, say going on, our program reversed it. Now they have the same A1C as their non-diabetic friend. Statistically, they still have higher risk factors. And so post diabetic is every moment that you have moved out of the diabetic range and essentially for the rest of your life so that you know to be careful.

Megan Lyons:

Yes, that’s so important. I’m so glad you’re calling light to it. And honestly, I’m still shocked by the number of people who come into my office and they have a type two diabetes diagnosis and they literally have not heard from their practitioner or elsewhere that it’s reversible. And that’s really sad because that leads people to throw their hands up in the air many times and just think, okay, this is my lot in life. I’m going to ride it out until I have to take medication or something like that, which is so far from the answer. Tell us a little bit more about why you think this is not widely known and why conventional medicine might still treat it as they do.

Eric Edmeades:

I’m going to give you two answers. One is a little hard to take and the other one is a little bit more acceptable in a sense. The first answer is that it’s just very profitable to manage diabetes instead of reversing it. Now, I’m not suggesting that any single doctor has that in their mind, not at all. But the industry that provides their education and their continuing education and their facilities and funding for research and all that kind of stuff, that industry behind them does not profit from the reversal of diabetes at all. And so from an industry perspective, there is no real will. Even organizations that claim to be advocacy organizations for people suffering with diabetes, even those organizations would go out of business if diabetes was reversible. So even they aren’t really motivated to end the whole thing. Now, that’s the hardcore conspiracy theorist tinfoil hat answer.

Eric Edmeades:

And then I’ll give you the other answer that is, I think more true relative to the average md and that is that the average MD has been, first of all negatively influenced by the industry. So they’re sometimes unaware that diabetes type two and prediabetes are optional and reversible conditions. But then the other version is that they may be aware ish. And so they may then say to their client, look, you’re now in the pre-diabetic range, so I really suggest that you take it easy with sugar. And they give them advice at that point. And there are two major problems with the advice. Often the advice is absolutely not enough. It’s not the right advice. Secondly, even if they do deliver the correct advice, less than 2% of patients will actually follow that advice for anything more than about a week. So then the doctors give up.

Eric Edmeades:

In essence, you can imagine, let’s say I’m a totally, I’m a good-hearted, good nature doctor. A client’s walked in, they, they’ve shown up as pre-diabetic, and I know that it’s reversible and I know that they don’t have to become a type two diabetic. So I have this conversation, look, here’s where you’re at. This is what’s going on. It’s largely because of your relationship with sugar and processed food and all that kind of stuff. So if you can dial that in a little, we can avoid going with the medication. So how would you like to proceed? And the challenge is the patient says, just give me the medication. I want to keep eating chocolate cupcakes.

Megan Lyons:

Right, right, exactly. And taking it back to that, well-meaning physician, they might genuinely say, because this is their experience. Well, we have these two options. You can improve your relationship with sugar or go on the medication. And let me tell you, 90% of the clients that I see, or patients I see who go on medication get their A1C down within next months. And only 2% of patients who try to work on their own, on their food do. And that’s maybe true in the doctor’s experience, but that 2% or whatever is because they don’t have the support and they’re trying to white knuckle it as you say, and change everything overnight and feel restricted and bad about themselves. And that lasts. We both know how long, not forever.

Eric Edmeades:

Yeah, we did. We are now just about to start clinical trials on our process for diabetes rev rehearsal, but we did a preclinical trial just we did a class that had mostly type twos and some pre-diabetics in it. I think it was 110 people or something like that. And we measured all the stats all the way through it as a sort of preparation for going to clinical trials. And we had, I think 90% of the type two diabetics recede at least to post diabetic, to pre-diabetic range. And a hundred percent of the pre-diabetics came completely out of the range. And those numbers are astounding to any doctor because they had the experience that you’ve had. Well, I gave them dietary advice and it didn’t work, and so they stopped giving it to them. In fact, here’s kind of a cute little anecdote that makes this point really well.

Eric Edmeades:

Years and years ago, I had a girlfriend and her doctor was a psychiatrist and she knew me quite well, and she knew that I’m not a very big fan of pharmaceutical psychiatry. I believe that there’s a lot that can be done with proper therapy and that most of the pills that are prescribed in that area weren’t really necessary. In fact, occasionally I might have gone so far as to make hyperbolic statements like for every 10,000 pills that are prescribed, only one was needed. But she says to me, Hey, we’re having dinner with my dad tonight. Please don’t pick a fight with him. And I’m like, I want to make a good impression. I don’t want to pick a fight with him. Clearly I’m not going to do that. So we’re sitting having dinner, and at one point her dad, this is in France in Normandy, and he turns to me and he goes, so rik, what do you think about pharmaceutical psychiatry? And I looked at my girlfriend and I’m like, oh my God, I fight, but you can’t ask me to lie at this point. I’m going to have to tell my truth here. So I dumbed the truth down by a zero. I said, well, for every thousand pills that are prescribed, I think only one was necessary. He looked straight at me and he goes, I think it’s more like 10,000 to one.

