I was 21 years old and I was sick, I mean really sick. I mean,
I'm not talking facing death sick, I'm talking that I couldn't breathe
through my own sinuses, I had gut pains that were so bad that
I couldn't think. I had horrible cystic acne that was painful to smile and it was
my life. I always had that tissue. I was that kid that always had the tissue
in their pocket. You know the one. You know, I was that kid.
And I went to doctors. The doctors want to help me.
They didn't go spend six, eight years in medical school because they
didn't want to help people, but were they empowered at medical school
to help me? No.
No. No, they weren't. But I didn't know that.
Hell, my dad was a famous orthopedic surgeon. My uncle was a well-recognized
orthopedic surgeon. We had doctors all over the family, and so I trusted doctors
and I visited them for year upon year upon year. And you know what they gave me?
Pills, inhalants, injections, and then finally, surgery.
Yeah, you know what? It seems like God or evolution,
whatever your belief, accidentally put tonsils in my throat.
Total accident. "Got to take those babies out." That's what they said to me.
Luckily for me, some friends of mine sat me down and said, "Eric,
I think you need to consider some changes to your diet, just for a month."
And so I did. And so over the next -- I'm telling you, two weeks -- my body started
to change. Two weeks later, no acne, no allergies, I had dropped 35 pounds
off my body. I was completely transformed. And then I became deeply curious, I mean,
deeply curious. How is it, how is it that I can spend year upon year
upon year visiting doctors and get no result, and then I could just simply
change what I put in my body and I could get all the results?
And so I asked a doctor one day, I did, I asked a doctor... I've now asked
hundreds of doctors in countries all around the world the same question.
But I asked a doctor one day, "How long did you go to medical school?"
Can you imagine being a doctor and a kid says, "How long did you go
to medical school?" "Six years." "And how much time did you spend
studying food?" "Uh, uh, not very much." "How much specifically?" "Well, none."
I'm in an event in Germany about a year ago, there's about a thousand and a half
people in the room, and there's a doctor sitting just about here.
And in the middle of my talk, I go, "Do we have any doctors in the house?"
He raised his hand, he says, "Here." I get a microphone to him.
And in front of a thousand people in Germany where I've never asked this
question before, I asked him, "How long did you go to medical school?"
He was a general practitioner, 6 years. I asked him again, "How long did you
study food?" Microphone in his hand, cameras around, thousand and a half
people watching, he says, "None." And for many of the people in the room,
the penny dropped. They suddenly realized what the significance to that
question was. And I'll put it to you another way, in case you're still
wondering what the significance is, how many of you would be happy to take
your car to a mechanic who had never studied fuel? It's funny, right?
Had never studied oil? Had never studied anti-freeze?
Would you take your car to that mechanic? Then I suggest you rethink your
relationship with your doctor. And then one day, I'm on a plane and I'm
on my way to Africa doing a wildlife photography thing and I'm reading
this article. And in the article,
they talk about elephants being captured and put in zoos and circuses,
which I'm no fan of.
So I was curious because the article was the history of it. And it said that 100
years ago, when they took these elephants and they put them in the zoos
and circuses, they would make a lot of money because they would attract audience,
right, but the elephants would only live for 6 or 7 or 8 years, maybe 10.
But nobody knew that that was a problem. I mean, they made their money back
in that 10 years and that was the main concern for them, until they found out
that elephants in the wild could live 70 years. And suddenly,
they became deeply concerned about their investment. I'm sure some of them were
concerned about the elephant, but I'm thinking it was mostly
a profit-loss question. And once they had that
profit and loss question, they were forced to do the very
simplest thing, they were forced to evaluate elephants in the wild.
Sure, they could have conducted a multigenerational macro-nutrition and
micro-nutritional study on elephants to try to figure what's wrong,
or they could just go and look at the ones that are getting the result
and duplicate that. Does this make sense? And so that's what they did.
And they found out that elephants in the wild eat 200 kilograms,
500 pounds of fresh grass and bark and fruit when it's in season and they drink
70 liters, I don't know how many gallons that is. It's a lot. Every single day.
And when they duplicated that for the elephants in captivity, look at that,
70 or 80 years. I became fascinated. Because as I was reading this article,
they were making a massive grammatical mistake in the article.
They kept referring to the elephant's wild diet and the elephant's captive diet.
