Have you ever wondered why you eat? Okay look at a core reason you eat because
you have nutritional requirements right? You eat because your body needs things
It needs energy, it needs building blocks. That's sort of why you eat. But have you
ever really wondered why you eat what you eat? That's a fascinating
conversation because once you begin to understand why you make your food
decisions they way you do, you begin to take a step toward food freedom. And by food
freedom what I mean is eating what you want when you want as much as you want
in a functional and healthy way. We've determined having helped thousands of
people in over 20 countries around the world change their relationship with food
that there are six primary hungers that drive the eating decision. And when you
begin to understand what those six hungers are, when they come up you know
what to do about them and sometimes eating isn't the thing to do about them.
I'll give you a perfect example: thirst. Thirst is one of the six hungers.
That may sound a little bit odd to you but bear with me. The reason that thirst is
one of the six hungers is that for the vast majority of our ancestors' history
they didn't have pottery and they didn't have sports bottles to walk around with.
So that meant that they weren't able to carry water and so a lot of the water,
a lot of the hydration that our ancestors got came from the food they ate. They ate
a huge amount of water-based foods and so here's the challenge, what that
created is a communication system within the human body that says that when you
begin to start to feel a little dehydrated the body knows that one of
the best sources for water is water based foods so it sends a message that
says I'm hungry eat something. But what it's really saying is go get me some
hydration. The challenge is that it's lost in translation and so now what happens
is, you go alright I'm hungry eat something and maybe what do you go eat?
Maybe a bag of chips. How much water is there in that? Not so much and so your
body's like "dude did you not hear the message? We need some water go and eat
something" and so maybe you eat the next thing and then you eat the next thing.
And so thirst when you begin to recognize that it shows up as hunger is
incredibly powerful because all you really need to do is to stay hydrated.
And by hydrated what I mean is drinking water, you know drinking coffee and coke
and that kind of stuff is not going to keep you hydrated, it means drinking
water and when you handle that one hunger about 1/6
of your motivation to eat will go away. A huge number of the food
decisions that people make are about emotions, to change the way they feel.
Look I want you to really think about something, do you have some foods that if
you're feeling really down, that you really want to go to those foods? Or do
you have some foods that when you're really up and you want to be celebrate
that you want to go to those foods? How did that happen?
How did that get created? How did those linkages happen? I want to tell you it
was like a Pavlovian dog response and ultimately what happened is that you
were having peak emotional states, up or down, and then you were given those foods
during those times and now you've linked them up and so sometimes when you're
feeling a little low, maybe a little lonely, a little on your own, we need
chocolate help. But when you begin to recognize that pattern then you can start to
notice that there are certain emotions that if you deal with those emotions
functionally you won't need to deal with them through food. Another one is variety.
Variety is a very important need from a human perspective because
you know our ancestors would often be faced with the situation where one type
of food was in regular abundance but in order to get all of the nutritional
needs met, they would kind of need to get bored of that one food and be driven to
go get another one. A great example would be if there's a lot of plant-based foods
around and they're just lying around well you just eat them why would you
risk your life and go hunting when all this food is lying around unless of
course a power drive, a powerful drive came in for variety for something different.
The challenge is that that drive which once served our species so very well is
now in overwhelm because we can have variety not even on a daily basis but on
a meal by meal basis and not even on a meal by meal basis we can a variety in
one meal. We can have five or six different types of food on the plate at
the same time. And so our need for variety is causing all kinds of
challenges because what we really need to recognize is that we don't need
nearly as much variety as we get currently.