Megan Lyons:

Wow.

Eric Edmeades:

And that began a really fascinating conversation about what’s happened in the world of pharmaceuticals and whether it doesn’t really matter whether it’s psychiatry or physical medicine, but here’s what’s happened is that many countries changed their legislation so that drug companies could advertise directly to the consumer. And so now people are simply walking in and asking for the shortcut. He says to them, look, I think that that pill could help you, but would be really good is if we had two or three sessions first to see what we can resolve without going that way. What do you think? And they go, if you don’t give me the pill, I’m just going to find another doctor. And that is the problem. The consumers also have lost faith in natural solutions, and they only want shortcuts. And that’s because pharmaceutical companies over promise and under deliver. And so they see the ad that promises them green fields on the other side of their problem. Of course, it lists 4 million side effects underneath the green fields.

Megan Lyons:

Right? Yeah, that’s a really good point. I think my client population is biased because I can’t prescribe pharmaceuticals. I’m only working with tools of lifestyle and diet and supplementations and all of this stuff. So when people come to me, they know that they are going to try this other option. And I think I get the people who are willing to put in the work and don’t expect it to be easy. Also don’t want it to be as hard as they think it might be. But I know the vast majority of people out there, like you said, are promised those green fields and they want that quick fix. Let’s say someone received this diagnosis of type two diabetes, they don’t want the quick fix. They’re willing to put in the work as long as it’s sustainable and pleasant. What are just a few of the things you’d start them with to improve their health? And of course, we want people to buy the book post diabetic and do WildFit and all this, but just give us a few things you’d start off

Eric Edmeades:

With. Of course. No, no, I don’t hold anything back. I’m not worried about that. It’s funny, I did this talk Copenhagen many years ago and I came back six months later and this woman came up to me and she goes, you gave that talk and you were offering WildFit after it. And she goes, I lost 30 pounds. And I go, congratulations, which class were you in? She goes, well, I just listened to what you said in the talk. I never joined a class.

Megan Lyons:

Yes.

Eric Edmeades:

And she goes, and I feel really guilty about that, that I never paid you. And I go, you don’t understand. I am doing this for the purpose of it. I have other things in my life that are about money. This is not like that. In any event, I think that one of the things that we like to do is to say, if you want to solve a problem, then you really should understand the cause of it. And so the idea here is to take a look at diabetes in a different way, is to say that rather than look at it like a disease that say snuck up in the night and struck you down because we think of disease that way because there are things like that of course, pathogens and what have you, but we would suggest that it’s not really a disease, that it’s a repetitive stress disorder, that you have behaved in a certain way for a long enough period of time that the body’s elasticity in that area has snapped, and now you’ve got a problem.

Eric Edmeades:

And so therefore, if you were to correct the underlying behavior, you’d be able to turn the condition around. So that’s the approach we take. In fact, mark Hyman wrote the forward to the book, and the reason I think he wrote the forward is when he heard that argument, he was like that. Exactly right. That’s what we should be seeing. So then there’s another thing to really understand, and this is very important, is that how long does it take to create diabetes? Well, it depends a little bit on what decade you were born in. If you were born in the fifties, then it take, at that point, it took 30 or 40 years to create type two diabetes. By the time we got to the 1970s, basically nobody under 40 had type two diabetes. It was called adult onset diabetes. Of course, if you were born in the eighties, you might’ve got diabetes by the time you were in your twenties.

Eric Edmeades:

And if you were born in the last 20 years, you’re getting it in your teens and preteens years. And that’s a mark of how disastrously things are going in our food education and our food legislation regulation and frankly manufacturing and marketing. So that said though, let’s say it still takes 10 years to create it. We know that in the vast majority of cases, it can be turned around in about eight weeks. So hang on. What that sort of suggests is that the body was resisting it the entire time. If it takes 10 years of pushing against the body’s energy management systems against the metabolism, 10 years of straining the metabolism to create the disease, but in eight years of relaxing the metabolism or eight weeks I should say, then that’s a very big clue, both the nature of the disease and what your lifestyle needs to be like.