Let me just back up for a minute. The elephant was on a captive diet when it
was on the zoo, and when it was in nature, it was on what, the elephant diet.
Not the wild elephant diet, the elephant diet. And the grammarian
in me wanted to take out a red pen and circle every instance of this wild diet
rubbish in the thing. Like that's not… It's the elephant diet.
And as I want to do this, I start thinking to myself, oh,
elephants have a diet. So does every other organism on Earth.
Every organism on Earth has a diet. An oak tree has a diet.
A cheetah has a diet. Its diet is 2.5 kilograms of fresh meat
every day. It won't eat existing meat. It has to kill it itself.
A hyena doesn't have that issue, right? They have different diets.
The leaf-cutter ant has a diet. What does it eat?
Ants. You might think so, but they don't.
They go out and they collect leaves
and they bring them back and they compost them and grow fungus,
because they're fungivores. And if you try to make them eat leaves,
they would die. Diet is specific, and humans have one.
Humans have one.
And I know that some of you are going to go, "Yeah, but what about the blood
type diet? And what about the genome testing diet?"
Okay, raise your hand if you need Vitamin C. That should be everybody.
And how about omega fats, who need those? Oh, yeah, everybody again.
And how about this, anybody needs calcium? Anybody up for iron. Hang on a minute,
what about the blood type diet? What about the genome diet?
What I want to suggest to you is that every homo sapien on Earth needs the same
stuff. We have some different production capacities, some of you
are gluten-intolerant. Some of you have issues with lactose.
And I get that. But what I would suggest to you is that that so many of us have
an issue with lactose is a clue and that if you are not sensitive to lactose,
I feel bad for you, because it means the alarm's been turned off.
You don't have the pain so you just keep having it and that will give you,
according to Harvard Nursing School, a 30% uplift in your opportunity
to develop ovarian or prostate cancer. Milk, it does a body good. It does not.
That's why you will never see those ads again. You look, you will not, in Britain,
Canada, or America ever see an advertisement from the dairy industry
ever again telling you that milk is good for you. Diet is specific, guys,
but what we have to do is get to behavior. And that's what truly gave birth
to WildFit. I got to tell you something, that whole conversation, you know,
Vishen and Allen wants an inspiration and Emily Fletcher, like I want you
to hear something. When I created WildFit, I knew that what I wanted to do was have
massive impact, like we need to turn around the lives in the health
of billions of people on this planet for the planet. It has to be done.
We're arguing about Obamacare, Trumpcare, national health care in all your
different countries. Stop it. Who here would be happy to buy car
insurance from a company that charges the same amount to you as to a 16-year-old
child with five accidents under their belt? Who wants that insurance? I'm sorry,
you want insurance based on your risk factors? I'm not interested in universal
health care. I'm interested in universal self-care. You know how the diet
industry works. You write a diet book, 10,000 people buy it,
5 people get really good results, you get their before and after pictures,
you sell more books. What if instead, that every 100 people that does it,
90 of them get really good results? What would happen then? Big change.
And I want to tell you why we're able to create that and that is that lasting
transformation is not about giving people a bunch of restrictive rules.
It's not about telling people you can and can't do this. It's about changing
your psychology. When we created WildFit, it was really simple.
I knew I could coach people one on one, but what I knew I had to do is I had
to put them together. And so we created a community.
And that really gelled people together and it's one of the big reasons we've been
so successful. I want you to think about that when you're creating transformation
for people. You want to make sure you're changing the way they think,
you want to make sure they're community. But here's the big one.
You need to treat them like the whole frog in the hot water thing.
How many of you that had done WildFit showed up on Week 1 and thought that I was
actually crazy? How many people? How many people realize that it's not
crazy at all, it's just crazy enough to be making a dent in the universe?
That's what Week 1 is all about. It's about easing in and learning
some things, because if we want to get different results, we're going to have to
do different things. And that's exactly what that's all about. Your health is far
more determined by you getting enough of what your body needs than by removing
stuff. If we tell dung beetles, "Dung beetles, stop eating poop. That's gross,"
they will get sick. They need what they need and you need what you need.
Does this make sense to you?
And so all I'm going to say to you, even for those of you who haven't
even begun yet the WildFit Quest, what I want to suggest to you is just
do this, before you eat the other garbage, get all the stuff you need in first.
That is the primary thing you need to be doing to turn things around.
And with that, you can begin to change the industry.