Dr. Axe: Hey, guys.
Dr. Josh Axe here with Dr. Isaac Jones.
Isaac, glad to have you here today.
Dr. Isaac: [inaudible 00:00:06]
Dr. Axe: All right.
We're going to be talking about how to naturally boost your energy.
By the way, we are live right now.
So hey, take a minute, let us know the city you're from, the state you're from, the country
you're from.
We'd love to give you a shout-out, and actually Dr. Isaac here is a Canadian.
Dr. Isaac: Yes.
Dr. Axe: So any Canadians watching, hey, let us know where you're from.
You're from . . .
Dr. Isaac: Toronto.
Dr. Axe: . . . North Toronto, right?
Dr. Isaac: Yep.
[inaudible 00:00:24] Ontario.
Dr. Axe: All right.
There we go.
So we're going to be talking about how to naturally boost your energy levels today,
and answering some of your questions.
So if you have questions, go ahead and feel free to ask those.
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Dr. Isaac has five great tips to take your energy to the next level today.
Dr. Isaac, what's your number one tip here?
Dr. Isaac: Sure.
The first tip is to start out with a morning ritual.
I know that most people, they start their day off really poorly.
That it just turns into one thing after another throughout the morning and throughout the
day, where they're just depleting their energy and they're not really creating the momentum
that they should be creating.
Dr. Axe: Yeah.
Dr. Isaac: So a really simple morning ritual, the night before, if you want to just have
a glass of water ready for you in a particular place in your home, where you can just enjoy
some quiet time.
Maybe five minutes where you write out what you're going to be doing for the day.
You take your supplements.
You drink your water.
People have various morning rituals.
I like to meditate in the morning.
I like to get my scripture out of the day on my Bible app.
I like to just do various things that just inspire me for the day, and even look at my
vision board and things of that nature.
But just getting in that morning ritual, writing down maybe three things that you can do every
single day can help you create a lot of momentum to really create a really incredible morning.
Dr. Axe: Awesome.
Love the advice, Dr. Isaac.
So what Dr. Isaac is saying, it's so important that you start your morning off the right
way.
Dr. Isaac, I saw this, the same thing, myself.
Especially, even looking back to college and thinking about, “Okay.
What made a day to where I was really productive, I felt good?”
It's all about how you start your morning off, as you're saying with these daily rituals.
That's something a lot of people don't necessarily do is, I think there's some famous quotes,
your habits determine who you are.
Dr. Isaac: Yes.
Dr. Axe: Your habits determine your outcome.
Your habits really create a path for your entire life.
Dr. Isaac: Yep.
Dr. Axe: So, “We are what we repeatedly do,” I believe as Aristotle said, is an
important thing to remember there.
All right.
I want to see who's joining us, of if we have anybody joining us here.
I know we've got people jumping on from all over the country here.
Let's see if we have any Canadians.
All right.
It looks like my phone is running a little slow here, so we'll go ahead and jump on to
number two.
Dr. Isaac: Yeah.
Dr. Axe: What's your number two tip?
Dr. Isaac: So alkaline a.m.
You want to alkalize your body in the a.m., because most of the day we're acidifying our
body.
EMF creates acidity within the body.
You've got foods that create acidity within the body.
But really what is energy?
It's getting your body into a really healthy pH, and really creating that energy in the
morning for the rest of the day.
So what I like to do is start the day off with a smoothie.
I put in kale.
I put in some various greens.
I like the Superfood Greens mix that you can get at the grocery store, because you've got
baby swiss chard.
You've got baby kale.
[recorded audio playing 00:03:35]
Dr. Isaac: Oh.
Dr. Axe: That's you.
[Inaudible 00:03:38]
Dr. Isaac: There you go.
There's all of these different types of baby sprouts that you can put into your shake,
and then I put in the bone broth protein.
Dr. Axe: Oh, yeah.
Dr. Isaac: Yeah.
I love the collagen and bone broth protein.
Chocolate is actually my favorite one.
Dr. Axe: Oh, yeah.
Dr. Isaac: Then, I put in different types of healthy fat.
So I'll maybe put in some grass-fed butter or I'll put in some ghee, or I'll add some
chia seeds afterwards, because I don't like the way that chia seeds make the shake kind
of come together a little bit too gelatinous.
But if you add in those greens, I throw in a little bit of lemon or lime into it.