Eric Edmeades:

And the core message there is your lifestyle does not have to be some extreme life of deprivation at all. It needs to be a life of seasonality. And that’s really the core message is that I believe that there are a number of different influences in diabetes, and I mean, for example, two of them are our lack of seasonality with regard to carbohydrate foods and our massive introduction of processed foods and seed oils and that type of thing. I think those things have combined to create a storm, an epidemic of diabetes. But if we start with that foundation about seasons, our ancestors evolved the ability to not starve to death in the most harsh conditions we could imagine. I mean, most of us could never survive in the conditions that our ancestors lived in. We just aren’t that tough anymore. They were facing starvation on a daily basis, and we evolved instincts, cravings and metabolic function to get through those very difficult times.

Eric Edmeades:

And not only did we evolve to survive them, but we evolved to utilize them. So as an example, winter, winter for our ancestors wasn’t like Minnesota. It was Sub-Saharan Africa, it was drought and there wasn’t a lot of water and there wasn’t a lot of food. You might think, okay, well yeah, now the body’s going to fall to burning fat, sure for a little while, but if it gets panicked enough, if you get past about 48 hours without food, it’s going to switch to protein. And a lot of people think that’s a bad thing. And I’m like, no, it is not a bad thing. Your body burns old, sick and diseased proteins first. I mean, you know this, right? And it’s like the metaphor, by the way, bar, if you’ve never thought of it this way, please feel free to borrow this metaphor. I always put it like this.

Eric Edmeades:

Imagine you and I are in a cabin in the north of Norway and we ran out of heating fuel and it’s minus 30 outside and it’s starting to get cold inside. We’re going to need to make a fire and we can’t find any firewood. We’re going to start looking around at the furniture pretty quick, but we’re not going to burn the antique grand piano. We’re going to burn the broken picnic table. That’s exactly what our bodies do when we go into winter. They start burning out all the old sick broken proteins and stranded aminos and what have you, and that’s important. And yet today most people get stuck in one metabolic season and they stay there and until their system gets strained, and then they get a repetitive stress injury called insulin resistance problems. And there you have it.

Megan Lyons:

Fantastic. I love that. And no, I have never used the cabin analogy in burning the old picnic table, so thanks for the permission to borrow it. So make this a little bit more practical for the average person. So what does that mean in terms of how they would be eating and how they would be fluctuating these carbohydrates?

Eric Edmeades:

Sure. Right now there’s a lot of focus on say, nutrition. And the way that works is we tell you don’t eat these things and eat these things over here. That is important. Those conversations are important, but the part that’s missing is that mother nature used to control the type of macros that we were getting at any given point in time. And so roughly speaking, what would happen is that the summer would come along and we’d start seeing some berries and root vegetables and fruit as we moved into fall, and honey would become prolific and we would be eating lots of carbohydrate foods, and we should have, and this current Instagram trend of sugar is evil, is just about as evil as the evil sugar they’re talking about. We have had a long standing relationship with carbohydrates. I don’t believe that we should stop doing that, but those carbohydrates told our body something they said to our body, Hey, listen, you know what comes after all these carbohydrates, massive calorie restriction in the form of winter.

Eric Edmeades:

So then the body’s like, okay, so what traits do we need to evolve to survive that winter? Well, we should have evolved powerful cravings. If we’re eating carbs, we should want to eat more. We should slow down our metabolism so we become even more efficient about our energy. We should probably even feel a little tired in the afternoons because we don’t want to burn all this energy because we want to store glycogen and fat, because that might be the thing that gets us through the winter. Then we move into winter, and at first the body’s like, look, I’ve got fat to burn, no problem. But they’ll say, after two days without food, the body’s like, holy crap, I’m going to have to start burning, so I don’t want to get rid of my fat. And this is very important because people go on diets with calorie restriction and they don’t understand that when they do that, they’re very often telling their body not to release the fat.

Eric Edmeades:

There’s a food with crisis, don’t get rid of the fat. But then for our ancestors, the skies darkened and the lightning ripped through the horizon and thunder roared across the plains, and water came pouring down and green shoots started coming up, and there were plants everywhere, and the hunting became unbelievably prolific, and suddenly they started eating a massive calorie surplus of the most unbelievably rich protein sources. And in that calorie surplus, the body said, oh, there’s abundance around us. Now I can release the fat that I had stored for the winter. So when we consider that’s the cycle that our ancestors evolved to experience, what can we do about that? Well, we can mimic those seasons. We can mimic those cycles. No, I don’t believe that anybody should be living in keto permanently. It’s like, no, that the diet industry has a baby bathwater approach.