What we do need to do is make sure we're getting a variety of the right healthy
foods coming in. And then, have you ever had that feeling, you know 2 o'clock 3
o'clock 4 o'clock in the afternoon? When you start to flag a little you get a little
tired. Maybe you're yawning a bit, your eyes feel a bit heavy. Well guess what's
going on, low blood sugar! Humans have two primary
energy sources one is fat and one is sugar and when you have your body
predominantly burning sugar what's gonna happen is is that you're gonna have ups
and downs of your energy. When somebody trains their body to predominantly burn
fat, then they have this steady slow burn they can run for ages and ages that's
why you now have these people, ultra marathoners who can run multiple
marathons in a day when the prevailing wisdom of the old used to be that you'd
hit the wall at 17 miles and you had to be so tough and use your willpower to
get through that. That's because low blood sugar kicks in and so the problem is
is the minute somebody starts to feel low blood sugar, they want to go out
and eat something with what? With high sugar with a
high GI count, they want to go eat something with sugar and it gives them a
craving for carbs and so when you begin to recognize that you can change your
metabolism to get yourself to a place where you have a steady form of energy.
Then you'll eliminate a huge reason for snacking and a huge reason for eating
dysfunctional foods. Have you ever felt empty? You know your stomachs growling a
little and you want to fill up. What I want to tell you is that's actually not
a form of hunger at all that is simply a physical sensation. Your stomach is empty
and you feel more comfortable with food in your stomach. The challenges is that
most people in the developed world today are constantly starving. What I mean is
is that they're eating a lot of food but the food is so low on nutrition that
they are actually feeling like they're starving and the problem is is that then
when their stomach is empty, while they're starving, those things get linked
up and become incredibly powerful and so now when somebody's stomach is empty
they feel like they have to fill it. Absolutely not the case. Your stomach in
normal condition is about the size of your fist, go ahead and make a fist and
take a look. How much food do you think it takes to fill that out? And your
stomach is like a transformer it's designed to be able to expand into a
large sack for times of serious opportunity. Suddenly there's fruit on
all the trees, you need to be able to eat a lot of it because it won't be there
tomorrow. Or your clan has suddenly been very
successful and had a great hunt, well without refrigeration we got to eat as
much of the meat as we can right now and so then the stomach can expand but the
problem in the developed world is that for most of us our stomachs are expanded
like that all the time, and so then when it feels empty it takes so much more
food to fill it. When we begin to recognize that an empty stomach is
simply a sensation and not an indication of hunger at all, we can really begin to
make some change and then we can deal with the only true hunger, nutritional
hunger. The rest of them are illusionary. Nutritional hunger is the
only real hunger and the problem is that it's not very clear. You see it's not
very clear because our ancestors didn't have a grocery store to go to, so in
other words mother nature ultimately drove what was nutritionally available
and so as the body said "Wow I need this vitamin, I need this mineral, I
need these fats, I need these proteins" the body didn't say "we'll go and get
this brand". It said eat something because if you simply did that every day if you
simply ate what was available around you and nature every day over the course of
the year you would get your nutritional needs met. The challenge we have today is
that most of us are not getting our core nutritional needs met and so we are
walking around with a permanent state as a permanent feeling of hunger.
The simplest way to neutralize this one is to make sure that you follow one of our
very very core principles at WildFit and that is that your health is far more
determined by you getting enough of the good stuff than it is even by you
eliminating the bad stuff, if you focus on getting enough of the plants that you
need to be eating, enough of the healthy proteins that you need eating, enough of
the hydration and water that you need. And if you focus on that then you're gonna
reduce your nutritional hunger dramatically and then all of a sudden
you're gonna have a great deal more power to deal with emotional hunger when
it comes up and you won't have the low blood sugar issues.
By getting your nutritional needs met you'll change your
relationship with food forever and by understanding all these hungers and
paying attention to them, by slowing time down and asking yourself really, really
why are you eating this thing right now? You can make some change.
Spend three months with us, if you spend three months with us we'll take
you through a process where we'll incrementally change your nutritional
relationship with food and your psychology over a
steady period of time so that over time your relationship will be changed
permanently. This is not a situation where you're gonna go on a program and
get short-term results and then boomerang back. This is how we
will change your health trajectory forever.