It's just an amazing way to start the day and it creates incredible energy for the rest
of the day when you have a shake or a drink smoothie in the morning like that.
Dr. Axe: Love it.
All right.
What's tip number three for everybody?
Dr. Isaac: Tip number three is, typically after lunch, people eat a big lunch, and then
they feel this lull after lunch.
One of the things that I recommend to a lot of the high performers and executives, and
entrepreneurs that I work with is to do squats.
Dr. Axe: Okay.
Dr. Isaac: I know this might sound a little crazy.
You don't need to get into a sweat or anything.
But what the research shows is that squats can actually help to burn that sugar that
you just ate for lunch, and it can actually help to increase the testosterone and the
various hormones to help you maintain a higher level of energy throughout the afternoon.
Squatting just 10 times a day has been shown to be just as effective as doing a short 30-minute
jog, which is just a jog that's kind of like a slow jog at the gym or something like that.
So squatting has been extremely profound.
It's what our ancestors used to do.
They used to get in the squatting position quite a bit.
If you just come down 90 degrees, come back up, do that around 10 times to 20 times in
the afternoon, it can actually help to boost your energy quite a bit.
Dr. Axe: I love that.
As Dr. Isaac is saying, there's some great research showing you, one of the great things
about doing squats is you're working your body's largest muscle groups, which is going
to really help rev up that metabolism, boost your energy throughout the day.
So again, these are some great tips.
As Dr. Isaac is talking about, number one, start your day off right with morning rituals,
like being grateful, meditation, and practicing other healthy habits, such as going for a
walk.
Number two, as he was talking about, get a healthy smoothie.
A superfood smoothie every single morning for breakfast is key.
Number three, do squats.
What's number four?
Dr. Isaac: Yeah.
So typically, we have one bad habit or maybe two bad habits in the day that steal our energy.
Right?
It may be stressing too much, or it may be eating something that you just can't help
but eat.
Whatever you're consuming or whatever you're doing in the day creates a lot of challenges
physiologically, and it leads to depletion of energy.
So it's important to understand how to change those habits.
Because really, all we are is a bunch of made up habits.
That's how we live our day, almost robotically.
So if we can understand how to actually shift our habits, then you can start seeing some
really powerful momentum in a powerful direction to increase your energy.
So what I want you to do is just think of maybe one bad habit that you have, or perhaps
two bad habits that you have.
So the first thing that we need to understand around that bad habit is there's something
that triggers that habit.
If we can understand what triggers that habit, we can then understand what brings us into
the behavior that gets us the result.
So when we understand the triggers to the habits, we can literally change our behavior,
because we start understanding or becoming more aware of the things that trigger the
bad habit.
BJ Fogg from Stanford who studies habit transformation, one of his bad habits was eating popcorn at
night.
He would come home and it was just the most convenient thing for him to eat was popcorn,
throw it in the microwave, and just sit down and eat some popcorn.
Well, it was obviously very bad for his health.
What he did was he took the popcorn, he put it in the garage.
He made it more inconvenient for him to get to the popcorn.
He knew that walking past the kitchen on the way home was the trigger to him making the
popcorn, and if it was in the garage it would be harder for him to actually get triggered.
Of course, his habit started to change.
He actually put something healthy in place of the popcorn, and now he's eating a much
healthier diet because of just understanding habit transformation and changing triggers.
Dr. Axe: That's awesome, Dr. Isaac.
One of the things that people don't do enough is just find that simple replacement.
Dr. Isaac: Yes.
Dr. Axe: As Dr. Isaac is talking about, if you're a person that loves sugar, switch over
to honey and stevia, and dates, and things like that, those healthier alternatives.
Making those swaps in your life can be key to living a better life, having more energy,
as we're talking about.
Isaac, what's your fifth step to naturally boosting energy?
Dr. Isaac: Yeah.
Absolutely.
Getting good sleeps.
Now, here's something that you probably don't know about getting good sleeps is that we're
driving, driving, driving throughout the day, cortisol increases.
We have a lot of certain types of neurotransmitters in our body that keep our brain going at night,
making it harder for us to go to sleep, like glycine, for instance.
One thing that we want secreted before we go to bed is GABA.
GABA is the primary inhibitory neurotransmitter of the body, and it helps us get those deep,
delta-wave sleeps, so we can feel energized the next day.
So one of the best ways for you to secrete GABA right before going to bed and creating
a really deep, rejuvenating sleep is to stretch.