Eric Edmeades:

The minute something appears to work a little bit, now we should do only that. But equally, the people that say keto is evil and wrong are just as wrong. Ketosis is simply your body’s reaction to not having carbohydrates. That’s great. You need that from time to time, but you need to cycle through those seasons. And so what I really suggest to anybody who’s concerned about diabetes and their blood sugar levels, especially if they’re into the pre or type two range, is consider that the season that contributed most to the creation of that condition is the season of autumn, the season of abundant carbohydrates, and probably junk carbohydrates too. So that means what you want to do is move to the season that would correct that imbalance, and that season would be spring. You’d want to move to a spring season, not forever, not forever, but for long enough that your body could start to reset.

Eric Edmeades:

And then once you’d managed to get the body reset, you would want to make sure that over the course of your calendar year that you had cycling in and out of those seasons so that your metabolism becomes flexible and you become fat adapted, and suddenly you’ve got regular energy, consistent energy, and you have the ability to choose seasons based on whatever activities you’re on, you suddenly know, well, I want to go and do a triathlete, well, a triathlon. Well, here’s the seasonal cycling that’ll help with that. It would be really good to eat some really good quality carbs for some time before, but then it would be really good to switch back to ketosis. So you can do the race in fat burning mode, though you’ve got all this glycogen like, okay, I’m overcomplicating a little bit. But the main idea here is that while nutrition is important, metabolic switching is even more important relative to this particular conversation about diabetes.

Megan Lyons:

Fascinating. And the audience has heard a little bit about metabolic switching and shifting from being a sugar burner to a fat burner, but I’d love to hear your take on that and why it’s so important.

Eric Edmeades:

Well, one way to think of it is that when you consider that we have three fuel sources, we have sugar and fat and protein as fuel sources, but the reason that we burn sugar as a preference, and I don’t mean as a preference as in it’s the best fuel source, I mean that we burned it as a preference because it’s basically to some degree toxic. If you have too much sugar, you can die. So the minute you put any carbohydrates into your system, whether they cause a big glycemic hit or not, the minute you put those carbs into the system, the pancreas starts producing a bunch of insulin and the insulin’s basically going out to open up cells and say, let some sugar in, let some sugar in. But if you do that for too long, pretty soon the cells don’t answer the door anymore.

Eric Edmeades:

And that’s where we talk about the insulin resistance thing starting, right? The cells won’t open the doors and the sugar can’t get in, and now the blood sugar starts going up because there’s nowhere for the sugar to go. And so if we don’t fix that condition, that there right there, that’s the beginning of the problem, and that’s the beginning of sticky blood circulatory problems that are going to lead to finger and toe amputations, eyesight loss, and all the other things related to that. So how do we fix that? Well, at the point in time that we start having that insulin resistance, what we really want to do is now cycle out, as you say, metabolically switch. We want to switch to another fuel source. The trouble is the only way to switch away from burning sugar is just stop putting it in. If you put it in, your body has to burn it.

Eric Edmeades:

And remember that it’s not just that the body’s burning it, it’s that sugar conveys a message and that message is winter is coming. And this is where I would say to a client, they’re like, well, I want to eat X amount of sugar. Should I eat a tiny little bit every day or should I eat it all in one weekend? Eat it all in one weekend, get it out of the way. You think that our ancestors stumbled upon a bush and thought, you know what? I’ll eat four berries a day from No, they didn’t. They ate every damn berry they could find in that moment. It’s one of the reasons our stomach is capable of stretching to take advantage of these gluttonous opportunities of healthy food, and then all of a sudden the fruit would be gone. And so the insulin resistance would begin to reverse again and the cycle would start over.

Megan Lyons:

Yes. And in that example with berries, I hear what you’re saying that if you eat a stomach full of berries, yes, that can create some insulin resistance. I totally agree with that. And then you have winter to reverse it. What I’m struck by is though today a stomach full of berries is not generally causing the problem. It’s so much easier to develop insulin resistance by a couple cans of coke every day or something like that. And then we never stop because the ultra processed food with the different forms of sugar and lack of fiber, nutrients, et cetera, are making that just so easy to slip into and never come back out of.

Eric Edmeades:

I agree. Again, let’s go back to the thing we were talking about earlier. It used to take 30 or 40 years to develop diabetes and now it takes 10. Well, the seasonality issue was already a problem. The seasonality issue is already a problem. The seasonality issue is enough to cause diabetes over a 20 or 30 year period. When you add the corn syrup, refined sugar and soft drinks and all the seed oils and stuff, then you clog everything up, all the worse and you create the condition more quickly. And I would even say, and I can’t immediately quote any research that would support this idea, but I would say that if somebody lived a life where they actually did eat fruit every single day, I don’t agree that that would be a good idea, but I suspect they’d probably make it through their life without necessarily becoming a type two diabetic, assuming the rest of their life is pretty healthy. The trouble is that once somebody is type two diabetic, they can’t eat fruit every single day if they want to reverse it.

Megan Lyons:

Absolutely agree. So let’s talk a little bit about the emotional side of this. People are having clicks in their brains now with what you’re saying. Okay, so processed sugar is the problem. We need to cycle all of this kind of good stuff, and yet even if we get that, many of us still turn to sugar out of some kind of emotional soothing. I know you have a lot of thoughts about that, so I’ll just let you run wherever you want.

Eric Edmeades:

Yeah, that’s, I would say that that’s really been one of our biggest areas of victory. I dunno if you know Naveen Jane from my own. So Naveen’s a good friend of mine, and he and I don’t agree about every single nutritional principle. We’re pretty damn close, but we have good fun debates. I was at his house this last week and we were having a debate that was almost heated. Our friends are like, holy cow. They’re really getting into it. And in the end, it was funny, one of the things I said is if we were to do a test group, I said, even if you’re right, I would still win. And he said, why? And I said, because my clients adhere to the advice. And that’s something he and I talked about is that he gives people really, really good advice, challenges the adherence portion because they’re not running it through the behavioral change dynamic system in the same way.

Eric Edmeades:

So the truth is, if somebody does a biome test and follows the advice they’re given, they’re likely to get really incredible results. But the trouble is, do they stick with it? So understanding that behavioral change thing has been a big part of our success and our vira and the virality of our success. So there are a couple cool principles. The one thing that we like to work with our clients on is understanding the nature of rebellion. So again, a diet is designed to give you a bunch of really restrictive rules and remove from you some of your greatest pleasures and access to nostalgia. Like take away all your favorite foods, take away all your favorite crutches so you can feel empty and you can feel alone. And then they don’t replace those things with any coping mechanisms to solve the problems that those foods used to solve for you before.

Eric Edmeades:

So no wonder people relapse within a week or two weeks or three weeks or a month or something. So when you understand the nature of rebellion, this is kind of the way that works. If I say to you, say, say you’re struggling with some weight issues or lifestyle issues, and I say to you, that’s it, no donuts for you. One thing that’s really fascinating about that is that now a permission to eat a donut will give you biochemical reward because humans a reward to rebel. So the minute you’re walking through the mall and you suddenly like you smell cinnamon, you smell cinnamon, and you go, but Eric said no donuts. Well, it’s not a donut, it’s a cinnamon, right? You start negotiating with yourself and the minute you go, oh, what the hell? You just do it in that moment, you start producing feel good chemicals in your body.

Eric Edmeades:

You haven’t even eaten it yet, but those feelgood chemicals are going to change the way that food tastes. It’s going to make it taste even better. So a Cinnabon, by the way, very yummy, no question about that, except if you’re not hopped up on your own feelgood chemicals and you eat a Cinnabon Cinnabon, you will taste the artificialness of it. Sure. But if you have a bunch of serotonin coursing through you, then it’ll just taste blissful. That’s genius. When you realize that that’s a half of the manipulation, then what you want to do is get clients to think this way is, I don’t want to rebel against your rules. I want to rebel against the food industry. A really good example of this, I imagine at times you’ve said to clients, you know what I want you to do? I want you to start reading the labels.

Eric Edmeades:

And if sugar is showing up in the top three, then you want to have some increased awareness and maybe cut that down. You’ve probably had a conversation along those lines with the client. Here’s one of the challenges though. They go to the store and they buy a jar of ragu or Prego or whatever tomato sauce, they want to come home and make something, and then they pick it up and they look at the jar and they notice shockingly that sugar is the number two or number three ingredient on most of those things. What? That’s amazing. Now they go, oh man, I can’t have that. The minute they can’t have it, there’s a dopamine reward on the other side of rebelling, and they’re dis will stack up to the point that one day they walk in and go, oh, you know what? Forget it. I’m doing it anyway.