I'm not talking about an hour-long yoga session.
You could stretch for just five minutes, two minutes.
Dr. Axe: Wow.
That's cool.
Dr. Isaac: But when you stretch, you see that increase in GABA.
What you do is when you're secreting that GABA, you can really see yourself get into
that deep sleep.
I've noticed a big change in the just rejuvenating sleeps.
I wake up earlier when I stretch before bed.
I know sometimes I'm so tired at the end of certain days where I'm just like, “You know
what?
I need to stretch, because I know that it's going to help me get a deeper, more rejuvenating
sleep.”
Dr. Axe: Yep.
Dr. Isaac: If you combine the stretching afterwards with some essential oils, where you just breathe
in some essential oils before you go to sleep, man, that helps you get such a deeper sleep.
If you're habit tracking and you're tracking your sleep, you can actually see how much
deeper you're getting into those delta waves when you do that.
So it's very powerful, and obviously sleep is primary to increasing your energy throughout
the day.
Dr. Axe: Yeah.
I would say it's probably the biggest thing.
Like I remember years ago, on a radio program I did, I would have people call in all the
time saying, “Dr. Axe, I'm just really lacking energy.”
We'd go through things like their diet and their activity levels, and it never ceased
to amaze me how many people would say things like . . . I'd say, “Well, how many hours
of sleep do you get at night?”
“Four hours.”
Dr. Isaac: Right.
Dr. Axe: How can you possibly have energy when you're getting that little sleep?
So listen.
Sleep is actually essential to energy, as Dr. Isaac is talking about.
So remember these tips, as he's gone through.
Number one, create these healthy habits.
Every morning, have your, I know as Tony Robbins used to call it, the “hour of power,”
“15 minutes to thrive.”
Dr. Isaac: Yep.
Dr. Axe: Or those things, getting your morning started off right through being grateful,
through meditation.
Number two, hey, get a good breakfast.
Start off with a superfood smoothie, lots of green superfoods and bone broth, and berries,
and things that are really energizing.
The number three thing you talked about, Dr. Isaac . . .
Dr. Isaac: Squatting.
Dr. Axe: . . . was squatting, really working on working those large muscle groups and really
helping balance your hormones.
Well, I'll tell you, listen.
As Dr. Isaac said, you don't have to go and do an hour of squatting.
It's two minutes.
Dr. Isaac: Yeah.
Dr. Axe: You do a quick, little two-minute drill, and look at your timer here.
Just body weight squats, it makes a huge, huge difference there in your overall energy
levels.
Then, number four?
Dr. Isaac: Four was just changing your habits.
Dr. Axe: That's right.
Dr. Isaac: Understanding those triggers to what creates those bad habits, and then understanding
what those triggers are and maybe changing the triggers, and really trying to shift that
habit or behavior that comes as a result of that.
Dr. Axe: Yeah.
Great.
Then, number five?
Dr. Isaac: Number five is really stretching in the evening to secrete more GABA, because
GABA is that inhibitory neurotransmitter.
It helps you get those deep, delta-wave sleeps, and it just creates such a better experience
while you're sleeping, so you wake up feeling energized.
Dr. Axe:Yeah.
So many people, as you're saying, I know not only lack sleep, but lack flexibility.
Dr. Isaac: Yeah.
Dr. Axe: I look at my own dad . . . Dad, if you're watching, please do this.
I've already told you 100 times.
But sometimes, I mean, getting your family to change things is one of the hardest things
in the world.
Now, my parents are pretty healthy.
They retired from Ohio down to Florida now.
My dad water skis all the time, and he's a really fit guy.
But he could definitely work on his flexibility.
So listen.
Five minutes, right when you get up in the morning, after a walk or a workout, and then
especially, before you go to bed at night, as Dr. Isaac is saying, helps improve GABA,
but also increases circulation to all of your joints.
A lot of times, our joints kind of . . . If they don't get motion, there's not fluid in
there.
What that's going to do is you have a greater chance of arthritis building up in those joints,
having chronic pain.
So you've got to get movement in those joints.
Flexibility and stretching is a great way to do that.
Well, guys, we want to say thank you so much . . .
Dr. Isaac: Thank you.
Dr. Axe: . . . for joining us down on Ancient Medicine again.
This has been Dr. Isaac Jones, a good buddy of mine here for a long time.
We'll be back next week with another Ancient Medicine Today.
Dr. Isaac: Thank you.