Eric Edmeades:

I deserve it. I’ve been good. The rebellion, on the other hand, you say to them, now, the reason I want you to look for the sugar in the second or third position is that the reason that it’s there is not for flavor. You might think it is, but the reason that it’s there is that sugar is basically by evolutionary design created to stimulate your appetite. So the more sugar that is in the food you eat, the hungrier you are. And so by adding that sugar, they can make you eat beyond full, they can make you overeat, and that way they get to sell more food. So the reason I want you to look at the label is if you see sugar in the top two or three, then they’re trying to manipulate you. You can have it if you want, but now think of that total reaction. Person walks in, picks it up and goes, W, t, F, and they put it down and they’re not rebelling against you. They’re rebelling against the company that made it. And that one psychological shift is unbelievably powerful.

Megan Lyons:

That’s really fantastic. You said two things in your example that are not allowed in my clients. One is I can’t have this, we don’t say that good deal. And two is I’ve been good, so I deserve this. Food is not moral. So the audience will be hearing that, and I know you were using that example to make a point. However, what I’ve struggled with is exactly what you said. We have that human desire, human tendency for rebellion. So I saw this Ted talk sometime probably a decade ago where the person was saying, okay, rebell against something else, like delete an email or wear orange pants if you’re on Zoom or something like that, which I get that that expresses our rebellious tendency, but it never really scratched that itch. So I love how you’ve connected rebel against the food industry because they’re trying to harm us. That’s really fantastic.

Eric Edmeades:

And listen, I want to touch on that a little bit too. They’re trying to harm us. I would step back from that a little bit and I would say, I remember I saw this comedian once talking about that, and he goes, I can’t believe what they’ve done to us. Look at the obesity and the diabetes. I want to walk over, I want to go over to the Coca-Cola or Nabisco, and I’m going to find an employee and I’m going to punch them in the face. I’m going to punch them in the face, but then they’re probably just doing their job and they were told to do that, so that means I should go to their manager and I should punch them in the face. But then they were doing their job. And so you know what? I should go punch the CEO in the face. It’s the CEO’s fault. He’s making too much money anyway, and I should, but the CEO answers to the board, so really I should go punch all the board members in the face, or at least the chairman of the board. But then the chairman of the board answers to the shareholders who are the shareholders, our parents pension funds, right?

Megan Lyons:

Yes.

Eric Edmeades:

And so you begin to recognize that it’s not even necessarily that they’re trying to harm us, it’s that they’re trying to drive at any cost, and that is disgusting. So that’s what we’re really rebelling against. Not some individual executive at Coca-Cola, although I’d like to have words with them, but it’s like understanding that it is a broken system.

Megan Lyons:

Thank you for that. It really does make it feel more wholesome and true, to be honest. I mean those who really know me on the podcast listener or of podcast listeners will know. My husband had a brief stint with a food manufacturer that I would not support in this current role. And he’s not a bad person. He was exactly following a job that was advancing his career, and thankfully he got out of that very quickly. But I get it. So what you said is really, really important and still doesn’t let us demonize any people who are likely just doing their best, but really allows us to turn that thought against, I’m bad if I’m doing this and towards, oh look, this is there for a reason that sugar is there to make me eat more. I don’t want that for myself right now. I’m going to choose another option that genuinely makes me feel better.

Eric Edmeades:

And then along that same track, another thing that we work with our clients on, I affectionately refer to it in the Harry Potter Sense as defense against the dark arts, that is teaching people to understand how specifically the food industry manipulates us with their marketing and even biochemistry and that sort of thing. So for example, I would suggest that the food industry has done a phenomenal job of hijacking our holidays and sponsoring our emotional states. I can be doing a big webinar or a big seminar, and I could have say, 3000 people, and this will happen every time. I’ll say, I would like you all to tell me what the best treatment for depression is, and they’ll wine, chocolate, ice cream cake, what’s the best depression for this? And what’s the best treatment for these other emotional states? And everybody has a food response to those things.

Eric Edmeades:

They have a food response. And the truth of it is, is that we know damn well that a glass of wine does not fight depression. In fact, it might distract you from it temporarily and then make it worse. We know that logically, but by showing people that these, A really good example is you start, it’s three o’clock in the afternoon, you’re feeling a little tired and all of a sudden there’s a little voice in your head and the voice says, you deserve a break today. You Kit Kat came up with that. They did that to you. And it’s basically a form of hypnosis. So that’s another big part of the work that we do, is having people really understand the way here we are, what are, we are a week and a half out of Easter at the moment, right at the time of our recording now. And I know there are people out there that cannot, they can’t experience Easter without chocolate. They just can’t do that. And I went to an Anglican school and we had Bible study and all that kind of stuff, and I’ve read that part of the Bible and I’ve never seen chocolate in there.

Eric Edmeades:

I don’t recall Jesus eating chocolate. And then of course, the same thing goes on with Christmas. I can’t experience Christmas without candy canes or Christmas cake or what have you. Well, hold on a second. Now I remember that story too. There was this questionable pregnancy and then there was the manger, and then the three wise men came and they brought frankincense, mer, and gold, not candy canes and Christmas cake. And so when you begin to realize that those are bought and paid for campaigns and manipulations, then again you begin to create some strength against them because overall, there’s a nice saying in psychology, a strategy known for manipulation is a strategy blown. And so highlighting exactly what the food industry is doing to people, then people look at their ads and they see through the veil and they see the manipulation of it. Here’s my favorite food ad ever.

Eric Edmeades:

I mean, it’s absolutely deplorable, but it was outstanding. It was a collection of CCTV footage of random acts of kindness. You see this little old lady crossing the street, it looks like it’s probably in Czech Republic or something, and none of the cars will stop for her. And two men stop their cars, get out each, grab her by the arm and walk her across the street. And then you see another woman up at a banking machine and she walks away from the bank machine and her wallet drops out of her pocket and a guy runs up behind her, picks it up and hands it to her. And it just shows countless stories like this, each one making you feel good about humanity, each one making you feel just expansive and abundant and grateful. And as they are building your emotional state up and up with each of these incredible stories, at the sudden right at the end, at crescendo of your emotional experience, they go, Coca-Cola, open happiness.

Megan Lyons:

I was riding that ride. I got goosebumps with the lady crossing the street and all of this and oh, Coca-Cola,

Eric Edmeades:

Coca-Cola make open happiness. And so when you explain what they’re doing that they’re trying to link in a Pavlovian sense, they’re trying to link those incredible good feelings. And by the way, Coca-Cola has understood that Pepsi never did. And that’s why to this day, Coca-Cola outsells Pepsi, I think four or five cans to one, we think of Pepsi as like number two. Sure as a company they’re bigger, but they’re soft drinks. Coke beats them every time. And that’s because Coke stayed on emotion. They created Santa Claus for us. They told us that they’d give us happiness. They told us that it adds life. They focused on our emotional states and they got us as a population. So when we can go with our clients and really show them that defense against the dark arts, then they see an ad like that, and the minute that ad is supposed to hook them, it repels them. Yeah,

Megan Lyons:

That’s really insightful because those emotions we do want, like when you said, I deserve a break today. Yeah, you do deserve a break today, great, go outside. Or when we see happiness at Christmas, yes, I want you to have happiness at Christmas. Absolutely. All of this kind of stuff. I want you to do a genuine act of kindness, whatever. And when people think I’m getting all my joy taken away because you’re taking away my Coke, or you’re taking away my Easter candy or whatever, that’s the food manufacturers at work connecting those emotions, we get to disconnect those emotions. You can still experience the joy without necessarily the food, and that’s a lot of what you’re doing in your work, which is so needed and so fantastic.

Eric Edmeades:

Alright, I’ll give you one more. Yes. And this is the point where my team goes, if you give away everything, I can never give away everything in an hour long podcast, but I can just give away some tools that people can apply. Just building on what you just said. Now, there’s another very interesting thing about humans. Now maybe you’ve seen, there’s people writing books like James Clear’s Atomic Habits, which is a fabulous book, but there’s always this debate about how long does it take to create a habit? Is it 21 days? Is it 66 days or what have you? And I think that they’re going about that question incorrectly. It’s not a matter of how many days it creates take a habit, it’s how much emotional engagement does it create to care to habit? And so the way I would put that is that you take a rookie sports person who didn’t believe they’d be playing in the championship game because they’re a rookie, but all of a sudden they’re needed and they go out onto the pitch and they’re playing whatever sport it is and they score the winning whatever it is, they win the game in that moment.

Eric Edmeades:

They are feeling elation, they’re getting flooded with feel good chemicals. They’re celebrating in a major way. Their team is celebrating them, their town is celebrating. There’s a huge amount of energy and focus on them, and their body is at a peak state of achievement. And the body goes, I like this feeling. What did I do to create it? And so the body looks back at the play, it looks back at the game and it looks back at the pre-game and the breakfast and so on. Now, what happens is totally unconsciously the athlete remembers that he tied his left shoe first and his right shoe second, and then he banged his head on the locker as he was getting up. And it hurt. It didn’t bleed, but it hurt. I pretty much guarantee you that that athlete will for the rest of their life, tie their left shoe first and then the right shoe and then knock their head on the thing because we’re superstitious like that.

Eric Edmeades:

Now, when we understand that mechanism, then it is not about the number of recurrences to create a habit. It’s about the emotional intensity. One event can create a habit if the emotional intensity is high enough. So now let’s consider that a client of yours is at work and something goes badly and they lose their temper a little bit and they get a little down and they have a rough day and a few other things go off. And now they’re in their car and they’re driving home and they’re feeling off and they’re not feeling very good. And then as they’re driving along, they smell Dairy Queen or something and they decide, you know what I need? I deserve deserve, I deserve a blizzard. That’s what I deserve. I want a blizzard. I want vanilla ice and score bar blended up together in a diabetic mix, and I’m going to go have that.

Eric Edmeades:

Now. They pull into the drive-through, they pick up that drink and they start drinking it, and immediately they’re transported back to being 12 years old when life was simpler and their worries start to fade away and they’re heavily distracted. And then the body goes, wow, that’s a lot of calories. And it starts producing a bunch of serotonin and dopamine. And in the same way that the athlete felt all these positive emotions, now the body is feeling all these positive emotions. And then it starts asking, how did I create this circumstance? So it looks back and it says, well, you pulled into the drive-through. Okay, we can do that again. What else happened? Oh, you were grumpy with people at work today. So the body learns the path to the blizzard is by being a bit grumpy. The body begins to learn that the path to the wine or to the ice cream or to the pizza or to the donuts or to the cookies or whatever the crutch food it is that people go, the path to that food is by creating the very emotional state that triggered it. And so guess what? The body will start going, I’m going to serve you up a little depression because I want cookies this afternoon.

Eric Edmeades:

Very powerful principle. And the best way to break that one is outstanding. And that’s to say, look, don’t give up ice cream. Don’t give up donuts, and don’t give up cookies if you don’t want to. But only ever, ever eat them in celebration of greatness. That’s it. If you just make that one change, eat all the chocolate bars you want, eat all the ice cream you want, eat all the garbage you want, but eat it only in the celebration of greatness. And what will happen is your life will begin to turn because your body will start going, the only way I’m allowed to have this stuff is when I’ve had a great day. And so the body will start going, Hey, there’s a chance we can have ice cream today. What has to happen? We have to have a great day off we go and have a great day. Now here’s the other side effect. When you’ve had a great day, you often don’t want those things anymore.

Megan Lyons:

Yeah. Wow. That is so powerful and such an amazing way to put a close on this episode. I know people are going to be scrolling right down to the show notes to get access to everything you have to offer. So tell us where you would direct us most for the audience to learn more about you.

Eric Edmeades:

Sure. I think post diabetes.com is a great place to start. And I would add one thing to that is that many people think, well, I’m not diabetic, so why would I need to go there? Let’s consider that seven out of 10 people living in America right now are on that diabetic spectrum, and most of ’em don’t even know that they are. So our book shouldn’t be seen as only a reversal process, but as a prevention process. So if you have any concern about your relationship with sugar in any way, and I don’t just mean sugar, I mean carbohydrates, then I highly suggest that you go and you get two copies of the book, one for you and one for your physician. Because physicians need to learn this stuff too. And most of the physicians we’ve met so far, we’ve met because our clients have introduced them to our programs because of their changes. For people who are more interested in a generalized approach to changing their relationship with food and nutrition, I suggest going to get wildfit.com and anybody who wants to connect with me, I’m on Instagram under my name and I manage my own account and I do everything I can to answer people directly.

Megan Lyons:

Well, that is incredible. We will link to the book, the website, both websites and your Instagram in the show notes. I highly encourage people to do, as Eric said, buy two copies of the book, pass it off to a physician or someone else who needs to know it, and thank you so much, Eric, one more

Eric Edmeades:

Time. May I add one thing? Yes, please. I want to add one thing, and this depends a little bit upon when people listen to this or watch this particular episode in the first print run of post diabetic, which came out about a week ago. As part of that launch, anybody who gets that book gets free access to our diabetes reversal program. So you get the book and there’s a code inside it and you can just go get it. And that program, it’s a multimedia video hosted program that guides you through the process. And it’s usually, I think it’s 2 47 or 2 49 or something like that, and it comes for free with the book. So this is a great time to go out and get one of the early print versions of the book because you can jump right in and get support and not just have to follow along in the book.

Megan Lyons:

Amazing. What a great offer. Now, even more people are running down there, so I appreciate that and appreciate you, your time and your wisdom. Thank you so much for coming on Wellness Your Way today.

Eric Edmeades:

Thanks so much for having me.

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